The home of homemade

2026 is our year of homemade and January is the perfect time to refresh your thinking about how you eat. With the rise in awareness of ultra-processed ingredients in the food we buy from the supermarket, it’s getting trickier to make the healthiest choices for you and your family. And as a result, we’re seeing a renewed interest in all things homemade which we couldn’t be more excited about.

We’re a nation of passionate cooks, and recently, we’ve become more mindful than ever on the amount of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) we’re consuming. Our January 2026 survey polled 2000 people to discover the impact that processed foods have on our lives, with two thirds worried about the impact of UPFs on our health, and 39% saying they should be banned altogether.

Homemade made easy, for less

If you are looking to cut down on UPFs, we have all the kit anyone needs to make delicious, nutritious meals from scratch. Our survey showed that 31% of us are cooking from scratch more than we were a year ago, all in the name of reaping the health benefits that come from choosing the ingredients that go into your food, avoiding UPFs, and saving money. Encouragingly, 63% say home cooking is the best way to avoid ultra-processed foods and take control over exactly what’s going into the meals we eat.

And budget-friendly, healthy, homemade food can be made in minutes with the right kit. Our soup makers and slow cookers will help you serve up fresh and nutritious dinners, free from additives, preservatives or artificial ingredients, and are a great way to reduce food waste.

Making your own bread couldn’t be easier with our range of bread makers. It tastes wonderful and is the best way to swerve the excessive amounts of salt and sugar you’ll find in supermarket loaves. Our compact bread maker saw a huge 776% increase in sales last year – we struggled to keep it in stock as more and more of us turned to cooking delicious homemade bread from scratch!

With you every step of the way

Despite these positive signs of changing habits, there is still a lot to do. Firstly, there’s the problem of being able to tell what ultra-processed foods actually are, with a quarter of us not being sure how to identify them. A simple way of looking at it is: anything that has more than five ingredients in it that you wouldn’t normally have in your kitchen is an ultra-processed food; think supermarket bread, ready meals, instant soup and sugary drinks.

Other problems some people in our survey told us about included the belief that making food from scratch is too complicated (16%), costs too much (19%), or won’t taste as good (9%), however 60% said they would cook from scratch if they had access to easy recipes.

Thankfully, help is at hand here at Lakeland. We’ve been the champions of homemade for over sixty years and as a result, we’re the one-stop shop for preparing, cooking and storing fresh and healthy meals, and we have so many new ideas to make the process quicker, easier and more convenient.

And because we can’t help but go one step further, we have a bank of exciting and mouth-watering recipes that anyone can have a go at. From the easiest slow cooker cider pulled pork, to warming and indulgent chilli, parsnip and parmesan soup, to a simple and delicious gluten-free seeded loaf, there’s hundreds of recipes to discover and use with your soup maker, slow cooker, bread maker, or for any other way you want to cook from scratch.

After reading the results from our survey, Wendy Miranda, our Customer Ambassador, said:

“We’re the experts in homemade and we believe it’s better for you than buying ultra-processed foods from the shop. There are clear benefits to cooking from scratch and knowing exactly what is going into the food we eat. We’ve been the home of homemade for over six decades, so there’s no one better to show how simple it can be to make healthy, homemade meals quickly, easily and without breaking the bank. Our customers are great advocates of the benefits of homemade; from the nutritional and economic benefits it brings, to the simple sense of personal achievement that comes from the process of making your own.”