Jaffles Are Falling From The Sky In Melbourne, And America Is Losing Its Shit

Anybody who pays close attention to airborne food trends will already be across the Jafflechute: Melbourne’s first “pop-up, float down eatery”.

The brainchild of locals David McDonald, Adam Grant and Huw Parkinson, the concept — online-ordered toasted sandwiches, delivered via parachute to hungry consumers from various vantage points above street level — picked up some serious traction last year, with write-ups in Three Thousand, Time Out Melbourne and Good Food.

And, after reaching their $5000 Pozible target last month for their first jaffle drops in Montreal and New York, the “catch and eat” concept is going viral again. This month, Jafflechutes have gotten airtime in TIME, Huffington Post, and USA Today — so it didn’t take long for those wily young trendspotters at Fox News to pick up the story and get all the facts wrong.

They were more than a little perplexed.

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Junkee: Congrats on reaching your Pozible goal. When are you going to be throwing sandwiches at people in NY and Montreal? 

David McDonald: Thanks! We’ll be in America from mid-May till mid-June. Still confirming locations and times at the moment (i.e. figuring out how many people we know in NYC and asking to borrow their apartments.)

Have you gotten any funny feedback from perplexed Americans? Do they even know what jaffles are over there?

SO much. Jafflechutes are a pretty silly, whimsical thing, so of course people are going to react to it in funny ways. The most common misconception is that we’re a regular, profit-focused enterprise. We try to cover our costs, but making money or breaking new ground in the restaurant scene has never been our thing. We’re in this for fun, for ourselves and for those who come to catch a jafflechute.

And no, Americans don’t know what jaffles are — they call them grilled cheese. We call them grilled cheese too sometimes, but only to communicate the concept. We’re pretty confident that Americans will come to understand the word ‘jaffle’. Who couldn’t love the word ‘jaffle’?

When things go viral like this, it’s hard to keep control of the message — and Jafflechutes are being flagrantly misreported by some outlets. Fox News seem to think it’s already happening in New York, and NBC got drones involved for some reason. What’s the funniest thing you’ve heard?

Misreports? MANY.

People keep telling us that we should be using drones to deliver sandwiches, which is a fair suggestion — but we have enough trouble with string and tape as it is without adding rotating blades and radio frequencies into the mix. Some news agencies have gone ahead and said that that’s what we’re doing anyway.

The Chinese whispers effect is interesting to watch. For a while it was getting around in the Netherlands that we started doing this because street level shop rents were to high. Rents may be too high, but that had nothing to do with why we started this. Someone just made that up.

Any plans for further expansion? What’s next for jafflechutes?

Well, it’s all eyes on North America for the moment. After that, we’ll regroup, have a beer and a good think, and probably launch into something even dumber.