The Food Brand Spicing Up Their Social Media (HBBIP #143)

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I am hungry.

I don’t mean hungry for creator marketing knowledge, though that would be cool too, I guess. More that I’m simply a bit peckish. I could go for a snack. And one of the blessings and curses of working in creator marketing, a field that exposes me on a daily basis to the best of social media, is that I have a whole world of food and beverage content to choose from.

By ‘choose from,’ I mean ‘fantasize about.’ Sadly, I can’t just reach through the screen and grab all the tantalizing goodies parading before me. But CreatorIQ’s engineering team assure me that they’re working on it.

While I’m not exactly lacking culinary options here in New York City, there are still plenty of cuisines, dishes, and brands to which I’ve been woefully underexposed. Today, I’m profiling a globally beloved food and beverage company with a less pronounced presence in the United States—though given how social media operates, it might be only a matter of time before things change. After all, there’s a reason they call it a ‘feed.’

So grab a meal and the social media platform of your choice, and tuck in with me as we explore…

The Top Brand of All Time (of the Week): Maggi

A Swiss brand operating under the banner of Nestlé, Maggi is known for its mysterious and delicious seasonings, including a literal secret sauce, instant noodles, packaged meals, and so much more.

Not that we in the United States would know, of course: Maggi is titanically popular across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa, but remains a bit less of a go-to here. Well, fear not, Maggi: you’re about to receive the HBBIP Bump. By the time this newsletter is over, bouillon cubes will be the official snack of summer.

How Is Maggi Performing on Social Media?

Maggi Creator Count, 2020 - 2025

It’s not quite Anua’s growth story, but Maggi’s creator count expansion remains extremely impressive. From 2020 to 2025, Maggi surged from 228 creators to 4.7k creators, a 20.5x increase. After a slight decline in 2021, Maggi experienced a major breakout in 2022, when its creator community more than quadrupled. Growth continued steadily through 2023, then accelerated again in 2024 and 2025.

Maggi Post Count, 2020 - 2025

Stop me if you’ve seen this graph before. While post count’s trajectory diverged slightly from creator count’s—Maggi’s content volume improved from 2020 to 2021, a notable feat given the brand’s creator count contraction, and a sign of Maggi’s future success—the outcome was nearly identical: annual content volume surged from 621 posts in 2020 to 12.6k posts in 2025, a 20.3x increase perfectly in pace with Maggi’s 20.5x improvement in creator count.

Usually we see a bit more divergence in these numbers, so I’m actually not 100% sure what this alignment means. Maybe nothing! Oh, the joys of data.

Maggi EMV, 2020 - 2025

Maggi’s Earned Media Value (EMV), a metric that reflects share of viral conversation on social media, followed a similar pattern, climbing from $3M in 2020 to $139.8M in 2025. As with many high-growth brands, the multipliers here were even more pronounced than what we saw for creator count and post count: in this case, an impressive 46.7x increase.

Each year delivered meaningful gains, but the pace really accelerated after 2022. From that point, Maggi’s EMV more than doubled between 2024 and 2025 alone.

                                                                                                       Maggi Impressions, 2020 - 2025

Here, with impressions, we have the grand prize: a whopping 246x six-year growth, the brand's fastest-growing key metric by a wide margin. Impressions crossed 200M in 2022, nearly doubled again in 2023, exceeded 1.3B in 2024, then tripled to almost 4B in 2025. The scale of this expansion demonstrates how dramatically Maggi increased its global visibility over a relatively short timeframe. Simply put: what are they cooking over there?

Maggi Engagements, 2020 - 2025

As for engagements, Maggi saw its total swell from 1.4M in 2020 to 64.6M in 2025, an impressive but decidedly more modest 45.3x increase. It’s not a bad thing per se to have a 200x spread between six-year growth rates for engagements and impressions, but it does give us an indication of which platforms this growth might be occurring on: video-heavy, engagement-light.

Which Social Channels Were Key to Maggi's Growth?

Maggi's Share of Impressions by Platform, June 2025 - May 2026

Like I said: video is the key.

We haven’t had YouTube lead a HBBIP brand for a while, so it’s always a nice reminder that these platform ecosystems are diverse after all.

YouTube serves as Maggi's largest source of audience reach by a wide margin, generating nearly two-thirds of all impressions. Instagram serves as the brand’s primary secondary channel, while TikTok trails behind. This is also a reflection of the global markets where Maggi sees the most momentum—more on that in a bit.

Maggi's Share of Engagements by Platform, June 2025 - May 2026

As for engagements, the picture is a bit more even. Instagram generates nearly as many interactions as YouTube despite the impressions gap, highlighting Instagram’s strong engagement efficiency. TikTok provides meaningful additional engagement, while even Facebook reasserts itself as a key contributor.

