As a recipe staple, there’s a good reason honey is typically shelved in the baking aisle. But a few years ago, the worker bees at Nate’s Honey began noticing honey was increasingly being used by athletes, gym rats, and hikers as a one-ingredient energy gel.

To ride the trend and fuel it, the brand redesigned its single-serve mini packages, which were originally intended for honey lovers to be able to drizzle on food and beverages on the go, in 2024. The new packages, as the brand explained at the time, were “created with the modern athlete in mind because they are portion-controlled and easy to open and squeeze.”

To learn more about how the brand used innovative packaging to respond to a consumer trend and boost its business, we sat down with Michael Carle, CEO of Harvest Foods, which owns the Nate’s Honey brand, at Retail Brew’s Clicks, Bricks & Everything In Between event in New York on June 3.

Keep reading here.—AAN

The most innovative piece of coffee technology was made by a 130-year-old Italian. Coffee company Lavazza introduced its new sustainable espresso puck, Tablì, to the US yesterday, and it’s the first single-serve coffee product not enclosed in a pod or a cup for brewing. Each puck is 100% ground and packed espresso.

How does it work? You put the wrapper-less puck in the special $100 machine (of course there’s a special machine) that resembles a Keurig, push a button, and your espresso is ready.

Keurig really wanted to win the race for a plastic-free, single cup of coffee, since the SEC slammed it with a $1.5 million penalty in 2024 for recycling claims the agency said were misleading. Keurig neither confirmed nor denied the SEC’s accusations. Nespresso uses aluminum pods that can be recycled, but it requires customers to ship them back.

Big picture: Lavazza’s debut is part of a broader push to bolster its presence in the North American market.

Keep reading here on Morning Brew.—MM

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Yana Shekhter is senior director of brand marketing at A-Frame Brands, which works with retailers like Target and Walmart to create private label and exclusive brands in categories like beauty and personal care.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? I help brands figure out why consumers will want them before we even start building. Then, I build them so they actually deliver on that promise. At A-Frame Brands, I work across a portfolio of consumer brands in beauty and personal care, which means on any given day I could be writing copy for a celebrity-founded skin care line, developing a fragrance naming system for a heritage fashion house, or putting together a pitch deck for a major retail buyer. It’s part strategist, part storyteller, part cultural translator, and I love that no two days look the same.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? A huge part of my job is selling before I’m selling. First, I have to convince a retail partner that there’s a real business case for expanding into beauty or personal care—that their brand has cultural permission, consumer demand, and a white space worth owning. Then, once we’re aligned, I build the brand that actually delivers on that for the end consumer. And threading both of those needles comes down to words. Not just taglines, but the specific word that makes a product feel expensive vs. approachable. In a market this saturated, clear language is clear positioning.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? There’s a project I can’t fully name-drop yet, but we’re building out the product roadmap for a brand with serious nostalgic equity, and it’s been genuinely one of the most exciting things I’ve worked on.

Keep reading here.—EC

101 crosswords from the team behind your favorite email. Built for quick breaks, screen-free mornings, and the brain that appreciated our puns enough to buy the book.