Welcome to First Bite, a Nation’s Restaurant News podcast, your daily source of news from NRN hosted by Holly Petre.
Today, we’re talking about MrBeast Burger’s foray into brick-and-mortar.
Long gone are the days of restaurants just being sassy on social media; now it’s time for them to be savvy on social media and MrBeast Burger was a perfect example of capitalizing on a moment. When the brand debuted, it was met with national acclaim, one of the biggest virtual brand openings ever. Now it has a brick-and-mortar location in the American Dream mall in New Jersey, where thousands of fans gathered to watch MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, cut the ribbon to the first permanent location of the chain that spawned thousands of virtual franchises.
So what does this all mean? Well, it means that celebrities, and the internet, are becoming more involved in the food world than ever before. Not simply with brands, but consumers are going to have to get used to their favorite stars from social media jumping into the food world like MrBeast did, and brands doing the opposite. Think about the rising tide of restaurants looking to TikTok and TikTok creators for content. Just last week, Chipotle used the corn kid on TikTok, a viral kid who loves nothing more than corn, to create a viral ad campaign for its burrito bowls and corn salsa. It did gangbusters.
There are over 1700 MrBeast Burgers as of this moment.
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