Best Served Hot

Best Served Hot

Best Served Hot: June 14–20, 2026

Rachel Cunliffe's avatar
Rachel Cunliffe
Jun 14, 2026
∙ Paid

Hello,

This week, 708 new posts were published by the top 521 food blogs. The most popular categories this week were Dinner, Gluten Free, and Summer. Recipes with the descriptor “grilled” in them have jumped to the second spot, after the always-popular “easy”. New to the top 20 were “marinated”, “perfect”, and “simple”. The top ingredients this week were chicken, pasta, and strawberries. Shrimp and oatmeal joined the Top 20 ingredients.

Roundups made up 3% weekly meal plans, which sat at 2% of posts this week.

  • Raptive launches Raptive Intelligence: I do wonder what they will do with the “stealth agentic food-intelligence platform” they have acquired. Perhaps this will be a part of a revamped Slickstream, which is installed on so many food blogs and hasn’t been updated in a long time. What are your thoughts?

  • Grocers are catering to GLP-1 users: I’m yet to see any food blogger address this rapidly growing market. Have you seen anyone mentioning this in their meal guides or recipes? Let me know!

  • Food Blogger Pro talks to Joy to the Food founder Mika Kinney on growing her Instagram following and site traffic, and her current focus on membership.

  • Do you use the Updraft Plus plugin? Make sure you upgrade to the latest version, which fixes a security vulnerability.

If we haven’t yet met, 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.

If you find this analysis valuable, please consider sharing this Substack with your food blogging friends.

Methodology: Top food blogs are defined as those running Raptive ads with 100K+ followers, DA 40+, and have posted in the past six months. Lifestyle, cocktail-only, and aggregator sites are excluded. This week we’re tracking 521 sites.

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