From Dubai chocolate to cottage cheese: The 10 food trends that dominated 2025

2025 was quite the year when it comes to food trends.

Some of the biggest fads of the year caused supermarkets to sell out of certain foods, like cottage cheese. Others were a case of everything old becoming new again – think: retro meals while some, such as Dubai chocolate, were items we'd never heard of before.

So what were the biggest food trends of 2025? Let's take a walk down memory lane.

Cottage cheese

Cottage cheese is a mild-flavoured cheese product made from skim milk.

Like ricotta, it comes in a tub but is known for its wet consistency and obvious curd-like appearance.

It became popular among dieters in Australia in the '70s and '80s before falling in popularity in recent years.

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Fast forward to 2025, and this once-maligned 'diet food' suddenly exploded in popularity, largely thanks to TikTok.

'Foodtok' as it is known, was soon awash with cottage cheese recipes as Gen Z discovered the benefits of cottage cheese, which is known as being low in fat but high in protein.

It 2025, it was whipped, blended and baked into recipes to boost protein content, and used for everything from alternatives to other cheeses, to accompaniments and even desserts.

The result: Cottage cheese became one of this year's biggest protein-focused trends, leading to widespread supermarket shortages.

Dubai chocolate

You would have to have been living under a rock if you got through 2025 without hearing about Dubai chocolate – the wildly expensive treat that originated, as the name suggests, in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

Dubai chocolate is a sweet treat that consists of a milk chocolate bar filled with a pistachio-tahini cream and kadayif (chopped filo pastry).

It was created in 2021 by Filipino chef Nouel Catis Omamalin and engineer Sarah Hamouda to fill the latter's pregnancy craving.

They launched FIX Dessert Chocolatier a year later.

But it wasn't until 2025 that Dubai chocolate really went crazy, thanks to TikTok. Various versions of the treat soon began to become available in Australia.

While it is hard to get the original in Australia, early variations started began selling for around $25 for a small bar before cheaper alternatives started arriving on the market.

Pistachio anything

Off the back of the Dubai chocolate craze came another – pistachio.

Not necessary the nuts themsleves, but bright green pistachio creams and sauces that were added to just about anything.

Pistachio sauce or cream, which you can now buy in a jar, was soon being drizzled on ice-cream and frozen yoghurt, or used to fill desserts and baked goods.

Matcha

Matcha is a type of tea made from the finely ground powder of the Camellia sinensis tea plant.

It provides a boost similar to coffee thanks to its high L-theanine content that is said to being a calm alertness without the jittery side effects of caffeine.

While matcha drinks started to become popular more than a decade ago, 2025 saw matcha, and strawberry matcha in particular, become more widely used as a flavouring for other proudcts such as baked goods.

High-protein anything

'Protein' was the buzzword of 2025.

While gymgoers and the like have long included extra protein in their diets, 2025 saw just about everyone else follow suit.

Soon there were high-profile derivatives of almost every snack food while some, such as YoPro yoghurts, grew in popularity to the point they were often emptied from stores.

But while sales of protein powders and products increased, many consumers, including Gen Z, went the old-fashioned route with good old steak and eggs making a comeback.

Good old mince, also known as minced beef or ground beef, also grew in popularity as a lower-cost alternative.

Turkish pasta

Turkish pasta became popular this year, again with the help of TikTok.

Turkish pasta is a derivative of a traditional dish Turkish Manti, but instead of lamb, many used minced beef as a base.

It came to prominence after influencer Anna Paul filmed her mother making the dish.

While Turkish Manti involves making meat dumplings, the viral version is deconstructed, or a 'lazy manti', which involves making a savoury mince dish that is dumped on a layer of shell pasta that has been topped with a yoghurt sauce.

One-pan 'dump and bake' dumplings

Baked dumplings, also known as one-pan dumplings or dump and bake dumplings, are another dinner craze that took off in 2025.

This viral, easy one pan meal involves placing store-bought dumplings in a baking dish, before covering with an easy sauce – the most popular were coconut curries or soy-ginger broths – then baking in the oven.

A nine.com.au staffer favoured a recipe that combined minced garlic, ginger poweder, soy sauce, sesame oil, red curry paste, rice vinegar, water and coconut cream with some bok choy and frozen dumplings which were then combined and baked for 15 minutes.

She said the dish was "so good" and definitely "worth the hype".

Carrot ribbon salad

It wouldn't be a year without a viral salad. Who remembers last year's cucumber variety?

This year, it was another vegetable's time to shine.

Enter: the carrot ribbon salad. Chef, cookbook author and content creator Cassie Yeung was one of the first to share her recipe, which she said was not only healthy, but had health benefits, especially for skin and hormones.

One version she shared was slightly different to her original recipe. It combined ribbons of carrot she made with a simple vegetable peeler with thinly sliced red onions, fresh dill, grated garlic, red wine vinegar garlic, extra virgn olive oil, salt, pepper, chilli and lemon juice.

After popping on the lid and shaking the bowl, it was time to enjoy her masterpiece.

Retro meals

2025 was the year many retro meals made a comeback in Aussie kitchens for a number of reasons, including nostalgia, their high protein count and their simple ingredients.

Among the popular dishes to make a return were apricot chicken, tuna mornay served with rice or as a pasta bake, sausage casserole, including curried varieties, meatloaf, garlic or curried prawns, devilled eggs, rissoles, vol-au-vents and beef stroganoff.

Cloud cake

We couldn't round out the viral food trends of 2025 without at least one dessert, so enter the cloud cake.

There are a number of different versions of cloud cake, which makes this confusing.

One is a concoction of layered cotton candy, while others are actual cakes of many varieties, including chocolate and lemon.

But my favourite and I believe real cloud cake is a lighter than air concoction that is Japanese in origin.

Also known as Japanese cheesecake, it is, as the name suggests, "like eating a cloud".

This Japanese version of a cheesecake gets its unique, fluffy appearance from its cooking technique, with cloud cakes often baked in water or in a rice cooker.

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