The online food delivery industry has managed to solve an issue that has managed to stifle online retailers-- the so-called "last-mile"delivery. But the companies that can pull it off and turn a profit, tend to be local. The logistical challenge of the last mile is, in part, why Amazon's food delivery service, Amazon Restaurants, just failed. Companies like Seamless, Postmates, and Grubhub have the advantage of being small and local. Still, Amazon has taken note, and might co

That pricing disconnect comes from a lot of moving parts in the industry. For example, there's an oversupply of coffee beans, and industry-wide moves towards less coffee-reliant drinks, like pumpkin spice lattes or Ariana Grande's "cloud macchiato." Today on The Indicator, how that squares for coffee drinkers. Full story here. #Retail #Food

How did Colonel Sanders and Kentucky Fried Chicken take over Christmas in Japan? PLUS: Household Name Uncut covers some Christmas decorating gone horribly wrong and the curse of the colonel. #Culture #Japan #Marketing #Trends #Food

The Japanese are eating less rice. Blame TV, the internet, burgers, Italian food, a growing economy. Blame the lunch ladies! Rice consumption in Japan is about half what it was in the 1960s. But guess what? Demand for Japanese rice may be way down, but prices are going up. In fact, prices are now so high that Japanese people are buying imported rice, rather than the home-grown stuff. On the face of it, Japanese rice appears to be defying one the basic laws of economics, suppl

Listener Brian Stieler had this question: Why is the ice cream machine at McDonald's always broken? Full story, . #Consumers #Retail #Food

Humans have been eating meat since, well, before we were human. But there are so many of us now eating so much meat that raising all those animals is having a big impact on the global environment, including the climate. That has people around the world scrambling for meat substitutes, but something better than those dry and pasty veggie burgers. Patrick Brown, founder and CEO of Impossible Foods, thinks he's hit the jackpot. His company invented a veggie burger that claims to

There are picky eaters and then there are the Gastronauts of the world. "What's the oddest thing, by American standards, you've ever tried?" I asked Irina Lust. "The blood thing," she answered. "We had a blood dinner, everything was bloody. And I loved it. It's like red wine almost, but more like aged and spoiled and stinky but it tastes good. I like it." Lust is a member of the Gastronauts, a club for adventurous eaters in New York. The group spent one recent evening eati