A whole generation discovers what their grandparents already knew
The #MarmiteFirstTimer hashtag has, as of last week, just passed half a billion cumulative views on TikTok. Half a billion. For a yeast extract spread invented in 1902. Whatever else you think of the social-media age, it has a remarkable instinct for handing free marketing to brands that should, by all rights, be too old and too British to interest it.
The format is simple. A young person, usually but not always under twenty-five, films themselves tasting Marmite for the first time. They react. The video is short. The reaction is usually genuine, occasionally faked, and almost always more entertaining than it has any right to be. Some love it. Most hate it. A small but vocal minority film themselves trying it three times in a row, because once was not enough to be certain.
Why this is more than just a trend
Marmite did not start the hashtag. That is the first thing worth saying. The first-timer reaction video as a genre existed long before Marmite was the object, and similar treatment has been applied to Vegemite, kimchi, surströmming, Bovril, and, briefly and incomprehensibly, mushy peas.
What Marmite did do was lean into the trend once it became clear it was sticking. The brand’s official TikTok account started featuring user-submitted reactions in late summer 2024 and ran a small campaign through 2025 specifically encouraging students to try Marmite during freshers’ week. The Media Week Awards recognised this in November, naming it the best low-spend social campaign of the year. The actual spend, by all accounts, was startlingly small.
This is the boring, professional version of why the campaign worked. The fun version is that Marmite is structurally perfect for this kind of content. The strong reaction is the point. The product was designed, accidentally, to be a reaction-video object decades before reaction videos existed. It is not, in that sense, very surprising that TikTok found it.
The convert problem
What is more interesting is what the trend tells us about who is actually buying Marmite. The conventional wisdom is that the brand’s customer base is ageing. That is partly true: classic Marmite is most-consumed by households over forty-five. But the first-timer trend has produced, by Marmite’s own internal numbers (which I have seen referenced but not the underlying data), a measurable bump in eighteen-to-twenty-four purchase rates throughout 2025.
Not all of those buyers will become lifelong fans. Most will not. But a small percentage of half a billion views is still a real audience. And the converts who do stick will, by virtue of being twenty-three and having found Marmite themselves rather than inheriting it, be more enthusiastic about it than their parents are.
This is not nothing. This is the brand picking up its next decade of customers, more or less by accident.
The reaction video as British cultural export
The other quiet bit of the story is that a meaningful share of the #MarmiteFirstTimer videos are not British. American, Korean, Filipino, Brazilian, Japanese creators have all had a go. Most of them dislike Marmite intensely, which is fine and on-message. A few decide they love it, which is more interesting.
For a brand that has historically struggled outside the UK and the Commonwealth, having half a billion views of international tasters is, frankly, the cheapest international awareness exercise it has ever run. Whether McCormick decides to capitalise on that in 2027 and beyond is a question for next year. But the foundation has been laid, by teenagers with phones, for less than the cost of a single American TV spot.
A small worry
The only worry, watching the trend with a sceptical eye, is that the reaction format wears out. TikTok burns through formats at speed. If the half-billion-view moment turns out to be the peak, and if the next generational rediscovery of Marmite is fifteen years away rather than five, the convert rate might not stick.
This is, however, not a problem worth panicking about. Marmite has survived war, rationing, Brexit, and twenty-six years of Unilever ownership. It will probably survive the end of TikTok trends.
