As well as raking it in with his charity stunts, James “MrBeast” Donaldson has been dabbling in the confectionary game with his Feastables brand. Apparently his chocolate bars, which include a peanut butter bar called Deez Nuts (sigh), are pretty popular, though the same could be said for his burgers, which MrBeast says are so “raw” and “inedible” that he sued his partner Virtual Dining Concepts.
I cannot speak to the quality of his chocolate, though it strikes me that it’s harder to mess up candy than it is beef. Even bad chocolate tastes pretty good, and it looks like a lot of his 240 million fans are more than happy to take a punt on Feastables, because they’ve been flying off the shelves—at least according to MrBeast and his acolytes, who have been struggling to find them stocked in Walmarts, as reported by Kotaku.
On February 19, MrBeast responded to a parent who had failed to procure MrBeast Bars for their now furious kids. “I went to 3 Walmarts and they are all gone,” they told him. “Now my kids r mad at me lol.” Because the charitable YouTuber cares about the kids, he promised he was “doing everything I can to restock stores” in an effort to maintain their sugar levels.
A day later, on February 20, he returned with an update.
“I spent 15 hours yesterday visiting Walmarts/Targets and seeing if they had inventory in the back and helping them put it out,” he tweeted, accompanied by a photo of boxes filled with MrBeast Bars.
He alleges that the shop in which he took the photo was doing “zero sales” and had none of his bars on its shelves. Thus he entered the stockroom, found the bars, got the employees to scan them, and then got them put out on the shelves. It’s pretty weird for the co-founder of a brand to show up unannounced, but he does claim that he was actually involved in restocking them, rather than just shouting at retail workers until they got the product out on the shop floor.
“Most products don’t have velocities like ours,” he added, “so you have to stock the shelves more frequently or they sit empty and people don’t have anything to buy. Learning a lot!”
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that most shoppers don’t go to Walmart and Target just to buy a chocolate bar. When I can’t find one item on my shopping list (which is really par for the course), it’s not quite the same as not having anything to buy.
It turns out that MrBeast bars have also made it across the Atlantic and are available here in the UK, but I suspect UK retail workers won’t have to worry about MrBeast showing up to snoop around in their stockrooms.
