Social media's beauty queen: which foods has Instagram made famous, and how did they get there?

Beyond the kitchen, Instagram is the second front chefs have to conquer.

If any social platform is the beauty of the bunch, it is Instagram.

Even the founders, Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, probably never imagined it: an app built to let people talk and share their real lives through pictures ended up powering a "looks economy" that has swallowed fashion, design, food and nearly every other field.

Food most of all. Instagram pushed the hunt for beauty about as far as it can go — and because of that, looking good can now buy a dish some forgiveness for how it tastes.

People love to post whatever they ate, wherever they ate it. The platform carries more than 180 million posts tagged #food, about 95 million tagged #foodporn and 77 million tagged #yummy. It even produced a word, "Foodstagram," to tease the tribe that photographs its meals.

So whether or not you use Instagram much, you are going to run into a lot of food pictures.

Which is how "internet-famous food" was born. A Wall Street Journal report says avocado, kale and turmeric were all made famous by Instagram.

Under that pull, nearly the whole restaurant business is now working to please Instagram.

Sonic, the fourth-largest fast-food chain in the US, designed and made a milkshake just for Instagram during April's Coachella festival in California. A chain called Chili's spends an extra $750,000 a year brushing egg wash on its burgers, purely so the tops come out glossy. A filter-themed restaurant in Thailand painted its premises in the colors of five photo filters and invites diners to shoot and post.

Chefs who once treated a diner's camera as an insult have changed their minds too. Fernando Peire, director of The Ivy in Britain, said, "We used to print 'no mobile phones or cameras' on the menu, quite solemnly. But times have changed." Plenty of chefs now read Instagram for customer feedback, and even study recipes there — other people's color schemes, cooking methods, the way dishes are combined. Hence the line: beyond the kitchen, Instagram is the second front chefs have to conquer.

Everyone is studying Instagram, and it has no shortage of what businesses want: exposure and engagement. Its latest quarterly figures put registered users past 500 million and daily active users above 300 million. On engagement it leaves Facebook and Twitter far behind, with more than 1 billion interactions — a figure even Snapchat, the app young people now prefer, struggles to match.

No one underrates Instagram's marketing power, risks and all. A beautiful photo of food is hard to resist. And many companies now behave like compulsives, spending real effort to make their products look as Instagram as possible on Instagram.

First, a feast for the eyes: the foods that have trended there.

Foods that show what "colorful" really means

If you ask which color of food does best on Instagram, the answer is rainbow.

Starbucks' rainbow drinks flooded the app not long ago; posts, likes and comments on the subject added up to more than a million. Starbucks said it knew nothing about them — then quickly put them on an official menu and published the recipes.

Unicorn shades and macaron pastels had their turn as well. Those colors catch the eye on their own, and because they "look better together," they sell in bundles. Fluffe Nathan, from Sydney, fills her Instagram account with dreamy desserts she makes herself: cloud ice cream, unicorn-colored pancakes.

A more systematic approach is to build the picture around the Pantone color system. An artist named Hedvig Astrom Kushner turned smoothies into a color project, mixing ingredients to match Pantone swatches. Ordering a smoothie by number rather than by name must be fun.

Gradients are just as striking, and look like the work of compulsive sorters. Food brands are not the only ones using them. Fresh, a cosmetics brand built on natural ingredients, sells face masks this way. To promote one said to contain 50% orange pulp, Fresh worked with the American photographer Brittany Wright (@wrightkitchen), who has a gift for color: she sliced dozens of oranges and laid the cross-sections out as a gradient.

Others avoid loud color altogether and go for low saturation and restraint. These pictures borrow the look of Kinfolk magazine: refined, cool. The food gives off an attitude — "Mmm, I'm delicious. But do hold yourselves elegantly in check."

Inventive foods, usually the oddly shaped ones

We have reported on the "raindrop cake," which started selling in New York this April. The man who brought it there was 36-year-old Darren Wong: inspired by Japan's mizu shingen mochi, he used agar to make a delicate, transparent cake (@raindropcake) and pushed it on Instagram. At $8 each, 700 sold on its New York debut day. "A light, delicate, refreshing raindrop, made for your appetite," he wrote on the site introducing it.

