Mattress review site Sleep Junkie is hiring five “dairy dreamers” to record the impact of eating various cheeses before bed on sleep quality and dreams. The three-month assignment pays $1k and, of course, cheese.
In today’s email:
Egg alternatives: The market is yolked.
Chart: Trucks are changing.
Weekend reads: Our best stuff from the week.
Around the web: A Web3 explainer, an ode to Kraft Mac and Cheese, a baby colugo, and more cool internet finds.
🎧 On the go? Listen to today’s 10-minute podcast to hear Zack and Juliet talk about the wild world of egg alternatives, BuzzFeed’s shocking news, burrito season, and more.
The big idea
Is it the egg alternatives’ time to shine?
Eggs are expensive. Will consumers give plant-based eggs a try?
2023-01-27T00:00:00Z
Juliet Bennett Ryla
Eggs, a typically low-cost protein, now cost ~60% more YoY, leading egg headlines (and jokes) to dominate our feeds.
But some consumers have realized you don’t have to break a few eggs, turning to omelet alternatives and creating new business opportunities, perNPR.
Ron Kern of Back Forty Farms in Idaho is selling freeze-dried egg powder that lasts for years for ~$20-$60 a package — and they’ve been selling out.
But there’s also the no-egg egg
The plant-based egg market isn’t huge, worth $30m in the US and accounting for just 0.13% of total egg sales, perBloomberg.
Its funding also pales in comparison to the alt-meat market, securing $208.7m in 2021 compared to plant-based meat’s $2B, perCrunchbase.
But here’s something interesting: Plant-based eggs typically cost more than chicken eggs (AKA shell eggs). Yet in late 2022, prices dropped to ~$1 cheaper per unit than shell eggs.
As shell egg sales declined, plant-based egg sales rose.
Eat Just Inc…
… makes a no-cholesterol liquid egg alternative from mung beans. Its sales shot up 17% YoY. (Fun fact: Eat Just also makes lab-grown chicken that’s available in Singapore.)
Eat Just accounts for ~99% of US liquid plant-based egg sales, but it’s not the only player in the space:
Yo! Egg’s soy and chickpea protein eggs — available in “fried,” “poached,” and “boiled” varieties — are on the menu at an Israeli breakfast chain.
Germany’s Perfeggt, made from fava beans, raised $4m in March.
Spero Foods makes its liquid egg alternative from pumpkin seeds.
The real question is: Will the high prices spur egg loyalists to try something new? Or, as in the past, will we just suck it up?
TRENDING
Yesterday in headlines we did not expect to see but did: “BuzzFeed says it will use AI to help create content, stock jumps 150%.”
SNIPPETS
Top TV: Nielsen crowned Netflix’s “Stranger Things” as 2022’s most-streamed show, with 52B+ minutes viewed, followed by “NCIS” (38.1B), “Cocomelon” (37.8B), and “Ozark” (31.3B).
Intel’s revenue declined 32% YoY in Q4. Hasbro also reported its Q4 revenue dropped 17% and plans to lay off 15% of its staff.
Chipotle plans to hire 15k full- and part-time workers ahead of its busy March-to-May months, or what it calls “burrito season.”
NYC Mayor Eric Adams said he plans to work with Uber and Lyft to make the city’s 100k+ ride-share vehicles zero-emissions by 2030.
Comcast’s Q4 revenue grew to $30.55B, down 5% YoY amid slowing subscriber growth. Meanwhile, Peacock’s revenue bumped 6%, largely thanks to the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Kittl, a Berlin-based Canva competitor that offers an in-browser graphic design platform, raised $11.6m in Series A.
Southwest Airlines reported an $800m loss in Q4 pretax profit, due to the 16.7k+ flights canceled over the holidays. Southwest’s net loss was $220m, compared to a $68m a year prior.
JetNet, an aviation data company, bought ADS-B Exchange — the site Jack Sweeney uses to track celeb jets — sparking concerns that the data will no longer be freely available for public use.
Surprise: A woman is suing the makers of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky after learning its mini bottles of Fireball Cinnamon don’t actually contain whiskey, but malt- and wine-based spirits.
Busted: The FBI shut down Hive, a ransomware gang that allegedly stole $100m+ by hacking hospital, school, and company systems, then demanding payment.
$100m cup of joe: Frozen coffee pod creator Matthew Roberts has a few tips for locking down high-profile investors. We broke down his advice in this short video.
The Hustle Recommends
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Chart
Olivia Heller
How America’s pickups are changing
Less bed, more cab, and a whole lot of pleasure driving.
2023-01-27T00:00:00Z
Jacob Cohen
The Ford F-150 has been America’s bestselling car for 41 years.
Last year, an F-Series Truck was sold every 49 seconds, and pickups accounted for the top three bestselling cars nationwide.
Interestingly — despite stunts like this one, where an F-150 tows a double-decker freight train filled with 42 other F-150s — data shows a third of pickup owners rarely or never use their truck for hauling, while two-thirds rarely or never use it for towing, per Axios.
Instead, 87% of pickup owners frequently use their truck for shopping, and 70% say they do so for pleasure driving.
To accommodate for this, today’s F-150s are 63% cab and 37% bed, a near-total opposite from early generations’ 36% cab, 64% bed design.
So what?
Since 1990, the average mass of US vehicles has increased 25%. Pickups are already a safety concern, with twice the pedestrian strike fatality rate as smaller vehicles.
They’re getting heavier, too, as the industry electrifies them with enormous batteries. Ford’s F-150 Lightning, for instance, at ~6.5k pounds, weighs 35% more than its gasoline twin.
Free Resource
Five tips for breaking into TikTok
Lookin’ at you, old-timer. And smiling. (Love you.)
But you’re probably scared to make the jump to TikTok. It’s not even the cloudy regulations — it’s the clout implications. We understand.
In such strange digital corners, take a page from the pros. Here are five steps from our social media team on making relevant short-form videos.
Chart: Is India Apple’s next frontier? It sure is looking like it.
Story: Our visual explainer about what the hell stock buybacks are.
Video: A quick clip about why Florida makes $20m a year from Gatorade.
AROUND THE WEB
🎧 On this day: In 2003, the Library of Congress announced the first 50 recordings to be added to the National Recording Registry, including Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition speech, and Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” skit.
✏️ From our blog: For many, work is just a thing you have to power through each day. But what if you could actually enjoy it? There’s a way.
🧀 That’s interesting: Writer Ivana Rihter reflects on Kraft Mac and Cheese, a meal that’s stayed pretty much the same, in both substance and cost, for decades.
