How Gen Zers dine out: From spicy food to menu hacks

• Gen Zers love customized meals, spicy food, and viral trends like menu hacks and mashups.
• They're changing restaurant menus with their desire for bold flavors, international ingredients, and personalization options.

Gen Zers have dining habits that set them apart from other generations.

They love to customize their food, they're suckers for a menu hack, and they crave spicy dishes, restaurant executives and experts say.

Gen Z, defined as the cohort of people born between 1997 and 2012, grew up with social media, ride-hailing apps, and Taylor Swift. They're changing fashion, celebrity culture, and the world of work. Here's how they're changing restaurant menus across the US.

They're adventurous eaters

Gen Zers generally crave big and bold flavors, executives told Business Insider.

They're accustomed to ingredients and flavor profiles "that generations in the past did not grow up with," Joe Labombardo, vice president of culinary at Chartwells Higher Education, which provides food services at around 320 colleges and universities, told Business Insider. "Profiles, ingredients, and recipes from all over the world are now part of their diets."

"They definitely have a bold palette," he said. "It's definitely not the blander palettes of yesteryear."

Younger diners want to try new things and are more likely to be attracted to limited-time offers at restaurants, Lizzy Freier, director of menu research and insights at restaurant analytics company Technomic, said during a panel at the National Restaurant Show in May.

Menu hacks fly on social media

Gen Zers are more inclined to try out menu hacks, creating new dishes using items already available on the menu. These can sometimes go viral on social media, where people share new combinations they've discovered.

Some chains are using these menu hacks to their advantage. Tom Boland, CMO of Bojangles, said during a panel at the National Restaurant Show that he'd noticed a spike in people ordering iced blueberry biscuits with a side of sausage on the weekends, particularly in areas with a high student population. It turned out that college kids were visiting after nights out and putting the sausage inside the biscuit for a sweet-savory snack.

Bojangles has now added the hack to its menu, served with the icing on top of the sausage rather than the biscuit to make it easier to eat. "This thing is flying off the shelves," Boland said.

They love to customize

Gen Zers want to feel like they're getting something exclusive. This includes ordering customized dishes. Younger customers, for example, have been known to embrace Starbucks' modifications to craft personalized drinks, while Chipotle, where diners can create their own burritos and bowls, was ranked as teens' third-favorite restaurant chain in a Piper Sandler survey.

"Made-to-order, built-to-your-liking foods are almost the staple now," Labombardo said. "That is here to stay and Gen Z and the generation after that both grew up with it."

At Caribou Coffee, younger customers — Gen Alpha, Gen Zers, and younger millennials — are most likely to modify their drinks, CMO Erin Newkirk told BI. "It's like what makes you famous on TikTok, if you can unlock the TikTok customization."

Snacks don't have to be unhealthy

Gen Zers are less likely to stick to the typical breakfast-lunch-dinner meal pattern.

"Gen Z is more apt to have more, smaller meals throughout the day versus the standard three square meals," Labombardo said.

"With Gen Z we don't really see a pattern per se" in dining times, El Pollo Loco CMO Andy Rebhun previously told BI. "It's usually: 'When it's most convenient for me.' They will eat whenever they can fit it into their schedule."

But when they do choose to snack, it's not necessarily on unhealthy food.

While they may opt for cronuts or boba, Gen Zs also graze on a lot of cottage cheese, hummus, or vegetables with spicy ranch, Labombardo said.

They crave spicy food

Gen Zers are big fans of spicy food, executives previously told BI.

Labombardo said that dishes with the North African paste harissa and the Thai jam nam prik pao were becoming increasingly popular.

"There's a lot more excitement around spicy flavors, but it's not just spice and pure heat," Labombardo said. "It's also recipes that compliment the heat." He said that they were also looking for ways to add a "spicy twist" to classic recipes, like spicy ranch, which he said is "extremely popular."

What they're ordering now: Chicken, mashups, and pickled food

Popular dishes among college students at the moment include Hawaiian musubi, a sushi-like dish made with spam and rice; shawarma; pickled foods; desserts with sweetened condensed milk, including in boba; and mochi doughnuts, Labombardo said. Flavors like za'atar and yuzu are also trending, he said.

Meanwhile, bacon pancakes, pickles wrapped in crispy fried cheese, Korean dishes including hot dogs, fried chicken, and chewy rice cakes with spicy sauce, known as tteokbokki, and Chinese tanghulu, a crunchy candied fruit, are flooding people's social-media feeds, Labombardo said.

Chicken also appears to be Gen Z's protein of choice. In a 2022 poll by Morning Consult, US Gen Z respondents listed chicken as their second-favorite food overall, behind only pizza. Chicken-sandwich brand Chick-fil-A keeps topping Piper Sandler's survey of teens' restaurants, while chicken-finger chain Raising Cane's has shot to number four in the ranking.

Mashups like Nashville hot chicken bao buns and birria ramen are also popular and can perform well on social media, Labombardo said.

They have high expectations

"This generation knows more about food than any generation in the past because of how they grew up," which includes shopping at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's and seeing food content on social media, Labombardo told BI.

"Gen Z is demanding and they're not going to compromise their values for taste or for convenience or anything else," Caribou's Newkirk said.