Connor Blakley used to tell America’s biggest brands what Gen Z wanted. He’s no longer waiting for them to listen

Mark Smucker probably should have taken the meeting.  

In 2018, Connor Blakley, then 18, mailed a handwritten letter to the CEO of J.M. Smucker Co., the fifth generation of the Smucker family to lead the business. 

Blakley was pitching the services of his Gen Z marketing consultancy, called YouthLogic. “ I grew up eating Uncrustables,” Blakley tells me. “We all did.” 

J.M. Smucker Co. executives responded with a letter of their own, saying that Mark Smucker was “very impressed” with Blakley’s “approach to influencer marketing and connection with Gen Z,” noting that Cleveland, where Blakley grew up, “is just up the road” from the company’s Orrville, Ohio, headquarters, so they should “find a time and a place to meet.” Blakley says he followed up 10 times, but a meeting never happened. (Smucker declined to respond to Fast Company’s requests for comment.) 

Blakley, who now oversees a multifaceted business and media empire of his own, called Dropout, with a growing stable of consumer brands operated under Dropout Cos., recently stumbled onto the letter. He decided, for fun, to DM it to Mark Smucker on Instagram, with the message “Remember this?” (“He watches all my Stories,” Blakley tells me. “That’s how I found his Instagram.”)  

For a decade, Uncrustables, the crimped, crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, all but owned the frozen snack aisle in grocery stores, growing to become a cultural phenomenon and a billion-dollar megabrand. NFL players were downing 80,000 Uncrustables per season. Then, in July 2025, Blakley, a high-school dropout who’s been running businesses since he was 13, started a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company and launched Jams, a better-for-you frozen PB&J sandwich.  

Last November, Jams entered Target stores, and six months later one flavor began outselling its Uncrustables counterpart. Jams are now stocked in half of NFL locker rooms, and when the new football season kicks off on September 9, Jams will debut as the NFL Players Association’s first official PB&J—a title Blakley spent a year quietly engineering.

Jams, which is based in Nashville, will also be taking advantage of the reach of its new co-owner, Pat McAfee, the former NFL all-star turned sports media force who joined Blakley’s team in June. How’d Blakley woo McAfee? Dropout spammed The Pat McAfee Show with samples (“for months,” Jams bragged in the actual press release). “They pushed the product hard,” McAfee, who spent his college and professional years pounding frozen PB&Js, later acknowledged. “How can you not respect that?” 

Jams’s total weekly sales at Target nearly quadrupled from December to April, and Dropout says they have yet to plateau. “My Target team just texted saying we had another record week,” Chief Growth Officer Cody Cooper told me in late August. 

Blakley has spent more than half his lifetime selling his distinct perspective on Gen Z, the cohort from which he hails. His early work in social media and youth marketing made him an early participant in what we now call the creator economy; he came up alongside Jake and Logan Paul.

Over time, though, Blakley left that world, convinced it was struggling to build things that would last. “When you’re creating a brand around a fad, I just think it’s a fake spirit,” he says. “How can this last 100 years if that’s the basis on which it was founded?”   

What he has bet on instead—starting with the upgraded frozen PB&Js, but with an eye on the rest of the freezer aisle and the broader CPG category beyond it—is that Gen Z’s complex relationship with the food it grew up on, combined with its appetite for a culture that feels authentic again, represents a multibillion-dollar untapped opportunity. Dropout’s vision for capturing it, meanwhile, is singular enough to come off slightly bonkers: a mashup of an entertainment company, a food conglomerate, and a nostalgia machine—with athletes, sitcom actors, and country singers as equity partners. 

Ironically, no one could have prepared J.M. Smucker Co. for this upstart challenger better than Connor Blakley. “If you do not pay attention now,” he warned brands about the next generation of competition in a 2023 Fast Company interview, “you will end up overpaying for the companies we [Gen Z] create to crush yours.” 

