I’m Calling It: 2026 Is the Year of ‘Haute Homemade’ Meals

Pickles, hot honey, cottage cheese and Dubai chocolate may seem like strange bedfellows, but they do a solid job of summing up 2025’s biggest food trends. And while those flavors won’t disappear once the clock strikes midnight on January 1st, I couldn’t help but notice new cultural obsessions emerge as I compiled PureWow’s 2026 Food Trend Report.

Of those trends, there seemed to be one dominant theme. One that’s less a specific flavor or ingredient and more of a movement. If social media and grocery stores have any say in it, 2026 will be the year of Haute Homemade.

Or, perhaps more accurately, Haute Halfway-Homemade.

What do I mean by that?

Picture restaurant-caliber meals featuring global flavors and elevated ingredients—only prepared using shortcuts, like drizzling Cloud23 Sweet Jalapeño Hot Sauce atop your Flour + Water Cacio e Pepe frozen pizza, that help us save time (and don’t require serious culinary chops).

Multiple reports have addressed that we’re collectively dining out less, and that inflation fatigue has made us more selective about when and what we eat. At the same time, TikTok and Instagram Reels have made us more likely to share what we’re cooking, dabbling and experimenting in the kitchen. We’re not just pinning dozens of perfectly curated recipes from blogs with the intent to make them someday; we’re seeing real people create their own banana bread cold foam-topped matchas and saying, “I could do that too.”

Supermarkets are rising to meet that need too, with more complex, gourmand-caliber flavors in packaged foods. Your go-to spaghetti night suddenly feels Michelin-star-worthy when you deviate from the ordinary and spring for Sauz’s Miso Garlic Marinara, Cravings’s Corn & Truffle Sauce or Carbone’s Cacio e Pepe Alfredo.

Maybe it’s the years of watching the Barefoot Contessa extol the virtues of how “store-bought is fine,” but we’re okay with a shortcut. It doesn’t feel like cheating; it feels like a smart way to have our sourdough cinnamon rolls and eat them too, especially in a world where there are 5,983 other demands on our time at any given moment. When the moments we want to savor are the ones where we’re seated around the table, rather than standing over the stove. Or waiting for our table to be ready at the hottest restaurant in town.