Food and beverage marketing agency case studies: how to read the numbers before you sign

A food and beverage marketing agency sells strategy, creative, media and content to brands that make food or drinks, and it proves itself with case-study numbers. Before you hire one, ask four things about every number: what the baseline was, how long the window ran, what else changed, and which part of the lift the agency did.

Key takeaways

• The top Google result for "food and beverage marketing agency" today is an agency homepage that sells with three headline results and lists no prices.
• A case-study number is only useful once you know its baseline, its time window, what else changed that quarter, and which job the agency owned.
• Velocity (sales divided by distribution) tells you more about marketing than total sales, because new stores can grow total sales on their own.
• One agency's own 2026 guide puts full-service retainers for emerging brands at $8,000 to $75,000 or more a month, and calls them overkill under $1M in revenue.

What does a food and beverage marketing agency do?

A food and beverage marketing agency plans and makes the marketing for companies that sell food or drinks. That can mean brand strategy, package design, advertising, PR, shopper marketing, media buying, organic social and content. Some shops do six of those well. Most do one or two well and staff the rest thin.

The services list on a homepage won't separate the shops that ship from the ones that don't. Case studies will, if you read them like a buyer instead of a fan.

Why does an agency homepage rank first for this search?

Search "food and beverage marketing agency" and the first organic result is the homepage of quench, a full-service agency. There's no article and no guide. You get a services menu with fourteen line items, from Advertising to Media Planning, and three case studies, each with a headline number: a same-store sales lift for a restaurant chain, a dollar sales figure for a seafood brand, and a year-over-year lift for a dried fruit brand.

Google is telling you what people typing this phrase want. They're shopping. They want to see who does the work and what it got. That's fair, and a homepage built that way is doing its job.

The homepage won't teach you how to judge it. No price. No engagement model. No word on how they measured any of those numbers. Last update was September 2024. No FAQ either. A founder still has to decide whether a number on a sales page means anything for a $4M snack brand in 900 stores. So let's work it out.

What I learned reading results slides from the brand side

I've spent most of my career on the brand side of the table. I built Topo Chico's digital identity at Arca Continental before Coca-Cola bought the brand, then led social strategy at Coca-Cola for nearly six years. Before that I spent six years at Frito-Lay as a content creator, videographer and video editor.

When you sit on the brand side, you see both halves of a results slide. You see the number. You also see everything else that happened that quarter: the new retailer, the price change, the display the sales team fought for, the competitor that went out of stock. The agency deck shows the first half. Your own sales report shows the second.

None of that makes agencies liars. A lift is a lift. The question is how much of it the agency's work caused, and a good shop will tell you plainly where its credit ends. Out here in Marfa a rain total means nothing until somebody tells you which gauge and which week. Case-study numbers work the same way.

How do you read a food and beverage marketing agency case study?

Ask five questions of every headline number. If the agency can answer all five without flinching, the number is worth something. If it can't answer two of them, treat the case study as a portfolio piece and judge the creative, not the math.

1. What was the baseline? A 50 percent lift on a brand that was collapsing the year before is a different story from a 50 percent lift on a steady one.
2. How long was the window? Six weeks around a launch and twelve months of steady work are not the same claim.
3. What else changed? New distribution, a price cut, a reformulation, a big retail promo or a competitor's recall can all move sales with no help from marketing.
4. Which job did the agency own? If three shops worked the account that year, ask who did what and who gets credit for which slice.
5. Where does the number come from? Retailer scan data, syndicated data, the brand's own reports, or the agency's estimate. Ask to see it, even with the brand name covered.

Here's the same list as a cheat sheet you can bring to a pitch meeting.

| Claim on the slide | What to ask | What a straight answer sounds like | |---|---|---| | "Sales up 40 percent" | Up from what, over what period? | "Versus the same 13 weeks last year, in the same stores." | | "Added $20M in sales" | How much came from new stores? | "About half was new distribution. Here's velocity in existing stores." | | "Engagement up 300 percent" | Did it move anything at the register? | "Not directly. Here's what we saw in retailer data during the flight." | | "Award-winning campaign" | What did the brand buy afterward? | "They renewed for two years and moved the launch budget to us." | | "Trusted by top brands" | Which person there can I call? | "Here's the brand director. She'll tell you what went wrong too." |

Total sales or velocity: which number should a founder trust?

Trust velocity first. SPINS, which sells retail data to natural and specialty brands, defines velocity as how fast a product sells once it's on shelf, worked out as sales divided by distribution. You can read the definition in the SPINS glossary.

Total sales can climb because a brand got into 400 more stores. That's a sales team win, or a broker win, and it would have happened with or without a clever campaign. Velocity strips that out. If an agency says it grew your brand, ask whether units per store per week went up in the stores you already had. That's the number marketing can fairly claim to move.

A food brand doesn't own the planogram. The buyer does. What it can own is whether the shopper already knows the name before they hit that shelf. Social and content earn their keep right there. Velocity is where you'll see it.

What should a food or beverage brand buy first?

Buy the one thing your stage needs, from a shop whose case studies prove that one thing. Most independent brands don't need the whole menu. They need one lane done well for twelve months.

