Sydney's Acai Bowl Renaissance

The acai bowl trend truly is the meme that keeps on giving. Every time I make a meme or a story about it, I find myself having a deep and serious moment with myself.

“Ok, this is the last time I post about goddamn acai bowls. The joke's old, it’s getting stale, we get it, people out west are really into acai bowls.”

Then boom.

A brand new dude from the area called Bill is half-threatening me to eat at his new acai bowl place through a 30-second promotional TikTok video paired with 2Pac blaring in the background.

I have to share this with the world.

And the process repeats itself.

The trend, which seems to have started at the end of last year, shows no signs of dying off.

As we get deeper and deeper into this phenomenon, men all across Western Sydney are competing for the top acai bowl position, which is hard when there is pretty much only one supplier for acai puree, so standing it out is difficult. Perhaps this is one reason for it producing so many great moments on Sydney tiktok? The fact that you can’t really set yourself apart from the rest on the quality or taste, so the only way to stand out is by getting the most eye-catching bloke on your tiktok to promote it.

It reminds me of those videos explaining just how small the earth is compared to the universe. The video slowly zooms out to reveal our solar system, then the Milky Way, and further and further—surely it can’t get bigger, but it does. This is how I feel about the acai trend; surely there can’t be a bigger, more intimidating Western Sydney man promoting acai, and there always is.

There’s always a bigger, more intimidating, more Bankstown guy on TikTok willing to advertise the Brazilian superfood that is acai on social media.

The acai bowl trend has slowly grown into one of Sydney’s biggest cultural phenomenons of 2024. 

It’s hard for me to think of a trend that has captured the imaginations of our city so strongly. Not Behd Good Size? Kerser vs 360? The HSP movement? I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve found myself in the middle of a conversation about the origins of the Westie acai bowl renaissance and whether it’s an authentic movement or just a money laundering operation. From classrooms to work sites, acai bowls are on the mind of our city. Honestly, I was sure the great Baked Potato Cheese Melt truck explosion earlier this year was going to be the new Western Sydney food trend, but clearly I was wrong. Somehow or other, the demand for acai bowls has only increased.

Once again, The Area, which has been the meme factory of Australia for 2 decades now, has once again delivered with this bizarre cross-cultural exchange that has taken place.

There are two reasons why I think the acai bowl trend has become such a meme of The Area within a matter of months. One is the people that advertise them; men who look like they just got out of a 5-year stretch at Long Bay Jail—who also comment on how much they miss it there. The other is that to most of us, acai bowls are a quintessential Eastern Suburbs icon. It’s something you’d expect to see in the hands of a girl who doesn’t trust tap water, not someone who sells that girl a bag on a Friday night.

The man who introduced this trend to Western Sydney is Jacob Najjar, also known as the “Unbeatable Texture Guy.” He is the godfather of Western Sydney acai bowls and started his company, Thirsty Monkey, well before it was popular out west in 2018. Their mission statement on their website says:

“Since 2018, our mission has been to revolutionize the way people view acai.”

I think Mr. Najjar definitely succeeded in changing the way people view acai.

What’s wild - and highlights the perils of the new Acai bowl landscape - is that late last year, Jacob Najjar was kidnapped, beaten, and stabbed under mysterious circumstances. He hasn’t made a comment about it publicly.

What’s even more wild is the fact that the second he got out of the hospital after what would be a pretty traumatic experience for most, he made a TikTok brushing it off and telling people to come into his store. What an absolute hustler.

Clearly, a lot has changed for acai bowls since its sun-kissed Bondi days of the mid-2010s.

Just the look of acai bowls, is so Bondi. If I was in a coma for the last 12 years and someone showed me this strange purple goop, I would say, “Yep, they love that shit in Bondi don’t they”. 

The purple puree decorated in elaborate fruit toppings is the most instagrammable food ever, it reminds me of those galaxy tights girls would wear in 2012. Unsurprisingly, the era of the galaxy tights was also the same era that birthed acai’s 1st wave of popularity.

It’s 2014, Flappy Bird and Ebola are huge talking points and music is at an all-time level of annoying—I just looked at the top 100 songs of 2014 and, fuck me dead, 2014 has to be THE year of annoying music. “Happy” by Pharrell, “Timber” by Ke$ha and Pitbull, “Fancy” by Iggy Azalea (all in the top 10)—what a nightmare.

It was around this time that a Brazilian superfood started to gain traction throughout our coastal suburbs. It may just be a coincidence, but these suburbs happen to be the home of Sydney’s Brazilian community.

