It’s the summer of the Franken-sandwich. First, Marks & Spencer unleashed its strawberries and cream offering, two wedges of “soft, sweetened bread” cemented together with blobs of cream cheese and studded with strawberry slices. It looked like something that a piece of errant AI software might dream up, if you asked it to imagine what people eat at Wimbledon – and yet it proved to be a sellout.
Now, desperate not to miss out on any of the action, Tesco has launched a “birthday cake” sandwich of its own, featuring brioche bread filled with multicoloured sprinkles, cream cheese icing and, for that extra hit of sweetness, vanilla frosting. And yes, you can get it as part of a meal deal (so you can enjoy it with a smoothie and a tiny tub of hummus and carrots, if you’re looking to create a truly discombobulating lunchtime experience).
These products have more in common than just their sickly fillings. Both are part of a wave of supermarket food products that seem designed to be talked about rather than actually, you know, be eaten. Is anyone over the age of five actually enjoying snacking on two slices of sweet bread doused in dollops of icing (and, presumably, cresting the wave of the resultant sugar rush)? I’m not convinced. Are they still clamouring to get in on the trend, posting photos and videos on social media and essentially doing the retailer’s marketing for them? Absolutely.
Welcome to the TikTok-ification of the humble weekly food shop. Supermarkets, not usually the most clout-chasing of operations, have become thirsty for online hype. How are they trying to generate this? By coming up with ever more bizarre products and flavour combinations.
Have you ever wondered why everything in the drinks aisle is suddenly matcha flavour? Or why every Christmas and Easter seems to see the arrival of some new, and undeniably weird, themed culinary creation? The answer’s simple: virality. “Some brands now engineer innovation with TikTok in mind, crafting bold flavours, playful packaging or nostalgic twists built for the algorithm,” says Sam Barker, head of omnichannel insights at Greenpark, an agency that works with big brands to optimise their TikTok search.
Supermarkets are no longer just competing with each other on price and convenience, explains customer experience and retail expert Martin Newman; they’re fighting for our attention in the online world, too. “TikTok and Instagram are today’s shop windows, and retailers know that the easiest way to get into people’s feeds, and conversations, is by creating products that are highly ‘shareable’,” he says. “It’s less about traditional advertising and more about engineering moments that customers want to post, share and talk about.”
Essentially, we’ve changed the way we interact with food. “People literally buy products just to film their reactions,” says Tiah Slattery, influencer expert at digital branding agency DEPT. “You used to show up to dinner parties with a gift. Now you turn up with the viral cookies or Dubai chocolate. The harder it is to get something, the more people want it. It’s part status symbol, part social currency.”
Take Marks & Spencer, for example. The strawberries and cream sandwich (inspired by the Japanese “sando”, a delicacy made from milk bread, whipped cream and fresh fruit) is just the latest in a long line of social media bait launches from the upmarket retailer. Also currently doing the rounds online are the M&S cheesecake-laden cookie cups and the frankly quite massive Big Daddy 300g chocolate bar. The latter is, inevitably, now available in pistachio, to satiate our collective desire for all things “Dubai chocolate”. (That’s chocolate filled with pistachio creme and shredded fragments of filo pastry, a flavour that went viral on social media last year, and has since had more staying power than the average food fad.)
The harder it is to get something, the more people want it
Tiah Slattery, DEPT
Then there’s the store’s increasingly surreal product line devoted to Percy Pig: the cheery cartoon swine was once only available in sweet form, but has been reborn as hash browns, fizzy drinks and pancakes over the past few years. Percy’s agent must be raking it in.
And if M&S is the reigning king of the viral food launch, Aldi comes in a close second place. The supermarket is playing a similar game of trend bingo: among its recent innovations are Dubai chocolate-flavoured (tick!) mochi ice cream balls (double tick!). Plus, every Christmas, Aldi can be relied upon to dream up something vaguely monstrous: 2022 saw the unveiling of a Yorkshire pudding stuffed with a 60cm pig in a blanket; the following year, a pigs in blankets-flavoured ice cream was released.
