A year as challenging and different as 2025 is all but certain to interject colorful new expressions into the food-away-from-home vernacular.
Since cussing can put someone high on Santa’s Naughty List, hopes of finding a Porsche in the driveway on Dec. 25 prevent us from recounting most of the new terms here. But a few are sufficiently inoffensive to merit a mention. Indeed, these expressions are certain to be added in ink to the trade’s vocabulary.
Slop bowls
You can now get Jersey Mike’s sandwiches in bowl form. Ditto for many brands’ burritos, fajitas, sushi, mashed potatoes, breakfast staples, barbecue, poke, and of course salads, made to order or composed.
The proliferation of familiar items served in bowls continued in 2025, but signs of both customer and operator fatigue were evident. Formerly high-flying brands that specialize in bowls, like Sweetgreen and Cava, hit definite speed bumps. And bowls failed to spare the likes of Chipotle from a slowdown in traffic.
Part of the negative reaction was a condemnation of bowls that looked as if their ingredients had been haphazardly smushed together instead of carefully composed to be an attractive knife-and-fork meal. The derogatory label preferred by the non-fans was “slop bowl.” The pejorative tag not only stuck but appears to be getting wider use.
Hallucinations
No, we’re not talking here about the effects of microdosing. The term has been taken up by users of AI to tag inaccuracies the potent technology "imagines” in response to a query.
Often there’s no discernible reason for the mistake. The concocted answer can be ridiculous, like depicting someone with two left hands, or extremely hard to detect, like citations in a legal brief of court cases that never existed. Famously, a request of an AI bot for a pizza recipe was met with a step-by-step guide for producing a pie, albeit with glue as a key ingredient.
The term is often used to reinforce assertions that AI, though powerful, still abounds in bugs that can undercut its utility.
Ultra-processed food
Like pornography, everyone seems to know it when they see it, but defining it is a different matter. Yet the term has figured into a growing number of conversations this year because of pledges by the federal government to address what it asserts are serious health threats from highly refined fare. Coining the term is a major objective of the Administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative.
The effort could be a major negative for the food-away-from-home business because the trade relies on products prepped and cooked in factories to save time and effort. The implications point toward significantly greater use of the term in 2026 and beyond.
Snackle boxes
Some enterprising parent had a brainstorm: Use the top tray of a fishing tackle box as a serving tray for kids’ various snacks and nibbles. That way the youngsters won’t whine about foods touching one another, and the visual display is pretty powerful.
The idea has caught on, firmly adding “snackle box” to parents’ glossaries.
Now the term is creeping into the food-away-from-home business, and not just as a reference to something for kids. Restaurants like Mangia NYC and Fine Fare are using the trays for adult arrays like vegetable or slider samplers, and the format has been co-opted by many more as an enticing way to present charcuterie.
Expanded Producer Responsibility, or EPR
Four years ago, Maine decided to follow the lead of many European countries by rethinking who should pay for the recovery of recyclable and reusable food and beverage packaging.
The legislation called for the expense and effort to be shifted off government or for-profit upstarts to the businesses and users who benefit from the use of food and beverage containers. Complicated records would need to be kept of who used what, the foundation for allocating the expense of gathering and processing the packaging materials.
Six other states have since followed Maine’s lead, providing enough of a critical mass to put EPR on the list of concepts the industry needed to master. Now about two dozen other states or municipalities are eying similar requirements for foodservice and other industries that use high volumes of disposable containers.
The trend is still new, but EPR is a term likely to be heard more often at industry conferences as the movement gains momentum.
Cheese pulls
Blame Chili’s for this one, though TikTok has clearly been an enabler. The restaurant chain turned the stretching of deep-fried cheese into a competition to see who can pull the ends of a Triple Dipper oversized mozzarella stick farthest apart without breaking the connecting strings of cheese. Ideally, the attempts are captured via smartphone and posted on social media for future generations to admire.
Hey, we once laughed at curling, too, and now it’s a must-watch Olympic event. And the success of Chili’s highly stretchable cheese sticks is anything but a joke. The finger foods are part of the chain’s appetizer sampler, which now accounts for about 15% of sales and has been a crucial part of the casual chain’s head-turning comeback.
As Managing Editor for IFMA The Food Away from Home Association, Romeo is responsible for generating the group's news and feature content. He brings more than 40 years of experience in covering restaurants to the position.