Insight companies (which The Food Channel has partnered with since its inception), base their trend reporting on data: surveys, analysis of consumer behavior, scientific advances, and the numbers behind the behavior. Food manufacturers and others pay big money to access those reports.
Two things, however, have made trend reporting muddy. First, the internet. Sure, online polling and observation offered new ways of watching the trends. It also put new voices on the scene, some trained and some not-so-trained. Second, the COVID crisis, when all bets were off and consumers went into survival mode, where trends just didn’t seem to matter as much.
Now, companies are tentatively finding their way back. With that in mind, we are publishing a mid-year trend piece just to get the juices flowing again. Here are five of our Top Food Trends for Mid-2023:
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1) Food & Travel Changes. Yelp and TripAdvisor have gotten cluttered, and TikTok has added to the mix to the point that many no longer know where to turn for reliable information. What’s sponsored and what is truly a consumer experience? Do you use Expedia, Travelocity, Hotel Tonight, reward apps direct to the hotel…and when are they all the same thing/owned by the same parent? As more Boomers enter retirement and have time to travel, how do they figure it all out?
Many are falling back on traditional travel agents, even though they are often hidden behind a .com name. Companies such as cruisetraveloutlet.com, and others, are offering bundled options and all-inclusives that recognize that some people travel specifically for the food experiences. Culinary tours continue to spring up, and we expect to see more. Travel has changed, and food travel has become its own niche opportunity.
(To begin your research on culinary tours check out sites such as these: https://www.exploreworldwide.com/experiences/
https://www.culturediscovery.com
https://www.zicasso.com/italy/food-tours-vacations
https://www.foodnwinevacations.com/culinary-tours-italy)
2) The Conversation Around Tipping. We first called this out in a column in 2015, then in our Trends Report in 2016. We’d been following a conversation started by noted restaurant entrepreneur Danny Meyer, among others, and saw early hints that there would be a call for change. Now, with tip jars on counters and machines that ask for your tip before they move forward, well, consumers are starting their own conversation. We’re hearing words like “enough,” and “I draw the line.” At the same time, consumers recognize that workers often rely on tips, and want to help. When will the conversation move into action, and what will be the final impetus for change?
3) Customer Service. Granted, this has been iffy for years, and the fallout from recent events has made it worse simply because companies are short-staffed and don’t always have time for advance training. Restaurants are focusing on the need to create a place where people want to come. Consumers want to be around people who appreciate their patronage. This is the opportunity area: Nurturing staff members who are excited to help customers find what they may not even know they want. Less shrugging of shoulders and more extensions of consideration. It requires knowledge, training, but most off all attitude.
This is crucial as restaurant service is recognized as a long-term career, not an interim or high school job. That means the incentives have to be better, and the industry has to work harder at this.
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4) Charcuterie anything. For a while it was food flights, where bars and restauranteurs offered tastings. They can be fun, actually—pancake flights, beer flights, cheese flights, dessert flights, and more. The next step seems to be putting them all together on one big board…or into something innovative (snackle box, anyone?). Celebrity Chef Tyler Florence has reportedly even called out “tin fish boards” as the new charcuterie—using cans of caviar and other tinned fish.
People are playing with size, too, making mini-boards for personal feasting and table-length boards with multiple options beyond the traditional meat and cheese. TikTok Influencer and “private chef in the Hamptons” Cooking Classy (also known as Meredith Hayden of Wishbone Kitchen) has been known to comment that “cheese chunks and crackers are not charcuterie,” and she’s not wrong. After all, the origins of charcuterie are about charred meat, paired with cheeses and any number of sweet and savory items for flavor and texture. That includes pickles and olives, various spreads and preserves, mustards, honey, fresh fruit, and more.
Presentation is part of making food fun, and it’s a great way to make food both entertaining and safely sharable. So, bring on the Charcuterie Brunch and the Charcuterie Chocolate boards.
Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash
5) Pickles. We always try to offer at least one specific food item that answers the question, “What’s the on-trend food item?” When the Chick-fil-A app allows you to remove its famous pickles from a chicken sandwich, it makes you wonder how popular that option would be, because pickles are in the limelight right now. It goes along with our previous trends that identified an interest in brining, although the latest interest extends to the pickle juice itself—cooking with it, reusing it, even drinking it. And it’s not just cucumbers. Sandwiches have pickled onions, as do tacos. Pickles and all-things-pickled are turning up as something more than a condiment right now, and are worth watching.
That’s our top five for a mid-year checkpoint of food trends. We’re also watching as more and more restaurants begin charging an additional percentage to use a credit card. We’re watching AI and the pros and cons and how they will affect the industry. We keep an eye on the kinds of grocery stores where people collect their merchandise and even shop and ship for others (yes, Trader Joes, but it’s catching on). Food prices and availability are still discussion topics, and lots more.
In the past we’ve brought you mushrooms/mushroom coffee, plant-based, seafood, nostalgia foods, mocktails, food as medicine, THC, Ube, African food, fermented, hatch chilis, and more—all before they were regularly talked about. For fun, go back and look at a few from the past. After all, knowing what has come before is often the first step to understanding what’s next.
