The supermarket deli provides consumers with an appealing alternative to walking up and down aisles of packaged food products, gathering enough ingredients to mix together and combine into a meal that, with any luck, tastes good. The deli and its increasingly important prepared-foods section lets them walk up to one counter, order everything they need for a meal and leave. Instead of spending hours in preparation and cooking, shoppers could be eating their meal in a matter of minutes.
The Hartman Group reported in its 2012 paper, The Third Grocery Sector, that over the past decade, deli/prepared foods sales have outpaced the growth of packaged foods (including frozen) and the oldest segment of packaged meals, the shelf-stable meal categories such as dinner mixes, canned soup and canned vegetables.