Kerry, the Taste and Nutrition Company, has released its 2020 US Taste Charts, which represent the company’s annual review of the food and beverage landscape utilizing sales performance, consumer trends, foodservice influences, and internal culinary and mixology expertise to predict tastes for the coming year.

As a leader in taste, Kerry is on a constant quest to discover and translate the best taste experiences from nature’s high-quality ingredients. Kerry’s predictions forecast that 2020 will bring the resurgence of nostalgia and indulgence across all categories of food and beverages. For instance, butters and dessert-inspired flavors such as cookie dough, cinnamon bun, s’mores, and churro will inspire sweets as well as hot and dairy beverages. Furthermore, meals-inspired nostalgic flavors such as grilled cheese, guacamole, wings, and pizza will bring an innovative twist to the salty snack category.

“The Taste Chart program has a rich heritage, spanning over a decade of providing the industry and our customers a proprietary view into our predictions for sweet, beverage, savory, and salty snacks,” says Soumya Nair, director of marketing insights for Kerry North America. “Consumers are expecting hyper-authenticity with shock- and talk-worthy taste experiences. The appeal of mainstream and key flavors such as ranch, sea salt, and buttermilk married with the emerging and trending heat flavors of North African harissa, Japanese togarashi, and Malaysian sambal are magnetizing to consumers.”

“The thirst for unexpected and provenance-inspired taste experiences continue to drive consumer interest in food and beverages,” says Sian Cunningham, marketing insights specialist for Kerry North America. “Visible in new product innovation in cold and water-based beverages, provenance has been driving new age citrus tastes from Chinese satsuma and Filipino calamansi, to Japanese dekopon, and Filipino dalandan. Furthermore, flavors that are conventional in categories, are emerging across new categories. For instance, the sweet category continues to blur lines with beverages, inspiring each other’s taste profiles from florals, alcohol-inspired, to dessert-inspired.”

Customers can leverage Kerry’s unique expertise as a food and beverage company with a built-in flavor house to create differentiated products with the tastes consumers seek, that go beyond flavor and also deliver on consumers expectations from the future of food.

The 2020 Taste Charts are available for download HERE.