Pretty Pantry Paradigm, Aesthetic Kitchen Trend As Self Expression

JAKARTA Millennials and Generation Z groups no longer consider the kitchen as a mere room for cooking, but become elements of a visual lifestyle. Although considered to be up in class, this beautiful kitchen phenomenon has a negative impact because it is considered to encourage people to behave consumptively.

About ten years ago, we were presented with the fact that the kitchen was limited to cooking rooms and storing food. But in today's era, the kitchen seems to be changing functions. It's no longer limited to where mothers prepare dishes for families.

The current kitchen is far from dirty, oily, or sticky. The current kitchen is more modern, with a clean appearance, aesthetics, and pampering the eyes.

But behind the beautiful kitchen of these mothers' dreams, there are negative impacts that lurk. The desire to make an instagramable kitchen encourages individuals to become more consumptive.

The phenomenon of this beautiful kitchen is loved by millennials and generation z (gen z). This trend is then called the practice ministry paradigm. These two generations now make kitchens like phashionitem, different from the generation of predecessors who prioritized function.

However, the phenomenon of aesthetic kitchen does not just happen. It all started with the rapid development of social media in the past few years.

You could say that the younger generation was inspired by the lifestyle of the celebrity family and US entrepreneurs, the Kardashian family, who were successful with a reality show entitled Keeping up With the Kardashians.

During the event, the Kardhasian family was known to have a clean, neat, beautiful kitchen. A large room, various jars arranged in neutral color, and a minimalist shelf managed to spoil the eyes of the audience.

As a result, the millennial generation and gen z who idolize the Kardashian family are hypnotized by the aesthetic appearance of the kitchen. This trend penetrates a number of social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Influencers seem to not want to miss showing off their kitchens that are so regular, as if they have never been used. In addition, the beautiful kitchen ideas that are spread across Pinterest, the mainstay social media of young women who want a good kitchen are seen as pleasing to their eyes.

Pandigm's trendy frequency then made kitchen items an expression of themselves, similar to a fashion, to create personal identity. Not only that, this trend also has an impact on the industry.

Seeing this phenomenon, several brands even redesigned their packaging so that they could be accepted by the aesthetic Gen Z and millennial kitchens.

One of them is the packaging of the legendary product, Lee Kum Kee. According to a report from Langcet Planetary Health via Earth Commission (2024) they redesigned product packaging such as sauce, salted soy sauce, and cucumber sauce by leaving color-color genjreng. The goal is to attract the interest of the younger generation.

According to research agency Kantar Millward Brown, Gen Z prefers content in visual form to writing. Visual content is easier to accept by gen z because it makes them not need to focus on just one activity.

The same data was also revealed by the Forbes Advisor and Talker Research survey in April 2024. This poll shows that around 45 percent of z genes tend to search on social media rather than traditional search engines like Google.

The reason is that gen z prefers to seek information on social media such as TikTok and Instagram compared to Google because they are more interested in visual, fast, and interactive searches.

Genz also tends to value minimalist and functional designs. They like clean, regular, and efficient spaces in their use. The concept of less is more'' is very relevant in their decoration choices.

This pretty pantry trend not only has an impact on food products that change their designs to make it more accepted by young people, but also into organization tools companies, such as racks, jars, bottles, and eating utensils that compete to change the design display to more simple, clean, and neutral color.

This happens because the younger generation now prefers to include food products, kitchen spices, and various cleaning products into containers that match kitchen tones rather than storing these products in their original packaging.

But this paradigm photography phenomenon is like a double-edged knife. On the one hand, this trend makes the kitchen move up in class, but on the other hand it actually worsens the consumptive nature because it makes people more wasteful of spending on goods that are not really needed.

You see, this phenomenon encourages people to buy new racks and jars to meet the expectations of an aesthetic kitchen. So, people tend not to take advantage of existing goods, but instead buy more goods.