The year 2020 is likely to be forever divided into two categories: before and after. That is, of course, before and after the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way people live. Even now, as Maryland and the rest of the country continue to emerge from the isolated lives that social distancing required, nobody can be sure of when—or even if—things will return to the way they used to be.
That includes how people eat. Every year, culinary experts predict what will be hot in food, but not a single expert could have predicted what would happen this past spring. While some food trends held strong throughout the pandemic, others didn’t quite get the traction that forecasters predicted, though they could come back around as life returns to somewhat normal. Some trends weren’t even on the radar, but were born out of necessity as grocery store shelves turned up empty, restaurants closed, and home-cooking once again became priority.
“It will certainly be interesting to see what happens in the year and years ahead,” says Mike Kostyo, a trendologist—yes, that’s his real job title—for food trend-tracking company Datassential. “...But there are few reasons to believe that things will bounce back, and that the trends we were tracking before COVID-19 will still be important. For one, consumers want things to return back to normal, so they have a vested stake in making that happen. According to our research, the number one food or drink experience they want to have when things open back up is dining at a full-service restaurant, and the reason they give for choosing that is that they ‘need to feel normal again.’”
However, you can’t ignore that delivery and curbside pickup became the name of the game for restaurants in 2020. “Delivery was already growing so quickly before this happened, so now expect it just to become a fact of life, particularly because so many people who had never tried it before are now comfortable with it,” Kostyo predicts, though he expects to see a shift in how people will order. “Overall, they’ll continue to use and rely on delivery and curbside pick-up apps. There is a real love-hate, or even hate-hate, relationship between restaurant operators and delivery apps, though, so there could be some shake-ups in the future.”
Beyond restaurant delivery, let’s take a look at what food trends persisted through the pandemic, what rose in popularity unexpectedly, and what previously predicted trends might still come back around in the latter half of the year.
The Year of Comfort Food
When the world around you becomes uncertain, you reach for what’s known—and that’s comfort food. “A likely recession or even depression is one factor that has historically had a major impact on what consumers are buying and eating,” Kostyo comments. “During recessions, we typically seek out affordable comfort foods. When times are tough, you want to be comforted, you want to choose things you know your whole family will like, you don’t want to take a monetary chance on something new and unproven.”
In early and mid-March, Kostyo notes that pizza was consumer’s top food choice. A New York Times article from early April detailed that sales of Campbell’s soup had soared 59 percent in the past month and Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers sales jumped nearly 23 percent.
During the pandemic, Odenton resident Laura Foster says she was making recipes that take longer, such as homemade stock, chicken and dumplings, and soups and stews from dried beans. “Recipes from my mom and grandmother that combine pantry items with fresh and frozen, so we didn’t use up everything fresh and end up with ‘sad’ meals,” she recalls.
Foster says that she’s always used cooking to de-stress, but it was especially important during the uncertain times that COVID-19 brought to the world. “There was definitely comfort. It’s something I can do. It was a helpless time, but I could feed our family,” says the mother of 3-year-old twins.
Plant-Based Foods Slow but Still Thrive
In the past couple years, consumers have had an increasing amount of meat-free options from which to choose—and they were definitely choosing them. The National Restaurant Association named plant-based proteins as one of the top three trends for 2020 in its annual “What’s Hot Culinary Forecast.”
“More and more plant-based meat substitutes are coming onto the market, and they taste better than ever before,” notes Bret Thorn, editor of Nation’s Restaurant News. “On top of that, some of the new ones actually do have a better nutritional profile than meat, so that’s promising.”
However, Thorn believes that the trend—made even more popular by brands such as Impossible Foods, with its Impossible Burger made from soy and potato protein served at multiple restaurants—is transitional and will eventually be replaced by lab-grown meat in the next decade or so.
This year was really going to be a “proving ground” for plant-based foods, Kostyo says, as some consumers started to question their health benefits. The COVID-19 pandemic may have slowed the trend, but he doesn’t think it’s over.
“We saw pictures of consumers leaving many of these options on the shelf when the pandemic began, but part of that were simply the higher prices and the fact that they are still new for most consumers at a time when they wanted brands that they were familiar with,” he says. When things go back to “normal,” though, Kostyo believes that the popularity of plant-based foods will grow again. “The reasons that consumers chose them—namely, health and sustainability factors—haven’t gone away,” he adds, though he thinks price will continue to be an important factor until the economy bounces back.
Bread-Baking Is Back
Making your own bread takes time, and if there’s anything that local residents found themselves with more of on their hands this year, it was certainly more time. During the spring months, the website Pinterest reported that searches for bread recipes—particularly those that didn’t require yeast, which became a scarcity during the COVID-19 pandemic—rose by thousands of percentage points. This included yeastless bread recipes (up 4,400 percent), bread in the crockpot (increased by 3,195 percent), and sweet Amish bread (up 1,499 percent).
