17 Feb Salty Snacks Social Media Benchmarks: Disruptors Are Eating Legacy Brands’ Lunch

Posted at 08:26h in Social Media Stats by
Research Report ยท February 2026

We analyzed 13 brands across Instagram, TikTok, and influencer marketing throughout 2025. The findings are a wake-up call for any legacy CPG snack brand still playing it safe.
8 min read If you manage social media for a snack food brand, here’s a question worth sitting with: Is your large follower count actually working for you โ€” or against you? Our new Snap Analysis of the salty snacks category digs into that exact tension, examining 13 brands across Instagram, TikTok, and influencer marketing over all of 2025. The pattern we found is clear, a little uncomfortable, and full of opportunities.
We looked at 10 legacy brands โ€” Doritos, Pringles, Cheez-It, Rold Gold, Wonderful Pistachios, Cape Cod Chips, Deep River Snacks, Utz Snacks, popchips, and Wheat Thins โ€” alongside three disruptors: Takis, Siete Foods, and Mid-Day Squares. Across every channel, the data tells a consistent story about what’s working and what’s stale.

Instagram: The “Ghost Following” Problem Is Real

The legacy brands that have been on Instagram for a decade often built massive followings during the platform’s early days. Doritos boasts over 1 million followers. Pringles has nearly 900,000. The problem? Those audiences have largely gone quiet. When engagement rate is calculated โ€” total likes and comments relative to follower count โ€” these behemoth accounts frequently fall around 0.5% to 0.76%, a range that signals a largely disengaged audience. We call this a “Ghost Following”: a large audience accumulated years ago that simply isn’t reacting to current content. It’s a structural liability that’s hard to fix with posting frequency alone. Utz Snacks posted a remarkable 478 times in 2025 โ€” nearly 40 times per month โ€” and still averaged only 129 engagements per post, yielding a 0.88% engagement rate. Volume without resonance is expensive noise.
Chart comparing 13 salty snack brands performance on Instagram
Legacy snack brands often have large Instagram followings built in an earlier era โ€” but engagement rates tell a different story in 2025. Because we used publicly available data, we calculated the engagement rate as (Likes + Comments)/ Follower Count * 1000. This is non-traditional but makes apples-to-apples comparison easier to interpret at a glance. 
Meanwhile, some legacy brands are bucking the trend. Rold Gold (6.33% engagement rate), Cheez-It (5.02%), and Wheat Thins (5.03%) are punching well above their weight, suggesting that a smaller, more relevant audience combined with quality content can outperform sheer scale. Among disruptors, Takis stands out. With 522,000 Instagram followers and 169 posts in 2025, they drove 869,382 total engagements โ€” the most of any brand in the study. Their average of 5,144 engagements per post is more than double Doritos’ 2,032, despite having less than half the follower count. Takis’ content is raw, textural, and ASMR-adjacent in a way that feels genuinely native to how people consume visual content today.
“Engagement rates vary wildly among food brands on Instagram. Strategies and content quality matter a lot here.” โ€” Ignite Social Media Snap Analysis, 2026

D = Disruptor brand.

The Content Quality Gap

Our side-by-side content review makes the difference tangible. “Flat” content โ€” clean, bright, high-production-value product shots with no tension, humor, or cultural hook โ€” consistently underperforms regardless of posting volume. The “textural” approach used by brands like Takis, with close-up sensory footage and raw visual energy, drives the kind of comments that marketers dream about: “I love Takis and I’m getting Takis tomorrow.” Even more telling is the purchase intent signal in comments. Mid-Day Squares, despite posting only 42 times in 2025, regularly generates comments like “Where is this sold?” and “Which stores have them?” โ€” language that connects directly to shelf velocity. This kind of comment section is worth more than a million low-intent likes.

TikTok: Takis Is in a Category of One

If Instagram shows a mixed picture, TikTok is where the generation gap between legacy and disruptor brands is most stark. Takis posted just 99 times in 2025 โ€” less than Doritos (327 posts), Utz (375 posts), or Siete Foods (222 posts) โ€” and yet generated 2.8 million total engagements, averaging 28,417 per post. No other brand in the study came remotely close. The implication is important: on TikTok, more content does not mean more engagement. Siete Foods posted 222 times (14โ€“22 posts per month) and averaged just 144 engagements per post. That level of output with that level of return isn’t just inefficient โ€” it’s algorithmically dangerous. TikTok reduces distribution for accounts that consistently post low-engagement content, creating a negative feedback loop that’s hard to escape. Chart showing performance of 13 salty snack brands on TikTok

