You Are What You Eat: Trends Behind Food & Beverage Trends
Zeno’s Michael Sheen explores what makes food trends trending. Writing from his own perspective, Michael examines the cultural and commercial forces that propel certain foods into the spotlight, looking beyond prediction to understand what really makes trends take hold. This isn’t about guessing what’s next, it’s about unpacking the deeper currents that shape what we eat, how we talk about it and why it matters.
One Saturday afternoon in February, nearly 10 years ago, I stood in a queue, in literally freezing temperatures, in the arse-end of nowhere, for over an hour, to eat a pizza.
Actually, two pizzas: one margherita, and one marinara. The most basic pizzas there are. Practically the same pizza. It had been so cold in queue I’d brought a flask with me.
Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, I thought to myself “Why on earth am I doing this?”
That recurring thought sits behind this report into food trends.
Food is big business, and one of the dominant forces in modern culture – what you eat, how you eat, what you cook, where you dine, which ingredients you use, how it makes you look, how it makes you feel.
And it’s that cultural element we’re interested in. There’s a whole industry dedicated to predicting what the trends are; what we’re interested in, as a communications agency, is why they trend.
So isn’t a series of predictions about food trends for the year ahead. Instead, it’s an attempt to understand the deeper currents that make food trends trend.
They say don’t sell the steak; sell the sizzle. Well, this is about understanding why the sizzle whets our appetite, and how you can make your own at home. (A really hot pan; don’t dry your meat too much.)
We’ve digested a 12-course feast of social data and years of trend reports to find five macro tends and a whole bunch of supporting data and insight:
- Does it help your audience’s health and wellbeing, in the broadest sense?
- Does it play into their differentiating identity?
- Does it combine the novel with the familiar in an unexpected way?
- Is there an opportunity for curation or collection?
- Does it make something desirable easy and accessible?
The aim is to give people looking to communicate about food and beverages the foundations to build on when planning campaigns this year.
So click on the link here and tuck in.
