The holiday season is a make-or-break moment for Food and Beverage (F&B) brands. While limited-edition flavors, seasonal packaging, and festive campaigns have long been the norm, consumers are craving more than simple nostalgia. They want experiences– the kind that feel sensorial, aesthetic, and fresh. And in 2025, the brands that stand out won’t just be selling beverages or treats– they’ll be selling an experience through cross-category collaboration.
One trend shaping this shift? The rise of sensory marketing in the beauty world. From gloss textures to ASMR packaging to multi-sensory launches, beauty brands are creating immersive worlds. And now, F&B brands are jumping in too– blending categories, aesthetics, and fandoms to create unexpected holiday magic. According to a recent review, brands that produce multisensory marketing, “moving beyond visual alone,” can create deeper emotional engagement.
Enter one of the most talked-about collaborations of the season: Tower 28 x Poppi, a limited-edition holiday drop that merges clean beauty with better-for-you soda. This partnership reveals where F&B holiday marketing is headed and how creators help take it to the next level.
Why Beauty + Beverage Is the Collaboration Trend of the Year
Sensory experiences drive emotional connection
Beauty brands have perfected the art of sensory storytelling– textures, scents, applicator sounds, product rituals. Consumers love it because it’s immersive and personal. F&B brands, meanwhile, naturally offer sensory moments through flavor, fizz, and scent. Combine the two, and you get multi-sensory storytelling built for social attention.
Research shows that multisensory brand experiences can improve brand recall by up to ~70% compared with single-sense engagements. Also, 63% of consumers say they want multisensory brand experiences. Beyond recall, studies show sensory branding strengthens emotional connection and thereby drives brand loyalty among consumers– particularly relevant when entering a new category or stretching brand equity.
Cross-category collaborations unlock new audiences and buzz
In the F&B world, collaborations are increasingly viewed as a strategic way to innovate, share reach and stay competitive. “Collaboration lets brands tap into each other’s customer bases and brand equity,” per industry commentary. A review of F&B licensing and brand collaborations highlighted that unique partnerships (including cross-category ones) were featured prominently in 2024 strategies. Together, Beauty and F&B collaborations create cultural buzz that resonates across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and even retail. These collabs feel delightfully unexpected– and that novelty fuels virality.
It’s a creator-first playground
Creators love unusual mashups. They spark curiosity, invite experimentation, and feel tailor-made for visual content. The algorithm rewards creativity, and cross-category collaboration delivers it on a silver platter. Creators help bridge communities and make the unexpected feel meaningful.
Before diving into the Tower 28 × Poppi collab, it’s helpful to look at how creator-powered strategies already drive results for F&B brands.
Taco Bell × Social Native: Driving Product Exposure Through Creators
Taco Bell was looking to introduce their new Breakfast Quesadilla in a fun, dynamic way. Social Native activated creators to produce high-quality content: showing the quesadilla in natural breakfast moments, lifestyle environments, and vibrant real-world settings. Creators delivered 124 images in just two weeks, providing Taco Bell with a deep library of authentic assets ready for social and paid amplification.
The campaign’s impact was a 4.8% average engagement rate and an impressive 1M+ reach to new consumers. When brands pair a culturally relevant product moment with scaled creator storytelling, they unlock massive momentum– fast. This same formula is exactly what makes the Tower 28 × Poppi collaboration primed for holiday dominance.
Tower 28 x Poppi’s Limited Edition 2025 Holiday Collab
Tower 28 and Poppi already share a Gen Z-forward ethos: vibrant branding, clean ingredients, and a community-driven marketing approach. Their holiday collab takes that synergy and elevates it into an experience.
What Makes the Collab Work
- Unified aesthetic: Both brands lean into bold, juicy, eye-catching colors– perfect for holiday shelf impact and social feeds.
- Sensory design: Soda flavors that match beauty moods (“glowy,” “juicy,” “refreshing”), gloss tones inspired by Poppi’s hues, and packaging designed for ASMR-style unboxing.
- Lifestyle alignment: Beauty routines often feature F&B moments– morning matcha, afternoon hydration, evening wind-down. Combining the two feels natural.
Why It’s a Holiday Hit
- Giftable: Bundles of gloss + soda? That’s TikTok gold.
- Collectible: Limited-edition holiday packaging taps into scarcity.
- Inherently social: Aesthetic visuals, flavor reveals, GRWM pairings, and creator-friendly storytelling.
The result: a cross-category collaboration that merges flavor, beauty, lifestyle, and culture– exactly what holiday consumers crave.
How Creators Bring Collabs Like This to Life
Creators are the engine that transforms a fun collaboration into a cultural moment. They validate it, contextualize it, and amplify it. They are essentially the translators of culture when bridging separate communities. They help consumers understand why the partnership makes sense– through storytelling, routines, and aesthetic content.
The content possibilities are endless
- Aesthetic holiday flatlays with soda cans + gloss.
- Flavor-inspired makeup looks.
- ASMR unboxings with foil, fizz, and gloss textures.
- Festive beverage styling paired with holiday party makeup.
- Holiday gift guides and stocking-stuffer recommendations.
- Color-matching moments: gloss shade vs. soda hue.
Creators drive excitement pre-launch, mid-launch, and late-season. Early teasers build curiosity, launch-day content spikes social chatter, and follow-up reviews and lifestyle integrations extend momentum through December. In short: creators make the collab feel alive, relevant, and must-have.
What F&B Brands Can Take Away for Holiday 2025
1. Think cross-category, not category-first
Don’t limit yourself to traditional food or beverage partnerships. Think beauty, wellness, lifestyle— adjacent categories where shared ethos or aesthetic makes sense.
2. Design for sensory storytelling
Flavor matters, but so do texture, packaging, aesthetic, ritual. Brands that engage more than taste are more likely to stand out. Notably, controlled studies show sensory marketing strategies can lift sales by ~10%. Give creators something textile to show off.
3. Activate creators early— and at scale
Begin pre-launch teaser campaigns, involve creators across the funnel (hero launch, holiday gifting, always-on content). Think beyond one hero creator– build an ecosystem of voices.
4. Prioritize authentic lifestyle integration
The cross-category collaboration shouldn’t feel forced. When beauty routines meet beverage rituals naturally, the content resonates more strongly. The more a collab fits into everyday moments, the more viral potential it has.
Where Social Native Comes In
Brands can’t afford to rely on guesswork or small-scale influencer activations during the holiday season. They need volume, speed, quality, and creators who understand how to tell cross-category stories. This is exactly where Social Native gives brands an edge:
- Scalable access to creators who specialize in lifestyle convergence: Beauty creators. F&B creators. Wellness creators. Aesthetic-first creators. Holiday storytellers. Social Native connects brands with diverse talent at any scale– micro to macro.
- Faster content production to fuel holiday timelines: With Social Native, brands can activate creators quickly, gather assets at scale, and keep content fresh throughout the entire season.
- Content that fuels every channel: Organic social, paid social, retail media, e-commerce product pages, email, OOH– the platform powers full-funnel performance.
- Proven results with brands pushing creative boundaries: Social Native has helped F&B, beauty, and CPG brands turn bold concepts into social movements– and the holiday season is where creator-led storytelling shines brightest.
The Tower 28 x Poppi holiday collab proves that the future of F&B holiday marketing lies in cross-category creativity and sensory storytelling. But what truly turns a collaboration into a cultural moment is creators– their authenticity, their creativity, and their ability to make novelty feel meaningful.
For brands ready to step into this new era of holiday innovation, Social Native is here to help unlock creator-powered success at scale.
