How This Startup Went Viral on TikTok After Accepting Only Beans as Currency

It’s not unusual for New Yorkers to line up for entry into a buzzy pop-up. But it was out of the ordinary that TikTok buzz over beans drove them to it.

With the goal of breaking through social media saturation to increase its brand recognition–a challenge many startups face–Heyday Canning Co., which sells cans of flavored beans, put on a pop-up event in New York City. The hook? Shoppers couldn’t use actual money to buy things. The only accepted currency was beans.

From November 30 through December 3, in a small retail location in lower Manhattan, the Capitola, California-based startup gave away between 4,000 to 5,000 cans of beans, 300 tote bags, 50 hats, 100 socks, and a few other one-off pieces of bean-related paraphernalia (including a signed photo of the actor and star of Booksmart, Beanie Feldstein) through a barter system. Attendees could trade a can of beans–any kind from any brand–in exchange for a can of Heyday’s flavored beans, which retail for $40 for a six-pack on the company’s site. If they wanted any kind of merch, they’d have to trade in more cans. All customer-swapped beans were donated to the New York City-based food bank, City Harvest. Heyday matched each can donation 1:1.

Co-founder and CEO Kat Kavner, 31, couldn’t have predicted just how much her company’s pop-up would pop off on TikTok, which she estimates drove the vast majority of traffic–but she was thrilled to see the marketing stunt resonate: The brand saw more than 300 percent follower growth on TikTok and more than 13,000 profile views in the past week. One video by the creator Alex Mutammara racked up nearly 750,000 views.

“Coming into the end of the year, I wanted to put all our eggs in one basket and take a risk on a concept that we [thought was] really strong,” she says. “It felt like an idea worth taking a bet on.” 

The concept came from Kavner’s older brother Reed Kavner, a comedy producer based in Brooklyn who doesn’t work for Heyday, and it took about 30 percent of Heyday’s Q4 marketing budget to pull off. The company declined to share its exact outlay for the event, which came together in just four weeks.

While Heyday, which launched in 2022, quickly found retail success–it is currently sold nationwide in Whole Foods and Sprouts, and just launched at Meijer–Kat Kavner says that the brand’s distribution outpaced its brand awareness. “We’d been thinking, ‘What can we do to cut through the noise?'” she says. 

As it’s become increasingly hard to target customers through paid social media advertising thanks to changing privacy restrictions, brands have had to find new strategies to grow their customer base. Some have found success through sampling programs and in-person events–strategies that Heyday combined in its bean pop-up.

The brand had focused on building an organic following on Instagram, where it has about 7,000 followers. The Heyday founder had expected that audience, as well as foot traffic, to drive attendance at the pop-up, but TikTok is what led it to take off.

Building Buzz for Beans 

Heyday hosted a “friends of the brand” party for the pop-up the evening before it opened and invited content creators, with the hope that they’d help publicize the event and generate interest. The brand also paid for an ad in the newsletter Cool Stuff NYC. On the first day of the pop-up, the first attendee showed up 30 minutes before opening with 28 cans of beans that she hoped to trade for a ceramic bean pot. By the afternoon, Kavner says the pop-up was swamped, and by the end of the day, its inventory was nearly gone.

“As we closed up shop, we were like, ‘We still have three days of this and we have almost nothing left,'” she says. “We clearly priced the merch way too low–people were coming in with 20 cans of beans and were like, ‘Great, I’ll take five pairs of socks.’ So we decided to do some bean-flation.” Heyday increased the “prices” for its remaining bean merchandise, announced the change on social media, and by Saturday morning, fully sold out of merch.

The beans themselves also went fast. The brand had to institute a maximum one-to-one per-person swap and overnighted a shipment of beans to have enough inventory to last till the end of the pop-up. And although demand far exceeded supply, Kavner says that customers were still happy to wait in line and donate what they had. “It was kind of mind-blowing to see that people were willing to do that,” she says. “I think at that point, [the pop-up] became a thing they wanted to experience themselves. They wanted to see the store where beans were money and everything was beans. I think for a lot of them, they just really love beans.”

Naturally, it’s impossible to engineer virality, but lessons from other success stories can help steer you in the right direction. Case in point, when Athenos wanted to develop a recipe for a winter soup using its feta, the company tapped a few select influencers and then worked collaboratively with them on the creation of a roasted feta soup, which multiple creators referred to as “viral” in their sponsored videos. Even though a search using the hashtag #roastedfetasoup, yields 29 videos on Instagram and 17 videos on TikTok, a spokesperson from Athenos confirmed that the brand received more than 20 million views. The spokesperson further confirmed that the Stoughton, Wisconsin-based company worked with just 20 influencers for the campaign. 

For Heyday’s Kavner this first taste of virality is leaving her wanting more. “If I had a big budget to work with, I’d do a tour of the U.S.,” Kavner says. “We had so many comments of people being like, ‘Come to Atlanta,’ or ‘Come to Seattle.’ There’s so much more we can do to get the brand in front of people.”

Corrections and amplifications: An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the results of Athenos’s roasted feta soup campaign. After tapping just 20 influencers, the project did indeed go viral.

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