The scramble to create social media-friendly food is nothing new. If you cast your mind back to the mid-2010s, you might remember the beginnings of this larger-than-life food culture, as restaurants, bakeries and street food pop-ups seemed to compete with each other to launch weird new creations, precision-engineered to look good on Instagram.
Every millennial’s social media feed was crowded with rainbow-hued bagels (best not to think about the E-numbers) and whimsical, pastel-coloured “unicorn” drinks. People queued around the block for cruffins, or cronuts, or whatever unholy hybrid dessert had been invented by the patissier of the moment. And everything seemed to be available in pumpkin spice flavour. Dishes like these, Freeman notes, “were designed to draw queues and press coverage”. It worked.
Trends tend to have a “trickle-down effect” across industries, says Kara Buffrey, co-founder of hospitality marketing agency Chomp. And so just as “in fashion, runway designs inspire high street stores, in food, supermarkets look to pop-ups, restaurants and chefs for ideas”. It took a few years, but the high street stalwarts have now cottoned on to the fact that they can use similar tactics to chase attention.
They started off quietly (remember when every other product in the dessert aisle seemed to be salted caramel flavour? Or when all the supermarkets seemed to start launching jars of biscuit-filling spreads?) but seem to have become bolder – or more unhinged – over time. “The real driver is our shrinking attention spans in a screen-saturated world,” says Olaf van Gerwen, founder of food branding specialists Chuck Studios.
There are a few ingredients that conspire to make a food product go viral, Newman reckons. First up is visual appeal, “something that looks unusual, colourful or surprising on camera” (think of those rainbow bagels, or the supersized croissants that influencers like to pose with in Paris), and a sense of novelty – a “quirky twist on something familiar” goes down well, he says.
If there’s a feeling of scarcity, too, like when a product is marketed as limited edition or as part of a short, seasonal run, that helps to pique the interest; so do “cultural hooks, tapping into wider food or wellness trends” and also “ease of replication” – “if consumers can ‘try it at home’ and post their own attempt, it fuels the cycle,” Newman adds.
The real driver is our shrinking attention spans in a screen-saturated world
Olaf van Gerwen, Chuck Studios
You might notice that “taste” or even “edibility” doesn’t come up in this list of criteria. And, let’s face it, it’s probably not the primary concern of product developers chasing a TikTok hit – because does it really matter if it’s grim if everyone’s still buying it? It’s the food industry equivalent of social media rage bait. “Viral culture feeds on extremes,” says influencer expert Slattery. “Whether people love it or hate it, if they’re talking, it’s doing its job.”
So what’s actually in it for the supermarkets? Don’t they risk alienating their older shoppers by filling their shelves with odd flavours and novelty products? “In the short term, viral moments can spark sharp spikes in demand,” says Barker. Beyond that, he notes, they can create a “halo effect”, prompting more people to search for the brand online or head to the IRL store. The hope is that once they’re here, they’ll fill their baskets with plenty of other products beyond the latest cursed sandwich flavour.
But van Gerwen isn’t necessarily convinced that this approach pays off. “It’s about grabbing quick attention – especially from Gen Z – but let’s be real, this isn’t where long-term brand value is built,” he says. Viral hits, he reckons, are more a distraction than anything else: they’re “like fireworks: bright, loud, gone in a flash”.
And, he notes, this approach can backfire fast. He cites the example of M&S’s “LGBT” sandwich, released to mark Pride month back in 2019 (the LGBT stood for lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato… yes, really). Understandably, it raised a few eyebrows among the queer community. “What was meant to show support”, he notes, ended up turning sexuality “into a novelty item”. Supermarkets that are “playing in fast-trend territory”, he adds, “risk coming off as tone-deaf or performative”.
And yet it seems like so many once-staid retailers are ready to take that risk if it means generating online hype (or even hate). Love them or loathe them, these unholy creations aren’t going anywhere: in fact, it seems that they’re only going to get weirder as our attention spans stagnate. Resistance is futile: pass me the matcha-flavoured Dubai chocolate sandwich from hell.
