I recently read a fascinating food trend report created by Google.
The report is based on trends in search terms for food words and phrases. For example, the study quantifies how many people type into their browser “does rice have gluten,” a phrase whose incidence increased 17% in the past year.
With 3.5 billion food-related searches every single day—and Google’s near dominance in search—it’s easy to see why they put their Food & Beverage team together with their Trends team to tap into this treasure trove of data.
Google provides a list of food search terms, and then ranks them by volume and growth. What never ceases to amaze me is how conflicting the so-called trends seem to be.
As you might expect from the buzz in the media, the phrase “gluten-free foods” is + 140%, the highest growth rate of all searches for dietary restrictions. The phrases “gluten intolerance” is +69%, “symptoms of gluten intolerance” is +24%, and “gluten-free bread” is +24%. This would seem to indicate that we’re shying away from wheat in our collective national diet.
Not so fast.
Google has christened a top seven list of Sustained Risers that, they explain, are food terms that have shown steady growth over the past years. Google anoints them “safe bets.”
Google calls their Sustained Risers “safe bets”
While reading this gluten-saturated list, I couldn’t help but smile.
The Sustained Risers list reads like a 1980s carb-loading marathon runner’s diet, including ramen (gluten-full wheat noodle soup), rigatoni (gluten-full wheat pasta), linguine (gluten-full wheat pasta), empanadas (gluten-full wheat pockets), and Bundt cakes (gluten-full wheat flour cakes).
With talk of Paleo and Atkins diets, you’d expect the word “protein” to rise to the top. Yet it doesn’t even show up in the top health related searches. I wonder: is this because we think we know all there is to know about everyone’s favorite macronutrient, protein?
Often terms are searched in tandem
“Protein” does show up as a keyword that’s associated with snacking, so wecan conclude that consumers are in pursuit of high-protein snacks. Butprotein, as a singular search query, is somehow not being searched on its own. It might be a good thing if more people were Googling “protein,” as they might just learn that most of us already get plenty of it.
There is one Sustained Riser I simply cannot explain. Bundt cakes.Synonymous with sugary, sweet, gluten-full decadence, I wonder if they’retrending as a backlash to all this talk of gluten-free foods, or maybe as a result of the bad press that’s been heaped onto sugar. Oddly, though, sugardid not show up anywhere in Google’s report.
Are Bundt cakes the next cupcake or cronut? If so, I didn’t get the memo. If you can explain the rise of bundt, please email me. I’m flummoxed.
While it may not be the same people who are searching for conflicting terms such as linguine and gluten-free foods, these are trends, quantified from a subset of 1.2 trillion annual searches. So they should make some sort of intuitive sense, right?
This dietary confusion doesn’t surprise me. I’ve heard wildly oxymoronic tales in the course of my own work. While helping our clients through the food and beverage product innovation process, I often moderate or attend focus groups where we’re discussing food beliefs, behaviors and productprototypes. From consumers’ responses to food topics, we gather insights. I’ve watched the same woman walk through the front door eating a bag of Fritos tell me 30 minutes later she eats only natural, healthy, organic foods. And even more unbelievable things.
When it comes to food behavior, we often say one thing—and perhaps even convince ourselves of it—while our actions tell a different story.
NEWS REFERANCE: FOBES
