The real food trends for 2014

From Gluten free to buffalo wings. What are the real trends of 2014? Yesterday we took all 14 food trends from forbes.com and uncovered their real trending stats with Google Trends. Today we aggregate all that data together into one chart.

Let’s compare all 12 trends in the past 10 years by taking the ranking from March 2004 and comparing it to March 2014. Here’s the percentage difference:

The good
Gluten-free is totally the trend for 2014. Look how growth it’s experiencing in the past 10 years. Buffalo wings, which I thought was so 2004, is actually so 2014. Then there’s the strange umami. Look for more growth in umami in years to come.

The bad
Nuts is a mixed bag depending on the words used with nuts. Clearly not a trend anymore is vegetarian. Perhaps the people who were into vegetarian recipes ten years ago have now moved onto being gluten-free.

The coverage
Now that we can see how many people are searching for these trends, how much is each trend being covered in the news? Google News shows these results:

Wow. If you aren’t writing about bisquits, now is the time. Not only is the beloved food trending, there’s only four articles about this sandwich bread alternative. Four. [update: I spelled Biscuits wrong. There are 17,400 results for biscuits. Four for bisquits. Oops.]

On face value, umami’s 1,410 articles on Google News might seem like a lot, but in comparison to other food trends in the tens of thousands, umami looks under-covered.

A big asterisk on this chart is that these searches are done without quotes. So general words like: local food end up with a ton of results. Google News captures any page that has both the word “local” and “food.”

End result. Maybe someone should come up with a recipe that uses umami on gluten-free biscuits with a side of chicken wings.

Have you noticed any food trends?
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