The Strategic Move
The Honey Baked Ham Company is entering Holiday 2026 with its most expansive marketing push in recent memory, naming Kylie Kelce — podcast host and mother of four — as brand ambassador and launching a national, omnichannel campaign called "Traditions That Bring Us Home." The buy spans TV, streaming, digital, social, and radio and runs through the holiday season. For a brand with more than 400 locations and 65-plus years of heritage, the move is less about awareness and more about audience expansion.
The casting is deliberate. Kelce's audience skews toward millennial and Gen Z households — exactly the consumers HoneyBaked needs to convert from occasional holiday buyers into year-round loyalists. Maegan Markee, Chief Commercial Officer at The Honey Baked Ham Company, framed it plainly: this holiday marks "the start of a broader marketing transformation for HoneyBaked, one that honors our heritage and celebrates our loyalists while finding new ways to connect with the next generation of HoneyBaked customers."
Why Operators Should Pay Attention
For food and foodservice brands with strong heritage equity but aging core demographics, HoneyBaked's approach offers a useful playbook. The brand is not abandoning its identity — the signature bone-in ham, spiral-sliced and individually hand-glazed after up to 24 hours of smoking, remains the centerpiece — but it is deliberately recontextualizing that product through a spokesperson whose connection to it is personal and pre-existing rather than transactional. Kelce's family has used HoneyBaked products for years, including Cinnamon Apples tied to a multi-generational family memory, which gives the campaign a credibility floor that paid partnerships often lack.
The omnichannel media mix also signals where holiday food marketing budgets are flowing. TV and radio provide reach; streaming and digital allow for retargeting and frequency control; social — particularly short-form video — creates the organic amplification layer that extends paid reach without proportionally increasing spend. Brands and suppliers evaluating holiday campaign architecture should note that this is not a social-only activation. The full-funnel commitment suggests HoneyBaked is treating this as a brand-building investment, not a performance sprint.
The Intelligence Takeaway
The campaign also has operational texture worth noting. HoneyBaked is pushing pre-orders and scheduled in-store pickup for Thanksgiving and the holidays, which is a direct labor and demand-smoothing tool. By capturing orders early, the brand can better forecast production, reduce peak-day throughput pressure across 400-plus locations, and improve the guest experience at pickup. Operators in QSR, fast casual, and specialty food retail running holiday pre-order programs should watch how HoneyBaked executes this at scale — the combination of a high-profile ambassador driving top-of-funnel awareness with a frictionless digital ordering path is a model worth stress-testing against your own fulfillment capacity before November arrives.
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.