Who Are Maggi's Creators?

1. India Emerges as Maggi’s Most Powerful Social Media Market

With roughly 8k creators generating $228M in total EMV from June 2025 to May 2026, Maggi's creator footprint spans multiple continents and languages. Notably, this creator population has a strikingly high new-entrant rate: 728 creators who generated more than $50k EMV during this time period hadn’t posted about Maggi during the preceding 12 months. This cohort accounted for 57% of Maggi’s total EMV, a sign that Maggi's organic conversation is expanding rapidly into new corners of social media, rather than relying on an established roster.

India is by far the dominant market behind this expansion, accounting for an estimated 24% of Maggi’s EMV. It’s not just airlines, folks—India drives growth for every major industry. The Indian market is characterized by a dense cluster of creators making cooking vlogs, comedy, and everyday food content. Ranking as Maggi’s top overall creator by EMV, ‘not a cook’ leads with $4.1M (67 posts, +3% vs. prior period). Other major new Indian entrants include Jagdish Comedian ($2.5M EMV, 77 posts), Ujjal samanta ($1.8M EMV, 265 posts), and Ranwa Family ($2.9M EMV, 22 posts).

Beyond India, Latin America is Maggi’s second-largest regional cluster, featuring Roberto Morales ($1.5M EMV, new), Jujumao ($1.4M EMV, +71%), Mexicana En La Cocina ($1M EMV, +329%), Tony And Maribel ($783k EMV, +1.3k%), and hijosdesuhambre ($667k EMV, +2.8k%). Finally, Southeast Asia adds still another layer to this delicious stew we’ve got going: Silna's Kitchen ($1.5M EMV, 754 posts), Devina Hermawan ($1.1M EMV), and Lalaine Manalo ($727k EMV) anchor a strong Filipino and Indonesian cohort.

In other news, I’m still extremely hungry.

2. YouTube Drives Views Via High-Frequency Recipe Content

Again, unlike many of the TikTok-first brands I profile in HBBIP, Maggi's creator ecosystem is overwhelmingly YouTube-centric. Forty-six of the top 50 EMV-driving posts for Maggi from June 2025 to May 2026 are YouTube videos, a concentration that reflects both the platform's dominance in Maggi's key markets and the nature of the content itself: recipe demonstrations, food vlogs, and ‘slice of life’ cooking formats that reward longer watch times.

It’s basically like a food-based, far more international Home Depot. After all, what is cooking if not another form of DIY?

Maggi’s top individual post by EMV is a $417k YouTube video from Shreemani Tripathi, while Jagdish Comedian placed two posts in the top five ($332k and $314k) across 13 leaderboard appearances totaling $2.2M, suggesting that entertainment-adjacent content is a powerful driver for the brand. This signal is further reinforced by an entire comedy and entertainment creator cluster generating significant Maggi EMV: Munfed to fact ($1.5M), Abir Sag ($1.2M), Mr Ballu Shorts ($996k), MR. INDIAN HACKER ($662k), Bhaismara Music ($403k).

As we’ve seen with many stateside F&B brands, which are often amplified across YouTube thanks to podcast tie-ins or cross-vertical collabs, Maggi is generating earned media not merely via cooking content, but in the broader Hindi-language entertainment ecosystem, where the brand appears organically as part of everyday life content.

3. Long-Term Relationships Provide a Competitive Advantage

While Maggi’s volume of new fans is striking—728 creators who generated significant EMV from June 2025 to May 2026 had no history of posting about the brand during the prior 12 months—Maggi's most reliable EMV engine proved to be its cohort of sustained, multi-year performers. Ultimately, their habitual Maggi content builds associations over time that one-off activations can’t fully replicate.

The clearest example of this trend, and a misleading username, is top EMV-driver ‘not a cook,’ who generated $4.1M EMV during the last 12 months, up 3% from his $4M the prior period. Elsewhere, Jujumao grew 71% to $1.4M (23 posts). Devina Hermawan grew 13% to $1.1M (28 posts), and Gauravaroravlogs grew 212% to $1.4M. In a brand community this global, and a market this crowded, the creators who reliably move the needle year after year are those with whom Maggi has invested in sustained relationships, and who now form the backbone of the brand’s strategy. They’re sort of like that famous liquid seasoning: you don’t quite know what it is, but you know that things just aren’t the same without it.

In conclusion, my hunger for creator marketing knowledge is sated. But my hunger for, you know, food is worse than ever. Who’s up for some instant noodles?

*All data, unless otherwise specified, stems from CreatorIQ's public-facing brand leaderboards. We will never share performance metrics from a customer's CreatorIQ profile, or any brand's private information.

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