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Coffee creamer brand Coffee-Mate developed two limited-edition flavored creamers – piña colada and Thai iced coffee – in collaboration with the HBO hit television show The White Lotus. But, after the show’s season finale aired on Sunday night, the Nestlé-owned company was taken aback when a batch of poisoned piña coladas nearly caused the deaths of four of the show’s main characters.
“Well this is awkward” the creamer brand wrote in an Instagram post on Monday, accompanied by a picture of the piña colada-flavored creamer.
In the final episode of the show’s third season, set in Thailand, disgraced businessman Timothy Ratliff devises a plan to blend seeds from a poisonous tree into the frozen beverage, intending to kill himself, his wife, his elder son and his daughter. He ultimately changes his mind and spares his unsuspecting family.
Unfortunately, nobody cleaned out the blender after he made the lethal cocktail. The next day, Ratliff’s son Lochlan uses the blender – which still contains leftovers of the poisonous mixture – to prepare a protein shake, which nearly results in his death.
Daniel Jhung, president of the Nestlé USA coffee and beverage division, told the Wall Street Journal this week that the marketing team behind Coffee-Mate was notably unaware of the plot involving piña coladas before the episode aired.
“We didn’t know that piña colada was such a featured part of the last episode,” Jhung said. “I will say that in hindsight, we were showing the different flavors, and the fact that The White Lotus team was like, ‘Oh, you know, piña colada is a really good idea, you should go in that direction’ – it now kind of makes sense.”
The company launched the limited edition The White Lotus-themed flavored creamers in partnership with Warner Bros ahead of the show’s third season, which premiered on 16 February.
Jhung said that Sunday night’s episode took the Coffee-Mate team by surprise, and that the team quickly devised a social media plan to react, sharing the “awkward” post on Instagram.
“The ‘awkward’ post got picked up quite a bit by consumers, by other brands, because it was so perfect with the show’s ending,” Jhung said.
Jhung told the Journal that it’s still too early to determine whether the episode impacted sales of the flavored creamers since they won’t receive consumption data for another week.
“We’ll probably see next week how it did this week,” he said, adding that “the show going on week by week is helping drive buzz for the flavors. So they’re both doing really well in market through the first quarter.”
Jhung said that he suspects that next week, when the sales data comes in, that the piña colada flavor “will see a bit of a lift as people try it, just for the novelty aspect”.
The essence of limited-time offers, Jhung added, is about “mysterious flavors, intriguing flavors that are not typical in the coffee set, and so it kind of fits well with the show, which is about mystery and intrigue”.
On TikTok, some fans of the show have made videos reacting to the finale and the flavored coffee creamer collaboration.
One TikTok user shared a video of the piña colada creamer in their fridge, with the caption “I got this back in February being like wow what a random flavor for the Thailand season,” adding: “NOT MIKE WHITE MAKING OUR COFFEE AN EASTER EGG.
“PSA EVERYONE WASH YOUR BLENDERS BEFORE RE-USING PLZ,” the user added.
