Brief
Booker is the UK’s leading wholesaler, supplying thousands of hospitality and catering businesses across the country. Despite its market-leading position, the brand’s profile within the hospitality and catering trade press did not reflect its scale or significance.
2025 marked our first year managing Booker’s press office function, and the task was clear: raise the wholesaler’s profile across the hospitality and catering trade media landscape and generate the quality, consistent coverage that a brand of Booker’s stature deserved.
Our job was to put Booker on the map within the hospitality and catering trade press, building brand trust and credibility through an earned-first approach with a laser focus on its own brand food and drink ranges – communicating quality, value and convenience.
Strategy
We adopted an earned-first strategy, prioritising media coverage to build brand trust and credibility before layering in strategic paid support. The approach centred on Booker’s own brand food and drink ranges, positioning the wholesaler as a go-to source for quality, value and convenience within the catering and hospitality sector.
We blended strategy with storytelling, crafting narratives around Booker’s own brand portfolio and layering with insightful commentary that resonated with the needs of caterers, publicans, restaurateurs and foodservice operators. Every piece of activity was designed to reinforce Booker’s position as a progressive, quality-led wholesaler and to give trade journalists compelling reasons to cover the brand.
Activation
We operated a full-service press office for Booker, generating a consistent drumbeat of coverage across the year. This included proactive news announcements, bespoke feature submissions, commentary pieces and spokesperson profiling to ensure Booker maintained a visible and authoritative presence within the trade media.
Earned activity was the backbone of the campaign. We created a bank of targeted press materials covering product launches, range updates and category insights, alongside bespoke commentary for trade features on topics spanning food trends, menu innovation, value in foodservice and own brand quality. We worked closely with the Booker team to identify and brief spokespeople, preparing detailed Q&As to ensure they were media-ready and able to offer credible, informed perspectives.
To amplify our earned impact, we delivered strategic paid placements across key trade titles, including promoted articles, newsletter banner ads, sponsored posts and advertorials. These were carefully selected to complement earned coverage, extend reach and reinforce key messages around quality, value and convenience to highly targeted audiences of hospitality and catering decision-makers.
Results
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