Ben’s Original Moves Rice Marketing Out Of The Kitchen And Into The Ballpark

Ben Rice plays first base for the New York Yankees. Ben's Original sells rice. The two of them spent the 2026 season together starting in March, and every big play Rice made, such as home runs, RBIs and run-saving defense, triggered a donation to the hunger charity No Kid Hungry. Sales of rice slow down in the summer when more people cook on a grill, and baseball gave the brand a reason to keep talking to shoppers through its slowest months. The campaign started online and ended up in supermarkets, inside Yankee Stadium, and on Yankees radio.

Drew Brinckerhoff is VP of Marketing at Mars Food & Nutrition North America, the Mars business behind Ben's Original. He has spent close to a decade at Mars, starting on the e-commerce side where he ran online and in-store marketing for Mars Food in North America. He then took over Ben's Original in North America as its brand marketing director, and later ran it worldwide along with the pasta sauce brand Dolmio, Seeds of Change and Tasty Bite. Before Mars he was digital analytics lead at Astellas Pharma.

"The real job for a brand that's trying to maintain its iconic status in the environment is to interrupt and intercept people in their regular routine. It's not just about injecting us wherever we want to be. It's really about establishing that connection and that relevance to where people already are," says Brinckerhoff. A baseball season is a long, predictable routine with a crowd that turns up for months, and Brinckerhoff wanted to tap in. Sharing a name with the first baseman did most of the heavy lifting.

Relevance in a lull

Baseball fans were a new audience for Ben's Original, but getting in front of them wasn't the hard part. Brinckerhoff wanted to catch them at a point in the year when rice was worth thinking about. "I think what we saw was we were able to bring this relevance to a new consumer set," he explains. "You might see an ad at home, but it's not relevant to you in the baseball season. And summertime's a bit of a lull for rice as people go to grilling."

Although the baseball season ends in the fall, Brinckerhoff wanted the campaign to carry the brand into its best selling months. He kept it running to the last game. "We found ourselves right there at the perfect cross point of baseball, one of these massive moments in the US during the season," he notes. "It was a great connection for us, and then it threads right into our back to school where routine cooking becomes relevant. You're setting the stage for yourself as you go into your next big season."

Stadium, store, and broadcast

Ben's Original took the campaign into supermarkets and the ballpark itself. The chains that stock the brand were eager to take part, and the campaign ended up with shelf displays and stadium signage on top of the online campaign. "Our customers got really excited about it. We were able to launch some activations with partners like ShopRite in the New York tri-state area. We were able to have communications at Yankee Stadium. We did six audio broadcasts with various Yankees broadcasts and podcasts," he explains. "We were able to take this and make it bigger than that simple execution you may have seen online where Ben Rice and Ben Rice got together."

A GIF of Rice eating from a bowl kept circulating the whole time. Right now, Mars is in the middle of analyzing the season, so sales figures are still to come, but Brinckerhoff has a count of how often people used the GIF. "We're talking about 32,000 uses a day since we launched it in March. That level of engagement, when we're thinking about developing and remaining an iconic brand, is essential for us to be able to continue that," he says. "It's a great signal for the level of connection that we were able to build with consumers."

Following the consumer

Ben's Original is also working to grow its TikTok following. Brinckerhoff picked the platform for the same reason he went with baseball: both are places people already spend their time. "The really important thing for us as a brand is to remember it's about being where the consumer is," he explains. "Some of the obvious shifts that you've seen are TikTok. Us having a more prominent presence on a platform like that is important."

Brinckerhoff also buys the channels people have moved away from. When viewers leave a particular channel, he says the advertisers follow them out, leaving open space for anyone still willing to advertise there. "On the counter side of that, it's also thinking about what becomes disruptive because attention has moved from it. And when attention moves from it, oftentimes the mass of media that's there is gone," he notes.

Where the ads aren't

Brinckerhoff bought print for Mars six or seven years ago, when he was running a different team. He says enough people opened the mail to make it worth doing. "We used print when print was a really low thing. We put things in people's mailboxes and got a huge response rate because you just weren't getting advertised that much anymore," he says. "There are these nuggets of opportunity, like with out-of-home or even in general broadcast, where you can get back in front of consumers and there's not as much concentration of advertising and you can break through there," he adds.

Ben's Original's next campaign is already in the works, and Brinckerhoff is keeping the details close to the vest. He does have a message for anyone who assumes a rice brand disappears between campaigns, and he delivered it unprompted. "Look out ahead for us. We're not a sleepy brand, so don't sleep on us," he concludes. "We're going to be in front of you in a lot of different places in a lot of cool ways, and I'm very excited for the plans that we have coming up."