Here’s a childhood memory of mine that persists through the years: 8-year-old me freezing in an international farmer’s market in Tennessee in a shopping cart parked in front of the butcher’s counter while my mother ordered enough oxtails to feed a small army. To a woman born and raised in the Caribbean, this cut of meat was a staple of Sunday dinners, holiday feasts and gatherings with friends. In recent years, they’ve become a culinary sensation, a FoodTok darling and one of the trendiest menu items of the 21st century.
Seeing a dish I grew up eating become an internet phenomenon was exciting. Suddenly, everyone understood the deliciousness that had come out of my mother’s kitchen for years, and I stopped feeling the need to argue with nonbelievers that actually, the tail is a perfectly acceptable part of a cow to eat. My experience with a piece of my culture going mainstream was fairly positive, however, that’s not the case for many cultural dishes that gain internet fame.
The difference between a PR disaster and a compelling brand story often comes down to a single ingredient: acknowledgment. Get it right, and you have a product with a loyal audience, a story and a soul. Leave it out, and you’ll end up relying on damage control to salvage the recipe.
The Bobba Blunder
Like many Gen Z-ers, I think of the 2010s as a golden age of viral food. We lost our minds over The Cronut, avocado toast and the Unicorn Frappuccino among other delicacies, but I’d argue that no food trend has aged quite as well as bubble tea. Originally brought to the United States by Taiwanese immigrants in the 1990s, this mixture of tea, sugar, cream and tapioca pearls rose to popularity in 2013.
The drink’s signature tapioca pearl is a product of Q, a Taiwanese term for the chewy, springy texture prized across the culture’s food traditions. Thanks to social media, it’s a worldwide phenomenon with a global market value of nearly $4 billion.
Among those cashing in on the craze is the Canadian brand Bobba, now infamous due to its founders’ disastrous 2024 appearance on the CBC show “Dragon’s Den” (think “Shark Tank,” but with a different animal on the logo).
While pitching their product to the show’s panel of moguls, Bobba’s Jess Frenette and Sebastien Fiset referred to traditional bubble tea as a “trendy, sugary drink you queue up for, and you’re never quite sure about its content.” In contrast, they characterized their bottled variation as a healthier, ready-to-drink alternative.
Though positioning products as healthy alternatives is common practice in establishing food brand identities, companies must be careful not to play into culturally insensitive tropes or stereotypes. The trope at play in Bobba’s case has a name and a history. Orientalism, the Western tendency to portray Asian cultures as exotic and inscrutable, has long shaped how Asian food is portrayed in the West.
In addition to the Fiset and Frenette’s questionable remarks about traditional bubble tea, their failure to acknowledge their product’s Taiwanese roots in their pitch, on their website or on their packaging read as erasure, or concealment of the drink’s cultural origin.
When called out by Chinese-Canadian actor and guest mogul Simu Liu, Fiset tried to justify the erasure by claiming that Bobba’s use of popping pearls instead of tapioca meant it was “not an [ethnic] product anymore,” a statement that rings hollow considering that the fruit juice-filled add-ins are also attributed to Taiwan.
After the episode aired, the internet erupted in criticism and accusations of cultural appropriation. The controversy invited consumers to question Bobba’s entire premise: Why should it be the brand to make bubble tea accessible to the masses if its marketing misrepresented something as important as the drink’s origin?
Four days after the episode aired, Bobba released an apology. “We will re-evaluate our branding, packaging, and marketing strategies to ensure that they reflect a respectful and accurate representation of our Taiwanese partnership and bubble tea’s cultural roots,” their statement read.
There’s something infuriating about having a beloved cultural staple advertised to you – now, without the culture! Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Bobba did. When marketing departments separate foods from their origins and call it an improvement, it implies that the origin was a problem in the first place.
Whether Bobba will make things right with their rebrand remains to be seen, but the backlash it received serves as a warning to future food marketers: people will notice when your story doesn’t add up, so it’s better to lead with authenticity than to leave consumers craving it.
The Fonio Formula
Cultural food marketing doesn’t always make headlines for the wrong reasons. Take for example Yolélé, a New York-based brand that sells spice mixes, microwaveable pilaf pouches and chips made of a West African grain called fonio.
A staple of West African cuisine for centuries, fonio is typically steamed and served like rice. Though Yolélé reimagines the grain for more convenient consumption in a similar manner as Bobba’s bottled bubble tea, Yolélé diverges from that mold by celebrating fonio’s roots instead of downplaying the culture behind it.
From its tagline ‘The vibrant flavors of West Africa’ to its mission of bringing West African cuisine to the mainstream, the brand treats its heritage as part of the story rather than something to be ignored.
According to cofounder Pierre Thiam, fonio’s limited availability worldwide comes down to infrastructure; there simply aren’t enough processing facilities in West Africa to meet global demand. Yolélé isn’t just trying to solve that problem for their own supply chain. In 2022, the company secured a $1.98 million co-investment grant from USAID to build a processing center in Mali, projected to create over 13,700 agricultural jobs and increase cash income for smallholder farmers in its grower network by an estimated 85 percent.
The project has since been canceled following USAID’s dismantling in 2025, but the intent speaks to a brand philosophy that goes beyond good marketing. Yolélé’s model treats West African farmers as stakeholders in fonio’s global success rather than nameless suppliers.
Yolélé’s transparency about reinvesting in its product’s place of origin also gives consumers a sense of participation. Its mission statement on every product’s packaging, paired with coverage in outlets like The New York Times, the World Economic Forum and PR Newswire, reinforces the brand as a credible steward of the culture it profits from, whose impact story holds up beyond the marketing.
For my family and countless others across the world, food is identity, history and memory arranged on a plate. Rather than just avoiding controversy, the companies that treat it that way offer an authentic experience worth sampling. In an industry full of brands chasing the next food trend, Yolélé made sure to highlight who was doing the cooking. For that, my compliments to the chef.
