Wild Snacks for Wild Times
About a year ago, I saw an Instagram post with a hand holding a box of JELL-O No Bake Candy Cane Cheesecake mix. A seasonal food item against the backdrop of a grocery store floor is the kind of lifestyle content I’m into. I saved the post and more snack-food images appeared in the algorithm, floating hands holding packages of Kit Kats, bottles of Funfetti Coffee-Mate creamer, and bags of pickle-flavored Doritos.
The featured snacks ranged from mild-mannered Trader Joe’s products to the sort of experimental industrial gambles—like a Sour Patch Kids Chips Ahoy collab—that end up on a low shelf at Dollar General. More of these accounts started to appear in my feed, most with “junk” or “snack” in the handle like @snackgator or @junkbanter.
Having spent years absorbing the sanitized, minimalist aesthetics of lifestyle brands—or the carefully crafted palette of unicorn-hued Instagram food circa 2017—seeing casual photos of snacks on a convenience store shelf brought a maximalist smile to my face. The junk food community is an ideal balm if you’re tired of constantly marketed optimization and wellness. Like most niche internet things, these snack review accounts take a common interest and reflect it through the fragmented web of social media. For Hurley, who runs @snackmurder, it’s as simple as being into snacks.
“I’ve always been into snacks, but I just did it on my own—my own kind of hobby,” he tells Very Famous. “At work, our marketing team always used me with my acting experience for anything they wanted to put online. They said, ‘You like snacks and stuff, why don’t you just do this on Instagram,’ Basically, Instagram is just my hobby virtually.”
His account, which he’s had for around three-and-a-half years, features more understated photos of snacks than some of the other junk food accounts. A pint of Ben & Jerry’s Pumpkin Cheesecake Ice Cream rests on stone tiles with natural lighting. His video reviews are blunt and funny, and truly great products are given the designation of being a “murder.” A recent breakdown of grocery store Aldi’s Pumpkin Spice Whipped Cream started with a review of his first trip to Aldi (“that store is garbage”) but continued with a rave review about the whipped cream (“this is a murder SCORE”).
There are loosely two types of snack accounts: those that serve as essentially unofficial PR for companies like McDonald’s or Nestlé, and those that are run by people who take a more personal approach to their reviews. Some of the accounts have no visible person behind them, just product imagery or the occasional mysterious hand holding a box of something. They offer upbeat, newsy announcements of a new Krispy Kreme doughnut or Oreo flavor usually in lieu of more in-depth reviews.
Similar to Hurley’s page, Dijana Jashari’s Instagram @snacksfromaround highlights the person behind the account. Jashari’s page has photos of her smiling holding a bag of cola-flavored Sour Patch Kids and wearing matching masks with her son, all with conversational captions (When I was living in NY I was obsessed with Snapple, literally all I would drink,” she writes under a Snapple post.) She started her account when she was a new mom staying at home and spending a lot of time on social media. “I want my followers to connect with me on not just snacks,” she says. “I wanted to make friends, not just a number.”
It’s been around three years since Dijana started her account, and after 10,000 followers, she saw a lot more interest from other pages and companies. “My first PR package was when I hit 1,000 followers,” she says. When I was initially observing the snack community, the obvious didn’t occur to me—of course free food is involved. This is great PR for brands that don’t necessarily need it, but hundreds of thousands of new eyeballs on your products certainly can’t hurt. For both Dijana and Hurley, free snacks don’t get in the way of an honest review.
If a smaller brand sends a snack she doesn’t like, Dijana will tell them she didn’t like the product and, as such, doesn’t want to review it and give a burgeoning business a bad reputation. “There are some big companies I talk smack about because I don’t agree with the American culture of liking bad junk,” she tells Very Famous. One of those companies is Hersey. “To me, the regular Hersey’s chocolate bar is absolutely crap and just sugar,” but she’s a fan of their new apple pie-flavored Kit Kat bar.
“I make sure to let my followers know, I still hate everything else, but it’s OK to like something from this brand,” she says.
Hurley tells a story he heard about a mega-popular account that is run by someone possibly paid—presumably by the snack-food companies—to do posts and much of their content is just “stockpiled and repurposed.”
“I love a real review,” he says. “There are some people who are afraid to give a bad review because, oh my god, you might not get free samples from that company or what will people think. If someone says ‘7 out of 10’ that means they didn’t like it, and they’re lying, it’s a 1. If it’s terrible and it sucks, say it.”
The bulk of these accounts seem to have been created within the last three years, but throughout the pandemic, comfort food has taken on a new purpose of nostalgia and efficiency. Bloomberg reported in March that Americans were dropping healthier foods like kale and quinoa in favor of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and “dried meat snacks” (lol!). Hell, people were even eating Spam at an increased rate of 37% that month.
Amy D., who runs the Instagram @foodiewiththebeasts, has noticed an increase in traffic since the shutdown began. “Most people find it keeps their mind off of everything going on,” she writes to Very Famous.
There are so many niche internet communities that take aspects of everyday life—malls, cakes, etc.—and recontextualize them into something that feels a little obsessive and a little surreal. What used to be a fleeting, ephemeral late-afternoon feeling of being a kid at the mall has now translated into social media accounts dedicated to documenting that sensation. Junk food is not inherently nostalgic because clearly new products are released every day, but comfort food will always correlate with a childhood treat.
Growing up around Eastern Europe, from Kosovo to Macedonia to Montenegro, Dijana tried snacks from all over. Her mom, before she left for work at night, would leave Kinder Surprise Eggs under Dijana and her brother’s pillows. Amy started @foodiewiththebeasts after connecting with fellow snack Instagram @junkbanter about a new Oreo flavor. When asked why she thinks these accounts are so popular, she writes, “because it brings the nostalgia of feeling like a kid again.”
But the snack universe isn’t all Dunkaroos nostalgia. Like fast food itself, these Instagrams serve both practical and emotional purposes. Dijana attributes the appeal of these accounts to the “American way.”
“Everything here is go, go, go, everybody’s in a rush,” she says. “Everybody’s trying to find a way to get a good, healthy snack—or just a tasty snack—without having to spend all the money trying everything. That’s what I’ve seen happening. There are nurses who are like, thank you, I won’t spend my money and time looking for this and that.”
Fast-food meals and snacks add up, and it’s helpful to know if a new Starbucks Refresher flavor is worth the five bucks. For the wilder, more hedonistic items— Red Lobster’s “dewgarita,” for instance, or Sour Patch Kids cereal—it’s mostly just satisfying to know it exists. “There are two kinds of people, those who eat like shit and those who wish they could,” Hurley says. “They’re both looking at that stuff. You always want to see what the latest stuff is.”
