Consumer Trends
The golden age of the 5-minute meal
The 30-minute dinner is slow food now.
By Dan Frommer on Friday, October 9, 2026 at 8:00 am
Let’s get out of our Bon Appétit bubble for a moment: Here’s a great chart showing how much time Americans say they actually spend preparing their main meals of the day. It’s not a lot of time.
Around half of main meals require less than five minutes to prepare, according to Circana’s latest National Eating Trends survey. This includes 65% of breakfasts, 56% of lunches, and 35% of dinners. Another quarter of main meals get 5 to 14 minutes of prep. People say they spend an hour or more preparing just 2.4% of their main meals — roughly one in 40.
CHART OF THE DAY
The trend has been moving toward even shorter prep times over the past five years, though slowly.
The share of zero-prep meals increased to 17.3% in the 12-month period ending in March 2026, up 1.2 points from 16.1% in the same period in 2021. Meanwhile, the share of main meals taking 30 to 44 minutes to prepare declined by 1.2 points, shrinking that group by about a sixth. And those requiring 15 to 29 minutes of prep declined modestly, too.
This is surprising to me — that 2021 period was the COVID lockdown year, when it seemed like everyone was just cooking all day and all night. (And my hourlong, four-burner dinners are clearly an anomaly!) But it’s a great reminder that mainstream American eating, as defined by meal prep time, is driven by convenience.
The obsession with short prep times made a fast impression on Mark Ramadan, the co-founder of Sir Kensington’s and former CEO of Hu, when he started studying the “meal makers” grocery market — mac and cheese, Hamburger Helper, etc. — a couple of years ago.
“The joke we had at the time,” he tells me, “was that some were saying ‘three minutes until ready,’ then ‘two minutes,’ then ‘one minute,’ and it’s like, what’s left? ‘Fourteen seconds until it’s ready’? This is so extreme.”
Last month Ramadan launched his latest brand, Riff, which he co-founded with Daniel Humm, the fine-dining chef who runs Eleven Madison Park in Manhattan.
Riff’s initial lineup includes five pasta-based meal-in-a-box kits, promising “restaurant-level flavor in less than 20 minutes” and covering a range of cuisines and flavors. Each comes with dry pasta or noodles, a dry seasoning packet that becomes a sauce, and a packet of crunchy toppings.
The idea is that you can make an elevated, multi-textured meal straight out of the box, relatively quickly.
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