The Top 21 Food Trends of 2025

Online food purchases drives growth of shelf-stable foods

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.

Meal replacement shakes continue to garner demand as consumers try to fit meals into increasingly busy days

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 other 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 says its customers include doctors, students, and shift workers on top of fitness buffs and efficiency-obsessed tech executives. 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.

Freeze dried foods on the rise

Cereal companies are often at the forefront of adopting new kinds of preserved fruit. Since freeze-dried fruit has low water content, they're mostly sugar, so buyers like the taste and cereal companies like the fact that they can say “no sugar added” by removing the non-sugar components of an ingredient. These strategies help cereal companies address the growing group of consumers shying away from cereal in favor of a more healthy breakfast option. On the demand side, freeze-dried food is growing in popularity alongside hiking. Covid also accelerated this trend, as people bought preserved foods and experimented with more baked goods.

In parallel, the "ugly produce" business is booming; Imperfect Foods and Misfits Market have collectively raised over half a billion dollars to grow their business of selling produce that tastes better than it looks. As it turns out, the "ugly produce" business has existed for a long time: soups, sauces, and baked goods are often made with pieces of produce that wouldn't look good on a shelf but that taste fine when chopped up and processed. Freeze-dried strawberries are another example of how the food industry repurposes food products that wouldn’t otherwise have strong shelf appeal.

The economics of strawberry production also tie to the rise of freeze-dried strawberries. Strawberries are a very labor-intensive product, with labor representing 50x the share of costs relative to a more mechanized product like corn. When strawberry pickers pick an excessively ripe strawberry, they usually discard it, because it won't stay fresh in time to get to a grocery store. Since the labor component of cost is so high, waste is less of a problem—but it is an opportunity. Freeze-drying strawberries is not only a way to deal with the lower visual appeal, but also a way to preserve them. This has gotten easier since the development of a more complex cold chain, which allows more foods to be transported through cheaper forms of transit that may take longer.

Growing portion sizes create more chaos in the fridge and, in turn, demand for fridge organization

Average plate sizes in the US have gone from 8.5 inches to 12 inches in the last fifty years, and that's changed food consumption patterns.

Many families now have bigger fridges, more ingredients, and more complicated meals—which means more food that gets lost or wasted. Americans on average discard over 100 pounds of food from their fridges each year, often because they literally can't see what they're missing. Fridge storage containers are an increasingly popular new way to keep fridges organized and make sure everything gets used on time. And while they may seem like a luxury product for people who value a neat and organized fridge, in reality, they’re a cost-saver, popular among cash-conscious consumers, that reduces waste.

Grocery shopping, too, has changed in a way that incentivizes people to buy more food: online shopping leads to bigger orders – one study showed an average of a 30% increase in average cart size – since this can save money on delivery costs. And grocery ordering apps have gotten good at using in-app ads to push people to buy just a little bit more.

The fridge plays a cultural role, too. On Reddit, the Fridge Detectives community has almost 100,000 members. They share photos of fridges and try to make guesses about the owner's age and lifestyle purely by their contents. While most people don't see a refrigerator as a means of self-expression, it's increasingly becoming one—and since a typical refrigerator gets opened many times a day, noticing a messy fridge is unavoidable.

Falling demand for dairy forces the industry to be more creative

Similarly, the $620B dairy industry is being increasingly threatened by alternative dairy products like Oat Milk and Almond milk. Normal milk consumption has fallen 40% since 1975 and in just the past decade, over 20,000 US dairy farms have gone out of business.

Today dairy companies are struggling to make even a 2% profit on milk. But the rise of whey protein has been a path forward for some of these companies. It’s a natural byproduct of cheese production that, until the 1980s, was discarded at a significant cost. Now, whey protein is more valuable than the cheese itself. For every pound of cheese, 9 pounds of whey is created.

