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Being a food and beverage brand is a bit of a blessing and a curse.
The blessing? Everyone’s gotta eat and drink, so to a certain extent, demand will never diminish. Food and beverage retail sales will reach an estimated $1.23 trillion in 2022, and that figure is expected to grow to $1.37 trillion by 2026.
The curse? Well, it just might be a four-curse meal:
To keep your brand in the conversation, it’s more important than ever to stay up to date on all the latest food and beverage marketing trends.
Hungry for more? Here are four trends to watch as you shape the advertising strategy for your food and beverage brand(s).
According to the Institute of Food Technologists, inflation is driving Gen Z and millennial consumers back to the kitchen—six in 10 people age 25-34 are cooking more dinners at home than last year—and they want their meals easy and economical, healthy, at times plant-based, and sometimes saucy and spicy (perhaps experimenting with recipes to replicate the dining-out experience). Now, each of those could be a fully baked trend in and of itself (and we’ll slice into the “healthy” aspect more shortly), but the big takeaway here is that higher-priced food and restaurant staffing shortages have made cooking at home more attractive. Online research behaviors reflect this, too: searches for “air fryers” have remained above pre-pandemic levels, and interest in “meal kits” and related phrases continues to trend.
And as we gather more often in each other’s homes, charcuterie boards are taking center stage. From how-to searches to visual inspiration on Pinterest and Instagram, folks are showing more online interest in the self-serve party trays and the bites they host, to the point where global grocer Aldi has created a Charcuterie Board (yes, those were capital letters—we’re talking about a board of directors made up of seven gourmet food and wine enthusiasts) to track food and beverage grazing trends.
To appeal to the at-home chef, food marketers can benefit from showing how easy it is to cook with their ingredients (and maybe even offer some 30-minute quick-prep recipes), how cost-effective their options are, and how yummy the plated product appears on the dinner table.
The trend of cooking at home requires food from the grocery store, but many consumers are opting to buy their groceries from the comfort of their own homes: e-commerce will make up more than 10% of grocery sales in 2023, lifting Instacart’s reputation and Walmart’s digital revenue, and “click-and-collect” grocery sales are forecasted to rise steadily as a share of that e-commerce. And for those who want to skip cooking altogether, intermediary delivery services (think GrubHub or DoorDash) are poised to grow in the next half-decade, too.
Even Prime Day in July 2022 saw food and grocery purchases grow 12% year over year, the third highest category growth of the year for the annual online megasale.
Meal kits also fit into this category, and although the post-pandemic near-term saw users drop their subscriptions, the market outlook sees meal kits growing from a $6.9 billion industry in 2021 to more than $10 billion in 2024, with one forward-thinking service working with dietitians to develop meal plans aimed at helping patients with diabetes and chronic kidney disease manage their health.
Investing in your digital presence can help your brand(s) stand out—or, at least, keep up—in this increasingly competitive space. The flexibility and nimble nature of programmatic advertising can help you navigate today’s unpredictable market, and it can put your most valuable messages in front of your most valuable customers in their true moment of need. And as consumers spend more of their food and beverage budget via digital channels, combined with the fragmented and complex nature of the digital space, brands can also benefit from investing in digital advertising automation tools to streamline processes, keep up with the industry’s ad spend trajectory, and navigate today’s unpredictable market.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the COVID-19 pandemic got many of us to pay more attention to our health. This has a significant impact on food and beverage brands, as consumers are thinking about how to take better care of themselves via their diets.
There are myriad bite-sized trends inside the larger “health” trajectory, including:
All in all, the industry has plenty of lanes to swim in to meet consumers’ health demands!
Marketers in food and beverage can take this opportunity to toot their own horns (the buzzword here is “transparency”) in their advertising and product packaging. Maintaining presence, relevance, and helpfulness in a conscious consumer’s journey is key, and following up with advertising to close the sales loop can help put your healthiest options in their fridges and pantries.
The perception of “scarcity” is one of those trusty marketing tactics that generates sales because it plays into people’s fear of missing out—or, as we’ve come to know it, FOMO. From hybrid foods to celebrity-curated meals, limited-time offers (or LTOs) are re-energizing brands and causing curious consumers to spend before the chance slips through their fingers.
The combo of limited-time menu items and influencer marketing has been on display on fast-food menus for a while now: McDonald’s Travis Scott combo boosted declining US sales at the Golden Arches in 2020 and inspired more partnerships like Justin Bieber and Tim Hortons, Megan Thee Stallion and Popeye’s, and Charli D’Amelio and Dunkin’. These quick-service restaurants see their marketing amplified by social media word of mouth, and they benefit when customers download mobile apps that make ordering and paying faster and in-app communications possible.
