Welcome to You Are What You Eat...Or Are You?, a mini series about the ways that we project our identities through food.
I made my way past the columns of orchids and a pyramid of tomatoes until there I was, gawking at the boxed lettuce section of a Fresh Market in Richmond, Virginia. I had come that day with a mission: Buy the Grateful Dead lettuce.
I know what you’re thinking, and no, “Grateful Dead lettuce” isn’t a euphemism for weed, at least not this time. I’m talking about salad: a new lettuce mix from gourmet lettuce company Gotham Greens called Grateful Greens, a blend of butterhead, green, and red leaf lettuce. It features a dancing bear, the cuddly icon of the Grateful Dead, right on the box—plus a QR code that would transport salad eaters to a Spotify playlist with 20 hand-picked hunks of tuneage. What’s more, for every box sold, the Dead would pledge to plant trees with ForestNation, a reforestation-oriented environmental business.
The lettuce tasted crisp and fresh but otherwise unremarkable, but it sent me on a bit of a spiral: It turns out branded produce is a thing, not only for Deadheads, but other fandoms, such as devotees of Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Lucasfilms, and even the cartoon Strawberry Shortcake (or at least its reboot). I had questions I needed answered. Like, why should we need fruits and vegetables branded with our favorite bands, movies, and TV shows when their maximum shelf life is about a week? Who is this for? And why did a dancing bear on a box of lettuce make me want it so much?
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“Every time an item with Dead imagery is seen in the wild, I get a photo,” says ‘Some Dead Guy,’ the anonymous creator behind @allmyhatsaredead on Instagram, where he posts Grateful Dead–themed baseball caps. “It’s like the first thing anyone that knows me does when they see the bear or a Steal Your Face.” Dead Guy says he first saw Grateful Greens at Whole Foods and that, in general, he’s in favor of these kinds of collaborations, because “it’s a plus for the culture.”
Other Heads aren’t so wooed by these collaborations. On Reddit, a picture of Grateful Greens garnered 148 comments, many of which blasted the collab as nothing more than a cash grab. The originator of the thread, who has asked to remain anonymous because a family member occasionally designs merch for the band, said, “I’m kind of split on the branding aspect. Like I get the collab was to plant trees. In fact, I would prefer seeing the Dead [planting trees] with every collab they do. If you’re gonna throw your name on everything, may as well have it do good, right?”
I think the punchline to this joke (which is, make no mistake, on us) is that we are living in a moment of the most bespoke customization in every level of our lives, even in our most perishable foods, because if they brand it, we’ll buy it (or at least talk about it). It’s not enough to have a box of hydroponically grown gourmet lettuce; if we want to truly signal our values to the world, that box needs to have our favorite band’s iconography emblazoned on it. What it comes down to is personality assertion through branding, and it’s a big business.
Take fruit, for example. Most of the fruit we buy comes with its own packaging—its peels and husks. But man-made packaging sells. We see it with cereal boxes, in which tigers and Flintstones and leprechauns vie for the attention of the youngest shoppers at the grocery store. Kids might be super susceptible to that kind of marketing—bright colors, cartoons, familiar faces—but the thing is, we all have that little kid in us. Unlike cereal, much of the branding around fruits and vegetables plays on the virtuousness of the ingredient. But healthy or not, it all comes down to marketing.
Branding produce in the U.S. dates back to the 1890s, when the advent of national shipping meant companies needed a way to differentiate their crates of fruit from the competition. Sunkist was one of the first companies to put its branding right on the fruit itself, according to Sunkist’s senior director of global marketing, Christina Ward. It started with a stamp on its oranges in 1926. (There is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a dedicated group of vintage fruit crate and sticker collectors.)
About a hundred years later, in March of 2022, Sunkist kicked off a promotion with media company WildBrain’s Strawberry Shortcake series, Berry in the Big City. Focusing on its blood oranges (it doesn’t sell strawberries, alas), Sunkist released *Strawberry Shortcake–*themed packaging, coloring pages, and recipes. Ward says that while the campaign was meant to appeal to young fans, “Overall, we developed content specifically with the millennial mom in mind.” And it worked. Ward says retailers saw an increase in blood orange sales during the promo, which ran through June.
Like Sunkist, Dole has been branding produce since its early days. It’s perhaps best known for its banana stickers, which have featured characters from Disney movies like Beauty & The Beast and Cars 3, Pixar favorites like Ratatouille, and, most recently, Marvel superheroes. Dole and Disney have been BFFs since 1976, when Dole began sponsoring Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room.
These banana stickers become instant collector’s items for particularly devout fandoms. In a Reddit thread with over 400 comments about a “limited edition” Frozen 2 banana, u/A_Yeti says, “My dads been collecting banana stickers his whole life. Huge collection. There’s always someone out there who collects -insert weird shit here-.” And u/great_bowser asks, “So am I the only one who's been maintaining collection [sic] of banana stickers since childhood?”
In the same thread, u/shadow247 shares a parenting hack, saying, “I moved a Captain Marvel sticker to at least 12 different banana’s….convince [sic] she was getting a Captain Marvel banana every time. This trick also works with Minions Stickers. Just slap any sticker on a banana really, and your kid will probably suddenly want to eat it.”
Many of these collaborations are geared toward kids and their parents, but for the 2017 campaign around Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Dole’s director of corporate communications, Bil Goldfield explains, “We broadened our target to mirror the all-ages, nostalgic appeal of the Star Wars franchise.” He says retail partners reported increased traffic. And the effort landed Dole on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, as Stephen Colbert grilled Mark Hamill about Luke Skywalker appearing on a bag of iceberg lettuce. Where nostalgia meets absurdity, a collector’s item is born.
Back on Reddit, in r/StarWars, a post sharing a bag of Dole lettuce with the Millenium Falcon on its packaging features puns and jabs, but at least one commenter, such as u/babydykke, affirms its effectiveness: “I bought like 5 packs of this salad just because it had Rey on it. NGL, all the Star Wars food marketing completely gets to me. And apparently helps me eat my veggies!”
When it comes to produce packaging, it’s not “sex sells,” but “nostalgia sells.” So what about the Grateful Dead lettuce? It’s different from fruit meant for kids. This is a gourmet product wearing tie-dyed overalls, and it feels like the next step.
My personal window for touring with the Dead, living out of a camper, and selling patchwork pants, slammed shut when Jerry Garcia died in 1995. (I was a devastated 11-year-old.) But Grateful Greens finds me where I live now, namely in the kitchen next to my smart speaker. The lettuce, and the plethora of Dead merch on the market, from Hedley & Bennett’s dancing bear–printed aprons to Igloo’s Steal Your Face cooler, tugs on my wistful nostalgia, and that’s a hell of a drug.
Gotham Greens said in a press release that partnerships with other bands will follow, so this is probably just the tip of the iceberg lettuce. In the future, I think we can expect more customization of the most mundane goods to a highly personalized level. A California start-up called Branded Fruit is getting in on the action, customizing fruit with corporate logos as conference swag. It feels like only a matter of time before we’ll see produce in the grocery store that reflects even more extremely specific interests, like Crocs bananas and Harry Styles kiwis, and yeah, I’ll probably buy both.
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