NEWS

Manufacturers and retailers must now take account of Britain's expanding army of desk diners when developing products to be eaten at the lunchbox occasion, Teed says. Focus groups organised by Brahm to explore attitudes to desk dining found that two of the biggest consumer concerns were dirt and smell. "People had a lot of issues about food dropping on to their desk, because they do consider their desk to be an unsanitary place. Someone in one of our focus groups said: isn't your desk supposed to be worse than your toilet for germs?"

Manufacturers should think about developing packaging that addresses this, she says. Lunchtime options should also be 'low smell', because "office etiquette demands you don't stink the place out all afternoon", she adds. In. terms of practicalities, lunch-time options must also be easy to eat one-handed. "Desk diners are doing something else while they're eating lunch and they want a hand free to type or to use the phone. Dishes need to be fork-friendly or ideally have their own fork."

The rise of desk dining has dovetailed with a boom in sales of pre-prepared lunch options. Although millions of us still make up our lunchboxes at home, it seems many of us don't have time or can't be bothered. Hence the market for pre-packed sandwiches rose 4% to £g4ini (Nielsen year to w/e 17 May). Other options such as pre-prepared salad meals and sushi are also generating impressive sales growth. Sales of food-toga salads, the kind that contain pasta, rice or couscous, rose 8% to £n8m in the same period, while sushi sales shot up 19% to £40m (Nielsen).

Ready-made sandwiches, salads and sushi are popular because they tick all the right boxes as perfect desk-dining meals, says Richard Esau, director of marketing at Greencore Sandwiches. "If you have a sandwich in a cardboard skillet, it's very easy to take to it your desk, open, pull the sandwich out, take a bite and put it back in," he says. "Sushi is possibly even more suitable for desk dining. And the pasta salads we make come with forks."

With 67% of lunchbox meals eaten at work. (TNS), companies are eager to take account of the needs of the desk diner in their NPD.

The rise of eating at the desk prompted Proper Cornish to change its recipes. ''The pastry for our pre-packed range was specially adapted to be less flaky than traditional Cornish pasties," says marketing manager Mark Muncey.

Princes Foods' ambient ready meals also target deskbound lunchers and can be microwaved in two minutes and eaten straight from the pot, -says Neil Brownbill, marketing director.

Del Monte, meanwhile, provides a 'spork' -a hybrid of a spoon and fork - with its Fruit Express ambient pots of fruit, allowing desk-diners to eat their fruit with one hand and hunt for bargains on eBay with the other.

Health, as well as convenience, is becoming an increasingly important driver and not just in the adult lunchbox market. A growing number of schools are policing much more closely what goes into kids' lunchboxes, as are parents. Manufacturers are responding with products that are convenient, tasty and