The First Drop: A Fish Story

There’s a theory that we no longer live in a society that takes anything seriously. But I’m just starting to think the savagery of the social media environment has sapped our sense of humor to the point where it’s almost impossible to maintain the perspective required to know when something is so far out of bounds as to be just… silly.

To illustrate this point, I bring you the latest swell of excitement around the David Bar. I’m writing this a few days after the company announced it was selling frozen boiled cod as part of a marketing campaign to make the point that their main product is a much more appealing and only slightly less nutritionally efficient on-the-go protein source than a block of frozen whitefish.

There’s only one problem – the campaign may have been too good. Now they’ve gotta sell the fish.

I kid. They were always planning to sell the fish. To prove a point, But folks are taking this stuff really seriously. Like the listeners who still believe the Martians are coming after they heard a replay of The War of the Worlds broadcast, many internet folks are still out there saluting the brilliance of the cod strategy as a serious line expansion.

Here’s the LinkedIn reaction of a guy who’s an actual CMO. Note the sentence structure, which imparts an almost poetic meter to the hysteria:

“David Bar gets it.

They started as a protein bar brand.

Today they announced they’re selling frozen cod.

Wild-caught. Zero sugar. 23g of protein.

Feels random — until you realize they’ve always been selling one thing:

High-quality protein.

That’s the brand.

And once you know what you’re really selling, expansion becomes obvious.”

No, dude. David Bar gets it in the sense that they’re making the point that their bars are a great protein source. The branded cod is about as likely to be a long-term play as Liquid Death’s SKUs featuring Tony Hawk’s blood.

Blame it on the heat. After all, it’s the silly summer CPG season, when all of the products have already gone into the sets and most of the action is happening online.

It’s going on in beverage, of course, as well. You’ve got Pepsi rolling out their second attempt to compete against Poppi via a prebiotic cola, only this time, they’ve got the ultimate advantage: they own both brands!

Meanwhile, our friends at Coke found an even more ominous threat, the possibility that the President of the United States of America wanted to troll them on social media.

As you’ve probably heard by now, President Trump threw his weight behind a call for Coke to re-launch their flagship product with cane sugar, a move that quizzically played chicken not just with the beverage giant but also with his own tariff policies, as the U.S. imports most of its cane sugar, and also provides massive subsidies to corn growers, who provide the “C” in HFCS. Also, it’s not lost on me, or anyone within earshot of me, that the product he’s demanded Coke make is actually known as Mexican Coke, and I’d gladly pay 5X per bottle for that to be the name of that particular line extension.

Cue: the National Guard descending on 1 Coca-Cola Plaza, attempting to send Mexico fellow traveler James Quincey back to Great Britain.

It’s so hard to understand what Trump is trying to accomplish here. Sure, his secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., dislikes HFCS, but he dislikes real sugar only a little less than that, and nutritionists don’t see a lot of value in the change.

Still, it’s the silly season, when massive companies are throwing (unbleached!) bread and circuses at the administration. It’s clear that in the back of their minds there’s a Kid Rock-shaped shibboleth, waiting to hit their own products with a scatter gun, and rather than face some kind of Bud Light-sized disruption, the cheapest option they’ve got is to concede a little bit of ground.

So you’ve got companies that have been gradually moving away from certain food dyes forswearing them en masse, giving RFK a chance to crow, while also keeping him off their backs about the really major supply chain changes that would have to take place for the food system to match what medical and nutritional experts – not activists, but scientists – would recommend.

Fortunately, RFK’s belief in science seems to only go as far as its willingness to agree with him for a sound bite; if there was some way for scientists to rename vaccines “magic ouch serum” do you think he’d resume access to them? What if we label the “pointy magic applicators” with “guaranteed mercury-free?”

It could work. After all, being mercury-free seems to be one of the chief attributes of the latest David product. That David Bar really gets it.