Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, the greatest youtuber in the worldHe recently asked his fans to do him a favor: patrol the shelves at his local wholesaler to make sure his Feastables candy bars aren’t a big mess. Some seem happy to have joined his efforts, while others mocked the brand activation psy-op and threatened a counterattack.
“I need your help!” MrBeast tweeted on Friday. “Next time you see Feastables at Walmart (and soon at new retailers) if you could clean up the presentation and look better, that would make me very happy. I’m building a team to do this routinely, just need short term help.”
For the uninitiated, Feastables is a candy bar brand that MrBeast launched in early 2022 that claims to source its cocoa “sustainably,” offer a “carbon-neutral checkout” through TerraCycle, and make cash donations to help address food insecurity in the US to alleviate. Doesn’t taste bad,” someone wrote on Reddit
Some fans immediately went into clean-up mode and responded in the thread with apparent pictures of themselves that were very odd. “I was at Walmart and saw your candy bar,” a self-proclaimed business mogul who goes by the moniker LoneWolf wrote on Twitter. “I fixed them properly. Everything for the team. I even bought the chocolate sea salt.”
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They were far from the only ones. “I got you covered at the San Tan Valley, AZ Walmart,” another person wrote. “It wasn’t in bad shape, but the Walmart in Marion IN is good right now.” wrote a third. Others who didn’t volunteer at the world’s largest company rushed to congratulate MrBeast on his incredibly savvy business move. “Brilliant! Crowdsourcing for the cleanup,” Reluctant Carnivore tweeted ItsJustinRhodes. “I think creator brands will dominate shelf space this decade,” YouTuber Muaaz tweeted.
But the backlash was swift. MrBeast’s call for Feastables action soon became a battleground for anti-beasters, who threatened to go out of their way to mess up the displays. Some mocked them Rich YouTuber because he asked fans to work for him for free, others joked about catching Feastable vandals and tying them up Batman-style. A few simply felt humanity’s last gasp and hope fled from their mortal coils in the face of late capitalism so brazen.
MrBeast is no stranger to controversy. His recent journey through the salty waters of online discourse turned around pay to have cataract surgery for a thousand people to fix her eyesight. “1,000 blind people see for the first time” was the title of the following video. Many applauded the apparent philanthropy as a case of clout hunting well done. Others simply criticized it as the latest stunt in a long-running trend of MrBeast making content out of charity in ways that are both emotionally manipulative and papers about the systemic injustices that caused the problems in the first place.
There are no similar moral stakes in the Feastables campaign, but it has all the hallmarks of an internet sinkhole. Something is wrong with this picture. Posting about them won’t fix any of them. And yet the attraction is so strong that no one can resist intervention. Far from making a few superfans sort through candy, that’s the true strength of the MrBeast brand.
