Selecting a growth partner in the grocery/restaurant space can be a high-risk venture because brands typically assess creative portfolios instead of considering measurable retail velocity. Generally speaking, a team with expertise in direct-to-consumer digital sales will also lack the infrastructure to secure wholesale orders or achieve a national presence on the shelf.
This study goes through 11 specialized food and beverage marketing agencies who have demonstrated an ability to solve specific commercial issues, manage complicated retail environments, and deliver provable revenue results.
How to Choose the Right Food and Beverage Marketing Agency
Food marketing is treated within the marketplace as a single category; however, commercial buyers are faced with very different operational challenges. You may need to build consumer demand, secure national retail distribution, enhance store-level sell-through, or create foodservice business opportunities.
Generalist agencies tend to combine the business-to-business foodservice buying journey with the consumer product buying journey. When evaluating food and beverage marketing agencies, you must realize this leads to inefficiencies and inconsistencies in the execution and reporting of campaigns.
Purchasing strategies should be based on a stringent evaluation framework. Within an agency's offering, an agency's fit with your business is equal to category relevance and channel capability multiplied by measurement quality, and evidence of commercial success.
It is critical to validate that an agency's case studies accurately illustrate your specific sales channel prior to entering into a contractual agreement. A direct-to-consumer digital return on advertising spend (ROAS) is not an indicator of retail velocity, and a public relations impression count does not validate additional sales at retail locations.
11 Top Food and Beverage Marketing Agencies
1. Quench Agency
Quench is a consumer packaged goods (CPG) specialist, incorporating shopper marketing, media, creative design and consumer insights.
Mid-market and enterprise CPG companies (consumer packaged goods), snack companies, spirits, and restaurants are all the focus of this agency.
They're usually going to charge according to a quote based on the project. Reports indicate that custom project pricing ranges from $5,000 and rates for hourly services range from $100 to $149.
Quench provides solid sales metric proof and is able to provide commercial proof. As an example, for House Autry in test markets, they provided upwards of 50.75% same-store sales growth. For pouch products, StarKist had a reported annualized growth rate of 199% and 14.5% over year sales growth.
2. LYFE Marketing
LYFE focuses on digital marketing, paid social media, short-form video, and e-commerce conversion services. Their target customer is small and mid-sized food, beverage, and restaurant brands, and those who are looking to generate direct digital dollar sales.
They also have a relatively low barrier to entry, with minimum project sizes of $1,000 and average hourly rates of $50-$99.
According to their records, LYFE marketing has generated over $304 million for clients across their portfolio. Outlined results for LYFE include a complete 225.25% ROI for Royce' and a complete 197.87% follower growth increase for Domino's.
3. The Food Group
The Food Group specializes in culinary marketing, recipe development, food styling, and shopper marketing for food brands and foodservice companies and those with significant appetite appeal.
Reports indicate their minimum project size is $1,000 and hourly rates $200-$300 with integrated campaigns starting at approximately $75,000.
Their proven results indicate that they have created significant shifts in market share on a large scale. A recent integrated campaign for Hellmann's/Unilever Food Solutions created 2,362 leads and increased their market share by 60 basis points.
4. Padilla
They are focused on food/tobacco category clients; therefore, practitioners should consider requesting assistance from Padilla when seeking out these types of services.
Padilla's minimum project size is $10K, while their average hourly rate falls between $100 & $149.
As such, Padilla provides its clients clear evidence of the effectiveness of its work through both digital and retail outcomes. They reported a 4.9x Instacart ROAS for Dole, and they generated 10-30% retail sales increases and 55% online sales increase for Norwegian Seafood Company.
5. Designity
Designity operates based on the Creative-as-a-Service model.
This model allows a customer to have a dedicated creative director manage the design of their product/packaging and paid advertisement campaigns for both artificial intelligence supported and traditional creative work. Designity has chosen to focus their services primarily on the mid-size business segment.
Designity's pricing structure is simple: all services are subscription based, and all plans come with two weeks of free trial service for new users.
Designity states their business model offers its clients the ability to save up to 70% off design costs while delivering projects 3 times as quickly; however, this is not based on any actual performance metrics.
They receive an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 based on 111 ratings on the Trustpilot platform.
6. SMAKK Studios
SMAKK is a company dedicated to mission driven branding, sustainable packaging, e-commerce development, and creating stories about sustainability.
They are specifically focusing on providing services to companies that manufacture plant-based, ethical and purpose led food products.
SMAKK offers customized pricing for clients based on their project requirements. In addition, their pricing structure is project based and estimate hourly rates are approximately $200-$300.
The only evidence that SMAKK provides to its clients as proof of their success is through the strength of their previous work portfolios and qualitative reviews of their products and services.
SMAKK's clients include the following large brands, Honey Pot and Burt's Bees.
7. Presenture
Presenture is a niche agency that specializes in food industry sales and providing a broker-network, developing retailer go-to-market strategies, and managing your Salesforce account.
Presenture supports food manufacturers who are looking to grow or build a presence in grocery channels.
Presenture does not provide information regarding the price or minimum project size, nor does it disclose standard hourly rates.
