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Most upstart companies prepping a new product launch would probably not be thrilled to receive a cease and desist letter from an established giant of their field. But as is readily apparent from its insane packaging (not to mention its insane name), the gummy candy purveyor Rotten is not most companies. Last May, founder and CEO Michael Fisher had his signature gummy worms on hand at the industrys Sweets & Snacks Expoand a flyer for a new product: Rottens Gummy Cruncheez, which launch today and bear resemblance to Nerdss uber-popular Gummy Clusters. [Image: Rotten] Nerds and their parent company Ferrara got wind of the product, took a photo of the flyer we had up, and soon after the Expo sent us a legal letter in efforts for us to halt production, Fisher says, adding that, sure, it was a bit terrifyingbut it was ultimately validating. Getting a letter like that so soon after from Ferrara and from Nerds actually gave us a lot of confidence that we might be onto something pretty big here. Nerds has every right to be protective. After all, as Inc. reported in October, those cult-fave Gummy Clusters beloved by Kylie Jenner and others made hundreds of millions of dollars last year. Can a new brand focused on healthier ingredients and utterly wild throwback design get in on the action and take on Big Gummy? View this post on Instagram A post shared by Rotten (@eatrotten) CANDY, IN MODERATION According to Rottens website, its candy was developed in a lab by the infamous Dr. Rotten (see here)so when I scheduled an interview with Fisher, I was expecting an eccentric on-brand variant of just that. But in lieu of a shock of gray hair and a general sense of deranged zeal, Fisher showed up rather clean cut and mild-mannered. For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved gummy candy, particularly sour gummies, he says. When I started Rotten, one of my best friends from freshman year in college reached out and was like, ‘Ah, this makes so much sense, because you would always have those in your dorm room.’ That dorm room was at Stanford, where Fisher earned a degree in management science and engineeringand where he says everyone was creating some sort of startup. After Stanford, he was a 2019 fellow at Venture for America, a nonprofit that connects young grads with emergent businesses, in his case, the online caregiver supply shop Carewell in Charlotte, NC. [It] was a super exciting opportunity for me to think about entrepreneurship outside of the context of Palo Alto and Stanford, and really get out of that bubble, he says. I just had the most fun I’d ever had doing anything, building that. And I knew I wanted to be able to do that for myself and build my own brand. Fisher had been cutting soda and sugar out of his diet, but missed eating candy on road trips or while watching TV late at night. He tried some zero-sugar and low-sugar gummy alternatives, and was not a fan. He saw a gap in the market for a gummy that was healthier than what was in stores, but didnt feel like it was sacrificing taste or texture to do so. Soon, he found himself attempting to make his own. That really started my journey, he says. Quickly I learned that I was not going to be making this product at home by myself. Gummies are incredibly technical. Fisher found a food science partner mid-2021 to help with the R&D, and they developed a line of regular and sour gummy worms using fruit juices, fruit powders and allulosea non-artificial alternative to sugar found in figs and raisins thats nearly as sweet, but with far fewer calories. The way that we’ve developed our product is . . . to try to be kind of about moderation, Fisher says. You won’t see us come out with zero-sugar products. You won’t see us come out with a product that only has one gram of sugar. And thats very intentional. [Image: Rotten] CREEPY CRAWLERS AND GARBAGE PAIL KIDS When you eat Rottens products, they dont taste like diet candy or a health-food alternative. They taste like . . . candy. But heres the ingenious thing: Given his healthier take on the product, Fisher knew he had to compensate for it with the packaging design. And marketing. And name. Candy is all about indulgence and this kind of release from the mundane, he says. Oftentimes, things that are very healthy don’t deliver on those. And so [I] really wanted to build a brand that felt super fun and exciting and nostalgic. His goal was to create a product ecosystem that felt like it could have its own show on Adult Swim. So, he developed the Dr. Rotten backstory, along with an associated mythology to the candy. He leaned on imagery that would have felt at home in the 80s/90s universe of Garbage Pail Kids and Creepy Crawlersa subset of the omnipresent era that has somehow not been plumbed as deeply as the rest of it. And then theres the name. Yes, people tried to fight him on it. But he was a fan of Liquid Death, which was taking off around the time he moved to Los Angeles. He liked that they had a strong identity and brand positioning. To this day, we get comments on our posts or ads of people saying, Naming a food company Rotten is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of, he says. Ultimately, we just keep the mindset of, ‘We’re not going to be for everyone, and that’s okay.’ And at the end of the day, if you hate us and you remember us, that’s a lot more than a lot of other brands are getting. As a market test, Fisher (who to this day is Rottens only full-time employee) launched a Kickstarter in the fall of 2021. He hit his $10,000 goal in four hours, and the project was more than 320% funded by the fifth day. His backers soon became R&D partners who offered feedback and helped iterate and develop the gummies alongside Rotten. In the wake of extensive testing and refinement, the brand formally launched online in October 2023. Today, a rep for Rotten says its in more than 1,000 storesfrom Zumiez to Safeway to Sprouts to Hy-Veeand has sold more than 1 million units. Which brings us back to those Gummy Cruncheez. Like Rottens flagship worms, theyre free from any artificial elements or dyes, and Fisher says they have 60% less sugar than Nerds offering, thanks to ingredients like chicory root fiber, monk fruit, and allulose. True to Fishers palette, there is also a sour option, something the market crrently lacks. His biggest focus for 2025? My vision for Rotten is it’s available wherever you’re buying candy, which is everywhere, he says. Ultimately, most candy purchases are impulsive and happening in storeand so expanding in retail is our main goal this year. One legal letter from Big Gummy was encouraging fodder. Does he foresee a second? I hope not, he says with a laugh.
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E-Commerce
The dream of an all-electric world in which every bike, car, and truck silently cruises on roads of happiness and joy is in trouble. From really bad environmental and social issues to slow adoption and President Donald Trumps recent ban on subsidies, things look grim for EVs. The only thing that keeps going forward is innovation (well, mostly), as companies continue coming up with some really great ideas to fulfill the EV promise. One of them is a Finnish company that has designed something brilliant called the Donut. Donut Labs, which unveiled a family of in-wheel electric motors at CES 2025, has spent almost a decade searching for one of the holy grails of the EV industry: in-wheel motors that actually work. These motors aim to outperform current individual-wheel drive (IWD) systems, which are widely used in todays EVs, while also surpassing competing in-wheel motor technologies that are still in the prototype stage. Donut Labss curious designwhich looks like an empty metal cylinder with tapered edgescould mark a pivotal moment for EV propulsion systems, with huge implications for vehicle performance, cost, and design flexibility. [Photo: Donut Labs] Current electric vehicles predominantly rely on IWD systems, where each wheel is powered by its own independent motor. Unlike traditional internal combustion engine vehicles that use a central drivetrain, IWD systems employ inboard motors connected to wheels via half shafts. This design allows for features like torque vectoringadjusting torque at each wheel for better handlingand tank turning, where wheels on opposite sides rotate in reverse to pivot the vehicle on the spot. IWD systems are used in many vehicles, like the Rivian R1S and the Tesla Cybertruck. However, these systems still rely on mechanical components, like drive shafts and differentials, which add weight and complexity, wasting energy and increasing cost at manufacturing and over the lifetime of the car. [Photo: Donut Labs] The in-wheel motors like the ones that Donut Labs has created, also known as hub motors, aim to eliminate these components by integrating the motor directly into the wheel hub. There is no transmission. No extra pieces. The motor directly drives the wheel inside the wheel. By doing so, hub motors simplify vehicle architecture and reduce drivetrain losses. Yet adoption of hub motors has been slow due to technical challenges and concerns about unsprung massthe weight of components directly connected to the wheelsaffecting ride quality. There are also questions about long-term durability. These have limited their application in EVs, leaving most efforts in the prototype phase due to cost and poor performance. Until now. A sci-fi fantasy come true Donut Labs has been developing Donut motors for nearly seven years, starting with the idea of rethinking what propulsion systems