It listed the names of fast-food chains he hoped to stop at we would end up visiting 18 of them.Īfter paying $2.59 for the Jack in the Box order, Pocker and I head down the street to the next stop on our itinerary: Burger King. When we’d first set out, winding south down Interstate 5 to the tune of SiriusXM’s TikTok Radio, I’d noticed a handwritten note stuck to the central console of Pocker’s SUV. Jack in the Box is our first stop of many. To contain the smell of the fries, he’s brought along an insulated Grubhub bag otherwise, he warns, “we will go crazy.” Pocker’s strategic sauce reserves are running dangerously low - back home in Hollywood, the shoebox filing system in which he organizes his supplies is down to little more than barbecue sauce and mustard - and he needs to restock.Īt the same time, we are on the hunt for loads and loads of French fries Pocker has plans for a video in which he’ll mix them into the world’s least appetizing potato salad. It is on one of those trips that the two of us find ourselves in Downey, chatting about exploding condiment packets in a slow-moving drive-through lane. One of the biggest drains on Pocker’s resources is his weekly schedule of “shopping trips,” during which he drives out into the Los Angeles sprawl and buys the bulk of the sauces, sandwiches and sides he demolishes on camera. He even uses EBay to track down rare condiments in what he describes as “a huge score,” a hoarder once sold him hundreds of packets of a picante sauce McDonald’s no longer makes. He has a second phone for all his fast-food apps so that he’ll get notified whenever chains announce new deals. He tracks fast-food trends on social media and reads the industry trade paper QSR every day in search of new ideas. Pocker says he puts more than 40 hours of work into the account every week and has spent hundreds of dollars on camera equipment, lights and editing software. Yet each video - even the ones hardly anyone watches - requires time, energy and money to produce. How hard is it to make money as a social media influencer? Take a peek inside the budget of Sam Pocker, a TikTok artist focused on fast food. The cost of being TikTok’s condiment king, tallied Plus, they boost his publish rate, which leaked documents indicate is a key metric for TikTok. These are mostly filler, Pocker concedes, but are cheap to make. Many of Pocker’s posts get only a couple of hundred views - not just the sauce-dumping ones but also Muppets-esque skits in which googly-eyed hamburgers discuss self-care and lip-sync to Madonna. (He said that he’s earned about $600 on the former, and received but not accepted any offers on the latter.)īut internet fame is a tricky beast to wrangle. Since starting the project last June, Pocker has amassed enough fans that he now has access to TikTok’s Creator Fund, which lets him make money off his posts, and Creator Marketplace, which helps corporate sponsors hire him for brand deals. Pocker’s videos are bizarre, visually engaging pieces of performance art, and they sometimes catch the attention of TikTok’s fickle content recommendation algorithm. Three minutes and 34 sauces later, the result looks less like a meal than an exploded Sherwin-Williams paint factory. (Ken Greenlee / Upgraded Images Pasadena)Īs TikTok’s text-to-speech assistant names each condiment, Pocker - unseen but for his hands - pours it over the sandwich. Add a packet of Red Robin original seasoning. “Add a packet of In-N-Out Burger ketchup. “Unwrap a bacon, egg and cheese,” instructs one of his best-performing videos, a Starbucks breakfast sandwich “hack” that’s been viewed more than 4.4 million times.
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Working under the handle Pocker has intermittently gone viral on TikTok for a series of gross-out videos that find him dumping ungodly amounts of sauces and flavorings atop hot dogs, hamburgers and more, for an effect that’s less appetizing than it is artistic. They are, after all, his stock in trade, if not quite yet the foundation of his livelihood. When it comes to condiments, Pocker, 45, doesn’t kid around. “I thought that was a joke,” he tells me as we pull into the drive-through, “until they started fermenting.” Leave the packets in a hot car for too long and they’re liable to explode. In the parking lot of a southeast Los Angeles Jack in the Box, Sam Pocker offers me some advice: In dealing with the fast-food chain’s “secret sauce,” refrigeration is key.
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