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🥚 The egg king cracks: Cal-Maine swings to a loss as egg prices crash, and bets on pancakes.
🍪 Chip City crumbles: a buzzy cookie chain shuts all 22 stores overnight.
🍁 A 20-year grocery ban lifts: Walmart can finally sell fresh food in Squamish, BC.
🖨️ Dinner, printed: meet Revo Foods, 3D-printing whole cuts one every three seconds.
🍬 Fans win: Sunkist's Fruit Gems are coming back after an online revolt.
GLOBAL GRUB
The current global forces shaping our food industry ecosystem.
The egg king just cracked
After two years of sky-high egg prices, the biggest egg producer in the US just had a very different quarter. Cal-Maine swung from a $199 million profit a year ago to a $58 million loss, as prices crashed back down and sales fell 42%. Its fix is to stop living and dying by the price of a dozen eggs: it is pouring money into specialty and prepared foods, with prepared-food capacity set to jump more than 60% by 2028, including a brand-new high-speed pancake line.
When even the egg giant wants off the egg rollercoaster, that tells you something about the category.
Chip City crumbles overnight
One of the buzziest cookie chains in America just went dark. Chip City closed all 22 of its remaining locations on Thursday, with a president who had been in the job ten weeks blaming a tough environment and shoppers spending less. Restaurateur Danny Meyer's investment arm had put $17.5 million into the chain, which did more than $35 million in sales last year and peaked at 45 stores in 2024, and a messy lawsuit from a co-founder did not help.
Proof that viral and profitable are very different things.
A 20-year grocery ban finally lifts
For two decades, Walmart was barred from selling fresh produce, meat, seafood, or dairy in Squamish, BC, thanks to town rules meant to shield local grocers. That wall just came down. Walmart has converted its Squamish store into an 86,000-square-foot Supercentre with a full fresh department, after the municipality lifted the restrictions amid population growth and affordability pressure. A small-town fight over who gets to sell groceries, and a sign of how much the affordability conversation is reshaping the rules.
ON THE MENU: REVO FOODS
An insider look at the industry disruptors, biggest players, and culinary visionaries.
🖨️ The startup trying to 3D-print your dinner
Most alt-meat companies are quietly struggling. Revo Foods, a Vienna startup, is running the opposite play, and so far it is working. Instead of moulding patties, it 3D-prints whole cuts of plant-based "fish" and "meat," and the economics are the interesting part: its printers cost about 25,000 euros each, pay for themselves in under two months, and produce one finished product every three seconds. The company says it grew 70% in the first half of 2026, expects about 1.5 million euros in sales this year, and is targeting profitability by late 2027.
Why the industry is watching:
If the printer math holds, Revo has a cost structure most alt-protein brands can only dream of.
Whole cuts, not nuggets, are the hard part of fake meat, and the part shoppers actually pay up for.
VIRAL BITE
The story everyone is posting about, so we had to bite!
The internet brought back a candy
Here is a modern love story. When Sunkist Fruit Gems quietly disappeared, after Ferrara walked away from the licence, fans did not shrug and move on. They revolted online loudly enough that Sunkist is bringing the citrus-pectin gummies back in early 2027, with a new maker in Kentucky set to produce them. The 50-year-old candy is kosher-certified and a fixture at bar and bat mitzvahs and weddings, so this was personal for a lot of people. Never underestimate a snack with a fan club.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
A bite-sized serving of the strange, surprising or just plain random facts.
🍓 Scientists knit sweaters for strawberries
File this under ideas that sound silly until they work. Researchers at NC State made a breathable knitted fabric called Plant Armor, laid it right over strawberry plants, and watched the harvest more than triple, up to 3.5 times more fruit than uncovered plants. The fabric physically blocks insects while still letting through sun, rain, and air, and it even warms the plants enough to fruit earlier, all with no pesticides.
Turns out the future of farming might be knitwear.
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