Food and Drink Ads in the UK: 1,278 Long-Running Meta Ads
More than half of Europe’s long-running food and drink ads on Meta target the UK. What 1,278 ads from 733 brands show about copy, emoji and how long winners run.
adthief.ai · · 6 min read
If you sell food or drink online in Britain, or run a café, bakery or restaurant brand with a shop, the UK is where most of Europe’s long-running Meta competition is. In our archive, 1,278 food and drink ads from 733 brands had the UK as their main market. That is more than half of all the long-running food and drink ads we hold.
This post looks at what those ads have in common, how they compare with the rest of Europe, and what to do with it.
How we built the data
- Source: Meta’s public Ad Library, collected by adthief.ai every night. Snapshot: 31 October 2026.
- Which ads: ads that ran for 60 days or more in Europe. The food and drink group has 2,428 ads from 1,471 brands.
- Main market: the country where the ad reached the most people.
- Survivors only: every ad here already ran two months, so the data shows what winners look like, not how often ads win.
- No spend data: Meta doesn’t publish spend or sales for commercial ads, so a long run stands in for a profitable one.
One caveat matters a lot for this group: it includes pet food. An ad can belong to more than one industry, and raw dog food or cat treats count as both food and pets. Three of the four brands with the most long-running UK food ads are pet brands. Keep that in mind when you read the averages; if you sell human food, look at the ads themselves, not just the numbers.
Also note that ads shown only in the UK carry less detail in the Ad Library than ads shown in the EU, because the reach, age and gender breakdowns come from EU rules. More on that in our UK post.
Finding 1: A typical run, at a much bigger scale
| Main market | Food and drink ads | Median days | Ran 6 months+ | Median words | Ads with emoji |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The UK | 1,278 | 66 | 14% | 92 | 57% |
| Germany | 312 | 70 | 11% | 81 | 70% |
| Italy | 121 | 66 | 16% | 72 | 76% |
| Ireland | 92 | 66 | 13% | 57 | 59% |
| France | 81 | 66 | 14% | 66 | 75% |
| The Netherlands | 77 | 65 | 19% | 58 | 52% |
| Spain | 73 | 65 | 8% | 82 | 74% |
| All of Europe | 2,428 | 66 | 14% | 80 | 64% |
British food winners ran a median of 66 days, and 14% passed six months: exactly the European figures. The UK isn’t a market where food ads last unusually long or short. It is simply where most of them are. Across Europe, the longest food and drink ad in the archive had been running for 809 days.
What to do with it: plan for a winner to carry you for two to three months, with a few lasting much longer. Keep new creative in testing so you are never relying on one ad.
Finding 2: British food ads are wordy
The median UK food and drink ad has 92 words, the longest of any country in the table and well above the European 80. Only 57% use emoji, one of the lowest shares.
Part of that may be pet food: UK pet ads have a median of 95 words, and many of them also count as food. But it also fits the British market as a whole, which has the longest copy of the 15 countries we measure.
Across European food ads, length didn’t decide how long an ad ran:
| Ad text length | Food ads, all of Europe | Median days running |
|---|---|---|
| Under 30 words | 417 | 67 |
| 30 to 99 words | 1,001 | 66 |
| 100 words or more | 1,010 | 66 |
What to do with it: if your product needs explaining (a new ingredient, a subscription, a diet), long copy is normal in the UK and doesn’t hold an ad back. If it doesn’t (a coffee, a snack, a box of pastries), a short ad with a strong photo or video will stand out among the long ones.
Finding 3: How food ads open
| First line contains | Food, all of Europe | All UK ads |
|---|---|---|
| “You” or “your” | 32% | 37% |
| A number | 20% | 21% |
| A question | 17% | 15% |
| An urgency word | 9% | 11% |
| An emoji | 44% | 39% |
| A percentage | 3% | 3% |
We don’t have first-line patterns for UK food ads alone, but both columns point the same way: talk to the reader, use a number when you have one, and keep the discount out of the first line. Only 3% open with a percentage.
What to do with it: start with the moment, not the product: breakfast, the school run, the Friday night in, the dog’s dinner. Our hook formulas post has more structures.
Finding 4: Who advertises
Among the brands with the most long-running food and drink ads with the UK as main market are Mersey Raw, Healthy Petz Co and Feline Institute of Health, all pet food or pet health brands, and Tim Hortons, the coffee chain. Across Europe’s food group, Tim Hortons had 18 long-running ads, the longest at 264 days; Mersey Raw had 28, the longest at 66 days.
These are two different patterns. One brand has many ads just past two months; the other has fewer, with one running for most of a year. Both show up among advertisers who keep paying for their ads, which is the signal that matters.
For a local food business, the useful lesson is that a food ad doesn’t have to be replaced every month. When one works, some keep working for most of a year.
Finding 5: Check the HFSS rules
This is not legal advice. The UK has introduced restrictions on paid online advertising for food and drink high in fat, sugar or salt (HFSS). If you sell snacks, sweets, sugary drinks or similar, check whether your products are in scope and what the rules allow before you plan a Meta campaign. It may change which products you can promote, and it is a good reason to build ads around products that are clearly outside the rules.
What this means for food brands in the UK
- Expect competition. Half of Europe’s long-running food ads are British.
- Plan a two-to-three-month cycle for most winners.
- Match length to the product: long copy for things that need explaining, short for things that don’t.
- Open with the reader’s moment, not the discount.
- Check HFSS rules before you choose which products to advertise.
- Separate pet food from human food when you research, or the averages will mislead you.
See the ads
Browse long-running food and drink ads in the UK, or run a free competitor check on your own market. If you run a restaurant or café, our post on Facebook ads for restaurants is a good next read.