Food Symbols — Copy and Paste

Text symbols and emoji are not the same thing

Most of the grid is emoji: characters the operating system draws in color from its own emoji font, which is why the same codepoint looks different on an iPhone and a Samsung. A few are ordinary text symbols, drawn in the current font, at the current size, in the current text color. Those are the ones that answer the black-and-white and text-symbol searches.

• ☕ Hot Beverage, U+2615 — added long before emoji existed, which is why it also has a plain text form. Almost every platform now shows it in color by default.
• 🍭 Fork And Knife With Plate, U+1F37D — a flat monochrome drawing in text contexts, color emoji when a variation selector is applied. Which one you get depends on the app, not on you.
• ⛾ Cup On Black Square, U+26FE — a genuine Unicode symbol, not an emoji. No color version exists anywhere, and on many systems it shows as an empty box because no installed font covers it. Test it first.
• ☓ Saltire, U+2613 — a diagonal cross. It is not a food symbol by definition; people use it as a stand-in for crossed cutlery because nothing better exists in plain text.

The same character, drawn differently

Vendors interpret food emoji freely, and the differences are large enough to change a message. The hamburger is the famous case: Google stacked the cheese underneath the patty and redrew it in a 2017 Android release after the argument spread. Sushi is nigiri on some platforms and a maki roll on others. Sandwich, bento box and curry differ in contents everywhere, because the standard names a subject, not a recipe. If the reader has to see a specific thing, write it in words too.

Cute and aesthetic combinations

The cute and aesthetic variants people search for are not extra characters. They are these same characters typed in sequence, sometimes with brackets or punctuation between them. Nothing in a combination is new Unicode, so it is exactly as portable as the characters inside it.

Caveats worth reading first

• Most username and handle fields strip emoji, and many reject the whole entry rather than trimming it. Display-name fields are usually more permissive.
• Character counters do not count these as one. Each emoji takes two units in the encoding most fields use, so a 280-character field sees a hamburger as two.
• Screen readers announce the official name every time. A row of five is announced five times, which makes a long repeated run unpleasant to listen to.
• The newest characters here, flatbread and fondue among them, show as boxes on older devices that never got a font update.

Using the repeater

The tool below takes any tile, or the whole row, and repeats it ten, fifty, a hundred, five hundred or a thousand times with the separator you pick. Use a space or a newline if a person has to read the result. The general-purpose version is copy and paste 100 times. For the full color set arranged by food, see food emoji; for what the marks on real packaging mean, see food symbols and food label symbols.