• Pre-retail or direct to consumer: brand basics, packaging that reads at six feet, and a steady stream of organic content that gives retail buyers proof people care.
• First regional retail: shopper marketing for the chains you're in, plus social and content aimed at the zip codes around those stores.
• Scaling past a few million in revenue: this is where a retainer with a larger food and beverage marketing agency starts to make sense, and where paid media and PR join the mix.

The generalist trap is buying a full-service retainer when you need one lane. I wrote about that in an earlier piece, and it still holds. If you sell drinks, the drinks marketing agency breakdown goes deeper on that category.

How much does a food and beverage marketing agency cost?

Prices vary by shop, scope and city, and most agencies don't publish them. One CPG agency, Cool Nerds Marketing, does publish 2026 ranges in its own buyer's guide. It lists project work at $15,000 to $150,000 or more, full-service retainers at $8,000 to $75,000 or more a month for emerging brands, and $75,000 to $300,000 or more a month for scaled brands. Performance media fees run 10 to 20 percent of media spend.

Under $1M in annual revenue, a full-service retainer is usually overkill. Once a brand passes $3M to $5M and starts trying to scale, it tends to pay for itself. That's the same guide talking. It lines up with what I've seen.

Whatever the quote, ask for it broken into strategy, production, talent or creator fees, usage rights and media. A single monthly number hides where your money goes. A broken-out number lets you cut the line you don't need.

Agency, independent strategist or in-house hire?

Pick on scope and seniority, not size. A big food and beverage marketing agency gives you bench depth and a lot of services. An independent strategist gives you the senior person on every call. An in-house hire gives you someone who lives in your Slack, but you'll still need to buy production.

I'm upfront about my lane. I do organic social strategy and content for food and beverage brands. I don't run paid ads and I don't build email funnels. When a brand needs those, I point them to people who do. If you want to see what that lane looks like on real brands, look at that kind of work before you take anyone's word for it, mine included.

Ask any of the three the same thing. What won't you do for us? The shop that answers fast is the one you can plan around.

What are the red flags in an agency pitch?

• Every case study leads with a percentage and none of them shows a baseline.
• The team in the pitch isn't the team you'll get, and nobody says so until month two.
• The deck lists fourteen services and the references only speak to one.
• Results come from the agency's own estimates, with no retailer or syndicated data behind them.
• The proposal is one monthly number with no breakdown.
• Nobody asks about your distribution, your velocity, or your margin before pitching a campaign.

The flip side is easy to spot. A good pitch asks more questions than it answers in the first meeting.

What should the first 90 days with an agency look like?

1. Weeks one to two: the agency pulls your baseline. Velocity by retailer, current content performance, what your shoppers say in reviews and comments.
2. Weeks three to six: one clear plan for one lane, with the measure of success agreed in writing before anything ships.
3. Weeks seven to twelve: work in market, with a check-in against that baseline every two weeks, using the same data source the case study would use.

If day 90 arrives and nobody can tell you what moved against the baseline, you have your answer about every number in their deck too.

FAQ

What does a food and beverage marketing agency do?

A food and beverage marketing agency plans and produces marketing for companies that make food or drinks. Depending on the shop, that covers brand strategy, packaging, advertising, PR, shopper marketing, media buying, organic social and content creation. Most agencies are strongest in one or two of those, so check which services their case studies prove before you compare proposals.

How much does a food and beverage marketing agency cost?

Most agencies don't publish prices. One CPG agency's 2026 guide lists full-service retainers at $8,000 to $75,000 or more a month for emerging brands, project work at $15,000 to $150,000 or more, and performance media fees of 10 to 20 percent of spend. Ask for any quote broken into strategy, production, creator fees, usage and media.

What is the best food and beverage marketing agency?

The best food and beverage marketing agency is the one whose case studies prove the single job your brand needs this year, with numbers you can check. A shop with great packaging work may be the wrong hire for organic social. Judge proof against your stage and your lane, and ask every finalist what they won't do.

How do I check an agency's case study results?

A fat percentage on the pitch deck means nothing until you ask five things about it. The baseline. The time window. What else changed that quarter. Which job the agency owned. Where the data came from. Ask whether velocity rose in existing stores, not only total sales. If the agency can't answer at least three of those, judge the case study on creative. Not results.

Do small food brands need a full-service agency?

Usually not. An independent brand under about $1M in revenue tends to get more from one lane done well, such as packaging, shopper marketing, or organic social and content, than from a full-service retainer. One agency's own published guide calls full-service overkill at that size. Revisit the question once you're past a few million and scaling into new retailers.

What to do next

Pull your own velocity numbers for the last 13 weeks before you take a single agency call. Then bring the five questions and the cheat sheet to every pitch. The agency that answers them with real data, and tells you plainly what it won't do, is the one worth a second meeting. If you want a second opinion on what AI search tools say about who to hire, read why AI recommended six agencies and none were mine, and how to vet a CPG marketing agency pitch.

Organic social and content is the lane. If that's what your brand needs next, message me on LinkedIn. I'll tell you straight whether I'm the right fit.