Top Kitchen Trends of 2023

The pandemic has accelerated an already growing scrounge for more space in cities: consumers can be seen talking online about how stove top covers let them buy additional hundreds of square inches in their confined city apartments. These boards go over a stove top when not in use, yielding more food prep surface, and have been popping up on Etsy and more recently on Amazon.

While Amazon is usually dominant for kitchen gadgets, Etsy is leading in sales of stove top covers. One reason is that they sometimes have to be customized to fit each stove’s dimensions, and Etsy specializes in customization while Amazon is for mass-production with a variety of product specifications. But as the product gets more popular, mass production for Amazon scale becomes more feasible.

While the pandemic has moved parts of the world ten years into the future, in fields like video conferencing and ecommerce, others have gone the opposite way. More people are spending time at home, more households are suddenly multi-generational, and suddenly and more than ever before, space is at a premium.

Google NGram Search shows that mentions of “stove board,” an older term for the same product, were high from the 1870s through the 1920s; suburbanization and the rise of kitchen appliances after this period made space less of an issue for a while. Today, the urbanization process is almost complete (82% of the US population is considered urban, up from 73% five decades ago), but sudden population shifts show people that small amounts of space can make a big difference.

After years in the limelight, data reveals that yoga is on the decline. This has forced yoga-related companies to retool: many yoga mats suppliers have pivoted to focus on using the same materials for different purposes.

From kneeling pads for gardening to sink mats for backsplash protection, yoga mat production infrastructure is being revitalized. One of the top-selling sink mats on Amazon, in fact, is from a supplier that started off selling yoga mats. Several reviews even comment that the product seems like it’s just a yoga mat cut to fit around a kitchen faucet.

The purpose of these mats is to protect the (sometimes wooden) countertop around the sink from water buildup over time. Of all the rooms in a house, renovating the kitchen has the highest ROI on resale value. In part because of this, Kitchens are the most renovated room in the house.

Freeze dryers historically had two main markets: food manufacturers and Mormons.

Mormon doctrine encourages keeping a year's worth of food supplies on hand at all times, and freeze drying reduces the weight and size of food while making perishables last 25-30 years. More broadly, the preparedness industry was accelerated by the pandemic and supply-chain issues this year have only increased concerns.

For a kitchen gadget, freeze dryers represent a hefty investment, running at $2,000-$3,500 apiece. But amortizing that over the cost of a year's worth of food makes the price look lower. They also help avoid waste, since freeze-dried food takes decades to spoil. And the process preserves most of the nutritional value, while dehydration reduces it by 5% and canning by 60-80%.

Freeze drying is becoming more popular though among the typical consumer. Since it removes water from foods, it makes fruits much more sugary. Buyers like the taste and companies that sell foods like cereal like the fact that they can say “no sugar added” even though the product tastes much sweeter than it otherwise would with the water content diluting the flavor. They're also popular as a way to make homemade dog food, and as a way to dry cannabis while preserving its potency.

Today, there's one major consumer-facing brand of freeze dryers, Harvest Right, which sells direct online and through some retail stores. On Alibaba, freeze dryers are available for as little as $500 per unit for bulk orders, indicating that there’s room for new brands to profitably enter the space.

Cookware is usually designed to be utilitarian first and photogenic second (if at all), but some kitchen-focused product companies have launched products built for a world where the biggest audience a meal gets is on Instagram, not at the table. Cooking has always been a social activity: among other things, it's a way to show off to the people you're cooking for. With more people stuck at home, the nature of this signaling has changed, and now cooking is a way to show off virtually to the people you aren't cooking for.

Because sheet pans allow consumers to cook a meal in a single dish, they get the highest social media clout per minute of prep/cleaning time: a single dish to both photograph and clean.

And when it comes to photographing a meal, sheet pans' rectangular shape maximizes the amount of food in the frame, given Instagram's aspect ratio. In a similar way, restaurants, too, have adapted over the years: some switched from round plates to square ones to fit in with Instagram's format, which was square-only until mid-2015.

