As cell phones increasingly play a larger role in retail purchases both digital and in-person, some alcohol brands have partnered with an app that recommends alcohol and food pairings.
Alcohol companies including Bacardi, Jackson Family Wines and Francis Ford Coppola Winery have worked with the digital meal planning service eMeals to boost online revenues through strategies including menu pairings that place branded wine, beer and spirits recommendations as options on the weekly eMeals shopping list.
Subscribers send their final food and beverage selections for the week to Walmart, Kroger, Amazon, Instacart or Shipt for online grocery fulfillment — or use the list for in-store shopping.
The partnerships are executed through eMeals’ BrandBuilder program, which aims to grow online and in-store sales for participating food and beverage brands through a combination of recipe discovery on the service’s 15 weekly meal plans, shoppable recipe content with brand placement on eMeals shopping lists, and related promotional campaigns.
“The digital environment is critical to alcohol sales growth, both directly from e-commerce sales and indirectly from the role that online visibility plays in building brand awareness and generating demand,” says Lorran Brown Cosby, VP of digital commerce at Bacardi North America. “eMeals’ BrandBuilder program offers a unique platform for alcohol brands to fuel growth from the top to the bottom of the funnel, including coupling drink recommendations with special occasion menus to drive awareness of online alcohol delivery and availability.”
