The 12 Hottest Food Trends for 2015
Sipping broth seems like an easy way to meet Americans’ demand for more protein in their diet. Brands like Pacific Foods are taking notes and making it easier for health enthusiasts to access the drink, which can take up to 24 hours to make. The first take-out window devoted to shippable bone broth also recently opened in New York City, so you can now chat with your best friends around a cup of broth.
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As Colorado beer maker New Belgium puts it, "Experimentation doesn’t mean new.” Gruit ales are revisiting an ancient way of making beer using herb and aromatic mixtures instead of the typical hops found in beer. Think horehound, bog myrtle or wormwood, which create a bitter, dry sweetness.
New Belgium
Matcha tea is like green tea on steroids. As a cancer fighter and fat burner, its health benefits exceed those of green tea because when you drink it, you ingest the whole leaf, not just the brewed water, as noted by Matchasource.com. The site also points out that one glass of match is the equivalent of 10 glasses of green tea in terms of nutritional value and antioxidant content. Almost sounds too good to be true.
Teavana
Americans are always on the lookout for the next sugar substitute and this time they've found coconut sugar. After a strong interest in recent years for everything coconut, from coconut milk to coconut water and coconut oil, it’s no huge surprise that coconut sugar would be next. Although coconut sugar is a better alternative than table sugar, though, it’s not the no-guilt-free-for-all some manufacturers might have you believe, as recently noted by the Huffington Post.
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This broad category, which includes probiotic yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchee and other fermented vegetables, appeals to the health conscious and is an old method of food preparation. Fermented foods create good bacteria that help the digestive and immune system. While it may not yet be easy to find these items at your local grocery stor, farmers markets and community-supported agriculture outlets are more likely to carry them.
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With cannabis legal in several states now, experts are experimenting with edibles that include cookies, chocolate, power bars and flavored syrups. “Edible marijuana moves far beyond clichéd pot brownies,” noted brand development Sterling Rice in its list of 2015 cutting-edge culinary trends.
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Almonds are so 2013. Make some room for pistachios, the new trendy nut that's already embraced by comedian Stephen Colbert. Pistachios help lower blood sugar and insulin levels in people with prediabetes and are a healthy source of protein.
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Asian food isn’t a new thing, especially if you live in a large U.S. metro area. But in 2015, Americans will be discovering some Asian flavors they haven’t tasted before, from Filipino cuisine to Northern Thai dishes and Japanese okonomiaki pancake, as Sterling Rice noted.
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Phil Lempert, aka the Supermarket Guru, has identified smoky flavors as one of the hot food trends for 2015, as reported by the Chicago Tribune: “After the rise of hot sauces such as sriracha, Lempert sees smoky flavors gaining the attention of cooks. Some may go out and buy a backyard smoker, while others will add liquid smoke to a recipe or look for smoked canned vegetables or smoked cheese at the store.”
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Everyone is on the lookout for the next quinoa and there are a few contenders. From East Africa, there’s teff, a wheat-like grain that’s gluten free as well as high in calcium, protein, iron and amino acids. From South America, like its distant relative quinoa, there’s kaniwa, a dark reddish-brown grain with a slightly nutty flavor that is also gluten free and high in protein. Which one will win the hearts of Americans in 2015?
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It took Tozer Seeds, a British vegetable company, 15 years to create the new vegetable, which is a hybrid of kale and brussel sprouts and was first available in U.S. supermarkets in the fall of 2014. Kale’s popularity in the last few years has helped kalettes tremendously. “In the U.K., kale has always been sheep food,” David Rogers, the company’s sales director told Modern Farmer earlier this year.
kalettes.com
Everyone from Whole Foods to Amazon, Walmart, Google and a slew of startups is getting into the online grocery delivery game, trying to bring customers their food as fast and trouble-free as possible. “Grocery delivery is stretching into new areas and formats, with services such as Instacart offering delivery in as little as an hour,” Chicago Tribune wrote.
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