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🤖 Burger King hits the brakes on AI: too many drivers were peeling off rather than order from a robot.
☕ Starbucks shrinks again: another 250 cafes are closing across North America.
🍁 Canadians are eating out less: 8 in 10 are cutting back, and the restaurant math is getting ugly.
🍫 Chocolate's giant turns a corner: Barry Callebaut posts its first volume growth in two years.
🎩 Wonka is back: Ferrero revives the candy brand with a Netflix show and purple chocolate.
GLOBAL GRUB
The current global forces shaping our food industry ecosystem.
Burger King taps the brakes on its drive-thru robots
Turns out people really do not want to order a Whopper from a robot. Burger King is walking back its push on drive-thru AI after pilot locations watched customers simply drive off rather than talk to a machine. The chain, testing voice AI at around 1,500 restaurants, now wants to make it easy to reach a human instead. The numbers back the mood: just 23% of diners find AI ordering appealing, while 46% actively dislike it. The lesson for everyone racing to automate the counter: convenience only counts if people will actually use it.
Starbucks pulls the plug on 250 more cafes
Starbucks is closing about 250 more locations across North America, roughly 1% of its 18,000-plus stores in the region, as CEO Brian Niccol keeps pruning the map. The targets are the underperformers that cannot hit their numbers or be upgraded to the experience the chain wants. It follows around 600 closures last year, the first real drop in the US store count since the Great Recession. When the biggest name in coffee starts shrinking on purpose, the whole category pays attention.
8 in 10 Canadians are cutting back on eating out
Canadians are pulling back from restaurants, and the industry is feeling it. A new Restaurants Canada report says 80% are cutting back on restaurant visits, up five points from last year, as living costs bite. Sales are still projected near $130 billion, but 41% of restaurant companies are now losing money or just breaking even, versus 12% before the pandemic, on a razor-thin 4.1% average margin. A lot of favourite spots are running on fumes.
ON THE MENU: BARRY CALLEBAUT
An insider look at the industry disruptors, biggest players, and culinary visionaries.
🍫 The world's biggest chocolate maker wants to be more than chocolate
Barry Callebaut makes the chocolate behind a huge share of the brands you know, and after two years of falling volumes it just turned a corner. New CEO Hein Schumacher's "Focus for Growth" plan zeroes in on 10 key markets, leans hard into premium and gourmet, and pushes the company from selling single ingredients to selling full solutions. Q3 brought the first volume growth in two years, with a target of 2 to 4% a year and the gourmet range trimmed to about 200 products.
Why the industry is watching:
Cocoa costs have been brutal, so a Callebaut turnaround hints the whole chocolate supply chain may be steadying.
The pivot from ingredient to "solutions" is the same move half of Big Food is chasing right now.
VIRAL BITE
The story everyone is posting about, so we had to bite!
Wonka is back, and yes, the chocolate is purple
Everyone's favourite fictional chocolatier is getting a real-world reboot. Ferrero is relaunching the Wonka candy brand this November with four gloriously over-the-top treats: Magic Hats with creamy centres, a PurplyPurple bar filled with purple caramel, berry-cola Oompa Loompa Gummies, and lemon-filled Magic Garden Chewy Ropes shaped like blades of grass. It is all timed to Netflix's new reality show, Wonka's The Golden Ticket, which just premiered. Ferrero, which picked up Wonka in its $2.8 billion Nestle candy deal, says the trick is products that taste great with a few surprising twists.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
A bite-sized serving of the strange, surprising or just plain random facts.
🥕 The baby carrot was invented to rescue ugly carrots
Here is a good one: the baby carrot is not a baby anything. In 1986, a California farmer named Mike Yurosek got tired of tossing the bent, broken, and misshapen carrots that supermarkets refused to buy, so he started shaving them down into smooth little two-inch pieces. The whole product was born to save produce headed for the bin, and it worked so well that today most of North America's baby carrots come from one stretch of California farmland.
One farmer's fix for food waste quietly turned into a billion-dollar snack aisle.
See you next week!
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