Every year, the food world erupts with enthusiasm over the next big thing. A sauce goes viral. A superfood gets crowned. A dietary concept sweeps through social media like a wildfire. It feels exciting, fresh, and somehow urgent, as if eating anything else would make you deeply uncool.
The problem? Not every trend deserves its moment in the sun. Some of them look great on an Instagram grid but fall apart in the real world. And increasingly, experienced chefs and food scientists are speaking up about the food fads that promised gold but quietly started to crack. Let’s take a closer look at eight of them.
1. The Plant-Based Meat Obsession Is Crumbling Under Its Own Weight
There was a time when plant-based burgers felt like the future, not just a menu option. Investors poured in billions, restaurants rushed to add them, and brands like Beyond Meat became household names almost overnight. That golden era now feels like a distant memory.
According to data analyzed by the Good Food Institute (GFI) and the Plant Based Foods Association, US retail sales of plant-based meat and seafood dropped seven percent to $1.2 billion in 2024, with unit sales dropping eleven percent. That’s not just a slowdown. That’s a free fall. Sales of refrigerated plant-based burgers continued their precipitous decline, dropping twenty-six percent year over year.
Investment in plant-based startups also plummeted sixty-four percent in 2024 to just $309 million, down from $854 million the previous year, according to the GFI. The numbers tell a brutal story. Plant-based meat sales declined more sharply than plant-based food sales overall, and surveys of lapsed consumers showed that plant-based meat products are not meeting consumer expectations, especially in regard to taste, texture, and price.
Plant-based meat consumption has faced pressure due to a pullback in consumer interest, with economic uncertainty and concerns over the processed nature of the offerings pushing shoppers toward cheaper animal options. Honestly, calling ultra-processed soy patties “healthy” always felt a little shaky. In a Food Technology survey, respondents singled out plant-based as the trend most likely to lose ground with consumers in 2025, with fourteen percent of respondents writing it in as the answer most expected to diminish.
2. Raw Milk Mania: A Wellness Trend With Real Danger
Few food trends in recent memory have stirred more controversy than the raw milk revival. Advocates praised it as a purer, richer, more nutritional alternative to pasteurized dairy. Social media amplified the message. Suddenly, unpasteurized milk became a symbol of rejecting the industrial food system. Here’s the thing, though: the science simply doesn’t support the hype.
The CDC says that drinking or eating products made from raw milk opens the door to several harmful germs, including E. coli, listeria, salmonella, and brucella. These aren’t minor inconveniences. Between 1998 and 2018, raw milk was linked to 202 outbreaks resulting in 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospitalizations.
One major investigation, running from October 2023 through May 2024, identified 171 cases linked to a single raw milk outbreak, spanning five states. The median age of patients was just seven years old, and nearly forty percent of patients were younger than five. The trend didn’t just fail adults who made informed choices. It put children at risk. While the FDA has indicated that pasteurization is effective at eliminating infectious H5N1 virus in dairy milk, the virus has been detected in unpasteurized milk collected from clinically ill dairy cattle.
3. Dirty Soda: The TikTok Sensation That Was Never Really About Flavor
Dirty soda swept across social media platforms in 2024 in a way that felt almost unstoppable. The trend was born in Utah and involves mixing soda, usually Coke or root beer, with flavored syrups, coffee creamers, and sometimes condensed milk. It looked photogenic, customizable, and fun. That part was real.
Dirty soda is essentially a sugar bomb in disguise. Behind the deceptive sparkling of the syrups, creamer, and soda, you’re looking at a drink so sweet it makes a milkshake seem mild. Chefs who take beverage development seriously weren’t exactly thrilled by this one. Most viewed it as a children’s experiment, not a drink concept worth replicating at scale.
Between caramel-colored iced coffees and flavored water, dirty soda lasted too long as a social media trend, seemingly buried behind several other drink fads that also caught on. Perhaps the mainstream masses couldn’t totally get behind the coffee-creamer-and-soda combination. The novelty wore off fast, just like the sugar rush did, leaving behind little more than bloating and a slightly embarrassed feeling about the whole thing.
4. The Superfood Carousel: Quinoa’s Cautionary Economic Tale
Remember when quinoa was going to save the world? It was declared a superfood, became a dietary staple across Western countries, and skyrocketed in global demand. Chefs, nutritionists, and food bloggers couldn’t get enough. What nobody talked about much was what happened next to the people who actually grew it.
Food writer Alicia Kennedy traced the fallout of the quinoa fad, drawing a direct line between quinoa’s coronation as a superfood and the subsequent market collapse, which left Bolivia’s agricultural economy in ruins. That’s the dark side of food fad culture that rarely makes it into the trend roundups. A Western appetite surge creates a global demand spike, drives up prices, then collapses just as fast, leaving farmers holding the bag.
The superfood carousel keeps spinning, cycling through kale, acai, turmeric, and moringa, each crowned and dethroned within a few seasons. Consumers are increasingly prioritizing the ingredients in their food and purchasing products with ingredients that are easy to understand. Ironically, the best “superfoods” often turn out to be the humble, affordable ingredients that have been on your plate your whole life. Beans, anyone?
