Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.

Retail Brew

Erin Cabrey

retailbrew.com

Valentine's Day chocolates in a store aisle 

Valentine's Day confection prices increase

Confection giants like Hershey and Mondelez continue to implement price hikes

Valentine’s Day indulgences are coming at a higher price this year

The Farm Bill's impact on retail 

 The multiyear landmark legislation for food and agriculture has governed programs and policies since 1933.

A new Farm Bill is coming this year, and it promises to impact the retail industry

Too Good to Go users have formed a community around getting the best haul for the lowest price

Consumers are using this food-waste app to cut down their food spending

Simply orange orange juice, milk, eggs, ice cream and paper towels in front of goPuff bag

Food & Bev

With the buzz around healthy sodas far from fizzling, Pepsi is doubling down on the emerging segment just months after 

 one of its pioneers, Poppi, by launching a new innovation: Pepsi Prebiotic Cola.

The product is “one of the largest new innovations in the cola category,” Mark Kirkham, CMO of PepsiCo Beverages US, told Retail Brew. Containing 5 grams of cane sugar, 30 calories, and 3 grams of prebiotic fiber, the new soda is aimed at giving consumers more soda choices, he said, as Pepsi tries to meet demand for more 

. It’ll be sold first online in Original Cola and Cherry Vanilla flavors for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, followed by a retail debut in February, priced at a premium to traditional Pepsi, Kirkham said.

Poppi, whose acquisition was completed in May, also offers Classic Cola and Cherry Cola flavors with a nearly identical nutritional profile, but Kirkham sees the two as complementary, selling in two separate soda segments that reach different consumer sets.

Kirkham broke down the new product, and how it fits into its portfolio alongside Poppi and aligns with Pepsi’s larger beverage innovation strategy.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why did Pepsi decide to develop this product?

One of the things we wanted to do is address two opportunities. One is the 

. Particularly, we’ve seen occasions drop over time in the core, but especially in diet [soda], and also to look for new ways to deliver more, better-for-you functional ingredients into our core. And obviously this was early days in what has become the modern soda business, and we started working on this well over a year ago.

We found…we could get to an amazing-tasting product that is no artificial sweeteners, that’s 5 grams of cane sugar, that’s got the taste of Pepsi…But also it’s got prebiotic fiber…And it’s the kind of ingredient that we’ve seen bringing new consumers into the category. The reality is, no one has that in cola, and obviously super complimentary to Poppi, who do have two cola SKUs, but that’s only 8% of their mix. We feel this is a great opportunity to: one; bring innovation to the traditional cola category; two, compliment this amazing new family member in Poppi—they are the leader in developing the modern soda category; and then three, offer choice. Offering choice to our consumers is the ultimate goal of these innovations…It’s a win-win for the consumer, and it’s a win-win for us.

What are your thoughts about how similar those products are?

A lot of what makes Poppi so special is it’s been built from the ground up. It always was clean label, natural ingredients. One of the biggest drivers there was always the apple cider vinegar. When you taste their cola, particularly their cherry and their regular cola, it’s a very different flavor profile than, let’s say, traditional cola, like we offer with Pepsi. We felt there are a lot of cola lovers out there that have this certain expectation of a cola flavor, particularly of Pepsi, but they also want alternatives in terms of different sweetener systems, or added benefits, or having lower sugar. Being able to address that part of the market that may not be being addressed through the cola segment within modern soda—that’s where the real opportunity is for us.

The prebiotic soda space has been popping off for several years. What instigated the development of this product now?

We were just listening to the consumer, and we were seeing the emergence of different segments in the category.

This is about Pepsi, and Pepsi delivering a new product to address the consumers of cola, or, in the case of maybe some of the younger consumers who maybe didn’t grow up with cola like I did, right?...We’re bringing them in through the fact that this is only 5 grams of sugar, no artificial sweeteners, that it’s only 30 calories, and the prebiotic fiber gives it a new way to bring in a different audience and a new consumer.

