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SHARPSBURG, Pa. — When did we know for sure? Was it April, when Nature Made introduced its pickle-flavored gummy vitamins? Was it November, when Petco's "Pickle Mania" promotion offered 26 different pickle-themed toys for dogs and cats? Maybe it was the December day a food scholar uttered, "Everyone can kind of see their needs met by pickles." Or perhaps it was just a couple weeks ago, when Instagram chef itsmejuliette (no stranger to online pickle activities) posted a cheeky challenge on her "cooking with no rules" feed: "this is your sign to surprise your neighbor with a pickle wreath.
" More than 70,000 people liked her post. At the intersection of health and edginess, traditionalism and hipsterism, global culture and the American stomach, the pickle in 2024 found itself caught in a mealstrom of words like "viral" and "trending" just as its foodas-fetish-object cousins — bacon and ranch dressing, notably — experienced in years past. People are also reading.
.. Prepared Foods, an industry newsletter, said it outright in September: "The pickle obsession is at an all-time high.
" Tangy Pickle Doritos. Grill Mates Dill Pickle Seasoning for your steak. Portable pouches of pickles.
Pickle mayonnaise, pickle hummus, pickle cookies, pickle gummies. Spicy pickle challenges. Pickleback shots at the bar.
Pickle juice and Dr. Pepper. Corn puffs colored and flavored like pickles and called, naturally, Pickle Balls.
In Pittsburgh, the cradle of the modern American pickle (talkin' to you, H.J. Heinz), a summer festival called Picklesburgh draws aficionados of the sour and the puckery from several states away for copious amounts of pickle beer washed down by brine, or vice versa.
As 2025 begins, two possible conclusions present themselves. First: The pickle embedded its sour self at the nucleus of the American gastro-zeitgeist for the foreseeable future. Second: This maybe played itself out, and the pickle has jumped the shark.
Still, more of us are living the life of brine. "I think pickling in general has had a resurgence," says Emily Ruby. She is a curator and expert on the history of the Heinz company for the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, a couple miles downriver from this industrial borough where Henry J.
Heinz churned out his first packaged pickles in the 19th century. Indeed, pickles are now a $3.1 billion annual market in the United States and growing.
"It's been a scary few years for a lot of people. In 2024 we needed something we could agree on. Maybe it's pickles," says Alex Plakias, an associate professor at Hamilton College in New York who teaches the philosophy of food.
"I was surprised at how the pickle could be all things to all people," says Plakias, whose most recent book is about awkwardness. "All these different food identities in 2024, and no matter who you think of, pickles can be for them." The American cucumber pickle is crunchy and sour, with an aggressive taste of its own but can accommodate other "flavor profiles" (Ghost pepper pickles! Garlic pickles! Horseradish pickles! Bread and butter chips!).
They're also absurdly low fat — the rare food trend that's not outright bad for you — and some offer the probiotic benefits of fermentation. Key marketing points all. From a positioning perspective, the pickle exists at the crossroads of homey-slash-traditional (Mom, Lower East Side, preserves, harvests) and edgy-slashslightly subversive (sour, intense flavors, startup pickle factories in reclaimed industrial neighborhoods).
"It's not like I come from a long line of picklers. But I realized that a cucumber is a blank slate and you get to paint it with all kinds of different brines and spices and salts and sugars," says John Patterson, who founded Pittsburgh Pickle with his brothers out of a church kitchen a decade ago. "A pickle is something you can rely on and count on," he says.
"A pickle is always funny, for some reason. A pickle is never nefarious or mean. It's a peaceful, wholesome business to be in.
" Of the cucumber itself, he has this to say: "It's almost like God intended them to be pickled." The pickle is also, let's be candid, usually green and bumpy and intrinsically unattractive. That means even social-video newbies don't need precision lighting to crank out reasonably compelling pickle content.
Credit — or blame — TikTok for some of the frenzy. Watching the chronicling of pickle-cake baking, pickle-wreath making and pickle-pizza crafting, you get the sense the social platform was made as much for dills as for dancing. Pickle videos there regularly top 2 million viewers, and TikTok recently reported more than 251 million pieces of pickle content.
Then there is the Great Glickle Surge of 2024 — a social media oddity involving someone pouring "edible glitter" into a jar of pickles and making "glickles" — ostensibly a sexier, blingier, even Instagrammier version of pickles. Finally, COVID-19 likely played a pivotal role. The pandemic's forced inward focus in 2020 and 2021 led many Americans to revisit DIY approaches to food, including baking sourdough bread and, yes, pickling things.
It's what Nora Rubel, who researches food and culture, calls "an embrace of 'grandmothercore' culture" by, well, grandchildren. "Gen Z is taking pickles as their thing. This is the new avocado toast," says Rubel, a professor of Jewish studies at the University of Rochester.
"Pickles are also kind of funny. They're just sort of goofy. You can make a lot of puns about pickles.
It's intense flavor, but there's also a kind of silliness about them," Rubel said. Packaged food is no longer positioned as merely something to eat. It often presents itself as a multimedia experience — something to be talked about and reveled in, to join likeminded communities over, to incorporate into your own personality.
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