Margin Points - Arnold Engel<br>Nostalgia is new for some<br>June 10, 2026 · Essay #81<br>Nostalgia marketing can only work if consumers were alive for when the product used to be popular, right?

Bloomberg reports on a new study on food and beverage trends:

Dirty martinis, ice cream floats and baked Alaska are all back in vogue, according to Datassential. But a lot of the Gen Z consumers ordering these items don’t even know they’re vintage. In a recent survey, the research firm asked consumers about a limited-time offer of twice-baked potatoes — the 1960s delicacy featuring a hollowed-out spud filled with mashed potatoes and cheese and topped with bacon or whatever else someone wanted to stuff in there — at the chain Twin Peaks. Incredibly, 68% of Gen Z respondents categorized it as “extremely new & different” or “very new & different.”

Nostalgia marketing only works for a portion of the market demographic. For the rest of your audience, assuming you want sales outside of the core demographic, you are relying on some of the same factors that drove interest in the original concept at the original time.

Sure, some of the uptake in this case is Gen X and Millennials who remember overstuffed potatoes with all the ‘fixins’ at family dinners, casual dining buffets and fancy steakhouses.

For the Gen Z who has no idea that twice baked potatoes have been around for a while, there is no nostalgia at play.

Baked Alaska, dirty martini, ice cream floats are all also back in. All of them have a little something extra involved. They all peaked at different times—dirty martini in 90s and 00s, baked Alaska in 50s, ice cream floats 40s and 50s—telling us this is more about the intangibles than nostalgia. Any one of them you could read into as much as you like.

There is a published recipe for the twice baked potato from 1880. When it came back into vogue starting in the 1960s, there would have already been a few nostalgic cycles driving it. By the 1980s it was hitting its peak popularity.1

Asking people in the 1980s why they liked twice baked potatoes might have yielded a range of different answers from the mouths of consumers. Most of them might not have really gotten at the real reasons they liked it. It can be hard for consumers to put their finger on, which helps to understand some of the timelessness of reviving things that have worked in the past.

If we were to wildly speculate because the 1980s were also speculative and mainly driven by an economic cultural milieu, we would end up down a wrong path. The ‘80s were a bull run for stocks.2 It was also the time when the corporate takeover, the leveraged buyout, the ‘greed is good’ mantra and a stock crash followed by a fast recovery and regulatory changes. Complex changes in the economic environment drive consumers to simpler concepts. Stock market growth drives consumers to small indulgences.

This type of grafting of time periods for specific consumer tastes back to the present falls down. We will learn something not from reading the tea leaves, but looking at why consumers who are showing up for a nostalgia train they have never seen before are behaving the way they are.

Product revivals are much more about the products than the nostalgia.

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Footnotes

The double stuffed Oreo was also popular through the 1980s and into the 90s. The potato’s extra toppings sets it apart. ↩

The twice baked wasn’t so separate from that world. It was a mainstay at steakhouses. ↩

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