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There was a time, back in the mid-2010s, when Starbucks was in its prime. It was an era characterized by handwritten notes on cups, signature purple chairs, and coffee houses teeming with people sitting down to enjoy a morning pick-me-up. Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol wants to revive that erastarting by adding hundreds of thousands of chairs back into its stores. When its truly a third place, I think thats our point of difference, Niccol told audiences at the Fast Company Innovation Festival on September 16. Its why people fell in love with Starbucks. It’s why I fell in love with Starbucks 20 years ago. Since those early days, Niccol added, Starbucks has become very transactional. Post-pandemic, the companys business model has been increasingly focused on mobile ordering, a system thats transformed the coffee house from a sit-down experience to something more like an endless, harried line. Niccols plan to turn the company around, called Back to Starbucks, hinges on the thesis that Starbucks is suffering from an overarching design problemand its using a design-led approach to make the Starbucks experience actually enjoyable again. Starbucks to add hundreds of thousands of new seats in stores In July 2024, Niccol was in between jobs. The restaurant industry executive had just exited his role at the helm of Chipotle, and was weeks away from starting his new gig at Starbucks. In the intervening time, he decided to visit as many Starbucks stores as possibleand what he saw was eye-opening. I walked into stores, and outlets were covered. There weren’t enough seats. It was clear that we had prioritized a waiting area for mobile order, Niccol said, adding, We had done some things that did not deliver on having a great in-cafe experience. The last several years have been fairly lackluster for Starbucks. Niccol told Fast Company in a recent interview that the once-dominant chains transactions peaked around 2019 and have remained fairly stagnant ever since. Starbucks brought in $36 billion in fiscal year 2024nearly flat with 2023by bumping costs to make up for dwindling customers. Other players, including the Chinese competitor Luckin Coffee and brands like Blank Street, Dunkin, and Dutch Bros, are slowly eating into Starbucks market share with creative, Gen Z-centric beverages. So, Niccol is setting out to redesign the entire Starbucks experience. Already, hes brought back personalized touches like handwritten notes on cups and in-store condiment bars, as well as investing in new menu innovations for younger customers. And bigger changes are on the way: In the coming months, he said he plans to redesign 1,000 of Starbuckss 11,000 company-operated cafés in North America; revamp the brands pastry menu to offer more artisanal, protein-forward options; and bring ceramic mugs back to cafes. Perhaps most notably, Niccol told audiences that hes reinstating the companys signature seating to the tune of hundreds of thousands of new seats in storesa major increase from his former estimate of 30,000 new seats. While these wont be the familiar purple seats of old, Niccol said they will be a contemporary version of that signature chair. Ultimately, he wants Starbucks to return to an institution that customers actually want to spend time in, rather than an experience to be endured. I hear over and over and over again that the connection between the barista and our customers is unlike anything else, Niccol said. There are these examples where people walk in and the barista knows them so well that they’ve already made their drink before they’ve gotten to the [point of sale]. I wish every single one of our transactions was that intimate, that personal. That’s what we need to get to.
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E-Commerce
A Texas refinery that supplies green fuel to U.S. airlines has been purchasing animal fat from cattle raised on illegally cleared lands in the Amazon rainforest, according to a Reuters review of government tracking data, interviews and eyewitness accounts. Louisiana-based Diamond Green Diesel, a joint-venture between biofuels producer Darling Ingredients and petroleum refiner Valero Energy, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into a refinery in Port Arthur, Texas that turns cattle fatcalled tallowinto a cleaner alternative to petroleum-based jet fuel and diesel. Diamond Green Diesel is a major player in the U.S. sustainable fuels market. It has collected over $3 billion in U.S. tax credits for producing biofuels since 2022, according to filings. But interviews and documents show at least two Brazilian factories that supplied Diamond Green Diesel with tens of thousands of tons of cattle fat since 2023 are sourcing some of it from slaughterhouses that have bought animals from illegally deforested ranches in the Amazon rainforest. Carriers such as JetBlue and Southwest Airlines, which struck deals with Valero to use the “green jet fuel, can claim credit for lowering their emissions because Diamond Green Diesel’s plant is certified under a United Nations agreement curbing the impact of aviation on the climate called CORSIA. The global market for sustainable jet fuel is small, about $2.9 billion in 2025 according to analysis firm SkyQuest Technology Group, compared to the $239 billion global market for conventional aviation fuel. But government incentives are expected to help the market grow exponentially, pumping more resources into the Brazilian cattle industry, the leading driver of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Pedro Piris-Cabezas, an economist at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, said any additional demand could result in the expansion of herds and directly or indirectly drive deforestation and forest degradation. It could also violate Brazilian law. “Companies that profit from raw materials originating from a supply chain that involves deforestation, are also responsible for these illegalities,” said Ricardo Negrini, a Brazilian federal prosecutor who has opened a number of government investigations into the cattle industry. Diamond Green Diesel, Darling Ingredients, Valero Energy, Southwest and JetBlue did not reply to multiple requests for comment, including detailed questions about the Brazilian tallow supply chain. To track the tallow trade from illegally deforested ranches in the Amazon to Diamond Green Diesel, Reuters partnered with the nonprofit investigative outlet Reporter Brasil, which helped review court documents that link slaughterhouses to the tallow plants, corporate filings, trade data, and government cattle tracking records. Reuters also interviewed over a dozen people involved in each step of the beef tallow supply chain, including traders, truck drivers, prosecutors, auditors and regulators. Diamond Green