Whole Foods Market named beef tallow the top food trend of 2026 in its own annual trend forecast, pointing to a resurgence of the old-school cooking fat in home kitchens after decades of being sidelined by vegetable and seed oils, according to Whole Foods’ own newsroom release.
Key Points
- Whole Foods’ annual trend forecast, compiled by the company’s own internal team of shoppers and buyers, ranks beef tallow as the No. 1 food trend of 2026.
- The forecast points to home cooks using tallow for frying, in pie crusts, and for roasting vegetables, citing its higher smoke point and flavor compared with some seed oils.
- Whole Foods’ release frames the trend as part of a broader consumer shift toward “traditional” and minimally processed cooking fats.
- The company’s forecast has previously flagged trends that later became mainstream across the broader grocery industry.
Tallow’s return marks a reversal of decades of nutrition guidance that steered home cooks toward vegetable and seed oils over animal fats. Whole Foods’ own trend team attributes the shift to consumers researching traditional cooking methods and prioritizing ingredients they view as less processed, a pattern the retailer has tracked building for several years before naming it the top trend for 2026.
Beyond frying, Whole Foods highlights tallow’s use in baking, where it can replace butter or shortening in pie crusts for a flakier texture, and in roasting, where its high smoke point makes it well-suited to higher-heat cooking than many vegetable oils tolerate well.
The company’s forecast is compiled annually from a mix of sales data, supplier conversations and its own team of shopping experts, and Whole Foods has used the platform in past years to spotlight ingredients and products that later moved from niche to mainstream across grocery shelves more broadly.
The tallow trend also dovetails with a broader “nose to tail” and whole-animal cooking movement that’s been building in home kitchens for several years, driven partly by cost-consciousness and partly by interest in reducing food waste. Rendering tallow at home from beef trimmings is relatively simple, which has made it an accessible entry point for cooks who want to experiment with traditional techniques without specialty equipment.
Grocery shoppers looking to try tallow for the first time can typically find it in the meat department or specialty foods aisle, sold in jars alongside other rendered fats like duck fat and lard, both of which have seen smaller but similar upticks in interest as home cooks revisit ingredients that fell out of favor decades ago.