We actually think it’s a great opportunity for, let’s say, Gen X female diet cola drinkers. There’s an opportunity to really source from a broader range of consumers. This is not just a pure Gen Z play, which is very much what’s built modern soda. This is a broader play for cola lovers.

How are you balancing innovating on the core versus bringing on acquisitions like Poppi?

The reality is you have to do both…I like to say “core and more.” The only way you’re really going to drive growth in some of our categories is to really ensure that your core is healthy and that you’re continuing to innovate your core, but at the same time, you cannot miss out on these new and emerging categories, like what we saw in modern soda and Poppi. It’s a balanced approach that you need to take with innovation, but you must make sure that you’re doing both core and more, because we built this amazing brand for over 125 years. We'’ve helped create amazing products through our Diets, through our Zeros, but this next generation of consumer and as the category evolves, there’s opportunities to offer new innovation within the core, and that’s what we're doing.

PepsiCo CMO talks Pepsi Prebiotic Cola and possible Poppi competition 

The new product is “one of the largest new innovations in the cola category,” Mark Kirkham, CMO of PepsiCo Beverages US, told Retail Brew. 

Morning Brew Creative Studio

Picture this: You run the neighborhood’s favorite coffee shop. Disaster strikes: Your espresso machine breaks before the Monday rush. No cappuccinos = no sales.

Not the ideal start to your week, but don’t panic. You book a repair—paid for using today’s sales, pre-espresso machine meltdown.

, you get instant access to your earnings the moment you make a sale. No waiting. No cashflow gaps. Just real-time business agility.

, so you can spend on repairs, inventory, or vendor payments without skipping a beat.

You read that right. Since 2019, Square and Mastercard have partnered to bring sellers the Square Debit Mastercard—a free business debit card designed specifically for small businesses. And now, new account holders can sign up for checking and payments in one convenient step, speeding up access to the tools they need.

The numbers speak for themselves. Square reports having over 250,000 active debit card sellers per month. And in 2024, sellers using Square Checking spent more than $3.6 billion using their debit cards—a 29% increase compared to 2023.

We teamed up with Mastercard and Square to learn how the Square Debit Mastercard empowers quick-service restaurants and small businesses to adapt quickly as they grow.

With the Square Debit Mastercard, merchants gain access to funds the moment they make a sale. Let’s go back to your hypothetical coffee shop. As soon as you sell the day’s first latte and breakfast sandwich, you can access that revenue immediately.

As the morning slows down, your staff is busy prepping for lunch hour and the mid-afternoon rush. If the shop runs out of cream, sugar, or even fresh fruit, one of your team members can take the Square Debit Mastercard to a local grocery store to grab the ingredients needed for the busy afternoon ahead—all paid for by the morning’s sales.

The same goes for equipment malfunctions and repairs. If an oven goes out, the shop can pay for repairs the same day. With funds instantly available, merchants can keep their shops running, the coffee strong, and customers happy.

In restaurants, things move fast: Vendors drop off fresh ingredients daily, menus need last-minute adjustments, and equipment needs regular tune-ups. Merchants must be able to manage and pay for what they need as quickly as possible.

Because the Square Debit Mastercard makes funds available immediately after a sale, merchants can eliminate worries about how long it’ll take to pay vendors. No more cashflow gaps or delays: You can pay instantly using your vendor’s preferred method, from debit card and ACH

The restaurant business is ever changing, but the need for agility and flexibility is constant. The Square Debit Mastercard empowers restaurants and small businesses to adapt to whatever the day (or night) brings.

Now, merchants can opt in to checking and payments in one streamlined process—making it faster than ever to get your free business debit card and start spending your funds on what matters most. Cover business expenses, pay for supplies, access funds, and move money whenever you need to.

Small businesses need speed to succeed. Square Debit Mastercard can help. 

person putting food together in restaurant kitchen

Square-Mastercard

square_mastercard_article1

How restaurants and small businesses get instant access to profits

In the restaurant business—where timing is everything—fast access to funds can make or break your day.

