It’s accepted among the people of the food industry that trends will always be changing despite the food often making no changes itself. It’s something we could end up calling the Food Trend Chain, and it all starts with fancy and innovative areas all across the world. Sometimes it is New York City, and other times it is some mom and pop place out in the middle of no-where that gets some publicity for their amazing new concoction. Either way we don’t see new foods as much as we see the foods we know about spreading or faltering. That’s the real food trends.
Coconut Water is an incredibly popular one right now, but the stuff has been around for as long as we have had coconuts. It only took someone stating how amazing it is and then we had everyone wanting it and saying how healthy it is. The same could be said for Cronuts, Kale, and Kimchi. These are all foods that have been done, they just weren’t famous.
That means, trending your special food has everything to do with people’s awareness of the food and nothing to do with the actual food. We see all kinds of new and innovative foods all the time in food trucks across New York City, but many of them just haven’t caught on as something people want to eat regularly or going searching for it. Eventually the food just becomes so mainstream that everyone knows about it and you see it everywhere.
Until then though, it is all about who eats your food and spreads the word about it. These people who eat your food before it becomes famous are often called the early adopters; they try the food and tell other people which then spreads into a chain until you end up with thousands and hundreds of thousands eating the meal. These early adopters are only around 5% of the entire world’s population though, and they tend to have large followings; whether on twitter or just in the real world media. If they get to your food, chances are it will explode like so many other food trends have in the past.
And that’s all it is. Foods become famous just like people.
Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/food-trend-story/378607/