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Omaha Steaks overhauls its tone for Gen Z, Constellation acquires SpikedAde to chase growth, and top creators are taking fewer brand deals.
Omaha Steaks is rewriting its playbook to win Gen Z without losing loyal customers. Constellation Brands just signalled it wants more than beer. And the creators FMCG brands most want? They're saying no more often.
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: Good morning — we've got a strong show lined up today.
Klara: A century-old meat brand chasing Gen Z, Constellation Brands hinting at a much bigger portfolio ambition, and why the creators FMCG brands most want to work with are starting to say no.
Marco: Three stories that matter if you're thinking about brand relevance, portfolio strategy, or influencer marketing right now.
Klara: Let's get into it.
Marco: Omaha Steaks — a brand that's been selling meat by post for over a century — is now trying to win over Gen Z.
Klara: And that's harder than it sounds. This is a brand built on a very specific type of customer: older, loyal, probably a gift-buyer. The kind of person who orders a box of steaks for their dad's birthday. That customer has been the backbone of the business for decades.
Marco: So what's changed? The brand is now actively reworking how it talks to people. Less polished, corporate-sounding copy. More honest, direct, culturally aware messaging — the kind of tone that actually lands with a younger audience. Gen Z, as a group, has an extremely good radar for when a brand is performing rather than being real.
Klara: And that's the challenge every heritage brand faces. You modernise your voice, you risk sounding like you're trying too hard. You stay traditional, you slowly become invisible to a whole generation of future customers.
Marco: For brand managers, the lesson is about sequencing. You don't blow up your existing tone overnight. You test new messaging in new channels first — social, short video — while keeping the core brand voice intact in the places your loyal customers actually look.
Klara: I'd add a small note of caution here though. Omaha Steaks is a direct-to-consumer brand, which means it controls its own channels completely. That makes repositioning easier. Most European FMCG brands sell through retailers — Tesco, Carrefour, Albert Heijn — so they don't have the same freedom to experiment quietly in a corner.
Marco: That's a fair distinction. The principle holds, but the path looks different if a retailer is gatekeeping your shelf space and your customer data.
Klara: Worth keeping in mind.
Marco: Now, let's move to our next story.
Marco: Constellation Brands — the company behind Corona and Modelo — has just bought an alcoholic hydration drink called SpikedAde, and it's telling us something important about where big drinks companies are heading.
Klara: A bit of context first. Constellation is one of the largest beer businesses in the world, but beer volumes have been flat or falling in many markets for a few years now. Younger drinkers are choosing different occasions — sports recovery drinks, flavoured alcohol, lighter options. That's pressure on any company that built its business on lager.
Marco: So the move here is deliberate. They've acquired SpikedAde — a drink that sits in what you'd call the hydration-adjacent space. Think alcoholic drinks that borrow the image of sports or energy drinks. The CEO has been clear that beer stays at the centre of the business, but they're actively looking for external deals in other growth areas. SpikedAde is the first visible step in that direction.
Klara: And this is where it gets interesting for brand managers outside of drinks too. The question isn't just "should we expand?" It's "does expanding into a new space make our core business stronger, or does it just spread our attention thinner?"
Marco: My read is that Constellation is doing this the right way — buying in rather than trying to build from scratch. They're not asking their beer teams to invent a new drink category. They're acquiring an existing brand that already has momentum, and then deciding how much to invest behind it.
Klara: I'm slightly less convinced. Buying something and actually building it are two different skills. A lot of these adjacency acquisitions — buying into a nearby category — look clever on paper and then quietly disappear from shelves two years later. The track record across FMCG isn't always pretty.
Marco: That's a fair challenge. The acquisition is only step one.
Klara: Exactly the part most people forget.
Marco: Our third story is coming up next.
Marco: Top creators — the people with the biggest, most engaged audiences on platforms like YouTube and Instagram — are taking fewer brand deals. Not more. Fewer.
Klara: Let's rewind a bit. For the last several years, FMCG brands piled into influencer marketing by working with as many creators as possible. The logic was simple: more creators, more reach, more people seeing your product. Brands ran what you'd call volume strategies — dozens or sometimes hundreds of partnerships at once, each one fairly short and fairly shallow.
Marco: That model is now running into a wall. The creators at the top — the ones with genuinely loyal audiences — are cutting back on how many brands they'll work with. They want fewer partnerships, longer commitments, and a real say in how the content is made. Not a brief and a deadline. Actual creative involvement.
Klara: Which changes the maths completely. If you've built your entire influencer approach around booking twenty mid-sized creators for a campaign, and the ones you actually want are now saying no to that kind of deal, you have a problem.
Marco: The brands that will hold on to the best creator relationships are the ones offering something more than a cheque. They're offering genuine collaboration — treating creators more like co-authors than delivery vehicles.
Klara: I'd slightly push back on one thing, though. This is mostly a story about the very top tier of creators. There's still a large middle layer of creators who are actively looking for more brand work. For smaller FMCG brands without the budget to lock up a major name, that middle layer might actually become more accessible as top creators get pickier.
Marco: A real point. The cream of the crop is getting harder and more expensive to reach — but the field underneath them is opening up.
Klara: The question is whether your brand is distinctive enough to stand out wherever you play.
Marco: The through-line today is earning attention — whether that's from a twenty-year-old who's never heard of your brand, a retail buyer weighing your portfolio stretch, or a creator who's turning down half the briefs they receive.
Klara: So ask yourself honestly — what has your brand actually done recently to deserve that attention?