Active Ingredients is a brand strategy and digital agency with deep roots in the natural, organic and better-for-you aisle, working with Amy's Kitchen, Chicken of the Sea, O Organics, Marin French Cheese and Laura Chenel. Their published stack runs brand strategy and voice, campaigns, web design, social, email and SMS, video and photo, data analytics and AI consulting, alongside paid social, paid search and media planning. They also run a separate B2B technology division. We do four things, all of them downstream of research.
We wrote this, so discount it. And we will start by conceding the thing that matters most to a lot of readers: in the natural and organic aisle, their client list is better known than ours.
Last verified 1 September 2026 · Active Ingredients facts sourced from activeingredients.com
How narrow is the category focus, and how far does the work go past creative into running and measuring media. Everyone in the F&B agency conversation sits somewhere on this grid.
Positions drawn from each agency's own published service list and stated industry focus, September 2026. Not a quality ranking.
Amy's Kitchen, Chicken of the Sea, O Organics, Laura Chenel. If you are a natural or organic brand and you shortlist on portfolio, that is a real advantage and pretending otherwise would waste your time. So the honest question is what a client list can and cannot tell you, and what we offer in its place.
All four of those matter. None of them are things we would dispute.
A logo wall answers the first question and none of the rest.
Four things you can check yourself, which is a different kind of proof from four logos.
Client names taken from activeingredients.com, 2 September 2026. We are not suggesting their work is weak — we have no basis for that and their portfolio suggests otherwise. We are suggesting that portfolio and method are different questions, and we can only put evidence behind the second one.
| Capability | Schaefer | Active Ingredients |
|---|---|---|
| Paid social — Meta, TikTok, Pinterest | ✓ | ✓ |
| Media planning and buying | ✓ | ✓ |
| Paid search | ✓ | ✓ |
| Food & beverage exclusively | ✓ | – |
| Buyer research fielded before media runs | ✓ | – |
| Retail media — Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, Target, Kroger | ✓ | – |
| Shopper activation — Fetch, Social Nature, Aisle | ✓ | – |
| Ad corpus public and free to search | ✓ | – |
| Written performance guarantee | ✓ | – |
| Pricing range published | ✓ | – |
| Brand strategy, voice and identity | – | ✓ |
| Web design and development | – | ✓ |
| Email and SMS | – | ✓ |
| Video and photography production | – | ✓ |
Teal dashes are work Schaefer does not do and refers out. Grey dashes mean the capability is not published on their site — not that it is absent. Their site lists Data Analytics and a Shopper Marketing category without naming a retail network or a research method, so ask them directly rather than trusting our reading.
Research is not a report we hand over and leave. It is the input to the creative, which is the input to the media, which is measured back against it. Pull any one of them out and the other three get worse.
Category-scale survey work plus qualitative, fielded and analysed by our own team. The people who read the data are the people who brief the creative, so nothing is lost in a handoff.
How the research works →Concepts built against each motivation the research surfaced, at the volume the platforms need before they can learn anything. Brief, design, copy, test.
See the creative process →Meta, TikTok and Pinterest, structured as a test against the research rather than run on platform defaults and hope.
See how paid social runs →Retail media, search and streaming across Amazon, Walmart Connect, Instacart, Target and Kroger, plus shopper activation through Fetch, Social Nature and Aisle — all measured against the number we agreed at the start.
See the full media scope →If the honest answer sends you elsewhere, we would rather you found that out here than four months into a retainer.
If positioning, voice and identity are unresolved, that is their centre and not ours. Spending media behind an unclear brand amplifies the problem.
Amazon, Walmart Connect, Instacart, Target and Kroger are not named on their services page. Ask them; a thin answer there matters if the shelf is where you win.
Both are legitimate. Theirs is the stronger portfolio in the natural and organic aisle. Ours is the method you can audit before you sign.
Every answer here is one we would give on a call. Publishing them just means fewer wasted calls.
Three results from food and beverage brands. Every one started with research into why the category buys, not with a media plan.
Research replaced a 30–45 year-old grill dad with a retiree over 65. Conversion rates doubled. Not one additional dollar of media spend.
Read the case study →We rebuilt the best-customer cohort, re-pointed the budget behind it, and fed the platforms a volume of creative the brand had not run before.
Read the case study →A competitive landscape study surfaced an entire product line inside existing capability — and an $80M category opportunity.
See the work →We work food and beverage brands spending $5,000–$500,000 a month across paid social and retail media, and every engagement starts with buyer research.
Most agencies do not offer one because they do not want the pressure. Ours is the reason we turn work down — it only holds up if we are honest at intake about whether we can move your number.
ROAS, CPA, conversion rate, revenue growth or foot traffic — named before anything launches, so there is nothing to argue about afterwards.
Not at contract signing. Research runs first, two to three weeks, and the three months begin when the ads do.
100% of our agency fees for the period. No negotiation, no process to go through, no exceptions.
And if it isn't, we'll say so on the first call rather than the fourth month.
Work With Us →Natural or organic brand? We will tell you honestly.
Work With Us →