In January, Dropout released a second frozen brand, Bronco—breakfast bagels that landed immediate nationwide distribution at Target. But Blakley seems especially focused on defeating Smucker’s at the PB&J game.  

“Do you know where your son is?” 

In the mid-2010s, when Blakley was a teenager, brands were already terrified of Gen Z consumers. These youngsters were skeptical of traditional advertising, active on platforms where content did bizarre things like erase itself entirely after a short pause, and on their way to $12 trillion in global spending power by 2030. 

One of the first attempts by brands to learn about this young population was AskGenZ.com, an award-winning, now-defunct hotline created by Day One Agency, the PR firm that had vetted teenagers to answer brands’ pressing questions about their values and habits. Like many exchanges with teens, they offered limited insight: 

“What’s cool?”  

“Everything and nothing.”  

And: 

“Do you drink Red Bull?”  

“Absolutely!” 

Blakley, at 13, had started Utpec, a social media agency with clients ranging from the deli across the street to the XPrize Foundation, Vineyard Vines, and the Mark Cuban Cos. In 2015, at age 15, he started another agency, a youth marketing firm called YouthLogic that would be very different from the likes of Day One Agency, which Blakley says actually tried to enlist his help while developing AskGenZ.com. 

Blakley believed that for Gen Z, how authentically a brand sold itself mattered as much as what it actually sold. He dismissed the alternative—a sort of manufactured relevance—as R&D: “Rip off and duplicate.” 

At 16, he ditched class at St. Edward, the all-boys Catholic school he attended in Cleveland, to take a business call. It was Tony Robbins. The dean didn’t believe him, and Blakley says he was punished. “It was the first time I remember crying in school,” he says. (Robbins would become an Utpec client.) 

Later, during that same school year, administrators called Blakley’s parents in to warn them that their son had missed 17 school days for “work.” An agreement was struck allowing him to stay enrolled, but only if he quit traveling. 

He signed it. But surprising no one, including his parents, Blakley was already closing another deal. He had sent an email to Marcelo Claure, Sprint’s new president, writing that he planned to be “in town” soon—in Kansas City, on a school day—and suggested they meet. Sprint put him up at the Ritz, where, naturally, he posted about it on Instagram. 

“His teacher Coach Lev asked the class, ‘Does anybody know where Blakley is today?’” Blakley’s father, Scott, tells me. “Someone held up their phone: ‘He’s in Kansas City getting a massage and having steak.’ Next thing I know, my phone’s ringing. ‘Do you know where your son is?’” 

Blakley shared with me two details from the Kansas City meeting: Claure was wearing Yeezys and a cardigan—“So, like, he got it”—and Blakley learned about his expulsion en route. “I told him, ‘I literally just got kicked out for being here,’” Blakley says. “He was like, ‘Well, you better get talking, but don’t mess this up!’” 

Becoming an “actual businessman” 

Blakley’s meeting with Claure led to Sprint’s first collaboration with a young Gen Z influencer, someone Blakley had befriended: Jake Paul. “Helicopter Trampoline!!” was a YouTube stunt in which Paul jumped on a trampoline hanging from a helicopter over the ocean to promote Sprint’s Live Unlimited data plan. It became a defining piece of Paul’s early oeuvre—a video that established him as an edgy young digital creator that blue-chip brands could safely get behind. 

“He wasn’t some punk kid who showed up with a big idea,” says Tracy Palmer, then Sprint’s VP of brand and advertising. “But I would still say, ‘Let’s pause and think strategically about what we’re trying to do.’”

However, Blakley already seemed to have an instinct for what made sense to young consumers. When the Paul video dropped, Palmer asked if he’d given her boss a rundown of how it went. “Marcelo and I have been Snapchatting,” he explained, as if this were the obvious thing to do, “which is why I just attached the video.” 

Even then, Palmer (who is now a VP at T-Mobile, running the in-house production studio she founded, T-Studio) says that fears were already surfacing about the value and durability of creator-backed campaigns. The Fyre Festival took place a month later, she notes. 

