Mr Beast sold 1 million chocolate bars after launching his brand “Feastables” on January 29th of this year.
10 million dollars was the revenue reported by the beginning of May.
Which is actually the Youtuber’s second attempt in food, with the first being Mr Beast Burgers.
A concept which began as a YouTube video and evolved into a delivery only restaurant chain “ghost kitchen”.
It launched in late 2020 and sold over 1 million burgers in four months, did 32 million in revenue and now has 1,000 ghost kitchen’s, where they claim the kitchens are averaging $500 a day each.
For Feastables, it’s also food, but where Mr Beast Burger began as a video and turned into a food concept, Feastible started as a food concept and became a video.
Pitch was every bar having a QR code and the codes would have “golden tickets” for people to get a chance to win Mr Beast’s chocolate factory, that ended up as a $500,000 cash prize.
The video was released three weeks ago and has 74 million views currently, with a fairly engaging set of challenges and a guest appearance from Gordon Ramsay.
At the end of the video, Mr Beast announced they were continuing to sell the chocolate bars and going to offer a variety of other prizes.
All said and done though, is this a fad or a real brand?
First up, a quick look at the product itself.
Feastables as a product are pretty generic.
Plain chocolate bars sold as milk chocolate, sea salt, original chocolate, almond and quinoa.
Flavors that are pretty generic and I along with any American can just drive to a walmart and get those options.
Price wise, they are also fairly high.
$30 is the current price to buy ten online, plus $5 in shipping.
Comparing that, I can go on Walmart’s website and get a pack of six Hershey Bar’s for $4.
Something anyone can do.
There is the argument the quality of the chocolate is better, where Feastables have joined a growing trend of brands listing the amount of ingredients in their product.
Something which seems like good marketing, but isn’t a huge standout.
Hershey Bar’s don’t have many ingredients either and the extra one’s not in the Mr Beast Bars are things such as soy, milk fat, cocoa butter and other really simple things that don’t make the product worse, but give it an edge on things such as shelf life, where Hershey Bar’s unopened can last over a year.
Mr Beast and other companies in the limited ingredient trend cut shelf life down dramatically, reducing the odds of retailers carrying them.
For the product, it’s an item that is vastly more expensive, not very unique and has factors going in, which will make it harder to get retail life.
So is this just a fad for Mr Beast and Feastables?
Hershey’s made 8.9 billion dollars in revenue for 2021.
Profit was 1.5 billion.
A 17% profit margin, which is pretty solid, especially for food.
That means Mr Beast is in a strong market category, margin wise.
512 million was also the reported marketing budget for Hershey’s in 2021.
Hershey’s spent $1 on advertising for every $17.38 of revenue.
This is where I think Mr Beast has an opening.
His Feastable Bar’s didn’t sell, because people were looking forward to chocolate.
His chocolate was generic chocolate anyone can go to walmart and buy twice as much of for half the price.
His edge was there was a contest behind the brand, where people felt they had a chance of winning and that was the marketing.
If Feastables became a brand focused on using prizes and QR codes as a form of marketing with regular contest on social media, that might be the edge.
Something which sounds gimmicky, but there’ve been projects such as Trivia HQ, where despite low odds, they had 700,000 weekly players in 2017, all with the goal of prizes.
Feastables could be that.
Become the equal of lottery tickets for kids and teenagers, where the goal is winning a tesla, but the down side is an overpriced chocolate bar was sold.
It’s something where I doubt the brand ever is put on shelves with Hershey’s or Mars products, but might have a strong niche in the fairly boring space of candy.