What You'll Be Eating in 2025, According to Experts and Robots

Dear Pros,

You've got Kat for this first Pro dispatch of 2026. I spend a lot of time steeped in the Food & Wine archives. In part, it's because I believe that to understand the present and strive toward a better future, you need to know what's come before. But I also find it tremendously reassuring that in the realm of trend predictions, the writers, editors, and restaurant folks of yore who I hold in such esteem weren't some all-knowing oracles on high, but pretty much just throwing spaghetti at the wall. Granted, it's hand-extruded spaghetti made with organic 00 durum and regeneratively produced guinea fowl yolks, but still, there's an element of educated faith to it all.

Take, for example, F&W's first-ever trend forecast in the January 1979 issue. Alongside a full-page photo of a dramatically uplit crystal ball-gazing seer, writer Carl Desen penned a bit of speculative fiction imagining a New Year's Day 2000 meal featuring an awful lot of insect-based ingredients, a hangover from powdered Champagne, featherless chickens, and possibly even some moon-grown mangoes because obviously, humanity would have colonized space by then. Subsequent prognosticators would have readers believe we'd all be downing a lot more buffalo, beefalo, and ostrich by now, and be shocked to discover that hydroponic vegetable beds aren't standard equipment in every urban kitchen. But they got it right as frequently as they whiffed (why yes, we are indeed still drinking bottled water, gnawing on Craisins, and using screens to order at restaurants), and that's the poetry of it all.

For my 2026 look at upcoming trends (feel free to point and laugh at my 2025, 2024, and 2023 predictions which I have — bravely, I think — not deleted), I went with the AI zeitgeist on my methodology. After collecting trend reports from 16 data agencies, grocery stores, specialty food providers, social media platforms, delivery apps, and other industry sources, I used multiple models to identify overlaps and the most compelling data-driven cases, and then (please don't rat me out to the robots), used my squishy and imperfect human brain to make sense of them. You can read the full report here, as well as look back at the biggest hits and trends of 2025 by my brilliant colleagues in travel, recipes, restaurants, cocktails, whiskey, coffee, news, groceries, and (unfortunately) microplastics.

Maybe a quarter-century from now, when the future editors of F&W are researching the 2050 equivalent of this year's "The F&W 25: The Moments That Defined Food and Drink for the Past 25 Years," they'll look kindly upon by then-septuagenarian me and my analysis of "vibe mathing," the cabbage singularity, and fibermaxxing, but I definitely can't predict that — or anything. I'm just hoping spaghetti still exists, minus the housefly flour.

Cheers to a new year,
Kat

p.s. We're currently accepting nominations for 2026 Game Changers. This year, the accolade will exclusively highlight innovative products — the tech, kitchen gear, ingredients, snacks, and drinks that are changing the way we eat and drink for the better. Got something in mind? Send it to over amelia.schwartz@foodandwine.com or fill out this form.