The hottest food trend of 2025 has a name the West just coined. But in the Philippines, it never needed one.
Food trends have a funny way of "discovering" what entire cultures have known for generations. We saw it with fermentation, with nose-to-tail cooking, with ceviche. And now, in 2025, the global food world has landed on its newest obsession: swalty — the irresistible marriage of sweet and salty flavours.
The portmanteau is fresh. The concept, for millions of Filipinos, is as old as breakfast itself.
What Exactly Is 'Swalty'?
The term is a mashup of "sweet" and "salty," coined to describe the growing trend of deliberately combining these two contrasting flavor profiles in a single bite. Think salted caramel, chocolate-dipped pretzels, miso-infused baked goods, and candied bacon. The NEXT Flavor Report by Rubix Foods named it the top food trend for 2025, noting that demand for swalty foods outpaced even the previous darling — "swicy" (sweet and spicy) — by 5% in 2024. The swalty market is projected to grow by a further 32% by 2028.
Food scientists will tell you this isn't just hype. Salt enhances our taste receptors' ability to perceive sweetness, meaning the combination is literally biological — salt makes sweet more sweet. That's why a pinch of sea salt on dark chocolate feels revelatory. It's chemistry doing the heavy lifting.
Gen Z, weaned on TikTok and Instagram, has driven this trend into the mainstream. Hashtags like #SwaltyEats and #SwaltySnackHack have pulled millions of views, and major food chains and artisan bakeries alike are scrambling to put swalty items on their menus. Funnel cake fries. Maple bacon doughnuts. Pretzel-crusted chicken. Popcorn cookies. Blue cheese baklava.
It's exciting. It's innovative. It's very, very 2025.
And it's also something Lola has been making since before anyone alive today was born.
A Flavour Philosophy, Not a Trend
In the Philippines, the interplay of sweet (tamis), salty (alat), and sour (asim) is not a culinary experiment — it is the foundation of an entire cuisine. Filipino food, shaped by centuries of Austronesian tradition layered with Chinese, Spanish, and American influences, has always used contrast as its guiding principle. These aren't separate flavour notes competing on a plate; they are a unified philosophy of balance.
As the esteemed Filipino food writer Doreen G. Fernandez wrote in her landmark book Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture, these three flavours orchestrate the Filipino palate. They don't take turns — they speak simultaneously.
And sweet-and-salty? That's been showing up at the Filipino table long before TikTok had servers.
The Original Swalty Dishes
Champorado and Tuyo — The Ultimate Sweet-Salty Pairing
If you want a single dish that perfectly encapsulates "swalty" decades before anyone coined the word, look no further than champorado with tuyo.
Champorado is a rich, thick chocolate rice porridge made from glutinous rice and tablea — pure roasted cacao ground into solid tablets — sweetened and served hot, often with a generous pour of evaporated or condensed milk over the top. It is warm, chocolatey, and comforting in the way that only a bowl eaten on a rainy morning can be.
Tuyo is dried, salted herring — pungent, crispy, deeply savoury, and intensely salty. Fried until golden and crackling.
Together, they are a Filipino breakfast classic — one that, as one Filipino food lover memorably put it, goes together "like love and marriage." The contrast is the point. The sweetness of the champorado is amplified by the saltiness of the tuyo; the fish's intensity is tempered by the chocolate's richness. It is swalty in its purest, most unapologetic form.
And Filipinos have been eating it this way for generations.
Tocino — Sweet Cured Pork, Every Morning
Tocino is sweet, cured pork — thin slices marinated in sugar, salt, and spices until the meat takes on a sticky, caramelised quality when fried. It is deeply savoury yet unmistakably sweet, with edges that turn golden and slightly charred in the pan.
It is eaten for breakfast, almost daily, alongside garlic fried rice (sinangag) and a fried egg — a combination affectionately called Tocilog. The sweet pork against the garlicky, slightly salty rice is a masterclass in contrast. No Western food trend needed to name it. It simply was.
