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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:
Flowbox stands out with its sophisticated content collection system that automatically monitors and gathers user-generated content across social media platforms. The system springs into action whenever users mention your brand, tag you in their posts, or use your designated hashtags, ensuring no valuable content slips through the cracks.
The platform’s social media integration capabilities allow your brand to collect content from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and other platforms, all from a single dashboard. Check out this collection of articles to see all the platforms you can connect to Flowbox as a source.
Flowbox’s content moderation tools represent a significant advancement in UGC management, combining artificial intelligence with sophisticated quality assessment capabilities. The tool offers comprehensive solutions for brands seeking to streamline their content curation process while maintaining high standards.
The great thing about using Flowbox is that you can send rights requests directly to the users and easily track their responses. Additionally, you can create templates to message the user for a request, and personalise this message however you like.
Once the request is granted, Flowbox’s auto-approve functionality automatically approves the content for use, making the whole process even easier for your team. Check out this article if you want to know more about rights requests and permissions: User Generated Content Permission, Rights, Laws & Legal Issues.
Flowbox’s Smart Tags feature leverages artificial intelligence to streamline content categorisation and moderation. The system automatically identifies key elements within posts and assigns relevant tags, significantly reducing manual moderation time while maintaining accuracy.
This AI-powered system can detect objects, scenes, colours, and even sentiment within content, making it easier to organise and filter large volumes of UGC. The technology also helps identify brand-relevant content and automatically flags potentially inappropriate material, ensuring both efficiency and brand safety.
The Quality Rate tool employs sophisticated AI algorithms to evaluate both technical and aesthetic aspects of user-generated photos. Drawing from a vast database of over 340,000 Instagram images, it assigns scores from 1-100, enabling efficient bulk moderation based on image quality standards.
This scoring system considers factors like lighting, composition, focus clarity, and overall visual appeal to ensure only the highest quality content is selected for brand campaigns.
An effective way to ensure that you’re only collecting content that you want to use is with tools like Blocked Users and Whitelisted Users. These are 2 Flowbox tools that allow your brand to block spam content while giving a green light to content that you know you’ll be interested in seeing.
From there, managing your content is easy, as you just need to approve the images and videos that you would like to appear on your eCommerce.
The advanced Publish feature enables seamless organisation and distribution of user-generated and brand content across multiple platforms. This integration helps maintain a cohesive brand presence while preserving the authentic voice that resonates with audiences.
The tool’s interface allows users to create, customise, schedule, and publish content directly to their social media accounts. Which greatly reduces the time spent by social media managers on planning and shooting content to post manually on a variety of platforms. It can all be done within the Flowbox platform.
Track UGC performance across all channels with comprehensive analytics features, helping you make data-driven decisions about your content strategy. With Flowbox’s Google Analytics 4 integration, you can send analytics events directly from your Flows.
This enables you to monitor user interactions, track conversion paths, and measure the impact of your UGC campaigns alongside your other marketing metrics in a single, unified dashboard. Find out more on Flowbox’s advanced website analytics and how you can harness data-driven marketing.ced tools that your brand can take advantage of to optimise your digital marketing strategy with Flowbox.
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.
