Designed for four. Eaten by one.

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I heard Elvira Masson on the radio the other day, talking about her new book, Recettes pour 1. Cuisiner pour soi. Cooking for yourself.

The premise sounded almost too simple to be a book. Recipes for one person. But the reason she'd written it is the interesting bit: recipe books, she said, are built around four to six people almost by default, which quietly excludes anyone eating alone from ever following one without doing the maths, halving an onion, or freezing the other half of something that doesn't freeze well. It's such an ordinary fact of cookbook publishing that nobody had thought to question it. And a rapidly growing part of the population has been living with the consequences.

That's the sentence that stuck with me. Not the recipes. The realisation that an entire category had a default setting nobody had chosen on purpose, and that the default had simply never been revisited as the number of people it excluded kept climbing.

The number underneath the sentence

In France, where I live, INSEE's data shows single-person households rose from 27% of all households in 1990 to 37% in 2020. Almost all the household growth projected out to 2050 is expected to come from people living alone, the large majority of them over 60.

The UK tells a similar story. The Office for National Statistics puts the number at 8.6 million people living alone as of 2025, or 29.5% of households, up from 7.7 million a decade earlier. I want to be honest about a caveat here, because the ONS is honest about it themselves: once you account for population growth, that increase isn't statistically significant on its own. Nearly half of people living alone are 65 or older. This isn't a sudden social rupture. It's a large, structurally growing group, and it's ageing.

In the US, single-person households were 27.6% of the total at the 2020 census, up from 7.7% in 1940. And if you want to see where this trend goes when it runs further, look at South Korea, where single-person households reached 36.1% of all homes in 2024, a record high, and where restaurants have started putting up signs refusing to serve solo diners. One Seoul noodle shop's sign, reported by CNN and others, read: "We don't serve loneliness." It caused a genuine backlash, with several commentators calling it discriminatory.

None of this is a secret. It's in every demographic report going. What's interesting isn't the statistic. It's what different industries have quietly decided to do about it, and what that reveals about where insight actually happens.

One industry noticed. One didn't.

Restaurants have noticed, and recently, in a way you can track almost month by month. Yum Brands' 2026 Food Trends Report has solo orders now making up 47% of quick-service visits, up from 31% four years ago. Toast, the restaurant software company, recorded a 22% rise in single-diner reservations at full-service restaurants in the third quarter of 2025 alone. Menus are changing in response: personal-size pizza, tasting portions, counter seating designed for one. The framing in the industry's own research is explicit — this isn't people eating alone because they're lonely. It's people eating alone on purpose, as a small, controllable pleasure in an uncontrollable world.

Go one step further back, into the home, and the story changes completely. I checked HelloFresh's own website, because I wanted to see how a meal-kit company marketed to solo customers. Here's what it says, in their own words: they don't offer a specific meal kit for one. Their advice is to order the two-person box and freeze half.

Read that twice. A company that explicitly advertises meal kits "for singles" is, on its own admission, still building for two and asking the solo customer to do the adjustment themselves. That's not a product gap born of ignorance. It's a considered decision that solo cooking is a portioning inconvenience to route around, not a need worth designing for. The restaurant industry looked at the same demographic fact and rebuilt its menus and floor plans around it. The meal-kit and recipe industry looked at it and reached for a workaround instead.

There is a small cookbook niche that has spotted the same gap Masson spotted — Eleanor Wilkinson's One Pot, One Portion in the UK, Joanie Simon's One Dish Kitchen in the US, a couple of other French titles sitting quietly alongside Masson's. It's real. It's also small, next to a demographic shift this size, and mostly built by individual authors rather than the major recipe publishers or the meal-kit platforms with the distribution to actually close the gap.

Why the industries split

I don't think this is really a story about single people, or even about food. It's a story about where the insight sits relative to the business model.

A restaurant's whole cost structure is built around turning tables, and a solo diner who lingers, orders a starter and two glasses of wine, and spends 48% more per head than the average diner (that figure comes from OpenTable's own research) is a customer worth designing for. The insight was sitting directly on top of the P&L, which is probably why it got noticed so fast.

A meal-kit company's cost structure is built around batching: buying, packing and shipping ingredients at a scale that makes the economics work. A one-person box breaks that batching logic in a way a personal-size pizza doesn't break a kitchen's. The insight was just as real. It simply sat somewhere the existing model made expensive to see.

That's the pattern worth taking from this, more than the food itself. An insight doesn't get missed because it's hidden. Masson didn't discover anything nobody knew. She just said the obvious thing out loud, in a category built around a default that nobody had reason to defend once you actually looked at it. The insight was sitting exactly where anyone could see it. What determined whether an industry acted on it wasn't how obvious it was. It was whether acting on it fit the model they already had.

Where this leaves the rest of us

If there's a practical version of this, it's a question rather than a checklist: where in your own business is there a default nobody chose on purpose, sitting right next to a customer fact everyone already accepts, that nobody's revisited simply because your existing model makes it inconvenient to?

It's rarely hiding. It's usually sitting in the same demographic report your own market research team already has open.

What's your version of the four-to-six recipe?

Sources: Elvira Masson, Recettes pour 1: Cuisiner pour soi (Seuil, 2025); INSEE, Ménages, couples et familles — France, portrait social and SDES/INSEE household projections to 2050; ONS, Families and households in the UK: 2025 (released April 2026); US Census Bureau, 2020 Census household data; CNN and TIME reporting on South Korea solo-dining restaurant policies (2026); Yum Brands 2026 Food Trends Report, via Axios (February 2026); Toast restaurant reservation data (Q3 2025); OpenTable/Kayak solo dining consumer research; HelloFresh.com, meal kits for singles product page.