As dietitians it is important for us to keep up to date with what is going on in the food industry. These trends affect our clients and patients on a daily basis.
What are this year’s trends?
Each year the National Restaurant Association (NRA) publishes a forecast of trends they expect to see in the food industry for the upcoming year. This year’s list has some things you might recognize! The NRA breaks these trends up into many categories. Check out a few of these lists below:
Top 20 trends
You can see that many of these trends revolve around new flavors and new ingredients, such as seafood, vegetable carb substitutes, and ethnic spices. This is important to be aware because we can use this to our advantage. Use the spice trend to discuss salt seasoning substitutes in cooking and use this carb substitute trend as a way to interest your clients and patients in incorporating more veggies!
Top 10 concept trends
From these concept trends we can see that sustainability and locally sourced food is a large portion of these trends. Food waste is something that we can use to our advantage, discuss using all the parts of the vegetable with your clients. Give them creative ideas for meal planning to prevent waste. See our sustainability blog post for more information on this topic!
Resources:
National Restaurant Association