The Whole Truth is back on Instagram but on their own terms

The packaged food brand took a break from Instagram on July 9th.

After waving the white flag and taking a break from Instagram on July 9th, the packaged food brand, The Whole Truth, is back on the platform, but on their own terms. The brand has a large Instagram community of nearly 200K followers, brought together by their deeply researched yet easily digestible content on food, fitness, and nutrition.

During this self-imposed break, the brand has seemingly found a way to marry their content creation & deployment strategy with their mission of rebuilding the world's trust in its food. The brand had cited Instagram's ever-changing algorithm, especially the shift towards short-form videos called Reels, in their decision to step away and reassess their content strategy in July. The brand's design partner, Thought Over Design, stood in for them, sharing good-looking pictures of their products for a while in July & August.

Shashank Mehta, CEO, and founder of The Whole Truth Foods said, “We decided to step away from Instagram because we didn't like how our content was drifting away from what we started out doing. We needed the time and space to reorient ourselves around our north star, and our mission, and figure out the best way of leveraging the reach provided by social media platforms in actualizing our goals.

We figured many content creators would empathise with this new rat race we were unconsciously sucked into, but we were amazed to see that even regular folks who largely consumed rather than created content were weary of not being able to find what they wanted on their Instagram feeds. This reinforced our decision; something was broken, and rather than wait or whine about it, we had to find a way to achieve our mission with the tools available to us."

We received a tremendous groundswell of support from our community: we’d assumed that we’d resonate with the content creators who were burning out fruitlessly like us, but it turned out that even folks who mostly consumed content on the platform were weary of not seeing stuff they wanted to on their feeds. The biggest bucket of comments was just empathy and support, and it was just heart-warming.”

He further added, “The most common comment we received was one of empathy & support, and this reminded us of the amazing community that had gathered around us on the platform. We worked harder than ever during our hiatus but we have never felt more energized. We now believe we have found the path to doing deep, educational content on food, fitness & nutrition while also enabling everyone who wants this content to have access to it."

The Whole Truth is back on Instagram. And it is clearly not business as usual. Their followers will be waiting with bated breath to know what's next.