Chocolate ‘Crunch’ Crumbles In Mexico: Offensive Tweet About 43 Ayotzinapa Students Causes Backlash; Nestlé Looks For Hacker

Every Community Manager and Brand Director’s worst nightmare came true last Sunday, November 9, when Nestlé ‘Crunch’ chocolate’s Mexico Twitter account presented an extremely offensive “play on words” about the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa having been declared dead. The almost-immediately deleted tweet read: “A los de Ayotzinapa les dieron Crunch,” which basically meant they had given the students the ax while using the brand’s name instead. Apart from being utterly insensitive and a moronic attempt at a joke, the remark comes when the country’s going through very unstable and vulnerable times.

The tweet did come at non-business hours, exactly at 12.01am on Sunday, and was removed from the account at 2.23am followed by an apology tweet, which read: “We’re sorry for the content which was recently published and wish to apologize to our community.” Later on, another comment from the account said, “We’d like to express our solidarity with the families of Ayotzinapa and we extend this to the brand which were part of that bad joke.” But it wasn’t until 12 or more hours later that the brand stated their account had been hacked, “Or account’s security was breeched. We are sorry about what was published about Ayotzinapa, it does not reflect the brand’s sentiment.”

Nestlé Mexico’s Vice President of communications, Mario Vera, told CNNMéxico that the brand has started an investigation to find whoever was responsible, whether internally or externally. “This is extremely serious, the investigation started since Sunday within the company, as well as with the agency in charge of the Crunch brand marketing.” Vera also stated that not only was the initial message unacceptable, but that calling it a “bad joke” was an extremely poor way to handle this.