Tapping into Tropical Tastes

Check out the dashboard we used to analyze this insight in Infegy Starscape. The dashboard is available here !

Using social intelligence to track rising and falling food and beverage flavors

Tropical flavors and seasonings have surged across beverages, candy, nicotine products, and regular food. Based on research by Pinterest's trends team in early 2024, the researchers argued that Gen Z ''...are driving this escapist aesthetic complete with hibiscus prints, tasty mocktails, and hot, hot, hot pink." We evaluated their research mid-year to see if their prediction panned out using Infegy Starscape , our breakthrough social listening data analytics tool.

Social listening represents the aggregate voice of billions of people across the planet, making it the perfect tool to gauge society's past, current, and future tastes. People's palates, like the words they use, the clothes they wear, or the music they listen to, constantly change, and social listening tools can help measure and validate those tastes.

Brand strategists and food researchers constantly look for new or developing tastes when developing new products, flavors, or brands. Let's jump into tropical taste trends and see whether Pinterest's researchers got it right.

Examining Pinterest's 2024 research

Pinterest's predictions centered around tropical flavors, aromas, and style. Within their prediction, they featured pineapple and coconut as growing tropical scents, along with mocktails and tropical baking.

We dove into their specific flavor research around pineapple and coconut. Both coconut and pineapple volume remained roughly constant when normalized by collection volume This discrepancy highlights two key research attributes: the importance of time frames when conducting trend research and the importance of a multiplatform approach.

First, instead of looking at just the lead-up to 2024, a better approach might have been zooming out multiple years to examine post volume growth in context.?

Second, the pineapple stagnation occurred, on aggregate, across the dozens of platforms that Infegy collects from, highlighting why a multiplatform view is so critical when examining social media. Pinterest researchers look at Pinterest data, while Infegy's tools can scour a much wider breadth of research.

Observing unique flavor growth

Although we found discrepancies with their picks (pineapple and coconut), we agree with the thrust of their argument. We saw enormous post-volume growth in other tropical flavors, which were more under the radar than traditional pineapple. We looked at dragonfruit, guava, ube, and tamarind, and found sharp increases in post volume for each of these over the last three years. While each flavor had differing post volume (i.e., guava had more than 4x the post volume versus dragonfruit), each subtropical flavor appeared correlated. This correlation shows where Pinterest research got it right - that some tropical flavors seem to be surging. Let's dive more into the demographics to see whether they got the Gen Z focus correct.

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