How to Make an AI Food or Drink Commercial

What happened when big brands tried it

Coca-Cola's AI-made holiday ads in November 2024 came from three AI studios, Secret Level, Silverside AI and Wild Card, "using four different generative AI models," NBC News reported, and Forbes named Leonardo, Luma and Runway, with Kling brought in near the end of production. Critics online called the result soulless, NBC reported. Coca-Cola said it "crafted films through a collaboration of human storytellers and the power of generative AI." A year later the company ran another AI holiday ad, made with Secret Level, which the Hollywood Reporter described as featuring "just animals" and AFP noted "avoids close-ups of humans." Coca-Cola's Pratik Thakar said "this year the craftsmanship is ten times better."

McDonald's Netherlands went the other way. Its 45-second AI Christmas ad, made by TBWA\Neboko and The Sweetshop, went up on YouTube on December 6, 2025 and came down on December 9 after a backlash, the BBC reported, and McDonald's called it "an important learning."

For a filmmaker, the useful detail is what Coca-Cola changed in its second year. It dropped close-ups of people and built the spot around animals.

What AI does well and badly with food and drink

Image and video models are good at surface: the wet shine on a brownie, crumbs in the air, steam, frost and beads of condensation on a can, the grain of a cut loaf. Those details sell food, and they are cheap to try again.

They are weak where food has to obey rules. Portions change size between shots. Liquids pour at the wrong speed, split into two streams or fill a glass that never overflows. Hands holding a fork or a can grow extra fingers or merge with the pack. Label text, the most important thing in a packaged-food spot, drifts into shapes that look like letters. Plan the edit so the camera lingers on surfaces and cuts away before physics has to be right.

The numbers from 100 Creatives' 2026 campaigns show the cost of food realism. Brownie food ads with motion took 120 renders for 10 keepers, 12 per usable image, against 3.2 for gummy supplement ads and about 8 across all four campaigns. Budget for that before promising a client a delivery date.

Build the hero stills first

Three frames carry most food spots: the hero (the pack or the plated product, clean and sharp), the texture close-up (the crumb, the fizz, the drip), and the action frame (the pour, the bite, the break). Make them as stills, approve them, and only then animate.

Write each still the way the kept prompts on the brownie job were written: the product and a pointer to the reference image first, the background as a hex color, the light as something falling on a surface, one sentence of lens, and grain in its own sentence. Here is one of them, for a dark, high-contrast ad on Nano Banana 2 (lightly edited: brand names removed).

The product shown in the reference image sits as two brownies stacked with a third tumbling downward, crumbs and cocoa dust frozen in suspension like a constellation of chocolate stardust against a pitch-black void (#000000). Hard direct flash carves ultra-sharp shadows beneath each piece, revealing wet fudgy shine across the top surface in deep chocolate tones (#2A1610). Faint particles of cocoa powder drift outward catching subtle cyan highlights (#42C0FB) that rim the edges with an otherworldly glow. The surfaces gleam with moisture, every crack and crater rendered in exacting detail. Shot at 90mm, f/4, focus locked on the middle brownie's glossy peak, framed as a tight vertical stack filling the center. Color science references Kodak Ektar 100, high contrast, saturated midtones, heavy visible film grain structure, deep blacks crushed to pure absence, with controlled saturation letting the warm chocolate browns dominate while cyan accents remain restrained and surreal.

All ten kept images on that job asked for heavy film grain, and nine carried the same hand-added sentence, "Heavy visible film grain throughout." Grain breaks up the too-smooth surfaces that can give AI food away, and it gives separate shots one texture. Once a line like that works, paste it into every prompt unchanged.

Animate in short clips

Give each clip one job. A slow push in on the texture frame, a pour that starts in frame and ends in frame, a hand that lifts the can and stops. Name the direction and the speed in the prompt, say what must not move, and keep clips short enough that the model does not have to keep liquid behaving for long. If the label is in frame, tell the model it stays facing camera and unchanged, and check it frame by frame in the edit.

