Sixty years ago, serving food that came out of a can or a box was considered bad housekeeping.

Today, you can go an entire week without chopping or marinating a single ingredient that goes into your family’s nightly meals, thanks to the decades-long rise of convenience foods.

The multi-billion dollar convenience food market first gave us sliced bread, then canned spaghetti and TV dinners. Now we have "quick assembly" salad and meal kits, no-drain tuna cans and garlic in a tube, all designed to shave off mere seconds from our already-limited time in the kitchen.

It all started when marketers convinced 1950s housewives that it’s okay to use cake mix or canned peaches if they ran out of time to make dessert.

Now, food companies are taking convenience to a whole new level.

You can have meal kits delivered to your doorstep and spend only a few minutes throwing all the ingredients together. Even if you’re not that busy, pre-chopped herbs and vegetables, pre-seasoned meat and ready-made desserts have become grocery staples.

When weighing the benefits of convenience foods, we need to ask: ‘What does convenience really mean?” says Mark Lang, a food marketing expert and assistant professor at St. Joseph University in Philadelphia.

In a phone interview with CTVNews.ca, Lang said it’s important to distinguish between useful, “value-added” food conveniences and “frivolous” ones.

Consumers are willing to pay more for the useful conveniences, such as bagged salad and pre-cut vegetables, because they know they will save time in the kitchen, Lang said. “They see the value in that almost immediately."

But gimmicky supermarket conveniences, such as no-drain tuna, are usually the product of marketing departments’ brainstorming meetings, Lang said.

Because the food industry is so competitive, marketers are always trying to find some kind of “short-term distinction” from their competitors, Lang said.

“If there is not an underlying value for the shopper, these things just go away. Food is very fad-oriented because it’s an everyday consumable item.”


Millennials’ food demands

Indeed, today’s convenience food market is influenced by a mix of culinary and diet trends, as well as the Millennial generation’s lack of kitchen skills, or unwillingness to spend hours hovering over a hot stove.

Lang said convenience foods will take on “a whole new dimension” in the near future because children of the 1980s and 1990s don’t cook like their parents or grandparents used to.

While previous generations commonly gathered around the dinner table every night for sit-down, homemade family meals, that’s something fewer and fewer younger people can relate to.

Millennials “appear to want what they want, when/where they want it,” one U.S. marketing report concluded, food companies are under greater pressure to “deliver more for less — fresher, higher-quality products, with more choices and more convenience.”


Convenient or healthy?

So how has the ubiquity of convenience foods changed the way we eat?

Brian Wansink, the director of Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab and author of “Slim by Design (Mindless Eating Solutions for Every Day Life)” says there were some “dark days” of convenience food consumption in previous decades, when unhealthy, heavily processed ingredients were the norm.

Pushback from consumers seeking nutritious and fresh meals has reversed that trend and even resurrected the art of cooking from scratch, Wansink said in a phone interview.

Convenience still trumps slow-cooking, but shoppers are now looking for wholesome meals with fewer additives, he said.

Are we finally striking a balance between convenience and healthy eating?

“I think it’s hitting in that direction,” Wansink said.