Fake Food Products Go Viral

A 28-year-old UK Instagrammer named Benji has gained virality — and the attention of snack conglomerates — for fooling the internet time and again with fake food flavors that are just interesting or wild enough to be real, potentially.

Why It Hits: Satire has been around forever, but the internet has turned it into a bonafide way for anybody to skewer the powerful — whether it be snacks (Benji’s “UK Snack Attack” account), Enron (the rebrand by the Birds Aren’t Real duo), or Infowars (The Onion’s in-the-works purchase). If the skewering starts making the creators money, satire may become a legit business model beyond entertainment.

Between the Packages: Benji’s nine-second video of “finding” a clear version of Heinz Tomato Ketchup at a grocery store fooled the internet in November 2023.

And the jokes haven’t stopped.

• Benji is the leading creator of the growing “snackfishing” movement (yes, catfishing, but for snacks), where people make fake flavors of food items, complete with packaging, and pretend they’re actually in stores.
• Benji has snackfished items, such as pistachio-flavored Coco Pops, pickle-shaped Haribo, mint Coca-Cola, ice-cream Pringles, and butter Oreos. He even started making the insane flavors for real.
• Besides getting a lot of laughs, some people have actually been interested in Benji’s fake flavors… which has led some companies to be inundated with calls to ask Benji to please put a disclaimer that they’re fake. He now does so.

Last Bite: Benji told Wired that he really doesn’t make money from his account yet, but the ultimate dream is for one of these flavors to get picked up by one of the gatekeepers of mainstream snacks and become an actual product. An extremely literal “fake it ‘til you make it.” If that happens, and the snack becomes a bestseller, satirical Instagram accounts could morph into unofficial R&D departments.