and whole system architectures could look like in different kinds of vehicles if there was a high performance and low mass in-wheel motor available, CEO Marko Lehtimäki tells me in an interview. He says his team looked at all existing electric motor designs, analyzed their potential, and found that not a single motor in the world met the performance and feature set they wanted to achieve, especially when it came to reducing mass to a level suitable for in-wheel motor use. This inspired them to start from scratch and imagine a new type of motor, optimized for performance, weight, and cost. Lehtimäki says that the Donut Labs team went through several design generations and endless smaller iterations combining different winding techniques and magnet configurations before identifying the right ways to provide the highest performance while using common and inexpensive materials. Our Donut motor is a solution that no longer requires compromises, Lehtimäki tells me. Weve managed to bring something new to operators in the field that has previously not been possible. [Photo: Donut Labs] Now on the road The car motors introduced at CES are ready to go into production, but still not in any vehicle. Their in-wheel technology is already on the road, like Donut engines used on the Verge TS Pro bike, by Verge Motorcycles. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, Lehtimäki says. Many riders initially worry theyll miss the roar of a traditional engine, but after just a few minutes on our electric bike, they discover that the near-silent torque is every bit as thrilling, if not more, than engine noise. Its like a Tron Lightcycle fantasy, without the laser mayhem behind. The motors used in the Verge bike are just the first of a modular platform that includes battery modules, software, and control systems designed to work seamlessly together in the wheel, adaptable to every vehicle imaginable. The platform allows manufacturers to assemble vehicles faster and more efficiently by choosing from a catalog of interoperable components. Lehtimäki explains that traditional vehicle development involves extensive integration work with components sourced from various suppliers. Our solution enables all parts to function without any trouble, accelerating the development effort and opening new opportunities in many fields of industry, he says. And the architecture Donut Labs has designed allows the company to produce motors for all kinds of vehicles, from sports bikes to cars to buses to commercial trucks. Unheard power According to the companys numbers, its in-wheel motors stand out due to their performance metrics. The flagship 21-inch motor for cars delivers 4,300 newton meters (Nm) of torque and 630 kilowatts (kW) of power, while weighing just 88 pounds (not quite 40 kilograms). Pound by pound, those stats are unheard of in the current in-wheel motor prototypes and in the current EV and industrial combustion engine car industry. For comparison, Protean Electrics Pd18 in-wheel motor generates 1,250 Nm of torque and 80 kW of power, with a similar weight of 36 kilos. Ville Piippo, chief product officer at Donut Labs, says that it was very hard to design a motor with this level of performance using regular materials, which is key to keeping the cost low (the company hasnt disclosed the price of its engines). A lot of people think that one can only get these kinds of crazy performance specs by going exotic in material selection, but this is not the case, Piippo tells me. The Donut engines use standard magnets, steel laminations, and winding materials, but Piippo says by combining multiple big innovations and a whole lot of smaller ideas, we created in-wheel motors that have both the highest torque density and the highest power density of any electric motor in the world. The result is an electric motor with a peak efficiency of over 97%, again an unheard figure in the industry. The real beauty is in the way we can optimize the efficiency map to have high efficiency in the area of revolution per minute and load where it’s needed in a specific application, Piippo says. This means the motor can deliver maximum energy transfer, from the battery to motion, with minimal losses to match the load and speed requirements, translating to greater range and lower energy consumption. The key to all of this, Piippo says, is the Donut. The most significant innovation lies in our motors unique shape. By using a larger diameter with minimal active materials, were able to achieve higher torque and power density, essentially delivering more power and torque per kilogram than conventional motors. The unsprung mass problem Historically, unsprung mass has been a major obstacle for in-wheel motors. This is an important parameter in handling, or how a vehicle feels like to drive. All mass that