The Biggest Thing in Health Food Is … Death Metal?

NOT MANY OATMEAL brands are born of suffering. But if you listen to Scott Turner, 32, and Nick Lagonia, 33, tell the origin story behind Misery & Mayhem, their new line of high-protein oats, they’ll make you feel their pain.

In 2017, Turner and Lagonia—the first a lean former marine, the second a brick-house former high school football player—started going to a Manhattan “gym” called Complete Body because the two friends needed a place to work out for cheap. “Gym” is in quotation marks because you’re probably envisioning high ceilings, squat racks, and rows of cardio machines.

Instead, it “was in this basement with wood paneling,” says Lagonia. “The things we’d do—like, for example, I’m laying on my back and shimmying 60 yards on turf ground, literally giving myself back rug burn, while this jacked instructor is screaming at me to go faster.” Fifty-rep pushup sets between bench presses. Sprints and spider crawls. Sweat and agony. They loved it.

Turner, who worked at Peloton after the marines, describes those workouts as like “crawling through glass.” And because the sessions started at 6 a.m., he was too tired to scramble eggs, he says. So Turner ate oatmeal mixed with protein powder for fuel, a blend that later evolved into Misery & Mayhem.

The name was inspired by those grueling workouts, but also the music that helped them persevere. Pantera, Ozzy, Full of Hell—bands that thrashed and wailed during their workouts and spoke to their torment. When they saw an opportunity to sell their protein-enhanced oatmeal, they realized they needed packaging that captured their never-say-die attitude. (A jacked Quaker Oats guy didn’t seem quite right.)

Misery & Mayhem’s branding feels like something ripped off a metal band’s merch table: the logo etched in jagged font, the mascot a fang-bearing viper. “We wanted [Misery & Mayhem] to feel like Ozzfest, where System of a Down is going to open up and you just feel something gnarly.”

If hellfire, chaos, destruction, and oatmeal aren’t quite lining up for you, know that there is, in fact, a methodology behind the madness. The collision of the most wholesome of breakfasts and the most unholy of music genres is just the latest example of a food or beverage company borrowing from death metal aesthetics to stand out from their competitors.

Marketers have two audiences in mind for these products. The first is obvious and niche: death metal diehards (old and young) who’ll buy anything with a skull on it. The second are consumers who are sick of the status quo and who are fist-pumping with their wallets. Sure, all these snakes and spikes look cool, but the trend also speaks to a larger and often unspoken relationship between what we put into our bodies and how we see ourselves in this tumultuous world.

It’s a little more complicated than you may think.

The Rumble and the Roar

YOU COULD CREDIT the birth of doom food to Death Wish Coffee Co., which started selling its jet-black, skull-adorned bags of organic fair-trade coffee back in 2012. “We’ve been deeply ingrained in the music space, and specifically heavy metal or rock, since we began,” says Shannon Sweeney, Death Wish’s marketing director.

Since revving up in 2016, the company’s podcast Fueled by Death Cast has hosted numerous musicians, from Guns N’ Roses’ Richard Fortus to members of Breaking Benjamin. In 2018, metal guitar legend Zakk Wylde helped Death Wish craft a coffee called Valhalla Java Odinforce Blend. Today, members of its Society of Strong Coffee subscription service can buy merch with a logo that looks like something a Spinal Tap II roadie would wear.

Around 2021, the company wanted to rock even harder. Now the packaging of its dark roast features two opposing cherry-red lightning bolts evocative of Dimebag Darrell’s axe. A bag of its chocolate hazelnut coffee has Rob Zombie-like skulls with dripping jaws. “We’ve looked to more classic heavy metal bands to help inspire us,” Sweeney says. “Because that’s what our die-hard consumers like. That’s what they grew up listening to.”

If you’re thinking that all this hyper-masculine imagery means Death Wish is just a guy thing, Sweeney says that their current consumer base is roughly 50-50, male to female. Millennials are buying the stuff, but the bulk of the brand’s customers are in their 40s and 50s. “It’s people who want to feel like they still have their edge,” she says, “yet they know that this coffee is going to get them through the day.”

There is nothing too pure—not even spring water—for the death metal treatment. Liquid Death started selling its water in 2019, its tallboy cans with the tagline murder your thirst soon supplanting Pabst Blue Ribbon as concertgoers’ ironic drink of choice.

