About Kettle & Fire

Kettle & Fire was founded in 2015 with a simple idea: make high-quality bone broth significantly more convenient.

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The brand helped bring shelf-stable bone broth into the modern CPG landscape, pairing traditional long-simmered preparation with clean ingredients and convenient packaging. Today, Kettle & Fire uses 100% grass-fed and grass-finished beef bones and organic, free-range chicken bones, with products designed to fit naturally into everyday life, from a morning mug of bone broth to weeknight cooking.

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That versatility is an important part of the brand's growth. Consumers come to Kettle & Fire for different reasons: some are looking for a clean, protein-forward cooking staple; others build it into a daily wellness ritual; some discover it through fasting, fitness, or a dietary protocol; and others first reach for it during recovery or a period when nutrition becomes especially important.

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For Kettle & Fire, creators have played an important role in making those different use cases tangible. In the brand's customer research, 43% of buyers reported discovering Kettle & Fire through an influencer or creator.

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"The best creator marketing doesn't feel like a brand telling you what to think. It shows up in a way that is authentic to the creator and their audience. If you believe you have a great product, you want to get it into the hands of the right people and give them room to show how it actually fits into their lives. Our job is to create enough of those opportunities at scale, learn from what resonates, and build deeper relationships with the people who genuinely love the brand."

The Challenge

Influencer and creator marketing has become one of Kettle & Fire's most important awareness engines. But as the program grew across paid creators, community, gifting, seeding, ambassadors, and organic earned media, the operational complexity grew with it.

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Historically, much of that work was manual. Creators were sourced through Instagram and other platforms, activity was tracked in large Google Sheets, and someone on the team had to continuously check whether a creator had posted, save the content, update the tracker, and determine whether there was a next step.

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That model works at a small scale. It becomes a problem when thousands of pieces of content are being created around the brand.

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"There really isn't a shortcut to building great creator relationships. It takes a lot of hand to hand combat and gritty work. I don't want my team spending time hunting down Instagram Stories, copying links and updating spreadsheets. I want them talking to creators, understanding what's working and figuring out how we turn genuine organic affinity into a deeper relationship."

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The challenge wasn't simply finding more creators. It was creating the infrastructure to understand a much larger creator ecosystem without needing a proportionally larger team to manage it.

The Solution

Kettle & Fire initially turned to Archive to solve a straightforward problem: knowing when people actually posted about the brand.

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That was particularly important for product gifting and seeding. Kettle & Fire could send products to hundreds of potential advocates, but without automated content capture, the team had limited visibility into who ultimately posted, what they said, or whether someone might be worth developing into a longer-term relationship.

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Archive made that activity visible. From there, Kettle & Fire expanded how it uses the platform across several parts of its creator workflow.

Find the people already showing affinity

One of the highest-value creator signals for Kettle & Fire is also one of the simplest: someone is already talking about the product without being asked.

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Social Listening and Archive Radar help the team identify creators and customers featuring Kettle & Fire, including content where the brand may not have been tagged directly. Those moments can become the beginning of a relationship, whether that is a product restock, an invitation into the Kettle & Fire community, a paid partnership, an ambassadorship, or simply recognition from the brand.

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That approach has become an increasingly important part of Kettle & Fire's broader creator strategy: prioritizing people who have already demonstrated real affinity rather than treating every creator relationship as a cold acquisition.

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"Someone posting about us organically is one of the strongest signals we can get. They already know the product and have chosen to put it in front of their audience without us asking them to. Archive helps us capture those moments, and then our team invest their time building meaningful relationships."

Prospect through audiences, not just categories

For outbound prospecting, Kettle & Fire also uses Archive to look beyond obvious "bone broth creators."

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The team searches within adjacent creator ecosystems based on the audience or behavior it wants to reach. A beef tallow campaign might lead into grilling, animal-based nutrition, and cooking communities. A retail launch might lead to grocery discovery and Costco, Target, or Walmart creators. Other initiatives may center on running, family, wellness, high-protein cooking, fasting, or everyday meal preparation.

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The goal is not simply to find food influencers. It is to find people whose audiences and lifestyles give Kettle & Fire a credible reason to show up. That reflects how consumers actually use the brand. Kettle & Fire isn't tied to one wellness identity or one consumption occasion; its creator strategy is increasingly designed to show the product across the many moments where it naturally fits.

Turn thousands of posts into usable signals

As creator volume increased, Kettle & Fire began building additional workflows on top of Archive's data. Using Archive's API, the team can route notable creator activity into Slack so relevant posts are visible internally without requiring everyone to continuously check the platform.

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The team has also experimented with AI-assisted workflows that use Archive's content data and post summaries to help sort and prioritize large volumes of creator content. Instead of treating every captured post equally, the goal is to identify content with particularly strong product integration, storytelling, or creative concepts that the team should study, amplify, or build upon.

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That has turned Archive from simply a content-tracking tool into an intelligence layer for the Partnerships team.

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"Once you're capturing thousands of posts, the problem changes. It's no longer, 'Did somebody post?' It's, 'What are we learning from all of this?' Which creators are showing up repeatedly? How are people naturally using the product? Which ideas keep working? Which posts should the whole company see? Archive gives us the underlying data, and we're continuing to build ways to make that data more useful."

The Results

The biggest impact for Kettle & Fire isn't simply the number of posts stored in a platform. It's what the team can do because those posts are being captured automatically.

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A relatively lean Partnerships team can oversee a creator ecosystem producing thousands of pieces of content without manually finding and logging every mention. That allows more of the team's time to go toward the work that actually compounds: sourcing the right creators, nurturing relationships, identifying organic advocates, developing better campaigns, and understanding which ideas are earning attention.

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The system also gives Kettle & Fire a much clearer view of its overall creator footprint. The team can benchmark content volume over time, understand how different initiatives are showing up in market, and identify where organic activity is happening beyond its paid campaigns. For a brand increasingly focused on expanding awareness and household penetration, that visibility matters.

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"Scale for us doesn't mean sending more transactional outreach. It means being able to have more real relationships without losing visibility as the program gets bigger. Because Archive is passively capturing so much of what is happening around the brand, a relatively small team can operate a much larger creator ecosystem and spend its time on the work that actually moves the business forward."

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• ~17,000 pieces of creator content tracked annually.
• ~45% year-over-year growth in tracked content.
• Significant reduction in manual content discovery and tracking, freeing the team to focus on creator relationships, strategy, and optimization.
• A centralized view of paid, gifted, and organic creator activity that helps Kettle & Fire identify advocates and opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed.
• A scalable creator intelligence layer that feeds Kettle & Fire's broader awareness and household-penetration strategy.

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The partnership has also benefited from the platform evolving alongside the program.

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"One thing I've always appreciated about Archive is that they keep building. They listen to how teams are actually using the product and continue adding things that make the platform more useful. That sounds obvious, but you don't get that from every technology partner."