"consumption" news and stories

A detailed examination of the US wine and spirits market has revealed that the country will be the world's leading wine consumer by 2010, with consumption up to 3.8 billion bottles of wine annually. It should also be the second largest wine importer, moving up from its current position in third place behind Germany and the UK, though imported wines represent less than 1/3 of all the wines consumed in the US.

The study was conducted by the International Wine and Spirit Record (IWSR) for VINEXPO, the world's leading wine exhibition held annually in France. It looked at wine trends from 2001-2005, calculating trends from that period and making projections based on them, in addition to considering economic and political factors that might play a roll in the next three years. Worldwide, wine consumption will be up everywhere, with consumer spending expected to be up almost $2 billion more than a decade ago. China and Russia will enter the top ten list of wine-consuming markets and per-capita wine consumption will be up, as well.

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The people of France are eating less bread than they did in decades past, according to a recent Reuters story. At the turn of the century, the average French person consumed a little more than a pound of bread per day. That figure is now down to a little over five ounces of bread per day, less than the average bread consumption for people from Germany and Italy. Still, the decline seems to have steadied, with some French bakeries bolstering their sales with loaves made of more traditional ingredients. Clotilde over at Chocolate and Zucchini posted about these "baguettes de tradition" a few weeks ago.

 According to a study that was just released, Britons eat the most chocolate per capita, of anyone in the world. The average consumption is about 22 pounds per person. This can be compared to rates of 17.8-lbs per person in Germany, 15-lbs in France, 8.5-lbs in Spain and 4.8-lbs in Italy. The same study also showed that Germans preferred boxed chocolate treats and the French preferred molded chocolate bars. The British seemed to like anything made of milk chocolate, as only 3% of the chocolate consumption was of the dark variety!

For contrast, Americans eat about 12 pounds of chocolate per person per year. Like the British, they prefer milk chocolate to other varieties, though the interest in darker chocolates is steadily increasing. This is most likely a combination of the much-touted health benefits of dark chocolate and simply a greater availability of high-quality dark chocolates that American are developing an appreciation for.

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