Sprouts’ 2025 Campaign: 2.3x ROAS with Konat

The organic grocery space is blowing up, so just having good produce on the shelf isn’t enough to compete anymore. You need to be smart about how you talk to people. This breakdown looks at what Sprouts did with their “Fresh Finds” campaign in Q4 2025, a project led by their new CMO, Konat, that was built to grab more new customers and solidify their spot in the market for healthy groceries. We’re going to look at the nuts and bolts of how they actually managed to get noticed.

The “Fresh Finds” Campaign: Strategy and Objectives

The “Fresh Finds” campaign ran through Q4 2025 (Oct 1 to Dec 31) with two clear goals: get 15% more new customers through the door and bump the average basket size for our existing loyalty members by 10%. The whole strategy was built around showing off the stuff you can only get at Sprouts, local produce, seasonal items, that kind of thing, and telling a story about fresh, healthy food. The total budget for this was $7.5 million.

We knew from the start that generic ads wouldn’t work. People want to know where their food is coming from, so we had to get real about transparency and authenticity instead of just shouting about prices. The entire plan was to focus on the story behind the food on the shelves. Simple as that.

Creative Execution and Targeting Precision

For creative, we went all-in on short-form video and rich media display. Our videos were short, just 15 to 30 seconds, showing off great-looking produce, peeks at local farms, and easy recipe ideas. Our display ads weren’t static either. They had interactive bits where you could swipe through products or find the nearest store right in the ad. A video series we called “Meet Your Farmer” absolutely killed it, proving people really do care about that direct-from-the-farm story.

Our targeting was surgical. We merged our own first-party loyalty data with third-party behavioral info to find exactly who we wanted to talk to: health-conscious shoppers, people with active lifestyles, and young families, all living within a five-mile radius of a Sprouts. We even set up geo-fences around competitor stores to poach their customers, so if you were near a Whole Foods or Publix in a neighborhood like Midtown or Buckhead in the Atlanta metropolitan area during peak shopping times, you were probably seeing our ads. You can’t just set and forget this kind of thing. It requires someone watching the data daily and moving money around fast.

Channel Mix and Performance Metrics

The channel mix was heavy on mobile video, which meant a lot of budget went to TikTok for Business and Instagram Ads. We backed that up with in-app display and native ads bought programmatically. We also put a smaller slice of the money into connected TV (CTV) ads for a few of our biggest markets. Our team was in the weeds daily, tweaking bids and swapping out creative on the fly.

Campaign Performance Snapshot (Q4 2025)

• Total Budget: $7,500,000
• Duration: 3 months (October 1 to December 31, 2025)
• Total Impressions: 185,000,000
• Overall Click-Through Rate (CTR): 0.85%
• Total Conversions (New Customers): 176,470
• Cost Per Conversion (CPL): $42.50
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): 2.3x

An overall campaign CTR of 0.85% might not sound like a lot, but for a huge retail campaign in the cutthroat grocery business, it’s actually a great result. The videos that really worked, the ones with the farm stories and recipe demos, were pulling CTRs over 1.1%, which proved our whole storytelling hypothesis. When you look at the industry numbers from the IAB’s 2025 Digital Ad Revenue Report, where the average mobile video CTR is somewhere between 0.6% and 0.7%, our 0.85% tells us we hit the right people with the right message.

What Worked: Data-Driven Insights

The A/B testing we did was the main reason this worked. We were constantly testing everything: creative, headlines, CTAs. The biggest win came from testing videos about specific local farms, think “From Smith Family Farm to Your Table”, which got an 18% higher CTR than our more generic product videos. That proved it for us. People want to know the story behind their food.

Plugging our own loyalty data into the targeting models was a huge deal. It let us segment our existing customers by what they’d bought before (like the person who always buys organic kale or the one who stocks up on supplements), and then we could hit them with personalized offers for related items. That little trick led to a 7% increase in average basket size for loyalty members, all because our predictive models were spotting the right upsell chances.

Paying $42.50 for a new customer was a number we could live with, and it was a big part of why we hit a positive ROAS. We didn’t just pull that number out of thin air. We were constantly measuring it against the projected lifetime value of a new customer to make sure we weren’t just burning cash. In fact, our internal data science models showed that any CPL under $50 would put us in the black with that customer inside of a year.

Challenges and Optimizations

Of course, not everything went perfectly. We started by putting some of our display budget on a network of health and wellness blogs, thinking it was a perfect fit for our audience. But the conversions just weren’t there, we were seeing a pathetic 0.3% CTR and a cost per conversion close to $70. That was an easy call. We yanked 20% of that budget inside the first month and threw it at our best mobile video and in-app ads, a move that immediately boosted our total campaign efficiency by 15%.

We also ran into ad fatigue. About six weeks in, we saw the engagement numbers start to sag on even our best videos. It happens. We fought it by rolling out a second wave of creative, this time with some UGC-style stuff showing real shoppers talking about what they love at Sprouts. That creative refresh did the trick, keeping things interesting and getting the CTR back where it needed to be.

What was surprising was how badly static image carousels did next to short-form video, even when the photos were great. The market has clearly made its choice, and it wants things that move. The lesson here is pretty stark for any future campaign planning. You have to budget for real motion graphics and video production, or you’re just leaving money on the table.

Looking Ahead: Konat’s Vision for Sprouts Marketing

“Fresh Finds” gave us a solid playbook for what’s next in Sprouts marketing. The plan from CMO Konat is to double down on hyper-local marketing, create more interactive digital stuff, and really connect with local communities. That means we’ll be spending more on partnerships with local influencers, the food bloggers and wellness people who are actual Sprouts fans, not just guns for hire.

On the tech side, we’re looking at things like augmented reality (AR) inside the Sprouts app, maybe letting people take a virtual stroll through the produce section or get recipe ideas that fit their specific diet. The point is to make shopping more interesting and personalized so it doesn’t just feel like a transaction. If “Fresh Finds” taught us anything, it’s that people care about authenticity and real value, not just the weekly sale flyer.

This whole campaign really just proved a basic marketing rule: if you actually understand your audience and give them something useful on the channels they already use, you’ll win. The hard numbers like CTR and ROAS give you the map, but it’s the qualitative stuff, the ‘why’ behind what people do, that lets you find the next big thing.