Today’s consumers are overwhelmed with content, yet they still turn to one format more than any other: recipes. According to a Google/Ipsos study, more than 87% of U.S. consumers use recipes to guide their food purchases. For food brands, that’s a golden opportunity.
Branded recipes go beyond inspiration. A recent survey by Greenpark Digital revealed that 66% of consumers have purchased a food product or ingredient featured in a recipe they've seen online, emphasizing the opportunity for brands to meet consumers at the intersection of inspiration and purchase.
Recipes integrate your product directly into the consumer’s meal plan and shopping list, show users how to cook with your products and allow you to build positive brand associations. This makes recipe development a high-performing tool for brand marketing, from brand awareness, to brand growth and brand sales.
At SideChef, we help brands with Food Advertising, in particular recipe-based ads and in-recipe campaigns. In this article, we’ll explain how brands can leverage recipe development for their overall marketing strategy.
Recipes aren’t just fluff content, they’re high-performing, high-converting tools. According to Statista, nearly 33% of U.S. adults searched online for recipes before making food or grocery purchases in 2023. And when those recipes feature your product naturally, it becomes part of the solution, not just another SKU on a shelf.
Recipe development is the process of creating engaging, brand-aligned recipes that showcase your product as a hero ingredient. For CPG brands, this means demonstrating how your pasta sauce, plant-based protein, artisanal spice blend, or frozen dumplings can fit into a delicious meal at home.
But this isn’t about throwing a random dish on your website and hoping for conversions. Strategic recipe development ties into:
SideChef works with brands to create, enhance, structure and SEO-optimize recipes that not only rank well but also convert. From gluten-free content to seasonal campaigns, each recipe is designed to meet your target customers where they are, whether they're passionate about home cooking and love discovering inspiration content when scrolling on their phones - or simply need to shop for groceries and prepare everyday weeknight meals for their family.
Here’s 5 reasons recipe development is essential when marketing your food product:
1. It Closes the Imagination Gap - Your customer may love the idea of your product—but if they can’t picture how to use it, it ends up collecting dust.
2. It Increases Consumption Frequency - If a customer buys your salsa to make tacos and then doesn’t know what else to do with it, they won’t buy it again for weeks. But show them it can also go on eggs, burgers, or in a salad dressing, and suddenly, it becomes a pantry staple.
3. It Fuels SEO and Content Strategy - Recipe pages are evergreen, keyword-rich, and ideal for SEO. One high-performing recipe can bring in thousands of new eyeballs a month.
4. It Powers Your Social Media and Email - One dish = a TikTok demo, an Instagram carousel, a Pinterest pin, a blog post, a reel, and a week’s worth of story content.
5. It Encourages Basket Building - When your product appears in a recipe alongside other items from your portfolio—or complementary brands you partner with—it boosts cart size and drives strategic upsell opportunities. Retailers love that.
For CPG brands, recipe development isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It’s a blend of culinary creativity, brand strategy, and data-driven decisions. Here’s a typical flow:
Chobani has effectively leveraged recipe-driven marketing to transform its yogurt from a simple snack into a versatile kitchen staple. Through its website, social channels, and partnerships with food influencers, Chobani shares a wide range of recipes that highlight both classic and unexpected uses of its products—think smoothies, salad dressings, baked goods, dips, and even savory sauces.
These recipes not only showcase the flavor and functionality of Chobani yogurt but also position the brand as a creative, health-conscious solution for everyday cooking, taping into broader lifestyle trends around wellness and home cooking. For instance, Chobani's "The Chobani Table" campaign, which featured a digital and physical cookbook experience, generated over 1.2 million impressions and 22,000 engagements through influencer partnerships alone, demonstrating the effectiveness of recipe-based content in engaging consumers and enhancing brand visibility.
To amplify its bold, playful image, Doritos launched a Super Bowl campaign with SideChef featuring inventive recipes like the Doritos® Loaded Poke Bowl. These recipes were not just eye-catching, but fully shoppable, integrating seamlessly into SideChef’s homepage and Pinterest ads.