Did acai bowls become popular here because of Brazilians? Or do Brazilians like moving to these suburbs because they’re the type of places where acai bowls would eventually get traction? I don’t have the answer to this. What I do know is that Oakberry, the largest acai puree manufacturer out of Brazil, says their second-biggest market outside of Brazil is Australia. Bear in mind this is before the current trend going on now. The Eastern Suburbs absolutely love a superfood craze; it makes total sense. It’s the Eastern Suburbs—they love dumb superfood trends. The wheatgrass shot of the 2000s was now the acai bowl trend of the 2010s.

Acai bowls fitted perfectly into the 2010s Eastern Suburbs repertoire of Empire of the Sun, riding penny boards down Campbell Parade, and the filter-era of Instagram.

And so, that’s where it seemed to live for a decade.

The hype around it died off very quickly, and it just became another food you would see in summer when you go to the beach. Slightly overpriced, healthy, Instagrammable, and very Bondi.

I think this is half of why the acai bowl saga currently unfolding has captured the imagination of Sydney—the idea that guys from the complete opposite reality of our city would fall in love with it so long after. It’s bizarre and challenges our preconceived ideas of “The Area.” It literally couldn’t be any further away from what people would assume a 30-year-old male from Greenacre would be into. A lot of Billy Elliot energy is coming from this acai bowl trend, I must say.

The main question you will hear when the eventual discussion of acai bowls in the area comes up is: where the hell did it come from? I have a theory.

During the late 2000s, a boy from the Hills District began uploading gym videos with his brother. The two would eventually form a social media collective on MySpace and Facebook known as the ‘Aesthetics Crew.’ His name was Zyzz, and the movement he started popularized being ‘aesthetic’, globally. He wasn’t the first to do it; it had been around Western Sydney and The Hills forever. ‘Aesthetic’, meaning going to the gym and using roids, but not to look massive—just sexy. To dedicate your life to simply looking as ideal as possible, and not the traditional bodybuilder mentality of trying to look like a cloud. Men would dedicate their lives to training so they could show themselves off at hardstyle music festivals. Zyzz would tragically pass not long after his fame, but the movement he started has stuck around in the bodybuilding world internationally. Someone like Zyzz could only come from this part of Australia—a part of the country where men waxing their legs, manicuring their eyebrows, and calorie counting wasn’t looked at as weird. This Western Sydney attention to appearance really goes against the scruffy, unkempt, unfazed Australian male tradition—and it would normally be bullied out of them if the rest of Sydney wasn’t totally scared of them.

I think The Area’s love of ‘aesthetics’—or looking good—is one of the keys to why it’s taken off so much here. Lots of men in the Area care A LOT about what they put into their bodies, and acai is primarily marketed as a healthy superfood.

The second reason really comes down to the soul of Western Sydney: migration and small business culture. After years of different waves of migrants landing here, a strong entrepreneurial small business culture has developed, from retail to social media, construction, fashion, barbers, and food. If it is profitable, there's someone from the Western Suburbs giving it a crack, and when they see their neighbor succeeding with a new thing, they won’t hesitate to jump on it. Many would have seen Jacob Najjar’s success with Thirsty Monkey. Just like wildfire, acai bowl places would begin popping up from Liverpool to Lakemba.

And so, this natural ability to spot economic potential in an area that is so appearance-driven has resulted in the greatest cultural appropriation in Sydney’s history. The acai bowl has made the unlikely move from East Sydney to Western Sydney.

What I love about these little cultural events, such as the acai craze, is that it’s one of the rare times when everyone in Sydney can have a laugh and be on the same page about something in such a culturally and geographically divided city. Everyone is curious about this situation, and no one finds this trend funnier than people from these suburbs themselves. A lot of my DMs when I talk about acai bowls are from people in the area sending me laughing emojis. Literally everyone, especially my followers from Western Sydney, can see just how bizarre and ridiculous this situation is—the fact that some of Sydney’s most intimidating men have suddenly fallen in love with a white girl superfood.

It seems like the acai bowl has reached its peak, but I’ve also been saying that since March. I just feel like it’s going to be hard to top Bill, aka the Acai Underworld co-owner who says “Yeeeeeaah” at the start of every video. Surely no one can be more intimidating than the 6ft 5 guy with a face tat and the deepest voice in Sydney—but just watch. As usual, there will be a new acai bowl guy who will come along next week and make Bill look like a priest, and I’ll be forced to continue this never-ending Sydney meme once again.