Abstract of TikTok meals tendencies
- TikTok drives fast world meals tendencies by personalised algorithmic content material
- Emotional visuals and aesthetics assist viral TikTok meals tendencies unfold rapidly
- Creators perceived as genuine strongly affect younger customers’ meals decisions
- TikTok tendencies considerably increase gross sales of trending elements and merchandise
- Dubai chocolate, cottage cheese and freeze-dried sweet markets surged through TikTok
You’ve seemingly heard of Dubai chocolate. For a second in 2025, the deal with was in every single place, pictures of it filling social media feeds and demand for it ratcheting as much as such a stage that it prompted a worldwide pistachio scarcity.
This might seemingly not have occurred with out TikTok. Dubai chocolate’s recognition originated as a TikTok social media pattern, and as soon as it had, little might cease it from spilling out into the true world.
Dubai chocolate was not the primary meals to be made common by the platform, and it received’t be the final.
TikTok tendencies exert an outsize affect on meals and beverage, particularly amongst youthful shoppers. The app has been instrumental to the success behind common meals manufacturers as nicely, from ice cream model Little Moons to Japanese chain Itsu.
Its affect is so important that researchers are exploring simply how the app influences dietary preferences and the uptake of viral tendencies. How a lot affect does the wildly common platform have in meals?
How meals is formed by TikTok
The TikTok algorithm is ready to fine-tune person expertise, making a extremely personalised stream of really helpful content material.
TikTok is, specifically, a supply of creating meals tendencies, with many now-ubiquitous tendencies initially stemming from the platform.
The social media platform’s well-known viral meals tendencies are sometimes spurred on by presentation and aesthetics: therefore, Dubai chocolate, with its mesmerising brilliant inexperienced knafeh and crunchy texture.
Such presentation is extra prone to evoke robust feelings, and optimistic content material is extra prone to go viral than the inverse.
Additionally learn → Dubai chocolate craze triggers world pistachio scarcity and scams
As a result of it’s a social media platform and is thus communal, TikTok naturally builds tendencies. Customers need to take part in these tendencies, and this mass participation helps them to develop.
Hashtags carry these tendencies into the stratosphere, linking customers again to different posts in a rising wave.
Creators themselves will be, partly, accountable for this. Youthful TikTok customers specifically typically see content material creators on the platform as extra “genuine” and “relatable”, and much more as friends, than different figures within the media. They might type a (often one-sided) emotional bond with them. This in flip shapes the uptake of tendencies.
Which meals tendencies had been boosted by TikTok?
Regardless of the purpose that they take off, the facility of TikTok tendencies is plain. Many firms will improve gross sales of particular elements because of the sheer demand such a pattern creates.
A number of well-known tendencies have originated from the platform. One main pattern was cottage cheese, which led to a growth within the dairy product. Customers gravitated in the direction of it due to its excessive protein content material and flexibility.
The freeze-dried sweet market has been pushed by TikTok too, to the purpose the place the market was predicted to double within the area of lower than a decade.
Extra uncommon tendencies have come from the social media platform as nicely. For instance, the recognition of butter boards – chopping boards slathered with butter and different meals – stemmed from TikTok.
And naturally, as beforehand talked about, the Dubai chocolate pattern can be nothing with out TikTok.
TikTok is a pressure to be reckoned with in meals. Meals tendencies originating there can transfer markets.
With calls to boycott the platform since its US possession modified palms, will this affect final?
