Brandwatch Bulletin: The World of Food Emojis

There's a lot to learn from tiny pictures of food.

19 April 2021

We hope you had lovely weekend. Today we’re easing into the week with a look at food emojis and what they can tell us about the world.

Let’s get to it.

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What food emojis tell us

Last week we released a report with Twitter looking at big alternative food trends. There’s some excellent data in there, so be sure to check it out.

With food on our minds, we decided to carry the topic over to today’s bulletin. And to mix things up a little, we’re using emojis to dig up some insight.

Using Emojipedia’s list of food emojis (we’ll save the drinks for another day), we created a query in Brandwatch Consumer Research. After looking over a year of data, here’s what we found out.

Social media is sometimes said to be all doom and gloom, but that’s certainly not the case. Especially not when it comes to food.

Of the emoji-laden mentions we were able to categorize by emotion, 77% were joyful. And in the end, what brings more joy than a giant hamburger or perfectly crafted cake?

And speaking of cake…

The birthday cake emoji is by far the most-used food emoji of the lot. Clearly a go-to when wishing someone a happy birthday, it gets lots of use no matter what time of year it is.

In second place is the peach emoji. And while we’re sure plenty of the mentions are about the love of the fruit, we can’t not mention its other uses. We’ll let the Metro explain why it, and the eggplant emoji, may have ranked so highly in our list.

The list is also fairly healthy, with fruit dominating the upper half of the list. But as we get further down, our self-control falters as sweets and hamburgers make an appearance.

The culinary emoji world

Food is hugely specific to culture as we know, so we decided to find out if food emoji use changed depending on the country.

First off we found that those in Japan are heavy users of food emojis. As the home country of the emoji, this was to be expected, but their lead is huge.

For every million people in Japan, 529k food emojis were posted. They’re followed by Spain at 74k, and the UK at 72k. That’s a stark difference.

With that in mind, we looked at the countries using food emojis the most to see how their top tens looked.

The birthday cake reigns supreme in all five countries, showing its universal use. After that, while the order differs, generally the countries share most of the same top ten. But there are some differences.

For example, Japan and South Korea aren’t huge fans of the eggplant emoji. Based on what we know about that, we’ll avoid digging too deeply to find out why.

In terms of unique emojis on the list, Japan has sushi; Spain has grapes and an egg; South Korea has a lollipop, candy, and a carrot; while the UK has cheese. The US and the UK are also the only ones to have pizza in their top ten.

What this tells us is that even with something as seemingly mundane as emojis, we can get a bit of insight into a country’s culture. It’s also a reminder for social media managers to think about their audience when they are picking emojis.

That said, you can’t go wrong with birthday cake.

What should we cover next?

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Stay safe,

The Brandwatch React team

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