California Grapes Partner with LA Rams for Global Promotion

At Melbourne’s MCG, the usual stadium inventory—jerseys, nachos, loud music—made room for a quieter California product: table grapes. The Los Angeles Rams brought Davante Adams into a promotion for grapes from California around the team’s first regular-season NFL game in Australia.

The California Table Grape Commission’s collaboration with the Rams is less about a single serving of fruit than about putting a recognizable California crop into a new piece of the global sports-and-food conversation.

A Stadium Becomes a Produce Aisle

Australia matters here as a public stage and as an export market. The promotion was designed to showcase California agriculture beyond the state’s familiar retail and food-service channels, with the commission using the Rams’ international reach to introduce the crop to people who may know the team before they know the farms behind the grapes.

The Rams’ Australia plan extended beyond the game itself. The team announced fan activities in central Melbourne and a youth flag-football celebration involving as many as 50 schools, giving the partnership more places to appear than the stadium scoreboard. The Rams described the program as part of a broader international effort, not simply a one-night football spectacle.

Selling the State Behind the Fruit

For California’s table grape growers, the useful part of this kind of campaign is the story attached to the bunch. The commission’s message links the fruit to the growers, workers and communities that make the state’s agricultural reputation possible—an attempt to sell California as a place and a production system, not just a label on a clamshell.

That approach fits a wider push to bring California agriculture directly to foreign buyers. CDFA’s Best of the West Global Buyers event has used a more conventional business setting to connect companies with international customers; the Rams partnership takes the same export ambition into a much louder room.

The campaign does not establish that a football audience will translate into purchase orders, higher returns or new acreage. Those outcomes usually arrive later, through importers, retailers and repeat demand—the less photogenic machinery behind an eye-catching promotion. The California Table Grape Commission’s work is to make the first association memorable enough for those conversations to have somewhere to begin.