Top Food Trends of 2023

As screen time grows, and consumers increasingly watch with a phone in hand (one 2019 survey put the share of TV watchers who do this at 55%), there's a battle for the last hand, and healthy snacking options are aiming to win it by becoming one-hand-eating friendly.

Protein powder has been growing in popularity for years, and while it's a good way to add protein to shakes and smoothies, it's not very compatible with preexisting meal habits. Quest Chips is a growing brand of protein chips that’s at the center of these trends.

One feature of chips, compared to bars, is that consumption is more continuous rather than discrete. If you planned on eating a single bar, it's hard to accidentally eat a bar and a half. But with chips, it's easy to passively consume them. That's especially possible while doing something else; there's a whole category of listicles that recommend the right snack for binge-viewing Netflix, and even an abundance of articles on content pairings for particular shows.

Rather than a traditional meal that could require a fork, knife, and plate, TV-focused snackers are increasingly seeking out hand-held snacks. A snack for gaming, a snack for texting, or a snack for watching TV. Food companies noticed and started pushing to create snacks that are utensil-free and clean-up-free.

Snacking has been growing too and, as this happens, the line between snacks and meals is blurring. Research shows that consumers are eating more meals at non-standard times and that snacks now account for over half the times younger generations eat. It’s a function of a more fragmented day that's less likely to be bookended by a context-setting commute.

Cereal, the most common breakfast food in America, is a huge business that has been on the decline. American spending on cereal fell from nearly $14B in 2000 to $9B in 2018.

While cereal is inexpensive, sweet, and easy to prepare, consumers' growing interest in eating less sugar has cut into sales.

Catalina Crunch, a healthy breakfast cereal company is trying to bring cereal back alongside similar companies like Magic Spoon which has grown over 1000% and $85M since we featured it in Glimpse 3 years ago. It's targeting those that left cereal for healthier options and those who are still frequent users but are looking for something more nutritious.

Because of how cereal has traditionally been distributed in retail stores, the competition has been around who can put the brightest colors and boldest fonts onto the front of the box to get consumers' attention in the aisle. By selling directly to the consumer, these cereal brands don't have to fight for attention this way and can instead focus on finding relevant customers on relevant channels.

One way these brands are able to sell at nearly 2.5x the price of traditional cereals is by positioning the product as an alternative to premium healthy breakfast foods like protein shakes or smoothies and by targeting adults who control their own food budgets.

Unlike other meals of the day, breakfast is the one where consumers tend to be okay with eating the same thing every day, so once a cereal customer turns into a daily user, there's a consistent and profitable revenue stream.

SnackMagic, a snack box company, went from $0-20M in revenue in a mere 8 months.

Over the past 3 years, software that helps companies hire internationally has grown rapidly. Deel–one of the fastest companies to ever scale to $100M in ARR–helps teams run HR internationally. But cultural infrastructure is now having to play catchup.

The days of on-tap kombucha, massage Fridays, and mediation rooms may be on pause as companies reevaluate their strategies for a new era.

And everyone is trying to get in on the shift: Food delivery businesses like Doordash and Uber Eats say they’re benefiting from the move to digital perks. Airbnb is running ads for “international remote team bonding” experiences. The Zebra, a fast-growing insurance startup, even offers to cover employees’ cost of adopting a pet as they work from home and may be lonely.

When it comes to snacks and meals though, there’s a new challenge: carving out time for meals when the day has less structure and is less likely to be portioned off by a context-setting commute.

And while working from home means workers can easily pick their own snacks, it also typically means they’d need to pay. With SnackMagic, employers send out a link and everyone gets to build their own snack box on the company’s dime. The concept exploded and with it, the company’s success: SnackMagic now orchestrates snack programs for everyone from small startups to Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.

When Instagram first started influencing restaurant traffic, some restaurants switched from round plates to square ones to fit in with the social media company’s image format, which was square-only until mid-2015. The rectangular shape maximizes the amount of food in the frame and helped restaurants stand out in the feed.

In similar ways, restaurants are increasingly putting more effort into eye-catching interior decoration rather than exterior design; if more customers are choosing dinner based on their social media feeds, rather than by walking down the street, it's what's on the inside of the restaurant that counts.

