The World Is Burning but We’re Busy Watching Energy Bar Companies Fight on Twitter

Brands on social media have gone over the edge of the Clif

Have you ever been in one of those situations where you just want mom and dad to stop fighting? Well, imagine that, but substitute your parents with two major producers of energy bars and adjacent products — and voilà, you have the internet in 2019. You may not have noticed it, but snack companies Kind and Clif have been arguing over social media and in other media outlets for three months.

It started in March when Clif took out a full-page ad “demanding” that Kind switch to using all-organic products. This was in a newspaper (like, printed and with ink), so it unsurprisingly wasn’t widely noticed. The likely fact that nobody actually cares didn’t stop Kind from retaliating this week with a campaign about how Clif bars are high in sugar. The campaigns aren’t particularly notable for being witty, funny, or particularly incisive — it’s literally just two large companies bickering in public. And yet as the world burns and democracy cracks at its foundations, we’re out here pondering whether it’s too mean for a company called “Kind” to yell at its main competitor on the internet.

And in other news...

• Jack in the Box gets what it deserves — it has to pay $15 million in damages to an employee who was injured on the job, and was then fired for asking for accommodation. [Restaurant Business Online]
• That “I’m just a construction worker, but i want to be an influencer too!” Instagram account was actually a publicity stunt for an Austin coffee company. [Buzzfeed]
• It’s been a couple of months since JAB Holdings, the German company that owns Krispy Kreme, Panera Bread, and Pret-a-Manger, revealed its findings about the company’s Nazi-affiliated history. Now, there’s a fascinating deep dive into the fallout from those revelations. [NYT]
• The New York Times has found evidence of teeny-tiny bagels from about 3,000 years ago. [NYT]
• Climate change will mean that supplies of staple, popular items like coffee, olive oil, and chocolate will be unreliable and unstable. Cool! [Wired]
• A prankster ordered pizza delivery to Buckingham Palace; the delivery guy was unsurprisingly not allowed through, although the guards did check to see if the queen had indeed ordered pizza. [Mirror]
• A South Carolina woman wasn’t impressed to see an opossum crawling around an Applebee’s bar in Columbus. Pick your side: are you team adorable marsupial, or team “I need to speak to the manager”? [Vice]
• If you’re dying of thirst in the wilderness, you can’t survive off your own sweat (duh, it’s salty and will make you dehydrated). [Mel]
• As Nickelodeon prepares to reboot ‘90s throwback All That (featuring Kenan and Kel and the Jonas Brothers), the TV channel will open a Good Burger pop-up in Los Angeles. [Food & Wine]
• All AM Intel coverage [E]