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Valentine’s Day may seem romantic, but to candy companies, it’s serious business. Our annual ode to St. Valentine is one of the most important and competitive days on candy company calendars, and every year, confectioners roll out special-edition heart-shaped chocolate bars and other product innovations to capture consumers’ dollars (nevermind hearts). When it comes to speaking to modern courtship, though, one candy brand has a unique leg up on the competitionand it’s built into the candy itself. Sweethearts were designed to be updated. The pastel-colored conversation hearts stay relevant year over year because their embossed messages can be easily and quickly updated, transforming a generic shape into a crunchy candy canvas that’s adaptable to the moment. That makes the face of these tiny hearts some of the most valuable real estate in the Valentine’s Day candy landscape, because the right quip could convert a passerby into a sale. And this year, their newest messages are all about the struggles of dating in today’s economy. [Photo: Spangler Candy Company] Sweethearts’s latest sayings have been dubbed “Love in This Economy” after an online survey that the brand’s owner, the family-owned, Ohio-based Spangler Candy Company, conducted last December of 2,000 Gen Z and millennials who are single, casually dating, or in a serious relationship, making an edible sort of consumer sentiment index. The candy company’s survey found 80% of respondents said the economy was impacting their Valentine’s Day plans. Their new two-line messages, then”Split Rent,” “Share Logn,” “Car Poll,” “Buy N Bulk,” and “Cook For 2″reflect the realities of dating and courtship during a time of high prices, persistent inflation, and low consumer confidence. But just because the company has introduced new messages doesn’t mean it’s abandoned more evergreen ones. “We’re careful about evolving the sayings because Sweethearts must be both nostalgic and new,” Spangler Candy Company vice president of marketing Evan Brock tells Fast Company. Classic messages like “Marry Me,” “Cutie Pie,” and “Ooo La La” are included every year, while new sayings reflect how people express affection and connection today, she says. “Our role is to strike a balance between enduring tradition and modern expression.” [Photo: Evan-Amos/Wiki Commons Some of the original messages stamped into the first Sweethearts from 1902 were Be Mine, Be True, and Kiss Me,” according to Smithsonian Magazine. But over the years, the candy has been updated with the times. “Fax Me” turned into “Text Me,” and in 2024, the candies were purposefully misprinted to symbolize the confusion and mixed messages of situationships. [Photo: Spangler Candy Company] Unlike M&Ms or Skittles, which use the surface of their candy shells to display their visual brands, Sweethearts has more flexibility to adapt to culture. But even so, it’s thoughtful about adding new sayings. Embossing the hearts is a highly coordinated process that involves engraving new phrases onto custom-made printing plates that will stamp the words onto each individual candy. There’s no understating how important Valentine’s Day is for candy sales. Along with Easter, Halloween, and the winter holiday season, the four holidays generate a whopping 62% of annual sales for the $54 billion confectionery industry, according to the National Confectioners Association. For Sweethearts, it’s practically the whole ballgame, since no one’s buying conversation hearts for Christmas. By tapping into current events and changing trends in courtship, the more-than-a-century-old brand is resonating with Valentine’s Day now.
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E-Commerce
This morning, shares of two of the largest computer memory companies that trade on U.S. markets are up yet again. The stock prices of Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) and Sandisk Corporation (Nasdaq: SNDK) rose after a Japanese memory firm issued a surprising outlook. Heres what you need to know. Stock prices jump as demand continues Shares in several memory chip makers traded on U.S. markets are currently up in premarket trading this morning. The companies include Micron and Sandisk, as well as Western Digital Corporation (Nasdaq: WDC) and Seagate Technology Holdings (Nasdaq: STX). As of this writing, Micron shares are currently up 2.9%, Sandisk shares are up 6.2%, Western Digital shares are up 3%, and Seagate shares are up 2.5%. While all four companies make memory chips, Western Digital and Seagate primarily focus on computer storage, leaving Micron and Sandisk as the two primary memory chip makers traded on U.S. exchanges. And those two companies are getting a lot of attention, not just today, but as of late, due to the memory chip shortage that global supply chains are currently dealing with. As Fast Company previously reported, there is a global memory chip shortage in 2026. Computer memory, also known as RAM, is the component inside a computer that saves and processes short-term memory (as opposed to long-term memory, which is what hard drives and SSDs store). Demand from artificial intelligence (AI) companies is fueling the shortage as they race to get as much RAM as they can get their hands on. These AI companies are currently building many AI data centers, which need powerful servers to run the AI, and those servers require memory to handle instructions. As a result, demand for memory chips is off the charts. And while that is bad