Food & Drink Influencer Marketing Benchmarks

How much of the Italy creator feed is Food & Drink?

Food & Drink takes 13.84% of the Italian creator feed, which puts it 4th of 21 categories. The ranking matters less than the shape of the field around it. Shopping & Fashion and Entertainment (TV, Film, Music) sit far ahead at 30.98% and 30.09%. Food & Drink belongs to a tight middle group, with Beauty & Wellness just above at 14.91%, Luxury & Lifestyle just below at 11.89%, and Sports & Fitness close behind. The gaps within that group are small next to the distance to the top two. Food & Drink draws attention on roughly equal terms with its neighbours rather than standing apart from them.

Who are the most visible creators in Food & Drink in Italy?

At the top of this category, reach and engagement do not move together. Giuseppe Maiello carries the largest view total on the list but engages at 0.59%. Sebastian Fitarau has a much smaller audience and reaches an engagement rate of 2.7%, the figure that stands apart. A low rate on a very large view count can come partly from boosting, because bought reach adds views faster than it adds likes and comments. Heavier boosting may be part of what holds Maiello's rate down. Attention beyond these names is widely spread. The 20 most viewed creators together hold 12.66% of category views, so the bulk of what this category earns sits outside its most visible accounts.

1. 1Giuseppe Maiello@giuseppe_healthy344M views0.59% ER
2. 2Chiara Biasi@chiarabiasi180M viewsER n/a
3. 3Sebastian Fitarau@sebastian_fitarau137M views2.7% ER

The 20 most viewed creators hold 12.66% of all Food & Drink views in Italy.

What is a good engagement rate for Food & Drink content?

Paid Food & Drink content engages at 0.85%, well under half the 1.99% that organic content reaches. The listed brands differ sharply in how steep that drop is. All three sit above the category on organic engagement, but their paid rates spread widely. Starbucks holds its paid rate closest to its organic one at 1.27%, the only listed brand above the paid benchmark, and that rate added 0.55 pp on the prior quarter. Heineken sits at the other end. It has the highest organic rate in the table and a paid rate of 0.3%, after its paid rate slipped 0.08 pp. McDonald's lands near Heineken on paid engagement, and its paid rate dropped 1.28 pp on the prior quarter, the largest paid move among the three.

Brand	Organic ER	Paid ER
Heineken	3.6%	0.3%
Starbucks	3.01%	1.27%
McDonald's	3.45%	0.37%

How much of the category are official partnerships?

Of the views earned by Food & Drink posts published in the period, 12.2% sit on content carrying a partnership, sponsorship or boost. That ranks the category 5th of 21, far above the cross-category median of 5.47%. Only Tech & Gadgets, Beauty & Wellness, Shopping & Fashion and Home & Garden rank higher. How commercial a category is does not simply follow its size in the feed. Entertainment (TV, Film, Music), one of the two largest categories by attention, does not appear among the most commercial categories shown, while Food & Drink ranks high on both. Over the five quarters shown, the share of category views gained on paid-supported posts rose from 5.68% to 9.34%. The one small dip, to 6.92%, came two quarters earlier, and the latest quarter is the highest of the series.

Advertising you cannot see on a creator profile

Dark boosts are creator-collaboration ads that never appear on the creator’s profile. In Food & Drink, Italy, Q3 2026 they carry 10.61% of the paid reach.

• 3.9M reach
  Reb ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹@rebecca.gradoni

  Paid by Yepoda.it12 ads
• 3.9M reach
  Nicola Carta@nicoolacarta

  Paid by Magnum1 ad
• 3.7M reach
  🏋️‍♂️Simone | Motivazione & Fitness 💪@fitwith_simo

  Paid by Myprotein4 ads

Also in the full report

• Timing of BoostingThe median boost starts 2.5 days after the post goes up.
• Brand Leaderboard20 brands ranked by the public views their creator content earned.
• Paid vs. Earned media20 brands compared on what they bought against what they earned.
• Top Dark Boosts17 more dark placements ranked by the paid reach they delivered.

How these numbers are measured

• Ranked by total public views in the category; share is the creator's category views divided by the category total.
• Cumulative ads reach counts the ads delivering in the quarter, pro-rated to the days each one ran inside it, and a boosted post and a dark ad count once each. No cross-ad deduplication, so one person can be counted twice.
• Creators counts everyone whose content for the brand was live in the quarter, matching the Share of Influence dashboard's own gates; views counts what brand-scored content gained inside it, so the two sit on different populations.
• The paid column counts the ads that delivered in the quarter, public and dark together, each ad's reach pro-rated to the days it ran inside it. The organic column counts views the brand's content gained in the same window.
• Dark boosts are creator-collab ads that never appear on the creator's profile.
• Posts were tagged with categories differently in Q2 2026 than in Q3 2026, so this page does not compare the category's share of the feed with earlier quarters.

More influencer marketing benchmarks

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