The future of food & drink marketing is changing. Here’s why.

Something is changing in food & drink marketing.

Not because of another Meta update, a new TikTok feature, or the latest AI tool. Those things are changing quickly too, of course, but the bigger shift I’m seeing is in how food & drink brands actually need to think about growth.

Over the last few months, I’ve spent a huge amount of time inside food & drink businesses at very different stages. We’ve been analysing ecommerce data, building digital strategies, planning Q4, reviewing paid media performance, rebuilding email journeys, looking at repeat purchase behaviour and working with founders and marketing teams to decide where their next stage of growth is actually going to come from.

And increasingly, the answer is not simply another marketing channel.

In fact, one of the most important things food & drink brands need to understand going into 2027 is that channel performance and business performance are not the same thing.

A brand can have a Meta account delivering a 5x ROAS, thousands of people visiting its website, a huge social following, a viral TikTok and an email database containing tens of thousands of people, and still have a growth problem.

Those numbers can tell us that individual parts of the marketing are working. What they don’t necessarily tell us is whether those parts are working together to create profitable, sustainable growth.

And that distinction is becoming more important.

The question is no longer simply: how do we get more customers?

For years, digital growth has largely been discussed in terms of acquisition. If a brand wanted to grow faster, the obvious answer was often to generate more traffic, increase advertising spend, create more content or add another channel into the marketing mix.

That approach made sense when digital acquisition was cheaper and there was often significant untapped demand available through platforms such as Meta and Google. But the economics are changing, and so is the level of competition for customers’ attention.

It means that when I look at a food & drink brand now, I’m increasingly interested in what happens after somebody discovers it.

Do they visit the website and understand the proposition quickly enough? Do they convert? What do they spend on their first order? If they don’t buy, do we have a way of capturing that interest? If they do buy, what happens next? How long does it take them to purchase again, and what percentage never return at all?

Because every one of those questions changes the economics of acquisition.

If we can increase conversion rate, the same advertising budget produces more customers. If we can increase average order value, the economics of the first purchase improve. If we can increase the number of customers who make a second and third purchase, customer lifetime value increases and suddenly the business may be able to afford to acquire customers more aggressively.

That is why the biggest opportunity we find inside a business is not always at the top of the funnel.

Attention is not the scarce resource it once was

One of the reasons this matters is that food & drink brands now have an extraordinary number of ways to generate attention.

A founder can create a TikTok from their kitchen and reach thousands of people. A creator can introduce a product to an entirely new audience overnight. Meta can create and capture demand at scale, Google can reach somebody at the exact point they are searching for a product, and TikTok Shop is shortening the distance between discovering something and buying it.

That creates enormous opportunity. But it also creates a trap: mistaking attention for growth.

We recently worked with a food & drink brand where awareness was absolutely not the primary problem. Organic social and acquisition activity were already creating attention and demand.

The bigger commercial opportunity sat further down the customer journey: increasing average order value, turning more first purchases into second purchases, strengthening email and retention, and improving what happened when all of that attention actually arrived at the website.

In that situation, recommending significantly more acquisition before fixing those things would have been backwards. We would simply have been paying to send more people into a journey that was not yet extracting enough value from the customers already entering it.

This is something I expect us to talk about much more over the next few years. The question will become less “How much reach did this generate?” and more “What commercial outcome did that attention eventually create?”

We explore this idea in more detail in our article on retention versus reach and why more traffic will not fix a weak customer journey.

The customer journey matters more than the channel

Most businesses still organise marketing by channel. There is a Meta strategy, an email strategy, an SEO strategy, a social strategy and perhaps a Google Ads strategy. Agencies are often structured the same way, and platforms naturally encourage us to evaluate performance within their own ecosystems.

But customers do not experience a brand in channels.

Somebody might discover a product through an Instagram Reel, see it again when a creator talks about it, search for the brand on Google three days later, visit the website without purchasing, join the email database because there is a useful incentive, receive an abandoned browse email, encounter a Meta retargeting ad and finally purchase a week later.

Six weeks after that, an automated email might bring them back for their second order.

From the customer’s perspective, that is one relationship with one brand. From a marketing reporting perspective, it can look like six different channels all trying to claim a piece of the same customer.

That is why I think one of the biggest changes in digital strategy is going to be moving away from asking which channel won? and towards asking how effectively did the whole system move somebody from attention to a valuable customer?

ROAS tells us something. It does not tell us everything.

This also changes the way we need to think about performance marketing.

ROAS is still a useful metric. I absolutely want to know whether advertising is generating revenue efficiently. But ROAS in isolation is not enough to tell me whether marketing is creating good growth for the business.

