The 2026 Fifa World Cup will give American food and beverage brands a stage most marketers would kill for: a global audience, a North American backdrop and a cultural moment built around mass participation.
For US brands, the temptation will be obvious. If the world is coming to North America, why not use the tournament to show the world what American brands can do? But that is also the trap. The World Cup can make a brand visible everywhere. It cannot make a brand familiar everywhere.
I was reminded of this recently while working with the Dr Pepper team in the US. My former company distributes their products in Europe and the conversations were fascinating. Dr Pepper is an extraordinary American brand: distinctive, growing, culturally embedded – it even recently surpassed Pepsi.
What struck me was the assumption that its US per capita development could, with the right investment, be projected into Europe over a few years. Europe was being treated less as a different consumer reality than as America running a few years late.
That is dangerous.
Fame is not familiarity
American brands often travel with enormous confidence. They bring strong domestic equity, powerful owners, big budgets and polished playbooks. They also bring the belief that what worked in the US should eventually work elsewhere.
Sometimes it does. Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Oreo and Lay’s prove that American-born brands can become part of everyday life across markets. But those successes can create a misleading lesson: that American scale is automatically exportable.
It is not. Some brands travel. Some merely clear customs.
The track record of established American fmcg brands in Europe is more mixed than many companies like to admit. Mountain Dew, Gatorade, Ocean Spray, Hershey’s, Reese’s, Pop-Tarts, Twinkies, Goldfish crackers, Froot Loops – they have often faced a harder road than their US fame would suggest.
The issue is not that Europeans dislike American brands. That would be too simple and too flattering to European self-image. The issue is that consumers do not buy products in a vacuum. They buy taste codes, rituals, expectations and memories.
In food and drink, familiarity is not decoration. It is part of the product.
Taste has a passport problem
A soft drink is not just a flavoured liquid. A cereal is not just breakfast. A snack is not just a crunchy object placed near a checkout.
Each sits inside a learned system: when to consume it, with whom, at what level of sweetness, with what texture, in what pack, at what price and against which alternatives.
That is where the passport trap begins. A brand may be iconic in the US because millions of consumers grew up with it. But the same product can arrive in Europe without the childhood memory, ritual or affection.
Root beer carries nostalgia in the US; in parts of Europe, it can taste medicinal. Pop-Tarts may mean childhood and convenience in America. In many European markets, they can feel like a hyper-sweet breakfast object looking for a job. Hershey’s has iconic status in the US, but its flavour profile is famously polarising elsewhere. Peanut butter, so central to American snacking, still does not occupy the same emotional or culinary space in much of Europe.
These are not small details. They are the hidden infrastructure of demand.
Even Europe is not one market
There is another complication American playbooks often miss: Europe is not one food culture.
In much of southern Europe, food remains a social currency. In Spain, Italy or France, people do not merely eat lunch or dinner. They sit, talk, argue, linger, judge, remember and sometimes conduct half their emotional lives around the table. Food is pleasure, identity, hospitality and status. It is not just intake.
In parts of northern Europe, and especially in the UK, food can more easily carry a functional role. The culture is often more receptive to products that promise a job to be done: energy, protein, vitamins, more fibre, better performance, cleaner fuel.
That difference helps explain why some US-style functional propositions, fortified drinks, protein snacks or vitamin-enriched products can feel more natural in the UK than in Italy or Spain. In one context, “high protein” sounds useful. In another, it can sound like something invented by people who have forgotten lunch is supposed to be enjoyable.
A product claim that feels modern in London can feel joyless in Madrid. Same continent. Different appetite.
Soft drinks make this even more brutal. In beverages, taste familiarity can matter as much as taste preference. Consumers often like what they have learned to like.
That is why Mountain Dew or Dr Pepper can be fascinating but difficult to scale broadly in Europe. Their distinctiveness is useful because it gets noticed. But brands are built by people who reach for them repeatedly – and that same distinctiveness and unique taste profile can also cap penetration.
Europe is not white space
Another common trap is assuming European markets are empty enough to welcome another American success story. They are not.
Most European food and beverage categories are mature, slow-growth and crowded. A new entrant does not simply “build the category.” It usually has to steal share from entrenched players who know the retailers, price points, promotional rhythm and consumer rituals.
When PepsiCo pushed Pepsi Max in Europe, Coca-Cola did not watch politely from the sidelines while sipping something refreshing. It first invested behind Diet Coke and later vigorously pushed Coca-Cola Zero.
That is the reality of entering mature categories: incumbents respond. The battlefield is not a PowerPoint map with white space. It is a trench system.
Many expansion plans confuse awareness with adoption. A brand can be famous and still not be mentally available at the right consumption moment. It can sponsor football and still fail to become part of how people actually watch football.
Football is global. Snacking is local
Football is global, but football consumption is local. A match night in Kansas City, Madrid, Manchester and Milan does not come with the same food codes. The same tournament can mean beer and wings in one market, pizza in another, crisps in another, family meals elsewhere, late-night bar rituals somewhere else.
Global fandom does not erase local appetite. It merely gathers it in front of the same screen.
The smarter American brands understand this. They do not treat international growth as copy-paste. They treat it as translation.
Lay’s is a useful example. The brand has long understood that potato chips are global, but flavours are stubbornly local. A global platform can co-exist with local taste: paprika here, cheese & onion there, jamón somewhere else, masala in another market. The brand travels because the product does not pretend the world has one tongue.
Translation, not transportation
That is the discipline many brands miss. They export the asset but not the insight. They scale the campaign but not insight. They assume the US success equation is the strategy, when often it was the product of specific history, distribution, pricing, media conditions and learned behaviour.
I often tell my teams that the best localisation is not cosmetic adaptation. It is creative translation. West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet transported to New York: same emotional architecture, different streets, different codes, different music. That is also the reverse lesson for American brands going out into the world. Do not just ship the original and hope people applaud. Re-stage the meaning.
The answer is not for American brands to become timid. Global ambition is healthy. The mistake is believing that a strong domestic brand arrives in a new market with its equity intact. In reality, it often arrives with recognition among some consumers, curiosity among others and indifference among most.
The World Cup will create a seductive illusion of borderless marketing: same tournament, same logo, same broadcast spectacle, same emotional soundtrack. But the consumer holding the drink or opening the snack bag is still local.
That is the passport trap. A brand may cross the border overnight. Its meaning rarely does.
François Bazini, former CMO at Suntory Beverage & Food Europe
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