The Mystery of ‘Human Meat’ for Sale on Temu

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Temu/YouTube

I should get this out of the way: I have no good reason to believe that Temu, the popular discount shopping app, is selling human meat disguised as cans of corned beef hash, and plenty of reasons to believe it’s not. It would obviously be a pretty risky move, brand-wise, and might make people give a second thought to that “shop like a billionaire” tagline.

In terms of e-commerce strategy and best practices, it would also be sub-optimal: Intentional cannibals might not think to look on Temu, so conversions would be low, while customers looking for deals on Hormel products would end up eating some disappointing breakfasts, leave negative reviews, and wonder if they should consider alternative shopping apps. No good. As a regulatory matter, offering a can of man could draw unwanted scrutiny to a company that has been subjected to a great deal already and ultimately targeted by aggressive new tariff policies. No, in fact, any suggestion at all that Temu is selling canned human meat would be utterly ridiculous, which is why I was a little bit surprised, the other day, when an ad shown to me on a search for “Temu food” did exactly that:

Google didn’t respond to a request for comment here, but Temu did, explaining that the ad “shouldn’t have run” and resulted from “a glitch in our automated ad system” that was quickly fixed. (One plausible explanation is that a seller supplied information to Temu intended to differentiate its products from pet food in web searches and some maybe-AI SEO-type tools got a little carried away, resulting this extraordinarily visible ad; a link to the same listing from within Temu’s website contained the phrase “human meat,” too, but the listing itself never did.)

Anyway, this is a roundabout way to get to the main point and the reason I saw this search page in the first place: Temu, which is by some measures the most popular e-commerce app in the world, grew by offering incredibly cheap products shipped directly from China, and is conceptually, as a cross-border retailer, an incredibly unlikely grocer, has gotten into selling food. For humans.

What? Why? These are questions also shared by thousands of commenters on videos like these:

Temu, an offshoot of the Shanghai-based e-commerce company Pinduoduo, launched in the United States in late 2022 and spent the next couple years expanding extremely quickly. Its early success depended on a few different factors: a large selection of extremely cheap (and, initially, often novel or strange) products; gamelike app design, which imported gambling-ish promotional tactics and design conventions refined in markets overseas; extremely large and expensive marketing campaigns across social media and TV, including a Super Bowl ad; a willingness to lose a lot of money to grow, holding prices at a tier below companies like Amazon; and, perhaps most of all, a friendly regulatory environment with low tariffs and international shipping loopholes that meant it was often cheaper to ship a small product to New York City from Guangzhou than from, say, New Jersey.

All of these things have changed, to differing degrees, in the last few years. Temu’s parent company has less tolerance for losing money now and isn’t subsidizing sales as much as it used to (the company works with thousands of independent sellers). Its marketing is no longer inescapable. It has competition, including from Amazon, which launched a Temu-like discount section. Temu’s main proposition now isn’t product novelty or unbelievably low prices but rather somewhat better deals on a much wider range of stuff, including more goods from recognizable brands.

The biggest change, of course, is that the Biden administration initiated a process to close some shipping loopholes and then the Trump administration actually closed them, then began levying tariffs on goods from all over the world, but especially China. This interfered directly, and intentionally, with Temu’s main proposition, which was cheap stuff shipped (almost) directly from manufacturers. By the time this happened, cross-border e-commerce companies had already started preparing, but their solutions, including Temu’s, involved a lot of compromise. Temu’s “fully managed model,” where sellers shipped goods from overseas factories directly to consumers in small, effectively duty-free parcels, no longer made sense by the end of 2025. The company pushed into domestic warehousing, which mitigated some costs but is also more or less what competitors like Amazon and Walmart had been doing for years. Prices went up and dragged down earnings. Temu eyed further expansion in (slightly) friendlier markets elsewhere, including Europe, but also adjusted to the new reality by recruiting more domestic sellers and by expanding what it sells. “The program now spans more than 700 categories,” Temu says, “from footwear to furniture to food.”

Shopping for food on Temu is like shopping for anything else on Temu, which is to say it’s hard to pin down a logic or sensibility to what you see as you browse, particularly after you get the attention of Temu’s recommendations algorithms. There’s a lot of packaged food, including from store brands, suggesting that at least some merchants are reselling products from Costco and Walmart (if you want to pay above retail for Kirkland Chunk Chicken Breast on Temu, you now have that option). Where Amazon’s pre–Whole Foods push into grocery tended to focus on household staples, Temu’s selection is the result of the curatorial choices of hundreds if not thousands of independent sellers — many located, according to seller addresses, in anonymous warehouses, office parks, and private homes and apartments around the country.

The offerings include a lot of shelf-stable snacks and nonperishable pantry items. Given how many sellers are effectively just small-scale import operations, there’s also a large if haphazard selection of international snacks. There are some interesting edge cases, too, including a Chinese business shipping raw honey in the comb from Texas. “It was amazing to find out I could get honeycomb honey through Temu which I could never find anywhere else,” wrote one reviewer, who seemed happy but perhaps uneasily confused. (“Food sellers on the program are U.S.-based businesses fulfilling from U.S. inventory,” a Temu spokesperson said. “Food has grown quickly since launch and includes everything from pantry staples to specialty and regional brands.”) All of this is filtered up through a search-and-social advertising sensibility that emphasizes attention-grabbing listings. Hence, maybe, the cannibal glitch.

The Temu food that’s garnered the most attention by far is the raw meat, as in the TikTok above, which comes from a Sheepshead Bay–based company that got its start selling flash-frozen, fully assembled hot dogs and previously sold meat on Amazon and Walmart. (There’s one competing Temu butcher, as far as I can tell, shipping from what appears to be a farm in rural northern Utah.) The reviews on Temu are mostly positive. The staff at Delish was less impressed. Given that most of the company’s listings appear to have sold a few hundred units at most, “Temu steaks” are probably best understood as viral content, a phrase that reads, to audiences that have seen hundreds of ads for Temu gadgets and cosmetics and discount garments, like a joke, only slightly more believable than an ad for “human meat.”

But Temu steaks are also a useful marker for where the company is going, at least in the U.S. Temu spent billions of dollars selling Americans on ultra-cheap cross-border commerce, which was broadly successful — Temu is popular! — but also lodged the brand firmly in the public’s brains as a place that’s become synonymous with knockoffs. Now that its regulatory advantages have disappeared and then some, it has to sell itself more like Amazon: as a place where you can expect to buy almost anything from sellers based in the country where you live. Granted, there was a time when Amazon selling food on the internet sounded like a joke, too. But Amazon-brand baby food arrived a full decade ago. Temu steaks have a ways to go.