Given How the Season Ended, Coffee Mate's 'White Lotus' Creamer Is Pretty Amusing

Spoiler alert! This article contains spoilers for the finale of The White Lotus Season 3.

Any brand that decides to team up with a TV show is running some inherent risk. That's especially true for shows like The White Lotus, which is about terrible rich people and can take some wild swings as a result.

That really backfired on Coffee Mate, which introduced a new coffee creamer themed around The White Lotus. That creamer might be pretty tasty, but the company apparently didn't know how important piña coladas would be in the final moments of the season. Here's what we know about their fateful decision.

Partnering with shows like The White Lotus can be a good way for brands to capitalize on the buzz around a show, and to Coffee Mate's credit, they have made the best of a strange situation.

According to reporting in The Wall Street Journal, the brand was not aware that one scene in the finale of the show's third season would involve a patriarch attempting to poison his entire family with piña coladas when they decided to introduce their new creamer.

"Well this is awkward," the company wrote in a post on Monday, acknowledging how strange it was to do a branded tie-in centered on a flavor that now has a murderous bent.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Jhung, the head of Nestlé's USA coffee and beverage division, explained that the team behind The White Lotus actually encouraged the development of a piña colada flavor.

"Obviously, the writers keep this [under] lock and key, so we didn’t know that piña colada was such a featured part of the last episode," he said. "I will say that in hindsight, we were showing the different flavors, and the fact that The White Lotus team was like, ‘Oh, you know, piña colada is a really good idea, you should go in that direction’ — it now kind of makes sense."

Daniel also added that Cofee Mate was willing to take some risks with the product, in part because it's just a limited-time offering.

"We’re willing to take risks like that, to basically be part of the zeitgeist and pop culture, and resonate with young consumers," he said. "The essence of limited-time offers [is] it’s about mysterious flavors, intriguing flavors that are not typical in the coffee set, and so it kind of fits well with the show, which is about mystery and intrigue."

Given how much secrecy there is around every season of The White Lotus, it makes sense that the team making the product didn't know one of the season's biggest finale reveals.

Like any savvy marketing team, though, Coffee Mate knew how to spin the plot development for their own ends.

Piña coladas may be dangerous in the world of The White Lotus, but thankfully, it doesn't seem like they will be for the average consumer. Now, if you've seen the season, you're that much more likely to understand just how funny it is that Coffee Mate introduced this flavor.