Hospitality July 11, 2026 · 7 min

Bubble tea, fried chicken, Dubai chocolate: how long do food trends actually last in Europe?

From frozen yogurt to Dubai chocolate, European food trends move at very different speeds. Real dates and numbers on seven crazes show when to jump on a trend — and when your margin needs you to wait.

When the next food craze hits your street, how long do you have?

France is in the middle of a full-blown fried chicken gold rush, and it isn’t a one-chain story. KFC still leads with 380 restaurants and 45% market share, but Popeyes opened its first French location near Paris’s Gare du Nord in February 2023 and had grown to 23 sites by 2025, with a decade-long target of 250–300 and franchising opened to outside operators in summer 2025. Korean chain Bonchon followed weeks later, opening in central Paris in March 2023 and aiming for 25 French restaurants within five years. Wingstop has landed in the capital, Raising Cane’s is expected, and homegrown challengers — Chicking, Krispy Krunchy Chicken and the newly launched Chik’Chill — are all fighting for the same young, urban customer. The French fried chicken market is now worth €1.8 billion, growing 12% a year since 2019. Meanwhile in London, one four-mile stretch of Streatham High Road already has 29 competing fried chicken outlets — a market several years further along the same curve. Before fried chicken, it was bubble tea. Before bubble tea, poke bowls, frozen yogurt, cupcakes, cronuts.

Every one of these trends looked identical on day one: a queue outside, a wave of copycats, headlines about “the next big thing.” What separates them is what happened in year two, three and five — and that is exactly the part operators cannot see when they are deciding whether to add a trend item to the menu, buy the equipment, and train the team for it.

Seven European food trends, and how long they actually lasted

Frozen yogurt — rose fast from the mid-2000s, with the number of US froyo stores doubling between 2009 and 2014. Decline started almost immediately after: Pinkberry alone closed 74 locations between 2014 and 2018, and the “second froyo craze” has been shrinking for a decade. Boom-to-bust: roughly 6–8 years.
Cupcakes — went from children’s party food to adult luxury dessert after a 2000 Sex and the City cameo, peaked in the early 2010s with national chains and dedicated cupcakeries, then saw widespread closures as the trend was declared “over” by the mid-2010s. Boom-to-bust: roughly 12–14 years, with a sharp acceleration and an equally sharp fade.
The cronut — Dominique Ansel’s hybrid pastry went globally viral in 2013, spawned imitators from Manhattan to Seoul within weeks, and had largely faded from headlines within two years — even though it still sits quietly on some dessert menus today. Peak hype: under 2 years.
Dark / ghost kitchens — exploded during the 2020 lockdowns (Uber Eats alone launched over 1,000 virtual kitchens across Europe, the Middle East and Africa in June 2020 in response to delivery demand), then hit a wall: Butler Hospitality dissolved abruptly in 2022, Delivery Hero closed tech hubs in December 2023, and multiple operators quietly pulled back. Gold-rush phase: about 3 years.
Bubble tea — entered Continental Europe seriously around 2019 (Gong Cha opened its first Portuguese store in January 2023), and by 2023 there were over 3,500 bubble tea shops across Germany, the UK and France, with the market still forecast to grow at 8.2% a year to 2032. It didn’t collapse — it matured into a permanent category, though the fastest-growing high streets are now seeing the shakeout of weaker independents that opened during the rush.
Poke bowls — grew steadily from roughly 2017 onward and, unlike most of this list, shows no sign of decline: Europe now accounts for about 25% of the global poke market, with over a third of new restaurant openings in Italy and Spain including a poke option. Still climbing, 8+ years in.
Dubai chocolate — the fastest cycle on this list. FIX Dessert Chocolatier’s pistachio-and-knafeh bar went viral on TikTok in 2024 and had racked up 13.8 billion TikTok views by the first quarter of 2025 alone. Within about a year, the craze had pushed pistachio prices up 34% and forced some retailers to ration stock. Viral-to-supply-shock: under 12 months.

The key insight: trend lifespans in food service range from under a year to over a decade — and there is no way to tell which one you’re looking at from week one.

Why the same trend behaves differently by market

Fried chicken is the clearest example of a trend that doesn’t move at one speed across Europe — it moves at several speeds simultaneously, sometimes within the same country. France is currently in the crowded, competitive-intensity phase: at least seven brands (KFC, Popeyes, Bonchon, Wingstop, Chicking, Krispy Krunchy Chicken, Chik’Chill) are actively opening sites and fighting for the same customer, with the market still growing 12% a year — meaning there’s room, but margins are being fought for street by street. The UK is a stage further along: Wingstop entered in 2018 and now runs 74 sites, KFC still holds over 65% market share, and Streatham’s “Chicken Mile” shows what real saturation looks like on the ground. Italy (2024) and Germany (2026) are only just starting, where competitive pressure and pricing look nothing like Paris or London today.

For a single-country operator, that staggering barely matters. For a group with sites in more than one country — or a caterer supplying multiple markets — it means the same trend decision needs a different answer depending on where the kitchen is. Copying what worked in one market onto a menu in another, without re-costing it locally, is how trend items quietly erode margin instead of protecting it.

The real risk of chasing a food trend isn’t taste — it’s commitment made before the data exists. Adding a trend dish typically means new suppliers, new equipment, retrained staff and a menu redesign, all locked in before you know whether you’re looking at a poke bowl (still growing after 8 years) or a Dubai chocolate bar (viral, then a 34% ingredient price spike within a year).

Three questions decide whether a trend is worth the investment:

What does it actually cost to produce, once you factor in the trend-driven ingredient premium? Pistachio prices didn’t move because pistachios changed — they moved because demand did.
How fast can you cost, price and launch it — and just as importantly, how fast can you pull it if the ingredient cost spikes or demand fades?
Does it hold up outside the market it started in? A dish that works in London doesn’t automatically work in Zurich or Milan at the same margin.

How CalcMenu helps you move at trend speed

This is exactly the gap between “we should put this on the menu” and “we know what it costs us to do so.”

Recipe costing in minutes, not days — cost a trend dish against real, current supplier prices before committing to it, so the decision is based on margin, not guesswork.
Live ingredient price tracking — when an input spikes the way pistachio did, you see the margin impact on every recipe using it, immediately, instead of finding out at month-end.
Multi-site, multi-market menus — the same trend dish can carry different costs, pricing and even recipe variants per site, so a group can chase a trend in one market without silently losing margin in another.
Fast to add, fast to retire — trend items go on and off the menu without leaving stale recipe cards, unused stock, or forgotten allergen data behind.

CalcMenu doesn’t tell you whether fried chicken or the next Dubai chocolate is worth chasing. It makes sure that when you decide to chase it, you know the real cost of doing so — and can walk away just as quickly if the data says the trend has turned.

Ask yourself three things before committing budget, equipment and training to a trend dish:

Do you know today’s true cost per portion, including the trend premium on key ingredients?
Could you pull the item from every site’s menu within a day if the cost or demand shifted?
Have you costed it separately for each market you operate in, rather than copying one country’s numbers?

If any answer is uncertain, the trend may be less of an opportunity than it looks — and more of an open margin risk.

Want to see what a trend dish would actually cost across your menu before you commit to it? Book a free 15-minute call with our team — no commitment: Schedule a call.

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