But YouthLogic was on its way up. It won PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson, and the NHL as clients. By 18, Blakley was billing between $500,000 and $800,000 annually and giving international keynotes on what teen consumers want.  

After spending nearly half a decade helping established companies ingrain themselves in youth culture, Blakley started to wonder what it would look like to build a company himself, so he sold YouthLogic in 2018 and stepped back from consulting altogether in 2020.

“I was like, I gotta figure out how to be an actual businessman.” (He reacquired YouthLogic in 2023, eager, he said, to tap again into its nine years of “deep relationships with well-known Gen Z talent.”) 

First, he tried beer. He raised money to launch a lower-cost light beer aimed at Gen Z, called Bru, which offered customizable packaging and leaned on creators instead of traditional marketing. Although he wound it down in 2023, he maintains that the Kelce brothers’ Garage Beer is basically what Bru would have been.

“Seeing Garage Beer become successful actually gave me confidence,” he says. “I just needed to apply my vision to the right opportunity.” Meanwhile, he tells me, “I would walk through the store, and on the frozen foods aisle, I was like, ‘These are shit brands with shit ingredients and shit marketing.’” 

They’re also classic young-person dietary staples: bagel bites, pizza rolls, breakfast strudels. “A gold mine,” Blakley said to himself. He pulled the category data and says two big brands stood above the others: Jimmy Dean, the top dollar-getter among protein breakfast items, and Uncrustables, which was flying off shelves.

Jams vs. Uncrustables 

Andrew Strife, Dropout Cos.’s CEO since June, says he still can’t hear the words “Hot Pocket” without thinking of “midnight in my college dorm, out of the microwave, burning my face off.” 

Strife joined Dropout’s CPG division after spending 14 years scaling his last disruptor brand, LesserEvil, into a better-for-you popcorn and snack company. “The frozen aisle was ripe for attacking,” says. “A large percentage of our customer base doesn’t shop on that aisle because they don’t trust it.”  

According to internal data Strife cited, 54% of Jams buyers at Target today are new to the frozen snack category. They are new customers, in other words, that the category wouldn’t have had without Jams. And this is before the upcoming NFL season, when players including Caleb Williams, J.J. Watt, Micah Parsons, and C.J. Stroud will be busy hyping the brand. 

This is a clear shot across the bow to Uncrustables, which has become a surprising fixture not just at NFL practice facilities but across the NBA and MLB, too, drawing rave reviews from players (Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto: “Wow, incredible”), and even getting Travis and Jason Kelce to call it the snack they eat “more than anything else in the world” and lament how it was “not around when we were kids.”

But Gen Zers—who actually do not know a world without Uncrustables—have started to sour on them as nutritionally mediocre and highly processed, laden with enriched flour, added sugar, and seed oils they’ve come to view as a health threat. 

Dropout calls its alternative “mom approved,” suggesting that it’s healthful, yes, but still familiar. Jams uses real-fruit jelly, no high-fructose corn syrup, 10 grams of protein—versus 6 in a classic Uncrustable—and palm oil rather than expeller-pressed seed oil. (Bronco, meanwhile, is made with turkey sausage and bacon, whole eggs, real cheddar, and no trans fats.) 

As recently as last fall, a Barclays analyst quizzed J.M. Smucker Co. CEO Mark Smucker about the rise in category competition—by a quick count, no fewer than eight new frozen PB&J makers have emerged in the past two years. “We knew that this moment was coming,” Smucker responded, but predicted “our traditional advertising and marketing campaign is going to continue to fuel growth.”  

Unlike Uncrustables, which are iconically round, Jams are square. This is for a reason. A Smuckers executive told me in 2024 that for years the company obsessed over how to seal that specific circular shape so it was totally leakproof. (The product was already round when J.M. Smucker acquired the brand in 1998.)