5. Ghost Kitchens: The Delivery Dream That Got Complicated Fast
Ghost kitchens sounded like a genius business model. No dining room, no front-of-house costs, just pure kitchen output sold directly via delivery apps. During the height of the pandemic, they seemed almost inevitable as the future of restaurant dining. Fast-forward to 2025 and 2026, and the reality is considerably messier.
Ghost kitchens, food delivery, and online ordering are past restaurant industry trends that have since become table stakes for restaurant businesses. The saturation point hit hard. Dozens of ghost kitchen brands, many operated from the same address, started competing for the same delivery customers. Consumers began noticing the lack of authenticity, and quality control suffered across the board.
Inflation reshaped consumers’ dining habits. Guests still want to eat out, but in more rational, budget-conscious ways. After sharp price hikes in 2025, the trend reversed in 2026, with more affordable concepts and menus attracting wider audiences. Ghost kitchens, which often carried high delivery fees and opaque branding, found themselves squeezed on both ends. Chefs who poured resources into digital-only brands have largely pivoted or retreated back to physical spaces where hospitality and experience can actually be felt.
6. Chili Crisp Overload: When a Cult Condiment Loses Its Soul
Let’s be real: chili crisp is delicious. Genuinely, unapologetically delicious. The crunchy, spicy, umami-laden condiment earned its devoted fanbase through years of word-of-mouth in the Chinese diaspora community before the Western food world finally caught on. Then, as always happens with cult favorites, the brands rushed in and it ended up everywhere.
A majority of culinary experts, about sixty-five percent, believe in the staying power of chili crisp, but its popularity is waning with home cooks, with only nineteen percent thinking it’s a flavor worth sticking with. Because spicy sauces topped the trends lists in 2023, this could indicate a decline in spicier flavors overall. Once something ends up in fast food chains and airline snack bags, the magic tends to dissipate.
The chili crisp saturation problem is a familiar story in food culture. An authentic, culturally specific product gets adopted, amplified, diluted, and commodified until even its most devoted fans start rolling their eyes. Chefs who worked carefully with the original product now find themselves distancing their menus from an ingredient that became almost self-parody. It’s hard to say for sure if it’ll fully recover its credibility, but the oversaturation phase was real.
7. The Wellness Mocktail Bedtime Ritual That Got Out of Hand
The sober-curious movement is genuinely meaningful and well-supported by data. The 2025 Surgeon General’s Advisory delivered a strong message about the significant health risks associated with drinking alcohol, particularly its link to cancer, and called for updated warning labels on alcoholic beverages to include cancer risks. That’s an important shift. What’s harder to take seriously, however, is the wellness-industry-adjacent trend that followed: the elaborate bedtime mocktail ritual.
What began as a calming nighttime trend became an over-the-top experiment with unreliable results. The question worth asking is whether we truly need another bedtime ritual that requires purchasing specialty ingredients. Though the mocktail is likely harmless in most cases, turning the science of sleep hygiene into such a process feels like another way to overthink rest.
Magnesium powder, tart cherry juice, ashwagandha, L-theanine. The ingredients list kept growing, and so did the price tags. Consumption of no- and low-alcohol beverages is on the rise, and alcohol-free challenges like Dry January are further promoting this trend. The underlying movement is solid. It’s the commercialized, overcomplicated version of it, the kind sold in expensive wellness bundles, that chefs and nutritionists find eyebrow-raising. Drinking water before bed remains, as it turns out, perfectly effective.
8. TikTok Food Trends: The Viral Machine That Prioritizes Looks Over Taste
The viral food trend machine powered by TikTok has fundamentally changed how dishes spread through the culture. Social media has exposed consumers to new cuisines and innovative food formats, with some seeing extraordinary spikes in search interest, such as mentions of boudin balls shooting up one hundred thirty percent in Google searches in 2024. That kind of velocity is unmatched by anything in food history. The issue is that speed and virality have almost nothing to do with culinary quality.
From grating frozen tomatoes onto cheese and bread to turning refrigerator interiors into Pinterest-worthy displays, culinary compulsions have taken “extreme” to new realms. Though well-meaning, some trends are wildly impractical, while others boldly sought to reinvent classics that were fine to begin with. Chefs who spent years honing their craft have watched dishes judged entirely on aesthetic. Color, texture, and that all-important “reveal moment” take priority over flavor, technique, or nutritional value.
The deinfluencing movement, led by social content creators who encourage people to buy fewer and more sustainable products, picked up steam at the start of 2023. Among those surveyed by appliance company Beko, more than half said they prefer durable designs to passing kitchen trends. Perhaps that’s the real signal to pay attention to. Trend forecaster WGSN predicts that Americans will increasingly shop for quality over quantity to reduce waste through 2025. Consumers are tired. Chefs are tired. And the appetite for something real, something that tastes genuinely good rather than photographs well, has never been stronger.
