Advent Calendar Ideas for Food and Drink Companies

We know it’s summer, but now is the perfect time to start thinking about your Christmas offerings for your food or drinks business. One increasingly popular trend is the branded advent calendar to promote your products and brand. Starting your design in the summer gives you plenty of time to perfect the design and come up with something unique for your customers to enjoy.

Over the years, we have worked together with a variety of different food and drinks brands to create their promotional advent calendars, from artisan cheese producers to gin distilleries. Using our knowledge we have come up with a short guide on how you can make the most of your advent calendar.

Benefits of creating an advent calendar

Have you considered creating an advent calendar for your food or drinks business but haven’t taken the plunge yet? This is why we think you should consider creating a promotional advent calendar for your business.

Generate extra income

Creating a seasonal offering that also sells your products is a brilliant additional revenue stream for the festive period.

It can also boost revenue throughout the year by increasing brand loyalty.

Great for promoting your range

Promote your whole range of food and drinks products whether they are samples or full sized. This is a great way of getting all your products to consumers so they can experience what your brand has to offer. This is likely to lead to stronger customer loyalty throughout the year, as the more of your products the consumer tries, the more likely they are to like them!

A promotional advent calendar is particularly useful for promoting lesser-known products your consumers might not know about and for new products that you are looking to launch.

Great publicity

Launching a new advent calendar can be used as a PR push in the lead up to Christmas. For example, you can post on social media and other platforms to generate interest and excitement around when the advent calendar will become available for purchasing.

This is a great way to create a buzz around your advent calendar by interacting with your customers in the lead up to the launch. You can also use your advent calendar in competitions to create further momentum.

Engage your consumers

A promotional advent calendar is a great way for brands to interact with consumers and is a real treat for people to look forward to every day on the run up to Christmas.

Consumer engagement in the retail space can be tricky to achieve, particularly for smaller brands. Using an advent calendar not only gives you that opportunity but also brings revenue.

Create something special

By making something special for customers to enjoy over the festive season helps to make this period even more memorable and reinforces brand loyalty. If your advent calendar becomes a talking point (and looks so good that consumers can’t resist posting photos on social media), your brand gets free publicity!

Create an annual purchase

Making an advent calendar that your customers enjoy can potentially create a loyal annual customer, one who looks forward to purchasing your advent calendar every year for themselves or a loved one. This really helps to re-enforce brand loyalty and excitement around your advent calendar every year. It can also increase the chances of referrals where past customers have recommended your advent calendar to others.

Promotional advent calendar ideas

Below is a selection of food and drink advent calendar ideas to help give you some inspiration on what you can put in your advent calendar.

Chocolates

This is the classic example of an advent calendar where every day leading up to Christmas day is a chocolate treat. Perfect for artisan chocolate makers.

Alcohol miniature

This adult calendar can range from 12 to 24 days of Christmas. This larger sized advent calendar is classic for spirits, beer and wine. They normally contain smaller sized bottles about 5cl and 10cl miniatures.

Easy to store/long shelf-life food

Great for food that won’t perish and is easy to store like spice mixes, confectionary and long shelf-life wrapped products. This makes production and storage easy because the products don’t require low storage temperatures.

Fresh food products

If you are food company that requires your food products to remain chilled, it is still possible to create an advent calendar that is safe for your customers to consume and is exciting to receive.

For example, Newton Print helped to create Paxton and Whitfield’s cheese advent calendar. It contained 24 days of cheese divided up between 3 deliveries, with 8 cheeses each delivery, to ensure the fresh cheese was kept cold. This enabled Paxton and Whitfield’s consumers to enjoy 24 artisan cheeses over December.

Samples

Samples of the main full sized products are great for beauty and cosmetic companies. This allows your consumer to try out your products and see if they would like to purchase a full size version. As mentioned above, samples are also great for promoting new products, new ranges and lesser-known products.

Full sized products

This is a larger version of the above example where full sized products are used instead of samples.

Collaboration or a selection of related products to your brand

If you don’t have a range of food or drinks products that will fill a 12 day or 24 day advent calendar, you could team up with other brands that sell similar or complimentary products, to create an advent calendar that contains a selection of related products. This way your business could reach a wider audience and all parties within a collaboration get to benefit from the promotion.

Discounts, vouchers and gift certificates

Adding discount codes, vouchers and gift certificates to each day of your advent calendar is great for promotions and to get consumers to purchase from your business and other related businesses. By giving people vouchers and discounts every day, you are encouraging people to make a purchase from your business and other various businesses.

Using exclusive deals that only people who purchase the advent calendar can benefit from helps to drive more purchases and creates a degree of urgency to use the deals especially if they have limited expiry dates.

What we can create at Newton Print

Here at Newton Print we love a challenge! Creating completely customised advent calendars is certainly a rewarding one.

On top of creating something unique, we offer a vast range of printing embellishments and effects to help you to design something truly remarkable.

We are a carbon balanced printer that is also BRC accredited so not only has the creation of your advent calendar been carbon offset but it also meets food safety standards. In addition, we can create a 100% recyclable advent calendar that can be kerbside recycled and is biodegradable.

Get in touch with our team of friendly experts about how we can work together to create your promotional advent calendar.

Looking for inspiration? View our case studies