Every year around this time, Datassential releases its trends report, and every year I read it the way my grandmother read the weather: with suspicion, but also with respect, because she was usually right. The food and beverage intelligence platform just published highlights from its 2027 Trends Report, and you can read the full announcement over at Yahoo Finance.

Why should you care what a data company thinks about dinner? Because Datassential tracks what's actually landing on menus and supermarket shelves, thousands of them, and the gap between what food media screams about and what people actually order is usually enormous. The report is less a crystal ball and more a mirror held up at a slight angle toward next year.

Regular readers know I've been holding the 2026 forecast to account all year. I wrote back in the spring that pistachio cream and swicy heat were running the flavor board, and the report data bore that out. So when the 2027 predictions arrive, I treat them as a menu I'll be checking against plates, one restaurant at a time.

The throughline I'm watching for is the one I flagged earlier this month: satiety. GLP-1 medications have quietly reshaped how America eats, and I'd bet good money that the 2027 trends reflect smaller portions with bigger flavor, protein density dressed up in casual clothes, and drinks that do more than fill a glass. When appetites shrink, every bite has to argue harder for itself. It's a new grammar of eating, not a passing fashion.

And there's my usual worry, which I'll repeat until somebody listens: the trends that matter aren't the flashy ones. A viral dish is fine as a door, but the hype can't be the job. What I look for in these reports are the quiet migrations, a spice moving from one cuisine's pantry into everybody's, a cooking technique slipping from fine dining into fast casual, a grandmother's ingredient finally getting shelf space at the supermarket. That's how American food actually changes. Slowly, then all at once, and always from somebody's home kitchen first.

My other habit with these reports is to ask what's missing. What didn't make the list because nobody thought to measure it. The family recipes disappearing as a generation stops cooking won't show up in menu data until it's too late, and that scares me more than any wrong prediction ever could.

So here's my plan: I'll file this report away, and twelve months from now I'll pull it out and grade it, plate by plate, the way I've been doing all year. Datassential gets a lot right. The fun is in catching what they miss, and in eating everything in between. As we say in my family, aspetta e vedrai. Wait and see. Preferably with a fork in your hand.