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I hope you’re hungry for another week of creator marketing laughs and learnings. In fact, I hope you’re also hungry for regular food, because I sure am. This being my newsletter and all, I figured why not combine two great tastes—creator marketing and food—and see whether they taste great together?
As any longtime reader or common sense-haver could guess, we already know the answer: yes, creator marketing and food go together like peanut butter and jelly, which is great news for Uncrustables, one of the brands we’ll be highlighting today. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, I need to establish proof for my content about creators as (food) consumers. How do we know it works?
Well, because I’ve been there before: in this very newsletter, I’ve written about some of the standout creator marketing campaigns from the world of food and beverage that come across my desk from time to time. In fact, I did so just a few weeks ago, when I discussed Heineken’s legacy of market-specific campaigns, especially in Latin America. But technically—not sure whether you knew this, but it’s true—Heineken is a beverage, not a foodstuff. And you should never drink on an empty stomach.
That got me thinking: when was the last time I wrote about a straight-up food brand?
Turns out it’s been a while. Apart from the occasional mini-spotlight in recaps of broader cultural moments like the Super Bowl, I haven’t dedicated a full HBBIP to food in roughly ten months, when I gave the floor to Chipotle all the way back in November 2024.
That’s ten months without food! You guys must be starving! I know I am, so grab a napkin and a plate and come away with me as I lead you to a veritable smorgasbord of delicious creator marketing insights. And yes: you’re gonna want to save room for dessert.
When I tell you that we have some goodies lined up in this newsletter for you, please believe me. These are some serious treats. We’re covering all the major food groups: cheese, sugar, sandwiches, and red. Let’s meet our players!
Talk about nostalgia. Ketchup? Lunchables? Capri-Sun? I’m eight years old again; maybe, despite my usage of semicolons, I never stopped.
Regardless, this is the lunch lineup of your elementary school dreams. We are so back.
But in all seriousness, it makes sense that these nostalgic brands would excel at creator marketing. After all, creator marketing revolves around establishing that emotional link between consumers and products, and the tasty treats you ate on sunny days in childhood is a pretty good place to start. That stuff works for creators, too. That’s why since 2020, we’ve seen significant growth for:
As we saw from the EMV graph above, Kool-Aid is still on top, but Lunchables is surging up the charts. Let’s delve deeper into other metrics to see where these brands really distinguish themselves.
We can start with creator count, because all the rest of this discussion starts with who’s talking about you. In this case, we see that Kool-Aid, which has an EMV advantage in four out of five years from 2020 to 2024, has actually trailed Heinz in creator count since 2022. Other things to watch here are Carnation’s gathering strength (more and more people are recognizing the glory of condensed milk!), Philadelphia’s compact community relative to its EMV totals, and Uncrustables’ impressive growth in creator count—which, if my research is any indication, might be composed entirely of NFL players. But more on that later.
Similar patterns can be seen in these brands’ post counts:
Top Food Brands Post Count (US): 2020 - 2024
Here, the gap between Heinz and Kool-Aid is even more pronounced. You can also see how Kool-Aid’s EMV improvement has come despite some ups and downs in its volume of content. Meanwhile, Carnation continues to bloom like some kind of flower, Philadelphia continues to punch above its class like some kind of underdog boxer, and Uncrustables…well, they’re doing pretty good too, even if no obvious joke presents itself.
Then we get to engagements and impressions, and all our preconceived notions go straight out the window.
Meet your 2024 engagements champion: Lunchables! Yes, it turns out those little cubes of meat and cheese, all in the ideal ratio, are naturally quite engaging—but you knew that already. Meanwhile, Philadelphia saw an absolutely massive jump between 2022 and 2023, but fell off somewhat in 2024. Our old friends Heinz and Carnation see steady growth, while Uncrustables declined a little bit from 2023 to 2024.
But nobody made bigger impressions than Lunchables and Carnation. This gives us a pretty scattered picture:
There’s something to celebrate, and something to work on, for everyone. But while we only have January through August data for 2025, that still gives us a directional sense of how things are faring more recently:
With an eye toward this continued progress, it’s fair to ask ourselves why we see all these discrepancies? Why are these food brands, while all enjoying standout growth, experiencing such stark fluctuations? Well, it might have something to do with our old friend Channel Dynamics.
In short, content about these brands is coming from different places.
Take Kool-Aid. (Please!)
The brand’s impressions—a category often driven by TikTok—stem mainly from Instagram. YouTube contributes a sizable amount, while TikTok runs a somewhat distant third.
