Jack in the Box will offer a boxed meal deal explicitly marketed to stoned Californians, to celebrate the legalization of recreational marijuana there. Jack in the Box is being remarkably up front about its sticky-icky strategy for the “Merry Munchie Meal,” which will include a hefty helping of fried snacks for the carefully-chosen price of $4.20.
The box will be co-branded with the Snoop Dogg-backed cannabis lifestyle website Merry Jane, and will bear the website’s abstracted pot-leaf logo. In a statement, Jack in the Box Chief Marketing Officer Iwona Alter said the fast-food joint is “about welcoming all of our guests, no matter what they’re craving of why they’re craving it.”
The move may be the most high-profile move yet by a major corporation to explicitly peg a marketing push to the spread of legal marijuana in the U.S. It’s also a bit of a shot across the bow of Taco Bell, which has engineered perfectly excessive stoner snacks without explicitly acknowledging the pothead demographic. A recent survey found Taco Bell, Wendy’s (WEN), and McDonald’s (MCD) winning the lion’s share of business from recreational pot smokers, despite Jack in the Box (JACK) itself quite directly targeting stoners for years. That’s largely down to size—Jack in the Box has about a third of Taco Bell’s overall revenue.
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The Merry Munchie Meal will include two disgusting/delicious tacos, five mini churros, three chicken strips, and a drink. They’re all standard Jack in the Box menu items, and Jack in the Box already offers various “Munchie Meals,” so this is a pure marketing move.
The box is initially available from Jan. 18 to Jan. 25, and only at three locations in Long Beach—Snoop Dogg’s home town. But the announcement references a “budding friendship” between Jack in the Box and Merry Jane, so it could become more widely available after the initial run.