How to Work with Food Brands as a Dietitian
Have you ever wanted to work with food brands on social media or on television? Many food companies offer a brand ambassador program for dietitians and nutritionists.
Food companies work with dietitians to help promote their brand or product on social media platforms or offer free products.
Food companies also might want to work with dietitians in a paid partnership to help promote their product or brand. This is where you can become a successful brand ambassador.
But what you really need to know first is how to connect with food companies to pitch your nutrition services.
Using RD Link to Connect You With Food Companies
According to The RD Link , "food companies have recognized the importance of having credible nutrition voices behind their products. By partnering with RDs, brands can educate customers while driving credibility and trust among their consumers too.
"As dietitians, it can be confusing for consumers to know which products and ingredients are best for them. It’s up to us to educate the public and provide sound recommendations. By getting behind brands we trust, we can ensure better health and education for the public.
"It’s a common misconception that you need to have a certain number of social media followers in order to work with brands. Dietitians can in fact work with brands at any stage of their career or business as well as any area of the field. From retail; to private practice; to media work– brands are looking to partner with RDs in all kinds of capacities."
Becoming a Brand Ambassador as a New Dietitian or a Seasoned Dietitian
Here are a few tips for working with brands no matter what stage you’re at. According to The RD Link, here's what you need to do:
Be visible - Whether you are visible online through social media, sharing quotes for publications, having a profile on The RD Link, attending conferences, or reaching out to brands directly - let them know you exist and how you may be able to support them.
Share unique, creative, and specific ideas for partnership - Think from their perspective - how could you help them specifically? Think about current trends and timely opportunities or ways you can incorporate them into your existing nutrition messaging.
Make it an authentic fit - Brands don’t necessarily want to work with just any dietitian; they want to work with RDs that are the right fit for their company. Seek out companies that specifically align with your audience or expertise to ensure the best fit and authentic recommendation.
Think beyond social media - Brands are seeking new and creative ways to reach consumers. Do you host cooking classes or store tours? Have an ebook, cookbook, or podcast? Hosting events or presentations? The opportunities are endless - think about what you currently offer and how a brand could get involved.
The RD Link is your liaison for brand partnerships. Whether you're new in the space or have been working with brands for years, The RD Link helps foster a variety of brand-RD partnerships all in one place. They help you, as the dietitian, create relationships between health and wellness brands to foster credibility and the spread of accurate nutrition information while helping brands and dietitians alike grow their businesses in meaningful ways.
How To Work With Brands as a Dietitian
Imagine this: You are asked to give a nutrition talk to the dietetic students at your alma mater. They can't offer you an honorarium but you are desperately saving your dollars for the updated version of Erica Julson's SEO Made Simple Course*. You are torn.
But then a genius idea comes to mind. Get your talk sponsored by a food brand through The RD Link! You set up your account, pitch your event to several food companies. You land a sponsorship with a special food company whereby you dedicate one presentation slide with info on their product that you will share with your audience in exchange for the equivalent of an honorarium. And bonus - you got two other food companies to send along samples and coupons for your attendees. Everyone wins!
That's working with brands as a dietitian.
The idea of working with food brands is simple. As a dietitian, you reach out to a representative at a food company and tell them that you want to help promote their brand with a paid partnership. But who do you call? What's their contact info? Will they pay in dollars or free products? It's not as simple as it sounds. That's where The RD Link comes in.
The RD Link is "Made for registered dietitians to connect with health-focused food brands, learn about new healthy products, and secure brand partnerships." You can start with your free account here.
I sat down with the founder, Jenna Gorham, RD, to get the inside scoop on how dietitians can work with brands.
Jenna also has a free download over at RD2RD Marketplace, How To Work With Brands When You Aren't An Influencer.
Examples of Dietitians who work with food brands
I attended a sponsored travel event with the Pork Board along with several other talented dietitians that work with food brands and share their messages with their clients and community on social media, on television, and in print media.
