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Food and Beverage businesses are tapping into the power of user-generated content (UGC) to forge genuine connections with their audience. Food enthusiasts on Instagram and creative home chefs on TikTok have emerged as influential brand ambassadors, sharing their culinary discoveries and genuine experiences.
For food and beverage brands, UGC has become an essential marketing resource, providing an organic way to present their offerings in everyday settings. Modern diners increasingly look to fellow food lovers for recommendations rather than traditional advertisements, making authentic content a vital tool for establishing credibility and fostering engagement.
UGC does more than just validate a brand – it creates a vibrant ecosystem where brands and their communities interact meaningfully. Customers become storytellers, sharing their personal experiences and contributing to the brand’s narrative.
In this article, we’ll show how leading food and beverage brands have effectively utilised UGC to enhance their social proof, expand their audience reach, and build authentic connections.
User-generated content has proven to be an exceptionally powerful and transformative tool for food and beverage brands, consistently demonstrating remarkable effectiveness in addressing industry challenges through several key approaches. This customer-created content format stands out as a particularly valuable solution, offering unique ways to engage with food enthusiasts:
By leveraging UGC, food and beverage brands can create a more inclusive, authentic, and engaging content marketing strategy that resonates with modern consumers while addressing industry-specific challenges.
Naturitas recognised the value of their community in enhancing the credibility of their products. In this market, the products must be reliable and trustworthy. The consumer is the priority and has to trust the product. Therefore, social proof plays a crucial role in the strategy, as it effectively demonstrates the product’s value.
With the Flowbox implementation, Naturitas have shown incredible results through the use of the hashtags #naturitas and #soynaturlover. Users share images of their favourite recipes using Naturitas products.
They have achieved a 21.76% increase in average order value and they also found that users who interact with UGC convert 3.7X more. Read the case study on how Naturitas benefits from UGC.
As well as this, they have created a specific page for their community, with dedicated sections for recipes and supplements, facilitating the search process for users as they can filter as they like.
“Customers are guided by what other users consume and recommend. In our case, food content significantly helps to create a community, since users share ideas and recipes, and therefore can be inspired.”
Victoria Robles, CRM Specialist at Naturitas
UGC helps to show the method of the recipe, bringing the process to life, and explicitly displaying the ways in which the product can be used. This exchange of recipes and identities creates inspiration, encouraging community growth and strengthening brand identity.
Absolut, the iconic vodka brand, understands that their community is more than just customers. They’re co-creators of the brand experience. In a market where authenticity and creativity are paramount, genuine consumer voices have become essential in building trust and inspiring others.
Through their social channels, Absolut has fostered a vibrant community where cocktail enthusiasts share their mixology creations. From classic martinis to innovative signature drinks, users showcase their personal twists on Absolut-based cocktails, creating an ecosystem of inspiration.
The brand has created dedicated spaces for their community to connect, featuring sections for cocktail recipes, mixing techniques, and entertaining tips. This platform allows enthusiasts to discover new ways to enjoy Absolut products while connecting with fellow creators.
User-generated content brings cocktail creation to life, showcasing the versatility of Absolut products in real-world settings. This organic exchange of recipes and experiences not only inspires other consumers but also strengthens the brand’s position as a catalyst for creativity in cocktail culture.
In the beer industry, authenticity thrives where product and personal experience intersect. Flens’ user-generated content community page highlights how their beer becomes woven into the fabric of daily life, capturing everything from spontaneous gatherings to quiet rituals.
By showcasing unfiltered moments shared by customers, Flens transforms ordinary interactions into a collective celebration of what it means to be together and enjoy a drink.
While traditional marketing emphasises brewing techniques or flavour notes, Flens understands that trust grows from seeing real people in real settings.
By inviting customers to share their moments, Flens fosters a sense of ownership over the brand’s identity. The community page highlights the diverse, unscripted ways people make Flens part of their story.
Smileat’s baby food brand centres its identity on trust, using user-generated content to highlight how real families integrate their products into daily routines. Parents are able to share their children using the Smileat products.
This is a huge advantage for the brand, as naturally parents need to trust the brand’s reliability before feeding their children with their products.
While ingredient lists and certifications matter, Smileat’s UGC cuts through parental anxiety by showing outcomes, not just promises. A video of a baby happily eating the Smileat products reassures parents and caregivers that the food isn’t just nutritious, it’s actually embraced by other consumers.
This shifts the focus from “is this safe?” to “this works for families like mine.”
The Flowbox UGC Platform has many great tools and capabilities that can help any Food and Beverage brand, no matter how big or small. Here is an overview of the key platform features that can help you automate UGC tasks:
Flowbox’s Collection Tool continuously monitors social channels (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and more) for brand mentions, tags, and designated hashtags.
Also, the Media Uploader feature enables your customers to upload UGC directly through your website or via a shareable link – no social media needed.
All captured posts flow into a single dashboard, ensuring your team never misses valuable user‑generated content.
The Moderation tool is a suite of AI‑powered moderation capabilities that lets you curate high‑quality, on‑brand UGC at scale:
Create, schedule, and distribute both user‑generated and branded content across multiple social platforms—all from within Flowbox. This unified interface eliminates manual posting, streamlines your social calendar, and preserves the authentic voice of your community.
Collect valuable customer feedback with highly customisable rating and review forms, moderate high volumes of ratings and reviews from within our platform or opt for auto moderation fields that optimise your workflow, then automatically display them directly on your product pages with different configurations to choose from.
With built‑in Google Analytics 4 integration, Flowbox lets you track every UGC interaction—clicks, conversions, engagement paths—alongside your broader marketing metrics. Use these insights to refine gallery placements, content mix, and UGC campaign tactics in a single, data‑driven dashboard.
As a brand in the food and beverage industry, implementing user-generated content marketing strategies has clearly become essential for brands looking to build authentic connections with their audience. The success stories of brands like Naturitas demonstrate that leveraging customer content can significantly impact both brand perception and sales performance.
A well-executed UGC strategy serves multiple purposes: it provides social proof, creates authentic brand representation, and helps potential customers have a sensorial digital experience where they can imagine the taste and texture of the food and beverage.
By incorporating customer photos, recipes, and experiences into their marketing mix, food and beverage brands can create a more trustworthy and relatable experience.
Book a demo with Flowbox and we’ll show you how a UGC platform can boost your brand sales.
