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Nestlé sells SimplyCook to Jardox, Sazerac acquires Full Sail Brewing, and Levi's uses claymation to push back against AI advertising.
Nestlé is cutting loose a DTC bet, Sazerac is buying into craft beer to chase drifting drinkers, and Levi's is making a pointed creative statement with handmade claymation. Three moves every FMCG marketer should understand.
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 — today's show is packed with moves worth paying attention to.
Klara: Nestlé is shedding a business, and the reason why tells you a lot about where big food companies are heading.
Marco: Then we're looking at a spirits giant buying a craft brewery — and what that actually means for the beer aisle.
Klara: And Levi's just made a holiday ad entirely by hand. On purpose. We'll explain why that matters.
Marco: Let's get into it.
Marco: Nestlé has sold SimplyCook — its UK meal-kit business — and the move tells us something important about how the world's largest food company is thinking right now.
Klara: Let's rewind a little. SimplyCook is a subscription service — meaning customers pay regularly to receive recipe kits delivered to their door. Nestlé bought the business not long ago as part of a wider bet on direct-to-consumer models, where brands sell straight to shoppers without going through supermarkets. That bet, it turns out, didn't stick.
Marco: The buyer is Jardox, a UK-based ingredient and flavour supplier. So SimplyCook is moving from one of the world's biggest FMCG companies into a much smaller, more specialist business. For Nestlé, this is a clean exit from a category that never quite fitted what they do at scale.
Klara: And this is worth pausing on, because we recently talked about Mondelez using small acquisitions to build out their portfolio — adding new products, new bets. Nestlé is doing the opposite. They're stripping back. The question for me is — was SimplyCook ever a natural fit for Nestlé, or did it look better on paper than it performed in reality?
Marco: Probably both. The direct-to-consumer meal-kit space is tough. High churn — that means customers cancelling their subscriptions — high delivery costs, and fierce competition. For a company Nestlé's size, that kind of business is a distraction if it's not delivering meaningful scale.
Klara: I'd actually argue there's something healthy about this. Big companies hang on to struggling businesses far too long. Selling quickly is a sign of discipline, not failure.
Marco: I take that point, but speed also raises questions about how thoroughly the acquisition was evaluated in the first place.
Klara: Fair challenge. Either way, it's a reminder that "portfolio fit" isn't just a phrase — it's a real strategic test, and Nestlé just acted on it.
Marco: Our next story is waiting — let's move on.
Marco: Sazerac — the American spirits company behind Buffalo Trace whiskey and Fireball — has just bought a craft brewery, and the reason why tells you a lot about where the drinks industry is heading.
Klara: To understand why this matters, you need to know that spirits sales have been under real pressure lately. Beer and RTDs — ready-to-drink canned cocktails and hard seltzers — have been pulling drinkers away from traditional spirits. Sazerac is one of the biggest spirits companies in the US, but even they can feel that shift.
Marco: So rather than simply trying to win back those lost drinkers through advertising alone, they've bought their way into craft beer. The acquisition is Full Sail Brewing — an Oregon-based brewery with over 35 years of history and a loyal following in the Pacific Northwest. It's a credible, well-loved brand. This isn't a random purchase. It's a deliberate move into a category that's taking their customers.
Klara: What strikes me is the logic. Instead of spending heavily to defend the spirits shelf, Sazerac now has a presence on the craft beer shelf too. If a consumer drifts toward beer for a while, Sazerac still gets the sale.
Marco: That's the defensive play. And it's something brand managers in any category should think about. When a rival category is growing at your expense, sometimes the most effective response isn't more marketing spend — it's owning a piece of that rival category.
Klara: Though I'd push back slightly — buying into a new category is expensive, and integrating a craft brewery into a spirits business is genuinely complicated. Culture, distribution, retailer relationships — they're all different. The logic is clean, but the execution is where these deals get messy.
Marco: Which is exactly why it's worth watching closely. Coming up — our third story is on the desk.
Marco: Levi's has launched a holiday campaign built entirely from claymation — and it's making a very deliberate point about how brands should be communicating right now.
Klara: To understand why this is interesting, you need to know what's been happening in brand advertising over the past year or so. AI-generated content — videos, images, copy, all produced by artificial intelligence rather than human creative teams — has flooded into holiday campaigns. It's cheaper and faster, so brands under cost pressure have been reaching for it.
Marco: Claymation is the opposite of that. It's a physical, painstaking animation technique where models are sculpted by hand and photographed frame by frame. It takes real time, real skill, and real craft. Levi's didn't stumble into this choice — the campaign is explicitly framed as a reaction to the AI content wave. The medium they chose is the message.
Klara: And that's what I find genuinely clever about it. Levi's isn't just making a pretty ad. They're using the production method itself to say something about who they are. Handmade, careful, human. In a sea of AI output, that stands out — almost by definition.
Marco: For FMCG brand managers, this raises an uncomfortable question. The pressure to cut production costs with AI is real. It's coming from finance, from procurement, from everywhere. But Levi's is betting that in a world where AI content becomes ubiquitous, visibly human-made work becomes a differentiator — something worth paying a premium for.
Klara: I'd partly agree, but I'd also say this works for Levi's because craft and heritage are already central to what they sell. For a brand without that existing credibility, the same move could feel forced. The lesson isn't "use claymation" — it's "make sure your creative choices actually connect back to what your brand already stands for."
Marco: And that's worth pinning to the wall before your next campaign brief lands.
Marco: Today's clearest signal — the brands making real moves right now are the ones being ruthless about what they keep and what they let go.
Klara: So look at your portfolio, your creative, your category — and ask honestly: is every choice you're making a deliberate one, or just a default?