Here's how a group of dietitians created their unconventional jobs in nutrition while working with food brands and food commodities:
- Dietitians sharing their nutrition message with their community of people with diabetes, college athletes, young athletes, people with PCOS, people with eating disorders, weight-inclusive, and cognition nutrition
- a dietitian who is also a pig farmer in South Dakota who works with the Pork Board
- a super fun food photographer dietitian who is also a culinary scientist and has a photography studio
- a board-certified sports dietitian who specializes in combat athlete nutrition who works with many food brands
- an expert media dietitian who is a seasoned cookbook author who works with food brands and offers her nutrition expertise for food and recipe development; also a wonderful mentor to less seasoned dietitians and a master networker
- a famous cookbook author, media expert, journalist, TV dietitian, recipe developer
- a dietitian who runs a fitness center
- a dietitian in private practice who works with PCOS and diabetes
- a dietitian who works just 5 hours a month hosting a nutrition TV show where she secures all the food brand sponsorship for her compensation
- a dietitian who works for an insurance company (who got her job with the assistance of AI!)
- a dietitian in private practice working as an anti-diet dietitian
- a dietitian in long-term care
- several tele-health private practice dietitians
- a dietitian who works with food brands, has a meal planning business, and has mastered Pinterest to reach her audience
Interview with Stacey of NutritionJobs and Jenna Gorham, RD, of The RD Link
NutritionJobs: Tell us how you came up with the genius idea of The RD Link!
Jenna Gorham, RD, of The RD Link: is an online platform that allows dietitians to connect directly with brands and food companies, to seek out whether you're looking for free product samples and coupons to share with clients or at events, or to pursue paid partnerships with brands too.
I think the idea really came first out of personal need and really having that struggle with finding the right contact at a brand and figuring out how to connect with brands.
When I was in private practice, I found that my clients were always asking me what products I recommended or what types of granola bars I ate or would recommend. So I found it provided value to my clients to work with brands.
As I evolved into consulting and working on the brand side, I found that brands also wanted to connect with a dietitian. So both brands and dietitians want to connect with each other for collaborations, but neither party really knows the best way to go about creating those relationships.
So for many years, I was doing it just by hand, and dietitians would come to me and say, hey, I have this opportunity, like do you have any brands who would be interested in sharing samples or partnering on this?
And so, I would share the opportunities my brand partners had with my contacts and it was just a lot to manage by hand. So I created the website to make it more accessible to everyone.
So the goal is to make dietitians more accessible to food companies so that they're sharing accurate, incredible nutrition information with their consumers.
NutritionJobs: You brought up an interesting point about the brands and food companies; dietitians who have an interest in working with brands or want to generate more income working with brands might think that the process is scary and that the companies don't want to work with dietitians. But you are saying that both parties want to work together.
The company wants to work with dietitians. They want to spend their money; they have a marketing budget to spend to get the word out about their brand or their product, to increase their revenue for their business!
And the dietitian has the ability to connect with that company, and receive a payment for that or receive product or whatever it might be, and get that word out to the customer. So it's a great way. I think it's important to know that the companies are looking for this, and they do want to spend too.
Jenna of The RD Link: Absolutely. And I think more and more so lately, too; I'm finding more brands they're really understanding what a dietitian is and what they can do for their company.
Food companies are looking to work with dietitians in a variety of ways. Not just via social media, but also behind the scenes work too. So they're really just looking for that credibility from the dietitian because it makes their consumers trust them more too.
NutritionJobs: So walk us through the process, so let's say a brand new dietitian user creates their free account and their account gets accepted, then how would they fill out their profile to optimize their opportunities?
Jenna of The RD Link: We do approve each dietitian account; just to ensure that everyone on the site is a dietitian or nutrition expert, and other degrees as well. So once your account is approved, the first most important step is to have a profile picture. Having a profile picture makes you look more engaged and active on the site.
The next would be to create a description (a bio) that tells what you do, who you work with, how you like to work with brands, what you're looking to get out of being on The RD Link.
You can also link to any social media profiles you have, your website, a media kit, or a list of services that you can upload, as well.