Smuckers protects this IP firmly: Michigan-based Albie’s Foods was once told to retire its round copycat. Gallant Tiger faced a legal threat over its pillowy flying-saucer design. Not long ago, Chubby Snacks got a similar warning for its crimped-edge product. Trader Joe’s is being sued right now for arguably the most pie-like knockoff of them all. 

Yet squares are everywhere: Fave’Wich is a no-thaw square. Welch’s Real PB&J is a 50% larger square. Aldi Lunch Buddies Crustless PB&J? A private-label square. Lil Sammies by Logan Paul and MrBeast’s Lunchly are what Blakley calls “protein slop.” (Blakley sees a difference between Dropout products and those being sold by the Paul-MrBeast corner of the creator economy: “We want to create things that can stand alone and stand the test of time,” he says again. “We don’t need to engineer anyone’s attention span on a video.”) 

As all this competition over frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches attests, it’s actually a great time to be in the scrappy food-disruptor business. Goodles is eating into Kraft Mac & Cheese, Magic Spoon is winning over Kellogg’s cereal eaters, and Poppi is carving into Coke. The share prices of Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, Campbell’s, General Mills, and Conagra have all fallen anywhere from 18% to 57% since 2023.

Smucker, meanwhile, is roughly flat since the start of 2023, while the broader market is up nearly 80%. The old guard’s response has been to open its checkbooks: Campbell’s shelled out $2.7 billion for Rao’s, Pepsi spent $1.2 billion for Siete and nearly $2 billion for Poppi, and Hershey forked over $700 million for LesserEvil, Strife’s old company. 

“Investors ask, what’s my exit plan, and I’m like, ‘I don’t have one,’” Blakley insists. But the big picture for Dropout is this: “There is a $40 billion opportunity here, and my plan is to get profitable and destroy every company that’s not delivering value to customers in the way they should.” 

When Blakley was growing up, his mother, Christine, recalls, his response when institutions stood in his way was: “‘They are not gonna dictate my future.’ And I couldn’t disagree with him.” 

The “raw powder” brands need 

“You have the studios over here,” Blakley says, pointing one way. “Then you have [Hollywood talent agencies] CAA, UTA, WME over there,” he says, pointing in the other. “Both sides are trying to get to CPG in the middle, where the money is. But neither can get out of their own way.”  

Before Dropout, Blakley pitched Hollywood studios on collaborations with creators such as Logan Paul, Jake’s older brother—though none landed. The Pauls now star in Paul American, a Max show about the making of their reality show.

Around the same time, A Minecraft Movie not only enjoyed a record box office run but also sparked a phenomenon in which the theater became an IRL extension of online culture. That so much of the Hollywood chatter afterward was about which IP to adapt next rather than recognizing the magic was coming from a new crop of creators in the audience left Blakley more convinced than ever that the entertainment industry, like legacy food brands, doesn’t understand the culture it’s selling to. 

Blakley is also a believer that those in control should carefully plant enough “raw powder” inside the IP and then get out of the way. If a simple video game where players build things from blocks could send theaters into a frenzy of chants, live chickens, and flying popcorn, a consumer brand like Dropout, he believes, can certainly stick a cast of athletes, actors, musicians, and livestreamers on camera with fun snacks and see what happens. The trick, he says, is to weave entertainment and consumer products synergistically into the same IP, with each party “incentivized to view it as an entrepreneurial endeavor.” 

For instance, to help market Bronco, Dropout recruited sitcom actor Bobbie K. Bowman, better known as BooG!e, not to endorse the product, but to reprise his role from Nickelodeon’s 2000s golden era as the eccentric smoothie-shop manager T-Bo on iCarly. 

“You’ve probably been wondering what I’ve been up to since you last saw me,” he says, wandering around Target. “Well, for 10 years I have been expanding my résumé and working on the perfect breakfast bagel.” 

