Known for their ravenous hunger for bold new flavor experiences, millennials serve up a feast of opportunities for foodservice operators. But it helps to tantalize their taste buds if you want to savor sweet success.

The future of snacking is shaping up to be a feeding frenzy for foodservice operators. The boundary between meals and snacks continues to blur, with snacks replacing meals 37% of the time and robust sales of snack brands helping the CPG industry register its greatest growth in four years.¹

Let’s face it: We can chat all we like about hot snack trends and market growth, but without the right merchandising, foodservice operations can be left out in the cold. While we can chew the fat about wellness snack trends, unless we bulk up our merchandising, we could be putting the bottom line at risk of thinning out. And before they can feed the seemingly endless millennial snack appetite, even the best-stocked foodservice operators must find ways to effectively merchandise the products millennials hanker for.

As the better-for-you movement goes from the margins of the foodservice industry to the mainstream, consumers are showing a growing appetite for well-being food and beverage products. With all the emphasis on wellness and transparency, the upward arc of the well-being foodservice trend seems a natural progression.

As the foodservice trend of snacks as meal replacements whets consumers’ appetites for grab-and-go options that complement their busy lifestyles, dayparts are becoming increasingly snackified.

Now that snacking is no longer an occasional rendezvous but more like a daily love fest, with more than 50% of all eating occasions considered snacking, ¹ it's more important than ever to understand the mindset and motivations of America's largest demographic group. The fact that 94% of Americans snack at least once a day is an impressive measure of the national love affair with snacking. ¹ But millennials in particular are head over heels as the generation more likely than any other to snack, with one in four considered “Super Snackers” who feed their hankering four or more times in a single day. ¹

Millennials are social beasts with a ravenous appetite for interaction – online, on their phones and in-person. That can be a heady recipe for success for foodservice and restaurant operations, provided they tap into the power of social media to leverage millennial snack trends and their taste for social sharing.

The better-for-you snack segment is a booster shot for business, surpassing the sales growth of the entire food and beverage market, according to a report from Packaged Facts, a market intelligence firm.¹ A convergence of factors, including portability, higher nutritional value and clean labeling, has spurred sales over the past decade for wellness-oriented snacks, resulting in a compound growth rate (CAGR) of 4.7%,and surpassing overall food and beverage growth.¹

A perennial favorite, ice cream has a long history as the cold snack that consumers stay hot for. It's no wonder that when New York’s Museum of Ice Cream debuted last year, fans of the creamy favorite scooped up all 30,000 tickets in five days.¹ The joy of ice cream continues to captivate imaginations and tantalize taste buds.

No flash in the pan, the better-for-you movement has boiled over into the mainstream, turning up the heat on foodservice operators to blaze a clean label trail of menu innovation. But while the millennial snack market may demand more natural and nutritious options, many consumers still hanker for traditional favorites with rich and satisfying flavor profiles.