Master the food industry each week—before your coffee cools.
60-SECOND APPETIZER
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🍫 A chocolate giant blinks: Lindt fired its CEO as record cocoa costs wreck the chocolate business.
🎃 Halloween costs more this year: candy prices are up 15%, about four times inflation.
♻️ Waste not: Danone is turning yogurt waste into energy at its biggest US plant.
🧪 Chocolate with less chocolate: the industry is racing to engineer around the cocoa crisis.
🎮 Pizza, now in Minecraft: Domino's put its new pie inside a video game.
GLOBAL GRUB
The current global forces shaping our food industry ecosystem.
Lindt just fired its CEO, and cocoa is the reason
Lindt, the maker of Lindor and Ghirardelli, has pushed out CEO Adalbert Lechner and brought back former chief Dieter Weisskopf on an interim basis, with a permanent replacement not expected until 2027. The trigger is cocoa. Record bean prices and soft demand, especially in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, forced the company to cut its 2026 sales forecast twice, and the stock is down about 28% this year. When the price of one ingredient can cost a CEO his job, you know the chocolate business is in a strange place.
Your Halloween candy got a lot more expensive
Candy prices are up more than 15% this year, roughly four times the overall inflation rate. The reason is in the bag: cocoa, sugar and corn syrup make up about 65% of what it costs to make confectionery, and all three have spiked. Cocoa alone has climbed around 144% since 2019, with sugar up about 44% and corn sweeteners up more than 26%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The treat is still there, the price just got a little scarier.
Danone is turning yogurt waste into energy
Here is a rare bit of good news. Danone is building a $40 million facility at its largest US yogurt plant, in Minster, Ohio, that turns wastewater and food scraps into energy. An anaerobic digester will convert the waste into biogas, cleaner water and nutrient-rich soil amendments, with the gas piped back to run the plant's boiler instead of natural gas. When it opens next spring, it is expected to cut about 3,200 tonnes of CO2 a year. Proof that the unglamorous back end of food, the waste, is quietly where a lot of the climate progress happens.
ON THE MENU: THE CHOCOLATE RESET
An insider look at the industry disruptors, biggest players, and culinary visionaries.
The industry's answer to the cocoa crisis: make chocolate with less cocoa
With cocoa prices breaking records, the big question in confectionery is no longer just how to pay for it, but how to use less of it. A wave of cocoa alternatives, cocoa butter equivalents and compound coatings is moving from the lab toward the shelf, designed to complement cocoa rather than replace it outright.
The targets are the places you would not notice first: the coating on a biscuit, the chocolate in a cereal, the drizzle on a baked good.
Why the industry is watching:
The driver: weather, crop disease and ageing cocoa trees have made supply unreliable and expensive, and that is not a one-season problem.
The approach: most of these ingredients are being pitched as cocoa extenders, not fake chocolate, to protect taste and the label.
The catch: scaling them commercially is hard, which is why food-tech start-ups are pairing up with big ingredient suppliers to pull it off.
The chocolate bar may not change. What goes into it quietly will.
VIRAL BITE
The story everyone is posting about, so we had to bite!
Domino's put its new pizza inside a video game
Domino's is launching a new individual Detroit-style pizza called the Domino, and to sell it, it teamed up with Minecraft. Starting today, buyers can collect one of six character-themed boxes, Domino's Rewards members can unlock in-game items, and the chain is giving away 2,000 free copies of Minecraft Dungeons II every day through November 4 to anyone who buys a Domino and shows proof. It is running in 19 markets, and it is a clever reminder that for a lot of customers the box and the game are half the point.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
A bite-sized serving of the strange, surprising or just plain random facts.
☕ Your coffee quietly gained 40% more calories, and it is not the sugar.
Researchers at Tufts looked at the coffee habits of about 30,000 Americans from 2003 to 2018. People are not drinking much more coffee, but the calories in it jumped from about 43 to 60 a day, and the biggest culprit is not sugar. It is non-dairy creamer, which has quietly overtaken sugar and milk as the main source of added calories, largely thanks to its saturated fat.
The catch: it is a population average, so your oat-milk flat white is not necessarily the problem. But that just-a-splash of creamer adds up more than most people think.
See you next week!
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