Kettle & Fire Elevates Discovery and Incremental Reach with Recipe Ads on Instacart

Kettle & Fire, a leader in clean-label broths and soups, has continued to expand its digital presence by embracing new Instacart advertising innovations designed to spark inspiration and drive incremental demand. Known for prioritizing high-quality ingredients and serving health‑minded consumers, the brand has consistently leaned into Instacart’s platform to reach shoppers at the moment of meal planning and purchase. Their latest step forward: testing Instacart’s recipe ads to inspire consumers beyond the traditional broth aisle.

Reach consumers with inspiration

In fall of 2025, Kettle & Fire partnered with Instacart on a recipe ads test, aligning the activation with a critical seasonal period for the broth category. The goal was twofold: spark inspiration during meal planning moments and expand brand reach to shoppers browsing far outside “broth” as a search term or destination. This test complemented Kettle & Fire’s broader custom marketing package, extending their omnichannel strategy into a new inspiration-driven format.

Instacart’s recipe ads were created to help brands reach consumers in unexpected moments — for example, when a shopper is browsing for spinach and is served a vegetarian lasagna recipe featuring products that were not initially on their shopping list. By merchandising sponsored ingredients alongside complementary items in a complete recipe, brands can extend their presence across aisles and win searches they wouldn’t typically appear in.

Delivering performance with recipe ads

Kettle & Fire’s recipe ad campaign exceeded expectations. The campaign generated:

• 386.8K out-of-aisle impressions, proving reach beyond typical broth shoppers

• 1.5%CTR

• 4.3 ROAS

Notably, 55% of sales were new-to-brand, 35% of sales were new to the broth category entirely, signalling meaningful incremental reach and category expansion. For Kettle & Fire, this was a key indicator that recipe ads were engaging a broader audience than traditional placements alone.

Instacart’s optimized performance targeting played a meaningful role in driving these outcomes. The brand set a comfortable CPM, while Instacart’s systems automatically optimized delivery toward shoppers most likely to turn inspiration into action— ensuring efficiency without sacrificing scale.

Meet consumers in moments of inspiration

Recipe ads are designed to meet consumers in moments of inspiration. When a shopper clicks on the ad, they’re taken to a dedicated landing page with cooking instructions, prep details, a full ingredient list, and one‑tap functionality to add all ingredients to their cart. Brands can either build a recipe page manually or upload a PDF or URL, and Instacart automatically fills in the details to save time.

Brands select both sponsored ingredients (specific UPCs they want to promote) and non-sponsored ingredients, which Instacart fills with the best in‑stock matches.

Because recipe ads serve when one or more sponsored ingredient is available at a consumer’s chosen store, they allow brands to extend reach across shopping behaviors and store assortments. Paired with optimized performance, recipe ads help brands appear for related searches and adjacent moments, driving out‑of‑aisle discovery at scale.

Validating incremental reach and expanding brand engagement

For Kettle & Fire, out-of-aisle impressions were a key signal of success. By serving recipe ads to shoppers browsing beyond pantry staples or traditional soup ingredients, the test demonstrated the potential of inspiration-led placements to widen brand consideration and engage new audiences early in their meal-planning process.

“We viewed recipe ads as an inspiration-led test, and the outcome exceeded expectations,” said the Kettle & Fire team. “Seeing 55 percent-plus new-to-brand with strong engagement and return reinforced that this format can build awareness while still delivering measurable performance.”

A Strategic fit for growth

Kettle & Fire has long recognized Instacart as a core pillar of its omnichannel marketing approach, tapping into the platform’s ability to reach highly engaged, digitally native shoppers. Recipe ads represent a natural evolution of this strategy, capturing attention in new moments and helping the brand show up where consumers make decisions about what to cook and what to buy.

For Kettle & Fire, the 2025 test demonstrated how inspirational content — paired with Instacart’s performance-driven infrastructure — can deliver both brand building and bottom‑line impact.

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