Other Bronco videos have staged Hannah Montana character reunions—informal ones, since the Dropout model isn’t to license the Disney show itself (which would be costly), but to place versions of the familiar characters in the Dropout-verse, played by the original actors, allowing viewers to make their own inferences. Jackson, Hannah’s older brother (played by Jason Earles), has turned up to sell Bronco bagels at his surf shop, and Hannah’s bodyguard, Roxy (Frances Callier), is now a Target security guard protecting the bagels from shoplifters. Dropout shoots most of these in an actual Target freezer aisle, ingeniously letting the content double as a map straight to its product. 

T-Bo’s life-update video has amassed 17 million views so far, more than most major brands will see on a single TikTok. (Duolingo has pulled in 68 million for the famous video where it “killed” its own owl mascot.) 

Dropout isn’t the only consumer brand to have figured out the magic of original content. Red Bull, Starbucks, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Chick-fil-A all operate in-house studios capable of producing everything from podcasts and animated dramas to full-on Netflix documentaries. But the Dropout version is more ambitious: Blakley describes a creative ecosystem where the talent can cross over, Marvel Cinematic Universe-style. 

Bronco has been dropping hints of such a thing for months: TikToks that resemble Disney Channel programming bumpers, with a voice-over promising “the long-awaited return of your childhood favorites, like you’ve never seen them before.” Or another TikTok teasing that “not everything stayed in 2006”—the year Hannah Montana premiered—with the Bronco Breakfast name styled in the show’s logo font and “Dropout Companies” written in Disney’s curlicue script. 

Sports and nostalgic sitcoms are just two of the entertainment “spheres” Dropout plans to activate for its brands (and “we haven’t even touched nostalgia for Jams” yet, Blakley says. “Wait ’til you see when we turn that on.”) Along with the future involvement of “a New York sports star,” he says “there’s a “country-western thing for Bronco—it’s gonna be big.” 

Blakley tells me the company is also finalizing partnerships with “some of the biggest streamers in the world” for a live entertainment push fully supported by the brands, noting comedy as one format: “I keep saying this—where is the Gen Z comedy now? SNL isn’t funny anymore, and late night isn’t that funny, either.” 

Who knows what this may look like. A recent Jams Instagram post featured an animated version of Pat McAfee wrestling a strawberry Jams sandwich. 

When we met to talk Dropout, it was at a photo studio in the NoMad neighborhood of Manhattan—the kind that Vogue, ESPN, and L’Oréal Paris use for photo shoots. Blakley and his team had arranged two armchairs by the windows, to catch the good lighting, and small tables stocked with Saratoga and banana water (essentially liquified banana that has emerged as the new challenger coconut water). A production crew from Nashville was also there milling around, in their words, to “film his life.” For Blakley, it’s ABC: Always Be Creating. 

Dropout’s expanding portfolio 

Last week, a very cute monkey introduced a banana Jams flavor, a category first that has people online very excited. The sandwich line has recently muscled into freezers at Walmart, H-E-B, and ShopRite. 

Dropout’s next frozen product, which Blakley hopes to roll out before year-end, is a functional waffle called Grids that’s taking aim at Eggo.

“You can also expect us to launch our own peanut butter and jelly, because there’s an appetite,” Blakley adds. These won’t carry the Jams name, but the concept is simple: Take one of Jams’s three base ingredients and put it in a nice-looking jar. 

Two more frozen products will debut soon—branding and design are now complete, Blakley says—and Dropout is planning at least three non-frozen items, with manufacturing and supply chain built for all of them. (One seems to be a natural energy drink called Nok.)

If that sounds like a lot for a company that launched at Target not even a year ago, Blakley agrees. “Too many ideas at once can be like a snake trying to eat a deer and it chokes and dies,” he says. He’s prepared to sit on them until the time is right. Worst case, he says, is late 2027. 

In the meantime, his attention stays on the brands already in-market, primarily helping Jams chip away at Smucker’s Uncrustables. “I do plan on taking 70% of their market share,” Blakley tells me. “If anything, they should hire me to help them with Hostess and some of their other businesses.”

They may have lost his mailing address, but they can certainly find him on Instagram.