Diesel sources tallow from multiple countries, and Reuters was unable to determine how much of it came from ranches in illegally-cleared land in the Amazon. Tainted cattle In 2022, Darling Ingredients CEO Randall Stuewe announced the $557 million acquisition of several plants in Brazil, including four in the Amazon region, that would supply waste fats to be used in the production of renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel,” according to a statement issued at the time. Reuters found one of those rendering plants in Para state, called Araguaia, sourced cattle fat from at least five meatpackers that failed a May 2025 audit conducted by federal prosecutors for slaughtering 20,000 cattle from illegally deforested areas. In 2023, Araguaia exported $4.4 million worth of beef tallow from the Amazon to Diamond Green Diesel, according to trade data from Import Genius. In June, a Reuters journalist saw a truck with an Araguaia logo inside the Sao Francisco slaughterhouse, which failed an audit for buying cattle from farms on illegally deforested land. The driver of the truck, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters he had been picking up carcasses at the Sao Francisco slaughterhouse and delivering them to the Araguaia plant for two years. Two other drivers and two Sao Francisco employees confirmed the slaughterhouse was an Araguaia supplier. Sao Francisco didn’t confirm or deny that it is a supplier of the Araguaia plant. It said it has been cooperating with federal prosecutors since 2018 and that it hired an outside firm to monitor its supply chain. Sao Francisco sources some of its cattle indirectly from Vale do Paraiso, a farm that had been blocked from grazing cattle since 2006 because 15 square miles of trees had been illegally razed, according to Brazil’s environmental protection agency, Ibama. Cattle tracking data shows that the cattle was moved from Vale do Paraiso to a farm with a clean record before it reached the slaughterhouse. The agency unblocked Vale do Paraiso last year because a court determined that the statute of limitations had expired, but its owner Antonio Lucena Barros still owes over $3 million in fines for the deforestation there, according to government documents. Barros lawyer Calebe Rocha said in a statement that his client is fighting the fines in court and has been granted an injunction that suspends the payment of the fine. He also said that no animals were sold from the part of Vale do Paraiso that Ibama had blocked due to deforestation. Another plant owned by Darling Ingredients sourced fat from a slaughterhouse that confirmed to Reuters that it bought hundreds of cattle in 2022 and 2023 from rancher Bruno Heller, who Brazil’s Federal Police has described as possibly the Amazon’s biggest deforester in a 2023 investigation. In a statement, Hellers lawyer Vinicius Segatto said Brazils environmental law is “excessively rigorous” and that the criminal case against his client is ongoing. Fat to fuel Airlines have been under pressure to buy more green jet fuel, which is now produced in tiny quantities, to meet industry targets of net zero emissions by 2050. Supporters of the use of tallow as a biofuel assert that demand for it alone is unlikely to push ranchers to clear rainforest to grow their pastures because of its economic value less than 3% of what slaughterhouses get for each animal. Diamonds imports from Brazil were certified as sustainable by the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC), a third-party certification body that approved Diamond’s plant for CORSIA. To be eligible, biomass used for fuel cannot come from land that was deforested after 2008 or protected areas, but the ISCC told Reuters it did not investigate Diamond’s supply chain because it considers tallow a “byproduct” of the beef industry under CORSIA. Three experts who helped design CORSIA told Reuters that the program allows producers to omit the score for carbon emissions and deforestation of the Amazon rainforest because it assumes demand for tallow is unlikely to push ranchers to grow their herds. The International Civil Aviation Organization declined to comment when asked about whether it viewed deforestation in the tallow supply chain as a violation of its sustainability standards. However, the agency said it is constantly monitoring the compliance of third-parties responsible for certifying sustainable aiation fuel producers and welcomes information on any potential deviations for further evaluation. Fabio Teixeira, Manuela Andreoni, and Allison Lampert, Reuters
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E-Commerce
On Tuesday, AI startup OpenAI announced it would launch a new ChatGPT experience just for kids. The announcement explained that the latest ChatGPT was created as part of an effort to protect children’ s privacy. “We prioritize safety ahead of privacy and freedom for teens; this is a new and powerful technology, and we believe minors need significant protection,” CEO Sam Altman explained in a blog post on Tuesday. ChatGPT will direct under 18 users to the experience specifically created for kids. If the person’s age is unclear, the technology will default to the experience for kids. However, OpenAI says it’s also developing “a technology to better predict a user’s age,” too. “In some cases or countries we may also ask for an ID; we know this is a privacy compromise for adults but believe it is a worthy tradeoff,” the blog explained. The ChatGPT for users under 18 was designed with some new parental controls, such as “blockout hours” when kids can’t talk to ChatGPT. It blocks sexual content, can’t flirt, and won’t engage in discussions about self-harm. Altman said that OpenAI will flag such messages and contact a user’s guardian if suicidal thoughts are mentioned. If they can’t be reached, OpenAI will reach out to the authorities “in case of imminent harm,” it noted. The new kid-friendly experience comes less than a week after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced an investigation into how AI companies, including OpenAI, impact the well-being of children. AI chatbots can effectively mimic human characteristics, emotions, and intentions, and generally are designed to communicate like a friend or confidant, which may prompt some users, especially children and teens, to trust and form relationships with chatbots, the FTC said. At the time, OpenAI said that making the technology “safe for everyone” is its top concern. We recognize the FTC has open questions and concerns, and were committed to engaging constructively and responding to them directly,” an OpenAI spokesperson said. According to the announcement, the ChatGPT for users under 18 will be available at the end of the month.
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E-Commerce
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