Imagine two brands both reporting a 5x ROAS. Brand A has a strong margin, a healthy average order value and customers who typically reorder several times a year. Brand B relies heavily on discounting, has expensive fulfilment, a low first-order value and very few customers ever purchase again.

The advertising dashboard might make those businesses look remarkably similar. Commercially, they are completely different.

This is why our conversations are increasingly going beyond what Meta or Google tells us.

I want to know what it costs to acquire a customer, yes, but I also want to know what they spend, whether there is enough margin in that first order, whether they buy again, how long it takes them to come back and how valuable that customer becomes over time.

For one of our long-standing food & drink clients, for example, understanding that frequent customers reorder within roughly eight to ten weeks while the wider customer base can take significantly longer gives us something far more useful than simply knowing how many emails were opened.

It tells us when the customer journey should intervene, when a reorder prompt makes sense and when somebody should genuinely be considered at risk of lapsing.

That is commercial marketing. And I think we are going to see much more of it.

If you’re questioning whether your current marketing metrics are actually translating into business growth, read is your marketing actually driving sales?

Retention is becoming an acquisition strategy

Retention has traditionally been treated as something that happens after acquisition. Get the customer first, then worry about keeping them.

I think that distinction is becoming outdated.

How well you retain customers directly affects how much you can afford to spend acquiring them. A customer who buys once at £25 and disappears has a very different commercial value from somebody who makes four £35 purchases over the following twelve months.

If we know customers have a strong lifetime value, we can potentially tolerate a higher acquisition cost on the first purchase. If almost everybody disappears after order one, the economics become much tighter.

That makes retention part of the acquisition equation from day one.

It is also why we are spending much more time looking at the second purchase. Not just whether customers eventually return, but when they return, what they buy next, which first-order products create the strongest repeat behaviour and what can be done to shorten the gap between purchase one and purchase two.

For food & drink businesses, this is particularly important because so many products have a natural replenishment or repeat cycle. Coffee runs out. Snacks get eaten. Wine gets drunk. Chocolate disappears remarkably quickly. If the product is consumable and customers like it, there should be a reason for them to come back.

Yet many brands spend considerably more time and money acquiring the customer than they do designing what happens after that first order.

That is a huge opportunity.

Email is becoming part of the commercial infrastructure

This is also why I think the conversation around email marketing for food & drink brands needs to mature.

Email is not dead. Far from it. But sending a couple of campaigns every month and reporting on open rate is not enough to call something an email strategy.

For the strongest ecommerce brands, email sits throughout the customer journey. It captures people who are interested but not ready to buy. It helps overcome objections. It recovers abandoned intent. It introduces somebody properly to the brand after their first purchase. It encourages product discovery, drives replenishment, identifies high-value customers and reconnects with people when their buying behaviour suggests they are starting to lapse.

And importantly, it turns some of the audience a brand has effectively rented from Meta, Google or social platforms into an audience it can communicate with directly.

We have seen the commercial impact of that first-hand. With Vino Zero, for example, the wider joined-up digital strategy contributed to 495% website revenue growth over five months, with email becoming an important part of how discovery, acquisition and the customer journey worked together.

In another recent food & drink strategy, we found that email was already responsible for around a fifth of ecommerce revenue.

That immediately changes the strategic conversation.

Email was not a small supporting channel that simply needed more campaigns. It was already a significant revenue driver, which meant improving the customer journeys, segmentation and relationship with existing customers represented a genuine commercial growth opportunity.

That is very different from treating email as the channel responsible for Tuesday’s newsletter.

For a deeper breakdown, read our complete guide to email marketing for food & drink brands. Or, if you want something practical to work through, download our free Email Playbook for Food & Drink brands, which shows you how to build an email strategy designed to generate revenue rather than simply send more campaigns.

Average order value is going to get much more attention

Another metric I expect to become much more central to food & drink marketing is average order value.

Acquisition gets expensive very quickly when the first transaction is small. That is especially true in food & drink, where shipping, packaging and product margin all have to be absorbed within relatively modest basket values.

Increasing AOV does not necessarily mean increasing prices. It can mean better bundles, smarter cross-sells, clearer merchandising, thresholds that encourage customers to add another product, or simply making it easier for somebody to discover what else they might enjoy.

This is where marketing, ecommerce and merchandising start to overlap.

If we can take the same customer, acquired for the same cost, and increase the value of their first transaction without destroying margin, we have improved the economics of acquisition without spending another pound on advertising.

That is exactly the kind of lever brands need to become better at identifying.

Paid media will still matter, but it cannot carry the whole business

None of this means I think brands should stop advertising. Quite the opposite. paid social advertising and Google ads remain incredibly powerful growth channels when the underlying economics make sense.

