An end-to-end read on Power Up: where the brand ranks against its trail-mix and nut cohort, how the creators tagging it are performing, what the category is doing in paid, and the creator plays running around it over the last twelve months.
What we analysed: 155 brands in the US Snacks niche, 200 top creators across Instagram and TikTok, and 2,848 active niche ad creatives, over a 362-day category window (8 July 2025 to 5 July 2026) and a matching brand window covering Power Up's own feed and Creator Tagged Posts.
Power Up sits in the middle of the trail-mix and nut cohort on followers, but the creators tagging it pull the brand well up the table on views. This section shows where it lands across the category before we look at who is doing the tagging.
The trail-mix and nut cohort, brand by brand · 362-day niche window. Four direct competitors compared on four creator metrics, target brand highlighted. Locations swapped for unique tagging creators, since every brand in this set is online-only.
Power Up sits in the top 40% of the niche by Instagram followers (rank 61 of 155) and the top 32% by Total Creator Views (rank 49). The follower base is middling, but the reach the tagging creators generate lifts the brand a long way up on views.
The gap between rank 61 on followers and rank 49 on Total Creator Views is the whole story of this report: the creators posting about Power Up out-reach its own audience, and one 4th-of-July Reel from @lifewithciji did most of the lifting. The next section looks at who those creators are.
Across the brand window (21 July 2025 to 5 July 2026), Power Up earned twelve Creator Tagged Posts (Instagram and TikTok posts where a creator tagged the brand inside the window) from twelve different creators. The obvious read is that this is a small number; the more useful read is where those posts came from and how far one of them travelled.
The conversation is concentrated. More than half of the tagging (58.3%) sits in one theme: 4th-of-July hosting boxes seeded through a single BabbleBoxx placement. Curated snack-hauls and pantry restocks account for a quarter, and high-protein snacking-for-goals content makes up the rest. The pattern is a seasonal spike rather than a year-round rhythm.
On brand centrality, Power Up is usually one item in a spread rather than the subject. Half the tagging comes from family and hosting creators, a quarter from wellness and better-for-you foodies, and the rest from deal-and-haul and fitness accounts. This surprised us less than the reach did: a 104K-follower wellness creator placing the product in a flatlay is scenery, yet a mid-tier family creator on a holiday Reel can still move six figures of views.
These are the Creator Tagged Posts that carried the window. One post from @lifewithciji did more reach than the rest combined, and the highest engagement came from a smaller family creator, not the largest account.
@mich58 (26K followers) — 452 likes at a 1.89% engagement rate, strong conversation for a mid-tier family creator.
Twelve unique creators tagged Power Up in the window, eleven of them lightly paid or gifted rather than on a media buy. That is earned attention of a kind most brands in this category run paid budgets trying to reach, sitting on top of an earned-mention engine the brand has not yet formalised.
We kept looking for a competitor in this cohort running a visible, always-on creator programme across the 362-day niche window. We could not find one. Nature's Garden out-tags everyone on volume and Navitas leads on followers, but the strategy scan detects no named plays running on any of the four direct competitors, or on Power Up. The category is mostly earned and lightly-gifted tagging, not managed benches.
| Brand | Instagram followers | Creator Tagged Posts |
|---|---|---|
| PO Power Up | 42,186 | 12 |
| NA Nature's Garden | 26,745 | 28 |
| NA Navitas Organics | 65,650 | 56 |
| SA Sahale Snacks | 18,383 | 9 |
| KA Kar's Nuts | 6,763 | 1 |
No named play is detected on any of the four direct competitors in this window, so the category advantage goes to whoever formalises first. The nearest models sit one tier out in the wider snacks dataset, where good culture runs Always-On Creator Retainers alongside UGC for Brand Feed, and Biomel pairs an Affiliate / Commission Programme with an Alt-Handle / Brand-Affiliated Creator Channel.
Across the 362-day niche window the US Snacks category keeps 2,848 active Meta creatives live across 73 advertisers, and roughly a third of the longest-running winners are creator-shot. Power Up runs none. This is the section where the earned engine from the last two sections meets its missing distribution layer.
On scale, creator content is not a fringe format here: it is more than a third of everything live, and it is the format Power Up's own earned creators already produce for free. The four brands leaning hardest into it, Gimme Seaweed (80% creator-shot), The Nut Dreamers (75%), Boundless (70%) and No Cow (60%), are building their paid libraries almost entirely out of creator videos.
On what survives, creator-shot UGC is the durable format. Six brands, among them No Cow, GoMacro and The Nut Dreamers, sustain creator videos built on a fast high-protein recipe hook, each still live past 30 days and the longest running 274 days. Two more, Gimme Seaweed and Boundless, keep a picky-kid lunchbox parenting hook alive past 250 days. These are exactly the hosting and better-for-you angles the creators tagging Power Up already film.
On who commissions at volume, the testing cadence is high. Clif keeps 136 creatives live and cycles most within a week, Nature's Garden holds 121 with a 29-day median runtime, and Oats Overnight runs 78. These brands are not betting on one hero video; they are producing enough creator variants to test constantly. Power Up, sitting on twelve earned creators and zero paid creatives, has the supply side and none of the distribution side.
