The plant-based food category is one of the most competitive and fastest-moving segments in consumer packaged goods. Dozens of brands compete for shelf space, consumer attention, and the loyalty of flexitarian and vegan shoppers who have more choices than ever before.
Daiya Foods has been a leading voice in plant-based dairy alternatives since 2008, building a strong reputation for dairy-free cheese, yogurt, and frozen meals. The brand serves vegans, people with dairy sensitivities, and the growing flexitarian segment looking to reduce animal products without sacrificing taste or texture.
But in a crowded category, even a well-established brand faces a fundamental challenge: how do you stay top of mind, build trial among new consumers, and sustain momentum when competitors are entering the market at pace? The answer was an integrated influencer and PR campaign built around authentic creator relationships and strategic earned media. This is how that campaign came together.
Every effective campaign begins with a clear brief. For this engagement, the strategic objectives centered on three priorities: increasing brand awareness among flexitarian and plant-curious consumers, driving trial of Daiya’s key product lines, and building social proof through authentic creator content that could extend the brand’s reach beyond its existing audience.
The target audience for this campaign was defined by behavior as much as demographics. These were consumers already exploring plant-based eating, people who followed food influencers for meal inspiration, and flexitarians who had not yet made Daiya a regular purchase. Reaching them required trusted voices in the right communities, not just broad advertising.
Success metrics were established before outreach began. The team set baseline targets for reach, engagement rate, and earned media pickups, with a secondary focus on tracking sentiment around key Daiya product lines.
For a food brand operating in the plant-based space, influencer selection is not simply about reach. Authenticity signals matter more than follower count. An influencer who has posted consistently about plant-based cooking, vegan lifestyle, or dairy-free eating for a year before the campaign carries far more credibility with their audience than a food creator who covers everything.
Jive’s approach to influencer selection for food and wellness brands starts with audience composition analysis. The team evaluates whether an influencer’s followers match the target consumer profile by geography, age, and category interest. A creator with 80,000 followers who reaches the exact right audience is more valuable than a creator with 500,000 followers whose audience skews toward categories unrelated to food and wellness.
Category fit assessment comes next. For Daiya Foods, this meant selecting creators who had demonstrated genuine interest in plant-based eating, not just broad food content. Creators who cook dairy-free meals, review vegan products, or advocate for sustainable eating bring established credibility to a plant-based brand partnership.
The final filter is content quality and production style. Daiya’s brand aesthetic calls for content that looks appetizing and lifestyle-forward. Jive reviewed each creator’s existing content to ensure that the look, format, and presentation style would serve both the creator’s audience and the brand’s visual identity.
An integrated campaign for a consumer food brand does not operate on a single channel. The Daiya Foods campaign deployed influencer content, earned media outreach, and owned social in coordinated waves designed to build momentum over the campaign period.
Creators received product along with a flexible creative brief that highlighted the campaign’s core message without scripting the execution. This approach produces content that feels native to each creator’s platform and audience, which consistently outperforms over-produced, brand-controlled content in engagement and authenticity signals.
Content formats were selected based on each creator’s strongest-performing channel. Recipe videos, product reviews, “what I eat in a day” style posts, and grocery haul content all served as natural formats for featuring Daiya products without feeling like advertisements.
Alongside influencer activation, Jive’s PR team pitched Daiya Foods to food and lifestyle media outlets with angles tied to the plant-based category’s growth and Daiya’s specific product innovations. Earned media coverage extends a campaign’s credibility beyond the creator audience and into editorial environments where consumers actively seek product recommendations.
Influencer content was re-shared across Daiya’s owned social channels with creator permission, extending the reach of creator posts to the brand’s existing audience and adding social proof to the brand’s content calendar without requiring additional original production.
The campaign delivered strong results across the core metrics established in the strategic brief. Creator content achieved above-average engagement rates in the plant-based food category, reflecting the high-intent nature of audiences following vegan and dairy-free content creators.
Earned media outreach secured coverage in food and lifestyle publications, placing Daiya in editorial contexts where plant-curious consumers actively research purchasing decisions. These placements carried the brand’s story beyond the creator audience into readers who had not previously encountered Daiya in their social feeds.
