Markets

Food & Beverage

Restaurants, CPG launches, and beverage brands. Press, tastings, and partnerships built to move product off shelves and fill tables.

What it is

Food press is easy to get and hard to convert.

Food and drink is one of the most covered categories in media. Openings, roundups, best-of lists, seasonal hooks. Getting mentioned is not the hard part. Getting mentioned somewhere that puts people in seats or product in carts is.

So we work backwards from the table. Where your guests actually come from, which outlets and creators those people actually read, and which desk at each outlet covers openings rather than recipes. Then we pitch the story that desk wants, on the calendar that desk works to.

For a restaurant the measure is covers. For a packaged product it is velocity off the shelf. Neither one is impressions, and we will say that in the first meeting rather than the fourth.

Caribbean and diaspora food carries a second problem. It gets written about as a trend when it is a cuisine, which caps the kind of coverage an operator can earn. Correcting that with editors is most of why owners call us instead of a generalist agency.

Who this is for

Three kinds of work, three different clocks.

Restaurants and hospitality

Openings and anniversaries, chef profiles, holiday and seasonal hooks, broadcast segments, and the neighborhood food creators who actually drive a walk-in. The work is built around your covers calendar, not ours.

Local and broadcast can move in days when the hook is real. National food press runs months ahead, so the two are planned separately and sequenced to overlap.

Clients include Rogers Burgers, Djon Djon and Fat Fowl.

Packaged food and CPG

Launches sequenced so press, creators and retail timing land together. Coverage that runs three weeks before the product is on a shelf is a cost, not a win, and it is the most common way food PR money disappears.

We plan the rollout against distribution dates and measure it against sell-through where the retailer will share it.

Clients include Frutango.

Beverage and spirits

Adult beverage runs by its own rules. Age-gating, platform limits on paid promotion, and a spirits review circuit that works months ahead of a release. A plan written for a food brand does not survive contact with any of it.

Heritage and provenance are the story here, and they are the part most agencies flatten into tasting notes.

Clients include Saint Sauveur 1972, the Haitian heritage rum founded by Melky Jean.

Questions

Before you get in touch.

How long before a new restaurant sees coverage?

Local and broadcast can move in days when the hook is real. Rogers Burgers landed a Fox 5 New York segment because National Hamburger Day gave the desk a reason to run it. National print and the glossy food titles run on a two to four month lead. The two are planned on different clocks and we will tell you which one your goal needs.

Do you work with restaurants outside New York?

Yes. The team works from Brooklyn to Canada to Thailand, and the Caribbean and diaspora relationships travel further than the New York ones do. Local press still needs local relationships, so we say plainly on the first call whether we already have them in your market or have to build them.

What does food and beverage PR cost at Playbook MG?

Monthly retainers, scoped to the number of locations and whether you are chasing local, national or broadcast. A single-location restaurant on a local hook is a different number from a CPG launch with a retail date behind it, and we will tell you which one you are before we quote.

Can you guarantee a TV segment?

No, and anyone who does is selling you something. We have booked broadcast repeatedly, including that Fox 5 New York segment. What we control is the hook, the timing, and the relationship with the desk. The booker still decides, and a plan that depends on a guarantee is a bad plan.

How we do it
Other markets
White paper

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The white paper goes past the case studies: how we build the target list for a food brand, what the press cycle actually looks like month by month, and how the work is measured against covers and sell-through rather than clip count.

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Tell us what you're up against.

Attention, awareness, relevance, consideration. Most brands lose it at one of the four.

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