PK Foods

PK Foods is a Glasgow-based food brand specialising in authentic Indian products, including their signature pakora range. They needed to scale online sales and expand well beyond their established local customer base. With competition in food eCommerce growing and the brand’s digital visibility still limited, the challenge was to build awareness, increase purchases, and create a sustainable direct-to-consumer revenue stream rather than relying on local reputation alone.

The objective was a genuinely multi-channel strategy: one that could introduce the brand to new audiences, convert efficiently across regions, and stand up a repeatable direct-to-consumer model that would keep working after any single campaign ended.

mtc deployed an integrated strategy across SEO, PPC, and paid social advertising. PPC combined brand search with Performance Max campaigns, targeting Glasgow pickup customers and regional offers to drive highly efficient returns at a significantly lower cost per conversion. Paid social ran a full-funnel approach, from top-of-funnel acquisition through to bottom-of-funnel sales campaigns, so the brand was building demand and capturing it in the same motion.

Alongside the paid activity, SEO focused on technical foundations, seasonal content creation, and conversion rate optimisation, strengthening organic revenue and improving the overall user experience. Together the channels covered the full journey from first discovery to repeat purchase.

Local food brands often have something national retailers cannot buy: authenticity and a loyal regional following. The challenge is that this strength is also a ceiling if the brand never translates it into demand beyond its home city. PK Foods shows how a business can protect what makes it local, its Glasgow pickup base and regional identity, while building a direct-to-consumer model that reaches much further.

As we look at the food eCommerce landscape in 2026, there are three areas where local and specialist brands most often stall. Taking our work for PK Foods as an example, here are the things to consider when planning your own expansion.

What we found by working on PK Foods:

Local intent and national intent need different campaigns. Performance Max targeting Glasgow pickup customers delivered a significantly lower cost per conversion precisely because it spoke to local behaviour, while broader activity built the national audience. Treating both with the same generic campaign would have wasted budget on both fronts.

Full-funnel paid social does more than acquire. The 136% increase in social advertising revenue came from running acquisition and sales campaigns together, so the brand was warming up new audiences and converting them in a single connected flow rather than hoping cold traffic would buy immediately.

Organic is the foundation that makes paid sustainable. The 68% increase in organic revenue, supported by CRO, means the business is no longer wholly dependent on ad spend to grow. That organic base is what turns a series of campaigns into a durable direct-to-consumer channel.

Some challenges for your own site:

If you have a local pickup or regional advantage, check whether your campaigns actually reflect it, or whether local and national audiences are being served the same message. The cost per conversion on well-targeted local intent is often dramatically lower, and worth isolating.

Look at your paid social setup. Are you only running sales campaigns to people who have never heard of you? Building a top-of-funnel layer first is usually what makes the bottom-of-funnel numbers work.

Track how much of your growth would survive if you paused paid media tomorrow. If the answer is very little, your organic foundation needs investment before you scale spend further, or you are renting your revenue rather than owning it.

Success for a specialist food brand in 2026 is not about abandoning your roots to chase a national audience. PK Foods more than doubled paid performance while strengthening the organic base that makes that growth last, which is what a sustainable direct-to-consumer business actually looks like.