NutritionJobs: That's a good pro tip; I think because I think we're all learning that it's not just your logo, it's not just your company, but it's your personality, it's who you are, who you're bringing to the arrangement, the agreement you create. What types of services can the dietitian provide for the company? Like what kinds of ways can they work with a brand?
Jenna Gorham, RD of The RD Link: There are so many different ways. So it really just depends on the dietitian, and what you're good at and what you like to do. So I think a lot of people, we first think of social media and things like recipe development. But I know for me, neither of those are really my skill sets.
So I think there are so many other opportunities. So I encourage dietitians to think about what are you currently offering or working on for your clients and where could a brand get involved. So we've worked with dietitians to sponsor things like webinars, presentations, online courses, podcasts, ebooks, and cookbooks; there are so many different ways you can work.
NutritionJobs: What are some other sort of pro tips that a dietitian could do to their profile, in addition to what you've said or to make contact with the companies? Is there another way that they can sort of boost their opportunities?
Jenna of The RD Link: Yes, there are a few ways. So the first step is really building at your profile; the next is you can post partnership opportunities. So if you have something, like say you're looking for samples to share at an upcoming health fair, or you're doing a cooking demo, and you're looking to work with a brand. You can post that as a partnership opportunity on the site, and then brands not only get access to our dietitian database, but they get access to the partnership opportunities. So that's just another place for them to find you and learn more about how they can work with you.
The other way is just to reach out to the brands. So you get access to all of our brands that are on the site, and you can browse their profiles and see if they'd be a good fit for you and your audience, and then you can send them direct messages just to reach out and learn more about them, ask to try products or samples or request them to share with your clients. Or even pitch your ideas for partnership.
NutritionJobs: You have new food brands joining the platform all the time. Do you have success stories to inspire dietitians?
Jenna Gorham, RD of The RD Link: Yes, we have lots of success stories. A recent one was a dietitian who had never worked with brands before, but she started this new company to support cancer patients. She was looking to put together goodie bags to share with all the patients.
So she reached out to a handful of brands that she thought would be a good fit for her audience and requested samples and coupons, and she had a lot of success. And she worked with at least four brands or so who donated coupons and products for her to share in these goodie bags.
But we've had other dietitians have success too. We have a retail dietitian who wanted to work with brands outside of the retail space. So she really worked hard to start posting more on social media and offering recipe development. She's very consistent with her pitching, and she is always offering up new ideas, and she's great at coming up with unique creative recipes and ways that she can work with these brands. So she's done a handful of sponsored posts on her Instagram, too, with a relatively small following.
NutritionJobs: How does the payment work for a dietitian working with a brand? Who will then sponsor their webinar? Or how does that work?
Jenna of The RD Link: The dietitians on The RD Link set their own rates. So the rate really depends on a variety of factors.
Options to consider when pricing your rate:
Webinars Sponsorships - The rate will depend on how many people you're expecting to attend or how you're going to promote this webinar.
Social Media Promotion - Promote the brand on social media for a set number of slides or posts or stories or video content.
Email Marketing - If you have an email list you can promote the brand to your email audience. You will factor in how many people you're going to reach with their brand message, plus the opportunities for them to share their product or get the product in the hands of these people.
Sponsored Presentations - Similar to webinar sponsorships, food companies can sponsor your presentation or lecture to help spread the word about their brand.
NutritionJobs: Thank you Jenna!
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About the Author
Stacey Dunn-Emke, MS, RDN, is the Founder Owner of NutritionJobs and an established dietetic career expert. She helps steer dietetic and nutrition professionals to a successful job search process with the top-ranked dietetic job board platform, NUTRITIONJOBS. Stacey is the author of The Dietetic Resume Guide and numerous dietetic career action-ables. She gives the tools to create a modern standout dietetic resume to land that job interview, help with job interview prep, and with creating All-Star LinkedIn profiles. Stacey has interviewed and hired many dietitians and in running NutritionJobs since 2000, she has reviewed thousands of dietetic resumes. She works closely with dietetic hiring managers and recruiters to know what standout resume elements land a job interview.