Photographing that transparency is not easy either. The photographer Tim Ireland had to work out "the difference between fully transparent, translucent and glossy translucent, and find the right way to light it" — and keep the cake from evaporating while it sat out in the air.

Another trick uses the camera angle to make a familiar food strange, and the strangeness draws people in. Look at this cross-section of an apple pie from @theartofplating. It could be a geometric figure derived from a theorem or a physics formula.

Oreo has tried this too. In one picture a real cookie becomes part of a drawing: the lens of a telescope, through which a girl is looking at the stars. The better material on Oreo's Instagram account, though, is the short video, where hundreds of ideas about a cookie are set in motion.

Foods laid out in perfect order, and dizzying because of it

The clearest case is the Cube series by the Dutch photographers Lernert and Sander. They cut food into cubes of identical size and line them up in sequence; apart from color, every piece looks copy-pasted, and the result would tile a computer desktop without a seam.

Or this chocolate picture from @theartofplating: chocolates of every shape and color, arranged in order across a marble counter. Beautiful, isn't it?

Then there is Michael Zee, the Englishman who cooks for his partner and uses the two matching plates to show off the relationship. He has posted more than 1,000 symmetrical breakfasts on Instagram (@symmetrybreakfast) and passed 620,000 followers — more than plenty of brand accounts. His most popular photo drew over 20,000 likes and nearly 300 comments.

Foods that look healthy

Instagram has become a display case for light, healthy eating: acai bowls, which nearly every Western blogger seems to be holding; detox juices; kale salads; quinoa porridge. The #eatclean hashtag has 33 million posts in all.

Fruit, grains, frozen yogurt and leafy greens are now required items on Instagram's healthy-food list. With them, a plate seems to acquire a healthy, organic soul. And the bowl or plate holding it has to be glass, wood or white porcelain, so you can take in the range of ingredients at a glance.

Georgia Boonen, a high school student in Sydney, told reporters that many of her friends follow nutritionists on Instagram, who post what they eat day to day: smashed avo, chia pudding, acai bowls.

"[Eating healthy] has turned into pop culture; healthy eating suddenly took over at school. Everyone still likes junk food — fries, pizza, soda — but when you're drinking one of these, people think: wow, that's cool," Georgia said.

Google Trends data shows that kale and turmeric, all over social media since last year, are among the stars of the healthy plate. Both were nutritious but obscure, even unappealing; because they kept turning up on food bloggers' timelines, Instagram turned them into superfoods.

Desserts that only look "healthy"

This may seem to contradict the point above, but according to Adweek, desserts — along with chocolate, chicken, vegetarian dishes and salads — are what Instagram users most like to show off.

Not every dessert gets the same welcome. Desserts are mostly sugar and fat, but the ones that look lighter win: the pistachio cake by @acozykitchen, say, whose muted pink simply reads as healthier. Whether it is, nobody knows.

Frozen yogurt and frozen milkshakes, meanwhile, are displacing ice cream as the summer dessert of choice.

Behind most of these polished food photos lies careful design. You may have noticed how many are shot from directly above, and how many come from professionals; Vice once ran a piece asking why all that Instagram food porn is shot from above. So what exactly are businesses doing to pull in more customers with a good-looking picture?

Designed and built for Instagram

As noted above, Sonic, the fourth-largest fast-food chain in the US, launched a milkshake designed for Instagram at Coachella in April. It hired the celebrity chef Christine Flynn to style the food. Color, shape, every detail was pushed toward internet fame.

In Sonic's publicity photos, the cup is square from above and head-on alike. The geometry suits Instagram and lends a tidy, ceremonial air. The colors are good too: to bring out the ingredients, each shake — lavender, brown sugar, butter toffee — gets its own dominant background tone, matched to the drink as if both had been pulled from the same palette.

Before the festival Sonic had 127,000 followers. By the end of it the company had added more than 70,000.

The chain Chili's went so far as to hire a brand consultancy to make sure Instagram-addicted young people would like its food. It added a step to grilling burgers: before the buns go in, they get brushed with egg wash — 20% egg, 80% water — at a cost of $750,000 a year. "But it makes it look great. It glistens. It shines," said the CEO of the chain's parent company.

