What is changing on the menu and in the box
The ingredients, formats and product signals shaping what comes next.
Search interest in menu terms, measured against each group's own past year, so a rise means the term is genuinely moving rather than the category being big. Each list is scaled to its own leader, so the leading term reads 100 by construction. What it is leading, and by how far, is the part we hold back.
What a customer wants the menu to say about the food.
- Gluten free100
- 4 more terms, rankedFree
Week of 5 October 2026 · Google Trends, South Africa, same method as the Buyer Interest Index. This is what people typed, not what they bought. It is worth reading for what is missing as much as what leads: a term the trade press is loud about and search is quiet on is a trend that has not reached the customer yet. Each group's momentum and the term leading it are free to anyone. The ranking beneath the leader opens with a free account. The same twenty terms compared against Britain and America is Pro.
Position out of five, within the same five terms, in each market. A term sitting lower here than in both Britain and America is established there and has not landed yet. One sitting higher is ours.
Widest gap this week: Iced coffee ranks 5 of five here, against 3 in the United Kingdom, 3 in the United States.
The figures above are each market's own momentum, its last three months against its own past year, which is comparable because every market is measured against itself. The shares in the panel above are not comparable between markets and are not used here: Google scales each request to its own top term, so a term at 100 in one market and 57 in another leads its batch there rather than being searched twice as hard. Rank is comparable, because the same five terms are asked everywhere.
