Master the food industry each week—before your coffee cools.
60-SECOND APPETIZER
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🥫 Trust is cooked: fewer Americans than ever believe the food at their grocery store is safe.
💔Grocery's biggest breakup gets ugly: Albertsons and Kroger are suing each other for billions over their failed merger.
🔥 Hackers cooked the fridges: a cyberattack spoiled millions in French groceries overnight.
🌱 Beyond Meat's last stand: the fake-meat pioneer reinvents itself as a protein-drink company.
🍔Flipping burgers, on Prime Video: Five Guys turned its staff cook-off into a TV show.
GLOBAL GRUB
The current global forces shaping our food industry ecosystem.
America is losing faith in its food
A new Gallup poll finds just 65% of Americans are confident the food at their grocery store is safe, down from 73% a year ago and 81% in 2019, a record low. Confidence in the government's ability to keep food safe hit a record low too. After a Cyclospora outbreak and a run of recalls, 73% of adults say they have started avoiding certain brands or foods, up from 53% in 2024. For an industry that runs on trust, that is the number to watch. When shoppers stop believing the label, every brand pays for it.
Albertsons and Kroger are now suing each other
A year after regulators blocked their $25 billion merger, Albertsons and Kroger are back in court, this time pointing fingers at each other. The trial opened Monday in Delaware, with Albertsons seeking at least $8 billion, arguing Kroger did not fight hard enough to get the deal approved and owes a $600 million breakup fee plus damages. Kroger says it owes nothing and blames regulators for the collapse. Two of the biggest names in American grocery spent years trying to combine. Now they are spending millions trying to prove whose fault it was that they could not.
Hackers turned up the heat on France's groceries
In one of the stranger food stories of the year, hackers took control of the fridges in hundreds of French supermarkets and heated them to 50C overnight, spoiling food reportedly worth millions of euros across chains like Carrefour, E.Leclerc, and Intermarche. It is a jarring reminder that the modern grocery store runs on internet-connected systems, and that those systems are now a target. Experts are urging the basics: secure configurations, no default passwords, and a plan for when, not if, someone comes knocking.
ON THE MENU: BEYOND MEAT
An insider look at the industry disruptors, biggest players, and culinary visionaries.
The fake-meat pioneer is betting its survival on a protein drink
Beyond Meat just launched a caffeinated protein drink, Beyond Immerse Protein + Energy, packing 20 grams of plant protein, 5 grams of fibre, and 160 milligrams of caffeine. On its own, it is a product launch. Zoom out, and it looks like a company fighting for its life.
This is the brand that went public in 2019 and briefly traded above $230 a share on the promise that plant-based meat was the future. Today it trades for less than a dollar. Its most recent reported quarter saw revenue fall about 20% to roughly $61 million, with gross margin collapsing from 13% to barely 2% as it wrote down discontinued products and shut its China operations.
Why the industry is watching:
The pivot: Beyond Meat is rebranding as "Beyond, The Plant Protein Company," trying to escape the slumping fake-meat aisle for the booming protein-and-functional-drink one.
The runway: A debt restructuring bought it lower leverage and more breathing room, but sales are still shrinking and management is guiding the next quarter lower.
The bet: Protein is the hottest claim in food right now. The question is whether a struggling meat-substitute brand can get shoppers to drink it.
For a company that once defined a category, the new plan is simple and brutal: find a growing aisle, fast, before the money runs out.
VIRAL BITE
The story everyone is posting about, so we had to bite!
Five Guys turned its burger contest into a TV show
Five Guys has taken its annual employee cook-off, the Five Guys Games, and turned it into a five-episode docuseries on Prime Video called "On The Line: The World Burger Games." It follows crew members from qualifying rounds around the world to the 2026 championship, won by Jonathan Martinez for a $100,000 prize. It is equal parts reality competition and feature-length recruiting ad, and a clever answer to the question every chain is asking: how do you make flipping burgers feel like something worth bragging about?
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
A bite-sized serving of the strange, surprising or just plain random facts.
🌙 Your midnight snack might be harder on your liver than you think.
Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University looked at nearly 200,000 people across three large US studies and found that those who regularly ate late, after dinner or close to bedtime, had a 20% to 30% higher risk of fatty liver disease and cirrhosis.
The catch: it is observational and based on self-reported eating times, so it cannot prove the late snack is the culprit.
Still, maybe close the kitchen a little earlier.
See you next week!
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