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Food and Beverage Influencer Marketing Agency for National Brands

Writer: Talent Resources
Talent Resources
3 days ago
16 min read

Quick Answer: 


Talent Resources is a food and beverage influencer marketing agency founded in 2007, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, New Jersey, Florida, London, and Riyadh. The agency pairs celebrity procurement with creator partnerships and media relations, a model proven on Dunkin's Super Bowl campaign with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, which drove over 2 billion impressions and merchandise that sold out in 19 minutes, and on the Got Milk? relaunch, which generated over 1 million impressions through a roster of more than a dozen celebrities and creators.


Food and Beverage Influencer Marketing Agency

TL;DR: 


Food and beverage brands compete for attention in a category where taste, texture, and occasion have to be proven visually before a purchase happens, and that is exactly what creator content does well. Talent Resources, founded in 2007, runs food and beverage influencer campaigns from eight offices worldwide, combining celebrity procurement, creator partnerships, and media relations into a single system rather than three disconnected vendors.


Its Dunkin' Super Bowl campaign with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez generated more than 2 billion impressions and over 800 million dollars in earned media value, while the Got Milk? relaunch used more than a dozen celebrities and influencers to drive over 1 million impressions during a period when the category needed relevance more than reach. This article covers how food and beverage influencer marketing actually works, what results look like, common mistakes brands make when they try to run it alone, and how to evaluate an agency partner for a category where trust is earned one bite at a time.


A restaurant chain can post a beautifully lit product shot and still lose to a fifteen second video of a creator's unscripted first bite. That is the entire tension of marketing in food and beverage right now, and it is why brands are moving budget toward creators faster than almost any other category. Global influencer marketing spend reached 47.8 billion dollars in 2026, up 46.8 percent from 32.55 billion dollars in 2025, according to the Influencer Marketing Hub 2026 Benchmark Report, and food and beverage is one of the categories driving that surge. In the United States alone, food and beverage brands accounted for 1.9 billion dollars of influencer specific spend in 2026, trailing only beauty and personal care among all verticals, per eMarketer's 2026 Digital Ad Spending Report.


This is a food and beverage influencer marketing agency guide built for marketing leaders who need a partner that understands both the culinary category and celebrity strategy at once. Talent Resources has spent nearly two decades at the intersection of entertainment and brand marketing, and the campaigns referenced throughout this piece, including work for Dunkin' and Got Milk?, reflect how that experience translates into measurable outcomes for food and beverage clients specifically. What follows covers the mechanics, the numbers, and the mistakes that separate a viral moment from a wasted budget.


Why Food and Beverage Is a Distinct Marketing Category


Food and beverage does not behave like fashion, beauty, or tech. A skincare brand can build months of anticipation around a product launch. A food or beverage brand often has one seasonal window, one limited time flavor, or one live event to get the message out before the moment passes. Super Bowl weekend, National Milk Day, a summer beverage launch, a holiday flavor drop: the calendar dictates the campaign far more than it does in most other consumer categories.


Earned media value (EMV) is the estimated dollar value a brand would have had to pay to achieve the same reach and engagement through paid advertising, and it has become the standard currency food and beverage marketers use to justify influencer and celebrity spend to finance teams. Talent Resources tracks EMV on every food and beverage engagement because it translates a creator post into a number a CFO already understands.


The category also carries a trust deficit that other industries do not face in the same way. Consumers put food and drinks in their bodies, and Gen Z and millennial audiences in particular are skeptical of polished, obviously paid promotion for anything edible. Short form recipe creators and honest, unscripted taste reactions on TikTok and Instagram Reels now account for the majority of food related social engagement, which is why the agencies that win in this space treat creator authenticity as a strategic requirement, not a nice to have.


The Retail and Seasonal Pressure Points


Food and beverage marketing also has to survive contact with the shelf. Retail media spend, meaning advertising placed directly on Amazon, Walmart Connect, Instacart, and similar retailer networks, was forecast to rise roughly 18 percent in 2026 from 58.79 billion dollars in 2025, according to eMarketer's Retail Media Ad Spending Forecast. That means a campaign is not just competing for attention anymore. It is competing for shelf placement, search visibility inside a retailer's own app, and a shopper's split second decision at the point of purchase, all at once.


