Why was there a bottle of BBQ sauce on a shelf in Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta presentation?

Facebook is now called Meta and Mark Zuckerberg truly embraced the new name by going meta during his presentation about the name change.

Speaking during the virtual presentation on Thursday, Zuckerberg explained that he is now looking to embrace the “metaverse” and branch his company out to incorporate more virtual reality technology, while keeping the likes of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram as they are.

That’s all well and good for him but why on Earth was there a bottle of BBQ sauce on the shelf behind him throughout the 90-minute presentation?

Yes, eagle-eyed viewers noticed that there was a bottle of Sweet Baby Rays BBQ sauce just sitting on a shelf on what we can only presume was Zuckerberg’s living room.

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As you can imagine, this odd ornament created a lot of mockery for Zuckerberg (not the only mockery he has faced since the name change was announced).

So what’s going on here? Was it product placement or does Zuckerberg just really love this brand of BBQ sauce?

Well, it turns out that Zuckerberg was being quite clever with us and was making a reference to a presentation that he had done years ago.

That was back in 2015 when he launched Facebook Live in a presentation which involved him basically putting on a BBQ where he smoked and grilled a lot of meat. According to a Ceros article on the presentation, Zuckerberg said the word “meat” 13 times in just 32 minutes and constantly name-dropped the aforementioned sauce.

So there you go. It was just Zuckerberg having a bit of fun – and we’d dare say that people would have found it funny if Facebook didn’t already have a series of controversies attached to its name.