Gimme Seaweed
Linwoods Healthfoods
Gimme Seaweed
No Cow
No Cow
Boundless
Boundless
The Nut Dreamers
The Nut Dreamers
Loser BitesTwenty-four brands in this dataset run 10 or more live Meta creatives with over half refreshed in the last 30 days, and about 35% of the category's longest-running winning ads are creator-shot UGC. Power Up commissions zero creator content for paid. The gap is not budget, it is a creator pipeline producing enough variants to test at category cadence.
Power Up's own feed is the quietest signal in this report, and the most fixable. Across the brand window (21 July 2025 to 5 July 2026) the account published nine Instagram posts, six carousels and three videos, averaging 13 likes and a median of 11 against 42,186 followers. There is a more useful signal underneath those averages: not all of the nine posts perform the same, and the ones that do best are the ones the brand makes least.
The winning pillar is Seasonal/Timely, averaging 16 likes across two posts. The over-published pillar is Relatable/Meme product flatlays, five of the nine posts, averaging 11. Promotional posts average 16 across one post and User-Generated averages 11 across one. The pattern is a clean inverse: the pillar the audience rewards most per post is one of the ones the brand publishes least, while the low-performing flatlay format takes up the majority of the feed.
Read as a creative brief, the top five own-feed posts tell the content team what to make more of: seasonal product storytelling and travel-ready framing, shot outdoors, not another studio flatlay.
Format tells the same story. Carousels take four of the top five slots and average 14 likes across the six in the window, edging the three videos at 11. The best post, the autumn three-variety carousel, is a low-production styled product shot rather than a polished studio set, which fits the category pattern where lighter creator-style production tends to out-perform brand-polished frames.
The multiplier is small in absolute terms but clear in shape: the top Seasonal/Timely post at 23 likes runs roughly double the 11-like average of the Relatable/Meme flatlays that fill the feed. Publishing more seasonal product storytelling and less studio flatlay is the single change the numbers point the content team toward.
Your Seasonal/Timely posts average 1.4× the likes of your Relatable/Meme posts, yet more than half your own feed is Relatable/Meme product flatlays. The own feed averages 13 likes against 42,186 followers, so the creators tagging you are out-reaching your own channel by three to four orders of magnitude.
Drawn from the 200 top creators across Instagram and TikTok in this niche, ranked on niche-attributable creator views with a competitor-overlap tiebreaker. Every name here already posts about brands in the trail-mix and snacks set, so each is a warm hand-raise rather than a cold pitch. Creators already deep in Power Up's own tagging were held back so this list opens new reach.
Combined: 938K followers across these 10. 6.4M Total Creator Views in the last 30 days. All 10 have already posted about your direct competitors, which makes every one of them a warm approach rather than a cold pitch.
Every move here scales a signal Power Up already produces rather than manufacturing a new one. The order follows the arc of the report: make the earned engine always-on, put it where the category spends, and turn retail distribution into tracked sales.
Power Up already earns twelve Creator Tagged Posts from twelve creators, led by a 597,749-view 4th-of-July Reel from @lifewithciji, rank 49 of 155 in this dataset on Total Creator Views.
Ten of those twelve posts landed in a single two-week window through one BabbleBoxx box, and the rest of the year is quiet. A small bench of five to eight family and better-for-you creators posting monthly would compound a signal Power Up already produces.
@powerupsnacks holds a TikTok handle but posted nothing to its own feed in the window, and the only Power Up TikTok reach came from a scatter of small #ad creators.
The category's biggest trail-mix and snack views are on TikTok, where recipe and snack-hack Reels routinely clear hundreds of thousands of views from mid-tier creators. A commissioned TikTok creator squad opens a platform the brand has left on the table.
Competitors running it: good culture, Feastables, Legendary Foods.
Power Up runs zero active Meta ads while 24 brands in this dataset keep 10 or more creatives live with over half refreshed in the last 30 days.
About 35% of the category's longest-running winning ads are creator-shot UGC, the format Power Up's earned creators already produce for free. Nature's Garden alone sustains 121 live creatives; licensing a handful of creator videos into paid would let Power Up test at the same cadence.
Competitors running it: Nature's Garden, The Nut Dreamers, No Cow.
Twelve different creators tagged Power Up unpaid or lightly-gifted in the window, the earned-mention signal that seven brands in this dataset run deliberate programmes to produce.
Siete Foods earns 44 posts from 39 creators the same way, and Power Up is already on the same curve at smaller scale. A steady product-seeding cadence to snack, wellness and parenting creators widens the top of a funnel that is already working.
@lifewithciji drove 597,749 views on one post, more reach than Power Up's entire own feed produces in a year.
Twenty-three brands in this dataset lean on a repeat high-tier creator as a long-term ambassador, and Power Up has the raw material in the creators already tagging it. Converting one or two of the best 4th-of-July creators into a multi-post-per-quarter ambassadorship gives the brand a recognisable face.
Power Up is in Target and Costco nationwide and on Amazon, yet almost none of its Creator Tagged Posts carry a tracked link or code.
Three brands in this dataset already run affiliate or commission programmes off scattered creator captions, a low-lift way to attribute sales. An affiliate layer over the creators already posting turns earned reach into measurable retail and Amazon pull-through.
Competitors running it: Clif, Biomel, GoMacro.
We built this report because Power Up's creator data is genuinely interesting and we wanted to share what we found. If any of this is useful or you'd like the full creator list behind the numbers, happy to send it over.
Who are we?
👋 Sup is an AI-native influencer marketing platform built around data and performance. We find creators who actually convert and track every sale, lowering your CAC alongside Meta and Google.
