Every year, various food companies, market researchers and professional organizations attempt to shine a light on what we’ll all be eating soon. There are often legitimate reasons behind the trends we see at restaurants and in grocery stores, like how we wouldn’t have had the chili crisp boom had the ban on Sichuan peppercorns not been reversed by the FDA in 2005. But in these trend reports, all the nuances of immigration patterns, crop booms and busts, and FDA regulations tend to get lost in the pursuit of jargon. Like “sensemaxxing.”
The Specialty Food Association named “sensemaxxing” the trend of 2026, based on what they saw at the 2026 Winter Food Show they put on. And like Flavorblasting and Doing the Dew before it, it basically means that people are responding to bold flavors, colors, and textures. “To deliver this ‘high-definition’ experience, makers are layering complex, culinary-inspired flavor profiles into unexpected categories,” says the trend report in a sentence that sounds like it was generated by AI. Oh, you have “culinary-inspired flavor profiles”? Should we invite Bella Hadid?
The report gives examples of sensemaxxing snacks like Purple Drop, a colorful Peruvian purple corn drink, and crunchy, spicy Brussels sprout chips from Woodbridge because apparently barbecue potato chips just aren’t cutting it anymore. Like most jargon, though, it makes it appear like there’s more happening than there really is. To say that humans respond to colorful, textural, and flavorful food is not a revelation. That’s just what good food is. By this definition, any time we respond to color or crunch or slipperiness in food it's sensemaxxing. You could describe Vasco de Gama barreling through his sea route to the Malabar coast in search of a black pepper fix as a pursuit of sensemaxxing (please don’t).
The Specialty Food Association’s report also names five supporting trends to sensemaxxing, such as “shelf-stable chic” (people like shelf-stable goods) and “promiscuous palate” (more snacks with calamansi instead of lemon or something like that). There are times when slang allows us to describe heretofore indescribable phenomena — could you even be “cool” before we had the word? But these new food phrases do not actually signal anything distinct or new about our eating patterns. They take what is already there and attempt to sell it back to us as a novelty.
It is genuinely interesting to think about the hundreds of new brands vying for the shelf every year, and why one yuzu salad dressing might beat out another, or whether packets of “savory energy broth” might become as commonplace as Red Bull. I’m sure there is some condiment within the winding aisles of the Fancy Food Show that will soon be as ubiquitous as Graza on the shelves of every shoppy shop. And, file under groundbreaking, it’ll be because that condiment activates multiple human senses.
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