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Mondelez acquires gluten-free Undercover Snacks, Colgate uses animated content for oral health in Mexico, and Celsius activates at the NYC Marathon's 50th anniversary.
Mondelez is buying its way into better-for-you snacking, Colgate is ditching product ads for animated education in Mexico, and Celsius is betting big on the NYC Marathon's 50th anniversary. Three moves every FMCG marketer should decode today.
In this episode:
The FMCG Marketing Daily is a concise briefing for FMCG and CPG marketers, brand managers and CMOs, hosted by Marco & Klara. New episode every day.
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Also from Marco & Klara: The Digital Commerce Daily · The Health Marketing Daily
The essential morning briefing for brand leaders in fast-moving consumer goods. Hosted by Marco and Klara — two senior strategists with decades of experience inside global CPG companies and consultancies. Every episode covers retail media and distribution shifts, brand and competitor moves from Unilever, Coke, Nestlé, and challenger brands, and the macro and regulatory forces reshaping the category. Authoritative. Analytical. No noise. Built for brand managers, trade marketers, CMOs, and agency directors who need to stay ahead.
Marco: Morning — three good ones lined up for you today.
Klara: Mondelez is reshaping its snacks portfolio with a better-for-you acquisition, we're looking at how Colgate is using animated entertainment to change brushing habits in Mexico, and then we're asking why so many brands are suddenly queuing up to sponsor the New York Marathon's 50th anniversary.
Marco: Let's get started.
Marco: Mondelez — the company behind Oreo and Ritz — has just bought a stake in a gluten-free snack brand called Undercover Snacks, and it tells us something important about where big food is heading.
Klara: To understand why this matters, you need to know what Mondelez is. It's the world's largest company focused purely on snacking. Its entire business is biscuits, chocolate, crackers. For a long time, that meant leaning into indulgence — treating yourself, not eating healthily. But consumer habits have been shifting, and the pressure to offer something better-for-you has been building for years.
Marco: So here's what actually happened. Mondelez has taken a majority stake in Undercover Snacks — a small, gluten-free challenger brand. The deal landed on the same day Mondelez beat its third-quarter profit targets, which is worth noting. When a company has financial breathing room, acquisitions like this stop being experiments and start becoming strategy.
Klara: What I find interesting is the method. They didn't just launch a new "healthier" Oreo variant. They bought an outside brand with its own identity and credibility. That's a deliberate choice.
Marco: And I think it's the smarter move. Consumers who are health-conscious are often sceptical of big brands suddenly going clean. An acquired challenger carries authenticity that a line extension — a new version of an existing product — simply can't manufacture overnight.
Klara: I'd slightly push back on that. Buying credibility only works if you leave the brand alone. The moment Mondelez starts pushing Undercover Snacks into every Carrefour and Tesco at scale, some of that independent appeal disappears. Distribution can dilute the very thing you paid for.
Marco: Fair challenge. The tension between scale and authenticity is real, and Mondelez will need to manage it carefully.
Klara: Worth watching how much operational control they actually hand over.
Marco: Now, our next story is waiting — let's get to it.
Marco: Colgate has just launched an animated social media campaign in Mexico — and the thinking behind it is worth unpacking.
Klara: For context, Colgate is one of the biggest oral care brands in the world. Like most big FMCG companies, it has historically relied on traditional advertising — TV spots, product claims, before-and-after comparisons. But that model is under pressure. Consumers, especially younger ones, are getting better at tuning ads out. In markets like Mexico, that problem is particularly acute.
Marco: So what Colgate actually did here is interesting. Working with agency VML, they built an animated content series for social media — designed around cavity prevention education rather than pushing a product. No hard sell. The goal is to change how people think about oral health, and let the brand sit alongside that rather than shouting over it.
Klara: The term for this is branded entertainment — where a company funds content that people actually want to watch, and the brand earns goodwill by being useful or enjoyable rather than just present. It's not a new idea, but using animation specifically to teach oral hygiene habits is a smart call. It's accessible, it works across age groups, and it doesn't feel like an ad.
Marco: The bigger question is whether this model travels. If you can shift budget from product-claims advertising into educational entertainment and get better engagement in Mexico, why wouldn't you test that in France or Germany or the UK?
Klara: I'd add a note of caution there. Mexico is a specific context — high mobile usage, particular distrust of traditional advertising. What lands there doesn't automatically land in, say, a Rewe customer in Stuttgart. You still need to test locally.
Marco: True. But as a direction of travel, this feels like something more brand managers should be watching.
Klara: Our third story is up next.
Marco: The New York City Marathon's 50th anniversary has pulled in one of the most diverse brand rosters the race has ever seen — and for FMCG marketers, that's worth paying attention to.
Klara: A bit of background. Marathon sponsorship used to be fairly predictable territory — running shoe brands, sports nutrition, maybe a big bank. The brands that showed up were obvious fits. But over the last few years, the profile of marathon participants has changed. More casual runners, more health-conscious consumers across a wider age range. That's made these events considerably more attractive to brands that have nothing to do with running shoes.
Marco: So for this anniversary edition, the brand list has expanded noticeably. Celsius — the energy drink challenger brand — is activating at the event. So is Maybelline, which is owned by L'Oréal and has a long history with marathon sponsorship. What's new is the sheer breadth of categories now treating this as prime territory. You've got a functional beverage challenger sitting alongside a mass-market beauty brand, both chasing the same health-forward, active consumer.
Klara: For Celsius, this makes a lot of sense. Energy drinks live or die by who's seen drinking them. Being physically present at a race with fifty thousand finishers — many of them exactly the kind of consumer Celsius wants — is a far more credible statement than a digital ad. You can't fake that association.
Marco: I'd extend that point further. This is a signal that mass participation events — not elite sports, not big-ticket stadium deals — are quietly becoming the most valuable cultural stage for health-positioned brands. The audience self-selects. They've already told you something important about themselves just by showing up.
Klara: Though I'd watch the clutter risk. When the brand roster gets this wide, standing out becomes genuinely hard. Celsius and Maybelline need very different things from this event — and doing it well requires more than just putting your logo on the finish line.
Marco: The brands that win these spaces are the ones with a clear idea of what they want the consumer to feel — and an activation that actually delivers it.
Marco: Today's clearest signal — the brands gaining ground right now are the ones actively reshaping what they stand for, not just what they sell.
Klara: So pick one part of your portfolio and ask honestly: does it reflect where your consumer is heading, or where they used to be?