They’re sweet on sour.
Gen Z, after rebranding walking and laying around in bed al day, has set their sights on another mundane, everyday occurrence, at least for Gothamites — chomping down on a pickle.
Centuries after European immigrants began selling the humble brined veg from their Lower East Side pushcarts, the younger generation has become obsessed with the deli sandwich’s best friend.
Crunch the numbers at TikTok, and you’ll see — the hashtags #pickle and #pickles have a combined 9.6 billion views, thanks to an ever-lengthening list of viral pickle-related trends including “Girl Dinners,” cooking fried cheese and pickle wraps, completing the Hot Pickle Challenge and making Chamoy-spice flavored pickle kits.
And not only are they eating pickles every way they can, they’re heavily identifying with the snack in the same way millennials made avocados a cultural phenomenon.
“It’s like a cult following”
Scrolling on her TikTok feed Leah Marcus, 23, noticed that “every video was about pickles” which enticed her to go from buying a few jars a year to several a week.
“It’s like a cult following,” Marcus told The Post. “The people who do like pickles are obsessed with them.”
She’s so sure of Gen Z picking the pickle that she quit her full-time tech job in Los Angeles and co-founded a soon-to-be-released pickle company with her friend Yasaman Bakhtiar, 24.
Charley Thomas, 25, from Boulder, Colorado admits that she’s obsessed with the sour snack and celebrated her birthday with chocolate pickle bites.
“I think people made it part of their personalities because the flavor is kinda polarizing without actually being important and people like to feel edgy but don’t want to risk being ostracized,” the self-proclaimed “pickle b-tch” told The Post.
The good-for-your-gut snack
While packing a punch of flavor, pickles are also a low-calorie healthy snack.
“Research shows that pickled foods that undergo natural fermentation processes may improve gut health and even reduce blood pressure,” Heather Davis, MS, RDN, LDN at Nutrisense, explained to The Post.
Pickles and pickled vegetables also contain electrolytes, probiotics and heart-healthy compounds.
Pickle popularity has taken off beyond just being a healthy snack- they’re also fashion. A sweatshirt featuring different jars of the snack has gone viral and made national news headlines. On Etsy, there’s been a 41% increase in searches for pickle-related items and a 405% increase in searches for pickle kits in the last three months, compared to the same time the previous year, a rep confirmed to The Post.
Crunching the numbers on pickles
While Gen Z may be leading the charge, the pickle fandom has been around for centuries but peaked in recent years.
Alan Kaufman has been making pickles in NYC for 42 years and running “The Pickle Guys” in the LES– formerly known as the Pickle District– for about 20 years expanding from seven barrels of pickled cucumbers to about 45 barrels of different pickled items.
“I’m shipping like crazy now. I’m shipping more than I’ve ever done in my life,” Kaufman told The Post.
Kraft Heinz Marketing Director Alison Kelly also confirmed to The Post that “popularity of pickles has seen a surge.”
On the back of all the sour freakout, pickle-flavored products climbed their way up the charts to become one of the top food trends in 2023, according to Yelp, which found that searches for the flavor jumped a whopping 55 percent over last year.
Cheers to the cured cuke
The flavor has become a big dill making its way into every category of the menu including, pizza, salad, chips, seasonings and more.
But for many aficionados of legal age, the celebration of the cured cuke starts — in a civilized fashion — with a drink at the bar.
“Over the past year or so we’ve seen the dramatic rise of savory cocktails, with pickle-flavored libations at the forefront,” award-winning bartender and Stoli mixology ambassador Jack Sotti confirmed to The Post.
“The sweet, spicy, tangy, and salty make for an exceptional combination and creates a delicious complexity of flavor.”
This summer two new canned pickle cocktails, the Spritz Society Pickle by Claussen and Two Robbers x Grillo’s Pickle Hard Seltzer were added to summer BBQs.
The Spritz Society and Claussen’s collaboration itself is a testament to the pickle’s popularity coming together after the sparking seltzer company teased the product as an April Fool’s Day joke and was met with such real demand that the briney bubbles were created.
But they’re far from the first briney beverages. Pickle-holics have also been offered sour sips, including, Dill Pickle Mountain Dew, Sonic’s Pickle Juice Slush, Pickle Dilluxe (a semi-savory sparkling water made with pickle brine) and of course the classic pickle martini or pickle back shot. Nick Jonas was spotted on social media reviewing a pickle-infused beer. (“I’m getting pickle and I’m getting beer,” he reported to his followers.)
“Drinking pickle juice became popular in the mid to late 2000s when word got around that drinking the pickle juice would reduce the severity of your hangover the next day,” Michael Manjon, Food and Beverage Manager at Hard Rock Hotel New York told The Post. “Any edge you can get in combatting the evil headache you get after a night of Dionysian-level drinking helps.”
He also noted that “the salty and briny pickle juice also does combat the intense alcohol-flavor of your ‘lower-shelf’ ie cheap liquors, helping to make them much more palatable.”
New York City bars including Forgetmenot, Hard Rock Hotel New York, Hidden Lane, Pando Park and Pando 39 have been serving more pickle cocktails than ever before and even added new options to their menus.
“Pickle juice seems to be on everyone’s mind,” Pando Park and Pando 39 Beverage Director Jason Jeffords told The Post.
