In paid partnership with Tracksuit. Data provided by Tracksuit; editorial control by THE GOODS.

At 31, Anna Pan has already lived a few careers inside consumer goods. She began on the unglamorous side of B2B packaging, then moved into shopper marketing at Kodiak Cakes and on to Feastables, the creator founded snacking brand launched by Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast) and Jim Murray. At Feastables, Pan oversees omnichannel and shopper marketing. The arc shaped her instincts: sightlines beat slogans, displays fail if the box fails, the shelf only works if you can see it.

We are on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Anna in Chicago, me in Lisbon, and the first thing we talk about is not chocolate or MrBeast’s YouTube fame. It is quiet. “I really value my time by myself and with my family,” she says. “Truly taking that time in the evening to step away from work and not be checking my phone or logging back in.” She lets the thought sit, then switches gears. Packaging, she tells me, was her boot camp. “We all have different pain points,” she says. “The pain point on the marketing side is that we always need to move faster. On the supply chain or packaging team, they want to move faster too, but cannot. ‘If we push it now, it may not hold up packaging wise. We have so many tests to do X, Y, Z.’”

Kodiak was “my first time working in a role in B2C,” she says. “I was working directly on projects that had to do with educating and converting people to buy a product… It opened my eyes to how different marketing investments shift the way shoppers view products and decide to buy. Small things can have such a big impact on the way a consumer views a product.”

From YouTube to aisle intent

Pan’s brief at Feastables is to turn attention into baskets. “As we enter traditional channels like grocery, mass grocery, we want to enter in an untraditional way,” she says. “We want to stand out. We are a brand founded by the biggest YouTube creator in the world. We are really big on creating engaging moments and viral moments no matter the platform. That includes the displays we have in store. Jimmy cares a lot about making sure what we are doing is always engaging and exciting and, in a way, grand. It needs to stand out. He wants his followers to know right away what this is, who it is by, and to get excited about it, and feel like they are having an experience that brings them closer to the world of MrBeast.”

Colour does a lot of the lifting. Early packs were mixed, legacy confectionery colours. “Our original packaging was very different,” she says. “We realised we needed a brand block.” The result is to lean into MrBeast’s bright blue that reads from metres away. It makes the consumer stop and say, as Pan puts it, “I have not seen these before. And then they see the MrBeast brand and they are like, ‘Okay, I am sold.’”

Visibility matters because she does not assume the aisle will do the job. “I rarely visit the chocolate aisle as a shopper, only whilst I am auditing,” she admits. “My role at Feastables is to bring new shoppers into the category and into the store.” That means building outside the aisle as much as in it, and defending that space. “With each of the retailers that we launched these products at, we put together these massive 360-degree launch plans that leverage email, social, SMS, YouTube, in-store display, shippers,” she says. “We partner with MrBeast himself and a few of our biggest creator partners… and then they post hype videos essentially talking about the brand, talking about the product and then also talking about the retailers that are carrying those products.”

Two audiences sit behind that plan. “You are hitting different consumers and also the people who have the buying power,” she says. “You have to educate mom and dad in order for the purchase to happen.” For a while Feastables tilted young and loud on purpose, then noticed the gap. “There was a big gap… where we were not educating the person with the buying power in what the product is, why we are different, why you should buy us over the traditional chocolate brands. Our brand team launched a campaign that was really focused around our ethical sourcing story.”

Pan says, “MrBeast, earlier this year, spent weeks on the cocoa farms in Africa, seeing what it takes from start to finish, and then he also spent a lot of time with the kids who we are working to get off the cocoa farms and into schools.” She reflects, “For him I know it was impactful but then also for us as a brand it showed families his commitment in a way they can understand.” The important part for Feastables is championing “simplified messaging and making sure everything we do is easy to understand. There is a unique line we have to toe as a brand so we can stay at the forefront of change.”

On budget and buyers

Budget follows the objective, not the calendar. “Maintaining a fluid budget is super important, seldom do we define a budget in January and stick to it,” she says. “If our goal is awareness, we are investing in top of the funnel marketing tactics, social videos, email and SMS. If our goal is conversion, we are investing in bottom of the funnel tactics, sponsored search. ROI will also vary by tactic and by what our goal is.” The tempo follows the same logic. “A mix of focusing on our core items along with small pulses on LTOs and ‘quick win’ programs or offerings.”

Recent brand practice reflects that LTO mindset. Feastables has used genuinely time-boxed variants, such as Hazelnut Cups,  promoted with creator assets and a named retail call to action, then retired on schedule where appropriate, keeping the range fresh without bloating core.

