HFSS is Reshaping Food & Drink Marketing: Here’s How Brands are Winning (and How You Can Too)

When HFSS advertising regulations came into effect, many food and drink marketers braced for disruption. And for some, disruption is exactly what followed — particularly those whose entire product range falls outside the rules. But alongside the challenges, another story emerged: brands discovering that the constraint of HFSS is, in some cases, the best creative brief they’ve been given in years.

At YMS LDN 2026, Pion brought together marketing leaders from across the food and drink sector in a masterclass to discuss how HFSS is reshaping their strategies, and how it’s affecting them connecting authentically with Gen Zalpha. The conversation was candid and sometimes surprising, and what emerged was not just a picture of regulatory adaptation, but of brands using storytelling to build stronger connections than ever before. 

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The Reality on the Ground: It’s Harder than Expected

We opened the masterclass with a direct question, how do you perceive HFSS regulations right now?

For some brands, the advertising restrictions are only the most recent layer of a much bigger operational headache. One major supermarket explained that they were in a long, complex process of adapting store merchandising, promotional mechanics, and sales strategies. With so much internal change already under way, the upcoming digital advertising constraints feel like another blocker on a route already full of them.

For food and restaurant brands, the challenge is often starker: the product itself. A marketing rep from a popular fast-food restaurant chain put it plainly:

“Most of what we sell is HFSS-classified, so the question isn’t whether we’re affected, it’s what we do about it.”

Other views from dessert brands echoed this, and explained that product reformulation isn’t a realistic short-term option, so instead, their team is in the process of fundamentally rethinking how it communicates with a digital audience.

What came through clearly from these conversations is that brands are at very different stages. Some are still in a reactive phase — assessing the scope of the problem, taking advice, and working out what they can and cannot do. Others are already running compliant campaigns and drawing lessons from them. 

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The Creative Opportunity Inside the Constraint

A consistent theme throughout the masterclass was the unexpected upside of HFSS compliance: in forcing brands to articulate what they actually stand for, beyond the product itself.

One restaurant shared their process of mapping their menu against HFSS compliance and explained how it had opened up a genuine creative conversation internally — about what the brand means to students when you can’t lead with the food. The answer wasn’t menu items. It was community, belonging, and shared moments.

The results mean their recent campaigns have shifted away from product imagery entirely, focusing instead on the tangible moments people choose to engage with their brand: a quick catch-up, the post-lecture treat, and first payday ritual. And the best news, their engagement metrics have held up despite the lack of a prominent visual of the actual products. 

This mirrors a broader pattern we’ve observed working with a multitude of brands in the sector. The most effective compliant campaigns don’t feel like workarounds — they feel like a natural evolution towards more human, and more memorable storytelling. 

3 Themes Keep Emerging: 

1. IDENTITY

Market personalisation and self-expression. Connect the brand to who your student customer is, not just what they eat.

2. COMMUNITY

Real-life stories and shared rituals. The meal after the seminar. The group order. The occasion your brand is part of.

3. EXPERIENCE

Sensory, in-person moments. Pop-ups, events, and OOH that create a feeling that can’t be regulated away.

One confectionery brand that works with Pion found this out first-hand. Rather than featuring specific products, they built a complete suite of marketing assets designed around a gift being unwrapped, that celebratory moment, or memorable occasion. This gave Pion a defined blueprint which enabled faster creative production, more consistent brand storytelling, and zero compliance issues. What began as a constraint became a scalable creative system.

Another example comes from a cookie brand who used a competition to build lasting student loyalty, by reframing the prize itself. Instead of advertising the win as 12 months of cookies, they repositioned towards gift cards and vouchers, replacing close-up product imagery with brand and occasion-led visuals. The result wasn’t a diminished campaign, it was one that strengthened long-term brand associations by focusing on loyalty and experience, not appetite alone.

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Shifting Channels: Where Student Marketing is Moving

HFSS restrictions apply specifically to paid digital advertising that reaches a general audience. This has had a predictable effect: brands are rerouting budget and energy towards channels that sit outside those restrictions, or that play by different rules entirely. 

Several attendees described actively investing more in out-of-home (OOH) advertising, campus presence, and in-person events — all of which are out of scope for HFSS rules. One brand described a growing partnership with campus spaces and student unions, creating physical environments where the brand and its products can be experienced directly. Another is exploring branded pop-ups and chef collaborations as a way to kickstart organic, user-generated content. 

