Consumers believed unhealthy food was likely to be the most tasty and healthy foods would be lacking in taste, a food expert told a conference yesterday.
Alison Haselgrove, group development manager at the Dawn company, told the International Congress on Meat Science and Technology in University College Dublin that the meat industry faced major challenges.
The primary challenge was to create meat products which tasted fantastic and delivered sound health and nutritional benefits while being presented in a format convenient for a wide variety of occasions, she told the 500 delegates from 50 countries.
Ms Haselgrove said that unless the meat industry catered to consumer desire to eat meat in more convenient formats, then market share would be lost.
"We are experiencing the demise of formal mealtimes and the rise of phenomena such as SAD [stuck at desk] eating, which had been nicknamed 'al desko' eating," she said.
Research had also shown consumers eating frequent, smaller quantities of foods - eating while on the move, which was called dashboard dining.
A 2005 Datamonitor survey in the US had found that lunch was skipped by 58 per cent of US consumers in favour of on-the-go alternatives. Of those who took lunch, she said, 82 per cent regularly spent 30 minutes or less and 43 per cent as little as 15 minutes on their lunch slot.
Aidan Cotter, Bord Bia chief executive, said that success for the Irish beef industry would ultimately be determined by its capacity to harness advances in science and technology to meet the evolving needs of consumers.
Ireland was the largest net exporter of beef in the northern hemisphere and 95 per cent of its exports, worth €1.5 billion annually, were now destined for consumer markets in Europe, Mr Cotter said.