The snack brand that’s roasting influencers
Jay, the face of Daadi, makes videos skewering influencer culture.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Come with meeeee as I interview the newest influencer boogeyman. —Kate
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I’m mostly supportive of influencers, partially because I’ve curated a feed of creators who work hard and are thoughtful about their content. So whenever an absolutely bonkers, entitled, baffling video ends up on my FYP, I know I’m about to see this face:
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Jay is one of the people behind Daadi, a family popcorn brand that uses south Asian spices adapted from his grandma’s tried-and-true recipe. But you won’t hear much about that on Daadi’s account. After launching the company earlier this year, Jay has almost exclusively used the brand’s Instagram and TikTok not to promote their products, but to call out entitled creators when they post truly outlandish videos—an influencer crying over not receiving the free skincare she wanted, for instance, or another complaining that he got too much ice in his McDonald's drink.
The videos often rack up millions of views and draw in furious commenters, many of whom may not know they’re interacting with a brand at all. I was intrigued by this strategy, especially as Jay becomes a known face himself. We hopped on Zoom to chat Daadi, his issues with influencers, and how this unconventional social media approach has paid off.
How did Daadi start and who is involved?
Just for context, my grandma growing up had made our family this Indian spiced popcorn when she immigrated over from Gujarat—60, 70 years ago. From the very early days, it was a way for her to marry American culture with a lot of the Indian cooking and flavors that she loved back home. So growing up, this was like our staple food. When we would get together we would eat it as a family, family friends would get it. For a long time I had wanted to work with her and our family to commercialize it, just 'cause I thought it was something really special and I also wanted to see more South Asian representation in the snack aisle.
So it had been ideating for a while, and then when COVID hit, naturally I was just inside a lot more and was looking for ways to stay in touch with my family, and so I started working towards turning her recipe into something more formal. We spent like two or three years on the recipe. The branding was very obvious in terms of how I wanted to do it. I wanted to make it a love letter to my grandma, hence the name of the company, which means grandma in Hindi, hence our packaging, which is unabashedly Indian and our flavors, which are rooted in classic South Asian foods and dishes.
And in terms of who's involved, my grandma was involved in the early days of helping come up with it. But it's really a family affair. My uncle helps out, my mom helps out, my partner helps out. It's really kind of like all hands on deck.
Right now you have two different flavors of popcorn, Spicy Masala and Sweet Chai. Why were those the ones you started with?
So my grandma's recipe is more what I would call a garam masala. And in the very early days of marketing the snack when we were doing some of the sampling and testing, unfortunately the friction of that term is too much to educate a consumer on what that is. So, we thought, you know, Starbucks and a lot of these other brands had done a lot of the education around chai. So that was an obvious one. The masala one takes the base of what her recipe is and just kicks it up with more spice.
I scrolled to the very beginning of your feed, and you can see how things evolved. It looks like the account’s original videos were more satirizing how white people interacted with foreign cuisines. How did it go from there to a broader critique of influencer culture?
It's kind of a weird product of perfect circumstances. When we were in the very early days of launching this brand, when I was doing my marketing research, a lot of these companies were leaning super heavily into influencer marketing. For us, we were bootstrapping it and that was a very cost effective way to get the word out. I spent a year and a half compiling a list of thousands of influencers to cold email and in the process was exposed to a lot of their content. Prior to this I didn't even use TikTok or Instagram.
I made a video about this influencer in particular, I won't name them again, but I had one very bad interaction. One particular food influencer who I thought was very unprofessional and rude. And so I remember looking at their page and being like, I don't feel like their content is all that special. Should I just start posting myself instead of reaching out to these people and hoping they give us a shout out? So that was on the one hand. On the other hand, I'm sure anyone you speak to who's lived in New York for more than four years could tell you the way that my neighborhood and the city has changed—over the last 10 years, but particularly the last five. That's kind of coincided with the proliferation of a lot of these New York City influencers who I believe are effectively marketing lifestyles of extremely wealthy suburbanites, but from a $10,000 a month, one bedroom apartment.
Not only did that feel wildly out of touch, but I just felt like big businesses and these deep-pocketed VC chains were being promoted at the expense of local small businesses and people who make the city special. So my goal was honestly, when we started posting, to educate people about South Asian culture, but really to kind of just speak my mind about these subjects, market our snacks, and then if we were fortunate enough to build an audience, one thing I wanted to do and we've started to do is promote other small businesses in New York City and support other creators on the platform, too.
It's a very organic way to end up in people's feeds. Do you find it is effective for directing people towards the snack?
People ask me this all the time. How do we think about marketing and like the brand and, like, why don't you push content? I have very strong opinions on small business marketing. My view is for a company like ours, which is family owned and very small, what makes us special is the people, not the packaging or any of that stuff. Obviously I think the product is really special, but I think the product speaks for itself. And then I also think what wins on TikTok and Instagram at the end of the day is authenticity. You might be able to fake it for a video or two, but I think people can tell when your heart isn't in it. So for better or worse, I treat the page like my own personal blog. It was a contentious issue with my family early on. It's much less contentious now. I think at the end of the day, bringing people into our page, getting them to our website, getting them to read about our story, and then more importantly getting them to try our popcorn, it's been a great vehicle to build the top of the funnel there.
I know you've had some pushback from influencers. What has that been like?
In the early days I was surprised because I was such an insignificant account, and I would characterize a lot of my critique as being pretty mild. Most of it is parodies, some of it is just light criticism. None of it is ever ad hominem, so I was surprised that they honestly cared enough to go out of their way to block me. And it's funny because you can see they all hang out with each other and the people that hang out with each other all have me blocked. The second phase of that was these pseudo lawsuit threats. I have a family full of lawyers. I'm very careful about what I say, so I know it's all just smoke and mirrors, but I was surprised in the early days. I'm honestly still surprised.
But you've also had some positive interactions. The one that I remember that I thought was sweet was there was the creator who actually ordered your snacks after you roasted her.
I love the way that she handled it. I've had some creators find it funny. I like the way that creator in particular took it, I think she got good engagement from my followers from that too.
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And then more recently, like you mentioned, you'll uplift either creators or businesses that you want to promote. For you, who are the people or what are the things you're hoping to uplift?
It's a fine line. I want to be careful about not doing things that aren't a hundred percent organic. So I only do things spontaneously. Like honestly, the videos I filmed, I just pick up the phone if I'm going to run an errand or go to one of my favorite spots and I just record a small video. It's never been a case where someone reaches out and they're like, can you review our stuff? Casey's Flower Studio is a good example. A family owned business, it's multi-generational, been in the city for a while. You're seeing a bunch of VC-funded plant shops pop up all over the city with the generic Gen Z marketing. And to me that's a clear place that I would want to uplift and promote. So I would say generally just neighborhood spots that have been here for a while, they don't have Instagram pages, they don't manage a social media account. Their stores aren't super aesthetic, but they're good hardworking people who've been in the city for a while.
At this point, do you think of yourself as an influencer or a content creator?
Content creator, yes. Influencer, no. I mean, all these terms are being defined in real time. I love consuming content—short form, long form. I love people who use social media to be creative, to teach or explore or share their passions. Where I start to draw the line is people whose content basically revolves around brand deals and they're marketing their lifestyle to fund their lifestyle. I understand that there's a market for those people, but I don't understand why we need so many of them.
Great interview. I never scroll past a Daadi video roast. I need to try the popcorn yum
Can’t wait to get my hands on some Daadi snacks, after reading Jay's description of them. His approach to marketing is sensible and inspiring.