Top Food and Drink Trends for 2024

WGSN's experts unveil two top trends that will shape product development and consumer behaviour this year.

Meals as drinks

Sweet and sugary cocktails are being usurped by umami-flavoured sips.

As demand for more savoury tastes and new sensorial experiences rises, mixologists are embracing bitterness, spice and salinity, and are using classic meal profiles for drink flavours with umami deliciousness.

Double Chicken Please in the US serves cocktails such as the Cold Pizza, with Don Fulano Blanco, parmesan, burnt toast, tomato and basil, while French bar Danico’s Nasi Goreng, based on the Indonesian dish, is made with nasi goreng syrup spice, tofu and egg. Hong Kong’s Thai Beef Salad sip is made with beef, peanut, kaffir lime, chilli, coconut, rum and Angus biltong.

Third-culture cuisine

New hybrid cuisines will blend rich culinary heritage from far-flung places.

Globalisation is giving rise to a wave of third-culture chefs whose food is a mix of inherited culinary traditions and the food cultures they were raised with or work in. By 2024, a diverse mix of third-culture cuisines will become established genres in their own right, with dishes and flavours inspiring new packaged goods.

Look to innovators such as Bea Malherbe, head chef at Cape Town restaurant FYN, focusing on Japanese-South African cuisine and layering local game and produce with global culinary influences for dishes such as Outeniqua springbok with kabocha squash and Hokkaido pumpkin.

LA’s Nankai Shochu (a Japanese distilled spirit sometimes described as a cross between vodka and whisky) can be combined with Italian aperitivo spirits to create wafu – Japanese-style Italian cocktails.

Get ahead of the curve and discover the top trends that will shape product and service development for 2024 and beyond. Download The Top Trends for 2024 & Beyond report at no cost here.