Branded recipes helped Doritos own the game-day conversation with flavorful, clickable meals that delivered strong engagement.
Explore the full Doritos campaign case study.
To amplify its holiday presence, Nestlé Toll House collaborated with Pinterest to launch a holiday-themed dessert series featuring its classic chocolate chips. The campaign utilized Pinterest's unique features to run a successful holiday ad campaign, leading to an impressive 8% sales lift and 3.53x increase in YoY ROAS. Explore the full Pinterest success story.
Case Study #4: Pullsbury
Among traditional CPG brands, Pillsbury is another classic example. Pillsbury has effectively utilized recipe-driven marketing to transform its products into essential kitchen staples, fostering deeper connections with consumers. A prime example is their collaboration with Pinterest, where they tailored recipe content to resonate with their target audience.
Recognizing that Pinterest reaches 72% of U.S. moms—a key demographic for Pillsbury—they strategically released holiday-themed recipes early in the season to align with peak search times. By investing nearly 90% of their campaign budget into video content, they achieved a significant lift in both Pin awareness and action intent, demonstrating the power of engaging, recipe-centric content in driving consumer interest and action.
When it comes to recipe development for brands, it’s not just about tossing your product into any old dish. The best recipes are thoughtfully created around what your product does best, making it feel natural and tasty—not forced.
The secret sauce here is tailoring recipes to highlight the product’s strengths and the audience’s needs. Whether you’re cooking for keto fans, plant-based eaters, or busy families, recipes should feel relevant and inspiring. Plus, they need to be tested and easy to follow—no one wants to try a recipe that falls flat or feels confusing.
Instead of sharing a random recipe here and there, many brands find success in rolling out themed collections. Think of bundles like “5 Easy Dinners,” “Weeknight Meals Made Simple,” or seasonal series tied to holidays or campaigns. These collections help create consistency and give people reasons to come back for more. They’re also great for social media, in-store activations, or even QR codes on packaging.
A good recipe needs good visuals to make people want to try it. Video content—whether quick TikTok-style clips or longer how-to demos—really helps bring a recipe to life and keeps people engaged. These videos can be used across social channels, websites, or even in-store screens, making the recipe more than just text on a page.
SideChef supports food brands with content creation and optimizations, from TikTok-style cooking videos to fully produced long-form recipe demos. Learn more in our guide on how food brands use social media to sell more, and see how product placement in food advertising brings branded visuals to life across platforms.
Even the best recipe won’t do much if people can’t find it. That’s why optimizing recipes for search engines is key. Using clear ingredient lists, proper markup, and thoughtful descriptions helps recipes show up in Google searches, Pinterest, voice assistants, and more. Also, tailoring recipes for local tastes or specific diets can lead to much higher engagement—sometimes double compared to more generic content.
Test out how well your recipe is written with a SEO optimizer plugin such as TextOptimizer, and keep an eye out for the performance in Google Search Console.
Branded recipe content doesn’t just look good, it performs. Successful recipe strategies often lead to increased engagement, stronger brand recall, and seamless add-to-cart behavior. When done right, these experiences bridge the gap between inspiration and purchase, helping brands reach home cooks in the moments that matter most.
Through SideChef’s platform, brands also get real-time reporting on views, saves, clicks, and cart additions, enabling performance-driven recipe content strategies.
Check out all case studies of SideChef with CPG brands, such as:
In an era where food brands are looking for content that performs across platforms, branded recipes stand out. They’re not just engaging, they’re functional, search-friendly, and purchase-driven.
If you're ready to turn your products into meals, not just marketing assets, it’s time to invest in recipe development for food advertising.
Want to create content that actually drives trial and loyalty? Partner with SideChef to develop custom, shoppable recipes that connect with home cooks, and convert, and to help distribute your content amongst high-intent shoppers with shoppable ads and in-recipe campaigns. Or, explore our recipe site widgets and CMS tool solutions, to enhance your own branded platform and simplify your recipe creation processes.
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