They also do different jobs. Paid social can be brilliant at creating demand, introducing products to new audiences and scaling what we already know resonates. Google can capture people who are actively searching with much stronger intent. For many food & drink brands, the opportunity isn’t choosing one forever. It’s understanding which job we need paid media to do at this stage of growth.

But paid media performance is increasingly dependent on everything surrounding the ad.

A brilliant Meta campaign cannot permanently compensate for a confusing website. Google Ads cannot fix an offer customers do not want. More traffic will not solve weak product pages, poor reviews, an unclear proposition or a customer journey that gives people no reason to return.

Creative matters. The landing experience matters. The offer matters. Social proof matters. Conversion rate matters. Email capture matters. AOV matters. Retention matters.

And this is exactly why I think the era of treating paid advertising as a standalone growth lever is ending.

The better the rest of the engine becomes, the harder paid media can work.

Social media needs a clearer commercial role

Social is another area where I think the industry needs to become more nuanced.

Not every social post needs to generate a sale. That would be an incredibly narrow way to build a brand. Food & drink businesses need awareness, personality, community, cultural relevance and content people actually want to consume.

But equally, a large audience is not automatically a valuable audience.

One of the questions we are increasingly asking is what role social actually plays in the wider growth journey.

Is it creating awareness? Building trust? Generating website traffic? Feeding creator content into paid campaigns? Driving TikTok Shop sales? Capturing email subscribers? Supporting retail demand?

There should be an answer.

Because “engagement” on its own is becoming an increasingly weak commercial argument for significant marketing investment.

That doesn’t make brand building less important. It makes understanding how brand activity eventually contributes to growth more important.

If social is an important part of your marketing mix, our social media marketing approach is built around connecting that activity back to the wider commercial strategy.

Discovery itself is fragmenting

At the same time, the way consumers discover food & drink brands is becoming far more fragmented.

Google still matters enormously, particularly when somebody has clear purchase intent. But consumers also discover brands through TikTok, Instagram, creators, Amazon, retail shelves, recommendations, Reddit, PR and increasingly through AI-powered search and answer engines.

That changes the role of content.

Brands need content that does more than satisfy an algorithm. They need to become genuinely useful and recognisable sources of information within their category.

That might mean helping somebody understand the difference between products, answering the questions customers repeatedly ask, explaining ingredients or production methods, providing serving inspiration, demonstrating expertise or taking a genuinely distinctive point of view on the category.

This is where SEO, social, PR, brand and content are beginning to converge.

For years we have talked about those as separate marketing disciplines. Increasingly, they are all contributing signals that help consumers, search engines and AI platforms understand who a brand is, what it knows and why it deserves attention.

For founders, that means the goal should not simply be to create more content. It should be to build enough authority, relevance and distinction that your brand becomes one of the obvious answers within your category.

AI will make average marketing easier. That makes good marketing more valuable.

We obviously cannot talk about the future of marketing without talking about AI.

AI is already changing how quickly marketing teams can research, analyse information, generate ideas, interrogate data and produce content. Used well, it is an enormous productivity advantage.

But I don’t think the most interesting consequence will be that brands can create more marketing.

We already have more than enough marketing.

If every business can generate 30 social captions, ten blogs and 50 ad variations at the click of a button, the existence of content becomes less valuable, not more.

What becomes more valuable is everything that cannot be created simply by asking a tool to produce more: original thinking, customer understanding, judgement, creativity, commercial awareness, genuine expertise and a distinctive brand point of view.

For founders, the question therefore should not simply be “How can we use AI to create more?”

It should be “How can we use AI to give our team more time for the thinking, creativity and commercial work that actually moves the business forward?”

AI will make execution faster. I think it will also expose businesses that never had much strategy underneath the execution in the first place.

D2C is becoming more strategic, even when retail is the bigger channel

Another important shift for food & drink specifically is the role of D2C.

For many brands, the ambition is not, and should not be, to make every customer purchase directly from their website. Retail, wholesale, hospitality, marketplaces and ecommerce can all play different roles in building the business.

But D2C gives brands something incredibly valuable: a direct relationship with the customer.

It allows a business to understand what people buy together, how often they return, which products create repeat behaviour, what offers resonate, what customers ask, how new launches perform and which segments become most valuable over time.

It is also somewhere a brand can tell its full story without relying on the restrictions of a retailer’s shelf or marketplace listing.

So the strategic question is becoming less “How do we make everybody buy D2C?” and more “How do all of our routes to market strengthen the overall customer relationship?”

This is particularly important for established food & drink brands where retail may remain the largest source of revenue. D2C can still be incredibly valuable as a place to build customer understanding, owned audience and repeat behaviour, even if it never becomes the only route to market.

