A Coconut Water Brand Tried to Engage With Its Critics. It Ended Up Offering to Send One a Bottle of Pee

Do not *ahem* piss off Vita Coco’s social media team, because they will call your bluff.

The coconut water company has just launched a new product called Vita Coco Pressed Coconut, which they claim tastes like — you guessed it! — fresh pressed coconut. Per the tagline, it is “Impossible to Hate”. And to get the word out, according to Ad Age, the company says it has developed an algorithm to find the most negative product reviews on sites like Yelp, Amazon and TripAdvisor — and it’s going to convince their haters to give the new product a try.

Here’s how that’s going: yesterday, Twitter superuser Tony Posnanski got into a war of words with the brand. Posnanski is a known coconut water critic (who wrote about his hatred of the beverage for the Huffington Post back in 2013) and was not interested one bit when Vita Coco’s social media team asked him to try their new drink.

“Save that nasty s— for someone else,” he wrote on Twitter, and didn’t stop there either. “I would rather drink your social media persons piss than coconut water,” he continued.

Those were fighting words, apparently, and Vita Coco kicked things up a notch with a reply that’s that left Twitter horrified, stunned, and delighted in (roughly) equal parts. The brand replied to Posnanski’s tweet with a photo of a member of their social media team standing in a bathroom stall, and holding a Vita Coco jar filled with what appears to be urine. “Address?” the reply tweet read, seeming to offer to send the jar to Posnanski in lieu of actual coconut water.

The brand told Ad Age that it wasn’t a stunt to gain attention on Twitter, but was simply furthering their brand’s message that their product defies haters. (And told New York magazine that, yes, “it’s pee” for real.)

Posnanski also said he was impressed by the stunt. While falling short of confirming he’d take Vita Coco up on their offer, he added in a tweet that he’d still prefer the urine to coconut water, “the Miracle Whip of beverages.”