Other examples of limited-time offers include merging flavors or even food items (how did it take this long to invent pretzel beer?!), experiential events, social media challenges (bet you can eat just #OneChip), and exclusive partnerships (C-store/pizza chain Casey’s partnered with Busch Light on a beer cheese pizza and Mountain Dew on an exclusive fruity flavor mix).
Even if these ambitious moves aren’t in your meal plan, food and bev brands have plenty of ways to generate excitement and/or curiosity—or even coordinate with product teams to create and introduce a limited-edition shock flavor—for a fun and buzzworthy way to showcase your brand and boost sales.
(And in a world where actual scarcity brought about by supply chain issues is very real and ongoing, maintaining advertising levels can help you stay top of mind, expand your reach, show off a bit, and maybe recruit from the talent pool created by the Great Resignation.)
In the bigger context of supply chain issues, product shortages, and inflation, reaching your target audience where they are is more critical than ever. And as food and beverage advertisers face the deprecation of third-party cookies, the challenge of doing so is about to increase dramatically.
Check out our guide, Beyond Third-Party Cookies: Your Guide to Overcoming the Identity Crisis, to get the latest on the next generation of identity solutions in digital advertising.
Recently, Basis Technologies held its first in-person New Hire Orientation since March 2020. We’ll be providing new hires with the option of attending their orientations either virtually or in-person from now on. To celebrate the occasion (and to get an inside look at Basis NHO!) we asked one our newest Beeps—Eric Nelson—to share his experience.
(Oh yeah, and if you’re interested in joining the team, be sure to check out our Careers page!)
Upon my start at Basis Technologies, I was invited to our New Hire Orientation, where 13 of the company’s newest hires descended on our Chicago headquarters to participate in a three-day journey through the purpose, people, and power of our organization.
The agenda was exciting, and the structure was clear: We’d learn the “why” behind the company on Day 1, explore the “how” on Day 2, and dig deep into the “what” on Day 3 (very Simon Sinek.) The event’s organizers—members of our amazing Talent and Development team—introduced and reinforced major points through videos, demos, guest speakers, and fun team activities. The structure provided an immersive, engaging onboarding experience that all baker’s dozen of us agreed was the best in which we’d ever taken part.
This illustrated, to me, Basis’ attention to detail, its care for its users, and its mission to do the most comprehensive work possible to achieve prime satisfaction. I left Chicago smarter and clearer about our roles and goals at Basis Technologies, armed with information and driven by inspiration.
Here are my four biggest takeaways from New Hire Orientation:
From the top of the company to the newest hire, we believe we do our best work when we are our best selves. Our culture is impressively people-first, and it shows in our benefits and perks, but also in the way we speak to each other—with reverence and respect, enthusiasm and empathy.
Sure, our schedules are enviably flexible. Yes, our sabbaticals and parental leave let us prioritize ourselves and our families. And wow, do we have access to multiple mental health services, including the chance to just take a day off when you need to clear your head. But this goes beyond checkmarks on a modern recruiter’s “to-do list.” Leadership offers these benefits because they want to—not because they feel like they have to. To paraphrase one famed television drama: When our minds are clear and our hearts are full, we can’t lose.
Digital advertising cannot have—and can never have—a “set it and forget it” mindset. We’re always looking to improve our products, our processes, and our people. That might mean ideating and prioritizing new features based on client feedback, removing redundant steps to get those features in our clients’ hands faster, or ongoing professional development for our sales, service, product, and marketing teams. Some call it “kaizen,” some call it “continuous improvement,” but for us, it just comes with the territory.
In the end, we want our users to be happy. Actually, we want them to be more than happy. We want the people—the agencies, brands, media buyers, ad ops, accounting, VPs, C-suite execs—who experience our product and services to be Raving Fans of Basis. We want every interaction to be positive if not uplifting, productive if not prolific. We want marketers to realize success in their ad campaigns, to learn from our educational content, and to feel like their brands and their budgets are safe in our hands. Satisfying our customers—creating Raving Fans—is truly embedded in the fabric of our organization.
We got a sneak peek at some of the capabilities our product team is working on for next year, and they’re impressive. I wish I could go into more specifics here (sadly, I have been sworn to secrecy) but we have some real game changers in the pipeline—features that will turn our already powerful omnichannel platform into a superpower. And it’s all happening in response to our clients’ needs, with the goal of making them more productive, efficient, and beyond satisfied.
To put it as Simon Sinek might: With everything we do, we believe in the success of people. We invest in our infrastructure, we provide value to our clients, we take great care of our people, and we always have an eye on the horizon. It just so happens we’re in the adtech game.
And I, for one, am ready to play.
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Want to learn more about Basis Technologies’ guiding principles, workplace culture, and benefits? Check out Life at Basis Technologies.