FOOD TRENDS 2022 – ASIAN CUISINE
The Asian cuisine is becoming increasingly more popular in Denmark. During the Covid19 epidemi the Danes have discovered what the asian, and especially the Japanese kitchen has to offer when it comes to cooking at home and for getting take out. Out of all the take out categories, sushi has seen the biggest increase in Denmark during this time.
According to the Danish media Finans (June 2021), take out orders for pizza has dropped with 12% since pre-Covid19 and now holds 62,5% of the turnover at Hungry (a Danish take out hub), while sushi has doubled it’s share and now holds 11,3% of the turnover.
But why are danes so into Asian food? And what can we learn from the Asian take out industry?
Focus on being the packaging climate-friendly.
The Asian trend in Denmark is partially driven by the food media and their celebration of the taste, but also by the growing trend to be a climate friendly culinary consumer – meaning less meat and more seaweed, and more vegetables and fish.
The Asian cuisine has managed to market itself as more green when it comes to the ingredients used. To be climate friendly is however much more than the base components of a dish. The packaging used makes up a big part of how climate friendly the dish is as a whole. By choosing a more climate friendly packaging and communicating it, it can change
the consumers perception of your business.
Visual presentation of the packaging and contents.
The Asian cuisine is not only popular based on the taste and the environmental perception, but also due to their ability to visualise the food. After all, we eat with our eyes first.
The Asian cuisine manages to tap into several of the food trends of 2022. Snacking (where the dish is made out of several small portions), clean-eating (which involves choosing minimally processed foods) and instagrammable food experiences. The dishes are usually beautifully arranged and visualised, which makes the consumer want to share their food experience with their family, friends and followers on social media.
The hashtag #Sushi has been used over 34 million times on Instagram and the hashtag #Ramen over 12 million times. By creating a visual food experience, they hereby manage to create one of the most powerful word of mouth marketing scenarios, what we refer to as shareable moments, where your customers share your brand and food on social media.
What the broader take out industry can learn from the growing trend of the Asian cuisine, is that the aesthetics matter just as much as the taste when it comes to the full dining experience, and the way that our food is presented has, and will have an increasing impact on sales. Visual branding of your food is more important than ever, and since you need take out packaging anyway, it is also a cheap and effective way of achieving the essential positive word-of-mouth that is crucial for any brand.
Instagram-friendly take out packaging
Your food doesn’t have to be aesthetic or lean into the clean-eating trend to compete with the aesthetics of beautifully arranged Asian dishes, but it does need to embrace the story of the food or of the brand in order to make for a coherent and shareable dining experience. Therefore to create an instagrammable food experience, your choice of take out packaging
plays a huge role, as it frames the immediate perception of the food your customer is about to eat.
By choosing a packaging design that fits your brand or dish, and adds to the experience you want for your customers, you will be able to facilitate these highly valued shareable moments, and forge your customers to share your food on social media. Your take out packing helps define if your customers are about to have a rustic, exclusive or unique dining experience, when they buy take out food from your restaurant, shop, food stand or food truck. People love to share their food experiences on social media, so why not give them something extra to share? The hashtag #takeaway has been used more than 7 million times on Instagram and the hashtag #streetfood more than 12 million times.
You can find inspiration and learn more about how you can use your takeout packaging to create and enable insta-friendly food experiences from our case studies.
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