As with other kitchen trends, sheet pans' popularity has led to a positive feedback loop, with more recipes leading to more sheet pan usage and vice-versa. Some sellers have even launched sheet pans in vibrant colors, not only as a way to differentiate from competitors but also because it's a high contrast way to highlight a dish, since very few foods are blue, for example. Meanwhile, others are pitching other differentiating features like warp-free sheet pans, addressing the most common complaints of the previous generation of the product.

As Zoom and Google Meet’s background blurring algorithms get better, users are increasingly taking calls from their messy bedrooms and obscuring the clutter behind them.

In the kitchen, workstation sinks are playing a similar role with their built-in sliding chopping boards that can cover messy sinks. It's embarrassing to have guests over with a sink piled high with dirty dishes, and a workstation sink can easily cover them up. This puts workstation sinks into an interesting category: products that don't necessarily save the customer time, but shift time instead.

Certain consumers are also chopping vegetables more. Online interest in chopping is rising relative to blending, in part as some consumers are looking for more ways to stand out in their social feeds with nicely splayed culinary arrangements.

And while most kitchen purchases take up counter space, the workstation sink actually adds space. This is especially useful since the boom in kitchen appliances purchases during the pandemic has reduced many kitchens’ amount of free counter space.

Workstation sinks also tie into changes in how people use their sinks. The average sink depth is increasing, from six to eight inches to as much as twelve inches, which increases back strain. One feature of a workstation sink is the ability to essentially raise the bottom of the sink which means less back strain when washing dishes.

The low-margin, cost-conscious grocery store industry uses rotisserie chickens as a loss-leader product. Many Americans visit the grocery store to buy rotisserie chickens on a weekly basis, and leave with other, higher margin products too. In fact, in 2017, one in every two Americans purchased a rotisserie chicken. But rotisserie baskets, a trend brought on in part by the broader air fryer trend, are a new and growing product category that threatens this key part of the grocery store model.

And while foods like chicken wings and french fries are generally taboo in healthy eating plans, cooking them in a rotisserie basket gives them the crispy finish without being submerged in fatty oils. This means rotisserie dishes can make their way into the growing trove of online content about dieting plans.

The best show of rotisserie chicken’s status as a loss leader is that they are cheaper than uncooked chickens. Because they're a popular product, they tend to bring in foot traffic, with 625 million rotisserie chickens sold in 2020. Costco kept theirs priced at $4.99 when other stores raised prices, despite losing $30-$40m annually from chicken, because the extra foot traffic paid for itself with more high-margin goods. When Amazon.com acquired Whole Foods, one of the first products they cut prices on was the rotisserie chicken.

The growth of air fryers, and an increased appreciation for outdoor cooking, have made home-cooked rotisserie a more popular option, and rotisserie basket sellers tailor their products to fit into existing cooking appliances. Rotisserie cooking takes a long time, but with more people working from home, a food with an hour of cook time but very little prep time is suddenly viable; when the kitchen or grill is a thirty-second commute from the home office, it means starting dinner an hour before the workday ends, instead of needing to commute and then start a lengthy cooking process.

The pandemic shifted many consumer behaviors but it also permanently changed the strategy of many businesses. Brands selling clothing steamers expanded their product lines to sell facial steamers as consumers stopped going to fancy events and started wearing sweaty masks.

B2B office chair companies pivoted to selling gaming chairs as office closures dried up enterprise sales.

And with schools and businesses closed, commercial griddle sales staggered. To help compensate for the loss, many big players shifted focus to the consumer market.

The indoor griddle’s rise is also tied to growing fire regulations as climate issues escalate. In many cities, like NYC, it’s illegal to use a grill on a balcony, regardless of the balcony size. In dense urban areas, indoor versions of outdoor appliances let residents more easily avoid detection and contention among close-quarters neighbors. From smokeless fire pits to indoor griddles, the move indoors is creating new product opportunities.

Many indoor griddles are also designed to make cooking as easy as possible. The easier it is to make good food, the easier it is to impress people (and gain social capital) without investing as much time. Plus, the food and how it was made is almost a guaranteed conversation topic so kitchen products that help make great food have a baked-in viral growth loop.