Food Trend Inspires Home Décor Palette

Stacy Sirk

We’ve all seen on TV, in magazines and in our favorite stores an increase in fermented foods. While they’re great for promoting health, for 2023 there’s a color trend emerging perfect for garden center and garden-centric retailers.

Think of things like pickled onions, beets, carrots, cucumbers and various fermented slaws. Think of fermented drinks like beer, cider, perry and cordials like elderflower. The color palette from all of these is a perfect color story for pairing home décor, containers, garden furniture and textiles for the coming year.

• Bright beet or radish pinks

• Carrot and pepper orange

• Deep reds

• Verdant greens, green beans, peppers, cucumbers, dill

• Deep yellow like mustard seeds, peppers and spiced cauliflower

• Dull pale yellows, sludgy olive greens, unsaturated golden vinegar colors complete the palette and add a neutral color story as a baseline—a perfect foil to the natural bright colors

All pair so well with houseplants and are perfect for the coming year. Let your local farm stand or grocer be your color palette inspiration.

If you have a food section in your store, or a book section, you can double down on this trend and sell related products like bottles and jars, or suggest to customers they recycle their own. In Europe, successful retailer Dille & Kamille (Dill & Chamomile) does the most fantastic job of stocking their shelves with every kind of useful glass container for extending the garden’s life with dried herbs, preserves, chutneys, fermented foods and vinegars. Their assortment is impressive and worth a look!

If you sell books, a success we’ve seen in Europe and the UK is to sell bundles of books at the holidays. There’s time for this now. Short stacks of like-minded books, tied with ribbon and a gift tag. If you’re uncertain this will work in your store, you could display bundles of books, suggesting the idea to customers to put together and finish off with a great ribbon and tag. Book sales continue to be very strong so there are opportunities here to do something different. For one garden-specialist retailer in England, we’re putting together bundles that are a mix of new books and second-hand books, but all on one subject: wildflower cultivation, wildlife in the garden, growing from seed, etc.

For those running courses, a course on pickling and fermenting is a great way to engage customers, and early autumn next year, the right time for
making gifts to give out during the holiday season. And don’t forget to source and stock great labels to sell or include on the course. Multi-layer merchandising stories are a great way to maximize sales. GP