The website has to become a better salesperson

If attention is becoming more expensive, the website also has to work harder.

For too long, ecommerce websites have sometimes been treated primarily as brand projects. They need to look beautiful, of course, but the commercial job of the website goes much further than that.

Can somebody understand the product quickly? Can they work out which option is right for them? Are their objections answered? Is there enough social proof? Can they discover complementary products? Is the delivery proposition clear? Is there a compelling reason to join the database if they are not ready to buy today?

Small improvements here can have a disproportionate impact.

If 100,000 people visit a website and 1% purchase, that is 1,000 orders. Improve conversion to 1.5% and the same traffic generates 1,500 orders.

That is 500 additional transactions without generating a single extra website visit.

This is why conversion rate optimisation is becoming such an important part of the food & drink growth conversation. There is eventually a limit to how much additional traffic a business can profitably buy. Getting more commercial value from the traffic already arriving becomes the next obvious lever.

Marketing teams need to understand the business, not just the marketing

Ultimately, I think this is where the biggest change is happening.

The strongest marketing teams are going to need to become much closer to the commercial reality of the businesses they are growing.

If revenue is increasing but profit is falling, we need to understand why. If a campaign has a brilliant ROAS but relies on a promotion that destroys margin, that matters. If the bestselling acquisition product creates almost no repeat customers, that matters. If returning customers are actually responsible for most of the growth, that matters too.

Marketing cannot operate in a vacuum from pricing, margin, fulfilment, product strategy, customer service and the wider P&L.

This is why the work we are doing with food & drink brands increasingly starts with the business problem rather than the marketing channel.

That is also the thinking behind our Strategic Growth Workshops. Rather than starting with “What should we do on Meta?” or “How many emails should we send?”, we look at the wider commercial picture first and identify where the biggest growth constraints and opportunities actually sit.

So what does the future of food & drink marketing actually look like?

I don’t think the future belongs to brands doing the most marketing. Nor do I think it belongs to whichever brand jumps onto every new platform first.

I think it belongs to brands that get much better at connecting the pieces.

They will connect brand with performance, acquisition with retention, social attention with owned audiences, ecommerce with retail, marketing data with commercial data, and AI-enabled speed with genuinely human creativity and judgement.

They will understand that a customer does not belong to Meta, Google, email or TikTok. Every channel has a job to do within one wider customer journey.

And critically, they will know where that journey is breaking.

When you look at growth like that, the question “Should we spend more on Meta?” suddenly feels far too small.

The better question is, where is the biggest constraint on growth in the business right now?

For one brand, the answer may genuinely be acquisition. For another, it might be conversion. For another, a low first-order value is making paid media harder to scale. For another, thousands of customers are buying once and never being given a compelling reason to return.

The strategy should follow the answer. Not the other way around.

That is the question I think the best food & drink marketers will spend the next few years answering.

And frankly, I think it makes marketing much more interesting.

Frequently asked questions about the future of food & drink marketing

What is changing most in food & drink marketing?

The biggest shift is away from evaluating individual channels in isolation and towards understanding the complete customer journey. Brands need to understand how attention, data capture, conversion, average order value, retention and acquisition economics work together.

Should food & drink brands still invest in paid advertising?

Yes. Meta and Google remain powerful growth channels, but paid advertising works hardest when the rest of the customer journey is strong. Before simply increasing spend, brands should understand their conversion rate, offer, average order value, email capture, repeat purchase behaviour and margin.

Why is retention becoming more important?

Retention directly affects customer acquisition economics. If customers purchase repeatedly, the business can often afford to invest more confidently in acquiring them. That makes second purchase rate, reorder behaviour and customer lifetime value increasingly important commercial metrics.

Is email marketing still important for food & drink brands?

Absolutely. Email is becoming less of a standalone campaign channel and more of an owned customer infrastructure. It can capture demand, nurture prospects, recover abandoned intent, improve the post-purchase experience and drive repeat revenue.

How will AI change food & drink marketing?

AI will make research, analysis and execution faster, but that is likely to make original thinking, customer insight, creativity, genuine expertise and commercial judgement even more valuable. Producing more content will not automatically create better marketing.

What should a food & drink brand prioritise first?

Start by identifying where the customer journey is currently losing the most commercial value. That may be attention, capture, conversion, average order value or retention. Fixing the biggest constraint is often far more valuable than automatically adding another marketing channel.

Further reading

• Q4 marketing for food & drink brands: If you want Christmas to work, fix this now
• Email marketing for food & drink brands: The complete guide
• Retention versus reach: Why more traffic will not fix your growth
• Is your marketing actually driving sales?
• Food & Drink digital marketing case studies