Why is Nutter Butter going viral? Signs point to a Temple grad and cookie superfan.

Surrealist edits of anthropomorphized peanut butter sandwich cookies are going viral on TikTok and Instagram, thanks in part to a Temple University graduate.

Nutter Butter — the classic cookie company owned by snack conglomerate Mondalēz International — is getting attention for its quirky (to say the least) social media presence.

Instead of using its accounts to sell cookies, the brand has spent over a year and a half building a nightmarish cookie universe where Nutter Butters run through horror movie houses smeared with peanut butter, participate in cultlike rituals, plea for help, and worship a mysterious person named Aidan.

“I’m concerned. Nutter Butter, are you guys OK? Are you doing alright?” TikTok user Cassie Fitzwater asked in a video that’s been viewed more than 3 million times since it was posted on Sept. 13, catapulting the brand’s social media into the mainstream.

Since then, Nutter Butter’s TikTok following more than doubled to surpass 1.1 million, garnering think pieces about why a brand would dare to be so unserious on main.

So, why is Nutter Butter trashposting? Who is Aidan? And what does Temple University have to do with it? We explain.

A delectable little sandwich cookie shaped like a peanut, duh.

It’s unclear who invented Nutter Butters, but Nabisco started selling the peanut butter snacks in 1969. The brand was acquired by Mondalēz in 2000.

The company has claimed to be the “best-selling” peanut butter sandwich cookie for decades, but has not done much advertising beyond a series of commercials from the ’70s that feature Nutter Butter Man, a Willy Wonka-esque mascot that lures children with cookies.

And before you ask: Yes, people did find the Nutter Butter Man creepy, too.

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Honestly, yeah.

Nutter Butter transitioned from posting standard snarky marketing content to nightmare fuel in January 2023, when the brand uploaded a pixilated video of the peanut-shaped cookies to Instagram set to a distorted version of the song “Summer” by Calvin Harris. Inexplicably, it featured the name “Aidan” and received 480,000 likes.

Nutter Butter’s content only got more unhinged as its follower count grew. Nearly every post feels like a psychedelic fever dream. Garbled voices soundtrack videos of cookies in cowboy hats riding on house cats through the desert, cookies growing arms so they can fly, or cookies dangling from a screwdriver that somehow catapults them into space.

The Nutter Butter extended universe also has a rotating cast of characters, including Aidan, a reference to a cookie superfan whose name or likeness appears in almost every video; Nadia, an amorphous cloud of black smoke whose name is an anagram of Aidan; Mr. 1021, a CEO-type figure who apologizes for this mess; and the Nutter Butter Man, who specializes in jump scares.

“Our social channels create a realm of extreme absurdity and deep lore by going where no other cookie has gone before,” a spokesperson for the brand told TODAY.com.

Aidan is Aidan Maloney, a 2024 graduate of Temple University who studied communications, according to his LinkedIn profile, where he refers to himself as the “Nutter Butter Guy.”

Maloney commented his name under every Nutter Butter Instagram post for a year straight, reported Rachel Karten in her internet culture newsletter Link in Bio, the absurdity of his comments largely driving the brand’s pivot to trolling. His persistence paid off: Maloney is both the center of the Extended Nutter Butter Universe and an employee.

Maloney started working at Dentsu Creative — the marketing agency that oversees Nutter Butter’s social media accounts — as an intern in June. In August, he was promoted to associate social media manager for Nutter Butter.

Maloney trashposts for Nutter Butter on a team with at least three other people, who can often spend up to a week fine-tuning a single post, Karten reported in Link in Bio. Maloney and Dentsu Creative did not respond to requests for comment.

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With confusion and curiosity.

“I really wish I understood what is going on here,” one person commented under a recent Instagram post from Sept. 27 that features Aidan (a doll with a cookie for a head) dancing with cats to hyperpop interpolation of the words “Nutter Butter.”

“My brain can’t even fathom what is going on,” another person commented under a video of the Nutter Butter Man poofing into a cloud of cookies.

Followers have an attachment to the brand’s surrealism. When Nutter Butter said on Instagram that it was reverting to a more normal style of posting as an April’s Fools joke in 2023, followers revolted.

“If this ever actually happens, we will boycott and your profits will drop by 60%,” one person wrote.

Because it can.

“Nutter Butter is one of the brands in our portfolio that doesn’t have a lot of marketing behind it, so we can kind of have this safe space to experiment,” Kelly Amatangelo, a social media lead at Nutter Butter’s parent company, Mondalēz, told AdAge.

Amatangelo couldn’t say whether the brand’s absurdist efforts have actually sold more cookies, but that’s besides the point. Awareness that the peanut-shaped cookies still exist has increased.

“I hadn’t thought about Nutter Butter in 20 years, they did exactly what they came here to do,” read one TikTok comment with 221,000 likes under a video from Jimmy Kyrack discussing the cookie’s rebrand that received 9.1 million views.

Nutter Butter’s TikTok account has gained nearly 692,000 followers over the last 30 days, according to an analytics tracker SocialBlade.

The brand’s approach is a departure from the sarcastic, confrontational tone that has dominated social media to the point of oversaturation since the 2010s, where consumers went from wanting to be roasted by Wendy’s Twitter account or seduced by Duolingo’s owl mascot to repulsed by the push for relatability.

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Marketing experts say Nutter Butter’s style works because it’s different yet familiar, drawing from Gen Alpha humor and the simplicity of millennial memes like “graphic design is my passion.”

“We see it as almost like a response to the overly curated Instagram aesthetic,” said Blake Pleasant — an art director with Dentsu Creative who works with Nutter Butter — in Marketing Brew. “We just feel like perfect curation feels fake, so we’ve moved beyond that, culturally.”