Hello!
I’m Rachel Cunliffe, food blog designer + statistician at cre8d design. Every Sunday, Best Served Hot provides exclusive trend analysis, clear-cut insights, and industry news you need to know.
From this week’s charts:
31% of top food bloggers posted this week, with popular adjectives being easy, homemade, and vegan.
Top ingredients were chicken, apple, chocolate, and pumpkin.
Top categories were dinner, dessert, and gluten-free. Thanksgiving has appeared on the charts for the first time this year.
Plantyou is growing rapidly on Instagram (+22K this week!).
Industry news roundup:
Pinterest strategist Laura Piper runs an in-depth Pinterest trends report each week, and she’s kindly shared the latest report. You can get more of her reports here.
Katie Trant from Foodie Brand Lab is hosting a free live webinar on managing your business brand and your founder brand, and how they work together on September 10. Save your spot: foodiebrandlab.com/webinar
How to audit your food blog in 2026. This detailed guide has a lot of solid information in it if you want to make improvements yourself.
YouTube now allows creators to tag Amazon products and earn affiliate income if you are in the US and meet their criteria.
Instagram adds a First Draft feature to make it quicker to make reels.
As part of a large legal settlement, Meta must limit teens’ time on Instagram and Facebook to a maximum of two hours per day, lock them out overnight, hide like counts by default, and switch to a non-algorithmic feed. Facebook is pushing TikTok and YouTube to make these changes too.
Almost half of Gen Z families buy prepared food every week and more than 60% purchase groceries online each week. Read the report.
Facebook traffic is becoming more important to food bloggers. See the data for Pinch of Yum.
Jeremy Carraso talks on Food Blogger Pro about the importance of trust and disclosing how you use AI.
Please email me back to let me know your thoughts on all things food blogging. Or just say hi, we need more human convos in our inboxes :)
Have a wonderful week,
Rachel