Get it while it’s hot: How restaurants can instantly access funds as they grow

Andrew Adam Newman

At a campaign event where tables were festooned with groceries last August, then-candidate President Trump 

 if elected, he would “immediately bring prices down, starting on Day 1.” But almost 150 days into his second term, menu prices are up over last year, according to new data from Toast.

It will come as no surprise that avian flu-related increases in egg prices have driven up the price of omelets, with the median price on restaurant menus for April is $14.71, up 5.4% YoY. But the price of coffee you wash down those eggs with is up too, with the median price of a nothing-fancy regular cup up 5.1% YoY in May, to $3.50.

Moving beyond breakfast (one hopes), the median price for a beer was up 2.7% YoY in May, to $6.44.

Other menu item YoY median price increases in May, per Toast:

Results are based on transactions from the ~140,000 restaurant locations on Toast’s digital technology platform.

Toast also analyzed tipping rates, which for full-service restaurants rose a wee bit, from 19.3% in Q4 to 2024 to 19.4% after being flat for the previous three quarters.

While tipping is not as high as the pandemic plateau of 19.9%, Toast noted we’re in the ballpark of pre-pandemic levels, which ranged from 19.5% to 19.7% over 2018 and 2019.

President Trump’s budget megabill that passed in the House proposes exempting those tips from federal taxes, but in the Senate, the no-tax-on-tips is getting some 

Trump promised to reduce food costs on Day 1, but menu prices are up, per Toast data.

It’s not just egg dishes that are up, per Toast.

Trump promised to reduce food costs on Day 1, but menu prices are up

AMC will join competitors Regal and Cinemark and begin showing ads at what’s called the “

,” when the lights go down after the previews (which themselves follow commercials) and when its movies had previously begun. The company had considered doing so in 2019 but declined to, stating in a news release at the time that it had concluded “US moviegoers would react quite negatively to the concept.”

 Are there too many commercials at movie theaters? 

, we told you about a Mondelez International lawsuit that claims Aldi packaging for some of its private label products looks so similar to packaging for its products, including Oreo and Nutter Butter, that it is “likely to deceive and confuse customers.”

So we asked if you’ve ever accidentally purchased a store brand instead of an advertised brand because its packaging was so similar. More than 1 in 5 (22.1%) said that yes, you have inadvertently bought a private label dupe when you meant to get the real McCoy, while 77.9% of you never have.

More than 1 in 5 accidentally purchased a look-alike store brand

Plus: Too many commercials at movie theaters?

Hot Topic: More than 1 in 5 accidentally purchased a look-alike store brand

 by Mondelez International claims packaging for some private label products sold by Aldi looks so similar to packaging for Mondelez products, including Oreo and Nutter Butter, that it is “likely to deceive and confuse customers.”

 Have you ever accidentally purchased a store brand instead of an advertised brand because its packaging was so similar? 

A person holds a shopping basket in the middle of an aisle. 

Do store brands look too much like advertised brands?

Take our reader's poll.

Hot Topic: Do store brands look too much like advertised brands?

There’s disappointment, and then there’s despair, and a vivid example of the latter came in the unlikely form of an April review on the Annie’s Homegrown website for its boxed Macaroni and Classic Cheddar, which has a new recipe that the package proclaims is “Now Cheesier!”

“I’ve been eating this mac and cheese since I was literally 2 years old,” the one-star review began. “To say I’m devastated over the recipe change is an understatement. It tastes NOTHING like it used to. I’m never buying again unless you change the recipe back.”

General Mills, which purchased Annie’s in 2014, 

 the new recipe for some of the brand’s mac-and-cheese products in September, calling it a “delightful upgrade” that has “even more ooey gooey real cheese” in a press release.

But many Annie’s customers disagree, and with the exception of incentivized positive reviews it imported from the Influenster.com website, many 

“‘Now cheesier’ is extremely disappointing :(” stated an April one-star review from a woman who said she’d been eating the product “exclusively for 22 years” but now found the sauce to have “significantly less flavor” and wouldn’t be purchasing it again unless they “bring back the old recipe.”

 on Mouse Print, a consumer advocacy website, compared the old and new ingredient lists for the products and concluded that Annie’s is engaging in “skimpflation,” which refers to the reformulation of products with cheaper ingredients.

