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Snacker.News

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Snacker.News

Snacker.News is a community-curated link board covering the snack industry, live at snacker.news under the tagline “Filings from the snack economy.” It was created in 2015 by Josh Y., and KmikeyM acquired a majority stake in January 2016 by shareholder vote, the first media acquisition in KmikeyM’s history. The original site published from 2015 until it was taken offline at the end of 2024, and the publication was dark for all of 2025. In April 2026 Mike Merrill relaunched it as a Hacker News-style board, reloading 618 posts recovered from the public archive of the first version, so the returned site reads as ten years deep from its first day.

Origin and acquisition

Snacker.News began as Josh Y.’s side project: a collaborative news aggregator about snacks, built on the open-source Telescope platform. Merrill was a longtime user. In late 2015, in the middle of KmikeyM’s Sandwich Theory period and as the internet genre “snackcore” was taking shape, he proposed taking a majority stake.

The proposal went to shareholders on January 8, 2016 as Acquisition of Snacker.News and passed with 84% yes. What shareholders authorized was specific. KmikeyM would take majority ownership, with the creator staying on to support the technical side. Operating costs such as hosting and advertising would come from KmikeyM funds, and all profits would flow back to them. Josh Y. would receive KmikeyM shares in exchange for giving up his majority stake.

The proposal framed the acquisition as the first step in something larger. In Merrill’s words, it was “the beginning of a much more ambitious plan: building a snack media empire, which would encompass partnerships, acquisitions, and new projects.” Snacker.News was to be the hub, with sister projects such as Is This A Sandwich? attached to it.

The first run, 2015 to 2024

The recovered archive gives a fair picture of what the site was. Between September 2015 and December 2024 members filed 618 posts: links to earnings reports, flavor launches, factory news, executive moves, and the stranger corners of consumption culture. Activity came in waves, with the busiest years being 2019 and 2021, and Merrill himself submitted the large majority of posts. The site’s X account posted as @snacklords.

The empire did not arrive on schedule. In January 2018 Merrill put Snacker.News on the list of things he had started and not finished when he asked shareholders to release him from every open project, the vote known as Project Bankruptcy:

“You approved my acquisition of Snacker.News. I rarely post there and have become the equivalent of a deadbeat web dad.”

Shareholders refused to release him, and the site kept going, quietly, for another six years. By then the original build, on the Meteor-based Telescope platform, had gone a long time without an update, and the editorial line had drifted toward what the publication would later concede were “overly speculative, some might say conspiratorial, theories about the snack industry.” The last post in the archive is dated December 16, 2024.

The shutdown

Snacker.News was offline for all of 2025. The publication attributes the silence to a legal dispute with Mondelēz Global LLC, the parent company of Oreo, Ritz, and Triscuit, and says the matter concluded through a confidential resolution process. It has not disclosed the terms. On April 27, 2026 it announced that it was resuming publication, and that as a condition of its return it had adopted specific editorial standards. Among them: it will not characterize executive departures or restructurings as punitive responses to the commercial underperformance of limited-edition or seasonal snack products, and it will not speculate about the relationship between the reception of a novel flavor profile and subsequent personnel decisions. The same notice thanked Josh Y. for having warned the publication about the direction of its coverage. Its About page now describes the revised mission as “the TMZ of snacks: faster, lighter, less litigious, still committed to the beat.”

The pause was, in the site’s own accounting, the end of a nine-year pursuit of being “the Fleet Street tabloid of snacks.”

The return, 2026

Merrill re-registered the domain on April 25, 2026 and rebuilt the site over the following weekend. The 618 posts of the original were recovered from the Wayback Machine the same day, with their original submission dates preserved, and the new site went live on April 27, 2026, the day of the announcement, as “Vol. II.”

The return changed the model. The 2016 plan had been content production: articles, video, brand partnerships. The 2026 version is curation. Anyone can read. Signed-in members can submit links, upvote, and comment in threaded discussions. Posts are filed under four sections: Biz, Drops, Rumors, and Culture. The site is built on Cloudflare Pages with a Supabase database and Clerk sign-in, and it is the first KmikeyM property where a shareholder’s identity carries across from one property to another.

Masthead

The site lists Mike Merrill as publisher, Josh Y. as “silent partner and conscience,” and Sid Thalberg on editorial.

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