Longganisa — The Sweet-Salty Sausage
The Filipino sausage, longganisa, comes in dozens of regional varieties — from the garlicky Vigan longganisa of Ilocos Norte to the sweet Lucban longganisa of Quezon province, packed with vinegar and pepper. But across all its forms, longganisa marries sweetness and saltiness into a single casing. Bite into a caramelised, pan-fried longganisa and you get the full swalty experience in one mouthful.
Filipino Barbecue — The Sweet-Salty Marinade
Filipino pork barbecue skewers are a fixture at every street corner, every fiesta, every family gathering. What makes them distinct from other grilled pork traditions in the world is the marinade — a combination of soy sauce, sugar, garlic, and, most distinctively, banana ketchup and Sprite or 7-Up. The result is a sweet, salty, and sticky glaze that caramelises over charcoal, producing char-edged skewers that are simultaneously sweet enough to feel like a treat and savoury enough to feel like a meal.
This isn't fusion or experimentation. This is lutong Pinoy — Filipino home cooking.
Kare-Kare with Bagoong — The Swalty Contrast Built Into the Dish Itself
Perhaps the most sophisticated expression of the Filipino sweet-salty instinct is kare-kare — a rich, slow-braised oxtail and vegetable stew in a thick peanut sauce, golden and faintly sweet from the peanuts and annatto. It is always, always, served alongside bagoong alamang: fermented shrimp paste that is intensely salty, pungent, and briny.
You don't have the dish without both. The bagoong is not a condiment — it is the other half of the flavour equation. The sweetness of the peanut broth needs the salt of the bagoong, and the bagoong needs the richness of the kare-kare to ground it. Remove either element, and the dish collapses. Together, they are swalty by design.
Bibingka and Kesong Puti — The Christmas Classic
No Filipino Christmas is complete without bibingka — a soft, coconut-inflected rice cake baked in banana leaves, sweet and fragrant from the coconut milk and eggs. It is traditionally served topped with a slice of kesong puti (fresh white cheese), salted duck egg, salted butter, and grated coconut.
Sweet rice cake. Salty cheese. Salty duck egg. Melting butter.
Swalty. For centuries. On Christmas morning. While the world was still putting ham on pineapple and calling it exotic.
Why This Matters
The global food industry is right to celebrate the appeal of sweet-and-salty combinations. The science is real, the flavour pairing is genuinely satisfying, and the trend is producing some genuinely creative food. But there is something worth pausing on here.
When champorado with tuyo becomes "a bold chocolate and anchovy parfait" on a London menu and gets written up as innovative, something is happening worth noticing. When the same flavour logic that underpins tocino and longganisa gets repackaged as a 2025 trend — as if the concept were brand new — it is worth naming the gap between discovery and invention.
Filipino cuisine has long been described as "the world's best-kept secret" or "the next big thing in food." The Michelin Guide only announced in 2025 that it would release its first selection covering restaurants in Greater Manila and Cebu. Anthony Bourdain noted that American palates were already "ready for the bold flavours" of Filipino cooking. That readiness has been there for a while. Filipino food has simply been waiting to be seen.
The swalty trend is, in many ways, the world finally catching up.
The Filipino Table Has Always Known
There is something quietly vindicating about watching the food world arrive, wide-eyed, at a flavour combination that every Filipino child has grown up knowing. The kid who ate champorado with tuyo on a school morning. The family who fought over the caramelised edges of the tocino in the pan. The lola (granny) who balanced her kare-kare with a generous scoop of bagoong and knew, without needing a food scientist to explain it, that the two belonged together.
The Filipino palate has never needed a portmanteau to justify itself. It has always been understood that sweetness and saltiness are not opposites — they are partners. They complete each other.
So yes, welcome to the swalty era. The Philippines has been here the whole time. Pull up a chair. There's champorado on the stove.
Kain na tayo. Let's eat.