Food brands lose track of 60% of word-of-mouth sales, their #1 channel

Someone tries a hot sauce at a friend's barbecue, sees it on a shelf the following week, and a month later types the name into a search bar and orders a case. To the brand's analytics that is a search sale, or a direct one. A new study of 178,530 post-purchase survey responses across 278 online food and beverage merchants finds that recommendation is the largest single way shoppers say they discover a food brand, and that 59.9% of those sales reach the brand's reporting with no source attached at all.

The Zigpoll Attribution Index, published by survey and attribution platform Zigpoll, asked customers how they heard about the brand immediately after purchase and compared each answer with the source the merchant's own analytics recorded for that same order. Across all food and beverage orders, 46.3% carried no usable source.

More customers named word of mouth (33,556) than named Instagram (31,883), Facebook (31,417) or search (30,977). It was also the channel most often lost. A sale that began on Facebook, which attaches a click identifier to every visit, went untracked 35.2% of the time. The gap between the two, a factor of 1.70, was the widest of the nine retail categories in the study, with jewellery close behind.

The other ways a food brand earns trial fared little better. Customers who first found the brand in a shop went untracked 54.5% of the time, and customers who named a creator or influencer 54.2%.

"Food is a category people discover with their mouths, not their browsers," said Jason Zigelbaum, founder of Zigpoll. "Someone tastes it at a friend's house, sees it on a shelf, or watches a creator they trust eat it on camera, and a week later they search the name and buy it. The report credits the search. The sampling budget, the retail listing and the creator who actually caused the sale show up as the weakest lines on the dashboard, and the next budget gets set off the dashboard. That is how a food brand ends up cutting the thing that works to fund the thing that measures well."

Food and beverage customers were the least certain of any category about how they had found a brand, but not by much: 12.5% of those behind untracked orders said they did not know or could not remember. The other 87.5% named a channel.

Share of orders with no tracked source, by the channel the customer named:

- Word of mouth — 59.9%
- Retail or in store — 54.5%
- Creator or influencer — 54.2%
- TikTok — 49.8%
- YouTube — 46.9%
- Instagram — 42.0%
- Search — 39.8%
- Facebook — 35.2%

The Attribution Index is published quarterly. The full food and beverage table is published at
https://www.zigpoll.com/attribution-index/2026-09/food-beverage alongside eight other retail categories, all figures are free to reproduce with attribution, and Zigpoll will provide further cuts of the food and beverage data to journalists on request.

Methodology: Findings are drawn from 178,530 responses to "how did you
hear about us" questions, collected between 18 September 2025 and 18 September 2026 across 278 food and beverage merchants using Zigpoll. Merchants were assigned to the category from the products appearing on their orders; those whose product mix was ambiguous were excluded rather than assigned. Only responses attached to a completed order were included, so that a customer's stated answer could be compared with the source recorded for that same order. No channel figure is reported unless at least 25 of those merchants and 1,000 responses stand behind it. Stores using Zigpoll are not a random sample of food and beverage retail, and the figures describe that population rather than the market as a whole.