Annapolis resident Jennifer Martin, mother of three, is just one of those folks who found herself baking more than ever before. “I’ve always been a baker, but my schedule after becoming a mother wasn’t conducive to baking bread,” she said during an interview in April. “More than anything, however, I have time to bake.”
During her family’s time spent at home, she practiced making breads that they ate when stationed overseas—her husband is in the U.S. Marine Corps. “My favorite bread to make right now is French bread because we lived near the French border for three years,” she explained.
“My next baking attempt will be German Sonnenbluem rolls—that is dense, dark bread made with sunflower seeds...those breads remind my family of places we lived overseas, and now I have time to practice making them myself.”
Hard Seltzer Skyrockets
As soda consumption has declined, the seltzer/sparkling water industry has enjoyed growth—so it makes sense that alcohol companies would cash in on that trend. “Hard seltzer came out of nowhere, and it looks like it’s here to stay a while,” Thorn comments. “I understand its appeal. It’s the drink equivalent of music with a good beat that you can dance to.”
The industry is lead by White Claw, but big brand names have gotten in on the action with brands such as Bon & Viv and Bud Light Seltzer (both owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev), Corona Seltzer (owned by Constellation brands), and Truly Hard Seltzer (owned by Boston Beer Company).
The industry’s sales grew roughly 200 percent over the past year, according to Nielsen data. This might be thanks to Millennials, who prefer lower-calorie alcoholic beverages, notes market research company EFT Trends.
Annapolitan Heather McGrath first tried hard seltzer on vacation in 2019 and fell in love. “Light, refreshing, and easy,” she says. “Pop the can, and you have the perfect poolside drink—or to survive the ‘Corona-cation.’”
The drinks’ lower-calorie, lower-sugar nutritional profile is a benefit to McGrath, too. “I like knowing how many calories I’m drinking versus guessing with cocktails,” she adds.
Fermentation at Home
Fermented foods, such as kimchi and sauerkraut, certainly aren’t anything new—the food-processing method has been around for thousands of years—but they’ve come back in a big way. Food history expert Dr. Julia Skinner, whose company Root offers online courses in the topic, says that sales of those self-paced classes increased 200 percent over the first few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Many people are fermenting for the first time (e.g. all of the interest in sourdough starters!) but are also branching out into new ferments that they haven’t tried before. For example, folks who have mostly made lacto-fermented foods like sauerkraut are venturing into the world of koji,” Skinner says.
This trend wasn’t totally pandemic-driven; there was interest in the early part of the year, too. However, “I think the pandemic accelerated that interest and will also make our collective interest in ferments more enduring,” she adds. “Instead of being a trend, it will become a practice, as more of us incorporate it into our lives long-term.”
The Trends Before and—Maybe—After
What about the trends that culinary experts predicted for the year at the end of 2019? Before anyone knew that restaurants would be forced to convert to takeout and delivery for months and consumers would turn to home-cooking more than ever? Here are three more trends that started to take hold and, as life returns to normal, may be back in the spotlight once again:
Oat milk. If you’ve been in a coffee shop over the past year, you may have noticed an addition to the roster of creamers available for your cuppa’ joe: oat milk. It’s part of the plant-based food trend—more and more people are choosing to skip dairy milk—and an allergen-free option for those who have problems with nuts and soy. Retail sales of oat milk grew to $29 million in 2019, up from just $4.4 million in 2017, indicating that this creamy beverage may be here to stay.
Zero-waste cooking. Restaurants and consumers alike have gotten more and more eco-conscious over the years, prioritizing sustainability and less packaging. Now it’s about making sure food scraps don’t go to waste—an important venture, given that restaurants generate approximately 11.4 million tons of food waste each year in the U.S., according to ReFed. Zero-waste cooking focuses on transforming food scraps, damaged, or “ugly,” produce and leftovers into viable ingredients for dishes. You may have heard of “root-to-stem” cooking, which refers to utilizing an entire vegetable rather than throwing part of it away. This might mean using carrot tops to make pesto or repurposing coffee grinds into homemade ice cream flavors.
Fried chicken sandwiches. “No one, least of all Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen, expected the runaway success of their chicken sandwich, which resulted in a spate of other fried chicken sandwiches,” says Thorn of the fast food restaurant’s unanticipated hit of 2019 that spawned a trend that has lasted into 2020. “Obviously, fried chicken sandwiches aren’t new, but they’re proliferating.” Other restaurants got on board, debuting spicy sandwiches like Nashville Hot chicken and other varieties.
What’s on the horizon in culinary trends? Well, given the weirdness of 2020, it’s hard to say what consumers might start craving and chefs might start cooking. There’s one potential trend that Thorn is excited about, though: “vintage beef.”
“Normally, dairy cattle that are too old to produce milk are turned into hamburger, but some chefs and meat producers are, instead, requesting cuts of meat that are made into steak, like the sirloin and rib-eye, aging them, and serving them as they would any steak,” Thorn explains. “They taste different from typical [beef cattle] steak—a bit chewier and more gamey—but it gives people a chance to taste beef in a totally different way.”
