In the town square of Tamworth, Staffordshire, a guy sells jacket potatoes from a van. A pink mohawk adorns him. For twenty-one years, he has been doing this. Nearly no one outside of Tamworth knew he existed for the majority of that period. After his teenage son showed him TikTok, a year later, people were traveling from Malaysia, standing in line for three hours, and paying someone 75 pounds to keep their spot for a baked potato.
As this happens, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that the meals that are gaining the most attention on social media are those that no one would have considered glamorous. Kidney pie and steak. In the hole, toad full breakfast in English Curry sauced chips the poor jacket potato. These aren’t the products of aspirational young cooks hoping to become famous.
For generations, the British people have been fed and kept warm by these foods, which are prepared in fryer oil-smelling pub kitchens and given in servings intended more for nourishment than for show. Nevertheless, they are currently among the most popular food content on the internet because to a unique alchemy of smartphone cameras, ambient fantasy music, and an algorithm that favors waiting.
| Founded | 2016 (launched internationally 2018) |
|---|---|
| Parent Company | ByteDance |
| Monthly Active Users | Over 1 billion globally |
| UK Food Discovery Rate | 35% of UK diners find new restaurants via TikTok |
| Restaurant Visit Rate | 55% of TikTok users visit a restaurant after seeing its menu on the platform |
| UK SMEs Using TikTok | Over 1.5 million small and medium enterprises |
| Key UK Viral Food Moments | Spudman (Tamworth), Binley Mega Chippy (Coventry), Guinness Split the G |
| Hashtag Views | TikTokMadeMeBuyIt — over 43 billion views globally |
| UK Food Delivery Market | £16 billion+ in revenue |
TikTok has a unique role in this that is important to comprehend. TikTok’s For You page relies on pure interaction; it doesn’t care who posted the video, only whether viewers continued to watch, shared it, or returned for more. This is in contrast to platforms that are built upon following friends or curated taste-makers. This proves to be a very successful strategy for bringing comfort food to the forefront. Watching a loaded jacket potato crackle as the skin cracks or a pie being cut open with gravy dripping over the sides is incredibly pleasurable in a way that defies simple explanation. The algorithm rapidly discovered that.
Commercially, the outcomes have been impressive. According to the Deliveroo 100 Report for 2025, one in three Britons now prefer restaurants that are popular on TikTok or Instagram over Michelin-starred businesses, and research indicates that 45% of UK diners now find new restaurants through social media.
That is an important remark about how quickly authority over taste has evolved. Ten years ago, a restaurant’s fortunes could be turned around by a positive review in a national newspaper or a listing in the Good Food Guide. Now, the same thing can be done with a sixty-second film of an absurdly big chip. A patron of a Wetherspoons bar in Camden recorded the crowd cheering on one very large chip, which made headlines around the country. The original video had 21,000 likes and more than 145,000 views. Commenters expressed how proud they were to be British.
The British pub’s ordinariness is one of the things that makes it so perfect for this time. Mallory Bartow, an American traveler, was not performing when she entered a Wetherspoons in Sheffield and recorded her reaction to the prices a vegetarian breakfast for £3.65 and refillable coffee for £1.20. She was truly taken aback.
When that shock spread from TikTok to Twitter, it went viral and received over two million views. A sort of nostalgic recognition swamped the remarks from Brits. Witnessing your most disregarded institution become someone else’s ideal travel destination has a surprisingly poignant quality. It’s likely that Wetherspoons’ outstanding qualities were simply forgotten by the British, in the same way that remarkable things are lost when they become familiar.
Price shock and tourist discovery are just two examples of the phenomena. With medieval fantasy soundtracks taken from Skyrim, users started posting traditional British dishes like toad in the hole drowning in gravy, sausages sizzling next to mashed potatoes, and thick-crusted pies releasing steam under the heading of “tavern food” in late 2024.
The food remained unaltered. The context was crucial. The trend, according to one spectator, made British cuisine seem “like stuffing yourself with autumnal food, drinking a pint of ale, and dancing.” This is a fairly true description of what the British have been doing in pubs for several centuries, but no one had before stated it quite like that. The steak and ale pie wasn’t created by TikTok. Millions of people found it quite enticing when it was reframed as something you might eat in a candlelight inn before riding off into the forest.
Of all these changes, the Guinness case is arguably the most significant from a commercial standpoint. For a long time, Guinness was connected to older male drinkers and the particular location of Irish pubs and rugby clubs.
The “Split the G” challenge, a TikTok game where players try to take a single sip that leaves the liquid level straddling the Guinness emblem, and a series of celebrity sightings, from Kim Kardashian to Olivia Rodrigo, contributed to Generation Z’s widespread adoption of it by 2024. Diageo was compelled to restrict the number of pubs in Britain. Some bars started using rationing cards. On a Friday night during Christmas, one bar owner was completely gone by ten o’clock. In just one year, women’s sales rose by 24%. For the task, a branded app was developed. It seems like none of this was planned by anyone at Diageo, which is why boardrooms are rarely the source of TikTok culinary trends.
The question that looms over everything is whether virality and quality are synonymous, and the truth is that they aren’t. After a ninety-minute wait, British Vogue sent a writer to a popular jacket potato vendor in London. The writer concluded that the potato was underseasoned and the workers was recording material instead of cooking.
In the TikTok food ecosystem, there is a constant tension: the queue creates content, which creates a longer queue, which creates more content, and occasionally the potato is overlooked in that loop. Users who cross-referenced TikTok recommendations with independent reviews prior to visiting reported significantly higher satisfaction than those who relied solely on social media, according to a 2025 analysis. This suggests that the abilities of a competent restaurant critic have not become obsolete, but have simply moved.
The extent of the alteration is undeniable. In mid-2025, the UK food and beverage industry’s turnover exceeded £147 billion, and social media was identified as a major growth driver. Today, more than 1.5 million small businesses utilize TikTok to directly connect with consumers. Tesco reported a nearly 400% increase in mozzarella sales due to content on the platform, and Waitrose now uses AI and social listening to identify TikTok trends before developing new product lines.
Tesco, Waitrose, and Aldi are among the supermarkets that have acknowledged that viral TikTok recipes are causing quantifiable demand spikes. As this develops, it is evident that TikTok is more than just a marketing platform that food companies can decide to use or disregard. Whether or not a certain establishment chooses to interact with it, the weather has a greater influence on the landscape.
Ben Newman the Spudman has four million TikTok followers, sells up to 1,500 jacket potatoes per day, and has made appearances on ITV’s This Morning. He has a devoted philanthropic fan base, a cookbook, and a line of goods. He has given pensioners thousands of complimentary potatoes. Nearly 100,000 people signed a petition, and the local council backed down after threatening to remove his pitch. Four to five pounds make up the potato.
There may be a three-hour line. People from Australia and South Africa who work portfolio jobs in south London stand in a market square in a town in the Midlands, waiting for something that has been available for as long as anyone can remember in every pub, chippy, and motorway service station in Britain. The jacket potato remained the same. Its surroundings all did.
i) https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tiktok-tavern-food-trend-explained_uk_66e40f87e4b0056e8291d6ce
ii) https://www.streetfoodhub.co.uk/tiktok-street-food-uk/
iii) https://madebyextreme.com/insights/tiktok-food-drink-industry
iv) https://www.standard.co.uk/going-out/restaurants/tiktok-instagram-hype-restaurants-reviewed-b1143508.html