How does a food brand in Kenya stay relevant in a competitive market where consumers have plenty of choices? Royco Kenya is one interesting example of how brands can use social media to build more than product awareness.
We used our Instagram competitor analysis tool to do a competitive intelligence analysis of Royco Kenya’s Instagram. We examined their content strategy, influencer partnerships, campaign activity, product messaging and use of Kenyan food culture. Our goal was to understand how the brand positions itself online, the themes that shape their communication. We also looked into the opportunities Royco’s approach presents for marketers and competing brands.
Let’s delve into the key findings and what your businesses can learn from them.
Key Takeaways:
- Royco combines recipe demonstrations with family stories, food entertainment and everyday cooking experiences.
- Their content features professional chefs, established creators and everyday home cooks.
- Kenyan dishes, Swahili, Sheng and local humour help make the brand relatable to its audience.
- The Taste Off Season 2 show on Citizen extends the brand’s presence beyond individual Instagram posts.
Royco’s Instagram Campaign Performance (July–October 2026)
Between July and October 2026, Royco’s Instagram content and influencer campaign generated an estimated 11.44 million total impressions and 713,070 total post engagements, demonstrating the campaign’s ability to generate visibility and audience interaction.
Engagement was driven primarily by likes, which accounted for 700,210 interactions, alongside 12,860 comments. The campaign recorded an average reach of 111,040 per post, with an average of 6,800 likes and approximately 125 comments per post. These results highlight the role of creator-led content in expanding Royco’s visibility and encouraging audiences to interact with the brand across social media.
Building a Brand Around Kenyan Food Culture
One of the clearest patterns in Royco Kenya’s Instagram strategy is the emphasis on food as a cultural and social experience.
They haven’t just focused exclusively on seasoning products. Their content is geared towards connecting cooking with family, relationships, local traditions and everyday life.
Some of the examples we spotted in the analysis include traditional dishes, street food, meals prepared for loved ones and humorous takes on familiar Kenyan experiences.
This approach gives the brand several ways to connect with consumers:
- Cooking is portrayed as an expression of care and affection.
- Dishes such as pilau, ugali accompaniments and mutura connect the brand with familiar local tastes.
- Simple recipes and humorous situations are used to make the content more accessible.
- More elaborate recipes and cooking challenges give audiences ideas to try at home.
Royco’s Instagram Content Pillars
Our analysis identified several recurring content themes that support different parts of Royco’s marketing strategy.
| Content pillar | Role in the strategy |
| The Taste Off Season 2 | Builds entertainment value and showcases culinary talent |
| Royco Kitchen Tales | Provides recipe inspiration and demonstrates product use |
| #Pikakamawewe | Encourages audiences to explore and share their own cooking styles |
| Flavour Max messaging | Connects recipes with product benefits and usage |
| Family and home cooking | Builds emotional relevance through relatable stories |
| Street food and Kenyan cuisine | Reinforces local identity and culinary credibility |
Influencer Marketing: Celebrity Chefs & Everyday Cooks!
Royco’s content features different types of creators, from professional chefs and established influencers to students, home cooks and other everyday personalities.
Some of the creators helping Royco drive engagement are @crazy_kennar, Akoko Val (@akoko_val), @joy_tothe_world__, @the_roamingchef, and Chef Ali Mandhry (@chefalimandhry).
Crazy Kennar drove the most engagement for Royco using humour and relatable skits to make branded content entertaining and shareable. Instagram creators like Joy to the World tap into playful, conversational food content that encourages audience interaction.
The Roaming Chef draws on nostalgia and humour. In one post he recreated boarding-school meals and invited followers to share their own food memories in the comments.
Chef Ali Mandhry uses his culinary expertise to showcase recipes featuring Royco products, demonstrating how they can be incorporated into everyday Kenyan cooking.
These are just but a few creators helping Royco communicate beyond traditional product promotion. This mix allows Royco to become part of the food, culture, and everyday experiences its audience already enjoys, making the campaign feel more engaging and authentic.
The Taste Off Season 2: Connecting Television and Social Media
The Taste Off Season 2 stands out as an example of campaign-led content. Through its association with Citizen TV and Ajab Flour, the cooking competition gives Royco a presence within a wider entertainment and food-content environment.
The Instagram content identified in the analysis includes cooking challenges, contestant-related material and clips associated with the competition.
This creates opportunities to extend a campaign across multiple touchpoints.
