A popular recipe on Tik Tok has created a huge demand for feta cheese, reports The New York Times. The recipe for oven-baked pasta sauce, which features a whole block of feta cheese along with cherry tomatoes, olive oil, chiles, and garlic, was first made popular by Finnish food blogger Jenni Hayrinen. But the dish didn’t really take off in the U.S until Tik Tok users began posting about it in January.
The #fetapasta hashtag has more than 600 million views on Tik Tok, with additional content spilling over to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, the “Today” show, and “Good Morning America.”
By mid-February, feta was the number one search on the Instacart grocery delivery app and stores like Harris Teeter were experiencing out-of-stocks. According to Harris Teeter spokeswoman Danna Robinson, demand for feta was up 200 percent.
Anne Saxelby, founder and owner of Saxelby Cheesemongers in New York City, saw such an overwhelming demand for the cheese that she couldn’t get her weekly shipment of it from Narraganset Creamery, a small Rhode Island dairy.
Narraganset also supplies grocers such as Zabar’s and Eataly with its Salty Sea Feta, is expanding weekly production of the product from 6,000 pounds to 10,000 pounds a week, according to Mark Federico Jr. who runs the company with his parents.
Walshe Birney, who oversees the specialty counters for Kroger, which own Murray’s Cheese, also noted that sales of feta blocks were up.
“This is the largest and most geographically broad interest and sales increase in a product that I have personally ever seen,” he said in an email.
This isn’t the first time that a Tik Tok trend has increased demand for a food product. Saxelby said that she sold out of another cheese, Winnimere, after a friend’s Tik Tok video praising the cheese got more than 250,00 views in two days. Saxelby said she sold 20 whole rounds in one day, compared to the norm of 12 per week.
Ole Mexican Foods also saw a nationwide surge in sales of its burrito-sized tortillas after a hack went viral on Tik Tok where users cut, filled, and folded a large flour tortilla to make a large sandwich. Full Story
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