The secret brine behind Grillo’s online success

This story is the latest in a series exploring how brands craft standout social media strategies. If you’d like to chat about how your brand is approaching social, Katie Hicks wants to hear about it. Reach out to her at hicks@morningbrew.com.

In the last 20 years, Grillo’s Pickles’s online presence has become kind of a big dill.

The brand started as a pickle cart in downtown Boston in 2008, Eddie Andre, Grillo’s co-founder and VP of branding, told us, and at the time, itssocial strategy centered on Twitter, where information about where customers could find the Grillo’s cart and secure two-for-a-dollar spears lived alongside the occasional joke.

Today, Grillo’s has gone national, and it has pivoted to a largely video-focused social strategy, counting nearly 2 million followers across TikTok and Instagram. While the medium has changed, Andre said, the brand’s irreverent and slightly unhinged tone has remained the same.

“We don’t want you to feel like you’re following a brand,” he said. “We want you to feel like you’re following your best friend who happens to be obsessed with pickles.”

We spoke with Andre about how Grillo’s in-house marketing team of about a dozen people has built its following, and how the brand has repeatedly racked up millions of organic views on its posts by leaning into a more humanistic approach.

“Our goal is not to go viral every time,” he said. “Our goal is to create real, relatable, organic content that can resonate with anybody, not just pickle people.”

Sweet, not sour

A recent Grillo’s post with more than 10 million views and 2.1 million likes on TikTok begins with an employee holding a pickle spear to the sky on a ferry in New York harbor. “What are you doing?” a fellow passenger asks. “Trying to show my pickle the Statue [of Liberty],” the employee responds. The video cuts to multiple people on the boat raising their spears.

It’s one of many “pickle hand off” videos that have become a cornerstone of Grillo’s social presence, Andre said.

“People at first were excited to eat a pickle on the street without necessarily knowing the brand,” he said. “Now they’ve seen [the videos], so they’re really excited like, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve been waiting for this day to happen.’”

The Statue of Liberty video is a particular style of content that has inspired a new crop of UGC posts in which people hold up pickles in front of just about everything, ranging from a sunset to a baseball game. The brand has also introduced other recurring themes, like its “Pickle King” character, who challenges people at fairs to out-eat him. The Pickle King has taken a life of its own, similar to the spear-in-the-sky videos, Andre said.

“Sometimes things will be an idea, and then we see it work, and then we’re like, ‘How do we build off of this?’” he said.

Part of the magic comes from the fact that Grillo’s videos aren’t staged or scripted, and that they’re filmed on phones, which keeps them feeling human, Andre said. Because Grillo’s started as a street vendor, he felt it was natural to center its social strategy on conversing directly with customers.

“I think the tone comes across very organically due to the in-person conversations that we’ve had for almost two decades,” he said.

Much of the brand’s engagement to date has been organic, Andre said, and he attributes the success of its most successful posts to shareability. Shares are the No. 1 metric the Grillo’s team looks at because, as the brand gets in front of new eyes, “typically, the rest will follow,” he said. Sometimes shares come from tapping into the simple, somewhat polarizing nature of pickles themselves.

“Some people don’t like pickles, some people really love pickles,” he said. “So you have a very passionate fanbase in regards to pickles in general, which I think helps a lot with some of the content that we’re trying to do.”

Spear you go

Grillo’s continues to embrace its in-person roots and sometimes-polarizing product through pop-up events, which also provide additional opportunities for social content, Andre said. The brand often uses its mascot, Sam Sam the Pickle Man, to drum up online excitement leading up to an IRL event, he said.

Grillo’s used to work with influencers but no longer collaborates with individual creators, Andre said; instead, the company has pursued brand partners that have allowed it to get in front of niche audiences and encourage word-of-mouth marketing on- and offline through UGC. Unexpected collaborators to date have included P.F. Candle Co., Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and Shut Skateboards.

“[Customers are] taking photos of their [pickle] tattoos, they’re taking photos of their own recipes, they’re tagging us in their own skateboard clips,” he said. “That’s where community-building comes into play.”

Andre said the goal is not to chase trends but rather to create them; beyond that, Grillo’s is aiming to stand out from other brands by appearing as little like a brand as possible.

“We care about the community, we care about the people, and we care about underdogs and subculture,” he said. “If we can get that to show through in our social media, then I think we’re going in the right direction.”