Pick your poison.
Coffee Mate, which released a piña colada creamer as part of a brand tie-in with “The White Lotus,” said it didn’t realize that Season 3 would end with a disturbing mass murder-suicide plot involving its drink.
On Tuesday, the Nestle owned brand posted a statement on Instagram simply saying, “Well this is awkward.”
During the Season 3 finale, which aired Sunday night on HBO, Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) used the beverage to nearly kill his entire family at the end of their Thailand vacation, including his wife Victoria (Parker Posey) and their two of their three kids, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger). He spared Lochlan (Sam Nivola) by refusing to let him drink because he was underage.
Unbeknownst to his family, Timothy got caught committing white-collar crime. The Ratliff family is heading toward financial ruin, and Timothy is heading to prison after their lavish getaway.
During the Season 3 finale, Timothy put poisonous fruit seeds in piña coladas and served them to his family as a macabre way to “save” them from their upcoming financial ruin.
But, at the last minute, Timothy changed his mind and slapped the drink out of Saxon’s hand, claiming the milk was bad.
Lochlan almost died anyway because he made himself a smoothie the next morning without washing the poisonous piña colada mixture out of the blender.
Daniel Jhung, president of the Nestlé USA coffee and beverage division, told The Wall Street Journal, “Obviously, the writers keep this [under] lock and key, so we didn’t know that piña colada was such a featured part of the last episode.”
He added, “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 marketing team found out about the beverage’s role in the finale as they watched the show live, he explained.
“The marketing team is a huge fan of the show, which is why we picked one of these properties. Again, we didn’t know [what would happen]. The piña colada thing was a surprise to us, too. But once they saw it, they did react pretty fast through our Instagram page.”
He said that their “awkward” Instagram post “was so perfect with the show’s ending.”
Jhung said that he didn’t know how this impacted sales.
“We don’t pick up consumption data for another week. So we’ll probably see next week how it did this week. 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 shared. “But I do suspect that next week, when I pick up the sales data, that piña colada flavor will see a bit of a lift as people try it, just for the novelty aspect.”
Each season of the Mike White series is set at a different location of the titular resort, following a cast of unhappy wealthy characters on vacation until somebody dies.
The Season 3 main character fatalities ultimately ended up being age-gap couple Rick (Walton Goggins) and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), who both caught bullets during a shootout that Rick started.
No piña coladas were involved in their deaths.