According to Influencer Marketing Hub, plant-based food campaigns using a combination of micro and mid-tier influencers with strong category alignment consistently achieve above-average engagement rates compared to general food content, reflecting the high-intent nature of plant-based audiences. Daiya Foods’ campaign aligned with this pattern, with creator selection focused specifically on authentic plant-based advocates rather than broad food content creators.
Brand sentiment tracking showed a positive shift in consumer perception around Daiya’s flagship product lines following the campaign period, indicating that the influencer and media activity was building genuine brand affinity rather than generating short-term impressions without lasting impact.
The Daiya Foods campaign offers a practical blueprint for any plant-based food brand planning an influencer and PR campaign. Four lessons stand out.
A creator with 80,000 highly engaged plant-based followers will generate more purchase intent than a creator with 2 million general food followers. Audience alignment — not follower count — is the primary selection criterion for campaigns with conversion goals. This holds across dairy-free, vegan, gluten-free, and other niche food categories where community trust matters.
Influencer content that exists only on social platforms misses a significant portion of the target audience. Pairing creator campaigns with earned media outreach extends campaign narratives into editorial environments where more risk-averse or high-consideration buyers form opinions. A brand that appears in both a food blogger’s Instagram story and a plant-based industry publication carries more credibility than one that lives only in the social feed.
Campaigns with rigid creative direction consistently underperform relative to those that give creators room to present products in their own voice. For food brands specifically, native content — a creator actually cooking with or eating the product — generates far more authentic engagement than posts that look and feel like advertisements.
Without baseline tracking in place before the campaign launches, brands cannot accurately attribute results to influencer activity. Establishing pre-campaign benchmarks for brand search volume, social sentiment, and engagement allows campaign performance to be measured against real change rather than absolute metrics that could reflect factors beyond the campaign itself.
Jive PR + Digital has built campaigns for consumer food and beverage brands that require precisely the kind of integration the Daiya Foods example illustrates. The agency’s approach combines influencer marketing with traditional media relations, giving food brands presence in both the social feed and the editorial environment where purchase decisions are often researched and validated.
For plant-based, health-focused, and specialty food brands, Jive identifies creators whose audiences have genuine affinity for the category rather than creators whose follower counts look impressive on a media plan. Every influencer selection is supported by audience analysis and content performance data, with content direction designed to preserve creator authenticity rather than override it.
The earned media component runs alongside influencer activation. Jive’s PR team pitches brand stories to food publications, lifestyle media, and category-specific outlets that reach the buyers influencer content alone does not. This combination produces the kind of multi-touchpoint presence that builds lasting brand recognition rather than a short-term spike in social impressions.
Food and beverage campaigns benefit specifically from Jive’s integrated structure because the agency manages influencer contracting, content coordination, earned media outreach, and reporting under one roof. Brands working with Jive’s influencer marketing services do not need to coordinate between separate PR and creator management vendors, which eliminates the message fragmentation that undermines most mid-market food brand campaigns.
For brands in the food and beverage space looking to build the kind of category authority Daiya achieved, Jive’s integrated PR and digital approach offers a direct path from campaign strategy to measurable results in earned media, influencer performance, and brand sentiment.
The Daiya Foods influencer campaign demonstrates what integrated PR and digital execution looks like in practice for a plant-based food brand. Careful creator selection, flexible content direction, paired earned media outreach, and owned social amplification produced results across multiple metrics and audience segments — not just a one-week spike in social impressions.
For food and beverage brands planning campaigns with similar goals, the framework is straightforward: identify creators with genuine audience alignment, give them creative latitude, pair the influencer activation with a media relations component, and measure against baselines you establish before the campaign launches.
Jive PR + Digital builds integrated campaigns for consumer food and beverage brands combining influencer marketing, earned media, and social strategy under one roof. If your brand is planning a product launch, category expansion, or brand awareness campaign, contact Jive PR + Digital to discuss how an integrated approach can drive measurable results across both social and editorial channels.
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Megan Balyk
Vice President · 15+ Years of Experience
Megan Balyk is the Vice President at Jive PR + Digital, leading campaigns that build cult brands through bold storytelling and cultural relevance.
With 15+ years of industry experience, she specializes in helping ambitious brands connect authentically with Gen Z and Millennial audiences.
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