Whole Foods Market identifies 10 food, beverage trends for 2018

Whole Foods Market’s global buyers and experts have announced food trends for 2018. Floral flavors, functional mushrooms, and root-to-stem recipes are just a few of the picks expected to take off in 2018. The 10 trends are:

1. Floral Flavors: Foragers and culinary stars have embraced edible petals for years, but floral inspiration is finally in full bloom. From adding whole flowers and petals into dishes to infusing botanical flavors into drinks and snacks, this top trend makes for a subtly sweet taste and fresh aromatics.
2. Super Powders: Because they’re so easy to incorporate, they’ve found their way into lattés, smoothies, nutrition bars, soups, and baked goods. For an energy boost or an alternative to coffee, powders like matcha, maca root, and cacao are showing up in mugs everywhere. Ground turmeric powder is still on the rise, the ever-popular spice used in Ayurvedic medicine.
3. Functional Mushrooms: Functional mushrooms are traditionally used to support wellness as an ingredient in dietary supplements. Now, varieties like reishi, chaga, cordyceps, and lion’s mane star in products across categories. Bottled drinks, coffees, smoothies, and teas are leading the way.
4. Feast from the Middle East: Middle Eastern culinary influences have made their way west for years, and 2018 will bring these tasty traditions into the mainstream. Things like hummus, pita, and falafel were tasty entry points, but now consumers are ready to explore the deep traditions, regional nuances and classic ingredients of Middle Eastern cultures, with Persian, Israeli, Moroccan, Syrian, and Lebanese influences rising to the top.
5. Transparency 2.0: More is more when it comes to product labeling. Consumers want to know the real story behind their food, and how that item made its way from the source to the store. GMO transparency is top-of-mind, but shoppers seek out other details, too, such as Fair-Trade certification, responsible production, and animal welfare standards.
6. High-Tech Goes Plant-Forward: Plant-based diets and dishes continue to dominate the food world, and now the tech industry has a seat at the table, too. By using science to advance recipes and manipulate plant-based ingredients and proteins, these techniques are creating alternatives like “bleeding” vegan burgers or sushi-grade “not-tuna” made from tomatoes. These new production techniques are also bringing some new varieties of nut milks and yogurts made from pili nuts, peas, bananas, macadamia nuts, and pecans.
7. Puffed & Popped Snacks: Crunchy snacks are perennial favorites, but new technology is revolutionizing all things puffed, popped, dried, and crisped. New extrusion methods (ways of processing and combining ingredients), have paved the way for popped cassava chips, puffed pasta bow ties, seaweed fava chips, and puffed rice clusters.
8. Tacos Come Out of Their Shell: This street-food star is no longer limited to a tortilla, or to savory recipes: Tacos are showing up for breakfast, and trendy restaurants across the country have dessert variations. Most of all, tacos are shedding their shell for new kinds of wrappers and fillings too—think seaweed wrappers with poke filling.
9. Root-to-Stem: Between nose-to-tail butchery and reducing food waste, a few forces are combining to inspire root-to-stem cooking, which makes use of the entire fruit or vegetable, including the stems or leaves that are less commonly eaten. Recipes like pickled watermelon rinds, beet-green pesto or broccoli-stem slaw have introduced consumers to new flavors and textures from old favorites.
10. Say Cheers to the Other Bubbly: LaCroix may have paved the way, but now there’s an entire booming category of sparkling beverages vying for consumer attention. Flavored sparkling waters like plant-derived options from Sap!(made with maple and birch) and sparkling cold brew from Stumptown will are shaking up a fizzy fix.

Press release