Food trends 2023

Every year, in the last few months, different agencies and analysts publish reports on the food trends of the new year. These reports are extremely transcendental for decision-making by all the actors involved in the food industry. Some of these reports focus only on trending food products or ingredients, others focus on ways to communicate and advertise a product, and still others focus on consumer behavior, global market trends, or product perceptions.

To make these “predictions”, different factors that affect the ways of consumption are taken into account. In reality, this exercise is about translating social and economic macro trends into food products and eating behaviors. Thus, for example, it is clear that factors such as the pandemic, the war in Ukraine or climate change are events that undoubtedly impact the way we consume food. Therefore, it is logical that for two years, trends include, for example, foods that replace wheat flour – due to the situation in Ukraine – and the use of flour substitutes such as red lentils, almonds, or pumpkin seeds for making not only bread, but also pasta. Also for about five years, trends include vegan foods or specific products that replace the use of meat, such as insects, seaweed or jackfruit. Predicting that within the trends, consumers look for healthy alternatives is actually one of the more or less common characteristics for consumers for a decade, but the trend of what is considered the new “healthy” panacea is Changing products every year.

In addition, consumer exhaustion is predicted regarding hyperinformation. Sociologists from all over the world have already predicted how the hyperinformation to which we have access can cause some confusion or anxiety in consumers. This ultimately translates into the trend for food communication, faced with consumers increasingly exhausted from contradictory messages, appealing to simple and easy-to-understand messages.

Another of the common places in the forecasts of food trends is the fact of including a dish or ingredient considered “exotic” typical of a particular culture. In fact, this trend had a strong boom since the 90s – almost 30 years ago – when the free market and free trade agreements made products once considered exotic more accessible.

However, something fundamental for the effectiveness of these trends is the mandatory need to place them in a context and in front of a specific group of consumers. Generally, the reports tend to put everything in the same bag, that is, to predict as a trend a concern about food that really only concerns a particular group of the population, such as the fact that the origin of the food is organic – whose consumption is related to a higher socioeconomic level – as opposed to the population that suffers from hunger – which is clearly not of interest to those who read the reports. Beyond the socioeconomic differences, there are very marked cultural differences that are generally overlooked in attempts to homogenize practices. Although there are some common trends, how they manifest is precisely differentiated by culture.