I've been looking at consumer food data for 30 years. I have never seen anything quite like what's happening right now.

These are in sharp decline in social food conversation, and it's happened fast:

→Nutritious. →Climate change. →Self care. →Weight management. →Mental health. →Animal rights.

That is not a list of fading flavor trends.

That is the entire value system that drove food culture for the last three decades. Gone. Simultaneously. In the same dataset.

At the end of last year I was tracking an increase in indulgence and comfort food. That's happened before during periods of economic stress and cultural uncertainty.

What's different this time is the speed and the scale. This didn't drift. It moved fast and it moved decisively across the entire value system at once.

Here is what is rising to replace it:

→Intense flavor: +121% →Melty: +118% →Ritual: +108% →Silky: +93% →Buttery: +59% →Sweet and spicy: +55%

And the single fastest growing ingredient in snack and seasoning data:

→Tallow. Up 172% year over year. The animal fat the food industry spent 40 years telling us to avoid.

People are not confused. They are making a choice.

When grocery bills are unpredictable, the news is exhausting, and optimizing for a future self feels beside the point... you stop counting calories.

You eat what tastes like something, right now, without apology.

We're calling this End of World Eating.

This is not a blip in the data. This is a cultural mood showing up in what people are putting in their carts.

For food manufacturers and the suppliers who serve them, the brief has changed. Consumers are not asking whether a product is good for them or good for the planet. They are asking whether it delivers.

We track these signals for the food companies and suppliers we work with. If you want to understand where your category is heading, let's talk.

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