Julia Faria
Research lead covering advertising and marketing
Food advertising in the United States – statistics & facts
From in-store displays to commercials and even packaging, food companies try to be creative, stand out, and extend their competition for customers' minds, hearts, and stomachs with their advertisements. This increases the amount of money spent on advertising each year. In 2024, local advertising expenditure of the food and restaurant industry in the United States was expected to reach 14.1 billion U.S. dollars, up more than three percent from the previous year.
Subsectors
At the subsegment level, the U.S. canned, frozen and preserved fruits, vegetables and food specialties sector was the leader with local ad expenses exceeded 1.1 billion dollars in 2023, up from 980 million dollars, a year earlier. The U.S. bottled and canned soft drinks and carbonated waters industry followed with roughly 756 million dollars in 2023. Meanwhile, the sugar and confectionary products industry spent approximately 627 million dollars on local advertising activities that year.Leading food brands
Brand value is a term used by marketers to describe the worth of a brand. In 2024, Switzerland-based Nestlé was the highest-valued food brand by a wide margin worldwide, with a brand value of approximately 20.8 billion dollars. Potato chip producer Lay's – run by PepsiCo – followed the Swiss giant with over 12 billion dollars.Largest advertisers
The data shows that food companies will continue to spend heavily on ads to compete over brand value and market share. In 2023, the largest advertiser among the sugar and confectionary product manufacturing brands in the U.S. was Hershey Company, spending more than 2.5 times more than its nearest competitor. Meantime, Anheuser-Busch led in beverage manufacturing ad spend that year, albeit more closely followed by Coca-Cola. If the top players keep this dynamic, the competition for consumer preference will continue to scale ad dollar by ad dollar.
