Feastables
Shaan Puri passed on the early investment rounds. “Chocolate company? I don’t know. Why chocolate? Your audience is young, but chocolate’s kind of low-priced.”
He regretted it.
Within a couple of years, Jimmy Donaldson had reduced his list of annual goals to exactly three items: grow the channel, get big, and sell chocolate. Feastables had gone from number three on his priority list to the single organizing obsession of a man who is already the most-watched creator on the two largest entertainment apps in the world.
What Feastables Actually Is
Feastables is mrbeast’s consumer packaged goods brand, built primarily around chocolate bars. It was launched as a creator-backed product play — the same structural move that Logan Paul and KSI made with Prime energy drinks, except with chocolate as the vehicle and Donaldson’s YouTube distribution as the engine.
The business logic is straightforward: Donaldson has one of the few genuine marketing advantages in consumer goods. More people watch his YouTube content every month than watch the Super Bowl. When that kind of reach points at a retail product, the economics of distribution look different than they do for a conventional CPG brand.
“Every day I wake up and think: how do I sell more chocolate?” Shaan reported from Camp MFM, where Donaldson hosted a group of entrepreneurs at his compound in Greenville, NC. “He’s going to do hundreds of millions in chocolate sales this year. His clear path is: there are five chocolate companies that matter, valued in the billions up to $30 billion. ‘We are eating share like crazy. These guys can’t touch us when it comes to marketing.’”
The Retail Strategy: Getting Into Walmart
The primary battleground for Feastables is Walmart. Donaldson’s bet is that no incumbent chocolate brand can match his ability to drive foot traffic to specific retail locations. If he says in a video that you can find Feastables at Walmart, a meaningful percentage of his 300-million-plus subscriber base will go to Walmart.
The traditional chocolate companies — Hershey, Mars, Nestlé — have distribution advantages built over decades. Feastables is trying to leapfrog those advantages with something those companies cannot replicate: the world’s most famous entertainer telling his audience to buy chocolate.
“Who can drive more people to Walmart than him?” was Shaan’s observation. No one, probably. The question is whether that kind of concentrated attention translates to the kind of repeat purchasing that makes a consumer brand durable.
The Honest Criticism: Chocolate on Hard Mode
The most pointed critique of Feastables came not from a competitor but from an admirer. Jeremy Giffin, the first employee at tiny, put it plainly:
“There are just levels of difficulty. A chocolate bar: low margin, not a repeat customer, not a mission-critical product. Versus something really low on the stack, like home insurance or property insurance, or Visa or Mastercard — something you need every day. There are just better qualities of businesses.”
The deeper point Giffin made was about enterprise value durability: “What would the enduring enterprise value of the business be without the person? Feastables is going to have a way harder time without Mr. Beast than if he’d built a bank.”
This is the fundamental tension in creator-branded consumer goods. The brand equity is inseparable from the person. If Donaldson’s interest wanes, if his channel declines, if public sentiment shifts — the distribution advantage evaporates. A bank with 100,000 customers could survive without its founder. A chocolate company whose primary marketing is its founder’s face on YouTube cannot as easily.
Giffin’s conclusion, which Shaan found persuasive: “I actually view it as very bullish for the creators — it’s very bullish for the space — because you’re making it work on hard mode. I wonder what it looks like on easy mode.”
Shaan’s $6 Billion Prediction
After Camp MFM, Shaan made a concrete bet: “I would bet he sells that chocolate brand for $6 billion. That’s my guess. If we fast-forward three years: Mr. Beast sells the majority stake in the chocolate business at a $6 billion valuation.”
The reasoning is not about current financials. It’s about trajectory and precedent. Donaldson raised $50 million in venture capital and invested all of it back into content, building one of the most dominant distribution platforms ever assembled. The chocolate business is the first major commercial vehicle attached to that platform.
“He’s running a billion-dollar company,” Shaan noted. “His company is worth well over a billion dollars.”
The unknown is how much of that value is Feastables versus the broader enterprise of Donaldson’s content empire. The brand is growing fast. The question is whether it can grow independently of its creator, and whether that independence arrives before anyone needs to exit.
Sam’s take from the same conversation was shorter: “It’s pretty obvious now that’s going to be a billion-dollar-plus business.”
The Obsession Factor
Whatever the ultimate financial outcome, Feastables illustrates something about how Donaldson allocates attention. He does less than almost anyone with comparable resources and opportunities. He narrows relentlessly.
“I only have three goals this year: grow the channel, get big, and sell chocolate.”
Shaan’s reaction: “He does less. He says yes to less stuff than we do. We’re doing four things. He’s doing two. That shows how poorly we’re staying focused and committed to what actually matters.”
The meta-lesson may matter more than the chocolate. If someone with 1,000x more opportunities than any normal entrepreneur still says no to 999 of them, the discipline of focus is not optional. It’s the mechanism.
See also: mrbeast | logan-paul | creator-economy | content-to-commerce | personal-branding