Stand aside Emeril Lagasse and Rachel Ray, there’s a new line of influencer cookware that the Instagram generation is going to *heart emoji*. But’s not a tie-in with a celebrity cook. It’s by Buzzfeed. And it’s on sale exclusively at Walmart.
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[Photo: Walmart]Called Tasty Cookware, it’s a spinoff of Buzzfeed‘s uber-successful Tasty media brand, which pioneered those super-fast, overhead cooking videos you see all over social media (which reach 540 million people around the globe through Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube). Starting today, Tasty Cookware is selling 90 different kitchen tools, starting at $4.44 and topping off at $100 for an 11-piece pot and pan set.
[Photo: Walmart]The cookware doesn’t look all that different from any other kitchen products you’d buy at any big box store. Aside from the Tasty-blue colorway on pots, and the poo emoji cookie cutter, it’s downright conservatively-designed, mainstream-friendly stuff. The internet meme-y items are hugely outnumbered by typical nonstick frying pans, muffin tins, micro-planes, and strainers.
But the partnership with Walmart, which even in the age of Amazon is still the world’s largest retailer, is a signal of how quickly the media-brand-gone-invention-studio is growing up. Buzzfeed seems to be telling the world that it doesn’t need to sell an internet-age gimmick to make money. It can just sell good old-fashioned pots and pans.