What Brands Get Wrong Without a Specialized Agency


Most food and beverage marketing teams do not fail because they picked the wrong creator. They fail because they treat influencer marketing, public relations, and paid amplification as three separate line items run by three separate vendors who never talk to each other.

At Talent Resources, we have seen brands spend six figures on a single creator activation that generated strong impressions and zero measurable lift at retail, not because the content was bad, but because nobody connected the celebrity story to a media relations push or paid distribution plan that could carry it past the first 48 hours. A single post, however well produced, has a short shelf life. A coordinated push across celebrity strategy, creator content, PR, and paid media does not.


The second common failure is timing. Food and beverage moments are seasonal and often tied to live events, and a campaign that is still in legal review the week of a launch has already lost. Brands that succeed treat the celebrity or creator relationship as the first conversation, not the last box to check before a launch date that was set months earlier without their agency in the room.


A third mistake is chasing follower count instead of category fit. Not every food and beverage brand needs a household name. A regional coffee chain with a modest budget may get a better cost per engagement from a handful of well matched local food creators than from a single celebrity post that reaches an audience with no reason to buy. The right mix depends on the brand's goal, its market, and its budget, not on which name is trending that week.


How Food and Beverage Influencer Marketing Actually Works


A food and beverage influencer campaign that performs is built in a sequence, not assembled in a rush. The mechanics matter because skipping a step is usually what turns a promising campaign into a forgettable one.


Discovery and Category Fit


The process starts with understanding the brand's category position, its audience, and what makes it different from the five other options on the same shelf or menu. This is where celebrity procurement, the process of identifying, vetting, negotiating with, and securing talent for a brand partnership, begins. For food and beverage specifically, that means matching a celebrity or creator's existing relationship with food, drink, or a related lifestyle category to the brand's actual product, not just their fame.


Building the Narrative


The Dunkin' Super Bowl campaign is the clearest example of this in practice. Rather than booking a celebrity for a generic cameo, Talent Resources built the campaign around Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez's real life marriage and Affleck's prior turn in a Dunkin' drive thru ad, giving the spot a built in storyline before a single frame aired. That narrative groundwork is what separates a paid endorsement from a story that press outlets choose to cover on their own.


Content, Format, and Timing


Food and beverage content has to work across formats. A fifteen second unboxing or taste reaction for TikTok and Instagram Reels needs to coexist with a longer, more polished piece for a brand's own channels, and both need to be timed to a specific moment, whether that is a game day, a seasonal flavor window, or a national observance day tied to the product category.


Media Relations and Amplification


Content alone rarely sustains a multi week story. Talent Resources secured press coverage of the Affleck and Lopez partnership across entertainment and marketing trade outlets before and after the Super Bowl air date, which kept the Dunkin' story circulating well beyond the 60 seconds of paid airtime. That layer, paid amplification stacked on top of organic reach and earned press, is what distinguishes a full service influencer marketing agency from a creator marketplace that only handles bookings.


What Results Look Like: Dunkin' x The Big Game


Numbers make the case better than description does. The Dunkin' Super Bowl campaign, built around Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in a spot titled "The DunKings," finished second out of 59 commercials in USA Today's 2024 Ad Meter competition, scoring 6.52 out of more than 160,000 fan votes, just behind the top ranked spot.


The campaign's staying power showed up off screen. Merchandise tied to the campaign, including tracksuits worn by Affleck, Matt Damon, and Tom Brady, sold out within 19 minutes of release. Dunkin' logged its highest volume donut sales day in company history on Valentine's Day 2024, the week following the ad's debut. Social performance followed the same pattern: Dunkin's Instagram reels tied to the campaign averaged 5.99 million views per post, compared to a 436,000 view average in the two months prior, and the commercial drew a combined 12.2 million views across Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. Across the full campaign, Talent Resources' celebrity and media relations work contributed to over 2 billion impressions and more than 800 million dollars in earned media value, figures that place the campaign among the most talked about celebrity brand moments in recent Super Bowl history.


