Fermented Foods Follow 1974 Pattern Into Invisibility

Pickle everything—chips, juice cocktails, flavored potato chips, marshmallows, even lube for the sex toy market.

Walk into any grocery store or upscale food hall and fermented vegetables have stopped being a condiment and become an aesthetic. The food press has documented this reliably since 2015, and the inevitable question has arrived. Are we at peak pickle, and what happens when the novelty collapses?

The press gets this wrong because it doesn't remember 1974. That year, fermented foods became the flagship product of the natural foods movement, offering everything the counterculture wanted to believe about itself: authenticity, rejection of industrial processing, digestive health. Connection to Old Country traditions.

Yogurt sales exploded and sauerkraut and kimchi migrated from immigrant communities into mainstream supermarkets as health products. Small producers launched fermentation companies with serious investment because the demand looked infinite. By 1978, fermented vegetables were everywhere, celebrated in food magazines and positioned as both nostalgic and progressive at once. Yet by 1985, they were ordinary—not gone. Stripped of novelty as industrial producers standardized the fermentation process down to 72 hours in temperature-controlled vats and sold them at commodity margins.

Fermentation is becoming what all absorbed trends become eventually: infrastructure.

This cycle is repeating because the underlying mechanism doesn't care what the product is. Niche-to-mainstream acceleration follows the identical pattern every time—fermented vegetables have passed through three phases already and we're entering the fourth one. The novelty hasn't peaked, the commodification has begun. Watch what happens to the markup. When pickle products stop getting their own marketing budget and start getting bundled into generic "functional foods" shelf space, you'll know the cycle is complete. That's when pickles stop being a thing people chose and start being a thing people forgot they were buying—which tells you something about how quickly any novelty you're currently excited about will become the ceiling you stop noticing.