Americans still eat more iceberg lettuce than kale

At first glance, it looks like kale has taken over the American palate. The number of times restaurants have mentioned iceberg lettuce as a menu ingredient in salads has dropped 17% in the last three years, according to research from the market-research firm Mintel. Mentions of kale are “off the charts,” said Caleb Bryant, a food-industry analyst at Mintel. “Kale is just exploding in all restaurants, whether it be salad or roasted kale,” he said. And on store shelves, there is a similar rise in kale products, from kale chips to kale smoothies and juices, he said.

From 2014 to 2015, the mentions of kale as an ingredient in salads jumped 63%; before 2014, mentions of kale were so infrequent that there aren’t even kale-and-iceberg comparable data, Bryant said.

Even though kale appears to be far more popular on menus than iceberg lettuce, Americans are eating a lot more of the latter. The U.S. either produced or imported 13.5 pounds of iceberg per capita for use in 2015, a drop from 20.9 pounds per person in 2005, according to the United States Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. Kale, meanwhile, has remained relatively steady for the last decade, with the U.S. producing and importing just 0.6 pounds of kale per person in 2015, up from 0.4 pounds per person in 2005.

Pre-made salads and salad kits at grocery stores have increased in popularity, and many contain at least some iceberg, said Trevor Suslow, a research specialist at the University of California Davis’s plant-sciences department. Plus, iceberg is an ingredient in foods that aren’t salads, such as wraps, he said. Iceberg also has a long shelf life and a resistance to turning brown, which may be attractive to restaurants and companies that produce bagged salads.

It will take some time for the kale trend to really change what farmers are producing, Suslow added, assuming Americans acquire a bigger appetite for it. Agriculture specialists are constantly analyzing restaurant and retail patterns and trying to anticipate what new products are becoming popular, he said, but even when they can predict a trend, farmers need several years to build up a sufficient supply of seeds and to dedicate land to grow a new crop.

Source: marketwatch.com