The post concluded the new “ingredients don’t exactly shout new and improved.” Even though cheese is high in protein and calcium, it turns out the “Now Cheesier” 

 has 22.3% less of both protein (9 grams, previously 11) and calcium (90 milligrams, previously 110).

That nutritional shift appears to come from a change in the recipe that General Mills did not highlight in its press release: The fourth and fifth ingredients from the old recipe, butter and nonfat milk, have been removed and replaced with cornstarch, a thickener which contains no protein.

Retail Brew asked Renee Leber, the food science and technical services manager at the Institute of Food Technologists, who’s worked on many product recipe developments and reformulations, to examine Annie’s old and new recipes and nutrition panels.

Leber noted that while truth in labeling requires that the new recipe have a statistically significant amount of more cheese, Annie’s has not made claims about either the percentage of increased cheese content or the percentage of cheese, listed as the second ingredient after pasta in both old and new formulations, contained in the overall product.

With the caveat that it’s “almost impossible to guess” a company’s motivation for reformulation without seeing a recipe’s exact proportions, Leber suggested it was likely a cost-cutting strategy.

“Logically speaking, there’s a good chance that if they took the milk and the butter out, replaced it with cornstarch, and then did a smaller percentage increase on the cheese, that they might have gone to a less expensive formulation,” Leber told Retail Brew.

Sally Lyons Wyatt, global EVP and chief advisor of consumer goods and food service at Circana, a Chicago-based market research firm, said that with the current nutritional obsession with 

, it’s counterintuitive that Annie’s reformulated a product to have nearly a quarter 

“If you give up on the protein, you’re running right into a very heavy headwind, because everybody’s upping the grams of protein, not taking them down,” Lyons Wyatt told Retail Brew.

Fans of Annie’s, which promotes its use of organic ingredients, may be more apt to notice such nutritional nuances.

“The natural food consumer is more in tune than the mass population consumer,” Lyons Wyatt said. “[Natural food] consumers inherently are more health conscious, health aware, health educated, [and] therefore are very much going to be zeroing in on what changes were made.”

Retail Brew posed several questions in writing to General Mills, among them: why it changed the Annie’s recipe to begin with, why the amount of protein in the product might have decreased if it added extra cheese, why it appeared to have removed milk and butter from the recipe, and whether it was considering returning to the old recipe.

The company addressed none of those questions directly in a written response.

“We’re always looking for ways to ensure our products deliver on the taste and quality our consumers want,” wrote Mollie Wulff, corporate communications manager at General Mills.

Wulff said the brand “spoke to many Annie’s fans during the recipe development process” and that “the new recipe with more cheese has been well received overall. We know any changes to a beloved product can come with mixed feedback, and we welcome consumers to continue to share their thoughts with us.”

There’s no indication that the new recipe is hurting sales for Annie’s mac and cheese products, at least not yet. For the 52 weeks ending April 20, Annie’s revenues were up 2% over the previous year, more than the 1.6% increase for the overall mac and cheese mix category, according to Circana data. Category leader Kraft Heinz saw revenues decrease 4.8% over the same period, while private label mixes (

 of late across multiple categories) grew 5.3%.

 the recipe for its buttery spread, with water, previously second, becoming the first (and most plentiful) ingredient.The new packaging also highlighted that the reformulation contained 39% vegetable oils, down from 64% before.

After an onslaught of negative reviews and other consumer backlash, Conagra, which owns the brand, reverted back to the original recipe.

Annie's new Shells & White Cheddar box that proclaims "Now Cheesier!" besides slices of cheese and bowls of pasta.

Annie’s new mac and cheese recipe has longtime fans fuming

The “Now Cheesier” version swapped butter and milk for cornstarch. 

There’s a lot to worry about eggs these days. Will prices, which reached an 

 in February, continue to drop? Will restaurant chains like Denny’s and Waffle House reverse their egg 

 on menu items? And will thrifty celebrants resort to dyeing and hiding 

But here’s one thing we don’t have to worry about as much as our forbearers did: a dozen white jumbos breaking on the way home from the grocery store.

