Food & Beverage Brand Investment Guide
Build a plan that's backed by benchmarks
We measured how Food & Beverage brands actually spend and what it actually returns — across trade, media, retail, and timing. The results challenge a few assumptions your 2027 plan is still built on.
Here’s what’s inside:
- Profit ROI benchmarks across channel, retailer, and platform for Food & Beverage brands
- Where your budget already moved and where it landed instead
- Top vs. bottom funnel ROI by brand size, including the gap small brands are missing
- A planned vs. optimized allocation gap worth several times the growth most brands plan
Get benchmarks you can use immediately to pressure-test your retail media plan.
8 channels
See how your mix compares to brands similar to yours.
5 revenue tiers
Compare your mix against brands under $50M all the way up to over $1B.
To show whether your next media dollar is moving toward.
Top 2025 retail media benchmarks from Keen
Our analysis surfaced the structural patterns most planning decks miss. Each benchmark below comes from Keen’s analysis of 182 brands.
Here’s a preview of the data inside the report:
Search's profit ROI eased to $1.85 in 2025, the lowest and least reliable return in the portfolio.
Across 182 brands, retail media returned a median profit ROI of 1.44, below trade (1.45), consumer promotion (1.45), and non-retail media (1.60). Among the brands growing retail media fastest, only about 1 in 4 earn more on retail media than on the non-retail media they were already running. This isn’t a “retail media is bad” story. It’s a mix problem, and mix is fixable.
96% of Food & Beverage brands running Linear TV clear break-even, the highest reliability of any channel.
Most brands keep retail media in sponsored search and performance placements that are simple to attribute and defend in a review. The returns point the other way. Top-of-funnel retail media returns a 1.85 median profit ROI versus 1.40 at the bottom, and the bottom-of-funnel trend is weakening. For small brands the top-to-bottom gap reaches 67%, and they weight the top of the funnel the least.
Audio returns $3.16 in profit for every dollar spent, the highest in the portfolio, and only 29% of brands buy it.
Search holds 70.8% of retail media spend at a 1.41 median profit ROI. Display takes 24.7% and returns 1.94. Streaming video takes just 4.4% and returns 1.74. Both display and streaming video pay back more per dollar than search and are growing faster, which is where marginal dollars should move.
One brand's marginal return moved from $0.55 to $6.13 on the exact same budget, just by rescheduling when it ran.
Amazon takes 48.3% of retail media spend across brands, yet Kroger (2.31) and Target (1.93) deliver higher median profit ROI. The concentration is steepest for small brands, which send 71% of retail media to Amazon, their lowest-paying retailer at 1.2x. Large brands already run a multi-retailer portfolio.
Optimized allocation points to 30%+ profitable growth, versus the ~4% brands plan.
Make your next dollar decisions: actionable frameworks you can use
Use the marketing industry report to:
Reframe retail media as a media decision
Make it compete head-to-head with non-retail media on incremental profit ROI, instead of treating it as a trade line item.
Rebalance your funnel mix
Use top vs. bottom funnel ROI benchmarks by brand size to move dollars out of saturated bottom-funnel search and into higher-earning top-of-funnel placements.
Shift spend by marginal ROI
Find where search has passed the point of diminishing return and how much value sits in display and streaming video.
Build a multi-retailer portfolio
Benchmark your retailer mix against brands your size and see what an over-weight to Amazon costs you.
Match the play to your brand size
The mix problem is biggest for small brands. Start there.
Close the loop between measurement and weekly buying
Move past quarterly ROI snapshots so optimized allocation shows up in the weekly plan.
Download the F&B 2027 Investment Guide
Inside the report, you’ll get:
- Profit ROI benchmarks across funnel, format, and retailer
- Decompositions of where retail media growth is funded by brand size
- Practical shifts you can make without raising total spend
Walk into your next planning meeting with a quantitative answer to “Where should the next dollar go?” and the data to defend it. Download your report now.
