Kara Nielsen’s article on trends offers insight into how they develop and how to best utilize them to resonate with your customers:
“The Center for Culinary Development (CCD) has developed a proprietary Trend Mapping process to spot and track these kinds of trends. Emerging culinary trends appear in fine dining and ethnic restaurants, or Stage 1 on the map. Stage 2 trends show up in gourmet food magazines, on the Food Network, and in specialty food stores like Sur La Table or Dean & Deluca. Casual-chain restaurants and cookware stores like Williams-Sonoma are home to Stage 3 trends while Stage 4 trends surface in mainstream women’s magazines such as Better Homes & Gardens. By the time a trend hits Stage 5 it is essentially mainstream, found on grocery store shelves and quick-service menus…
… Clearly it still takes years for culinary trends to reach mainstream. Yet not all new food items or ingredients on menus even become true trends. This is why it is vital to constantly monitor activity in Stage 1 and 2, tracking potential culinary trends to catch them when they start moving up the map….
… Considering all this new information about food, how can you tell what’s a fad and what might be a legitimate trend? Fads tend to spike high and fast but have no longevity. Typically, niche groups discover and promote fads such as low-carb diets. Media hype then spreads the word. But because consumer drivers behind many fads aren’t strong enough, they eventually fizzle. Who can really give up carbs long term?”