So ubiquitous are egg cartons that they don’t come in for much glory. And yet they are a marvel of form and function, keeping products as delicate as porcelain teacups safe on long hauls and short Trader Joe’s runs, with no tissue or bubble wrap, only ingeniously designed cardboard or plastic.

“As food packaging has become more sophisticated—from aseptic linings in cartons of milk to vacuum-packed fish—the humble egg carton has changed little,” 

 the BBC. “Shock absorbing and cheap to produce, the carton has also become a signifier for what it contains—you don’t need to see the eggs to know what it contains.”

But before the cartons became commonplace, figuring out how to ship eggs without breaking many of them was an obsession for farmers and grocers. And it was a challenge for inventors who, iteratively and incrementally, arrived at the carton design that’s so familiar today.

The man often credited for designing its earliest iteration of today’s egg carton was a Canadian, Joseph Coyle.

Coyle was publishing a newspaper in Aldemere, British Columbia, in 1911, when, as the apocryphal-sounding 

 story goes, a dispute arose between a hotel owner and the farmer who supplied his eggs repeatedly delivering them with some broken.

Hoping to restore peace, the newspaperman came up with a design where a dozen eggs fit into V-shaped folded cardboard slots that ensured they wouldn’t bump against each other.

“I have devised a simple, practical, and inexpensive box for carrying eggs,” wrote Coyle of this novel “egg box” contraption in his application for a Canadian 

, which was granted in 1918. Coyle received a 

 for the design the same year, and proceeded to produce and license the design through various partnerships and licensing deals in both countries.

Today’s egg cartons look less like Coyle’s origami-ish design because they are made from molds immersed in a wood-pulp slurry.

Many inventors built on Coyle’s approach using a moldable form of cardboard instead. One, Francis H. Sherman, secured patents for 

 egg-carton designs beginning in 1926 using a folded cardboard design, and in 

 received a patent for a design using “a pulp-sucking or fibre-felting process” with “the fibres being deposited on molds or forms of the appropriate shape.”

The first carton made of polystyrene foam (commonly referred to as Styrofoam, a brand name) was 

 by Dow Chemical in 1967. Strictly on the design front, it claimed to be the first to design the now-familiar latch system, where a nub in the base fits into an opening on the hinged lid cover.

As for the material, the patent is unequivocal in its assertion that the polystyrene is better at protecting eggs over cardboard or molded paper pulp.

“Prior to the present invention,” the patent application asserted, “there was no carton providing completely satisfactory cushioning of eggs contained in its cells such that the eggs, even under excessive conditions of load or impact, would remain unbroken.”

File that under “chutzpah” for Dow, because there is 

 a consensus that foam cartons are superior.

, if not quite up to Consumer Reports’ testing 

, came from WAMU, the NPR affiliate in Washington, DC, in 2019.

They dropped cartons of eggs from thigh height (again, not scientists), pitting the traditional molded paper pulp variety against polystyrene foam and clear plastic trifold versions. The winner with the least broken eggs was cardboard, followed by clear plastic and, last, polystyrene foam.

, the Journal of Food Science and Technology reached the same conclusion, that cardboard boxes were tops for preventing breakage, though they noted they weren’t so great when wet—even if its prose was a bit dry.

“The disadvantage of cardboard boxes is that they are not as resistant to the impact of moisture as polystyrene boxes and in the case of an increase in box moisture due to storage in inappropriate conditions, their mechanical resistance decreases,” the study concluded.=

More elegiac was Canada’s National Post, which published an 

 to the traditional molded paper egg carton in 2018.

The “biodegradable vessel is a masterpiece of streamlined efficiency,” it argued, “embracing a dozen fragile lily-white eggs in its 12 snug cradles and whisking them, miraculously intact, from farm to grocer to your refrigerator at home, as unblemished as the moment they were laid.”

Leave it to an egg carton to go over easy.

An open egg carton box with its lid open and containing a dozen brown eggs. 