for consumers, who are likely to see higher costs for smartphones and laptops this year due to rising memory prices, its very good for the companies that make memory, like Micron and SanDisk. Why are memory chip companies seeing their prices rise today? Todays rise in memory company stock prices isnt something totally out of the blue. The stock prices of memory companies have been rising for months as news of a memory chip shortage in 2026 spread. However, the stock price jumps in MU and SNDK today seem to be primarily due to a Japanese company called Kioxia. Kioxia is a Japanese flash memory supplier, and today, it reported fiscal third-quarter results. Those results, as noted by Investing.com, slightly exceeded expectations. Q4 guidance, on the other hand, blew past expectations. Most analysts had expected Kioxia to issue Q4 revenue guidance of 648.2 billion (about $4.2 billion). Instead, the company said its Q4 guidance is 890 billion at the midpoint (about $5.8 billion). That is a massive difference and one that many investors see as evidence that demand for memory chips isnt going to slow anytime soon. And when demand is high, prices rise, and memory chip companies make more money. And investors seem to believe that if Kioxia is guiding much higher on revenue than analysts expected, that signals good news for memory chip companies on this side of the Pacific, too. Memory chip stocks have had a great 2026 so far Even before todays Kioxia boost, U.S. memory chip stocks have had a pretty stellar run since the year began. As of yesterdays market close, Micron was up more than 43% year to date, Sandisk was up 152%, Western Digital was up 58%, and Seagate was up 47%. To put those figures into greater context, the stock market they all trade on, the Nasdaq, has actually declined during the same period. As of yesterdays close, the Nasdaq Composite was down about 0.7% for the year so far, according to data from Yahoo Finance. Looking back even furtherover the past 12 monthsthe returns on these same four memory chip companies have been even more eye-popping. In the last year, Seagate has risen 316%, Micron has jumped 336%, Western Digital is up 425%, and Sandisk has risen a staggering 1,609%. During the same period, the NASDAQ Composite has risen 17.4%
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E-Commerce
An Idaho-based beef processing facility is recalling about 22,912 pounds of raw ground beef over concerns that the products might be contaminated with E. coli O145. The company, CS Beef Packers in Kuna, issued the recall following testing by the U.S. Department of Agricultures (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), according to a recall notice published late Wednesday. An FSIS test at a downstream customer showed E. coli O415. This strand of the bacteria is a variation of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC). The USDA has labeled the recalled products as high risk, with the potential to cause adverse health consequences or even death. Heres what you need to know about the recalled CS Beef Packers items. What products are affected? The recalled products come in cardboard cases and were produced on January 14, 2026. Each case has a time stamp between 7:03 and 8:32 printed on them and a use-by or freeze-by by date of February 4, 2026. Plus, they bear the establishment number Est. 630 inside the USDAs inspection mark (available on the outside of the case and the clear packaging of each chub). As that expiration date has passed, the FSIS is worried that some products may be in food service freezers. Think you might have some in a freezer? The below cardboard cases of products are included in the recall: Eight 10-pound chubs of Beef, Coarse Ground, 73 L, case code 18601 Four 10-pound chubs of Fire River Farms Classic Beef Fine Ground 73 L, case code 19583 Four 10-pound chubs of Fire River Farms Classic Beef Fine Ground 81 L, case code 19563 You can view images of the product labels here. Where and when was the product sold? According to the FSIS, CS Beef Packers shipped the impacted products to distributors in California, Idaho, and Oregon. However, they were likely then sent to food service locations for further distribution. The recall notice does not include a list of potentially impacted restaurants or food-service establishments. Fast Company has reached out to CS Beef Packers for information on where else the recalled products might have gone. We will update this post if we hear back. What should I do if I have this product? The FSIS states that Foodservice locations are urged not to serve these products. These products should be thrown away or returned to the place of purchase. What E. coli symptoms should I look out for? As of Wednesday, there have been no reported illnesses from consuming the beef. However, people can become sick between two and eight days after exposure to E. coli O145. According to the USDA, symptoms include diarrhea (typically bloody) and vomiting. Diagnosis occurs through a stool sample. In most cases, people feel better within a week through treatments like vigorous rehydration, the USDA states. In rare cases, a person might develop a kidney infection known as hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS). This condition is most likely to occur in children under five-years-old, individuals with weakened immune systems, and older adults. Symptoms of HUS include easy bruising, pallor, and reduced urine output. Get medical help immediately if you experience any of these symptoms.
