What does social media look like when you're marketing a product people can actually pick up from a grocery-store shelf?
I worked with Tonica Kombucha across 2016 and 2017, managing and developing social content for a growing Canadian beverage brand. The work covered content planning, copywriting, community engagement, visual content, retail storytelling, recipes, user-generated content, influencer and partner amplification, and ongoing performance reporting.
About Tonica Kombucha
Tonica was an early Canadian kombucha brand built around making the fermented beverage approachable, delicious, and easy to work into everyday life. By the time I worked with the company, the challenge was bigger than introducing kombucha. We needed to continually give people reasons to notice the product, understand it, find it in stores, and imagine it as part of their routines.
My Role
I supported Tonica's ongoing social media presence with monthly content calendars and regular reporting. The archive from this engagement spans more than a year and includes campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
My work included social strategy, content planning, copywriting, photography and visual-content coordination, user-generated content curation, community management, retailer and partner features, recipes and lifestyle content, and performance reporting.
Creating a Beverage Brand People Could Picture in Their Lives
One of the most useful parts of working with a physical product is that the content doesn't have to stay in one lane. We could show Tonica on its own, inside recipes and mocktails, alongside food, at events, in retail environments, and as part of everyday wellness routines.
The content calendars show us deliberately building different storytelling angles around the product. We featured ingredients and flavours, recipes, retail locations, press, events, wellness education, founder-led messaging, seasonal moments, partners, and community content.
Visual Content + Photography
Photography was part of making those stories tangible. We worked with product photography, lifestyle imagery, retail photos, partner content, and user-generated images, then selected the right visual for the story we were trying to tell.
The planning process was specific. Calendar notes include decisions to swap repetitive imagery, prioritize stronger high-resolution product photography, save useful partner images for future posts, choose visuals that better supported a particular campaign angle, and credit creators when using community photography.
Community and Partnership Content
Tonica already existed inside a larger ecosystem of retailers, wellness creators, food brands, restaurants, events, and customers. Social gave us a way to make those relationships visible.
We regularly incorporated retailer features, event coverage, press mentions, influencer content, regrams, cookbook and food-community collaborations, and customer-created imagery. That gave the brand a much richer visual world than a feed made entirely of product shots.
What I Was Responsible For
- Social media strategy and monthly content planning
- Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter content
- Copywriting and campaign concepts
- Visual-content planning and photography selection
- User-generated content and creator attribution
- Retailer, event, partner, and influencer features
- Recipe and lifestyle content
- Community management
- Ongoing performance reporting
Why This Work Still Matters to Me
Working with Tonica taught me a lot about marketing a beverage beyond the bottle. A strong consumer brand needs enough visual and editorial range to show up in different contexts while still feeling recognizable.
For me, the most interesting part was connecting the product to real moments: grabbing a bottle at a retailer, making a mocktail, seeing it at an event, pairing it with food, or discovering it through someone you already followed.
That approach continues to shape how I think about food, beverage, hospitality, and experiential brands today.
This case study includes Tonica-owned, partner, retail, and user-generated imagery from the client content archive. My role included visual-content planning, image selection and curation, copywriting, social campaign execution, and community management.
