In the food world, trends now seem to spawn endless trends as they become possible. With the New Year, it is almost obligatory to announce the food trends for the coming year. With the start of the summer season, food magazines feature summer flavors and of course the staple summer trend: rosé wine. Recently, I had the opportunity to meet with Star Chen, CEO of Unilever Food Solutions, to talk about the UFS Future Menu Report 2024, which scrutinizes the global trends of chefs around the world and delves into the world of food trends. I was curious to know how an industrial food giant like UFS follows trends and acts as an actual trendsetter for the future of food.
Delivering more with less is the biggest challenge for chefs today. Customers and guests of restaurants are more demanding than ever before for memorable dining experiences, seeking tasty food and beverages, and a total package experience in the hospitality sector. However, rising raw material prices, dwindling labour and increasing costs of business continuity make these demands increasingly difficult to meet. Delivering fine cuisine with the chef’s creativity at its heart therefore needs to be done in a whole new way. Keeping up with menu trends remains crucial, but it has proven especially difficult in the digital age, where trends appear and disappear at the speed of light on social media. Chefs and home cooks alike are constantly striving to keep up with the pace, and in these busy times, it’s no secret that there just isn’t enough time to make everything from scratch, be it the perfect demi-glace or béarnaise sauce. The dwindling labour force is also an issue in professional kitchens. The good old days when apprentices would go through endless trial and error to perfect a particular classic sauce, or vigorously whisk egg yolks by hand to create the ultimate mayonnaise, now seem like a scene from an old movie. It’s nostalgic, but in reality it’s almost a thing of the past. This also leads to a lack of experience among apprentice chefs. In the digital age, the younger generation is restless with the clock ticking and wants to become a famous chef the moment they graduate from chef school, or even just a cooking course.
With changing times, and time itself now being the biggest challenge, we need to speculate on where the world of food is heading. That’s where UFS’s Future Menu 2024 Trend Report comes in. Updated based on the previous 2023 report, the report is compiled through hours of in-depth research by foodservice industry experts combined with input from at least 1,600 chefs from over 21 countries around the world. The aim was to identify the most prominent menu trends, concluding with selecting the eight most prominent topics. The Turkish edition was recently released and narrowed down the trends to five, which include those most adaptable to Turkish kitchens, namely: 1. Comfort food, 2. Charming vegetables, 3. Less waste menus, 4. Flavor shock, and 5. Modern home cooking.
The latter especially piqued my interest and I wrote a two-page essay on the subject for the Turkish edition. Incidentally, one of the reasons the list was reduced from eight to five is that in Turkish culture, some topics tend to go hand in hand. For example, the trend of taste contrasts naturally falls under the title Flavor Shock. And when it comes to comfort food, Turkish comfort food cannot be enjoyed alone. It is rather about conviviality and togetherness, and food to share effortlessly falls under the comfort food caption. Traditional dishes are an important heritage that reflect the spirit of a culture and a society. Every culture has its own traditional dishes that have been passed down from generation to generation. They build a bridge between the past and the future and give people a sense of inner comfort. The home-cooked food made by our mothers as children, whose aroma we miss and whose taste we cannot forget, occupies a very special place in our memories. Such meals soothe our hearts, give us comfort with their familiar flavors and in a way become a safe harbor to escape to in difficult times. Even if you just enjoy a mug of Tarhana soup in front of the screen in your office, the unique aroma of Tarhana makes you feel like you are at home, with your family, and not alone. No wonder it is the best-selling instant soup in Turkey. It makes you feel like you belong to a place, your identity.
When I spoke with Star Chen, I was happy to see that he wasn’t just talking about business, but was genuinely concerned about the issues I was thinking about, like the time pressure, the lack of apprenticeships, not having the time to make everything from scratch in a professional kitchen and not always making it perfect. Why would we chase chickens in the backyard to make chicken soup when it’s obvious that we don’t mill flour anymore, that we use appliances in our kitchens and have access to cutting edge technology? Also, there are always hygiene and sustainability concerns in professional kitchens. The issue of additives and chemicals in industrial foods is a concern for many, but science is there for the food industry. I reminded Star Chen of a much-discussed article by my friend and colleague Rachel Laudan called “A Plea for Modernizing Cuisine,” which argued that the obsession with eating natural and artisanal foods may not be historical, and that we should seek higher quality industrial foods for a better future.
Of course, I was also curious to know what Chen Xing’s favorite food trend was in the report. To my surprise, it was flavor shock! I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I heard Charles Spence speak at the Gastroeconomy Summit in Istanbul just a few days ago, and read his book “Gastrophysics” on another occasion, and realized that he had collaborated with Unilever many years ago to work on flavor perception. Now, writing this article in London, a very British and crazy global city where flavors from all over the world mix and unite. And listening to an inspiring food talk at the British Library’s Food Season Weekend, I realized that Chen was right. I expect we’ll be talking more and more about flavor shock in the near future. This is a topic that will shape the taste buds of a new generation.