The chain also serves its fries in stainless-steel trays and cuts its meat into small pieces, all so the food looks good — all so people will post it.

Hire the big food accounts, and turn a niche taste into a mass one

The Wall Street Journal report argued that the healthy foods now called "superfoods" — avocado, kale, turmeric, acai — were all made famous on Instagram.

A few years ago the avocado business wanted to sell beyond salad and guacamole, so it went looking. A marketing firm called Avocados From Mexico, surveying college campuses, noticed students spreading mashed avocado on toast. That gave the marketers their idea: they found big food accounts and had them post the habit online. After a bombardment of healthy-breakfast photos, avocado became breakfast for a lot of people, and the US went on to become the world's largest consumer of them.

Turmeric, a spice out of Indian curry, followed the same route.

Google Trends shows it taking off in 2015. That year a marketer in San Diego named Rachel Kay began running campaigns for products from the turmeric supplier Gaia Herbs — turmeric powder, turmeric drinks — among others.

Wellness and fitness bloggers posted the dishes they made with it and brought in nutritionists to back them up: turmeric is anti-inflammatory, and so on. A food that exotic soon had followers posting pictures of their own.

Broccoli rabe, also called rapini, is an old-fashioned vegetable that usually turns up in Italian restaurants and rarely in a salad. To raise its profile, the grower Andy Boy hired a PR team and brought in Candice Kumai, an influential chef on Instagram, to develop new recipes with the ingredient and vouch for it on her account.

And where do Instagram's big food accounts come from?

A fair number of people became stars on Instagram simply by posting food photographs, consistently and with focus. Most are home cooks, and their route to fame is the same as a fashion blogger's.

Michael Zee, who posts breakfast and nothing else, has 622,000 followers at @symmetrybreakfast. Deliciously Ella, another account full of life and color, has 927,000. Both grew popular enough to publish books about food.

They are not exceptions. Plenty of people have turned a hobby into a job this way: Brittany Wright, the American photographer with a taste for gradients, now has 174,000 followers on Instagram; Henry Gargreavs, a former model, runs @coffeecupsoftheworld, an account devoted to collecting the designs of coffee cups.

"A great deal of what we choose to eat comes from what our eyes see. Pay a food influencer a few hundred dollars and our restaurant might gain 500,000 customers," said Olivia Yound, brand director of Vaucluse and Osteria Morini. Helen Zhang of LFB Media agrees: "Plenty of people decide what to eat tonight from photos on Instagram. No restaurant dares ignore that."

So businesses court them — free meals sometimes, cash other times. According to the Wall Street Journal, a single posted photo earns them $350.

If the conditions don't exist, build them — anything to make the food photograph well

Catit, in Israel, gives diners several plates made for Instagram. Unlike an ordinary flat plate, the sides rise at almost a right angle, to give the photo a solid-color background. A ceramic artist designed it, and thoughtfully added a phone rest.

And so that diners chasing the fine-dining look never have to shove the clutter aside before shooting, the restaurant has a second plate, the "360." The name gives it away: it rotates, letting you find a dish's most beautiful angle. It is hard not to suspect the place really does believe looks matter more than taste — an hour there, looking and shooting and eating, costs $155. To spread the brand, they also ask customers to add the right hashtag when they post to Instagram.

Hashme, the filter restaurant in Thailand, exists to give food photographers a set to shoot on. Even the name comes from the English word "hashtag." For the interior, the Thai architecture studio Onion did something clever with color: five "filter" colors painted in order across walls, ceiling and furniture, so the whole room feels filtered already. The palette is strong without being garish, a backdrop that goes with anything, and almost no effort is needed to come away with a good photo of food that looks delicious.

That is how Instagram changed the restaurant business. One thing is worth noting, though: according to the Q1 2016 Instagram study from the social media analytics firm Quintly, user engagement fell sharply year over year. Over 2015, the frequency of photo posts on Instagram rose 12% and video posts rose 56%. The denser the stream around you, the less attention any single photo gets.

Which means standing out on Instagram will only get harder.

Cover image: eatbroccolirabe