What’s on the Menu This Christmas? Top Food Trends for 2025🎄

❄️Christmas Food Trends 2025❄️

Christmas is fast approaching and we want to make sure you are aware of the top 5 Christmas Food Trends for 2025! You might have seen them on our new Christmas Brochure, but let's dive a bit deeper...

🎁Nostalgic Comfort with a Twist:

This Christmas, nostalgia is going to be the centerpiece at the dinner table, with classic comfort foods making a stylish comeback. Timeless favorites like pigs in blankets, those irresistible bacon-wrapped sausages are being upgraded with gourmet twists, such as caramelised, red onion sausages or maple-glazed bacon🥓. Artisan stuffings are also glowing up, with chefs experimenting with different breads, wild herbs, and festive staple ingredients like chestnuts & cranberries! These classic dishes bring back old festive-food traditions, whilst exploring a modern edge, bringing both comfort and creativity to your festive menu👨‍🍳

♻️Sustainability on the Menu:

Sustainability is at the heart of Christmas cooking this year, with chefs having a big focus on sourcing local, seasonal ingredients to create their festive menus. Chefs are after high-quality and locally grown veggies for their Christmas dinners, as well as free-range turkeys raised on nearby farms. By using locally sourced ingredients, chefs are lowering their carbon footprint by not having their food travel miles as high as previous years. Chefs are also reducing their amount of food waste, by creating new dishes with leftover ingredients, such as creating warming soups from veggie scraps🥘. Great news for the customers who get to eat them too!!

🌏Global Festive Flavours:

Typically, global flavours aren't heavily used in our Christmas dishes, due to traditions, but that's changing this year! Chefs are going to be taking inspiration from other countries, to jazz up our traditional dishes and add an international spin🗺️. For example, Asian-style glazes are getting added to our turkeys, and we are adding Middle-Eastern spices to our winter veggies! This trend highlights how we are increasingly modernising our dishes by adding international flavours to them, which adds a sense of adventure to our plates✈️. It's great for chefs to be able to keep hold of our traditional dishes, whilst adding ingredients and techniques from all over the world!

🧀Refined Sharing and Grazing:

Grazing boards during the festive period have been popular for a while but this year the spotlight really is on them. We're pushing over the traditional plated meals, and chefs are creating huge grazing boards of charcuterie meats, delicious cheeses, warming nuts, dips and fruits🍇! Some chefs are even creating these sharing boards with desserts, so that customers don't just have to choose one, they can sample all! Not only are they tasty, they are also visually appealing for chefs to have on display in their restaurants, their look alone is enough for customers to be tempted. This trend also encourages sharing which is a very important part of the festive season, customers can head out for a Christmas meal and enjoy grazing boards, together👐

🥂Low & No-Alcohol Pairings

Low and non-alcoholic drinks are going to be very popular this Christmas, with the younger generation drinking a lot less than pervious years, but that doesn't mean the drinks you're serving need to be plain... Think about spiced berry spritzes, botanical cocktails and sparkling combinations of wintery flavours! Take a look at our Christmas Brochure for a Spiced Clementine Sparkler mocktail recipe on page 8, the perfect blend of sweet and spicy😋. Don't forget, although the flavour is important, so is the appearance, this season you need to be making your festive drinks stand out! Add gold dust, sugared cranberries & orange peel to make your drinks look immediately more appealing🍊! They'll be great alongside a charcuterie board!

Marketing Apprentice ~ Imogen Tincknell