WGSN flagged pistachio and craveable, contrasting textures inside Modern Arabic cuisine as early as 2020 — five years before Dubai chocolate hit 13.8 billion TikTok views on #dubaichocolate between January and March 2025, the forecasting agency says. The call traces to a repeatable method: signals are scored against weighted criteria and published only past a set threshold, with the horizon stated throughout.
What exactly did WGSN predict, and when?
According to WGSN’s own account of the case, the agency’s 2020 forecasting work identified that Modern Arabic cuisine would rise outside its traditional region, flagging both knafeh and pistachio and noting the growing appeal of stimulating textures such as crunchiness. Its Cuisine & Flavour Forecast 2025, published in 2023, went further, predicting that consumers would seek experimental flavor combinations built on contrasting textures.
By 2024, WGSN was calling out pistachio specifically as “a widening opportunity across food and drink,” alongside rising demand for textures it grouped as crunchy, stretchy, fluffy and creamy. The viral moment arrived in 2025, when FIX Dessert’s Dubai chocolate bar — a combination of knafeh, pistachio and milk chocolate first sold in 2021 — surged online. WGSN reports that searches for “Dubai chocolate” rose 128 percent and pistachio-related search interest climbed 35 percent over the same January–March 2025 window. Four years separate the first flagged signal from the viral spike; one year separates the sharpened 2024 call from it.
How does a signal become a scored trend?
WGSN says every candidate trend is run through what it calls a STEPIC lens — six structural forces: Society, Technology, Environment, Politics, Industry, and Creativity & Culture — meant to place a raw signal inside a broader system rather than treat it as an isolated data point. Analysts then perform what the agency terms “contextual crossing,” fusing that macro reading with category-specific expertise, on the premise that cultural meaning is something data alone cannot supply.
Each trend is scored against fifteen weighted criteria into a WGSN Score from 0 to 100; the agency states that only trends scoring 30 or above are published. A published trend also carries a Trend Investment Projection — a posture of Explore, Test, Invest, Expand, Protect or Decline — rather than a flat yes-or-no call. WGSN says forecasts go through peer-review sessions before release and are rescored twice yearly as conditions change, with monthly portfolio reviews layered on top.
How far ahead do forecasters actually work?
WGSN organizes its output across three horizons, according to its published methodology: short-term (roughly zero to twelve months) for tactical deployment, mid-term (twelve to thirty-six months) for product design and evolution, and long-term (three-plus years) for strategic planning and disruptive innovation. Its fashion-specific service narrows those bands further — six to twelve months for near-term calls, a two-year window for medium-term product forecasting, and up to five years for color forecasting, with specificity increasing as a season approaches.
| Horizon | Stated timeframe | Primary use, per WGSN |
|---|---|---|
| Short-term | 0–12 months (6–12 for fashion) | Tactical deployment |
| Mid-term | 12–36 months (2 years for fashion product) | Product design and evolution |
| Long-term | 3+ years (up to 5 for color) | Strategic planning, disruptive innovation |
Where do the underlying signals come from?
WGSN describes a network of more than 250 in-house experts working across 16 countries, tasked with capturing real-world signals before they spread digitally, alongside curated feeds that the agency says prioritize selectivity over raw volume — influencer mapping, retail shelf data and catwalk coverage among them. For product-level fashion forecasts specifically, the company lists five proprietary data feeds: social monitoring of more than 100,000 posts a month, consumer surveys and clickstream panels, search index data spanning five-plus years, shelf tracking across more than 300 million SKUs and 10,000-plus brands, and tagging of over 5 million catwalk and street-style images. Broader macro-trend work draws on roughly 2,800 third-party sources, according to the company, with AI used to triangulate patterns across them before an analyst validates the output.
WGSN frames the human layer as a check against noise: distinguishing a genuine shift in consumer behavior from content that is merely algorithmically amplified is, by the agency’s own account, work it assigns to people, not models.
How does a published score change what a brand actually buys?
A trend clearing the WGSN Score threshold does not sit in a report; the agency describes its purpose as helping client brands “create exactly what tomorrow’s consumers will buy,” feeding directly into what it calls the product-to-market pipeline on a quarter-by-quarter basis. WGSN frames the output as informing three linked decisions: which products get built for a coming season, how a retail strategy is shaped to match a forecast consumer shift, and how inventory is planned against predicted performance rather than historical sell-through alone.
That is the mechanical link between a scored signal and a stocked shelf: a Trend Investment Projection of Invest or Expand is meant to translate into buying-cycle decisions months or seasons before a shopper sees the result, while a Decline posture is meant to keep a brand from betting a season on a signal the system has already downgraded.
Does the same system extend to color forecasts?
A parallel process runs on color. WGSN develops its Colour of the Year and seasonal Key Colours with Coloro, which it credits as supplying a working library of roughly 3,500 hues and a seven-digit Coloro Code for defining each shade by hue, lightness and chroma. Before a color reaches production, WGSN says the pairing runs it through Coloro’s Feasibility Intelligence platform, which tests performance across fabrics and lighting conditions to reduce the risk of metamerism — a color appearing to shift under different light sources — ahead of a collection being built around it. Thorsten Traugott, Coloro’s VP Global, is quoted by WGSN describing the 2028 Colour of the Year, Radiant Earth, as translating “confidently across textiles and contrasting material finishes.”
What the score doesn’t promise
WGSN, founded in 1998 and now working with more than 6,500 client companies including 53 of the world’s top 100 brands by its own count, states that its TrendCurve AI model reaches 94 percent accuracy up to a year ahead. That figure is self-reported; the company has not published an independently audited accuracy methodology alongside it, and the claim applies specifically to a one-year window, not to the three-to-five-year calls the same system also issues. A WGSN Score of 30 or above earns publication and a posture such as Explore or Invest — not a guarantee. The Dubai chocolate case shows the mechanism working end to end, from a 2020 signal to a scored, dated call years ahead of a viral spike. It does not show that every scored signal arrives.
For a related trends news perspective, read Briefly about Miami Swim Week 2021 and 24Fashion TV.
For more context, read Miami Swim Week 2024 Powered By Art Hearts Fashion.