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E-Commerce
When the iPhone first introduced apps in 2008, a feverish gold rush followed. New APIs and design standards made it easier to make softwareeven by non-coders. The question became: Could you create a small experience, perhaps something as simple as a fart button app, that could make you a million dollars in a weekend? (And while some people definitely cashed in, a majority of us did not.) Nearly two decades later, the rest of us have another opportunity to rethink mobile software. Weve entered the era of vibe codingin which complex software can be generated with nothing but plain language prompts. Now, rather than offer developers the tools to make the next hit app, it seems phone manufacturers may urge everyone to vibe-code their next widget. The hypebeasty smartphone company Nothing Technology has launched what its calling Essential Apps in beta on its website. What that really means is that, for the first time, you can simply describe the widget youd like to have (maybe the latest scores from your favorite team, or a slideshow of beautiful public domain imagery), and it will become a widget that you can download right to your phone, or even share with the public. Nothings mantra? One billion apps for one billion people. I still prefer the term widgets for what Nothing is sharing, but Ill admit that its a good line. Because it seems quite feasible that, for many of us, our first experience with vibe coding will actually be a widget. The rise of widgets Full-blown apps have been the main modality of smartphones since the early days of the App Store. But the industry has embraced widgets for nearly as longas lighter-weight, glanceable apps that are always open on your screen. Desktop computers had used widgets for years before Google introduced them to Android in 2009. Apple held out until 2014. While theyve always represented a strange mortar of our digital lives, widgets have remained an established part of our app lexicon as bite-size vessels for information that can live wherever you want on your phone. Vibe coding is amazing, but its still involved in building something as complex as a modern app. Widgets, on the other hand, have such a limited scope that they seem perfect for an inexperienced vibe coder. The information you want is the interface, and theres not a lot more to it. Nothing isnt technically the first company to come up with the idea of vibe-coding widgets on a mobile platform. You may have forgotten that this was also the biggest promise from Rabbit, the early AI hardware company that captured the tech worlds imagination in 2024before turning out to be less capable than promised. (Meanwhile, its founder, Jesse Lyu, is building a new piece of hardware completely dedicated to vibe coding that’s called the Cyberdeck.) Nothing has sold over 7 million devices to a loyal crowd that appreciates its quirkier, more expressive approach to design. Its phones have touches like its Glyph Button on the back, which can contain cute micrographics that evoke the Atari era. [Photo: Nothing] As it turns out, Nothings vibe coding supports new animations for this buttonand people have already generated music visualizers and timers. Other early works you can find from Nothing vibe coderswhich, for now, seem to be Nothings own employeesinclude tic-tac-toe and phases of the moon. Theyre also letting people generate and share custom music equalizers and photo slideshows. Two different early hands-ons both suggest Nothings vibe coding isnt as perfectly automated as we may imagine, but the modality seems promising all the same. While I dont believe every human on earth is capable of developing the next Uber by vibe coding, its easy to imagine myriad people having a tiny, very specific problem related to their commutes, or a transportation challenge that theyd love to solve. And vibe-coded widgets offer a reasonable container for those solutions. This is only the beginning This is all to say that while Nothing was first(ish) out of the gate, I suspect vibe-coded widgets are going to be an extraordinarily popular modality sold by phone manfacturers. And not even necessarily because people need or want them, but because their limited scope seems just right for welcoming the masses into a cutting-edge behavior. Samsung, for instance, is already trying to distinguish its platform with AI integration of all types. Google, a global leader in all things AI at this moment, is almost certainly working on tools like this. On our December By Design podcast, former Fast Company design editorand current Google senior staff designer working on Android AICliff Kuang suggested vibe coding would be the biggest paradigm for the next decade or even century. Even Apple, a company I would naturally assume would never touch vibe coding, may come to surprise us. Consider that its already embraced generative AI in Messages and other apps, and it just signed a deal to source its next AI model from Google. I could certainly imagine Apple, working with its collection of internally designed components, creating a widget customizer for its users. And of course, we cannot count out Chinese companies, which produce around 50% of smartphones globally. Huawei, in particular, already offers a variety of Service Cardsan evolution of the widget that can turn an app into a little card, complete with the apps core functions, right on the home screen. Why couldnt AI make the perfect intermediary here, for a user to customize exactly what they want to surface from an app? Im not saying that vibe-coded widgets will become the predominant way we interact with our smartphones. As few as 15% of Apple users report actively using them today. But I do believe that a combination of feasible scope and FOMO-driven strategy could drive the entire smartphone industry in this direction over the next year or two. In other words: If you havent delved into vibe coding yet, dont be surprised if your first project is a widget.
