Last month, our colleague Amira McKee got an inside look at a test kitchen in Omaha, Nebraska.
So imagine an industrial kitchen, the kind you might see in a fine dining movie,
you know, the one with these stainless steel appliances.
Everything's huge and the chefs are in these aprons.
I'm like picturing ratatouille in my head, but okay, I'm with you.
Something like that.
And you might not realize that you're in a development laboratory for one of America's biggest food makers.
That food maker is Conagra, the company behind Slim Jims and Hungry Man Dinners.
Kitchens like this one are places where food brands perfect the kind of packaged food you see on shelves
and in freezers at grocery stores around the country.
In this test kitchen, Conagra chefs were working on their newest breakfast recipes.
These chefs serve this bowl of microwaved eggs and sausage and potatoes to a group of executives.
The executives sort of pour this gooey orange cheese sauce over the bowl.
And before they even take a bite, they sort of pause and they ask themselves, was this satisfying?
How would this make a consumer feel?
They're sort of trying to evaluate whether or not, you know, this consumer experience of, again,
pouring the cheese sort of adds something for the consumer who's buying this in the frozen aisle of their grocery store.
Kitchens like this one are a window into a shift happening across the food industry.
People spending less on food.
It's a shift driven by a combination of higher food prices, healthy eating trends,