WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
Do you like piña coladas?
After seeing the finale of the HBO hit The White Lotus, you may pass on the beverage given that four of the main characters almost died after drinking the pineapple cocktail.
The reveal also surprised the team behind Coffee Mate, which developed a limited-edition piña colada-flavored coffee creamer in collaboration with the show before the drink’s deadly toxins were revealed.
“Well this is awkward,” the brand, which also developed a Thai iced coffee creamer in honor of the show, wrote in a Monday Instagram post.
Instagram users played along with the joke, with one commenting “I gotta add this to my protein shake!” in reference to one of the show’s characters nearly dying after making his breakfast drink in the same blender that contained the poison.
In the show’s finale, disgraced businessman Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) tries to kill himself, his wife Victoria (Parker Posey), and two his children, Saxon and Piper (Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sarah Catherine Hook) by spiking a piña colada with seeds from a poisonous tree. He changes his mind last minute and decides to spare his family.
But nobody cleaned the blender after he made the deadly frozen beverage and Ratliff’s other son Lachlan (Sam Nivola) almost dies the next day after he prepares a protein shake in the unwashed blender.
The president of Nestlé USA’s coffee and beverage division, Daniel Jhung, told the Wall Street Journal that the White Lotus cast completely duped them. The Coffee Mate marketing team had no idea about the plot point before they began to sell the creamer.
“We didn’t know that piña colada was such a featured part of the last episode,” he said. “I will say that in hindsight, we were showing the different flavors, and the fact that The White Lotus team was like, ‘Oh, you know, piña colada is a really good idea, you should go in that direction’–it now kind of makes sense.”
The show’s third season, which premiered Feb. 16, became an immediate internet sensation and ended with a bang when 6.2 million people tuned in for the finale.
Jhung told The Journal that it was too early to figure out whether the episode impacted the creamers’ sales. But he said that while the episode took the Coffee Mate team by surprise, “the show going on week by week is helping drive buzz for the flavors. So they’re both doing really well in market through the first quarter.”
He also said that the flavors are “mysterious” and “intriguing” and they fit well with the show, “which is about mystery and intrigue.”
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