Gen Z’s new status symbol: super-expensive snacks

Jade Lily wanted to show off her grocery haul. In a recent video, the 26-year-old TikToker held up item after item: celebrity-endorsed supplements, packaged berries, coconut yogurt, bone broth, kombucha, and premade food from the hot bar. Last but not least, a “little bevvy,” she said, displaying her grape-flavored Olipop. “I am an Olipop girly till I die,” she said.

The groceries came from the upscale Los Angeles grocery chain Erewhon, known for its $19 smoothies created with the likes of Kourtney Kardashian and Katy Perry. Lily told her followers that the food cost $500. “These are all the things that I cannot live without,” she said in the video.

Increasingly, young people are hankering for pricey foods. In a McKinsey survey in February, groceries represented the top category that Gen Z and millennial respondents said they planned to splurge on, outpacing restaurants, travel, and fitness; in 2017, Gen Xers were the top spenders on groceries, followed by boomers. Some 20-year-olds are taking on second and third jobs to afford daily Erewhon trips. In June, Bank of America reported that its Gen Z customers spent more at premium grocery stores than any other generation.

Considering that regular grocery costs have been rising over the past few years, the trend is confounding. CreditKarma said that in a survey it conducted in May, more than a quarter of respondents who said they had noticed that food prices were rising also said they had skipped meals to save money. Some Gen Zers, however, are leaning into the rising costs by prioritizing health foods and expensive snacks. Gone are the days of coveting the latest iPhone or designer handbag. Pricey snacks and fun drinks are the “It” items for many young consumers. Buying a $53 box of croissant-shaped cereal or a $45 tin of potato chips might seem outrageous, but they’re still more affordable than a $2,000 bag.

In other words, inflation is no match for Gen Z’s love of little treats.

After documentaries like “Super Size Me” and “Food, Inc.” premiered in the 2000s, dietary concern spread like wildfire. Millennials kicked off a health-food craze with fads like avocado toast and grain bowls.

The trend picked up steam with Gen Z. Millennials and Gen Zers are driving demand for vegetarian and vegan food. In a recent YouGov survey for Whole Foods, 70% of Gen Z respondents indicated they were willing to pay more for high-quality foods. Since plant-based and organic options are often more expensive, it’s not surprising that Gen Z’s grocery bill would be adding up.

Neeru Paharia, a professor of marketing at Arizona State University, said that when it comes to expensive groceries, “you can always find some health-related functional reason to spend the money on it.”

Everything is content. Everything has to signal something.
Andrea Hernández, author of the newsletter Snaxshot

The generation’s love of health-conscious foods is also a display of economic power. Since buying a home is increasingly out of reach and fewer young people have a driver’s license (let alone a fancy car to show off), Gen Z is turning to a more affordable status symbol: their grocery cart. Andrea Hernández, the author of the newsletter Snaxshot, calls this the new lipstick effect — an economic theory that says consumers spend money on more-affordable luxuries, like lipstick, during economic downturns. “It’s a form of affordable affluence,” she said. “We’re now getting into this phenomenon of food not as a basic need but as a luxury experience.”

To be sure, Gen Z isn’t the first generation to serve up food as a status symbol. A New York Times article from 1986 titled “Pure Food: The Status Symbol of the Decade” quoted the food consultant and cookbook author Barbara Kafka as saying, “The food you purchase is a reflection of your position in society.” She added: “It’s a way to upgrade the image of yourself. It’s a class thing and has a lot to do with upward social mobility.” Gen Z is taking this to the next level.

Erewhon is ground zero for this phenomenon. The store sells thousands of $19 smoothies a month. The pastel-colored drinks feature an alphabet soup of ingredients: chlorella, spirulina, hemp, lucuma, maca, mesquite, xylitol, tocos. More importantly, they’re ripe for social media: Videos reviewing the most popular options rack up hundreds of thousands of views. “Everything is content,” Hernández said. “Everything has to signal something.”

Lily has shopped at Erewhon for the past six years because of its supply of quality foods — she prefers organic, gluten-free, and whole foods to help manage an autoimmune disease. “Nowadays it’s very trendy and maybe a little cringe to be so Goop/Erewhon coded, but at the end of the day I’ve always been this way,” she told me. “Health is wealth, and food provides so much joy in every aspect, so maybe it says I’m a little bit of a hippie and dare I say a snob.”

