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Spritzes, milkshakes, and so much more!
The Allrecipes team strives to keep you up to date on what’s new in the world of culinary trends throughout the year. From tinned fish to Travis Kelce recipes, 2023 has been overflowing with food trends that range from humble to Hollywood. Peppered with biscuit hacks and wild ways to eat signature snacks like Doritos (ahem, Kelly Clarkson!), it has been an unexpected—and unexpectedly delicious—year.
Before we look ahead to what might just be the year of little luxuries, let’s take a walk down memory lane through 10 food trends that defined 2023. To select our top 10, we scoured data reports from Yelp, YouTube, Pinterest, Grubhub, TikTok, Google, and more.
This year proved that cottage cheese is no longer viewed as your mom or aunt’s diet food. The year 2023 taught us a wide variety of ways to make the most of the versatile, high-protein dairy product, from blending to fluffing-up flapjacks to acting as the foundation for frozen treats. Cottage cheese ice cream clocked in at number 10 in the recipe category for Google’s Year in Search Top Trending Data 2023 in the U.S., and “Everything Cottage Cheese Foods” earned the top spot on TikTok’s list of the biggest culinary moments of the year. (Sorry, crispy feta eggs.)
We’ve seen mashups rising in popularity for years to the point that entire cookbooks are now focused on mashing up cuisines (see: Priya Krishna’s "Indian-ish," Eric Kim’s "Korean American," Illyanna Maisonet’s "Diasporican"). The latest crop of mashup recipes are centered around comfort food and nostalgia.
According to Pinterest, searches for carbonara ramen (+165 percent), cheeseburger tacos (+255 percent), and burger quesadilla (+80 percent) all jumped year over year, driven largely by Gen X and Baby Boomers. Over on TikTok, Gen Z was all about snack and fast food-focused combos, including hashbrown McFlurry sandwiches, Big Mac tacos or smash burger tacos, and ice cream fruit roll-ups.
The buzziest fast-food recipe of all wasn’t one of those mashup ingredients, though. It was McDonald’s wildly popular Grimace Shake. The vanilla soft serve and mixed berry blend hopped to number two on YouTube 2023’s Trending Topics and saw the largest year-over-year sustained jump in search traffic in the recipe space on Google. (This all holds true despite the controversy around how to order a Grimace Shake.) TikTok users created their own “HorrorTok” movies related to the violet-hued shake. Many also whipped up DIY versions to recreate the magic at home—even after the menu item was no longer available.
In a delightful exhibit of how life is all about balance, Grubhub reports that more than 600,000 of their users opted to pair their top-ordered side dish of 2023—French fries—with a salad. We love this dynamic duo of a combo meal so much that we say, "Why keep them separate?" Our Steak 'n Fries Salad features the fries on top of the salad, crouton-style. As far as what cuts we’re craving, Grubhub says that classic fries are first, followed closely by waffle fries, cheese fries, sweet potato fries, and curly fries.
The internet just about breaks when a public figure like an actor or politician takes a stance about pineapple on pizza. Still, this controversial odd couple experienced quite the renaissance in 2023. According to Grubhub, orders including pineapple on pizza jumped 33 percent in popularity since 2022. Hawaiian pizza, one of the most ubiquitous expressions of this theme, ranked at number five on Grubhub’s top pizza orders list. Cheese, margherita, pepperoni, and Buffalo chicken are the only options that topped the island-inspired pie.
Barbie is back. The Warner Bros. movie raked in more than $1.3 billion at the box office, making it the highest-grossing movie by a female filmmaker and the biggest worldwide film release of 2023. It was also YouTube’s number two trending topic of 2023. The box-office smash spawned a slew of culinary extensions, including a pop-up café at the Mall of America, a Barbie-branded pink milkshake at Coldstone Creamery, and a spike in searches for "Barbie mocktail" on Google. (Psst…our Pink Champagne Mocktail fits the bill!) We couldn’t resist getting in on the fun by showcasing 22 perfectly pink recipes for the ultimate Barbie-themed bash. What the TikTok trend report deems a “girl-aisssance” didn’t end there. 2023 was also the year of girl dinner, tomato girl summer, and the tart cherry sleepy girl mocktail.
Zero-proof drinks were prominent on this trip around the sun, as were low-ABV (alcohol by volume) options. Unlike spirit-forward cocktails like a Manhattan, Long Island iced tea, martini, or negroni, drinks lighter in alcohol allow you to imbibe without such a high risk for a hangover the next day. The Aperol spritz was already all the rage before we entered 2023. Its cousin, the Hugo spritz, stepped into the spotlight this year and was all over TikTok. By year-end, Hugo Spritz landed at number six in Google’s Year in Search Top Trending Data stateside.
After about a decade of rising in popularity, 2023 was the year that pickles officially demonstrated that they’re too tasty to be relegated to a side dish or garnish territory. Searches for pickle-flavored foods on Yelp spiked 55 percent this year. Those results surfaced some outside-the-jar options, including pickle martinis and pickle ice cream. Over on Grubhub, pickles boasted the biggest increase in orders compared to 2022, jumping 89 percent to a whopping 6.9 million orders. (If you, too, think these goodies are a big dill, don’t miss our 18 best recipes that put a pickle on it.)
Everything from ready-to-drink coffee to coffee cocktails to around-the-clock orders show that Americans are craving creative plays on coffee. Off-menu Starbucks orders swirled all over TikTok, and on Grubhub, 10 million coffee orders were placed after 5 p.m. (Bedtime, be darned!) EHL Insights predicts that the market for canned and bottled buzzy options, also known as ready-to-drink (RTD) coffee and tea, is expected to balloon to $133 billion by 2027. On the more bespoke side, Carbonate and af&co. says that now is the time to celebrate (and order!) sophisticated coffee creations from coast to coast. At Outset Coffee in San Francisco, California, you can score unique coffee drinks that are blended with citrus juice from their “Neo Americano” menu. In Des Moines, Iowa at Horizon Line Coffee, you can take a “Walk in the Park,” which includes blackberry pear brown sugar reduction, espresso, tonic water, cinnamon, and clove. And in Bentonville, Arkansas’ Onyx Coffee Lab, ask for a “Cold Fashioned,” which is made with spirit-free whiskey, bitters, caramel, and a cherry.
Croissants’ crusade to the top of the bakery case continues in 2023. Even though the cronut and savory croissants have existed for years, we’ve yet to reach peak croissant. This year, croissant cones, cube croissants, and spiral-shaped croissants were king. Searches for The Suprême—one particularly trendy and TikTok-beloved curly-cue croissant that drew crowds to Lafayette Grand Café & Bakery in New York City—were up 13 percent in 2023, according to Yelp. Keep the laminated love going—no line required—with these 5 brilliant ways to use Trader Joe’s frozen mini croissants.
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