Did COVID-19 Kill the Biggest Food Trend of the Last Two Years?

Some food trends come and go, like March’s craze over dalgona coffee. While others change our eating habits significantly, a la avocado toast and its takeover of coffee shop breakfasts for the past five years. But there’s one trend that’s been ubiquitous for the past two years: the Instant Pot.

In our network of over 1,500 shoppable recipe sites, Instant Pot recipes have dominated our trends charts.The set-it-and-forget-it nature of the Instant Pot trend goes well beyond the seasonality of strawberry shortcake or the novelty of a rainbow explosion cake. It became a trend because it aligns with home cooks’ busy lifestyles and provides a safe and reliable weeknight dinner solution.

But what happens when life slows down, and the option to be busy is removed from the equation? As the coronavirus pandemic hit, consumers became home-bound overnight, no longer feeling such a need for set-it-and-forget-it solutions. And while recipe traffic swelled, outpacing traffic seen around both Thanksgiving and Christmas, we observed significant drops in convenient cooking appliance recipes which utilize Instant Pots, but also similarly popular appliances like Crock-Pots, slow cookers and pressure cookers.

This is in stark contrast to the growth we observed for “from scratch” cooking. From baking bread at home, smoking meats on the grill, or looking for other ways to pass the time in the kitchen, it seems consumers have traded Crock Pots and Instant Pots for recipes that took significantly more active cooking time.

Usage of these passive cooking appliances often declines in summer months, but the sustained decline, even in spite of many states loosening stay-at-home restrictions, indicates that home cooks have picked up several cooking skills while confined to their homes -- and they won’t be quick to give up those new kitchen tricks. Instead, the coronavirus pandemic seems to have catapulted at-home, from-scratch cooking and killed the biggest food trend of the past two years; at least for now.

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