The lesson for other food and beverage brands is not "book a celebrity." It is that a celebrity pairing with a real narrative, backed by a press strategy built to extend the story, converts a 60 second broadcast buy into weeks of earned coverage and, in Dunkin's case, a measurable sales record.


What Results Look Like: The Got Milk? Relaunch


Not every food and beverage win looks like a Super Bowl spot, and the Got Milk? case study proves that a consistent, category appropriate creator strategy can carry a legacy brand through a difficult period. The California Milk Processor Board engaged Talent Resources to secure influencers and talent to promote a range of programs, including charitable relief efforts during the pandemic and campaigns celebrating creativity among children at home.


Talent Resources built a roster that included Marsai Martin, Matt Bomer, Jaime Camil, Mario Lopez, Kyle Kuzma, Alejandra Espinoza, Brian Baumgartner, Julissa Calderon, Tori Spelling, Christina Milian, and more, spanning multiple campaign moments including a #HealthyAtHome push, a Stay At Home campaign, and a National Milk Day activation. The engagement generated over 1 million impressions for a brand competing against a category wide decline in dairy consumption and an audience that had largely forgotten the "Got Milk?" tagline existed.


What makes this case study instructive for other CPG and beverage brands is the diversity of the talent mix. Rather than anchoring the entire campaign to one household name, Talent Resources spread the message across creators and celebrities with different audiences, from television actors to athletes to lifestyle influencers, which extended reach across demographics a single spokesperson could not have covered alone.


How to Choose the Right Food and Beverage Influencer Marketing Agency


Most food and beverage marketing leaders evaluating agencies ask about creator databases and campaign case studies. Those matter, but they are not the differentiators that predict whether a partnership will work.


Ask whether the agency handles celebrity procurement, creator partnerships, PR, and paid amplification under one roof, or whether you will be coordinating between three vendors yourself. Learn how to choose an influencer marketing agency before signing anything, because the coordination gap is where most food and beverage campaigns lose momentum.

Ask about category specific experience. An agency that has run beauty campaigns exclusively will not automatically understand the seasonal pressure, shelf dynamics, and taste driven skepticism unique to food and beverage. Look for proven work in product launch campaigns within CPG and food specifically, not just adjacent consumer categories.

Ask how the agency measures success. EMV, impressions, and engagement rate are a starting point, but a food and beverage agency worth hiring should also be able to speak to retail lift, sell through data where available, and how paid amplification extended a campaign's reach past its organic ceiling.


Finally, ask about talent relationships. Talent Resources has worked with over 400 brands across every tier of talent, from emerging creators to A-list names in film, television, music, and sports, and that depth of relationship is what allows a campaign to move quickly when a seasonal window opens rather than starting the talent search from zero. Reviewing a list of top influencer marketing agencies for consumer brands is a reasonable first step, but the questions above are what actually separate a strong partner from a name on a list.


Common Mistakes Brands Make in Food and Beverage Influencer Marketing


The most expensive mistake is treating a single celebrity post as the campaign instead of the centerpiece of one. A press strategy, a content calendar across formats, and a paid amplification plan need to exist before the talent contract is signed, not after the content is already live.


The second mistake is ignoring format diversity. A campaign built only for polished, brand controlled video will underperform against a mix that includes creator led, unscripted content, particularly since short form video on TikTok and Instagram Reels now accounts for the majority of food related social engagement across Gen Z and millennial audiences.

The third mistake is skipping the retail and seasonal calendar entirely. A campaign that misses its seasonal window, whether that is a holiday flavor, a national food day, or a live sporting event, cannot be rescheduled the way a general brand awareness campaign can. Food and beverage marketing runs on a calendar that does not wait for internal approval processes to catch up.


The fourth mistake, and one that compounds the other three, is treating EMV and impressions as the only success metrics. Those numbers matter for justifying budget, but successful influencer marketing campaigns in food and beverage also track sentiment, repeat engagement from the same creator audience, and, where the brand has retail partners, actual movement at the shelf. A closer look at what an influencer marketing agency actually does day to day explains why these four mistakes keep recurring at brands that manage the process in house without that structure.


