Lunchly are YouTuber-branded Lunchables. Created by Jimmy “Mr Beast” Donaldson, Olajide Olayinka “KSI” Olatunji, and Logan Paul, they’re supposed to be a healthier (and pricier) alternative to the space age Oscar Meyer snack packs. However, some of the Lunchlys apparently also have mold in them though. Yuck!
YouTube baker Rosanna Pansino, of Nerdy Nummies fame, recently made a video to compare the two products, only to discover moldy cheese in the first Lunchly pack she opened. The snacks consist of ingredients for little mini-pizzas, Mr Beast’s Feastable chocolate bars (which he obsessively makes sure are neatly stocked on store shelves), and Paul and KSI’s Prime hydration drinks, the energy version of which some senators think are dangerous for children to consume.
Pansino’s gross discovery might be bad for the Lunchly brand, but it was certainly great for content. “This is molded,” she confirmed after opening the package. The packs had an expiration date of December 8, 2024 and had been purchased the day the video was filmed on October 16. “That’s mold,” Pansino says. “This is not safe, especially for kids who are young they might not know what mold looks like, and just eat it.”
As the parent of a five-year old who recently attempted to take a swig of a nearly empty juice bottle that had been discarded by the curb in front of our house for nearly a week, I can confirm that kids will try to do the dumbest shit.
“I just want you guys to know I did not fake this,” Pansino continued. She said the original intent of the video was to go over nutritional facts and differences between the two brands with some expert input, and share healthier alternatives that were still affordable. “I did not expect this. You can cover the mold with pepperoni.”
She’s seemingly not the only person to discover mold in her Lunchly. A few other alleged incidents of FDA violations cropped up online in videos and posts that also went viral but whose provenance was less well documented. It’s still not clear if the moldy cheese in Lunchly is a common enough problem to be deeply concerning, or just the standard edge cases that crop up when food gets damaged during transport. Lunchables has certainly had its own issues with moldy cheese over the years.
So what did Pansino’s investigation turn up regarding non-moldy Lunchables ($3.79 a box) and Lunchly snacks ($4 a box)? She basically found that both contained ridiculous amounts of saturated fat, sodium, and added processed sugars. Shocker, I know. You can effectively make your own version of either snack by throwing some fruit, crackers, and cheese into a plastic bin for about the same price, although where’s the mold RNG fun in that?
The Lunchly debacle caps off a string of controversies dogging Mr Beast, from workplace concerns to Fyre Festival-level issues surrounding his Amazon Prime game show. But the mega YouTuber is far from the first celebrity to repackage junk and market it to kids just by slapping his name on it.
Update 10/23/2024 4:01 p.m. ET: The moldy cheese Lunchly fiasco has continued to develop in recent days thanks to responses from the company behind the snack boxes and Pansino releasing unedited footage of the moldy cheese discovery to rebut claims that she was making it up.
The YouTuber has also been hitting back at insinuations from an unnamed source “close to the product” who insinuated to Newsweek that Pansino was a liar. “So MrBeasts team is now trying to do damage control to the press,” she tweeted in response. “Did someone from MrBeasts team seriously just try to imply that I faked the mold in the Lunchly I bought? Is their PR move going to be smearing me when there are dozens of other reports of mold in their food?”
Donaldson previously defended Lunchly from criticism back in September. “Lunchables sells hundreds of millions of units and countless people eat it,” he wrote on Twitter. “Our goal is to give people a better for you alternative to it. Our turkey meal for example is 80 less calories, 60% less sugar, more electrolytes, we use real cheese they use “cheese product” (they can’t call it cheese), higher quality meat, etc,”
He continued, “Obviously eating fresh chicken and broccoli is healthier but if someone is going to eat a premade meal like this (which millions of people do thru lunchables) then I think giving them a higher quality version at roughly the same price is a net good imo [in my opinion] and why we launched Lunchly. Also as we get economies of scale and can get things cheaper we will be only improving the product more and more.”
Correction 10/21/2024 3:23 p.m. ET: Lunchly includes a Prime Hydration drink, not the Prime Energy drink.