While a predominance of Instagram content driving engagement isn’t rare, you don’t typically see TikTok fueling a greater share of a brand’s engagements than impressions. It’s telling, then, that Kool-Aid excels at engagement-based metrics like EMV and (duh) engagements, but lags somewhat, relative to this set, in impressions.
Then you have brands like Capri-Sun, which increased its impressions every year from 2020 to 2024, and has already blown past that mark in 2025. It’s not a surprise that a brand like that is a certified TikTok classic.
While TikTok dominates impressions for Philadelphia, what was more surprising to me was the degree to which TikTok was responsible for the brand’s engagements:
A rate like this is almost unheard of, and demonstrates TikTok’s key role in bringing Capri-Sun back into the mainstream, to the delight of nostalgic Millennials like me. But there are even more TikTok-dominant brands from this set:
If you’ve seen a TikTok recipe containing cream cheese sometime in the past year, then this shouldn’t come as a surprise to you.
So there are different paths to success for these food brands, as well as different metrics by which to gauge this success. But what does that success look like on the post level? What kind of campaigns, activations, and moments are moving the needle for social media’s favorite snacks?
Capri-Sun captured the hearts of creators in June 2025 thanks to a nostalgic, instantly viral campaign. Just in time for summer, the brand released a limited-edition, 15-inch, supersized, deliberately ridiculous pouch. As you would expect, the internet went crazy, with the product gaining particular traction on TikTok.
The short-form video platform contributed 17.8M impressions in June, a whopping 848% MoM surge. Thanks in large part to its supersized offering, which showed a savvy understanding of how social media works, and which novelty moments get virally magnified, Capri-Sun closed June with $3M EMV, a 136% MoM improvement.
I’ve never seen a recipe that called for Capri-Sun—and I have, in fact, seen recipes that call for Kool-Aid—so Carnation does have a leg up here. Of the brand’s $10.4M EMV in H1 2025, $4.1M EMV came from posts that mentioned ‘recipe.’ Of that $4.1M EMV from ‘recipe’ content, $1.3M EMV came from TikTok. And of that $1.3M EMV, just one was Aussie Fitness’ High-Protein Korean Fried Chicken Mac & Cheese recipe, which yeah, I’m gonna have to try. Though I don’t really see how it relates to fitness, unless that’s a sneak diss toward Australia.
Meanwhile, mentions of either ‘ingredients’ or ‘ingredientes’ (here’s another learning for you: Spanish-language creators, and presumably their followers, encanta el queso de Filadelfia) powered $12M of Philadelphia’s H1 $19.5M EMV: an even more lopsided proportion of recipe content. By the way, that Korean Fried Chicken Mac & Cheese recipe also uses Philadelphia cream cheese—further proof I’ll need to cook it for dinner tonight.
Remember when I said that I’ve seen Kool-Aid in recipes before? Kool-Aid pickles and the like? Well, it goes deeper than that. Way deeper.
Yes, it turns out that like Carnation and Philadelphia, Kool-Aid is prospering thanks to RecipeTok. From glazes or dipping sauces for fried chicken to boozy beverages that taste like candy, creators are going crazy for Kool-Aid, and it shows in the brand’s steadily expanding creator count.
I’ve talked before, including in our inaugural How to Build Brands and Influencer People: Live! Broadcast (watch the recap here!), that more and more brands, along with creators, are reaching across the divide and working with peer brands in other verticals. Gone are the days of rigidity and fixed categories; things are more fluid now, and savvy brands are reaping the benefits.
For example, Heinz received a boost from fashion-conscious creators when it partnered with Kate Spade on ketchup packet-themed bags, while Lunchables saw one of its highest-impact posts from lifestyle creator Avery Katherine Wood, who enjoyed a girl dinner courtesy of the brand and openly asked for sponsorship, prompting her followers to comment with ideas for adult Lunchables. Both brands demonstrated active attempts to expand their fanbases, and reaped the rewards accordingly.
That brings us to Uncrustables. If you know one thing about Uncrustables, it’s that these tasty sandwich products contain a healthy mix of protein, carbs, and sugar, making them a perfect snack for athletes. If you know another thing about Uncrustables, it’s that NFL players consume them by the truckload.
And yet when you look at Uncrustables’ top content, it’s not all just linebackers. You get moms and dads, recipe TikTokers, and even kids content, underscoring a diverse and dynamic community. And yes, there is some football content here and there, further underscoring the effectiveness of mixing and matching verticals.
So there you have it, folks: there’s no one way to find success as a food brand in 2025, but with a collection of exemplary brands trying out a range of notable strategies, the space has never been more exciting than it is now. I hope this newsletter has sated your hunger—next time I won’t wait as long to serve up more food content.
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