The ROI Case for Food and Beverage Influencer Marketing


The budget conversation in food and beverage is shifting fast enough that holding flat is a competitive risk on its own. According to the Influencer Marketing Hub 2026 Benchmark Report, 87.49 percent of marketers across categories plan to raise their influencer budgets heading into 2026, while only 5.55 percent expect budgets to fall. Research commissioned by Kolsquare and covering the food and beverage sector specifically found that 74 percent of food and beverage brands plan to work with more influencers in 2026, and 70 percent intend to increase influencer marketing budgets, up from 68 percent of brands in the sector that worked with influencers at all in 2025.


The category level spend backs up the sentiment. eMarketer's 2026 Digital Ad Spending Report put U.S. food and beverage influencer spend at 1.9 billion dollars in 2026, the second largest vertical behind beauty and personal care, while global social media ad spending in food and beverage was forecast to reach 28.4 billion dollars in 2026.


For a CMO or VP of marketing building next year's budget, the calculation is not whether to invest in creator and celebrity partnerships, it is how to invest efficiently. Around 80 percent of user generated content creator engagements cost under 500 dollars per Influencer Marketing Hub's 2026 data, which means a layered strategy combining a small number of high impact celebrity moments with a broader base of lower cost creator content can produce both the earned media spike of a Dunkin' style campaign and the sustained, cost efficient reach of a program like Got Milk?'s creator roster. See how enterprise brands scale influencer campaigns globally for a breakdown of how that mix gets built at scale, and review a broader set of best influencer marketing agencies for product launches for additional benchmarks.


Talent Resources' Approach to Food and Beverage Influencer Marketing


Talent Resources runs food and beverage influencer marketing as one connected system, not four separate services stitched together after the fact. Discovery starts with the brand's category position and audience. Strategy fuses talent selection, messaging, and channel planning into a single narrative. Activation runs celebrity procurement, creator partnerships, PR, and social strategy at the same time rather than in sequence. Amplification measures momentum in real time and reallocates budget toward what is working while a campaign is still live.


That model is built on nearly two decades of relationships across entertainment, media, and brand marketing, run from offices in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, New Jersey, Florida, London, and Riyadh. Talent Resources, a food and beverage influencer marketing agency with a global office footprint, has applied that system to campaigns ranging from a Super Bowl commercial that outperformed all but one of 59 national ads to a legacy dairy brand relaunch built on a roster of more than a dozen celebrities and creators. Explore the full range of CPG and food and beverage influencer marketing services to see how the same model applies to a launch, a seasonal moment, or a long term brand ambassador program.


Not every food and beverage brand needs a celebrity of Ben Affleck's profile. A regional restaurant chain or an emerging beverage brand may see a stronger cost per engagement from a curated group of mid tier and micro creators than from a single high profile name. Talent Resources, a New York headquartered influencer marketing agency operating globally, builds the mix to fit the brand's budget and goal rather than defaulting to the biggest name available. See examples of top agencies for product launch campaigns to compare how that scales across brand sizes.


Frequently Asked Questions About Food and Beverage Influencer Marketing


What is a food and beverage influencer marketing agency?


A food and beverage influencer marketing agency plans and runs creator and celebrity partnerships specifically for brands in the food, beverage, restaurant, and CPG space. That includes identifying talent whose existing audience and interests fit the product, negotiating and securing the partnership, producing content across formats, and often pairing the campaign with public relations and paid amplification to extend its reach. Talent Resources runs this model for clients including Dunkin' and Got Milk?, combining celebrity procurement with creator partnerships under one team.


How is food and beverage influencer marketing different from general influencer marketing?


Food and beverage campaigns are more time sensitive, tied to seasonal windows, live events, and limited product runs, and they carry a higher trust bar because consumers are evaluating something they will eat or drink. Content also needs to prove taste, texture, and occasion visually rather than through claims alone, which is why unscripted, creator led formats tend to outperform polished brand video in this category specifically.


