Expertise

Influencing consumer tastes in food and drink has never been easy. A successful food marketer must connect with the cultures, lifestyles, perceptions and attitudes that compel consumers to buy.
  
Ketchum has long been noted as a global leader in food, wellness and nutrition marketing. As one of the first public relations agencies to dedicate resources and invest in experts from the food industry and field of nutrition, Ketchum's 40-year-old Food & Nutrition Practice created the protocols and best practices that convert nutrition and health science into compelling marketing tools and headlines.
 
Ketchum's range of food-and-nutrition communication services offers deep expertise in nutrition marketing, retail food communication, nutrient and nutraceutical marketing, menu-recipe development, B2B communication, and commodity board marketing. Our Food B2B Group, for example, is a full-service marketing division focused exclusively on the foodservice and ingredient (food technology) channels. This group's 18-year heritage of award-winning work spans strategic planning, brand positioning, advertising, direct marketing, promotions, sales training, trade public relations, menu-recipe creation, multimedia design and partnership programs.
 
At the Ketchum Food Center, a test kitchen and "food think tank" that opened in 1984, chefs, R&D technologists, dietitians and marketers meet to develop new recipes, test and demonstrate new products, and hold cooking classes and food trend forums.
 
Ketchum also recognizes that food is more than what tastes good; it's an element of a lifestyle that reflects an overall feeling of wellness of mind, body and spirit. For example, our WellPositioned BrandBuilder is a proprietary research tool developed by Ketchum Global Research Network and the Food & Nutrition Practice. Partnering with Ketchum's Brand Marketing and Healthcare Practices, we developed WellPositioned BrandBuilder to quantify the relationships among a company's or brand's health and wellness reputation across multiple attributes that drive favorability, value and influence on purchase.
 
One of the many leading food companies where Ketchum has put these services to work is Tropicana. When the FDA announced a link between potassium and controlling high blood pressure, Ketchum was ready with exclusives for top-tier business press and a highly targeted influencer campaign, generating 895 million media impressions and a 54.5% increase in Tropicana orange juice sales in the four weeks following the campaign.
 
For Roche Vitamins, Ketchum helped educate health professionals and consumers about the importance of the antioxidant vitamins C and E and the nutrients lutein and zeaxanthin for eye health. A science-based campaign targeting health conferences, publications, and consumer news outlets resulted in a 21% increase in professional's recommendations of eye-health supplements and media coverage reaching 402 million consumers.
 
And for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, Ketchum helped find new ways to inform restaurateurs of lower-price alternatives to popular, expensive beef cuts by raising awareness of steak cuts that typically go into the grinder for hamburger meat. Through a "BEEFlexible" campaign targeted at restaurants, Ketchum generated 12 million media impressions in 2005 alone.