There was a time when Dean & DeLuca, the gourmet grocer founded in the ’70s, was the pinnacle of status. Its Manhattan flagship, situated on Broadway in the heart of SoHo, made the store’s pricey jars of pickles and its bespoke chocolate bar as attractive a luxury proposition as Louis Vuitton down the street.
J Lee, critic at large for the email newsletter Feed Me and food editor for Interview, says he loved shopping there for its high-quality products, but also for how he was perceived by others. “I used to carry a Dean & DeLuca tote all the time because someone told me it was a MILF magnet,” he says.
Dean & DeLuca’s flagship closed in 2019 amid financial troubles. But in a way, the company was ahead of its time in what it sought to convey. Erewhon, which began as a health food store run by a kinda culty couple, now pays celebrities to create off-the-wall smoothies that will go viral on TikTok. David, which sells hulking bars that promise a staggering protein to calorie ratio, sent out 20,000 product samples in the month before its official launch to fitness and productivity influencers. The gamble paid off: The New York Times reported that 40,000 people were waiting to buy the bars when they eventually went on sale.
These retailers and brands are responding to something very real. According to a new white paper from Highsnobiety, “cultural credibility is just as likely to be signaled through what’s in your fridge, where you book dinner, the coffee you drink, or the supplements on your counter” as it is by the clothes you wear and the luxury items you collect. Seventy-one percent of survey respondents said that, rather than consuming them purely out of necessity, the food they eat and the beverages they drink are tools of self-expression.
The trend is driven by a glut of emergent brands that make respondents feel like part of a bigger cultural world. Companies like Poppi, which sells a prebiotic soda in vibrant cans frequently seen in the hands of the teetotalling Mormon Wives; Fish Wife, which makes tinned fish that includes flavor bomb-y ingredients like preserved lemons and chili crisp; and Graza, which packages three tiers of olive oil in cheery plastic squeeze bottles, carry the same symbolic weight as a Hermès Birkin bag or a pair of Gucci loafers — without the 4-digit price tags. It’s a vibe shift that’s supported by actual data. Cultural pioneers — influential, taste-driven early adopters whose preferences shape what the broader market desires next — told us that the amount of money they spend on groceries has been growing at a rate that far outpaces that of the general population.
“Groceries are now a major status signifier,” says Angie Meltsner, the Boston-based founder of consumer insights and cultural trends research studio Tomato Baby. Meltsner, whose past clients include grocery store staples such as Unilever, Mars, and Nature Valley, says the foods we buy act as an extension of our identity and a means for personal expression. “They signal our priorities, aspirations, and taste, as well as an affinity and belonging with others whose priorities, aspirations, and taste align with ours.”
Although this is a decidedly 2026 reality, the conditions that have made groceries an essential indicator of taste have been brewing for more than a century. According to Benjamin Lorr, the author of The Secret Life of Groceries, the story begins in the late 19th century, when most Americans shopped at general stores and bought food in bulk by weight. “It was all generic,” he says.
Advancements in packaging allowed producers to give their products distinct names and identities. But most shoppers still relied on the staff of their local general store to choose items on their behalf. It wasn’t until 1916, Lorr says, that Clarence Saunders introduced the first self-service grocery store: a Piggly Wiggly in Tennessee. It was designed like “the modern IKEA, which leads customers on this weird trail through the store,” Lorr says. “They’re allowed to touch the goods instead of having a clerk pull them out.”
The success of this model encouraged retailers to think more critically about how to make their product desirable to shoppers. Some companies have done this more successfully than others. Trader Joe’s, for instance, pioneered the practice of using private-label goods to target the exact kind of consumer they wanted. Joe Coulombe, who founded the store in 1967, did extensive demographic research on the growing class of Americans who had attended college but ended up with modest incomes. Its extremely affordable wine options, Lorr says, were perfect for this kind of consumer: “If you have some level of taste, but you don’t have a lot of money because you’re underpaid and overeducated, ‘Two-Buck Chuck’ really speaks to you.”
There are plenty of contemporary retailers that influence the cultural conversation about what we put into our bodies, whether that’s Happier Grocery in New York City, where a shelf of flavored juices and milks greets you at the door, or Costco, where you can get absurd deals on massive bags of nuts but also gas. What might be most novel about the current crop of status-conferring pantry staples is that they often had willing buyers before ever appearing on shelves. Many of the Fast Moving Cultural Goods identified in our white paper, including David protein bars, Ghia aperitifs, and Fishwife sardines, used venture-capital money to develop a product, market it through social and traditional media sources, and build an audience who would buy from them directly.
Many of these rarified groceries are promoted with an educational pitch. If you buy them, they imply, then you understand the product category as a whole. Graza did this particularly well, says Houston-based creative strategist and astrologer Danielle Levy. It entered the market with two hero products, an olive oil intended for cooking and one intended for finishing. “This says, ‘Hey, we’re a company that knows a thing or two about olive oil. You can trust our product.’” The fact that it comes in a squeeze bottle, like something you might find on the pass at your favorite restaurant, just adds to its status as something for those in the know.
Indeed, compared to traditional luxury items such as jewelry and cars, food is more of an identity signal. “High-status items now are typically things that involve a lot of knowledge or skill,” Lorr says. “Food is the perfect vehicle for this.” The food you choose to buy can reveal an understanding of how food should be prepared, but also your awareness of wellness trends, he continues. “You can flex by knowing your own microbiome, which foods are good for your colon, and which foods you’re personally allergic to.”
Letting brands be your educators, however, can sometimes have drawbacks. As enticing as certain pantry staples can be, to make the most of them, you still have to learn how to best use them. Buying a single can of probiotic soda won’t make you healthy, in the same way that buying an ill-fitting T-shirt with a Versace logo on it won’t make you fashionable.
Still, in 2026, when information about any topic imaginable is available via a chipper AI chatbot, everything you choose to buy reveals something about your knowledge, taste, and priorities. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. If the fact that groceries are cool right now makes you want to learn to cook for yourself, lean into it. Even if the trend dies out, you’re still going to have to eat dinner.
