👋 Good morning. Have a $20 burning a hole in your pocket? Here’s a solution: High-end grocery chain Erewhon is selling a single strawberry for $19. The fruit is grown in Japan’s Tochigi Prefecture — known as the “Strawberry Kingdom” — between December and June, and hits the shelves in Los Angeles within 24-48 hours of being picked. Sound like child’s play? Go ahead and put a $260 Miyazaki mango or a $396 Rubyglow pineapple on the Amex.
🎧 On the pod:Ben & Jerry are trying to scoop their company back.
NEWS FLASH
🍕 Pizza with a side of fraud: Everyone loves free food, this we know. But some consumers are willing to commit fraud to get their delivery order on the house. Refund fraud accounted for ~48% of consumer fraud on delivery apps, according to a report by fraud prevention company Incognia. Customers often falsely claim their food was delivered cold, late, or not at all. Plus, some make multiple accounts under different emails to avoid maxing out their refunds and to take advantage of offers and discounts. The practice isn’t only an issue for food delivery services: Retailers across sectors lost $103B on fraudulent returns in 2024.
💰 On the other hand: DoorDash must pay $16.8m to New York couriers, some of whom may receive as much as $14k. DoorDash had promised workers a guaranteed payout, regardless of customers’ tips, but did not clarify that it was using tips to meet that amount and pocketing any overages. This upset both drivers and customers, who were told by the app that Dashers received 100% of their tips. DoorDash previously paid $11.3m in Illinois and $2.5m in Washington, DC, over the same issue.
🦉 Back so soon? Duo, Duolingo’s owl mascot, revealed he faked his own death — he was purportedly crushed by a Cybertruck on Feb. 11 — to see if users would bring him back. On Feb. 17, Duolingo challenged users to earn 50B “experience points” by completing language lessons to resurrect the bird, which apparently took one week. Duo, who was featured climbing out of his coffin in a social media post, said the stunt was meant to encourage people to do their lessons and to get pop star Dua Lipa to notice him. As a marketing gimmick, it did garner a lot of attention online — and Dua Lipa posted about the owl’s death on X.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
Sorry you had to see that… Meta is apologizing for a technical error that fed some users violent, graphic videos of people being beaten or killed on Instagram Reels. This follows the company’s scaling back of its automated systems that remove sensitive content.
“Don’t forget about meee!” — Amazon, probably. The tech giant revealed Ocelot, its first quantum computing chip, just a week after Microsoft announced its quantum breakthrough. Amazon aims to one day rent out quantum chips to third parties through its cloud arm.
Rockets on deck: Blue Origin’s next crew is all women, including pop star Katy Perry, “CBS Morning” co-host Gayle King, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Amanda Nguyen, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, film producer Kerianne Flynn, and Lauren Sánchez, a helicopter pilot and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos’ fiancée.
SMALL BUT MIGHTY
Little businesses leaving a dent
You don’t need a bloated budget to make some absolute strides for your business.
See these 15 mini case studies on small brands using data and creativity to skyrocket their growth.
Meet nutria, an ugly rat that could be the hot new meat
It’s National Invasive Species Awareness Week, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service is celebrating with a reminder that some horrible pests are edible.
This year’s hot recommendation? Nutria, a rodent (think: ugly beaver crossed with giant rat) that has been terrorizing wetlands since the ‘40s.
Holding out for a startup hero
The Fish and Wildlife Service recommends using nutria (which it says tastes like rabbit) in gumbo — but no one has stepped in to do something productive at scale with the beasts.
Some startup could come in and be on the ground floor of the new chicken or beef, provided it can market nutria better than “ugly beaver crossed with a giant rat.”
There is a market for repurposed invasive species
None of this is totally absurd.
Pet food brand Chippin uses copi, an invasive fish that is taking over the Great Lakes.
Barcelona-based Poseidona is developing a protein alternative from invasive algae, with ~$1.2m in pre-seed funding.
The process is similar to making fish milk, and like that divisive product, the goal is to make it look and taste nothing like the thing it’s made from.
Meanwhile, German brand Holycrab! is making the most of an invasive species from the US — what they call the “red American swamp crab,” AKA Louisiana mudbugs, AKA crawfish.
Its website compares the little shellfish to a Biblical plague over the way they wreak havoc on Berlin’s native plants and animals.
It presents them as being more palatable than their (let’s be honest) grotesque appearance might imply.
The lesson?
Find a way to eat and/or make money off of an invasive species! The environment will thank you.
Here’s one to get your wheels turning: Unreasonable goals are actually easier to achieve than realistic ones. Let us explain.
Retirement awaits: Is this $100m TikTok strategy your ticket to a life spent on the beach? We’re rooting for you.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Cat figurines stolen from Gordon Ramsay’s Lucky Cat, the celebrity chef’s new Asian-inspired restaurant in London, in a single week.
Maneiki-Neko, typically depicted as a calico cat with a raised paw, is a frequent fixture in Japanese businesses as a good luck charm to the their owners. Each reportedly cost Ramsey ~$5.70, meaning, if his estimation is correct, he lost ~$2.7k in cat figurines that week.
Restaurant theft is surprisingly common, from items as banal as a servers’ pens to more interesting keepsakes, like custom cutlery, glassware, and napkins. In 2019, equipment supplier Nisbets estimated the annual cost of stolen glassware across UK pubs totaled ~$235m.
While Ramsey may not be getting lucky, someone is — he also complained that couples were using the restaurant’s bathroom like a “mile-high” club.
AROUND THE WEB
🕜 On this day: In 1986, MLB commissioner Peter Ueberroth suspended 11 players and penalized 14 others for illegal drug use in a scandal known as the Pittsburgh Drug Trials.
🪦 That’s interesting: Charlotte Temple’s grave can be found in Manhattan, but she was never a real person.
That’s what hackers told Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Jaime Schwartz after they breached his patient information database — for a second time — and he responded by asking them to prove it, according to a new class-action lawsuit that accuses the doctor of not following standard safety protocols and failing to secure patient data.
Schwartz’s alleged negligence shocked even the hackers, who, after leaking more patients’ nudes and personal info, told those same people: “If you find your private data here just email us and we will let you know how to proceed further with actions against this DOCTOR!”
SHOWER THOUGHT
A perfectly straight road would go into space.SOURCE
