Perdue Farms and Food Network have joined forces on a holiday sweepstakes that sends five consumers to New York City for a curated feast hosted by Chef Lorenzo Espada — widely known as Chef Zo — a social media culinary personality with a fast-growing audience across short-form video platforms. The promotion marks a continuation of the poultry brand's strategy of pairing licensed media partnerships with influencer-driven activations to maintain top-of-mind presence during the competitive fourth-quarter selling season.
The Partnership Play
For Perdue, aligning with a recognizable media property like Food Network delivers immediate brand-equity lift in the grocery meat case, where shelf differentiation is increasingly difficult against both national competitors and a growing private-label set. Chef Zo's viral appeal — built on accessible, bold cooking content — speaks directly to younger household decision-makers who are reshaping how protein brands earn attention at retail. The sweepstakes format, while consumer-facing, functions upstream as a retail marketing tool: it generates in-store display, digital circular, and social content assets that merchandising teams can deploy across the grocery channel to justify end-cap and feature placement heading into Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Holiday Shelf Stakes
The holiday window is the highest-velocity period in the fresh and frozen poultry category. Retailers from conventional supermarkets to club and mass formats run aggressive HiLo pricing and TPR programs on whole birds and value-added poultry SKUs between October and December, and supplier-funded consumer promotions — sweepstakes, instant-win, mail-in rebates — remain a reliable mechanism for securing incremental display support and planogram positioning. Perdue's Food Network co-brand gives buyers a storytelling hook that pure price promotions cannot, particularly as grocers look for thematic content to populate their own social and email channels.
The broader fresh poultry category has faced margin pressure as feed costs and labor remain elevated post-pandemic, making brand investment that drives velocity and reduces reliance on deep TPR increasingly attractive to both manufacturers and their retail trading partners. Activations that generate earned media — as a celebrity-chef sweepstakes reliably does — extend the effective reach of a promotional budget well beyond paid placement. For a closer look at how CPG brands are structuring influencer and media co-brand deals heading into Q4, see Grocery CPG's coverage of seasonal merchandising strategy and the meat and poultry category.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
