By Kristen Putch, Dairy Processing/Sosland Publishing
Originally published in DairyProcessing.com
It started with a pasta dish. Cherry tomatoes tossed with olive oil and placed in a baking dish with a block of feta cheese. Everything gets baked up until the tomatoes burst and the feta melts, enabling it to be mixed up into a quick sauce with minced garlic, basil, crushed red pepper and pasta.
Dubbed the TikTok pasta, the easy-to-make baked feta pasta recipe became a viral sensation on social media platforms in 2021, ushering in a phenomenon of content creators sharing dishes that are easy to make, aesthetically pleasing and often boast high nutritional value.
The recipe also put dairy at the center – quite literally – a common theme with many of today’s popular social media-inspired recipes. Easy to use, accessible and high in protein, dairy has taken center stage – or in this case, center screen.
Getting creative
When it comes to food-centric videos on social media platforms, the sky is the limit. Some of these videos have racked up more than 4 billion views, bringing attention to every meal of the day, from breakfast to dinner, midnight snacks and everything in between.
Research into consumer psychology and the social sciences has shown that novelty is essential for anything to go viral on social media. The more novel the food, the more likely it is to go viral. This makes innovation especially important, as it is key for gaining traction among social audiences.
Among the notable trends of the past year, fruit roll-up wrapped ice cream was a standout. Despite being messy to make and to eat, the unexpected crunch as the roll-up hardened around the ice cream bite was the big selling point for many who tried it. The combination also opened up possible flavor mashups, such as strawberry vanilla or blue raspberry mango.
One of the biggest drivers in many dishes was cheese. It was part of some of the biggest dairy-forward trends of the last year, including “Chickles,” a pan fried dill pickle spear wrapped in provolone cheese, originally from Claire Snyder on TikTok.
“I don’t care if anyone says this is gross,” she said in the original video. “It’s amazing.”
Eggs are a staple in many breakfast dishes, but when cookbook author Grace Elkus showed off a fried feta egg, it became a game-changer for early risers. The quick-to-make dish consisted of frying an egg in a ring of crumbled feta cheese, and serving on toast or tortillas, making it popular among people looking for an added protein boost to start their day.
In fact, much of the consumer demand for feta cheese in recent years has been social media-driven, said Amie Wentz, Emmi Roth’s director of brand management.
The baked feta pasta introduced about 1.4 million consumers into the feta category. Jenny Englert, marketing director for Saputo USA, cited the enormous role #bakedfetapasta and other viral social media trends have played in feta’s surging popularity.
The #bakedfetapasta tag garnered 108 million views on TikTok and to date has been used in nearly 10,000 videos of users making or recreating the dish. And in the weeks that followed its initial explosion on the platform, customers using Instacart ordered the recipe’s ingredients 4.6 times more than normal, Englert said. Even now, three years later, feta continues to see momentum across social channels due to its versatility in recipes, she added.
Cottage cheese shines
There’s no denying that cottage cheese is having a moment.
The product is being hailed by health-conscious social media users as a high-protein hero. Inventive recipes from food influencers are going viral, from cottage cheese cookie dough, and hot honey and cottage cheese toasts, to homemade “ice cream” starring the cultured ingredient.
The #cottagecheese tag surged to 814.6 million views on TikTok, significantly outperforming #sourcream (322.4 million), but still behind #yogurt (3.1 billion).
No company has benefited from the surge in cottage cheese’s popularity more than Irvine, Calif.-based Good Culture. As of July, the company recorded $135,704,535 in retail sales in the previous 52-week period, according to Circana, which is up 97.8% from July 2023.
In fact, the company’s approach to dairy’s place in the nutrition conversation may be part of the reason this often overlooked product is having a renaissance, seizing an opportunity to bring life back to the $1.1 billion category that was larger than yogurt in the 1970s.
"My co-founder Anders Eisner and I saw a major disruption opportunity in the cottage cheese space,” Good Culture chief executive officer and co-founder Jesse Merrill previously told Dairy Processing. “Cottage cheese was an overlooked superfood with more protein and less sugar than yogurt, but it lacked relevant innovation and brand appeal.”
Recent data from the International Food Information Council (IFIC) shows that most Americans are trying to consume more protein, and the desire to get more continues to rise (59% in 2022, 67% in 2023 and 71% in 2024). The data from IFIC supports the trends many organizations are seeing on the consumer level.
“The rising popularity of cottage cheese is a great example of nutrition science meeting social trends, and it creates incredible opportunities for the dairy industry,” said Ashley Rosales, a registered dietitian and nutrition and industry affairs officer for the Dairy Council of California, Sacramento, Calif. “Dairy foods contain important nutrients that support optimal health, including high quality protein”…
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