Millennial pink took over your Instagram feed. Now it’s coming for your food

Maybe you’ll start your day with a pink smoothie bowl, full of chia seeds and raspberries and other pink fruits. On your way to work, you’ll pick up a Starbucks pink drink – a “crisp, Strawberry Acai Refreshers Beverage, with . . . accents of passion fruit” and an Instagram cult following. For lunch? A bowl of pink beet hummus, maybe garnished with some suddenly everywhere watermelon radish, the perfect shade of fuchsia. Wash it down with a blush-coloured can of La Croix. Dessert? An array of pink macaroons.

For happy hour, the choices are abundant: pink cans of rosé, pink gin, pink tequila, bottles of wine with such names as Summer Water and Pretty Young Thing, or frozen rosé (frosé). If you live in New York, you can eat pink spaghetti at Pietro Nolita, a restaurant with pink walls, bathrooms, chairs and napkins that say “Pink as F---”.

And at the end of the day, if all this pink food is inspiring a sudden queasiness, you can wash it all down with pink Pepto-Bismol.

Food is fashion, and fashion is food, and that’s why pink food became gradually, then suddenly, a thing. First, Pantone named Rose Quartz – a muted, dusty pink with the slightest hint of orange – one of its 2016 colours of the year, when it had already been popping up in clothing and accessories. It was more sophisticated than Barbie pink, more cynical than magenta. Brands like Thinx, an underwear company, and Acne jeans used the colour in their marketing. The colour took on a new name, thanks to the demographic that was most attracted to it: millennial pink. It expanded to include a wider range of shades, from a classic, warmer pink to peachy-beige to salmon.

Pink already had a toehold in the food world well before the Pantone announcement. Girly brands such as Sprinkles Cupcakes, which used the colour for its cupcake ATMs, and Sofia petite canned wines have long known its appeal. But one of the real drivers of the trend was the transformation of rosé from a slightly tacky punchline wine to a mark of affordable sophistication, a “lifestyle bevvie” and an expression of female sisterhood. #roséallday! The colour pairs particularly well with tiny cans – giving us about a dozen nearly identical choices, from Underwood, Lila Rosé and Trader Joe’s Simpler Wines. The fact that there is a brand of wine called White Girl Rosé should tell you everything you need to know.

As rosés started to sell swiftly, everyone wanted a piece of the pie. So we ended up with a rosé festival – La Nuit en Rosé – and rosé in malt-liquor bottles, and frosé pops, rosé gummies, and “Slay then Rosé” shirts. Last week, the Internet went agog over an attractively bottled pink gin (Wölffer Estate Vineyard makes it with rosé). Tequila brand Código 1530’s chairman Ron Snyder, the former chief executive of Crocs, says he didn’t set out to take advantage of the trend by selling a pink tequila, but when his tequila maker showed him the technique of ageing it in barrels of fine red wine, he realised he had an instant hit.

“Rosés are prob the hottest drink this summer, so we said, ‘This is going to be a very popular tequila for men, women, whomever,’ ” Snyder said. “Everyone’s making pink drinks out of it. They add some grapefruit. . . . When we get all of our tequilas into a bar or store, you’re drawn to the pink.”