Food PR runs on five disciplines — transparency, influencer marketing, trend management, crisis response, sustainability — and one new layer: AI engine retrieval. The operating model used by Chipotle, McDonald's, Oatly, Beyond Meat, Patagonia Provisions, and the food brands building Citation Share inside the category.
Five firms handle the bulk of proxy-fight communications: 5W AI Communications, Edelman Smithfield, FGS Global, Joele Frank, and Brunswick. The category is shifting as proxy advisors and institutional investors increasingly cross-check claims through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Bud Light. Stanley. Tarte. Three consumer brand crises that each broke through retailer, social, and AI engine retrieval in different ways. The patterns CPG should extract and the AI memory layer that now persists.
Cannabis operators face crisis exposure across categories few consumer brands match in combination: product safety, regulatory enforcement, license risk, financial restatement, executive matters, and reputation in a category where cultural acceptance is still evolving. Eight crisis categories, mock recall simulations, regulator-response tabletops, four-level escalation trees, dispensary communications, investor sequencing, and recovery in years not quarters.
The OceanGate Titan implosion became the canonical case study in how a niche category loses its license to operate when one operator fails catastrophically. The five-step trust-rebuild framework, what the U.S. Coast Guard investigation documented, and why the lesson extends beyond submersibles.
In times of crisis within an industry, businesses may face challenges in retaining their customer base.
A company's ability to take control of the narrative during such incidents will determine its success in resolving them.
The crypto crisis communications playbook: exchange collapse, smart contract exploits, stablecoin depegs, SEC/CFTC/OFAC enforcement, founder controversy, banking-rail crises, and the adversarial X and Reddit community as parallel press.
Mattel's 2007 recall of 21 million toys across three waves, led by CEO Bob Eckert, remains the under-cited reference for multi-wave supply chain crisis handling and shaped the 2008 CPSIA legislation.
When the pandemic started, many of the affected companies decided to either make things up as time progressed or dust off their old crisis communications plan.
