Welcome to the Era of Grocery Rot

Every day, and in every way, the supermarket is getting weirder.

You can tell a lot about a culture by looking at what’s trending on grocery shelves. In the 1960s and ’70s, when women were entering the workforce en masse, convenience foods like TV dinners and canned soups proliferated. Fat-free snacks ruled the diet-culture 90s. And in the pre-pandemic period, those halcyon days of ethical consumerism when climate action was still a thing, Fair Trade coffee and chocolate hit their stride, along with plant-based milks and meats.

What stands out to me when I walk through grocery stores now? Just how weird things have gotten.

A partial list of items I encountered on a recent visit to Target: dragon fruit cultured hydration probiotic electrolyte water, mojito-flavored probiotic seltzer, a Pringles collab with the YouTube talk show “Hot Ones”, Smurf-blue Takis, and cookies-and-cream flavored high-protein Cheerios.

Groceries circa 2025

Product innovation isn’t new. An average supermarket stocked about 10,000 different items in the 1980s and offers over 40,000 today. This, by definition, has meant more variety and experimentation.

Until recently, though, brands largely colored within the lines when choosing what to put in front of consumers. Want to shake your morning up with a new flavor of instant oatmeal? Try apple cinnamon! Tired of classic Triscuits with that Chardonnay? Look, a rosemary & olive oil version! The yogurt aisle, where you could pick up a key lime pie or strawberry cheesecake-flavored Yoplait, was about as wild as it got.

That tasteful restraint has gone out of fashion. We have entered grocery’s baroque period — an era of watermelon hibiscus popcorn, plant-based chocolate chip cookie coffee creamer, and caffeinated hot sauce. The crunchy, earnest health food of yesteryear has given way to zero-sugar sour-gummy-flavored performance energy drinks and Smurfberry-flavored probiotic soda.

These products strike me as the gustatory equivalent of the AI slop that floods the internet, which is why I’ve come to think of the category as grocery rot: food that seems to have been dreamed up by a hallucinating chatbot. (In a recent essay for her newsletter Snaxshot about the same phenomenon, Andrea Hernandez referred to the category as “late-stage groceries,” an excellent coinage; she points to Twix-flavored iced coffee, adaptogenic ramen, and Skittles drinks.)

While it’s easy to read a hint of nihilism into corporate decisions to unleash Cheez-It Frozen Pizzas upon the world, or market sugar-free cotton candy as a health food, these are, in fact, calculated choices — presumably ones backed by some sort of business rationale. To understand what’s driving brands to create these gonzo products — and grocers to stock them — I called up Nick Keswani, the head of mid-market and emerging brands for the market research firm Numerator. Keswani uses consumer data to help food companies plan their product strategies, so there’s no better person to hear from on this subject.

According to Keswani, the decision to roll out these more eccentric products is, at its core, consumer-driven. Food companies are experimenting with head-turning, amped up flavors because that’s where tastes are headed. “American consumers, especially Gen Z consumers, love newness, they love choice, and they’re more willing to try bolder flavors,” Keswani said. That helps explain products like mango habanero beef jerky, Late Night Loaded Taco Doritos, and sriracha everything.

What Gen Z hath wrought

When it comes to the maximally deranged end of the grocery rot spectrum, though, there’s an element of attention-seeking at work. Take the proliferation of collabs. Brands have discovered that teaming up on limited edition products is a great way to reach new consumers. Keswani mentioned Lundberg x Fly By Jing’s chili crisp rice and Ithaca’s special edition hummus made with Graza olive oil as particularly inspired examples of the strategy. But the more outlandish and nonsensical iterations — 5-hour Energy and Taco John’s creating a caffeinated hot sauce, for instance — are mostly about generating attention online. The same is true for screwball flavor extensions, like those bright blue Takis, or Sprite + Tea — a product born from a TikTok meme. “I have to believe that the intent is earned media, and the goal is virality,” Keswani said. “I think that's what they're going for in the hopes that a small spark sets off a massive fire for them.”

Don’t expect any of this to slow down. These products are largely made to appeal to Gen Z, a cohort whose spending power is on the rise. What about signs that consumers overall are pulling back on spending due to economic uncertainty? In a weird way, this might actually feed the urge for brands to branch out into more off-the-wall or attention-grabbing product innovation. “Consumers may not go on a fancy trip or pay a couple thousand dollars for a concert seat, but they will go and treat themselves to something really new and different in the grocery store or in the beauty section,” Keswani said.

Food brands’ deepening reliance on social media marketing is clearly at the root of this trend, as they chase or respond to virality, and use TikTok Shop as a low-lift way to experiment with newer, edgier products. But I wonder if there’s another TikTok effect at work beneath the surface, too—whether, just as attention-fracking smartphones have destroyed our ability to read entire books and watch any visual media longer than 30 seconds, that same inattention has wormed its way into food.

Are simple, lo-fi flavors no longer enough to hold our focus? Are Gen Z and even Gen Alpha now hardwired to seek out items like birthday cake flavored high-protein overnight oats, which is basically the skibidi toilet of food? I don’t have the answer, but it’s enough to make me wonder about the long-term staying power of the Millennial-driven movement against ultra-processed foods.