Where a pour will not behave, cut it. A close-up of the glass filling, then a cut to the full glass, reads as a pour to the viewer and never asks the model to handle the whole arc.

The rules on food images and alcohol ads

A food ad has to show the food you sell. The FTC's Policy Statement on Deception notes that "Section 12 specifically prohibits false ads likely to induce the purchase of food, drugs, devices or cosmetics." The classic case is Campbell Soup in 1970, when the FTC acted against the company and its agency over "clear glass marbles which prevent the solid ingredients (garnish) from sinking to the bottom" of the bowl. In the UK, the ASA ruled against Parsley Box in 2019 because side dishes on the plate gave "the impression that they could expect them to be included in the meals they received," and a "Serving suggestion" line did not save the ad. In a US lawsuit, Coleman v. Burger King, the plaintiffs allege the chain's ads show burgers "approximately 35% larger in size" than the real ones; a federal court refused to dismiss the case in 2023 and 2025 and denied class certification in November 2025. AI makes it easy to plump a burger, so keep portions, fillings and what comes in the box true to the product.

Alcohol adds casting rules. The UK's CAP Code says "People shown drinking or playing a significant role must neither be nor seem to be under 25," a test of appearance that reads directly onto an AI cast. In the US, the Beer Institute's code says models "should be at least 25 years old, substantiated by proper identification, and reasonably appear to be of legal drinking age," and the Distilled Spirits Council's code sets the same 25-year minimum. Neither US code mentions AI-generated people, since both are written for models and actors a brand employs, so cast AI drinkers who clearly look over 25. For a holiday spot, one more line matters. The Beer Institute code says ads "should not depict Santa Claus," and the spirits code lists him among content that appeals to people under the legal drinking age.

Where to enter a food or drink spot

Food and drink spots fit the ad categories on the current calendar. Atlanta AI Ad Fest, which closes October 25, 2026, has a Best Product Advertising award described as "Product or offer made desirable without sacrificing idea or taste," though every entry must answer one of its four brand briefs. Golden Dunes Dubai (October 15) runs Best AI Commercial for spots under five minutes, the Korea AI Cinema Festival (October 31) has Best AI Commercial Film, and the Hollywood AI Short Film Awards (January 11, 2027) lists a Best Branded Commercial award. For a holiday drink or dessert film, Curious Refuge's AI Holiday Film Competition (December 6) pays $7,500 or more in cash and requires Epidemic Sound for music. Check each contest's rules on real brands first; our guide to real brands in AI spec ads covers the traps.

Where Overs fits: the hero stills and the label

Overs is built for consumer, fashion and packaged-goods brands, and it grew out of the process 100 Creatives, the agency Abhi Chawla founded, used to make hundreds of photos a week for hundreds of brands. The brownie job above is one of that agency's 2026 campaigns. You give Overs one product photo and the brand's details. It writes the brand's visual DNA, plans the shots and gives each photo only the reference pictures it needs, so every shot works from the right pictures of the pack. Nano Banana 2, its default image model, is good at keeping a product accurate across a batch, and brand rules are applied last so they have the final say.

Use it for the three stills a food spot hangs on, the hero, the texture close-up and the pour frame, and approve them as one set before any motion. You see the shot plan and an estimated cost before anything renders. Overs writes a text motion prompt for each photo, for Seedance or Veo, and you make the clips in that tool. The agency's numbers set honest expectations. Across four 2026 campaigns, 361 renders gave 45 keepers, about 8 tries per usable photo, and food with motion took 12. At $0.034 to $0.211 a render, a usable still costs $0.27 to $1.69 in AI fees at 8 tries. Abhi's own businesses make their images with Overs today.

Overs is a sister product to AI Film Contests, from the same founder. Overs' guide to AI food photography covers portions, physics and the rules on food images in more depth. The free plan covers 40 photos a month on your own OpenRouter key, with no markup from Overs. Try Overs free at www.overs.studio and make the hero stills for your next food spot.