An In-depth Look At The Fantastical World Of Food Emojis

A study used Emojipedia’s list of food emojis to create a query in Brandwatch Consumer Research and found some interesting things.

The study ran for a year and the result showed that social media platforms influence food culture positively.

Among the emoji-laden mentions the study was able to categorize by emotion, 77% were joyful.

The popular emojis

The birthday cake emoji was also noticed to be the most-used food emoji. It is clear it is the go-to emoji when wishing someone a happy birthday, so it gets lots of use no matter what time of year it is.

After the cake emoji, the peach emoji is the second most popular. There were lots of mentions about love for the fruit and its other uses.

The eggplant emoji also ranked highly in the list which is surprisingly healthy with fruits dominating the upper half of the list.

But as we go further down, sweets and hamburgers make an appearance.

The world of culinary emoji 

Foods are a universal language and it turns out culinary emoji are common outside the US too.

First off it was discovered that people in Japan are heavy users of food emojis. According to the data, for every million people in Japan, 529k food emojis were posted.

They’re followed by Spain at 74k, and the UK following close behind at 72k.

The birthday cake reigns supreme in all five countries thanks to its universal use.

In terms of unique emojis on the list, there are countries peculiar to them. For instance, Japan has sushi; Spain has grapes and an egg; South Korea has a lollipop, candy, and a carrot; while the UK has cheese.

What this tells us is that mundane emojis can help us get a bit of insight into a country’s culture.