Xnurta and CA Fortune help Bumble Bee Foods reach 22% revenue growth with AI-led strategy

Goals

Bumble Bee Foods, a food and beverage brand, faced a complex challenge: launching Snackers—a new line of single-serve flavored tuna designed to reach younger consumers—without cannibalizing sales from more than 10 existing product lines already established in the Amazon store. The brand needed to grow overall revenue while ensuring the new product attracted incremental buyers rather than shifting existing customers between SKUs.

The challenge required capabilities that neither a single agency nor a single technology partner could deliver alone. CA Fortune, an Amazon Ads partner specializing in CPG retail operations and full-service advertising, brought multi-year operational knowledge of Bumble Bee's catalog, vendor management, and creative strategy. Xnurta, an Amazon Ads advanced partner specializing in AI-powered optimization and advanced measurement, brought audience-building capabilities, AI-driven bid automation, and Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) analytics.

Together, they set ambitious objectives for the nine-month campaign running from July 2025 through March 2026: achieve $24.5M in ordered revenue, maintain total advertising cost of sales (TACOS) below 10%, reach a 50% conversion rate on sponsored ads, and drive a 10% repeat purchase rate—all while confirming zero cannibalization of existing products.

Approach

The partnership's insight was recognizing that a successful product launch in a complex catalog environment required solving two distinct problems simultaneously: knowing which audiences to avoid and identifying which audiences to pursue. CA Fortune's pre-launch visibility into Bumble Bee's full catalog shaped the entire keyword architecture, ensuring Snackers reached browse terms and use cases—such as single-serve, on-the-go snacking—that no existing product owned. This prevented overlap with established product lines from the outset.

Xnurta deployed AI-powered sponsored ads optimization while running AMC conversion path reporting and cross-product association models to identify which existing Bumble Bee buyers were high-probability Snackers converters. Using AMC, the team built custom audiences including lookalike buyers, back-to-school shoppers, and younger consumers reached via connected household Prime accounts. Amazon Marketing Stream provided real-time signal ingestion that enabled continuous optimization.

The full-funnel activation spanned Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and display ads for high-intent conversion, with Amazon DSP and Prime Video extending reach to awareness-stage audiences. Every placement was evaluated against both new-to-brand acquisition and repeat purchase signals before budget was committed—an incrementality mandate that drove all decision-making. The teams planned jointly across marketing, sales, product, and technology functions, sharing real-time dashboards that enabled rapid adjustments throughout the campaign.

This methodology demonstrated how combining deep catalog knowledge with AI-powered audience capabilities can help brands launch new products confidently within complex portfolios—spending only where it demonstrably grew the business rather than redistributing existing demand.

Results

The results significantly exceeded all stated objectives. Ordered revenue reached $30M over nine months, surpassing the $24.5M goal by 22% and confirming the strategy's effectiveness at driving incremental growth.¹ TACOS came in at 5.51%, well below the 10% goal, demonstrating that AI-powered optimization delivered both scale and efficiency simultaneously.²

Conversion performance was equally strong, with Snackers sponsored ads achieving a 52% conversion rate against the 50% goal.³ The repeat purchase rate reached 12.5%, exceeding the 10% objective and confirming that the campaign built lasting customer relationships rather than one-time trial.⁴ Among the new-to-brand cohort built via AMC custom audiences, the repeat purchase rate reached 22%—more than double the 10.5% pre-launch baseline.⁵

Snackers generated $317K in ordered revenue and became a top-10 best-selling tuna Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) within six months.⁶ Most critically, AMC cross product association modeling confirmed zero cannibalization—Snackers buyers were adding to baskets, not substituting core products.⁷ The launch was declared Bumble Bee's most successful product introduction to date.

This campaign established a repeatable methodology for a CPG brand managing a multi-SKU catalog where launch success depends on incrementality rather than substitution. The partnership demonstrated that combining agency catalog expertise with AI-powered audience capabilities can help brands confidently scale new product introductions while protecting existing revenue streams.

Sources

^1–7 Bumble Bee Foods, U.S., 2025–2026.