Master the food industry each week—before your coffee cools.
60-SECOND APPETIZER
Short on time? This section’s got you covered.
🍔 A Tariff Break for Beef: Washington waves 300,000 tons of ground beef in duty-free for 90 days to cool prices near $7 a pound.
🥩 The Plate Police Get Sued: A doctors' group is suing over the 2026 dietary guidelines, alleging beef and dairy insiders wrote red meat back onto your plate.
☕ Starbucks Trims the Back Office: The chain is cutting more than 200 corporate roles and closing four regional offices.
🍄 Meat, Minus the Animal: Sweden's Millow is growing alt-meat from mushroom mycelium and oats, no binders required.
🍩 Dunkin' Hires an Influencer: Its "Earle-Y Riser Meal" with Alix Earle rides the launch of her Netflix show.
GLOBAL GRUB
The current global forces shaping our food industry ecosystem.
Washington Puts Your Burger on Sale
Tariffs are back on the menu, this time as a discount. With ground beef near $6.88 a pound in July, up more than 25% since 2024, the White House is waving 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef through duty-free for 90 days, on a promise it sells at 25% below current prices. The shortage is real: U.S. cattle processing hit its lowest level since 1970 this summer, the hangover from 2023's drought and ranchers leaning into dairy. Not everyone is cheering, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association warns that flooding the market with below-market beef undercuts the herd rebuild the industry actually needs. For restaurants and grocers, it is a short-term break on a core input, with a political clock ticking on it.
The Fight Over What's On Your Plate
The 2026 dietary guidelines are heading to court. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has sued to overturn them, arguing that beef and dairy industry insiders shaped a final version that suddenly champions red meat and beef tallow, reversing a 2024 independent draft that leaned plant-forward. The suit points to the nine-person advisory panel's financial ties to meat and dairy groups and asks a court to pull the guidance from federal nutrition programs. Whatever the verdict, these guidelines steer school lunches, hospital menus, and grocery habits, so a courtroom fight over them is really a fight over demand.
Starbucks Trims the Corporate Fat
Starbucks is cutting more than 200 corporate roles, and the math comes from two places: 104 positions from a restructuring announced back in May, plus 120 employees who declined to relocate to the chain's new Nashville support center. Four regional offices are closing, two of the cuts are VP-level, and separations run from October 18 to November 1. It is a leaner back office for a company still working to steady its business.
ON THE MENU: MILLOW
An insider look at the industry disruptors, biggest players, and culinary visionaries.
🍄 Meat You Can Pronounce, Grown in a Day
Most alt-meat reads like a chemistry set. A Swedish startup named Millow is betting the future tastes simpler. It grows its meat alternative by pairing mushroom mycelium with oats and psyllium, then running a 16 to 24 hour dry fermentation that needs no binders and no additives. The result is roughly half fungi, half plant, with a short ingredient list that does the marketing for it.
Why the industry is watching:
Clean by design: mycelium, oats, and psyllium, and nothing else.
Fast and frugal: a solid-state dry fermentation turns raw inputs into product in under a day.
Real backing: a EUR 2 million ($2.3M) round funds a commercial launch near Gothenburg within months, starting with Nordic foodservice.
Alt-protein spent years chasing perfect imitation. Millow is chasing something plainer and maybe smarter: a label you can actually read.
VIRAL BITE
Everyone and their mom is doing it… so let’s talk about it.
Dunkin' Hires an Influencer to Sell You Breakfast
Dunkin's fall menu is here, and its headliner isn't a pumpkin, it's a person. The "Earle-Y Riser Meal," co-created with social star Alix Earle, pairs a Shakin' Espresso, a Wake-Up Wrap, and three Munchkins, and it lands alongside eight pumpkin items and the chain's first tiramisu drink collection. The timing is no accident: the collab rides the launch of Earle's Netflix reality series, turning a value meal into a pop-culture moment. Fall menus used to compete on flavors. Now they compete on followers.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
A bite-sized serving of the strange, surprising or just plain random facts.
🧬 Your Lunch Is Mostly a Mystery
Your dinner holds more than 26,000 chemical compounds, and scientists have studied only about 150 of them.
The other 25,850 are still a mystery.
See you next week!
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