Friends are sending sample boxes with notes full of love. Children are shipping lavender gift sets to their mothers with handwritten messages about how much she means. Two weeks before Mother's Day in North America and Australia, food and beverage stores are carrying some of the most emotionally loaded gifts of the spring.
Nearly one in five gifts this week came from a food or beverage store. That 18% share makes it the second-largest gifting industry, trailing only jewelry. But the real shift isn't in volume. It's in what shoppers are writing on those gift notes.
Forty-one percent of all gift notes this week were full of love. Among food and beverage gifts headed to family, the notes read less like casual gestures and more like letters.
The emotional weight of a gift box
Food and beverage gifting has a reputation as the safe pick. The "I didn't know what else to get" category. This spring, the notes tell a different story. Across all industries, 41% of gift messages carried notes full of love this week, up from a 39% baseline. That gap has been widening steadily, and food gifts are riding the same emotional wave.
Family members accounted for 47% of all gift-givers this week. When those family shoppers choose food and beverage, they're pairing it with messages that go far beyond "enjoy." They're writing about shared memories, inside jokes about favorite treats, and what it means to send something from home. The sample box a friend sends for a birthday isn't just chocolate and crackers. It's a note about years of friendship wrapped around something edible.
This emotional intensity connects to a broader pattern. Shoppers writing notes full of appreciation have grown for five consecutive weeks, climbing steadily from a small base to 8% of all sentiment. Thank-you gifts followed the same arc, rising from 6% to 8% of all occasions. Food and beverage is a natural home for both: it's the kind of gift people send when they want to say something more than "happy birthday" but less formal than jewelry.
Mother's Day is pulling the whole category forward
With Mother's Day two weeks away, 84% of all seasonal gifting this week pointed to that single holiday. Seasonal gifts overall jumped from a 10% baseline to 12% of all gifting. That two-point climb might sound modest, but it represents a real shift in shopper intent.
In the United States, which accounts for 53% of all gifting volume, 20% of gifts carried a seasonal occasion tag. Children are sending their mothers curated food packages, tea collections, and lavender gift sets with notes that read like love letters. Australia, where Mother's Day also falls on May 10, saw 18% of its gifting turn seasonal.
The trajectory for seasonal gifting has been building: after a dip in early April as Easter faded, it climbed from 234 to 351 to 600 over the past three weeks. Food and beverage merchants sitting on Mother's Day collections still have a strong window. The gifting wave is cresting, not crashing.
Gratitude is the quiet engine
Not every food gift is tied to Mother's Day. Just-because gifts still represent 22% of all occasions, and food and beverage stores are a natural fit for that category. But even the casual gifts are carrying more emotional texture this spring.
The Netherlands offers a useful contrast. There, 50% of all gifting is just-because, and another 13% is get-well. Dutch shoppers use food gifts the way others use greeting cards: as a vehicle for care that doesn't need an occasion. In the UK, 63% of gifting is for birthdays, and food sample boxes show up as the thoughtful alternative to flowers or wine.
Friends sending birthday wishes with a "delicious sample box" are writing notes that go well beyond the perfunctory. They're referencing years of friendship, shared tastes, and the pleasure of picking something specific for someone they know well. That specificity is what separates a food gift that gets remembered from one that gets forgotten.
What this means for food and beverage merchants
The data points to a clear opportunity: food and beverage gifting isn't a fallback. It's becoming one of the most emotionally rich categories in the gifting mix. Merchants who treat their products as gift-worthy, with packaging that invites a personal note and collections designed for occasions like Mother's Day, are aligned with how shoppers already behave.
Two weeks is plenty of runway. The shoppers who haven't ordered yet for Mom are looking right now, and they're not just adding items to a cart. They're writing notes full of love, gratitude, and personal history. Making space for that message, whether through a gift note field, a curated Mother's Day bundle, or a landing page that speaks to family gifting, meets the moment shoppers are already in.
This week in food and beverage gifting
18% of all gifts came from food and beverage stores 41% of gift notes were full of love, up from 39% baseline 47% of all gifts came from family members 84% of seasonal gifting pointed to Mother's Day Grateful shoppers have grown for five consecutive weeks 54% of gifts crossed a border this week