Now, clear whey protein is taking off as an alternative to protein shakes. It’s not only clear but also yields a protein drink that’s much more similar to water in terms of its thickness. While many consumers want to be able to chug protein when they hit the gym, not everyone likes the thickness of a shake and the need for a blender and the associated prep work.

FDA's new label requirements drives surge in low-calorie sweeteners

In 2020, the FDA made a simple yet hugely consequential change to nutrition label requirements, requiring a larger font size for the calorie count. This set off a surge in demand for low-calorie sweeteners, as sweeteners usually constitute a significant portion of total calorie count.

Allulose, a synthetic sugar that has a similar taste, texture, and sweetness to real sugar, but has only ~10% of the calories, is consequently becoming a popular ingredient among food manufacturers.

Allulose, in particular, is benefiting from another labeling trend: it can now be excluded from the "total sugars" and "added sugars" lines on the label, meaning that it offers the lowest calories for a given level of sweetness. As a result, Allulose use has grown at 211% annually in North America from 2017 to 2020.

There are almost a dozen sugar substitutes in widespread use, from Stevia—which has been an ingredient for millennia—to newer compounds like sucralose and neotame. Some of these compounds have a bitter aftertaste, some are simply far less sweet than sugar, and some take a long time to receive regulatory approval. Still, though, artificial sweeteners haven't yet fully disrupted the massive $100B sweetening market, where sugar even now maintains an 85% share.

Meal kit economics drive demand for new types of ingredients

Curry cubes are an ingredient whose rising popularity is, in part, thanks to the non-obvious economics of meal kit companies.

When customers try recipes from meal kit companies like HelloFresh, they often want to later recreate the same meal on their own. And while many of the ingredients they use are already in their pantry, meal kit companies prefer concentrated versions like cubes or stock concentrates for economic reasons: shipping a heavy liquid (which is almost entirely water) adds to their cost, which cuts into margins at scale.

Meal kit companies are in the rare position that they both choose the ingredients in a meal and directly pay the shipping cost of the product, but not the labor cost of preparing it—whereas restaurants and grocery store shoppers are much less sensitive to incremental shipping costs. To a restaurant owner, stock concentrate’s lower cost could be offset by the higher and less-certain prep time. And to a grocery shopper, it’s just one more thing in their cart.

There are other cases where food decisions get made based on who bears the cost and who gets the benefit—American Airlines famously saved $40,000 each year by eliminating a single olive from each salad they served in First Class.

Demand for non-refrigerated eggs on the rise as consumers seek out more natural food products, even though it means shorter shelf life and higher prices

Producing a shelf-stable version of an existing food or drink is a good strategy to expand the market. Similar to how battery-powered devices are popular in regions with intermittent electricity, canned or otherwise shelf-stable foods gain popularity in areas with unreliable infrastructure.

This trend is evident with milk: Americans typically buy refrigerated milk, while many other parts of the world purchase unrefrigerated UHT (Ultra-High Temperature) milk, which can last 6-9 months. The UHT process, which briefly heats milk to a high temperature to sterilize it, has allowed milk to penetrate new markets, significantly increasing its adoption in countries like China.

The situation with eggs involves more complexity. While constant refrigeration can extend the shelf life of eggs from 3 weeks to 7, many countries do not have the resources for continuous cold storage throughout the supply chain. Even in countries that can afford such storage, eggs are often not refrigerated, leading to widespread confusion. For instance, one of the top Google search queries under "Why do Americans..." is "Why do Americans refrigerate eggs?"

In many parts of the world, there's a preference for unwashed eggs, which are not subjected to the cleaning process that removes the natural protective coating on the shell. This coating helps to preserve the egg without refrigeration, aligning with the growing consumer preference for more natural and less industrially-processed foods. As a result, the demand for these unwashed, non-refrigerated eggs is growing.

High-protein everything on the rise as consumers seek out every opportunity to gain muscle

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. Now, everything from high protein deserts, to high protein fast food, and the integration of protein into existing snacks like Quest Chips, are all on the rise.