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HospitalityJuly 11, 2026 · 11 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 eight crazes show when to jump on a trend — and when your margin needs you to wait.

Illustration of a rising and falling trend line with a bubble tea cup and a fried chicken drumstick plotted along it, symbolising the rise and fall of food trends in Europe

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.

  • 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.
  • Fermentation and gut health (kimchi, kombucha, kefir, sourdough) — built on a slow-burning wave of gut-health awareness that the 2020 pandemic sourdough boom accelerated rather than exhausted: interest never really receded afterward. Europe’s fermented food and beverage market is now worth $102.97 billion, forecast to reach $161.31 billion by 2032, with 80% of European consumers concerned about digestive wellbeing and kimchi and kefir now regular grocery items in Germany, France and the UK. Still climbing, 5+ years in — no ceiling in sight.
  • 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.

Not every food trend is a cycle. Three of Europe’s biggest food categories started exactly like the others on this list — a new dish, a new format, a novelty — and simply never turned around:

  • Döner kebab — popularized at Berlin’s Zoo Station by Turkish guest worker Kadir Nurman in 1972. More than 50 years later, Germany alone has around 18,000 döner shops selling roughly 550 tonnes of kebab meat a day, and the wider industry across Europe now generates an estimated €3.5 billion a year and employs around 200,000 people. It never peaked — it just kept compounding.
  • Japanese cuisine (sushi, ramen, izakaya) — conveyor-belt sushi reached Europe in the 1990s (YO! Sushi opened its first restaurant in London’s Soho in January 1997), and the wave never really stopped: ramen-ya and izakaya-style small-plates bars have since spread through Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Milan and beyond. Europe’s Japanese restaurant market is now worth $3.77 billion, and the global sushi restaurant market alone is valued at $22.6 billion, forecast to double to $46.1 billion by 2034.
  • Pizza — went from a post-war novelty to full culinary infrastructure. Peter Boizot opened the UK’s first known pizzeria, PizzaExpress, in Soho in March 1965; six decades later, the UK’s pizza delivery and takeaway sector alone was worth £4.1 billion in 2024.
  • Umami, since ancient Rome — the longest-running trend on this list, by a wide margin. Roman garum, a fermented fish sauce dense with glutamate, was a Mediterranean-wide staple for over 400 years until the empire’s trade infrastructure collapsed. It was made with no equipment more advanced than salt, sun and time: whole small fish such as anchovies, mackerel or sardines were packed in heavy salt and left to ferment for weeks to months until the proteins broke down into a savoury, amber liquid — the same basic process still used to make modern colatura di alici and fish sauce today. But the underlying trend — using fermented glutamate for savory depth — never actually stopped: it resurfaced as Byzantine and Arab murri, as Chinese fish and soy sauce with records dating to the 3rd century, as the fish sauce that still seasons most of Southeast Asian cooking today, and as Worcestershire sauce, invented in the 1830s and still a supermarket staple, which food historians describe as garum’s closest living descendant. Umami itself was only scientifically identified in 1908 — and immediately commercialized as MSG. Continuously reinvented for over 2,000 years.

None of these ever “ended.” They stopped being a trend and became a permanent line on the menu — which is exactly the outcome every operator hopes for when they place a bet, and exactly what makes it so hard to tell, in year one, which category a new dish belongs to.

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 trend to watch next: Korean food

Every trend on this list looked exactly like this once: real growth, real numbers, no way yet to know if it’s a Dubai chocolate or a döner kebab. Right now, that trend is Korean food. K-Food+ exports hit $13.62 billion in 2025 (up 5.1% year-on-year, with food products alone crossing $10 billion for the first time), Korean restaurant locations grew 10% in 2024, and the global Korean BBQ dining market reached $7.8 billion in 2024 — projected to nearly double to $15.9 billion by 2033. Korean fried chicken, corn dogs and cheese-laced tteokbokki are moving from niche to mainstream, propelled almost entirely by TikTok and Instagram: Gen Z appeal-index scores are running at 274% for tteokbokki and 210% for Korean corn dogs, well above typical new-menu-item benchmarks.

It has every early signature of a trend worth watching — and every one of those signatures is also what bubble tea, cronuts and frozen yogurt looked like in year one. Nobody can tell yet which category it will land in.

When the hype outran the fundamentals: plant-based meat and edible insects

Two of the best-funded food trends of the last decade show what happens when a trend outgrows its unit economics. Plant-based meat rode a wave of venture capital and EU-level sustainability policy through the late 2010s; global retail sales have now fallen for three consecutive years, down 7% in 2024 alone, and Beyond Meat’s revenue has dropped from a $464.7 million peak in 2021 to $326 million in 2024 — a decline of roughly 30%. Edible insects went further and faster: after the EU approved insect protein as a novel food in 2021 and the sector raised $472 million in 2022, France’s Ynsect — Europe’s best-funded insect-protein company, having raised over €500 million in total — collapsed into liquidation, and industry-wide funding fell to around $170 million in 2024, about a third of its 2022 peak.

Neither trend has disappeared — both still have real, if smaller, markets. But both show that hype and capital can move faster than the unit economics underneath them, and that the biggest, best-funded trend on paper is not automatically the safest one to build a menu around.

Meanwhile, microgreens — a trend with no viral moment and no venture-capital cycle — simply kept compounding: Europe’s market grew to $658 million in 2024, on track to top $1.5 billion by 2033. Sometimes the trend without the headlines is the one worth trusting.

What this means for your margin, not just your menu

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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?
  3. 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.

Before you add the next trend to your menu

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

  1. Do you know today’s true cost per portion, including the trend premium on key ingredients?
  2. Could you pull the item from every site’s menu within a day if the cost or demand shifted?
  3. 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.

Sources

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