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

FastCompany: 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. [Photo: Julian Otavo/courtesy of Dropout Cos.] 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.

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This article discusses a significant shift in brand strategy driven by Gen Z preferences, highlighting a new brand's challenge to established products, which is highly relevant and impactful for brand professionals.