Medjool dates are having a serious moment — from Erewhon smoothies to TikTok’s chocolate-stuffed obsession. Here’s why the ancient fruit is now the snack everyone’s reaching for.
In 2022, Hailey Bieber collaborated with Erewhon — the Los Angeles grocery store where a green juice will cost you more than a bottle of wine — on the blush-pink Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie sweetened with Medjool dates. It is still on the menu and has been succeeded by a roster of other A-list smoothies like Bella Hadid’s Kinsickle — a turmeric and aloe vera and coconut cream treat also sweetened with dates. The limited-edition Mama’s Bang Bang Smoothie, launched in partnership with singer Erykah Badu last year featured dates. So did Heidi Klum’s Kluminator.
But it’s not just Erewhon giving dates a stage. Scroll TikTok for any period of time and you’re bound to see someone splitting a date along its seam, pulling out the pit, tucking in a spoonful of peanut butter, and lowering the whole thing into a bowl of melted dark chocolate; then photographing it against a linen napkin, pulling hundreds of millions of views.
Natural Delights, the leading North American Medjool date supplier, says it saw U.S. retail sales jump 23 percent last year per Circana data, with organic date sales up 147 percent; the U.S. date market is projected to reach $1.16 billion by 2032. In the United Kingdom, Ocado reported Medjool date sales up 100 percent year-on-year, while searches for date butter and chocolate dates climbed 458 percent and 135 percent respectively.
The Medjool — big, soft, dense with a sweetness that registers somewhere between toffee and brown sugar — came close to extinction in the 1920s when disease swept through date plantations in Morocco; offshoots were eventually brought to California’s Coachella Valley, where the variety was preserved and, over the following century, became the dominant date in American supermarkets. It is now sold in plastic clamshells at Whole Foods, next to the raisins.
How Ozempic rewrote the grocery list
More than 12 percent of American adults were taking a GLP-1 drug — Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound — as of 2025, more than double the share from eighteen months earlier, according to the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index. A Cornell University study that tracked purchase data from roughly 150,000 households found that within six months of starting the medication, grocery spending fell by an average of 5.3 percent; spending on savory snacks dropped by about 10 percent, with similarly steep declines in sweets, baked goods, and cookies. The categories that gained were yogurt, nutrition bars, and fresh fruit.
Consumers taking GLP-1 medications are shifting toward higher-protein, fiber-rich, and healthy-fat items while cutting back on high-carb and sugary foods. Produce is doing well because it offers high-fiber options and whole foods that health care providers direct GLP-1 users to eat. By 2030, J.P. Morgan projects, more than 30 million Americans will be on some form of GLP-1 treatment, up from 10 million today. The grocery cart is already different.
Dates offer natural sweetness to meals and snacks without added sugar; they are loaded with fiber and electrolytes like potassium and magnesium. David Baxter, CEO of Natural Delights, told Fresh Fruit Portal that the momentum tracks with “broader consumer trends” around demand for added fiber, natural sweeteners, and whole-food ingredients. As a result, he says, d”ates are increasingly becoming a staple snack and functional ingredient.” Nichola Ludlam-Raine, author of How Not to Eat Ultra-Processed and a spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association, calls dates a “whole food indulgence” — the desire for comforting treats in forms “perceived as more natural or nutrient dense”; dates, she said, deliver “fiber, potassium, magnesium and small amounts of antioxidants, which can help support gut health.”
The energy balls — dates, nuts, oats, plant-based protein — have become a fixture of fitness content; dates stuffed with salted butter, drizzled with olive oil, pressed around peanut butter and lowered into dark chocolate have generated enough of it that Whole Foods named dates part of its mindful sweets 2026 trend pick. In the United Kingdom, searches at Waitrose for its no-bake Medjool date, pretzel, and peanut butter square recipe are up 60 percent. “A versatile canvas for incredibly indulgent fillings,” Lizzie Haywood, Waitrose’s trend innovation manager, calls the fruit. She is not wrong.
Deeper than the snack aisle
Ayesha Erkin, the author of the recipe book Date of the Day, runs date-tasting workshops in London and is known widely as “the date girl.” She got into them because of a hadith — a record of the Prophet Muhammad’s words and deeds — describing him pairing fresh cucumbers with dates; she has since developed recipes for hot fudge sun-dates, a riff on the sundae, and doughnut dates, the latter a date rolled in cinnamon sugar and served warm.
Dates have been cultivated in the Middle East for millennia; they carry real weight in Islamic tradition, where they are used to break the Ramadan fast; they appear in ancient texts with a frequency that suggests the date palm was once treated as something close to sacred. Erkin’s favorites include Ajwa dates from Saudi Arabia, which have “a very rich liquorice flavour,” and Sukkari dates, which are “like caramel but crunchy and go well with a coffee.” She is not describing a novelty product.
More than 90 percent of America’s commercial date-farming acreage is in California, with 95 percent of that concentrated in the Coachella Valley — a length of Sonoran Desert about two hours east of Los Angeles where 350 days of annual sunshine and underground aquifers have been producing date palms since the early twentieth century; U.S. production reached roughly 62,450 tons in 2024, valued at around $279 million, more than double the volume of a decade ago. Dates are also imported from the Middle East and North Africa; the Palestinian food brand Zaytoun reported a 50 percent increase in sales last year, widely credited to shoppers buying its dates and olive oil in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Dates are high in natural sugar, which concentrates as the fruit dries; they also contain fiber, which slows its absorption. “Dates are loaded with natural sugars, so drying them only intensifies their sweet, caramel-like flavor,” registered dietitian Gillian Culbertson told the Cleveland Clinic. “But just because they’re sugary doesn’t mean they’re bad for you. Dates have a lot of benefits and are packed with nutrients your body needs.” Ludlam-Raine lands in a similar place: “Nutritionally, these recipes may offer more fibre and micronutrients than traditional sweets, but they’re still ‘treats’.” Ultimately, she advises, “it’s about balance.”
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