Jet Chef

I received several emails and a comment or two regarding my last post on food trends. I even received an email stating that I missed a big dietary trend, "pescatarianism". According to Wikipedia, pescatariamism "is a dietary choice, in which a person — known as a pescetarian — eats the flesh of fish or of other non-mammalian aquatic animals but will not eat the flesh of non-aquatic animals or aquatic mammalian animals. Other animal products like eggs and dairy may be part of a pescetarian diet."

Well, that sent me back for more research, and I found a very interesting list online from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Some food trends for 2008...here is yet another list! It will be interesting to see which of these trends will impact the inflight catering industry as well!

Food & Wine magazine:

Old-fashioned candy

Wild American shrimp (pescatarianism!)


Muesli will become more popular than granola

Chef-run noodle bars

Barrel-aged beers

Chardonnay from Oregon

Haute frozen food

Mintel International Group (Chicago-based market research firm):

Functional waters (those with added nutrients)

Virtually anything fair trade

Ancient grains, such as amaranth, quinoa and teff (I fell in love with quinoa while traveling and studying in Peru!)



Easy-to-understand nutritional labels (finally!)

Baum & Whiteman Co. (restaurant consultants):

More restaurants will accept takeout orders via text messaging

Restaurants with ultraspecialized menus (such as breakfast cereal or grilled cheeses)

Cocktails enhanced with functional foods


Offal (entrails and internal organs of butchered animals)

Korean food

Have any trends that you are forecasting that you would care to share? Jet-Chef would love to hear your ideas, and is would love to have "guest bloggers" sharing their views on food, inflight catering, service trends and more!