Poppi’s Matt Giese backs that rhythm. “Our LTOs give us flexibility to keep the variety coming while still playing within our retailer’s space constraints,” he says. Poppi only promotes a flavour to core “when it drives sustained incremental benefit for us, our retail partners, and most importantly, our consumers.” His guardrail mirrors Pan’s: “Start with an objective that benefits the retailer, not just you, and give them time to align.”

At Feastables, partnerships with buyers sit close to the work. “With bigger players like Walmart and Target, we work much closer,” Pan says. The chocolate milk launch at Walmart in late August was “a huge launch for us and something that we worked really closely with the buyers on.” Planning for a national programme with 7-Eleven to launch Feastables chocolate milk and Sour Strikes gummies, began in the spring. “It has been months of coordinating and planning this launch, engaging with their marketing team and their media team as well to utilise their resources to bring the brand to life within their doors and also within their digital app.”

Anna’s advice for early-stage challenger brands is to prove you can operate inside retail’s rules before you try to bend them. Nail the basics first: the brand block, the calendar, the fixture and the out-of-aisle plan. Then earn the right to push. “The big mistake is trying to run too fast,” she says. “Launching in retail is very different from DTC. There are a lot of rules, you are at the mercy of your buyers. That said, there are times you can challenge those rules, as a challenger brand.” How to do it? “Day one, be the partner they are excited to work with. Bring ideas that excite them and bring new shoppers into their stores. It is okay to follow the rules while also still challenging the norm.”

Mentorship

Lending your experience to nurture younger talent is, of course, a fine way to give back. Pan explains how not to do it. “I was once told by a really close mentor of mine that I did not have what it took to manage retail media platforms,” she says. “Six months is not a reasonable amount of time to expect someone to be an expert in anything.” The lesson stuck. “The opinion of one person does not really define you.”

Today she runs most of the machine. “In my current role, I own 90% of our retail media management,” she says. “That is due to coming back from that feedback, embracing the challenge, working with leaders who believed in me, who fostered my growth and my learning and also gave me room to make mistakes along the way.” She is matter-of-fact: “For Walmart Connect, we work with an agency who manages all the hands-on-keyboard support. I work on the strategy, they review and apply everything, and I can ask them questions along the way.  What I learn from them, I can reapply across other retail media partners.”

Cross-category lessons

On what confectionery should borrow from other aisles Pan suggests, “A more experiential environment, especially in mass retail,” she says, linking to her view on personalisation. “We often use the same language for very different shoppers… it just may not strike the same for each.”

Club tells you how families really buy. “I do not think the two need to be mutually exclusive,” she says of health and household value. “Every day it becomes easier and easier to purchase healthy, better for you options in bulk, especially in the club channel. Costco is a perfect example. Members are no longer just looking for the cheapest option, they are looking for the most affordable, healthy option they can provide for their family.” Hence the format answer. “Feastables is rolling out our first ever rotation of a 70ct Variety Bag at Costco,” she says, “made with Simple, High-Quality Ingredients, and Ethically sourced.”

What actually moves a hand to the shelf. “When it comes to Feastables, they are looking for stuff that their teens are talking about,” she says. “It is all about discoverability plus right messaging plus being in the right place.” That is also what separates converting a YouTube subscriber from converting a traditional buyer. “Methods and main channels of awareness have changed a lot from what they used to be for brands. When we are marketing, we want to make sure we are talking to the right shoppers. Being at the forefront of digital should enable our brand to reach our shopper in ways that other brands cannot, especially given how digitally native our shoppers are.”

The balance between cultural pull and proof is intentional. “Huge cultural pull driven by our founder,” Pan says, paired with “continually investing in traditional shopper marketing and retail media tactics are key.” That means “display ad campaigns, sponsored product placements, OOH, field marketing, and so much more to engage with shoppers, drive additional awareness, and drive conversion online and in stores,” and “using shopper originated media, but through campaigns that are truly integrated so we are delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time.”

When Anna is out of office, she is not really off the clock. “I am a CPG nerd for sure,” she says. “Lately, I tend to shop mostly on Instacart, but when I do go to grocery stores, I will spend an hour minimum in the store, walking every single aisle to see what is new in each category.”

Feastables isn’t just chasing velocity; it is betting on clarity and cadence in a category long criticised for opacity: a visible blue brand block, a plain-English mission, and time-boxed drops supported by strong creators and collaborative retail partners. As Pan puts it, “Small things can have such a big impact on the way a consumer views a product.” In a broad, ageing category, as Tracksuit shows, the job is simple: make discovery visible, performance defensible, and ethics - intrinsic to your mission - legible at the shelf.

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For more information on this, take a look at my long-read for The Grocer on what supermarkets can learn about drop culture and creating hype in-store from LTOs.