Fondue Emoji

🫕 is a Swiss fondue pot, shown on most keyboards as a red ceramic caquelon with two forks dipping bread into melted cheese. It got its Unicode seat in March 2020 with Emoji 13.0, arriving the same batch as 🤌, 🧋, and 🪴.

It's not really a food emoji the way 🍕 is a food emoji. The pizza emoji means pizza. The fondue emoji means an evening. It's people around a small table, a single hot thing in the middle, and the social contract that you'll pass the wine and not double-dip. That's why it shows up in invites and recaps more than in menu talk, and why the closest spiritual sibling in the keyboard isn't cheese 🧀 at all, it's 🥂.

Most platforms render the pot in terracotta red with a wooden-handled fondue fork (sometimes two) poking out. The original proposal argued fondue needed its own character because no existing emoji captured the communal melted-cheese setup, and the Unicode Technical Committee agreed.

On Instagram and TikTok, 🫕 lives in two lanes. Lane one is cozy season: November through February, paired with ❄️, 🕯️, 🍷, and ski-chalet content. Lane two is Valentine's Day, where chocolate-fondue-for-two posts spike hard around February 10 to 14.

On X it's quieter and more literal, mostly people announcing they're making fondue tonight. On WhatsApp it's a dinner invite shortcut. The emoji does almost no flirty or sarcastic duty, which is unusual for a food emoji, because fondue as a word already carries "date night" meaning and people don't need to twist it.

One thing to watch: the emoji does NOT mean "cheesy" in the lame-joke sense. That slot belongs to 🧀. Sending 🫕 after a dad joke reads as confused, not corny.

The fondue you imagine, a centuries-old Alpine shepherd's dish, is partly a lie. Or more politely, a marketing campaign.

Fondue in some form has existed since at least the 18th century, but it was a regional dish eaten by upper-class households in the Jura region and lowland Switzerland, not the iconic national supper of folk memory. The modern story starts with the Swiss Cheese Union (Schweizerische Käseunion), a government-backed cartel that ran from 1914 to 1999. By the 1930s, Switzerland was producing far more cheese than Europe wanted to buy. The Union needed Swiss people to eat more of it.

So they invented a tradition. In the 1930s the Union mailed fondue recipes to households across Switzerland, sent fondue sets to military regiments, and ran ads built around the slogan "La fondue crée la bonne humeur" (fondue creates good humor). They branded it the Swiss national dish. It worked well enough that by the 1950s Switzerland's international image had cheese welded to it.

America caught on at the 1964 New York World's Fair, where the Swiss Pavilion served fondue and visitors started buying home sets. By the late 1960s and early 1970s fondue pots were the hot wedding gift in US households and the centerpiece of the suburban dinner party. Interest declined in the 1980s when dual-income households killed slow entertaining, then came back in the late 1990s and early 2000s as retro-cozy. The Swiss Cheese Union itself collapsed in 1999 after a kickback scandal.

The emoji arrived in 2020, late enough that for most of the internet fondue was already vintage-ironic. That framing is baked into how the character gets used.

1. 2018Proposed to the Unicode Technical Committee as document L2/18-328
2. 2019Shortlisted among Emoji 13.0 candidates in L2/19-018R
3. 2020Approved in Unicode 13.0, released March 10, 2020
4. 2021First appears on iOS, Android, WhatsApp, and Facebook keyboards
5. 2022Platform vendors refine designs; most settle on red caquelon with two forks

• •Fondue was not always Swiss. It was sold to Swiss people as Swiss in the 1930s by the Swiss Cheese Union, which needed to offload cheese surpluses.
• •The Swiss Cheese Union narrowed Switzerland's cheese varieties from over 1,000 to just seven while it ran the cartel from 1914 to 1999.
• •The canonical Swiss fondue is moitié-moitié: half Gruyère, half Vacherin Fribourgeois, bound with white wine and a spoonful of kirsch.
• •Fondue bourguignonne, the meat-in-hot-oil version, was invented in 1956 at the Chalet Suisse restaurant in New York by Swiss chef Konrad Egli. It traveled back to Switzerland, not out from it.
• •The Melting Pot chain opened in 1975) in Maitland, Florida with just four tables and three items on the menu.
• •At its 1970s American peak, fondue sets were one of the most common wedding-registry gifts in middle-class US households.
• •The Swiss Cheese Union slogan, La fondue crée la bonne humeur, translates as "fondue creates good humor." It is still quoted in Swiss tourism materials today.
• •In Japan, the closest analog is nabe hot pot, including shabu-shabu and sukiyaki. The social idea is identical, the cheese is not.

• •The Melting Pot restaurant chain (1975): Opened in Maitland, Florida with three items on the menu: cheese fondue, beef fondue, chocolate fondue. Still the only national US restaurant chain built entirely on fondue. Powers the "fondue date" association for a generation of American diners.
• •Asterix in Switzerland (1970): The Asterix comic embraced Swiss fondue penalties, showing Obelix being weighted down and dunked in Lake Geneva for breaking etiquette. Popularized the forfeit tradition internationally.
• •1964 New York World's Fair, Swiss Pavilion: First large-scale American exposure to cheese fondue. Home fondue sets became a hot gift-registry item by the late 1960s.
• •Fondue bourguignonne invented in New York (1956): Despite the French-sounding name, Swiss-born restaurateur Konrad Egli introduced hot-oil meat fondue at the Chalet Suisse in Manhattan. The dish spread back to Switzerland from there.