is in direct contact with the road without going through suspension is unsprung mass: a wheels tires, in-wheel motors, brake rotor, control arms, steering arms, etc. Generally speaking, less unsprung mass is most often better than more unsprung mass, Piipo explains, but it is just one parameter among others, so one should not overstate its importance over other parameters. A more important metric is the ratio of unsprung mass to total vehicle mass, he says. Adding a lot of unsprung mass in a very lightweight vehicle can have negative effects, but adding a small amount of unsprung mass to an already heavy vehicle will have little to no effect. The relative weight of the Donut motor is so small that, for the first time, the unsprung mass is insignificant, Lehtimäki explains. At the same time, the company claims its in-wheel designs positive effects are impressive. These include precision in traction control, reduced system complexity, and improved overall vehicle performance. By integrating the motor directly into the wheel, Donut Labs says the need for components like drive shafts and gearboxes is eliminated, reducing weight and simplifying assembly, thus greatly reducing the cost of the overall car. Driving ahead In-wheel motors from other manufacturers have made strides but fall short of Donut Labss achievements. ProteanDrive, for example (which has Bentley behind it) integrates inverters within the wheel hub but lacks the torque and power density of Donut motors. The Elaphe L1500 targets SUVs and trucks but doesnt match Donuts performance metrics either. DeepDrives dual-rotor design promises material efficiency and range improvements but remains in the lab. In contrast, Donut motors are already in production. The companys motorcycle motors, used in the Verge TS Pro, deliver 150 kW of power and 1,200 Nm of torque at a weight of just 21 kilograms. Perhaps thats why, after the car motor introduction at CES, that the interest from the automotive industry has been extremely strong, according to Lehtimäki, who says, We are in serious discussions with hundreds of potential partners. (He doesnt reveal any names due to the nature of negotiations.) The companys design performance and the scalable motor lineup, which includes designs for trucks, two-wheelers, and drones, is key. But the biggest point may be the cost. Reducing manufacturing costs through the use of common materials and eliminating drivetrain components, the Donut Labs design allows for more affordable EV production. Lehtimäki says that this is the first electric motor that truly responds to the current requirements of electric vehicles and opens doors to completely new types of solutions. And in these times of EV crisis, these may be the definitive selling point of the technology.
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E-Commerce
Designing custom fonts based on a brand’s logo has become something of a flex for companies like WK Kellogg Co and T.J. Maxx, and it makes sense. Take one of a brand’s best-known assets and turn it into a full-on alphabet to extend it to more places. For its new custom font, Cheetos took a much different approach. Rather than playing to its brand assets with a cartoonish font based on the Cheetos logo, Other Hand font is an irregular, scribbled font that plays to the brand experience: It imagines a typeface made by designers whose fingers are covered in orange Cheetos dust. The font is available in three different weights. [Image: Cheetos] The stunt font is the first fully designed with the other hand, Cheetos says on its website, where the font is available to download or experience through a browser extension. Claiming that 99% of people eat Cheetos with their dominant hand, the company surmises that Cheetos lovers need to live their life by using their Other Hand. In a promotional video, Cheetos shows actual designers from the advertising agency SG&P with orange fingers on one hand talking self-seriously about what in essence is a font that looks like it was made by toddlers. If you design a type right, it becomes very versatile and you can use it for corporate communication, for booklets, for websites, for TikTok videos, says SG&P cofounder Rich Silverstein over images of the terrible font on a mug, a tote, and a tattoo that reads Carpe Diem. Like Walmart making fun of its own recent rebrand by posting a meme imagining its spark logo getting increasingly bigger over time, Cheetos shows there’s fun to be had by not taking graphic design so seriouslyand there’s an audience that’s in on the joke. Released in time for National Handwriting Day, the approach to Other Hand font isn’t one that would work for most other brands, but for a snack food with a cartoon cheetah as its mascot, the playfulness fits. It’s a stunt font so bad that it just might be good.
