Latest cooking trends: Healthy vs unhealthy eating

It is quite evident that our eating and cooking preferences are constantly changing. Since the pandemic hit, traditional and modern recipes have been on a neck-and-neck battle of popularity. With this change in cooking habits, new trends started emerging including an increased awareness in healthy eating and a decrease in the unhealthy conversation. We previously identified that traditional cooking had started to take over modern day recipes. Cooking content has been seeing huge peaks since the beginning of Ramadan 2020; however, has anything changed since then? Here we look at the GCC latest cooking trends, predict upcoming ones and compare them to our previous analysis.

The cooking conversation

The peak in the online cooking conversations was identified during the month of May, with Ramadan always bringing in the highest number of cooking posts. Recently, the cooking conversation has seen a decrease. September in particular or the "Back To School" phase usually brings back the cooking conversation to life but that was not the case this year. With many students across the GCC opting to study from home, the back to school conversation has not been the same.

Fish recipes are losing popularity

On our previous analysis, we identified fish recipes as the most popular with engagements and views ranking top. This has not been the case recently with modern recipes regaining popularity. Burgers have climbed back in popularity again and are predicted to overtake fish recipes in October. Burgers finally overtook shrimps in September for the first time since the beginning of 2019. [caption id="attachment_212930" align="alignnone"] Fish recipes are expected to decrease in popularity in October 2020[/caption]

Healthy vs Unhealthy eating

Are people eating healthy? Simply put, no! With restaurants and cafes back in full operation across most GCC cities, residents have started to gain back their trust in eating from outside. After an increase in healthy activity pre-Ramadan, that interest has dropped, big time. Healthy content still makes up 90% of the food conversation; however, healthy content saw a decrease of 38% between April and September. [caption id="attachment_212933" align="alignnone"] Healthy vs unhealthy content[/caption]

What's next for food content?

We expect the conversation to remain constant until the end of the year with a big leap with the beginning of 2021. The healthy conversation should also rise up with the return of the "New Year New Me" trend. This could cause a decrease in unhealthy eating allowing for new cooking trends to emerge. As brands prepare to advertise their products with the beginning of the new year, content creators will get busy yet again supplying the demand of their foodies.

About the data

DA has built a custom data warehouse service called Sila, powered by data science we turn that raw social data into actionable insights. We have mined 32,000,000 posts, 16,125,448,591 video views, 4,152,699,615 comments, thus far.

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