By ROOT Marketing & PR
The food and beverage space continues to get more crowded each day. More brands competing for the same shelf space, the same customer trust, and dwindling media attention, which means standing out takes more than a great product and a well-timed press release. That work still matters, especially for bigger CPG brands who need the machinery of traditional PR running – but here’s what we tell clients: brand mentions in articles isn’t enough on its own anymore. The leaders behind the brand need to be seen as the experts in their space too — not instead of consumer-facing PR, but alongside it.
That’s thought leadership: not a replacement for brand and product PR, but an additional edge — one more way to rise above a genuinely noisy field, focused on the brand’s expertise rather than simply what it produces. In a market this crowded, you want both working for you as one gets your brand covered, the other gets a leader’s take when a reporter, a conference organizer, or a future customer needs someone to explain what’s actually happening in the industry.
This is exactly the kind of work we build for clients to strengthen their existing PR.
Kristine Root’s “The End of Cheap Food”
Kristine’s report isn’t a press release. It’s a credential. The End of Cheap Food report finds that fewer than 1% of fast-growing brands are capturing 27% of U.S. CPG category growth. It lays out the differentiators between the companies succeeding: ingredient integrity, sourcing decisions, transparency, and quality.
Rather than waiting for a reporter to call Kristine for a quote, we built the case for her to set the terms of the conversation herself — publishing original research and a clear point of view. In just two weeks, the report was picked up by publications like New Hope Network, The Packer fresh produce trade magazine and Food Engineering & Ingredients, giving her content for her personal and company marketing, and fodder for a conference-speaking push aimed at stages like Progressive Grocer, IFT FIRST, and Trellis GreenBiz.
Good Meat Project’s Earned Thought Leadership
Instead of pitching individual events one at a time, we built a thought leadership strategy, treating Good Meat Project’s voices as industry experts worth having on a video interview series, podcast, a print profile, and as the focus of a major agriculture publication, not just a one-off source for a one-sentence quote when a regenerative-meat story comes along. Good Meat Project was featured prominently in Martha Stewart, Food & Wine, Offrange, Oregon NPR and dozens of other publications.
Fermented Food Holdings’ (FFH) leadership team
Before FFH became a retainer client for brand-level PR — the Costco launches, the Wirecutter placements — we positioned FFH leadership as subject matter experts: people the fermentation and natural products world should be listening to, not just people running a company in it. The new CEO landed The Business of Agriculture podcast, the Food for Thought podcast, and was featured in GQ and many other outlets.
Three different clients, three different categories, same underlying motive: in a crowded field, don’t just get the brand noticed — make the people behind it the ones others turn to for the answer.
The Building Blocks
If you’re a leader wondering where to start, it’s rarely one big swing — it’s a handful of moves, done consistently, that compound.
Speaking — paid and unpaid. Not every stage pays, and that’s fine; some offer a stipend and expenses, others just cover costs, and trade shows may require exhibitor status. Increasingly, speaking slots come bundled into larger integrated marketing packages. What matters more than the fee is fit: know your audience before you say yes, prioritize quality over quantity, and target events where the room actually includes your customers, peers, or press — think Expo West, SXSW, Fast Company’s Innovation Festival, or the Fancy Food Shows, depending on your category.
Awards. A win is third-party credibility you can’t buy any other way. It says someone other than you decided you’re good at this. The trick is treating it like a program, not a one-off: research where your actual customers read (trade magazines, industry publications, not just any list), track deadlines on a real schedule, and budget realistically (most nominations run around $100, though logo licensing on a big win can run $5K or more — worth a case-by-case ROI call).
Judging gigs. The flip side of awards: sitting on the judging panel for one puts you inside the room deciding who’s credible, which is its own form of authority. It’s a door that opens most easily once you’ve built a little visibility elsewhere.
Podcasts. Guesting on someone else’s podcast borrows their audience and their credibility in one move, often for a fraction of the effort a speaking engagement takes, and it compounds well with everything else here (a strong podcast appearance is easy to repurpose into social content or newsletter material afterward).
Your own blog. Not the company blog — a leader’s own voice, writing in first person about what they’re actually seeing in the industry. This is the lowest-cost, highest-control version of thought leadership, and it’s the raw material everything else gets built from.
Your own voice on LinkedIn. The single most underused asset most executives have. A personal LinkedIn presence — real posts, real point of view, not just reshares of the company page — is free, immediate, and often outperforms far more expensive tactics for building a reputation as the person to know in a category.
If you want to go further, a few less obvious moves are worth a look too: bylined articles in trade press (a piece under a leader’s own name, borrowing someone else’s readership); original research, like Kristine’s report — one of the highest-authority moves available, because it means you’re not commenting on the story, you’re creating it; and board or advisory seats with industry associations or local groups, a quieter credibility signal that compounds over time.
The market is getting noisier by the day. The brands and leaders who stand out won’t just be the ones with the best product or the best press release — they’ll be the ones people already trust as the experts before they even see the pitch.
We’d Love to Help
Building a platform like this — the right speaking slots, a submission worth entering, a LinkedIn presence people actually follow — takes real strategy and follow-through, and it’s easy to let it slide when things get busy. A PR team can help you figure out where to focus, sharpen your message, and make sure it actually happens instead of remaining a “someday” idea.
We’d love to help! Drop us a note via our website here so we can set up a time to chat about how to help you stand head and shoulders above the crowd.
