2024 food trends: anything, everything, and SPAM

After perusing several articles proclaiming to know what the food trends for 2024 will be, I found it amusing that despite millions (perhaps billions) of dollars spent on consumer surveys, AI development, and statistical analysis, the predictions seem to hold as much weight as a restaurant fortune cookie. A prediction of “personalized tastes, global cuisines, as well as nostalgia and familiarity” means nothing. When has nostalgia ever not been a trend? As people age, they naturally look back to items they enjoyed in their youth, only now they have more money to spend on them so it makes sense for companies to turn toward whatever was popular twenty, thirty, or (gulp) forty years ago. You might as well predict that breathing is going to be big next year. You will be correct, but it’s a useless forecast.

Some of the articles may have been written using AI because they seemed a little off – so much so that I Google-stalked one of the writers to see if she was, indeed, a real person (she is, or else the bot went reaaaally deep into creating a fake Instagram account). AI itself is predicted to be a trend in the food world, although how it will be implemented has not been fully fleshed out (bad puns like this are one way to tell that we are not using AI on this blog).

A few articles said that AI could be used to create new flavor combinations and recipes. While a computer may more easily grasp the complex chemical compounds underpinning flavors than a human can, and can possibly predict combinations that might “go” together, it will still take a human to determine the success of the pairing. Why not let a human tackle this mostly pleasurable task and let the machine gather, wash, and put away the dishes instead? More practical applications for technology: a super-fast pizza vending machine, as reported by Kat Kinsman at Food and Wine, or chatbots at the drive-thru so you can experience the same irritation when ordering food as you do when trying to access customer service online. I guess installing a better speaker and microphone is a bridge too far.

A few trends did percolate through the noise: more Korean-influenced foods, simpler plant-based proteins, consumers seeking more value to offset inflation, and a resurgence in popularity of SPAM. What do you predict will be hot in 2024 (besides the planet)?