🍔 Dead meat

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👋 May the odds be in your favor today. And we’re really hoping for the same in 2032, since there’s a 1-in-63 chance that a 300-foot asteroid smashes into Earth that year. We also hope you don’t have anything special planned for that Dec. 22, since that’s the day NASA has named most likely for a collision.

🎧 On the pod: Startups are racing to extinguish the threat of wildfires.

NEWS FLASH

Sam Altman sitting in front of an OpenAI projection.

🤖 Where was this when we were writing that paper in college? OpenAI announced Deep Research, a tool that can do your Googling for you and gather information on a topic from around the web before synthesizing it into a report. The company said that the AI agent — which is available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers — can handle tasks that would take a human “anywhere from 30 minutes to 30 days” in a taut five to 30 minutes.

🐕 Chew on this: Pet supplier Chewy took the top spot among online retailers in an American Customer Satisfaction Index study, which surveyed ~42k consumers, for the third consecutive year. While customer satisfaction dipped for 66%+ of brands and 1% overall compared to last year, Chewy’s satisfaction score rose 1%. Experts attribute Chewy’s dominance to small touches that connect with customers, like sending e-cards on pets’ birthdays.

💰 Wow, great: Americans owed ~$1.64T in federal student loan debt at the close of 2024, up from $1.59T in January 2021, despite the Biden administration canceling $188.8B for 5.3m borrowers. What gives? The pause on student loan payments during the pandemic, and the rising cost of a US degree. Undergraduate students in the 2024-25 academic year can expect to pay an estimated $24.9k for tuition, fees, housing, and food at a public in-state college, and $58.6k at a private nonprofit one.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

AI won a Grammy. Kind of: The Beatles’ 2023 track “Now and Then,” which was created using machine learning to modernize an original John Lennon demo, took home the award for Best Rock Performance.
Steins are staying dry: German breweries and beer distributors sold nearly 2.2B gallons of beer last year, down 1.4% year over year and 10%+ over the past decade.
Meanwhile, Diageo North America is expanding with a ~$415m plant in Alabama. Diageo’s portfolio includes alcohol brands Guinness and Johnnie Walker and nonalcoholic brand Ritual.

READ UP

What’s top of mind for marketing leaders?

For stories like these…

The economics of unused gift cards
The unsung hero of gas stations
How all-you-can-eat buffets turn a profit
Why do airlines sell most tickets at a loss?

… we launched “Hustlenomics.” And today, class, y’all are lucky enough to get five of our favorite breakdowns in knowledgeable bites.

You’d be correct to print this out and pin it in your cubicle, home office, local library, barber’s bulletin board — wherever, we’ll take it.

Hustlenomics’ Top 5

THE BIG IDEA

A veggie burger against an orange background.

Alt proteins’ diminishing hype

The plant-based meat market used to be hot. When Beyond Meat IPO’d in May 2019, shares shot up 163% in a single day. By June, its valuation had reached $10B.

Today, Beyond Meat’s market cap is ~$258m, as the alt proteins space struggles with inflation and investor pullback.

Willicroft, a Dutch plant-based dairy company, announced its closure due to funding difficulties last month. Co-founder Brad Vanstone wrote in a LinkedIn post that in the company’s six-year history, it produced as much cheese as one of his grandfather’s cows had in its lifetime.
Sundial Foods, a California-based alternative protein startup backed by Nestlé, recently closed, citing a “challenging” fundraising environment, but sold its IP to an unnamed European food company.
San Francisco’s SciFi Foods shuttered last year, also citing a tough fundraising market, despite its hybrid meat (plant-based and cultivated) having reached price parity with traditional beef.

Why is the fundraising environment so “challenging”?

Investments in alt proteins slowed in 2023 due to high interest rates, plus concerns over climate change, the economy, and political discourse surrounding alternative proteins.

Fundraising for cultivated, or “lab-grown,” meat plummeted by 75% from 2022 to 2023, while alt protein dropped by 44%.

Plant-based is still a growing market, per Seeking Alpha, but customers remain unconvinced — despite the good it’d do for the environment.

Real meat is usually cheaper, and vegetarians can find more affordable options in tofu, tempeh, and other brands. Many restaurants have dropped plant-based meats from their menus amid lackluster customer interest.

Legislative and regulatory challenges have plagued the cultivated meat market, with Italy, Romania, France, and US states Florida and Alabama banning its sale.

But is there good news for the lactose intolerant?

We’ll see. California startup Climax Foods worked with artificial cheesemakers and casein proteins to develop cheeses that reviewers say taste just like the real thing.

A climate-conscious, easier-to-digest cheese that actually tastes good could win over consumers, but Climax has still struggled with funding and scalability.

There is at least one interested investor, however: In 2024, Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos’ fianceé and vice chair of the Bezos Earth Fund, announced a $60m contribution to build Bezos Centers for Sustainable Protein, which will attempt to develop better tasting, healthier, and cheaper alternative meats.

🔗

DATA POINT

The cost of climate change: While we were recently reminded of climate change’s environmental impact, a report from climate-risk financial modeling company First Street is shining a light on its financial repercussions.

The human-driven cost of climate change could amount to a staggering $1.47T in net property value losses, in large part due to rising insurance prices and changing consumer demand.

Beyond rising costs, the report predicts large-scale migrations to avoid rising tides and other natural disasters — 55m+ Americans are projected to voluntarily relocate to US states with lower climate risks by 2055, beginning with 5.2m people this year alone.

Expect moving boxes to pile up in California, Texas, and Florida, specifically — those states have absorbed 40%+ of the country’s $2.8T in natural disaster costs since 1980.

AROUND THE WEB

📅 On this day: In 2000, “The Sims” video game debuted in North America.

🤢 How to: protect yourself from norovirus.

🧀 That’s interesting: How a new generation is reinventing cheese.

🧠 Game: You’re the president of a fictional nation. Can you make the best decisions?

🐾 Aww: It’s on.

SHOWER THOUGHT

You stop getting money in birthday cards right around the age you need extra cash the most. SOURCE

Today’s email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Sara Friedman.
Editing by: Ben “What’s the beef?” Berkley.

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