The company has always been in on the joke, says Andy Pearson, Liquid Death’s vice president of creative. “Do you know Back to the Future Part II? The Biff Tannen, shitty 1985 timeline?” (You know, when Biff creates a hellscape future where wild dogs rule the streets and casinos have replaced courthouses.) “I was like, ‘Oh, Liquid Death is just how you market water [in that timeline].’ ” The company’s marketing barrage has included a swole mascot named Murder Man, a casket-shaped cooler (cross-branded with Yeti), and ad spots with the late Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy Osbourne.

Much of the brand’s ethos comes from Mike Cessario, Liquid Death’s founder, who grew up playing in metal bands. But Pearson says that the company’s branding takes inspiration from beyond the genre too: HBO’s The Rehearsal, horror movies, punk rock. “I couldn’t really pin down what Liquid Death even is, because it’s so messy by design.”

Messy works, apparently. Liquid Death was reportedly valued at $1.4 billion in 2024. The brand’s consumer base is split between men and women and skews younger, toward health-conscious millennials and Gen Z.

Pearson says he thinks the counterintuitive messaging of Liquid Death is what’s fueling its growing success among all demographics. “If you look at health food brands, they’ve all looked the same and they all talk to the same NPR-listening Whole Foods shopper,” he says. “So we’re making fun of the medium from inside of a medium.”

Liquid Death, Pearson says, capitalizes on the fact that “people are tired of being marketed to in the same boring way.” Coffee, oatmeal, water—branding for these products has always been so not metal. (Think toucans in the rainforest or bearded Bob and his red mill.) Doom food brands offer an antidote to precious packaging.

Except those outside the marketing industry have different takes on why dark marketing has taken over—some of which are far more apocalyptic.

The Reckoning

MAYBE WE SHOULD have seen all this coming when Metallica shared in 2023 that the band had started drinking less alcohol, eating organic food, and exercising. (Lars Ulrich prefers his Peloton; Kirk Hammet a yoga mat.) The metalheads are aging—and they’re concerned about their health.

“People are getting older,” says Zack Weil, the vocalist and lead guitarist of the metal band Oozing Wound. “In my mind, just based off people I know, especially for my age group, most people are having kids, and so they think it’s funny to have ‘dark’ oatmeal or something like that.” (Not that the genre is inherently earnest, he says.)

Sweeney, Death Wish’s marketing director, says something similar: “We hear a lot of feedback from our consumers. A lot of them are moms or they’re nurses working 12-hour shifts, and they’re like, ‘I’ve lost all my cool, but my Death Wish gives me my daily rebellion.’”

This reclaimed attitude may be one reason why death metal health food is selling now, says Emily Contois, PhD, who studies media, food, and health at the University of Tulsa. She thinks that people who buy these products are “a lot more than just a group of folks who actually listen to metal music, right? I imagine your typical office worker whose job might feel unfulfilling. Or how parenthood can feel so draining, you [want] a coffee that makes you feel full of attitude—like you’re at a rock concert.”

Contois, who has gone to concerts with her metal-loving husband, says that marketers might see the music genre as “real,” which means it carries a strong emotional weight for some people. Heavy metal music “is supposed to help you get through your existence. And I think life in 2025 feels hard.”

Death metal health food brands are pushing vibes that match the gloom and doom, Contois says. They offer nostalgia and commiseration and defiance. You could even argue that the things that draw fans to metal (escape, opposition, transgression) are the same things people seek—and find—in death metal wellness products.

Weil, of Oozing Wound, isn’t buying it: “Anytime you are selling any kind of a product, you are immediately bastardizing whatever concept of realness is there. Black metal is silly. Everyone’s wearing makeup and they’re pretending that they’re Satanists—but they’re actually just nice guys. We’re all just trying to fool ourselves into living in [our] own kind of view of reality.”

For what it’s worth, Liquid Death has more than 7 million followers on Instagram, and its fans are rabid. “What do I have to do for y’all to gift me this as a wedding present. It’s coming up in August 👀” reads one comment on a recent post about a Liquid Death vending machine.

And Liquid Death recently launched a line of iced teas, which Pearson says is the company’s number one–selling drink on Amazon. “We genuinely admire and love the things that we’re making fun of,” he says. “And so we don’t ever want to feel mean or exploitative. We want it to feel it’s an homage.” While Pearson says he can’t talk about what Liquid Death has planned next, “there are always opportunities to potentially move into other spaces.”

The success of death metal branding in the boring ol’ health space creates a whiteboard of possibilities. Could hyperpop sell Gen Z on wild salmon? Could phonk convince Gen Alpha that quinoa is sigma?

Doom food might just be the opening act.

Prop Stylist: JJ Chan. Food Stylist: Rebecca Jurkevich.