On July 12th of this year, Flower Foods, a bakery company famous for the snack cake brands Tastykake and Mrs. Freshley’s, made an investment in Base Culture, a better-for-you baked goods brand with recent meteoric growth. Base Culture has gained traction producing gluten- and grain-free breads. Why might a sweets-and-treats company like Flower Foods decide […]

In March of last year, my colleague Marshall Schleifman wrote in this space about the meteoric rising cost of shipping ocean freight – one of the many negative outcomes of disruptions and imbalances in the global supply chain. As tracked by the Global Freightos Baltic Index (below), China/East Asia to North America West Coast container […]

Since the 1980s, retailers have been investing in private brands – brands owned by and thus sold exclusively at a particular retailer. Once considered second-tier products offering cheaper versions of basic merchandise, today’s private brands sit side-by-side with national brands and are merchandized so customers may not realize they are store brands. In some cases, […]

A recent exposé on fast-fashion retailer H&M alleges that the company’s environmental promise is undermined by greenwashing. H&M was using a scorecard system to inform customers about the environmental soundness of each product, but a report by Quartz claims that more than half of the scorecards portrayed products as being better for the environment than […]

High inflation, soaring gas prices, rising interest rates, and a bear market correction in the stock market are among several factors that currently have consumers (and economists) on edge. These concerns are starting to manifest themselves in the economic data: retail spending posted a surprise 0.3% decline in May, and the University of Michigan’s consumer […]