The operational focus of Presenture is what separates them from others in the industry, making them highly unique among food and beverage marketing agencies. Presenture provides complex broker-network management and manufacturer reporting systems which help solve the distribution logistics from manufacturers rather than focus on the consumer advertising aspect.
8. Elevation Marketing
Elevation Marketing focuses on providing demand generation for businesses, account-based marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and trade-show support for the foodservice supply chain, including food manufacturers, distributors, and equipment manufacturers.
Elevation Marketing's published price starts at $2,300 per month for local SEO, $2,500 for paid media, and customized prices for larger projects.
Elevation Marketing's real advantage is their laser focus on B2B services within the food sector and the ability to maintain positive ratings through local reviews. However, independent industry sources have not verified the quantitative food-revenue growth achieved by Elevation Marketing's clients.
9. Gawronski
Gawronski is focused on growing direct-to-consumer, utilizing Google Ads, paid social media, and advertising through Instacart.
Gawronski has developed performance systems specifically targeted to support the growth of e-commerce food and beverage companies.
Gawronski does not provide a standard rate card for media purchases, as pricing is custom depending on the scale of media.
Gawronski's published case studies show a dramatic increase in account growth, including a threefold increase in total sales for one of their clients. Eventually this brand was able to become an official Instacart case study.
10. Top Growth Marketing
Top Growth Marketing focuses on acquiring profitable direct-to-consumer customers through Meta ads and through testing creative options and Klaviyo lifecycle marketing.
Top Growth Marketing focuses on e-commerce brands that are looking to develop and scale their digital order presence.
The prices charged are tailored to meet the brands' marketing budgets (spending) and growth objectives.
For example, the agency tracks the financial results of each of its clients across several different categories. For instance, the kosher meat brand achieved a growth in return on advertising spend (ROAS) of 64%. The coffee company achieved a 5.6 times increase in revenue in one month. The chocolate brand experienced a 3.3 times increase in sales.
11. Vivid Candi
Vivid Candi provides package design, identity development, and storytelling for retail-based brands. The agency sees their role as helping new brands to obtain retail exposure and attract consumers.
The agency does not have published pricing tiers or hourly rates.
Published evidence of Vivid Candi's success is focused on increases in retail velocity. For example, they worked with Cocobear to promote their flash-frozen organic coconut product, which resulted in increased shelf velocity at both Erewhon and Whole Foods.
Connecting Marketing Campaigns with Store Sales
Every agency should be required by buyers to show the correlation between product turnover or speed of sale at retail and the marketing attribution connected to it. A campaign that appears to be working well on a digital report/dashboard will have little value if a retail buyer stops carrying the product because it is not moving off of the shelf.
Agencies must also be mindful of the relevant marketing regulations relating to nutrition, health claims, alcoholic beverage distribution, and the need for influencers to disclose their endorsing relationship with the advertised products. Agencies must demonstrate to potential clients that they will operate within the legal limits of these laws before they launch broad-based campaigns.
In addition, agencies need to be prepared for operational challenges including delays in obtaining retailer data, product sample shortages, changes in demand due to seasonality, and conflicts with brokers. As an example, delays in packaging will cause delays in the launch of significant campaigns by several months.
The third element pertaining to the performance evaluation of an agency is how it establishes the benchmark for a campaign. A credible agency will define a pre-campaign benchmark, detail the specific intervention that will occur, define the length of time the intervention will occur and define gross sales versus incremental contribution margin.
Final Thoughts on Picking a Food and Beverage Marketing Agency
The current data does indicate that neither the so-called prestige metrics nor the so-called general service claim is a valid indicator of commercial success in the grocery and restaurant industries. The most successful vendor selection process for food and beverage marketing agencies will not factor into their decision-making process a vendor's creative award wins.
Instead, it will focus on whether or not a vendor has a proven ability to drive specific commercial events such as Instacart conversions, Whole Foods velocity, or food service broker engagement. Brands that align their immediate operational bottleneck with an agency's accurate and verifiable math-based capability will be able to capture market share much quicker while wasting substantially less capital on misaligned media investments.
Common Questions About Hiring a Marketing Agency
How do you separate online ad metrics from actual store sales?
You should require a true comparison between a digital platform's reported ad clicks and the actual scanner data provided by the specific retailer. Digital platforms measure intent based on click activity and identify the immediate click activity but store-level inventory counts are the only way to confirm whether or not the click resulted in an actual physical purchase.
What accounts and files must you own when hiring an agency?
You must preserve absolute ownership over all advertising account data, pixel data, and original creative files. If an agency requires that you run your campaigns through a proprietary agency master account, you will lose all historical optimization and audience insights data if you choose to hire a different vendor.
Why do traditional brand awareness metrics fail to predict store success?
Although follower counts and digital impressions are an indication of geographic buying intent, these brand awareness metrics do not indicate whether a customer picked up the product, bought it at full price, and returned to purchase the product again in a week. Retail buyers will want to see proof of product turnover in order to build trust in the brand and interest in the product.
How do you move from a brand-building agency to a sales-focused partner?
The transition must be constructed on a unified measurement hierarchy. The brand-building agency should provide visual assets, packaging, and digital marketing collateral to the performance vendor so that the high-level brand image can be translated directly into highly clickable products with a high likelihood of conversion for the performance vendor.