Culinary consumption patterns before, during and after the lockdown
On 27 August 2020 the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) announced a historic 8.2% quarter-on-quarter decline in Swiss economic output in the second quarter of 2020. In its economic note, SECO explained that private consumption in particular had suffered an unprecedented slump. Because private consumption is the largest GDP component, its swings hit output especially hard, so its decline was a major driver of the GDP fall.
Ever since the outbreak, US economists had speculated that consumption habits might change not just in the short term but in the medium or long term, with online shopping for everyday goods getting a particular boost. Whether the make-up of the consumer basket really changes is another question, best examined by looking at specific categories. Here we look at one of the most everyday categories: food.
We chose the terms Restaurant and Bar, along with Rezept (recipe) and Sauerteig (sourdough). The first pair reflects going out. During the lockdown both were hardly searched, returning to their usual level only around June 2020. Interestingly, Restaurant was searched even more after the lockdown than before, perhaps a compensatory effect, perhaps uncertainty about whether a place was open. Rezept and Sauerteig stand for cooking at home: the lockdown turned restaurant-goers into cooks, and sourdough saw a huge hype between March and May that ended abruptly once restrictions eased.
By late summer the terms had returned to old levels. Whether private consumption could stabilise output in the coming quarter remained open, though we were skeptical that sourdough would be part of that future.