Gen Z Trendspotters Name Top 5 About-To-Boom Food Trends From The NYC Specialty Food Show

Since Gen Z spends about 40% of its grocery budget on specialty food items, Drexel University sent 10 “trendspotters” to the 2024 Summer Fancy Food Show in New York recently, hosted by the Specialty Food Association. The results? Beverages are hot, wheat flour’s not, and honey is having a moment.

The group was led by Drexel Food Lab Associate Director Chef Rachel Sherman along with Drexel University Professor Jonathan Deutsch and Chef Brooke Olasewere.

After three days of snacking, walking, and talking with vendors from 56 countries across the world, the group came home with five main takeaways:

• Beverage boom: Innovation in beverages continues—this year, many were sparkling, cocktail-inspired, or had functional attributes. Brands like Kombucharista combine multiple elements with non-alcoholic, cocktail flavored, gut-healthy, prepared drinks. Bluestem Botanicals, who use herbs in organic mocktail kits, and Seraphim Beverages, who have pioneered a non-alcoholic wine, display the market is ripe with non-alcoholic offerings. Ceybon comes in with mushroom-infused aperitif and elixir concentrates, which create the perfect backdrop for non-alcoholic, wellness cocktails. Unity rounds out this category with natural energy drinks with adaptogens for extra health benefits. The growing trend is clean labels and additional health benefits without compromising on taste. Finally, the dry beverage market has also expanded. Pinky Up offers boba in a tea bag while Everydaze Reset Kombucha has powdered kombucha in a variety of flavors.
• Crunchy snacks: If you ever wanted to make a loud announcement when walking into a room, you now have endless edible means to do so. In the snack category, there was great innovation and experimentation that highlighted new methods of producing snacks, ingredients, and flavors. Mr. Mushroom features vacuum-fried vegetables such as mushrooms (shocker), tomatoes, and lotus root. Similarly, freeze dried snacks are being brought to the market by brands like Uptop Treats and Pocas. Brands like Bret’s Chips has expanded the classic potato chip into gourmet flavors like camembert and summer truffle. Everyone is bound to find a new favorite snack!
• Global flavors: With the summer months here, everyone seems to be going somewhere. Can’t afford a plane ticket but don’t want to miss out on the fun? No worries! Travel the world in less than 80 days with sauces and spices from Watcharee (Thailand), Perfeito (Brazil), HOXY (Korea), and Brundo (Ethiopia). Kasé’s dashi soy sauce, Pink Salt’s Nam Prik Pao, and Auria’s hot chili sambal can brighten up a meal. Prepared foods like Xinca‘s pupusas, Doro’s Cheesy Korean Rice Cakes, and snacks like HBAF‘s impressive flavor library like tteok-bokki almonds or cheeseburger popcorn exhibit how global flavors have popularized across the industry.

• Flours beyond whole wheat: As gluten-free snack innovation continues, we see a wider variety of featured alternatives. Diggables strays from the traditional with buckwheat puffs. In the same vein, Sorghum Symphony’s puffed snacks include global flavors like churro and curry while Yuca Balls offers a crunchy cassava snack. Ieialel offers dehydrated fermented millet flour while Local village has ready to eat sorghum grain in brine along with their sorghum, teff, and tiger nut flours. For Good granola features buckwheat in their oat free granola. Yolélé has expanded fonio to the American market with chips made from the African grain.
• Honey everything: Honey is having a moment. From hot honey to honey tea and sauces, you could not walk more than an aisle or two without tasting a honey product. Explorer has a honey chai concentrate, Savannah Bee Company launched a honey hot sauce. Fresh Fizz sweetens their sodas with honey. Casa Folino’s set out a wide array of flavored honey like bergamot, lemon, and balsamic. Bumbleberry farms featured their peach vanilla cream spread. Zen Bear has a selection of honey teas. Honey B has a sparkling honey drink and the list goes on. But of course, purists could always choose one of the many honeys brought by vendors from all over the world.

“We were so honored to be invited to the Fancy Food Show this year. It is a great way for our students to see how broad the food industry is and understand the impact of the work we do at the lab,” said Sherman. “I find it encouraging to see what products and trends jump out to them. Each student found at least one highlight that I missed. With such a big show it can be easy to overlook something, and students have a great eye for finding standouts amongst the excitement. We ran into multiple alums who were showcasing this year, inspiring the next generation of food professionals.”

“The Fancy Food Show is something I always look forward to each year. Visiting the booths is always a great opportunity to connect with individuals in the field as well as to learn about new, upcoming products. I personally love working as a Junior Trendspotter because it allows me to look at the exhibits through a more critical lens and analyze what is a new trend versus what is something that continues to be popular from previous years,” said Victoria Sanchez-Galarza, Senior, Culinary Arts and Sciences.

“It’s really fascinating and informative to see the overlaps and divergences between top trends identified by SFA’s Junior Trendspotters and those noted by Millennial and Gen X Trendspotters,” said Leana Salama, SVP of Marketing and Communications at SFA. “Where inescapable trends like global flavors or honey appear in both lists, the Junior Trendspotter’s callout of non-traditional flours speaks to something essential about the Gen Z experience of and interest in specialty foods.”

A full Trendspotter Panel report from the Summer Fancy Food Show can be found online.

The not-for-profit Specialty Food Association (SFA) is the leading membership trade association and source of information about the $194 billion specialty food industry. Founded in 1952 in New York City, the SFA prides itself on being an organization by the members and for the members, representing thousands of specialty food makers and manufacturers, importers, retailers, buyers, distributors, brokers, and others in the trade. The SFA owns and operates the Fancy Food Shows—which are the largest specialty food industry events in North America—as well as the sofi™ Awards—which have honored excellence in specialty food and beverage annually since 1972. The SFA produces the Trendspotter Panel annual predictions, the State of the Specialty Food Industry Report, Today’s Specialty Food Consumer research, the Spill & Dish podcast, year-round educational programming for professionals at every stage in their business journey, and SFA Feed, the industry’s go-to daily source for news, trends and new product information. Find out more online and connect with SFA on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

Drexel Food Lab in Drexel’s College of Nursing and Health Professions at Drexel University in Philadelphia is a food product design and culinary innovation lab that applies culinary arts and science to improve the health of people, the planet and economies. We do this through research and programming that help us understand consumers, develop new food products, and introduce new products to market. In doing so, we not only develop new food products and menu items with entrepreneurs, industry, non-profit, and government partners, but also develop our flagship “product,” graduates across disciplines who are poised to improve the food system. Students in the lab also enroll in the Certificate in Food Entrepreneurship (undergraduate) or Certificate in Food Innovation (postgraduate) to develop the skills they need to bring their own ideas to market.