To capitalize on the hype, Erewhon has partnered with celebrities like Hailey Bieber, Bella Hadid, and Sofia Richie to design smoothies. By buying a celebrity-sanctioned smoothie packed with collagen and sea moss, people can signal they have money to spend on being as healthy as these icons. “I like to call it gentrified groceries,” Hernández said.

The formula is working: Erewhon pulled in an estimated $171 million in profit last year, and has said it averages four times the annual revenue per square foot of other groceries.

As young people seek out products that signal something about themselves, brands are increasingly playing into the trend. Nate Rosen, the author of the newsletter Express Checkout, pointed to the explosion of celebrity- and influencer-affiliated brands designed to signify clout. In the early 2000s, Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen championed McDonald’s, and Beyoncé and Britney Spears backed Pepsi. Now Nina Dobrev and Shawn Mendes are backing SmartSweets, and Hailey Bieber is backing the chocolate brand Hu Kitchen. Niche, health-conscious brands that cater to Gen Z’s various tastes are popping up everywhere. As the appetite for healthy food grows, more brands are positioning themselves as healthy options — regardless of whether they actually are.

The beverage world is a great example. Prebiotic sodas, Gen Z’s favorite drink, are giving the old-school soda giants Coca-Cola and Pepsi a run for their money. Brands like Poppi and Olipop leverage stars like Camila Cabello, promote prebiotic benefits and lower sugar content, and package their drinks in soft pastels with bubbly fonts. Everything’s carefully designed to capture the eye of Gen Zers who want something healthy-looking to show off. The fact that Poppi is facing a class-action consumer-fraud lawsuit alleging that it misrepresents the beverage’s gut-health benefits is beside the point for many fans. In one TikTok, Lily drank her Poppi behind text that read, “I’m just a girl (idc about a class action lawsuit, I will still drink my Doc Pop Poppi no matter what).” In June, Poppi told the Associated Press, “We believe the lawsuit is baseless, and we will vigorously defend against these allegations.”

Are you a cold-pressed-juice, Lemme-gummies girl? Or a Fishwife-tinned-seafood, biodynamic-wine kind of person?

The success of Liquid Death is another example of young people’s willingness to drop money on a product to say something about themselves. The Los Angeles-based brand, which is essentially water in a can, was last valued at $1.4 billion, double its $700 million valuation in 2022. It’s also considering an IPO. These drinks, Rosen said, are not just forms of sustenance but ways to express identity and values. A Liquid Death drinker might be a young festivalgoer or a 30-something who recently became sober but wants to maintain their edge. A Poppi girl, on the other hand, likes to have fun but also cares about her health. She orders a Caesar salad — with a side of fries.

Much of this signaling takes place on TikTok, which spoon-feeds consumers the latest trends. For instance, cottage cheese is having a moment thanks to people’s insatiable appetite for protein. There are more than 100 million TikToks about the lumpy cheese, and brands have piggybacked on its popularity. Good Culture, a cottage-cheese brand, was already targeting younger people with its sustainability-focused branding when its product took off. Good Culture told Fast Company that it projected last year that its volume would grow by 35% but it ended up growing by 80%.

With more labels to appeal to — keto, carnivore, gluten-free, plant-based — there are more markets for brands to corner. That’s partly why the number of options in a grocery store has skyrocketed. In the 1990s, grocery stores would carry roughly 7,000 items; now it’s closer to 50,000.

“When I was younger, there were some brands like Five Gum, Trident Layers, Lunchables — these were brands that showed some sort of status,” Rosen, who is 28, said. “People will always use products as signalers. That’s not going away. They’ll just be different products.”

Today, there are vastly more options for people to use to signal their priorities. There are also more ways to share those choices. Before social media, showing off food preferences was relegated to the dinner party. These days, fridges, pantries, and grocery hauls are prime social-media fodder.

“All these things that used to be private are now public,” Paharia said. People can carefully curate all types of consumer choices for an engaged audience. Are you a cold-pressed-juice, Lemme-gummies girl? Or a Fishwife-tinned-seafood, biodynamic-wine kind of person? I just have to check your Instagram story.

Eve Upton-Clark is a features writer covering culture and society.