Sound in the multimodal construction of health and convenience: A case study of Sweetgreen’s Instagram advertising
Abstract
Healthy food consumption and promotion are increasingly prominent trends in contemporary culture, reflected in the proliferation of healthy food products and their advertising in online media. Research has shown that such advertising is multimodal, yet sound is less frequently analyzed in detail than visuals and written language. The article aims to address this gap by demonstrating the meaning-making potential of sound in multimodal construction of health and convenience in a promotional Instagram Reel of a U.S. fast-casual restaurant Sweetgreen. Conducting a case study enabled us to perform a thorough analysis of sound and its interplay with the visual mode in order to highlight its potential importance as a semiotic resource in short-form promotional videos. The video was selected from a corpus of Sweetgreen Instagram Reels posted in 2025 as an information-rich example that foregrounds the presentation of a single product and relies on montage rather than spoken explanation or interview-style delivery, and combines music, object and ambient sounds. The visual track was analyzed through Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual social semiotic framework and the auditory track through Graakjær’s framework for sound and music to identify the meaning-making potentials of each track in isolation. Afterwards, the interaction between modes was examined through the adapted Martinec and Salway’s system of status and logico-semantic relations to identify the contribution of each mode to the overall advertising message. The analysis shows that the visual montage compresses food preparation by omitting food labor and presents each ingredient as natural, pure, seasonal and fresh. The sound not only enhances the visual meanings, but also signifies the ongoing, coherent process of food preparation absent from the visual track, and frames it as artisanal craft rather than impersonal, mechanical action. The sound also uniquely provides circumstantial naturalness, thus adding a health-relevant meaning. Taken together, the sound is not merely decorative, but a key semiotic resource that helps convey brand values. Broader corpus-based analysis remains a task for future research.
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