Three Food Trends Worth Trying: Seaweed Granola, Charity Chocolate and Natural Coffee

Introduction

Some food trends are noise. Others quietly reshape how ingredients are grown, processed and sold. These three products sit firmly in the second camp: a seaweed-enriched granola that turns one of the planet’s most nutrient-dense foods into an easy breakfast, chocolate made by a charity that celebrates artists with diverse needs, and a natural-process coffee from a roaster treating sustainability as a core part of the recipe rather than a marketing line.

Evaluation Criteria

We looked at three things: does the product taste genuinely good on its own merits, does the trend behind it hold up to scrutiny, and is there a real reason to buy it over a conventional alternative. All three pass on flavour, and each carries a story worth understanding before you spend your money.

Seaweed Granola: Nutrition From the Sea

Phyco Health’s seaweed granola looks, at first glance, like a rich golden muesli with a solid crunch. The dark, crunchy, almost straw-like bits give it away: this is a granola blend built around protein-rich seaweed, blended with cinnamon and rice malt alongside hemp seeds, sunflower seeds, almonds and oats. The seaweed brings an earthy, slightly powdery, almost sandy bite that sits surprisingly well inside a familiar breakfast format.

The environmental case is strong. Seaweed grows in sea water, so it needs no fresh water irrigation, no farmland, and it acts as a huge carbon sequestration tank, turning sunlight and atmospheric carbon into edible, nutritious biomass. It can grow up to 50 times faster than some land crops, and because you simply harvest it, it keeps regrowing. It is also one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet per calorie, packed with micronutrients, antioxidants and anti-inflammatories, which matters when roughly 30% of the global population has an iron deficiency. Seaweed is showing up everywhere right now, from packaging materials to agricultural inputs, where feeding cows as little as 1% seaweed in their diet can cut methane output by up to 90%. Slipping it into familiar formats like granola and pasta is a smart way to get those benefits onto everyday plates.

Banana Powder Baking: The Sweetener Hiding in Plain Sight

One broader trend pairs naturally with the cookie category: banana powder, made by peeling, chopping and drying green bananas, where around eight to ten kilos of fruit yields a single kilo of powder. It is not new in every country, but it is hitting a global stage now as a gluten-free flour alternative. It does not behave exactly like flour, but in fudgy bakes such as cookies and brownies, or stirred into smoothies, shakes and ice cream, it works beautifully.

The nutritional case is real: banana powder is high in fibre, potassium, magnesium and vitamins, and contains resistant starch, a gut-friendly prebiotic that feeds the gut biome. It is also intensely sweet, so bakers need to reduce added sugar accordingly. A company in Chile is even producing it from banana skins and bruised or overripe fruit, cutting food waste while extending shelf life. With demand for coeliac-friendly baking rising, expect to see much more of it in coffee shops and bakeries.

ARTHOUSE Unlimited: Art, Inclusion and Chocolate

ARTHOUSE Unlimited is a UK charity that showcases the artistic talents of adults living with diverse neuro challenges and learning difficulties, providing a safe space where they can create, exhibit and be valued for their individual art while receiving physical and emotional support. The artwork appears on everything, from seed packets to chocolate bar wrappers to the boxes they ship in, celebrating the power of inclusion.

The product range goes beyond chocolate. Grow-your-own seed kits, such as pea shoots, let you nurture food from packet to plate, with all the growing instructions illustrated by the artists themselves. The chocolate is where things get seriously tasty: bars made with artisan producers, including a milk chocolate cheesecake with ginger nut crunch made with Colombian chocolate, and a dark chocolate with smoky crunch and maple syrup. One format even folds out like a postcard, so you can buy a bar, write a message and send it directly to someone you love.

The charity currently relies on donations and sales, but its goal, which it is getting close to, is full sustainability through product sales alone. Crucially, the products are not riding on sentiment alone. The flavours are adventurous, the quality is high, and the artwork makes each item genuinely giftable.

Kiss the Hippo Natural Coffee: Big Flavour, Small Footprint

Most coffee cherries on the market are mulched down to strip away the fruit, leaving a green bean that is then washed, fermented, dried and roasted. Natural coffee skips that: the bean dries and ferments inside the cherry, using a fraction of the fresh water, and the natural fermentation loads the cup with fruity nuance and flavour. It is coffee doing what skin-contact and orange wine did for wine, and ironically it is close to how coffee was made before industrial processing standardised everything.

Kiss the Hippo, London’s first carbon negative coffee brand, roasts this particular lot with tasting notes of blueberry, strawberry and hazelnut. The sustainability credentials run deep: the company pays double the fair trade price to give farmers room to innovate, runs its London roastery on 100% renewable energy, keeps its coffee shops waste free through partnerships that rescue surplus food and divert leftovers to charities, turns spent coffee grounds into biofuel, makes its cups, lids and takeaway boxes genuinely compostable, and even sends used coffee sacks to London Zoo, where primates use them as bedding and enrichment toys.

All of that would be superfluous if the coffee did not deliver. It does. The cup tastes bolder than a lot of standard coffees, with loads of fruit and funky, tannic notes more familiar from natural wines. It is a genuinely interesting cup of coffee first, and a sustainable choice second, which is exactly the right order.

Buying Advice

If you want the easiest entry point, the granola is a familiar format with unfamiliar benefits, and it works with milk, yoghurt or straight from the bag. If gifting is the goal, ARTHOUSE Unlimited chocolate delivers on quality and meaning in equal measure, and the postcard format is a genuinely clever touch. For coffee drinkers who already seek out interesting beans, natural process coffee from a roaster like Kiss the Hippo offers flavour you simply cannot get from conventionally processed coffee, with a footprint you can feel good about.

Conclusion

Three products, three trends, one common thread: each takes something with real substance, whether nutritional, social or environmental, and turns it into something you would happily buy on taste alone. That is what a good food trend looks like, and all three deserve to scale far beyond their current niches.