Shelf & Screen: How UK Food & Drink Brands Link Retail and Online

There’s a quiet shift happening in the UK food and drink world. It isn’t about the next big flavour trend or which challenger brand has managed to get itself into Waitrose. It’s about how digital and retail are finally learning to work together, after years of operating in separate corners of the room. For a long time, in-store and online teams have been competing for the same customers instead of building one connected experience, and it’s costing brands both sales and momentum.

Right now, growth is sitting in that middle space where digital activity drives people into stores and retail visibility pushes them back online. It’s not one or the other anymore. It’s both, feeding off each other.

According to Savills, UK online grocery sales reached £19.6 billion in 2023, and while that represents around 10 percent of the total market, it’s become clear this isn’t a temporary post-pandemic spike. Online grocery has found its level, and the smarter brands are starting to understand that the real power lies in how those online interactions influence behaviour in the real world. Meanwhile, Square’s 2025 Retail Trends Report found that over 70 percent of UK retailers believe marketing technology will be the biggest driver of growth in the next few years, with the same number saying smarter data and inventory tools are already reshaping how they plan, promote and sell. What we’re seeing is a retail sector that’s finally accepting digital as part of its DNA rather than a separate department that occasionally sends emails.

When we started working with Kohinoor, they were already well established on supermarket shelves, but they wanted to grow their share of voice online without cannibalising retail sales. Our approach was to connect the two. We used search and social campaigns to capture interest from people looking for meal inspiration, sent them to the website for recipes and ideas, and then pointed them to the right supermarkets to buy the product. It wasn’t about shifting people online for the sake of it. It was about using digital touchpoints to increase the frequency and quality of offline sales. Within weeks, we could see measurable impact on both sides, proving that when digital and retail work together, the uplift compounds rather than competes.

Most food and drink brands already have the assets they need to do this, but they’re often locked in separate silos. Retail teams chase promotional space, ecommerce teams chase clicks, and marketing sits somewhere in between trying to make the numbers make sense. The trick is to stop thinking in channels and start thinking in customer journeys. When a shopper picks up a jar of curry sauce in Sainsbury’s after seeing a video on Instagram, that’s not coincidence, it’s connection.

The brands that will win in the next few years will be the ones that use digital to guide real-world behaviour and real-world data to shape digital strategy. That means localised search campaigns that surface nearby stockists, social ads that reflect regional buying habits, QR codes that turn packaging into entry points for recipes and loyalty, and analytics that close the loop between shelf and screen.

It’s tempting to see retail and digital as two different worlds, but in truth they’re just two sides of the same coin. The best campaigns don’t ask customers to choose between them. They create an experience so joined-up that shoppers barely notice where one ends and the other begins.