Getting on shelf was the hard part. Staying there is the expensive part.
Most CPG brands we meet have the same shape of problem. Distribution is up. Velocity isn’t. The product moves in some doors and sits in others, and nobody can say exactly why.
Meanwhile the marketing is running in pieces. An agency handles paid social. A freelancer does content. Someone internal owns the retailer relationship and the trade calendar. Each one is doing their job. None of them are looking at the same number.
So the brand ends up with a feed full of nice-looking posts, an ad account optimizing to add-to-cart, and a buyer review in six weeks where none of that will come up.
That’s not a creative problem. It’s a structural one.
What a CPG agency should actually be doing
A CPG agency isn’t a social media agency that happens to have food clients. The job is different, because the buying journey is different.
Your shopper doesn’t convert on your website. They convert in an aisle, three weeks after seeing something on their phone, standing in front of your product and four competitors. Everything upstream of that moment either helps or it doesn’t.
Which means the work has to connect:
Demand generation — paid social and creative that build recognition before anyone reaches the shelf, not just retarget people who already know you.
Retail performance — retail media, trade calendar, and in-store activation timed to the same windows as everything else.
Creative built for the category — food and beverage sell on appetite, texture, and use-occasion. Product photography that works for a SaaS landing page does nothing for a shopper deciding between two hot sauces.
One scoreboard — velocity, distribution, repeat rate. Not impressions.
Most agencies can do one of these well. The gap is that they’re rarely run by the same people, looking at the same data, on the same calendar.
We’re independent, which means we can tell you the truth
Cool Nerds Marketing has been working with food, beverage, and consumer brands since 2014, out of Wilmington, Delaware. We’re independently owned. No holding company, no network media targets, nobody upstairs with a quarterly number that depends on you spending more.
That independence shows up in unglamorous ways. If your creative is the constraint, we say so instead of selling you a bigger media plan. If your unit economics can’t support paid acquisition at your current price, we tell you that before you spend, not in the quarterly review.
We’ve done this work for challenger brands finding their first real velocity and for names most people already have in their kitchen — Campbell’s, Herr’s, Pierre’s Ice Cream, Stauffer. Same discipline, different scale.
What we run
Social media management
Feeds built to sell units, not collect saves. Category-native content on a calendar that lines up with your retail windows and your launches.
Paid social and media buying
Meta, TikTok, and the rest, structured properly — broad targeting, real purchase optimization, and a creative testing system that compounds what it learns instead of restarting every quarter.
Content and creative production
Food and beverage photography and video made by people who understand appetite appeal. Shot for the platform it’s running on, in volume, on a schedule you can plan around.
Influencer and UGC programs
Creators picked for whether their audience buys your category, not for follower count. Usage rights negotiated up front so the good stuff can run as paid.
Retail and brand activation
Retail media, sampling, in-store, and event activation, planned against the same calendar as everything else — so the demand you’re generating actually lands somewhere.
The work
We’ve built and run programs for Owen’s Craft Mixers, Villa Roma, Kanin, Liverite, Passage Foods, and Orbita — across launches, retail expansion, and national account activation.
How it starts
1. We look at what’s actually happening. Your accounts, your creative, your velocity data if you have it. Usually a week. We come back with where the constraint really is, which is often not where you think.
2. We agree on one number. Velocity, repeat rate, distribution — whatever the business actually turns on this year. Everything gets measured against it.
3. We build the system and run it. Strategy, paid, creative, and retail on one calendar, one team, one report.
No six-week discovery phase. No strategy deck you pay for and then pay again to execute.
Is this a fit?
Probably yes if: you’re a food, beverage, or consumer brand doing roughly $10M or more, you have real retail distribution, and your marketing is running in pieces that don’t talk to each other.
Probably not if: you’re pre-revenue or pre-distribution, or you’re looking for a vendor to execute a plan that’s already written. We’re better when we’re involved in the decision.
Worth saying plainly — if we don’t think we’re the right fit, we’ll say so on the first call. It’s a small category and everyone talks.
Questions we get asked
What does a CPG agency do that a general agency doesn’t?
A general agency optimizes for clicks and conversions on a website. For a CPG brand with retail distribution, most of your sales don’t happen there. The work has to account for the gap between where demand gets created and where the purchase happens — which changes the creative, the measurement, and the calendar.
Do you work with brands that aren’t in food and beverage?
Yes — household, personal care, and wellness. F&B is where we’re deepest, and it’s where our creative and retail experience transfers most directly.
How do you measure this if sales happen in a store?
Velocity and distribution data where the retailer provides it, geo-based testing where they don’t, and DTC as a read on creative even when it isn’t the main revenue line. We’ll be direct about what we can and can’t attribute cleanly.
What’s the minimum engagement?
It depends on scope. We’d rather run one channel properly than four badly, so the honest answer comes after we’ve looked at your accounts.
Are you a CPG social media agency or a full-service one?
Full-service, but the point isn’t the service list. It’s that strategy, paid, creative, and retail are run by one team against one number instead of four vendors against four.
Let’s look at your numbers
Tell us what you’re up against. If we can help, we’ll show you how. If we can’t, we’ll tell you who can.
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