Food and Drink Ads That Last: 2,428 Long-Running Meta Ads
What 2,428 food and drink ads that ran 60+ days on Meta in Europe have in common, from coffee brands to cafés: copy length, first lines and the markets.
adthief.ai · · 6 min read
Food and drink is the widest category we track. It covers coffee roasters and snack brands, tea shops and protein powders, but also pet food, cafés, hotels with restaurants and pubs. That mix makes it the most useful category for local businesses to study: some of the advertisers look a lot like you.
This post looks at 2,428 food and drink ads from 1,471 brands that each ran for at least 60 days in Europe. Here is what they have in common, how markets differ, and what a café, restaurant or food brand can take from it.
How we built it
- Source: Meta's public Ad Library, collected every night by adthief.ai.
- Which ads: ads shown in Europe that had been running for 60 days or more, found through searches for food and drink. One record per creative.
- Snapshot: 31 October 2026. The archive holds 9,839 ads from 5,185 brands; 2,428 are in food and drink.
The usual caveats apply. Every ad is a survivor, so the data describes what winners look like, not the odds of winning. Meta publishes no spend or sales for commercial ads, so a long run is our stand-in for a profitable ad. And the category is broad by design: pet food brands, which also appear in our pet set, are among the most active advertisers here.
Food and drink at a glance
| Measure | Food and drink |
|---|---|
| Ads | 2,428 |
| Brands | 1,471 |
| Median days running | 66 |
| Ran six months or more | 14% |
| Longest run | 809 days |
| Median words in the post text | 80 |
| Ads with at least one emoji | 64% |
| Shown on both Facebook and Instagram | 95% |
You might expect food ads to be short: a photo of something delicious and a line of text. The long-running ones aren't. At a median of 80 words, food and drink has the second-longest copy of the six industries, after supplements.
Finding 1: Food ads tell a story
| Copy length | Ads | Median days |
|---|---|---|
| Short (under 30 words) | 417 | 67 |
| Medium (30 to 99 words) | 1,001 | 66 |
| Long (100+ words) | 1,010 | 66 |
Long and medium copy are equally common, about 1,000 ads each, and short copy is the smallest group. How long the ads ran barely changes with length.
Our data counts words; it doesn't judge what the words say. But 100 words is room for far more than a description of a dish: where a coffee comes from, why a snack is made the way it is, what changed in a recipe. When the product is something people eat or drink every day, many of them will read that far.
What to do with it: if you have a real story (your supplier, your recipe, your oven, the person who started the place), a longer post can carry it. Write a short version too and let the results decide.
Finding 2: Urgency is rare
| First line contains | Food and drink | Whole archive |
|---|---|---|
| An emoji | 44% | 47% |
| "You" | 32% | 30% |
| A number | 20% | 20% |
| A question | 17% | 16% |
| Urgency | 9% | 10% |
| A percentage off | 3% | 4% |
Food and drink has the lowest share of first lines with urgency of any industry: 9%. That is a little surprising for a category built around fresh products and daily specials. The likely reason is simple: ads that run for months can't say "today only". Long-running food ads sell the everyday reason to buy, and leave the limited offers to short campaigns or organic posts.
Discounts are rare too, at 3% of first lines.
What to do with it: split your ads in two. An evergreen ad that sells the product or the place and can run for months, and short, dated ads for events, menus and offers that you switch off when they end.
Finding 3: Coffee brands keep their winners
The most active pages in the food set are Mersey Raw (28 ads), Besser leben, Natürlich gesund (25, longest 90 days), Healthy Petz Co (20), Feline Institute of Health (19), Tim Hortons (18, longest 264 days) and Giants Coffee (15, longest 256 days).
Judging by their names, the first four are pet food and health pages, which shows how wide the category is. The two coffee advertisers are the interesting ones for a café or food brand: both have an ad that has run for more than eight months. Coffee is a daily habit, and an ad that wins people over to a daily habit can keep running for a long time.
Further down the market lists you also find local hospitality: Hotel Neue Post in Germany, Bunk Hotels in the Netherlands and Keans Claremorris in Ireland all appear among the most active food advertisers in their markets. Local businesses do run long-lived ads on Meta.
Finding 4: The markets
| Main market | Ads | Brands | Median days | Six months+ | Median words | Emoji |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The UK | 1,278 | 733 | 66 | 14% | 92 | 57% |
| Germany | 312 | 199 | 70 | 11% | 81 | 70% |
| Italy | 121 | 93 | 66 | 16% | 72 | 76% |
| Ireland | 92 | 65 | 66 | 13% | 57 | 59% |
| France | 81 | 56 | 66 | 14% | 66 | 75% |
| The Netherlands | 77 | 57 | 65 | 19% | 58 | 52% |
| Spain | 73 | 59 | 65 | 8% | 82 | 74% |
| Romania | 57 | 30 | 63 | 12% | 51 | 53% |
The UK again writes the longest copy (92 words at the median). Dutch food ads are among the shortest and use the fewest emoji (52%), yet nearly one in five passed six months. Spain sits at the other end: long copy, lots of emoji, and only 8% past six months. Most of these markets have fewer than 125 ads, so read the smaller rows as hints.
Browse the ads at food and drink ads in the UK or across Europe.
What to do with this as a local food business
- Write one evergreen ad. What you serve, why it is good, where you are. If it works, let it run for months.
- Keep offers separate. Daily specials and events go in short ads with an end date.
- Tell the story. Long copy is normal in food. Your supplier, your recipe or your history is content most chains can't copy.
- Use the habit. Coffee advertisers keep winners running because they sell a daily habit. Breakfast, lunch and the weekly shop work the same way.
- Show the place. For a café or restaurant, the room, the counter and the people are as much the product as the food.
For a full plan for restaurants, read Facebook ads for restaurants.
Before you spend, see what the places near you are doing. The free competitor check puts your reviews, prices and ads next to theirs.