The latest: August 25, 2017

Amazon announces plan to attack Whole Foods’ greatest vulnerability: its prices

It’s the beginning of a shock and awe campaign likely to shake the grocery industry.

By Joe Fassler | Read more

The aisle of man. It used to be that the words,“grocery store” meant one thing: Your local, 40,000-square-foot, wide-aisled, and familiar food retailer—home to all your favorite brands and host of your weekly two-hour shopping appointment. Now, “grocery” means many more things.

But while the traditional grocery format has been steadily losing dollar share for as much as three decades, all signs point to Thursday as a particularly bleak day for brick-and-mortar. After news broke that Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods will officially close on Monday, grocery stocks took a tumble.

Here’s the thing, though: while flashy, tech-takes-all headlines might tempt us into believing that the story is “RIP: Traditional Grocery,” we’re not quite there yet. And that’s for a number of reasons. Read more.
—Kate Cox

Swimming upstream. When the moon eclipsed the sun on Monday afternoon, cicadas chirped. Flowers closed. Hummingbirds changed their tune. And in the furthest reaches of the northwestern United States, thousands (and potentially hundreds of thousands) of salmon escaped their ocean pen to wreak havoc on the waters of Washington. Read more.
—Claire Brown

Just the one-liners

The National Hurricane Center expects Hurricane Harvey to gather in strength and make landfall along the Texas coast early Saturday morning. In preparation, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has issued food safety tips for affected areas. Find them here.

Cargill has invested in lab-grown meat company Memphis Meats. But Big Meat pouring money into Fake Meat isn’t quite as revolutionary as it sounds—Tyson bought a 5 percent stake in Beyond Meat last October.

Back in February, firefighters rescued several piglets from a fire in England. Six months later, the farmer turned them into sausage and fed them back to their saviors, Grubstreet reports. Dark!

In case you missed it, there’s a class action lawsuit brewing against Poland Spring. The allegations are, of course, that the water doesn’t come from a spring.

Both Amazon and Walmart want giant, floating drone warehouses. But they have very different visions for the sky

Company patents reveal the celestial future of home delivery. We read the paperwork so you don’t have to.

By Claire Brown | Read more