If you’ve ever wondered how far Nutella can travel and still hold up, the answer is: more than 250,000 miles.
During a Wednesday Artemis II livestream, viewers got an unexpectedly viral moment when a jar of Nutella floated through the cabin in zero-gravity, casually drifting across the frame as the crew went about its mission.
The moment came just minutes before the astronauts set a new record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth, adding a small but memorable pop-culture footnote to a major leap in space exploration.
“Honored to have traveled further than any spread in history. Taking spreading smiles to new heights,” said the Nutella company in a social media post.
By Friday, the company’s post about the sweetened hazelnut-cocoa spread’s space exploration had more than 4.3 million views.
“Enjoying sweet treats while our Artemis crew takes sweet photos of the Moon!” the NASA Kennedy Space Center commented back.
The viral moment became so huge that during another livestream Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney asked Jeremy Hansen, who is the first Canadian to venture to the Moon, about the incident.
“A lot of Canadians just wanted one point of reassurance that the preference is for maple syrup over Nutella on your pancakes in the morning,” Carney said, joking.
After a delayed pause while the question was transmitted into space the entire Artemis II crew burst out laughing.
While at surface level the event seems like nothing more than a simple meme, ALM Corp., an internet marketing service in Toronto, said the public’s fascination with Nutella in space says a lot about human psychology.
“The reaction to it tells us something about how people experience live events, why everyday objects can become the emotional center of complicated stories, and how a brand can benefit when it appears inside a moment the public is already invested in,” ALM Corp.said in a blog post.
“The Nutella clip became shareable because it made a technically complex mission feel human.”