The White Lotus has been one of the best additions to the television landscape in the past decade. It’s funny and sad and thoughtfully explores themes of power and morality and identity. The HBO show is beautifully shot, the written is impeccable, and the casting is pitch perfect. And it is the absolute last show I would ever want to do a brand collaboration with.
But I guess that’s why I don’t work at Coffee Mate. Ahead of the show’s third season, Coffee Mate has teamed up with The White Lotus for two limited-edition flavors, and it really feels like someone should have stepped in to stop this.
It’s perhaps one of the least thought-through coffee-related collabs we have come across. When watching The White Lotus, with its cast of oblivious well-to-do Americans running roughshod over gorgeous landscapes and the people that inhabit them, my takeaway normally isn’t, “Ooo what is Tanya drinking?”
But here we are, with cringy tie-ins that strain all credulity. As reported by Food & Wine, season three of the hit series set to premier in February of next year will take place in Thailand and will explore themes of “death and Eastern religion and spirituality.” And nothing speaks more deeply to the gravity of the subject matter than [checks note] Thai Iced Coffee and Piña Colada. Savor the illusory nature of suffering and the Wheel of Life, now with condensed coconut milk and pineapple flavors!
Leonardo Aizpuru, the vice president of brand marketing for Coffee Mate parent company Nestlé had this to say:
Now fans can experience this season’s luxurious Thai vacation vibes with the simple click of a button and pour of a creamer. We can’t wait to see how flavor experimenters escape to paradise from their own living room with these two tropical flavors never-before-seen from Coffee Mate.
Don’t get me wrong, Thai coffee is delicious and a piña colada—Spanish for “strained/cleaned pineapple” so I’m not entirely sure of it’s relevance to to the southeast Asian country—as an iced coffee beverage sounds pretty tasty as well. But uhhh I feel like the Coffee Mate decision makers really took away the wrong message from these morality plays.
Which maybe, now that I think about it, maybe that makes it the perfect collab. A completely tone-deaf and cursory tie-in with a show satirizing oblivious and tone-deaf rich white people. The Coffee Mate limited edition creamers express so succinctly the themes The White Lotus has spent some 24 hours of runtime to hit on. This non-dairy simulacrum draws inspiration from places of vast cultural significance and only mustering up the superficial and tangential, as seen on a postcard or through the white-washed lens the all-inclusive resort.
I think this collab might actually be a work of art.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
