So You’re a Food & Beverage Brand? Here’s How to Build Consumer Trust (2023/2024)

As a consumer, choosing which food to eat and beverage to drink is easy, given the many options out there. If you’re a food and beverage brand, how do you ensure that consumers choose you over others?

It’s not just about being visible or known now. It’s all about gaining – and keeping – consumer trust.

Let’s look at the elements of this trust and how you can get started!

Elements of Consumer Trust

●     High quality and great taste

Great food & beverage quality often influences how we perceive its taste. Thus, when brands speak of the quality of their products – and even price it accordingly – the return, the taste, and the experience has to be commensurate.

It’s crucial, then, for brands to ensure that they deliver on their promises.

Otherwise, this happens: last month, Reuters published a story about a lawsuit against Starbucks because its “refresher fruit beverages lacked a key ingredient: fruit.”

Imagine paying good money for a product that doesn’t contain what the product advertises! That this issue led to a class action tells us that people are looking more closely into what goes into their food experiences. Food, after all, is ultimately experiential and engaging to the senses.

●     Good hygiene

It should go without saying that to be able to trust a food or beverage brand, its preparation, environment, and handling must be clean.

Even a small speck of dirt or an unexpected presence in food or drink can deter a customer from making repeat purchases, regardless of the product’s high-quality ingredients and great taste. They might even start a conversation about their encounter.

On social media, this exchange of experiences often happens in groups like the Philippines’ “What’s Your Ulam, Pare?” which now has almost 930,000 members. It has become a platform for some Filipinos to share their feedback, including concerns on hygiene, on a dining experience.

To avoid being the topic of dining horror stories, make sure that you are following proper guidelines throughout every step of your production and packaging process.

●     Health and product accreditations

To help ensure that you have proper guidelines and implementation, you should seek third-party organizations to evaluate your processes and products. In the Philippines, you should definitely seek to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). You can also have various accreditations on sustainability and food safety, among others, from the ​​International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

With other credible organizations stating that your brand meets or exceeds health and safety, consumers will have more reason to believe your claims which, in turn, engenders trust.

●     Consistency

So you’ve established that your high-quality and good-tasting products are produced hygenically and carefully with the accreditation of other organizations that keep everything checked. What of it if your food & beverage service doesn’t keep it up consistently?

Consistency is still key. Take, for example, local legacy food brand Tropical Hut. It has been around for over 20 years! Even when it teetered on the verge of a possible nationwide shutdown, loyal customers that loved the brand kept it alive in efforts to keep their beloved nostalgia–inducing burger alive. Case in point, remember when a tweet from a loyal customer stating that he was the only customer in a certain Tropical Hut branch sparked an unprecedented support for the hamburger chain? Tropical Hut eventually had to hire more employees to accommodate the demand. Netizens even took it upon themselves to offer Tropical Hut rebranded assets, store layouts, and more.

This support wouldn’t have been possible without Tropical Hut building their brand and communicating their commitment through product consistency throughout the years.

How You Can Get Started

Make like Tropical Hut and get started on building your consumer base’s trust in your brand today:

●     Determine your brand’s highlight

Among the many things surrounding your brand—new flavors, recent accreditations, noble sustainable practices, up and coming promos, or others​​—what do you think is most relevant for your consumers at any given time? While all of these deserve a moment, the topic and timing must complement.

In identifying what to highlight and when, you get to keep your communication concise, thus enabling you to efficiently manage your brand resources. After one campaign, you can then move to highlight another aspect of the brand in a timely, spaced out manner (avoiding overwhelm, of course!)

• Pick a brand communications partner

Communication requires expertise, especially nowadays when people are inundated with information. PR experts who have worked with brands like yours could help you plan campaigns that will maximize your budget and yield consumer trust.

This is why it is important to have the right partner onboard!

●     Execute Well

PR for FMCG is quite different compared to that of other industries like technology, property, or automotive. As mentioned a while ago, food is experiential and emotions are deeply involved. Some products might invoke nostalgia while others become a source of refreshment. So, talking about the experience that your brand brings takes a lot of mindfulness about the target audience, strategic messaging, and follow-through.

You should consider partnering with a food and beverage PR agency that can help craft and implement tailor-fit FMCG public relations strategies for your brand.

Start Now

Apart from providing trustworthy, quality products that consumers will ultimately enjoy, the food & beverage industry continues to evolve. As with many other industries nowadays, being a successful FMCG brand that consumers trust now involves many other aspects such as equality, diversity, inclusion, and representation.

According to Edelman’s research on trust in the food and beverage sector, there is a 12-point decline globally due to various reasons including the high inequality in the sector, the demand for CEOs to speak out on societal challenges, and the low level of trust among F&B employees themselves to the sector. One of the key findings is that the sector must address these five gaps:

• Innovation Gap
• Inclusion Gap
• Information Gap
• Incentive Gap
• Investment Gap

With these, it is more important now than ever to utilize PR to build audience trust. If your brand is working on these gaps – or better yet, filling them – then it’s a story worth telling. Through internally and externally communicating these, you can further solidify brand trust. Big fast food brands like McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s have already started to expand their marketing and PR efforts to include more humanitarian narratives that extends far beyond their core business of providing food and beverage.

With the world bouncing back from the pandemic, it’s time brands like you to step up and make a mark in your industry and in the lives of people this way.

And one surefire way to encompass all of this to build trust is through personalized, purposeful, and effective PR.