Senior retail media leaders from Danone, Kraft Heinz, Nestlé, and Mars have joined the founding brand cohort of Media in Retail (MiR), the executive network operated by RETHINK Retail. The expansion also adds a nine-member agency cohort drawing from Omnicom, Publicis, dentsu, WPP Media, and Flywheel — bringing the full commerce ecosystem into one deliberate table for the first time.
For food and beverage operators and suppliers watching where CPG dollars are being allocated, the roster signals something concrete: major packaged-goods brands are now assigning director-level and above talent specifically to retail media strategy, not as a subset of trade promotion or digital marketing, but as a distinct discipline with its own organizational structure.
Why This Matters Now
Retail media has grown into a material channel for grocery and food brands, but the infrastructure around it — measurement standards, data-sharing agreements, cross-retailer attribution — has not kept pace. MiR's premise is that brands, retail media networks, and agencies have been building their practices in isolation, and the channel's unresolved questions can only be answered when those stakeholders are in the same room.
Nicole Lesinski, Director of eCommerce Strategy at Nestlé and a founding brand cohort member, framed it plainly: "Retail media grows as fast as its people do, and the next generation of operators will inherit businesses bigger than anything we have built so far."
For food and beverage suppliers navigating distributor relationships and retailer partnerships, that inheritance dynamic is already visible in the way category management conversations are shifting — buyers increasingly want to discuss not just slotting and velocity, but how brands plan to activate within the retailer's own media network.
The Commerce Media Signal
Vantage, a retail media network operating system, joined as a founding sponsor of MiR, with its Chief Strategy Officer Drew Cashmore chairing the network. That pairing — a tech vendor sponsoring an executive peer community — reflects the vendor playbook that has become standard in adjacent hospitality tech categories: get the practitioners organized, then position your platform as the operational backbone.
Food and beverage brand marketers and their agency partners should note the January 2027 timeline: MiR's inaugural Media in Retail Summit is scheduled as Commerce Media Saturday during NRF 2027, specifically designed as an intimate gathering for brand advertisers, retail media networks, and agencies. If retail media measurement and omnichannel attribution are budget-planning concerns heading into fiscal 2027, that event represents a rare venue where cross-stakeholder conversations are the explicit agenda — not a side track.
For operators exploring programmatic and retail media channels, or suppliers assessing vendor and agency partnerships for upcoming campaigns, the MiR cohort list itself is a useful vendor-intelligence signal: the agencies at the table — dentsu, Publicis Commerce, WPP Media, Flywheel — are the ones currently winning retail media mandates from the largest food and beverage portfolios.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
