giovanni gallucciSeptember 18, 2026social media strategy, food and beverage marketingComment

Omaha Steaks Called Its Rebrand No Bull. I Counted My Own.

giovanni gallucciSeptember 18, 2026social media strategy, food and beverage marketingComment

Omaha Steaks cut 60% of what it sells.

The part worth stealing is the name they stuck on what came next.

You could say the phrase out loud to a rancher and neither of you would flinch.

September 10, a 109-year-old company announced a business transformation and a campaign called "No Bull." Nate Rempe's run the place since November 2023. He's the first outsider to lead it outside the founding Simon family. He told Fast Company the reason plain. "We're kind of tired of the BS around all the information in the marketplace and in grocery about ground beef." Eric Johnson, the chief marketing and digital officer, set the bar next to it. "Quality is the easiest claim in the business to make and the hardest to back up. We back it up."

Read those two quotes again. Notice what is missing.

Neither man said journey. Neither said elevated experience. Neither said commitment to excellence.

These are two executives at a company a father and son from Latvia founded in 1917. They started out selling to Omaha restaurants.

They still talk like the butcher counter they actually own.

What they actually did

Rempe's SKU cut is the boring half. It's still the part that teaches you something.

He kept the center-of-the-plate proteins. Steak, chicken, seafood, pork.

He killed the meal kits, the single-serve microwavable meals, and the pineapple upside-down cake.

His math was 80% of the revenue coming off 20% of the SKUs.

"It really is logical that we would start to divest ourselves of some of the lower-turning SKUs and put that energy into innovating the more loved products."

Omaha Steaks dropped the flashy promotional markdowns every catalog business still runs. Rempe says customers want a clear final price, not a discounting gimmick.

Delivery went from more than six days in early 2025 down to two. Same-day and next-day are expanding as they turn retail stores into local fulfillment hubs.

Fewer products, honest prices, faster shipping, and a name a fifth-generation family business can defend at a county fair. That's the whole brief.

The campaign runs on linear and streaming TV, Instagram and TikTok, and influencer partnerships.

It leans hard on 100% U.S.-sourced beef, hand-cut in Omaha. They can substantiate that claim. Most of their competition can't.

The part I have to own

This is the part I'd rather not print.

I keep a file. It's the style ruleset every piece of content this operation ships runs through before it goes anywhere, for my own brand and for client work alike. It has 57 hard-banned words in it. Fourteen food and beverage sensory clichés I never want to see again, things like "explosion of flavor" and "culinary journey." Twenty-one exact phrases that research labs have measured showing up in machine-written text at multiples running into the thousands, strings like "vibrant tapestry" and "serves as a testament." Twenty-eight sentence patterns that are dead on arrival, including the "it's not X, it's Y" reframe that every AI writing tool reaches for by the second paragraph.

I got tired of reading copy that could run under anybody's photo. That's why I wrote the file.

This morning I ran it against myself. I pulled the sitemap for gallucci.net. 438 published posts. Checked every title against my own banned list.

Twenty-three of them fail. That's 5.3% of everything I've published.

"Elevate" shows up eight times. "Elevate your food and beverage brand." "Elevate your outdoor brand with Instagram Reels." "Elevate your brand at Expo West." "Journey" shows up six times. There's a "supercharge," a "harness the power of," an "illuminate your brand's path," and a "transformative strategies" in there too. One title manages "navigating the influencer landscape," which is two hits in four words and is genuinely impressive in the wrong direction.

Those posts are still live.

I'm not sanding my own archive down. You should be able to check the work, and the dates matter.

Most of that stuff predates the list. I wrote the rule after I'd earned it the hard way.

That's how most useful rules get written.

The lesson, which is the part that still matters in two years

The fancy word still shows up in draft one. You enforce plain speech one sentence at a time. It costs you something every single pass. Nobody launches their way into it.

Omaha Steaks spent real money on a two-word name that says less than what it replaced. That's the trade. Every hedge you cut is a claim you now have to back up. "Premium quality ingredients" survives any audit because it means nothing. "100% U.S.-sourced beef, hand-cut in Omaha" gets you a phone call from somebody who wants to see the plant.

So do it the cheap way.

Open a text file. Write every word you're tired of seeing in your own category.

If you sell salsa, that's authentic, handcrafted, bold flavor, and whatever your three closest competitors stuck on their about page. Steal from them. Their copy is the fastest way to see what's become noise.

Most of what passes for social media marketing for food brands is this problem at volume. Same six adjectives rotated across a posting calendar until none of them land.

Make it a gate, not a guideline.

A style guide nobody runs is decoration.

Mine's a file that loads before anything gets written and gets checked again before anything ships. The check is mechanical on purpose. It catches you on a Tuesday when you're tired and reaching for the easy word.

Then replace, don't delete. This is the step people skip, and skipping it is why "plain speech" rebrands so often come out flat. When you pull "artisanal," you owe the reader something in its place, and the replacement has to be a fact. The actual chile. The actual temperature. What the line worker said when the first batch came out wrong. Omaha Steaks didn't just delete the puffery, they put "hand-cut in Omaha" where it used to be. Subtraction without substitution is just a shorter version of nothing.

The FTC's Made in USA enforcement sweep is live, with penalties that can run past $50,000 per violation per day. Vague origin language just went from marketing choice to liability.

A specific claim is one somebody can check, argue with, or sue you over. That's exactly why most brands won't make one. Accept that this narrows you.

That reluctance is the opening. Being checkable is a competitive position now. Brands that can substantiate get to speak plainly. Brands that can't keep saying "premium."

Don't announce it. Omaha Steaks gets to name a campaign No Bull. They're 109 years old, they own the plant, and they've got butcher credibility to spend. If you're four years old and doing $2 million, nobody wants your manifesto about honesty. Describe the product accurately one time. Then do it again next week.

That's most of the job. No tool does that part for you. Every writing tool ever built trains on the average of what's already out there. That average is exactly the stuff on my list.

I've run this exact audit on client archives and it's never once come back clean, including mine, as of this morning, twenty-three times over.

If you want somebody to run it against yours and then actually fix what it finds, that's the work I do as a food and beverage marketing agency of one.

The audit is the easy part. The fixing is where you find out how much of your positioning was doing real work and how much was filler nobody would miss.

Pull your last ten posts. Read them out loud. Cross out every word you wouldn't say to somebody standing there holding your product.

Whatever survives the cut is the voice. It's shorter than you think. Better too.

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