Owned channels — brand websites, email, app push notifications, organic social — are also being given renewed attention. A dessert brand raised that rather than advertising specific products on paid social, they are directing students towards their app instead, using app-exclusive benefits and personalised offers to drive engagement without triggering HFSS constraints. Meaning their app becomes a central focus for advertising products.

There’s also been a notable shift in how brands are thinking about influencer and creator content. The rules apply to paid or commissioned influencer content — but organic content, where a creator posts about a brand entirely of their own accord, is not restricted. Several brands described programs designed to generate genuine word-of-mouth: events, free product experiences, community partnerships with micro-creators who already love the brand.

The goal? Make HFSS-compliant content feel authentic, because it is.

What Brands Still Get Wrong

Not every brand in the room was confident about their direction of travel. Several acknowledged being in a “problem-solving mode” — aware of the challenge, taking legal and regulatory advice, but not yet running fully compliant, or redirected campaigns, or having the ability to see this change as a creative opportunity.

Honest Challenges Included:

• Internal sign-off processes that haven’t caught up with the pace of regulatory change, leaving marketing teams waiting for legal clearance before they can produce content.

• Product ranges where non-compliance is near-total, making it difficult to produce any content that depicts the actual product.

• A lack of pre-approved content assets — many brands are discovering that their image libraries were built for product-forward advertising and lack the lifestyle, occasion, and brand imagery that compliant campaigns require.

• Uncertainty about how rules apply to specific types of content or channel, particularly at the boundaries (for example, content that features a brand environment but incidentally shows a product in the background).

These are genuine challenges, and brands facing them are far from alone. The regulatory landscape is still relatively new, interpretation continues to evolve, and the ASA has been clearer about some areas than others. What separates the brands making progress from those still stuck is mostly one thing: addressing the HFSS question head-on, rather than treating it as a shared problem that nobody is actively solving. 

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5 Ways to Turn Compliance into a Competitive Advantage

1. Shifting from Product-led to Brand-led Creative

The most adaptable brands had already been moving in this direction before HFSS arrived. Campaigns built around brand values, student shopping occasions, and cultural moments hold up regardless of what brands can or can’t show. If your creative strategy requires close-up product imagery to work, HFSS has exposed a fragility that existed long before the regulations.

2. Building a Compliant Content Library

Rather than evaluating every piece of content in isolation, proactive brands are building a bank of pre-approved lifestyle and brand imagery that their agency and media partners can draw on freely. This dramatically speeds up content production and eliminates last-minute compliance queries.

3. Activating Community over Advertising

Student communities are one of the few environments where organic, authentic brand advocacy can spread at scale without triggering paid media rules. Campus partnerships, micro-creator programmes, student union activations, and in-store experiences all build brand presence in ways that HFSS doesn’t touch.

4. Redirecting budget to owned and OOH channels

OOH advertising, app ecosystems, email, and organic social are all materially less constrained. Several brands are deliberately reweighting their media mix towards these channels, accepting some reduction in paid digital reach in exchange for channels where they have more creative freedom. 

5. Treating compliance as a creative brief, not a blocker

The brands that have found the most solutions are those that gave their teams a clear creative brief: here are the constraints, but instead of thinking about what we can’t do, let’s use this as an opportunity to think about what we can. HFSS compliance, framed as a creative challenge rather than a legal obstacle, consistently produces better brand storytelling than the product-first content it replaces.

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What's Next for Food & Drink Brands?

What our masterclass made clear is that the brands navigating HFSS best are the ones that have accepted the shift rather than waiting for it to pass. 

But the brands that see HFSS purely as a regulatory hurdle risk missing the bigger shift already underway.

The future of food and drink marketing — particularly with a student audience that has grown up with algorithmic content and can spot a forced or fake ad instantly — was always going to move towards authenticity, experience, and cultural resonance. HFSS didn’t create this shift. It accelerated it.

The brands that will earn student loyalty in the years ahead will be those that inspire, entertain, and create meaningful moments worth talking about. The product will always matter. But in a world where you can’t always lead with it, the strongest brands are proving they don’t have too.

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