Dive Brief:
-
Lemongrass has emerged as one of the trendiest ingredients of 2016, with more than 15,000 social media and blog posts mentioning the lemony, delicate Thai herb last month alone, according to FONA International.
-
FONA attributes lemongrass's sudden ubiquity with its popularity among food bloggers and websites like Pinterest, which food product developers have taken notice of. FONA claims that in North America, 84 new products featuring lemongrass have launched between 2009 and 2015.
-
Lemongrass potentially has an edge on other trendy ingredients like curry powder and turmeric because it is rich in in a range of vitamins and minerals, and could provide health benefits for consumers.
Dive Insight:
When observing the foods and ingredients that have become trendy in recent years, a pattern takes shape. The rise in interest surrounding specific foods, especially cultural foods from various geographies, is often sparked by food writers.
Collectively, food writers have a lot of space to fill – more of it every year, in fact, as online cooking and recipe sites increase in number and grow in size, and their audiences want them to fill their platforms with “new” or “different” flavors and recipes. Product developers face similar demands (more often from within their companies than from beyond it) for something new, or different, or both.
As Indian, Thai and Vietnamese cuisines have become increasingly popular, with dishes from each going mainstream in recent years, ingredients common to those countries' diets also became popular with restaurant cooks. In turn, as is often the case, product developers followed along and gave the likes of turmeric and lemongrass, among other ingredients, key roles in new products aimed at in-home consumption.
Curry powder is used primarily to bring spice and color to foods, but lemongrass can do much more. It's rich in several vitamins and essential minerals such as potassium, calcium and iron, which are required for the healthy functioning of the human body. It also offers no harmful cholesterol or fat.
On its own, lemongrass oil has enormous potential as a food ingredient both because of its pleasant, lemony scent and flavor and its nutritional benefits.