Product Messaging and Cross-Selling Opportunities
Royco’s content features products such as Beef Cubes, Chilli Cubes, Chicken Cubes and Pilau Masala, alongside broader Flavour Max messaging.
One example is the 2+1 formula, which combines two Royco Beef Cubes with one Royco Chilli Cube.
This type of product-led content connects a specific usage suggestion with a recipe or flavour outcome. It also creates an opportunity to introduce consumers to more than one product within the portfolio.
The broader lesson is that product messaging can become more practical when it appears in the context of a cooking activity.
As a competitor or brand in this niche, you can use similar analysis to investigate:
- Which products receive the most visible attention in social content.
- How frequently individual products appear alongside campaign messaging.
- Whether brands explain product usage or focus mainly on general benefits.
- How recipes and creator partnerships support awareness of different products.
Hashtags, Language and Community Participation
Royco’s Instagram strategy includes branded hashtags such as #Pikakamawewe, #RoycoKitchenTales and #TheTasteOff, alongside food-related discovery hashtags.
These hashtags are used to connect content to a campaign. They also organize recurring recipe themes and help audiences discover related posts.
The hashtags are a mix of English, Swahili and Sheng, with informal humour and references to local food traditions. This multilingual approach helps the brand communicate in a voice that feels connected to everyday Kenyan conversations.
For businesses, the lesson is to examine both the language of a competitor’s content and the ways audiences participate in its campaigns.
Competitive Intelligence: Royco’s Strengths and Potential Gaps
In general, here are some of the strengths in Royco’s approach, alongside opportunities your brand could investigate.
| Area | Observed strength | Opportunity for competitors |
| Content strategy | Multiple recurring content themes | Develop a distinctive format instead of copying recipes |
| Influencer marketing | A mix of creator types | Explore underrepresented communities and audiences |
| Cultural relevance | Kenyan dishes, language and humour | Reflect regional food traditions and local preferences |
| Entertainment | Cooking competition content | Create engaging, repeatable formats |
| Product messaging | Products featured in recipe contexts | Explain product uses and differentiating benefits more clearly |
| Platform strategy | Strong Instagram presence in the analysed sample | Assess opportunities across additional relevant platforms |
Recommendations for Competing Food Brands in Kenya
Based on these observed content patterns, competing brands could consider several approaches:
- Develop recognisable content formats: Instead of publishing disconnected recipe posts, create a recurring series that audiences can recognise and anticipate.
- Broaden creator representation: Combine expert voices with everyday cooks and creators from different communities, regions and demographic groups.
- Make product education more useful: Show consumers how products fit into specific cooking situations, while communicating substantiated product benefits clearly.
- Build participation into campaigns: Develop branded prompts, recipe challenges or community features that encourage people to contribute their own ideas.
- Assess performance across platforms: Investigate where audiences discuss food, share recipes and interact with creators. Use the findings to decide whether additional investment in platforms such as TikTok or YouTube is justified.
- Monitor competitor activity consistently: Track changes in campaign themes, creator partnerships, hashtag usage, product visibility and audience response over time. This helps teams distinguish a one-off campaign from a sustained strategic shift.
How Brand Moran Supports Social Media Competitive Intelligence
This case study illustrates how publicly available social media content can provide a starting point for understanding a competitor’s digital strategy.
Brand Moran helps businesses bring Instagram competitor intelligence and social listening into their decision-making.
Our tools help you analyse online conversations and relevant brand activity, marketing and communications teams. This way you can investigate questions such as:
- What themes are competitors discussing most frequently?
- Which campaigns and products feature in their content?
- How do brands use creators and branded hashtags?
- What are audiences saying about competing products?
- How does the conversation change during a campaign?
- Where are there opportunities to differentiate a brand’s messaging?
A structured monitoring process can help teams move from collecting posts to identifying patterns and developing practical recommendations.
Wrapping up
In a nutshell, Royco Kenya’s Instagram content illustrates how a food brand can combine product messaging with cultural relevance, creator partnerships and entertainment. For competing brands you can draw from this to understand how a competitor’s content, partnerships and campaigns work together. You could then identify a distinctive approach that fits their own audience and business objectives.
The good thing is that with our tools and structured competitive intelligence process, you can make more informed decisions all these
Talk to us via info@brandmoran.com and let Brand Moran help your team turn social media activity and consumer conversations into actionable competitive intelligence.
