Looking back on 2022: Tiktok's influence on the year's food trends

By Phoebe Cunningham
 Would you ever try pickles and kool aid if you saw it on Tik Tok? From dessert to pasta to fish, there are crazy  trends that appear every year, and 2022 was no exception.  
   One of the most popular places to get dessert from that has emerged late this year thanks to Tiktok is Crumbl Cookies. Although it’s been around since 2017, it was considered a small business until early 2022 when influencers on social media started to discover the oversized cookies, declaring them unique and the rotation of flavors interesting enough to promote. Because there is a Crumbl Cookies in the Lehigh Valley, it has become popular amongst people locally. From a survey of Freedom students, 100% would eat at Crumbl Cookies.
    On the opposite side of the food spectrum, a popular restaurant featured in California has come to light towards the middle of 2022. This restaurant features dishes like soup dumplings, “cucumber salad”, spicy noodles, and its most popular items: the green beans and chocolate buns. Although other Taiwanese restaurants have been popular like Din Tai Fung, none have gained popularity purely because of Tiktok as quickly. Although this restaurant is only featured in the West Coast, when taking a survey, 30.8% of applicants said that they would enjoy eating there. 
   One other restaurant that has turned up in 2022 is Raising Canes. Although this West Coast fast food has been around since 1996 and has been popular in past years, it really gained sales this past year through social media trends like blind tasting fast food chicken strips. Another 30% of people surveyed said that they would prefer Raising Canes over any other restaurant that has emerged this year.     
   Along with restaurants, there have been many food creation trends that have come through Tiktok. Each of these trends last about a month because people create them in different ways and get sick of eating it quickly. However, the salmon rice bowl was created by user @emilymariko took over the internet mid 2022 and has been considered a common homemade meal since then. People add white rice, sriracha, soy sauce, and avocado to make this dish their own. Seven out of thirteen surveyed people have created the infamous salmon rice bowl and learned of it through Tiktok. 
   One similar dish that has emerged from Tiktok more recently is the “butter board”. These boards are meant to be a type of dip that people can swipe bread onto. Some of the most interesting twists to the classic butter board have been the additions of fruit, bagel seasonings, and all sorts of vegetables to add flavor. This trend is seemingly the last one of 2022, as it’s just beginning to burn out towards the end of the year. 
   Of these trending Tiktok restaurants and cooking trends, there has been a great variety of creations on the internet and influencers to promote them. Every year the trends differ almost completely. Now the question is: what will emerge in 2023? Will it be things like the candy-wrapped pickles, spa water, or bold flavors of sunflower seeds? These are only a few new creations that FHS students have heard of that could potentially be seen on the internet in 2023. It doesn’t take much to start trends like these, and now on Tiktok, with the easy task of creating a 30-second video and uploading it to the app, there are endless opportunities for people to go viral, and it’s easier than ever. 
   Experience these trends for yourself by downloading the app itself: Tiktok.com or by downloading the app on your mobile device!