Costco and Hidden Valley: Food brands and retailers win brand coverage in March

Food content seems to be everywhere these days. Between recipe inspo, imaginative new flavors, and an obsession with watching people eat on TikTok, food tends to capture some of the biggest engagement online. This month that proved true for Costco and Hidden Valley who both captured interest for some tasty and interesting fare.

Costco is already well known for exclusive items that draw in shoppers, and when it comes to its food products the members-only club knows that one thing rings true for its audience – size matters. 

This time it’s not a pack of 850 gumballs or a 60 pound tub of honey, but the debut of a five pound peanut butter chocolate pie. Attention was first drawn to the pie in a video which received over 3.8M views. Two days later the story was covered by Today and has since amassed over 64k engagements, making it March’s top brand story. There were six other articles about the pie, featuring on websites like Delish and some local outlets, but none saw nearly the amount of engagement as Today. 

Although this hefty pie stirred up some excitement for Costco goers, ranch enthusiasts were also graced with a fun new product when Hidden Valley announced its partnership with ice cream parlor Van Leeuwen.

Coming together to create a limited-edition ranch flavored ice cream, the two brands revealed the pints would be coming to Walmart stores later this spring. We dug a bit deeper into the data to see how Costco and Hidden Valley compared, with the chart below showing the results. 

Every month we look at the top 250 brand stories for this blog, so although Costco’s pie had the most engaged article of the bunch, Hidden Valley was actually covered more widely over the month, with several articles earning a smaller amount of engagement individually, but totaling more than Costco overall. In the end Costco saw over 147k engagements, while Hidden Valley received 368k. 

We’ve often seen new flavors, and specifically brands collaborating to create fun or odd ones, receive a large amount of public interest to media coverage and on social media. We can’t be sure it will taste good, but the ranch-flavored ice cream has certainly created buzz. 

Let’s look at how other brands stood out in the rankings in March. 

1. Ford makes headlines for new patent 

In March, instead of earning engagement for articles about various classic car models as it often does, Ford found itself in the headlines for a new patent that describes the futuristic ways the automaker could repossess vehicles for missed payments. 

There were 10 articles written about the potential patent, although it should be noted that the company stated it has no plan to implement the ideas, as submitting these patents is a normal business practice and doesn’t indicate a course of action. That being said, the 10 articles received more than 97k engagements. 

2. Boeing shows that employees are still of interest

Boeing made it onto our rankings this month due to an employee winning the record-breaking powerball jackpot back in February. Upon seeing the jackpot was up to $747 million, the employee also realized Boeing had delivered its last 747 jet and felt she needed to buy a ticket. 

This story spread across local media earning 56k engagements to six different articles. Coverage included articles from several Fox outlets such as Fox 5 New York, and Fox LA. 

3. Local outlets generate engagement for John Deere

Continuing with the trend of a local story earning national levels of engagement is a story about a high school student winning money for college from restoring a 1954 John Deere tractor. There were three stories about the boy winning the $10,000 scholarship, the top being from Fox 19 Cincinnati with over 23k engagements. 

Even though John Deere wasn’t mentioned for any action directly involving the brand, this is a nice example of a brand earning positive earned media coverage in a notable way. 

March showed us a livelier side of how brands are written about, with giant desserts and interesting flavors shining through the noise of other big name brands that usually take up the spotlight. It was also a month that reinforced the impact local news outlets can have in positive and feel-good ways. 

To read more about what brands are capturing attention online, check out our blog on who has been the most successful on Instagram.