Food & Drink Emojis
162 emojis in this category. ☕ Hot Beverage is the most-used food emoji on the internet. Statista's 2023 Twitter analysis found it appeared 241 times per 100,000 tweets, nearly three times more than 🎂 Birthday Cake (93/100k) and 🍻 Clinking Beer Mugs (73/100k). Coffee isn't flashy. It doesn't go viral. But it shows up in morning routines, work breaks, and cafe check-ins so consistently that it outpaces every pizza, taco, and sushi emoji combined. This category holds 170+ emojis spanning flowers, plants, fruits, vegetables, prepared foods, desserts, drinks, and utensils. The Japanese origin of emoji left a permanent mark here. Shigetaka Kurita's 1999 set for NTT DoCoMo included 🍙 Rice Ball, 🍣 Sushi, and 🍱 Bento Box. When Unicode 6.0 standardized emoji in 2010, it imported these Japanese food items directly. Western staples like 🌮 Taco and 🌯 Burrito didn't arrive until Unicode 8.0 in 2015, after Taco Bell ran a public petition and tacos ranked among the top seven most-requested emoji. 🧋 Bubble Tea followed in Unicode 13.0 (2020), proposed by four researchers who argued for its cultural significance across Asian and Asian-American communities. Two food emojis carry meanings that have nothing to do with eating. 🍆 Eggplant and 🍑 Peach became sexual innuendo so widely that Facebook and Instagram updated their content policies in 2019 to ban these emojis when paired with sexual solicitation. Instagram officials clarified they wouldn't remove the emojis on their own, only in explicitly suggestive contexts. Meanwhile, in Japan, dreaming of an eggplant on New Year's night is considered lucky because "nasu" is a homonym for "achieving something great." 🥑 Avocado became the millennial identity emoji after avocado toast turned into a cultural flashpoint in 2017. It still signals health-conscious eating, brunch culture, and a specific generational vibe.
Most Used Food & Drink Emojis
Frequency per 100k tweets on Twitter/X, with relative scaling for non-Twitter sources.
Source: Statista/Emojipedia Twitter Analysis 2023, Unicode Emoji Frequency