Food & Snacks Influencer Marketing Benchmarks

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

Paid content earning less than organic is the normal pattern. What stands out in Italian Food & Snacks is the order of the brands. All three listed brands beat the 2.1% organic benchmark on their unpaid posts, yet each sits below the category's paid rate once support is added, and their ranking flips exactly: the strongest organic performer has the weakest paid rate, and the weakest organic performer has the strongest. Mulino Bianco shows the extreme. It holds the highest organic rate in the table at 3.52%, which added 1.89 pp on the prior quarter, against a paid rate of 0%, which slipped 0.2 pp from a quarter earlier. McDonald's keeps 0.37% on paid content, but that rate fell 1.28 pp on the prior quarter, the steepest paid drop of the three. Parmigiano Reggiano holds its paid rate closest to its organic one, at 0.48%, unchanged from a quarter earlier. In this table, a strong organic following tells you nothing about how a brand's paid posts will engage.

Brand	Organic ER	Paid ER
Mulino Bianco	3.52%	0%
McDonald's	3.34%	0.37%
Parmigiano Reggiano	2.63%	0.48%

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

At the top, reach is close and engagement is not. Giuseppe Maiello and Chiara Biasi each draw about 68 million views, but Maiello's audience engages at 0.34%, below even the category's paid benchmark. Matteo Sciaudone stands apart: on 45.5 million views he holds an engagement rate of 1.13%, the only listed rate above 1%. A rate as low as Maiello's on views this large can come from boosting, because bought reach adds views without necessarily adding interactions. His figure may therefore point to paid distribution rather than to a weak audience, though it does not prove either. Visibility is also spread wide: the top 20 creators hold 13.38% of category views, so no small group of names controls what this audience sees.

1. 1Giuseppe Maiello@giuseppe_healthy68M views0.34% ER
2. 2Chiara Biasi@chiarabiasi68M viewsER n/a
3. 3Matteo Sciaudone@sciaudone.matteo46M views1.13% ER

The 20 most viewed creators hold 13.38% of all Food & Snacks views in Italy.

How much of Food & Snacks are official partnerships?

Posts with a paid partnership or a boost behind them took 21.84% of the category's views, up from 19.39% in the prior quarter, a gain of 2.45 pp. That places more than a fifth of the views on paid support. The figure covers both posts set up as official collaborations from the start and organic posts that were boosted after publication. For boosted content, reach is read through view counts.

Which Food & Snacks posts got the most paid reach?

Public creator posts that brands boosted with Meta ads in Food & Snacks, Italy, Q3 2026, ranked by the paid reach those ads delivered.

• 5.8M reach
  Marco Fantini@marcofantini_mf

  Features Magnum3 ads
• 5.2M reach
  Gabriele Vagnato@gabrielevagnato

  Features Rio Mare1 ad
• 4.6M reach
  Emanuele Ferrari@emanueleferrari

  Features Barilla1 ad

Also in the full report

• Timing of BoostingThe median boost starts 2 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.

How these numbers are measured

• Food & Snacks counts the posts where we detected a named brand's product in this category, not every post on the subject, so it covers part of the creator feed in Italy rather than all of it.
• Ranked by total public views in the category; share is the creator's category views divided by the category total.
• 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.
• Product detection improves from quarter to quarter, so part of a quarter over quarter move can come from better detection rather than from the market.

More influencer marketing benchmarks

All Italy benchmarksAll markets and categories