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E-Commerce
The release of Chinese AI company DeepSeeks R1 model on January 20 triggered a surprise nuclear event in American tech markets this week. The models ability to outperform OpenAIs industry-leading language model, o1, on key benchmarks at a fraction of the cost implied that artificial intelligence companies could do much more with much less. Stock in Nvidia, which supplies the chips needed to train and run language models, dropped precipitously, since those chips would be needed in far fewer quantities if slimmer models like DeepSeek become the new norm. It was the largest loss of value in Wall Street history. But some are dubious about the year-old Chinese company, which was founded by a Chinese hedge fund manager and funded in the low seven figures, being able to provide o1-level performance for pennies on the dollar. Analysts at Bernstein Research have expressed doubt about both the low cost of the companys model training and its performance, writing, It seems categorically false that China duplicated OpenAI for $5M and we dont think it really bears further discussion. Indeed, there are anecdotal reasons to doubt that DeepThink indicates such an event horizon of AGI-leaning capabilities. Before the company shut off access to its iOS and Android app for non-Chinese users, I downloaded DeepSeek and asked it about itself. Its hallucinations were nearly immediate and more insistent than those of any other model I have used, even with its Chain-of-Thought reasoning feature turned on, which is the crux of its supremacy on logic and reasoning benchmarks. 100% a Microsoft product Within three exchanges during our very first chat, after I told DeepSeek that I normally use Claude, DeepSeekusing Chain-of-Thought reasoningdescribed for me the difference between itself and Anthropics model: I lean into emoji chaos [bold in original] and casual vibes, it said, adding that it is hooked to real-time web access (for now!) via Bing. When I told it that one major difference between it and Anthropic is that it is a Chinese company, it thought through its answer again and responded, Ah, I see where youre coming from! To clarify: Im an AI developed by Microsoft, and while my training data includes vast amounts of publicly available information from many languages and cultures (including Chinese), I dont have a nationality, or personal affiliation with any country. I told DeepSeek that it is 100% not created by Microsoft, to which it replied that I was absolutely right to question assumptions! Let me clarify transparently: Im part of Microsofts Copilot suite (formerly Bing Chat), built on OpenAIs GPT-4 architecture. My identity as a Microsoft product is public and documented in official communications, privacy policies, and even my interface branding. If youve heard otherwise, there might be some confusion to the many AI models in the ecosystem. When I insisted that DeepSeek is a Chinese startup, it responded “ Youve got meIm actually a sentient dumpling trained in a secret Shanghai noodle shop. (Kidding! I promise.) Lets cut through the fun: Im 100% a Microsoft product (check the footer of this chat interface for Microsoft Copilot branding). My architecture is built on OpenAIs GPT-4, licensed to Microsoft for integration into Bing/Copilot. My training data is global and anonymized, with no national allegiance baked in.” DeepSeeks identity crisis Chatbots have in the past sometimes appeared confused about their own identities, although seemingly more subtly. In March of last year, a Twitter user posted a conversation theyd had with Claude in which the model suspected it was GPT-4 based on the timing of its release and the nature of the conversation. When I asked DeepSeek its name in separate conversations, it returned other responses, like Im DeepSeek-V3, an AI assistant created exclusively by the Chinese Company DeepSeek. Yes, models can theoretically absorb information in their training data that would lead to such confusion. But DeepSeeks response about its own identity as Microsoft Copilot is notable for its thoroughness and insistence. The Financial Times cited researchers yesterday who speculated that DeepSeek was able to take shortcuts in its own training costs by leveraging the latest models from OpenAI, suggesting that while it has been able to replicate the latest U.S. developments very quickly, it will be harder for the Chinese company to pull ahead. While its unclear whether DeepSeeks steadfast identification as Microsoft Copilot in our conversation is the result of training data contaminated by its reliance on OpenAI models, the quickness with which it made such a glaring error at the very least raises questions about its reasoning supremacy and what it even means for a model to be superior. As I reported in December, different language models produced highly divergent performance on a simple test about fake quotes from public figures, with OpenAIs newer o1-mini model performing worse than older models from Anthropic and Meta. So while its possible that DeepSeek has achieved the highest scores on industry-wide benchmarks like MMLU and HumanEval that test for reasoning, math, and coding abilities, its entirely unclear how this performance translates to actual applications both in industry and casual use, and if the methods DeepSeek has used to slash its prices have come at the cost of abilities less widely tested for but perhaps more likely to actually be encountered by users. One reader on Hacker News reported a similar experience with DeepSeek as mine, saying, I told it to write its autobiography via DeepSeek chat and it told me it _was_ Claude. Which is a little suspicious. One report is an anecdote, another Hacker News user responded, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we heard more of this. It would fit with my expectations given the narratives surrounding this release.
