The most important battle in food marketing is no longer being fought on supermarket shelves or Google results pages. It is happening inside AI models that consumers never see. When someone asks ChatGPT for “a healthy weekday pasta” or tells an assistant “plan a budget‑friendly dinner for four,” an algorithm quietly decides which brands and ingredients enter the conversation — and which never show up at all. Unilever has been quicker than most of its peers to say this out loud and reorganise...

One quiet line in DoorDash’s latest Restaurant Trends report should make every marketer sit up: 22% of US diners have already used AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini to choose a restaurant. AI has quietly become a discovery channel in its own right—sitting next to Google, Instagram, and food apps in the path to purchase. The problem: consumer behaviour is shifting faster than marketing practice. Diners are increasingly comfortable asking AI, “Where should I go tonight?” while most brands have...

Hershey’s latest AI push is not just another corporate experiment with automation. It is a structural shift in how a large consumer brand measures, allocates, and improves marketing investment—moving from periodic, backwards-looking analysis to a more continuous decision-making system grounded in live signals across social, search, streaming, and sales. For years, marketing measurement in large CPG organisations has often been too slow to shape the moment. Models were updated a few times a...