Food Fight: MrBeast and Logan Paul's New Lunchly Drama

Issue #274 | September 19, 2024

Oh, to be a fly on the wall of Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson’s completely normal work-life hybrid zone. The 27-year-old is under (more?) scrutiny after the bombshell lawsuit filed Monday by several competitors who’d participated in his OSHA-nightmare Beast Games show alleged, among other things, unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, sexual harassment, unpaid wages, and “inflictions of emotional distress.” The suit names MrBeasts’ production company MRB2024, along with Amazon Studios and a third independent production company, as defendants in the class-action suit, which seeks unpaid back wages and an unspecified amount in damages.

Already: bad news. But somehow, it manages to get worse, as while the suit was in the process of being filed, as late as last Wednesday, there were reports of crew members narrowly escaping severe injury on the set of Beast Games (which, yes, was still somehow in production!). On Sept. 11, staffers were injured after a 6×6 portion of a tower fell on top of them during the final days of the shoot; a grim and eerie coincidence that no doubt the production hopes will escape Donaldson’s Gen Z and Gen Alpha audience.

If we were Jimmy’s publicist, we could tell him to take a week off from announcing any new products, but alas (for him), we’re not. We also would have advised him, not that anyone’s asking, to not go into business with crypto-cryptid shiller Logan Paul, who is facing his own litany of lawsuits regarding his (alleged) pump-and-dump NFT collectibles scheme. But again, no one is calling us, and maybe the thought goes any publicity is good publicity?

On Wednesday, Donaldson and Paul, along with professional boxer and influencer KSI, announced a new collaboration aimed at cornering the cafeteria market: Lunchly, a new Lunchables competitor featuring MrBeast Feastables chocolate bars, Paul’s Prime Hydration beverage and three different “variations of food” (as a now-viral press release put it) as the main course.

THE COMMENTS SECTION

“I’ll buy my son a Lunchly if Logan Paul gets a tattoo of Imane Khelif with her gold medal on his face.”
– X user Chris Ruiz (@OKChrisRuiz) on Logan Paul and Lunchly.

Now, influencers come up with terrible products all the time, with Donaldson himself being an old-hat at weathering these sorts of franchise misfirings. The whole thing might have fallen under the radar had the punch-happy Paul not taken the bait after a tweet from beloved Minecraft Twitcher streamer DanTM started making the rounds. Now, DanTM has been a well-known name in the space for well over a decade, and as far as we can tell, this is one of the few times he’s spoken out against another creator, a fact he alluded to in his initial tweet:

“What happened to YouTubers man..

I can’t not say anything anymore. This is selling stuff for the sake of making money, simple. How does this benefit their fans?

This is selling crap to kids who don’t know better than to trust the people who are selling it to them.”

Now, while it was a quote-tweet of the Lunchly announcement, Dan’s quote was vague enough to be read any number of ways: Lunchables, the product which Lunchly marketed itself as a direct competitor of, is not exactly known for being good for growing kids. In fact, since the Oscar Mayer product launched in lunchrooms back in 1989, they’ve been plagued with concerns from health groups for containing high levels of sodium (1,780 mgs!), lead and phthalates, the latter of which has been proven to cause hormone disruptions in young children.

So it’s possible to read DanTM’s tweet as “this is a gross industry to try and disrupt in the first place.” But since Lunchly is billing itself as the healthy alternative to Lunchables, Logan Paul felt the need to clap back, although he seemed to be taking equal offense to the “unhealthy” bit as he did to being called out as a YouTuber:

“I’ll tell you what happened to YouTubers

We spent our lives creating content and building our brands

Now we want to build businesses

You don’t say anything when Lunchables faces bans for allegedly containing LEAD but when we create a better version, you’re upset? Then don’t eat it.”

Kind of a weird, defensive response, as DanTM’s initial tweet was not an indictment of the entire pre-packaged lunch kit industry nor an attempt to differentiate Lunchly’s product as more or less poisonous than that of processed meat conglomerate Oscar Mayer’s offerings. It was more like, “Gross, maybe don’t market your chocolate bars and sports-slash-energy drinks as a well-balanced lunch to children?”

I’ll admit, for once, Community Notes on X came in handy, adding the perfect foot-note to Logan’s self-righteous health polemic:

Prime Hydration, LLC was filed against at for including lead on 3 separate occasions, with the third being on March 24th of 2024.
Commenting on Lunchables’ lead findings while including a drink also known to have lead inside a meal pack is very hypocritical. https://www.erc501c3.org/notices/prime-hydration-violation

A+, perfect, no notes…except maybe they should have added the part where Prime Hydration was also found to have toxic levels of Mercury? Either way, we’d advise anyone to stay away from Lunchly, especially since these influencers are taking a page out of Disney’s playbook and trying to sneak in a waiver that absolves their companies from any wrongdoing into Lunchly’s Privacy Policy.

– Drew Grant, Editorial Director

NOTED BY LON HARRIS

YouTube’s New Creator-Friendly Era

Why a YouTube app refresh points at hopeful new direction.

By Lon Harris, Passionfruit Contributor

→ READ THE FULL STORY

SHILLING FOR OUR FRIENDS

Join our sister site one5c at New York’s Climate Week

We interrupt this creator newsletter to inform you that one of the other websites we share a virtual office with is hosting an awesome event during New York Climate Week next Tuesday, and as friends of friends we’d love to see you there. Registration is free, the conversation is about the right to repair your stuff, and you could even go home with some cool swag. Register here, and check out one5c if you care about the planet as much as we do.

IN THE BIZ

Snapchat held its annual Partner Summit announcing major updates including a simplified interface, TikTok-inspired video feed, and AI-powered features like translation and photo/video generation.
LinkedIn has opted users into training generative AI models by default,
but users can opt out in their privacy settings.
YouTube has widely rolled out “pause ads” to all advertisers,
despite claiming they would offer a “less interruptive” experience.
Substack has introduced a new live streaming feature for its top creators, with plans to expand it to all users in the coming months.