TikTok is a breeding ground for unconventional (and often utterly bizarre) food trends, from butter boards and pickle-infused Dr Pepper to Fruit Roll-Ups wrapped around scoops of ice cream. The latest food-related craze on the platform is a slew of gourmet cucumber salad recipes posted by TikTok creator Logan Moffitt—and brands are lining up to collaborate with him.

It’s not just food-related brands rushing to work with Moffitt, who is often simply referred to as “Cucumber Guy” on TikTok, though Chipotle, DoorDash and Bloom Nutrition have done so. The majority of the brands sponsoring Moffitt’s recipes for cucumber concoctions such as “chicken caesar salad cucumbers” or “egg salad sandwich cucumbers” are in the beauty and hair care space, including Sephora, NYX Professional Makeup, K18 Hair and women’s shaving brand Flamingo.

Moffitt, a food content creator, has nearly doubled his TikTok audience from roughly 3 million to 5.8 million since he kicked off his ongoing series of cucumber recipes in early July. Each follows the same basic format, frequently starting with what at this point has become Moffitt’s catchphrase: “Sometimes you need to eat an entire cucumber. Let me show you the best way to do it.”

In the past month, he’s collectively amassed more than 300 million views across those TikTok tutorials and sparked an outpouring of videos from other TikTok creators, as well as brands such as Kroger, Williams-Sonoma and Philadelphia cream cheese trying out his various recipes for themselves. More 367,000 videos using the hashtag #CucumberSalad have been shared on TikTok in the past 30 days, per TikTok data. As of Monday, that hashtag had surpassed 1.3 billion views, according to data from social intelligence platform ViralMoment. 

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Brand advice

That massive community of TikTok users engaging with and Moffitt and his content—whether they’re simply heading to his account to check up on his latest cucumber salad creations or posting videos of themselves following his recipes—is what brands should be considering when collaborating with creators like Moffitt, not their fleeting moment in the TikTok spotlight, said Nicole Jones, chief media commercial lead at marketing data and analytics company Kantar.

For brands, creator partnerships shouldn’t be about “just sort of hopping on the next trend,” Jones told Ad Age. “It’s about looking at a [creator’s] audience and saying ‘Oh, I haven’t been able to connect with this particular audience. This person is doing a really good job of connecting with that audience. Is there a way for me to sort of play within that space as well?’” 

Flamingo, for instance, “[doesn’t] really believe in working with trending creators just for the sake of it,” said Vikki Williams Cornwall, VP of Flamingo Brand. “The partnership really has to have some relevant connection to our product, whether through a more straightforward approach or a little bit of a cheekier one, like we did with Logan.”

Flamingo’s collaboration with Moffitt played on his use of slicing tools such as a mandoline across many of his cucumber recipes, Cornwall said. With the help of influencer marketing agency Dialogue New York, Flamingo shipped Moffitt one of its dermaplane razors and asked him to substitute the shaving tool for his usual cutting instrument while otherwise maintaining the typical format of his unsponsored recipe videos, she said.

The resulting video, which Moffitt posted on Friday, has quickly become one of Flamingo’s “top-performing partnerships of the year,” she added, noting that Flamingo’s own TikTok account has seen a 1,000% jump in profile visits since its sponsorship of his video. 

K18 similarly discovered a link between Moffitt’s food-centric social content and its ostensibly unrelated hair care products in the form of Moffiitt’s bleached, platinum blond hair, Michelle Miller, K18’s chief marketing officer, said in an email. Moffitt’s K18-sponsored post veers slightly from his distinctive video structure, when Moffitt briefly interrupts his cucumber salad recipe to apply one of the brand’s hair masks before continuing as usual.

The video has generated nearly 10 million impressions, she said, including 4.6 million views and 225,000 likes. K18 further leveraged its collaboration with Moffitt by having Kayla Hagey, the brand’s senior influencer relations manager who brokered the partnership, duet his video, mimicking one of the ways many TikTok users are organically engaging with Moffitt’s recipes, Miller said.

“K18 is focused on cultural relevance, and Logan is driving culture with his cucumbers … by selling out cucumbers at your local grocery store,” she said, referring to a cucumber shortage in Iceland fueled by his viral recipes. (Previous TikTok food trends, such as the Fruit Roll-Up ice cream craze, similarly drove shortages of their key ingredients). “We love unexpected partnerships that also make sense, and this was that.”

Non-endemic magic

When a brand opts for an unconventional creator partner whose content doesn’t fit neatly into its product category, as in the case of Flamingo and K18’s respective collaborations with Moffitt, those surprise brand-creator pairings often end up attracting more attention than a partnership with an in-category creator would, said Cristina Lawrence, executive VP of consumer & content experience at Publicis Groupe agency Razorfish. 

“There’s magic in those unexpected partnerships,” she said. “And that’s actually something that we think about and that we do all the time. It’s not just about what’s in-category—it’s about what are those types of cross-category partnerships that can benefit both [sides], and maybe put a product or a brand in a new context that’s very relatable to the audience that that influencer represents.”

Indeed, while his TikTok virality stems from his popular cucumber recipes, it’s Moffitt himself and his engaging personality that have kept both viewers and brands watching and interacting with his TikTok videos over the past month, which helps brands outside of the food category integrate into his content without it feeling too jarring, Lawrence added.

“I actually think the cucumber is secondary to him,” she said. “People enjoy watching him, and if you look at his comments, you will see that. So, he’s kind of become a vehicle [for brands]—he can represent things that he cares about” that may not relate directly to cucumbers. “And so far, I feel like the partnerships that he’s had seem to make sense with who he is as a person.”