How much does a food and beverage influencer marketing campaign cost?


Cost depends heavily on the mix of talent. A campaign built around a single A-list celebrity, similar in scale to Dunkin's Super Bowl activation, represents a significant investment tied to broadcast level reach and earned media. A creator focused program, by contrast, can be built efficiently since around 80 percent of user generated content creator engagements cost under 500 dollars per engagement according to Influencer Marketing Hub's 2026 data. Most food and beverage brands run a blended budget across both tiers.


How long does it take to launch a food and beverage influencer campaign?


Timelines vary by scope, but talent negotiation, content production, and media relations planning typically need to begin months ahead of a seasonal launch date or live event tie in. Campaigns anchored to a fixed date, such as a Super Bowl broadcast or a national food observance day, require the longest lead time because talent availability and legal clearance cannot be rushed once the date is set.


What results can a brand expect from food and beverage influencer marketing?


Results range widely by campaign scale. Talent Resources' Dunkin' Super Bowl campaign generated over 2 billion impressions and more than 800 million dollars in earned media value, while the Got Milk? relaunch generated over 1 million impressions through a broader creator and celebrity roster. Brands should expect a combination of impressions, earned media value, engagement rate, and, where retail partners are involved, sell through data as the core measurement set.


Do food and beverage brands need a celebrity, or can micro influencers work?


Not every brand needs a household name. Micro and mid tier creators with highly engaged, category relevant audiences often deliver a stronger cost per engagement than a single celebrity post, particularly for regional or emerging brands. The right mix depends on the brand's budget, market, and goal, and an experienced agency will build a blended roster rather than defaulting to the biggest available name.


How does Talent Resources measure success for food and beverage campaigns?


Talent Resources tracks earned media value, impressions, and engagement across every food and beverage engagement, and layers in sentiment and, where available, retail sell through data to connect creator activity to actual business outcomes rather than reach alone.


What made the Dunkin' Super Bowl campaign successful?


The campaign paired Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez's real life relationship with Affleck's earlier Dunkin' drive thru ad appearance, giving the spot a built in storyline rather than a one off celebrity cameo. Talent Resources then secured media coverage before and after the Super Bowl air date, extending the story well past the ad's 60 seconds of airtime and contributing to a sales record the following week.


Why did the Got Milk? campaign use so many different creators instead of one spokesperson?


Spreading the campaign across a diverse roster, including television actors, athletes, and lifestyle creators, extended reach across audience segments a single spokesperson could not reach alone. For a legacy brand working to regain relevance during a difficult period for the category, that breadth mattered more than concentrating the entire budget on one name.

How do I choose the right food and beverage influencer marketing agency for my brand?

Look for an agency that runs celebrity procurement, creator partnerships, PR, and paid amplification as one connected process rather than separate vendors, has documented experience in food, beverage, or CPG specifically, and can speak to measurement beyond impressions, including EMV and, where relevant, retail lift. Ask for case studies with named clients and figures you can verify, not general claims.


Where to Go From Here


Food and beverage brands are not short on options for where to spend the next marketing dollar. The category is moving toward influencer and celebrity partnerships faster than almost any other vertical tracked by eMarketer and Influencer Marketing Hub, and the brands treating it as an afterthought are already behind the 74 percent of competitors planning to expand their creator programs this year.


The two most important ideas in this piece are simple. First, a food and beverage campaign performs when celebrity strategy, creator content, PR, and paid amplification move as one system rather than three disconnected vendors, which is the difference between Dunkin's 2 billion impression result and a single post that disappears after 48 hours. Second, category fit matters more than fame. Got Milk?'s diverse creator roster and a regional brand's micro influencer mix both outperform a mismatched celebrity booking, regardless of budget size.

If you are evaluating food and beverage influencer marketing partners, the first step is understanding what the right agency looks like for your brand, your category window, and your budget. Talent Resources offers a no pressure strategy session to help map that out, drawing on nearly two decades of campaigns across food, beverage, and CPG brands. Start a conversation with Talent Resources or browse more food and beverage marketing insights on The Source.


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