Birria tacos aren’t just having a Cincinnati moment, they're in the world's top five food trends.
Indeed, a new study of social media traffic shows that tacos made with the rustic chile-laden stew rank as the fifth-most-popular food trend in the world right now.
Meal replacement shake company Exante combed through online data to determine which dishes and cuisines were trending around the globe. Birria tacos only finished behind banana bread, focaccia, crème brûlée and keto diet-friendly cloud bread, in respective order.
To glean their results, researchers looked at the number of views on TikTok videos with hashtags mentioning a specific food or cuisine plus the number of Instagram posts using the same hashtag. They also counted up those items' global Google searches between June 2020 and May 2021.
Over the study’s duration, videos featuring the term “birria tacos” were viewed nearly 500 million times on TikTok and featured in 135,214 Instagram posts. The term also reached an annual Google search volume of 11.2 million.
Luckily for us, Cincinnati is home to plenty of places to find birria tacos — no global travel required.
Visit citybeat.com for our list of local birria taco joints.
This story was originally published by CityBeat sister paper the San Antonio Current.
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