Food Trends That Are Going To Take Over 2024

Healthier and more varied frozen meals should be coming to a freezer near you in 2024. The cost of food remains high, so many people have been choosing to eat at home more often rather than dine out. However, that doesn't necessarily mean we want to go into full cooking mode for every meal. While we've seen lots of stores fill the gap with refrigerated warm-and-eat meals, a more convenient long-term solution is stockpiling frozen meals rather than having to visit the grocery store every few days. Consumers have been buying more frozen foods in the 2020s than ever before, with Mordor Intelligence saying sales in 2024 should reach $356.28 billion, up about 4.9% from the year that just ended.

Snack-type frozen meals are also on the rise, and research firm Mintel's marketing studies say that 48% of customers are looking for healthier options even among the snacky foods (via Supermarket News). Today's consumers aren't satisfied with the Hungry-Man meals of the 1970s and 1980s. They're looking for more organic and clean-label foods with recognizable products and fewer chemicals. Other wants include higher protein meals, fewer carbs, less meat, more gluten-free options, and more international offerings.

Mixed-race and mixed-culture families are giving rise to a new type of cooking called third-culture cuisine. Food traditions flex as people combine a little bit of this and a little bit of that from different cuisines and adapt recipes with local ingredient availability and tastes.

Good examples show up Jon Kung's cookbook "Kung Food: Chinese American Recipes From a Third Culture Kitchen" published at the end of 2023 that includes dishes like buffalo chicken rangoon, Faygo orange chicken, Szechuan paneer, dan dan lasagna, and Hong Kong chicken and waffles. It goes beyond the fusion idea of having a chef add international ingredients to menu items since third-culture cuisine comes from a place of being immersed in multiple cultures and food traditions simultaneously through relocation, marriage, birth, or other means.

You're likely to see the third-culture cuisine trend pop up in cookbooks, restaurants, and even at the grocery store. When shopping for groceries, you should find more third-culture options like the Vietnamese-American noodle brand, Omsom. When going out to eat, you'll likely encounter more third-culture restaurants like Philadelphia's Royal Izakay, owned by Jesse Ito, an American chef with a Japanese father and Korean mother. Plus, more third-culture cookbooks like "Black Rican Vegan" by pop-up business founder Lyana Blount are sure to make it to shelves.

As an alcohol-free or moderate-alcohol lifestyle becomes more popular, the number of zero-alcohol drinks and euphoric beverages — those designed to deliver certain sensations without alcohol — will continue to rise. While alcoholic drinks still dominate the market, with global revenues predicted to increase by $377.9 billion between 2023 and 2027, according to Statista, alternatives are becoming more widespread. The compound annual growth rate for non-alcoholic beer and wine is projected at 7% between 2023 and 2032, according to Global Market Insights. More premium alcohol alternatives are also entering the market.

Plenty of bars, restaurants, and major beverage companies will join the trend of offering non-alcoholic beverages like zero-alcohol beer, freshly made and canned mocktails, and non-alcoholic wines. It's a win-win situation so that non-drinkers can join their friends and enjoy more than just a sad glass of ginger ale while the bar or restaurant can make more money from customers.

Some low-alcohol drinks and cocktails with only 0.5% to 25% alcohol by volume (ABV) will also make waves. They provide the familiar burn of alcohol and a better mouthfeel but without as many side effects as higher ABV drinks.

Research firm Datassential has predicted Spam on more menus in 2024. Many of us have kept an emergency stash of the canned meat on our shelves, but it's been growing in popularity in the U.S. again lately. Spam claims that people around the world consume 12.8 cans of its product every second, which comes out to 768 cans per minute, 46,080 per hour, and over 1.1 million cans per day. It has been popular in Hawaii, the Philippines, and South Korea for years. If you haven't looked for Spam recently, know that it now has 11 different varieties, including everything from maple flavored and jalapeño flavored to teriyaki and tocino (sweet Filipino pork) flavored.

With the rising cost of food, dipping back into Depression-era meat seems fitting. However, a basic can of Spam costs $3.58 at Walmart ($4.77 per pound), making it $0.65 per pound more expensive than store-brand ham lunch meat and $2.29 per pound more expensive than a whole ham. So, it may not represent the deal people think it does.

Spam's website lists restaurants all over the U.S. that serve up its canned meat. If the prediction proves true, numbers should grow in 2024. We've certainly started seeing it show up on menus and in recipes more often.

This won't be the year of the robot uprising, but such machines will be on the rise nonetheless. Whether it's working in a restaurant kitchen, delivering your food, or facilitating other food-related tasks, machines will be working to make your life more convenient.

Restaurants may adopt equipment like automated drink machines, fast-cook ovens, and smart buffets that can facilitate food safety. However, some automated systems will look more like the robotic future we've long envisioned. For example, robot servers that deliver food and drinks to tables are being spotted inside more restaurants. There's also a robotic assembly machine named Hyphen that may be constructing bowls and salads at Chipotle soon. Such machines allow restaurants to use exact measurements of ingredients for recipe accuracy, improved production speed, and cost savings. So, yes, the robots are coming for some of your jobs sooner rather than later in the food industry.

Delivery robots are also on the rise, whether it's a rolling pod on wheels operating on college campuses or employed by Chick-fil-A, delivery drones like what Walmart has been piloting, or driverless delivery vehicles like those used by Uber Eats. Something completely new to watch for in 2024 is stacked deliveries where a service can do all of your around-town errands for you — it'll pick up and deliver multiple items like your dry cleaning, groceries, and a hot meal all at once.

Sweetened condensed milk is slated to trend upward in the U.S. in 2024. Gail Borden created the first sweetened condensed milk in 1856 to try to make milk safer to consume for people who didn't have refrigeration. It supposedly helped the Union win the Civil War by providing portable and safe calories for troops. Now, the product is on the rise again. According to Imarc Impactful Insights, it earned $7.3 billion globally in 2022 with an expected growth to $10 billion by 2028. It's become especially popular in Europe.

One thing that's helping its growth is the introduction of new non-dairy versions, like sweetened condensed oat milk and sweetened condensed soy milk. Sweetened condensed milk has also been growing in popularity as a result of ads and social media exposure in a world craving more sweet foods and beverages. It's convenient since you can buy it and put it on your shelf without worrying about a close expiration date. While it's still most popular in cans, you can also buy it in handier containers like tubes and bottles.

There are lots of uses for sweetened condensed milk. You may have experienced it as the sweetener and whitener in Vietnamese coffee or other drinks in cafes. It's also handy for making caramels, fudge, flan, pies, dulce de leche, and other desserts.

The phenomenon of snacks as meals has become a trend out of necessity. We don't always have time for full meals when working, or we may favor convenient finger foods on a dash in our car across town. Eating whatever snacky things we have available is easier and faster than cooking a full meal. We see the snacky "girl dinner" trend of 2023 becoming more popular for everyone in 2024. Younger adults and people who live in busy cities are the most likely demographics for embracing this snackifying of meals.

Eating snacks as meals tends to be about time, convenience, and money. A Frito Lay survey found that 44% of people who eat snacks as meals do so because they don't have time to cook. With most people only having 52 total minutes to eat and cook each day, there's just no time for fancy cooking, the survey found. Additionally, with fast food now costing what a sit-down restaurant meal cost just a few years ago, snacking allows diners to eat something inexpensive. For example, someone might go through the drive-through and grab a couple of egg rolls rather than an entire combo meal. So, if you find yourself heating up pizza rolls more often than making a three-course meal this year, you're not alone. The good news is that frozen snacks will likely become healthier this year as manufacturers catch on to what consumers want.