Platform Insight

TikTok now uses your follower base as a “test panel.” Content that resonates with existing followers first has a meaningfully higher chance of being pushed to wide audiences. Building a smaller, engaged following matters more than chasing raw follower counts โ€” and prioritizing Saves and Shares over Likes will help with algorithmic reach.
Among legacy brands, Pringles (7,106 avg. engagements/post), Cheez-It (4,660), and Doritos (4,640) are performing well. Doritos in particular benefits from repurposing its best Instagram content on TikTok, where it often outperforms. New product announcements, like NKD chips, are a clear strength for them on the platform. Cape Cod Chips presents an interesting case: they have the second-highest TikTok engagement rate (4.41%) but posted only 37 times across 52 weeks. Their content clearly resonates โ€” they just aren’t feeding the machine often enough to capitalize on it.

Influencer Marketing: The Channel That Moves Product Off Shelves

Here’s where the research gets genuinely consequential for brand marketers. Our database tracked over 40,000 brand mentions in the U.S. food and drink category in 2025, spanning both paid and organic creator content across 23 million monitored accounts. The distribution of those mentions across the 13 brands analyzed was not even close to even. Doritos led with 9,240 tracked posts mentioning the brand. Takis came in second with 7,870 โ€” an extraordinary figure for a brand that many would still consider a challenger. The drop-off after the top two is steep: popchips (4,700), Pringles (4,240), Cheez-It (3,500). Siete Foods, at 1,800 mentions, punches above its weight for a brand of its size. And Cape Cod Chips, which performed well on owned channels, has only 284 influencer mentions โ€” a significant gap in earned amplification.
Chart showing performance of 13 salty snack brands and Influencer mentions
Influencer-generated content bridges the gap between digital engagement and in-store purchase behavior, with research showing a 3โ€“18% lift in incremental retail sales.
Why does this matter? Research cited in our analysis shows that influencer-generated content can drive a 3% to 18% increase in incremental in-store sales for CPG brands. Data-driven attribution models point to creator content as particularly effective at the “last mile” of the consumer journey โ€” the moment a shopper is standing in the snack aisle and reaches for one brand over another because they saw it on their feed.
“These mentions build top-of-mind awareness, influencing the ‘last mile’ of the consumer journey and effectively converting digital engagement into grocery cart additions.” โ€” Ignite Social Media Snap Analysis, 2026

What This Means for Your Social Media Strategy

Whether you’re a challenger brand trying to find your footing or a legacy brand wondering why your engagement rate hasn’t moved in years, this data points to a few actionable conclusions:

Key Takeaways for CPG Social Media Marketers

  • Audit your engagement rate honestly. A large follower count with a sub-1% engagement rate is a liability, not an asset. Ghost Followings suppress your organic reach and skew your performance data.
  • Content quality beats posting frequency. Utz posted on TikTok 375 times in 2025. Takis posted 99 times on TikTok and generated more than 13ร— the total engagements. Frequency without resonance is wasteful.
  • On TikTok, watch your engagement rate vigilantly. Posting high volumes of low-performing content can, over time, algorithmically suppress your channel’s reach. Better to post less and perform better.
  • Comments reveal purchase intent. Count the comments asking “where can I buy this?” or “which stores carry it?” That’s your real ROI signal โ€” far more valuable than vanity metrics.
  • Invest in influencer marketing with a retail lens. With a proven 3โ€“18% lift in in-store sales, creator content isn’t just brand awareness โ€” it’s a performance channel. If your brand is under-indexed on influencer mentions relative to your category, that’s a gap worth closing.
  • Don’t over-repurpose across platforms. What works on Instagram doesn’t automatically translate to TikTok. Doritos repurposes selectively and does it well. Blanket cross-posting is a different โ€” and riskier โ€” strategy.

The Bottom Line

The salty snacks category is a microcosm of a broader truth in CPG social media marketing: disruptors are winning not because they have bigger budgets, but because they have better content strategies. Takis doesn’t post more than Doritos on TikTok โ€” they post less, and every post is built to travel. Mid-Day Squares posts sparingly on Instagram and generates more purchase intent per comment than brands posting daily. Legacy brands aren’t doomed. Rold Gold, Cheez-It, and Cape Cod Chips are proof that legacy status is no barrier to high engagement โ€” if you’re willing to make content that actually earns attention. The brands winning in 2026 will be the ones who stop optimizing for posting volume and start optimizing for resonance. If you want to see how your brand stacks up โ€” or dig deeper into what the disruptors are doing that your brand could adopt โ€” we’re happy to pull a custom competitive analysis.

This analysis is based on publicly available data collected for the calendar year 2025.

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