And as TikTok and YouTube usage continues to rise, the popularity of aspirational dining grows too. Wagyu beef, a type of meat prized for its marbling, is a luxury food with strong visual appeal, making it popular for this type of content. Millions of consumers watch videos of wagyu being cooked and eaten even though most can’t afford it on a regular or even semi-regular basis.

Its aspirational nature is also clear when looking at the numbers. The "Wagyu" tag has almost 3 billion views on TikTok, compared to 1/5th that volume for “Barbacoa”, another type of meat, despite Barbacoa having higher consumption.

This widespread appeal creates buzz and the increased buzz eventually helps get the product in front of the consumers who can afford it, driving up sales in the long run. It’s a marketing strategy many companies use: Lean into the features of a product that appeal to a less relevant but wider audience as a way to create a buzz that draws in the ultimate target audience.

There has been pushback on marketing non-Japanese beef as Wagyu, especially from 1997 to 2003, when the Japanese government banned the export of Wagyu cows. Since then, different varieties like American Wagyu and Australian Wagyu have grown in popularity.

Expensive foods, more broadly, are an important export for Japan. Consumer behavior studies have shown that gift recipients put more value on an expensive version of a typically cheap item than on an average-priced version of something usually more expensive, even if the price tag of the latter is higher. This means that a $300 bottle of wine would be received more favorably than a $1,000 computer.

Mass adoption of electric lighting in the 1900s is, surprisingly, the reason consumers first switched from cooking with animal fats to cooking with vegetable oils.

At that time, Proctor & Gamble was largely in the business of making candles and candle demand was falling as electric lighting took off. P&G’s massive infrastructure for processing cottonseed oil, the key ingredient in their candles, was in danger of becoming obsolete so they started using the same material to produce shortening, turning into the massively popular cooking product Crisco in 1911.

Consumers were initially hesitant to switch from their seemingly healthy and natural lard to what they saw as processed candle wax, but P&G pushed hard to convince the world that Crisco was superior. To do so, they sent samples to food scientists and hospitals then later advertised the fact that hospitals and schools used it. They also embarked on a massive campaign to put out cookbooks with recipes that called for Crisco.

More recently, it’s becoming popular again to cook with animal fats like beef tallow. Aside from the supposed health benefits of tallow, demand for butter alternatives is on the rise. As more consumers buy food online, there’s a clear advantage to tallow–which has a long shelf life without the need for refrigeration, helping it fit into the standard ecommerce supply chain better than food like butter.

Interest in beef tallow regained momentum when factory farms attempted to figure out how to repackage their byproducts into something they could sell. Some brands, like Ancestral Supplements, lean directly into the saying that “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure”. The company has a unique business: taking the parts of agricultural farm animals that are usually discarded, and selling them for a premium as ”Grass Fed Beef Brain Supplements”. Their top products, including Beef Organs and Beef Liver, each have several thousand reviews on Amazon.

For many people these days, time is the ultimate currency. And while meal replacement shakes have been around since the 1950s, it's the marketing that has shifted to focus on productivity that has given this category a comeback.

Back then, meal replacement products were marketed with great success as weight-loss tools — today's iterations are marketed instead as healthy meal alternatives to productivity-minded professionals and on-the-go consumers. Metrecal, which led the craze half a century ago, likewise used convenience as a selling point, encouraging customers in one ad to keep the cans in their car's glove box.

Today's category leader, Soylent, first sold itself as the non-food of choice for too-busy-to-eat Silicon Valley workers, but it's now facing a rising tide of competition. Huel, which likewise sells an array of powdered and ready-to-drink shakes, announced in 2019 that it had surpassed 50 million meals sold, and interest in the brand is growing at a faster pace than it is for Soylent.

Huel says its customers include doctors, students, and shift workers on top of fitness buffs and efficiency-obsessed tech executives. Soylent, too, has shifted focus to a much broader consumer base, rolling out nationwide in Walmarts earlier this year. In both cases, though, the focus is on offering "nutritionally complete" meals rather than low-calorie products — a message that mirrors the broader cultural shift toward health and wellness over weight loss.