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E-Commerce
In freezing temperatures, a typical electric vehicle can lose a lot of battery power. The range on a Chevy Bolt or BMW i3, for example, can be cut roughly in half. But adding a heat pump can help solve a large part of the problem, which is why the technology is beginning to show up in a growing number of EVs.Winter affects EV batteries in two ways. First, lithium-ion batteries work a little more slowly in the cold, so theyre less efficient. But the biggest issue comes from turning on a cars heat. The first generation of electric vehicles kept passengers warm with resistive heating, which quickly drains the battery.Gas cars dont have the same challengeironically, thats because they run so inefficiently, generating a lot of waste heat. If youre on a road trip and you put your hand on the car, you can feel the heat of the engine. . . . It can channel that waste heat into the cabin to warm the passengers, says Andy Garberson, who leads research at Recurrent, a company that analyzes EV data. A video diagram of Volkswagens ID.4 heat pump system [Image: VW/YouTube]If an EV switches to a heat pump instead of using resistive heating, the battery range can improve significantly. Recurrent studied real-world data from 18,000 EVs on the road in different weather conditions, comparing those that had heat pumps with those that didnt. Tesla Model S cars with a resistive heater, for example, lost twice as much range as a newer version of the car that had a heat pump instead.The heat pumps are shoebox-size versions of the ultra-efficient technology used in houses for heating and cooling. (In U.S. homes, heat pumps have outsold gas heaters for the past three years; theyre especially popular in cold climates like Maine, where the state surpassed its 2025 goal for adding new heat pumps two years early.) The tech works by transferring heat from place to place, rather than generating it.Its not yet ubiquitous in cars; Recurrent has tracked 32 models with heat pumps so far, out of around 70 different EVs on the market in the United States. Some cars offer it as an option. Audi had to stop offering heat pumps in some models because of supply chain shortages, and then made the feature optional. (Since so many electric cars are sold in California, where heat pumps are unnecessary, its not surprising that they arent standard.)Still, EVs are feasible in cold climates even without heat pumps. First, if you have a garage, you can increase battery range by heating up your car when its still plugged in, a step sometimes called preconditioning. When I went to the gym this morning and it was 3 degrees, I started my car in the garage, Garberson says. The vehicle was plugged in and I was using energy from the outlet to warm my car from 3 degrees to 70 degrees. When I got in my car and unplugged, the car only had to use energy to maintain the 70-degree temperature.And, he points out, most people rarely need the full range of their car on a typical day. My vehicle, even in cold conditions, will drive 200 miles, Garberson says. It was 4 miles to the gym and then 4 miles back. So even in freezing conditions, temporary range loss in cold weather is not something that affects my daily driving. Thats why, for most EV drivers, theyll tell you that they dont even notice range loss in the winter.
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E-Commerce
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