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☕ Starbucks eyes Chipotle: a rumoured takeover would be the biggest restaurant deal ever.
🥤 Coke chases gut health: prebiotic fiber is coming to Coke Zero, Sprite Zero, and Fresca.
🍁 A sandwich with a cause: Maple Leaf turns Canwich into a Buy Canadian campaign.
🛵 Uber wants your office lunch: it is buying catering giant ezCater for $2.3 billion.
🍪 Cookie dough, by the day: Nestle Toll House drops its first Advent calendar.
GLOBAL GRUB
The current global forces shaping our food industry ecosystem.
Starbucks might buy Chipotle, and it would be the biggest restaurant deal ever
The Financial Times reports that Starbucks has been working with advisers on an early-stage proposal to buy Chipotle, a deal Starbucks will not confirm as it doubles down on its "Back to Starbucks" turnaround. At Chipotle's roughly $39 billion value, a takeover with a premium would be the largest restaurant acquisition in history, dwarfing Burger King's 2014 purchase of Tim Hortons. Here is the twist: Brian Niccol fixed Chipotle, then left to run Starbucks two years ago, and since then Starbucks stock is up about 21% while Chipotle is down 45%. On the report alone, Chipotle jumped more than 7% and Starbucks slid 5%. Analysts are split on whether the logic is visionary or a quiet sign Starbucks doubts its own growth.
Coca-Cola is putting fibre in its soda
Coca-Cola is adding 6 grams of prebiotic fibre to Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, Sprite Zero Sugar, and Fresca, with a pilot starting in late October across parts of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. It is the clearest sign yet that the better-for-you soda fight, built by Olipop and PepsiCo-owned Poppi, has gone fully mainstream. Coke first tested these waters with Simply Pop in early 2025, and it has a wave of 2027 launches queued up, from zero-sugar Powerade and Vitamin Water flavors to new Core Power protein shakes. When the world's biggest soda brand starts selling fibre, the functional-soda moment is officially no longer a niche.
Maple Leaf turned a sandwich into a Buy Canadian campaign
Maple Leaf Foods has launched Canwich, billed as Canada's first shoppable local-pride campaign, that uses the sandwich as a frame to spotlight real Canadian businesses as "ingredients" around a Maple Leaf protein, with an interactive map at Canwich.ca showing where to buy each one. Built with agency Sid Lee, it is a direct response to the latest Canada-US trade dispute and the Buy Canadian wave, launching in Hamilton, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver with five more cities to come. It is a clever bet that patriotism can move products off the shelf, even as shoppers keep one eye on the price.
ON THE MENU: UBER
An insider look at the industry disruptors, biggest players, and culinary visionaries.
🛵 The ride app is quietly becoming a food company
Uber just agreed to buy ezCater, the largest online catering marketplace in the US, for $2.3 billion. On its own that is a big deal. Stacked on top of its July move to acquire Delivery Hero, it starts to look like a plan: Uber is turning Uber Eats from a dinner-delivery app into an all-day food business.
Why the industry is watching:
The catering land grab: ezCater brings more than 140,000 restaurants, over $2.5 billion in annual gross bookings, and an average order above $400, a far bigger ticket than a solo dinner.
The B2B unlock: Uber plans to run ezCater through Uber for Business, already used by more than 300,000 companies, turning office lunch into a recurring revenue line.
The global play: paired with the Delivery Hero deal, Uber is buying into corporate meals and international delivery at the same time.
For restaurants, that means more orders flowing through one very powerful middleman.
The real question is how much of the margin Uber keeps as it becomes the table everyone has to sit at.
VIRAL BITE
The story everyone is posting about, so we had to bite!
Nestle built an Advent calendar out of cookie dough
Nestle Toll House has launched what it calls its first cookie Advent calendar, a snow-covered-house design that nods to the Massachusetts inn where the original Toll House chocolate chip cookie was born. Behind its 12 doors, which double as Christmas cards, sit a mix of new and fan-favourite cookie-dough flavours like Snowflake, Santa's, and Peppermint Cocoa. It is a small, sweet sign of a bigger trend: food brands are racing to turn nostalgia and heritage into holiday-season countdowns.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
A bite-sized serving of the strange, surprising or just plain random facts.
🧈 Not all trans fats are the villain we made them out to be.
A new review of 22 studies found that the natural trans fats in dairy, like butter, cheese, and milk, were not linked to heart disease, stroke, or diabetes, unlike the industrial trans fats from partially hydrogenated oils.
So the butter on your morning toast is not the enemy. The fryer oil still is.
See you next week!
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