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E-Commerce
It looks like ordinary paint, but a new coating called Lilypad Paint has a hidden ability to pull moisture out of the air. It works like a dehumidifier, without the energy use. If its on the wall in your bathroom, it can suck water vapor out of the air after youve taken a shower. The paint holds the humidity in nano-size pores, and then slowly releases it as humidity levels fall in the room. Under the paint, a layer of custom primer acts like a smart gatekeeper ensuring that vapor doesnt end up accumulating in the wall, says Derek Stein, founder and CEO of Adept Materials, the startup behind the product. A passive fix for moisture in modern buildings The tech spun out of Steins research as a physics professor at Brown University. While working with students on the design of a solar-powered house, he learned about a growing problem: As buildings become more energy-efficient, air quality can get worse. As were making buildings really, really tight thermally, they tend to trap in moisture and trap in air, Stein says. A new house might use less energy for heating and cooling but more for ventilationand if the system doesnt work perfectly, the home could end up with mold. Older houses that dont have mechanical ventilation also often have mold problems. [Photo: Adept Materials] Stein iterated on new materials that could passively regulate humidity inside a building and landed on the idea of a simple two-layer structure. Its like a material machine that can regulate humidity in a space while also teaching direction to the wall, he says. The design moves moisture out of the wall while preventing it from getting in. In conversations with the construction industry, Stein realized there was a clear demand for a product like this. In 2018, he left Brown and launched the startup to bring it to market. It became clear to me that to make this happen on any realistic time scale, I had to leave the ivory tower and go out into the proverbial real world to do this, he says. Scaling up outside the lab The basic tech, which the company calls Vaporwisp, could be incorporated in many different building materialsdrywall, for example, would benefit from humidity management. Adept Materials is also developing a new building wrap for construction that can keep moisture out without trapping it inside. In a seed round of funding a little over a year ago, investors included large home builders like D.R. Horton. Why are home builders investing in this? Its not just because of the paint. A lot of their problems, operationally, are related to moisture, says Stein. (The technology can also have broader applications, including packaging to keep food fresh longer, or moisture-wicking clothing.) Paint was a logical place to start in part because its used both by builders and by consumers working on DIY projects. And unlike drywalla low-margin, unbranded productpaint is something consumers can seek out by brand. [Photo: Adept Materials] In hundreds of lab tests on the paint, the team showed that the system worked as expected to absorb and release moisture. In two identical rooms filled with humidity sensors, testers painted one with Lilypad and one with ordinary paint, and ran a series of humidity assessments. The new paint kept moisture out of the walls. The process works as long as the paint is on the walls. In other words, the performance is tied to its physical properties, not to chemical additives that can wear out. Lilypad works because it gives moisture a place to go, and a way back out, Stein explains. When humidity rises, water temporarily clings to tiny surfaces inside the paint. When the air dries, that moisture naturally releases back into the room. Its the same everyday process that makes a bathroom mirror fog up and then clear again. The difference is scale: Inside a gallon of Lilypad, those invisible surfaces add up to about a million times the area of a mirror. After ensuring that the coating worked as expected on humidity, the company optimized it as a paint. The finish had to be perfect. It was engineered to flow onto walls as smoothly as top paint brands. We’ve really been engineering this to be a no-compromise paint, Stein says. The other thing, as a startup company, without the economies of scale that Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore will have, we’re not going to be able to compete on price. And so we’re necessarily going to be competing with higher-end products. . . . We cannot be deficient in any of that. Because its being sold not just as a paint, but as a coating to control moisture, its sold at a premium: A kit with a gallon of primer and a gallon of paint goes for $175. [Photo: Adept Materials] At launch, the coating is available only in white. There’s a a kind of poorly kept secret within the paint industry that about 80% of paint sales are whites, Stein says. So people go into the paint store, they bring the pillows and a sample of the drapes and the whatever and they’re checking all the colors, and after an hour they go up to the front and they say, ‘A gallon of double white.’ We wanted to free people of the decision paralysis and free ourselves of the operational headaches of having to offer every color under the rainbow. He notes that the company can easily add colors later. Saving energy and money In an ultra-tight new building like a passive house, the paint cant replace mechanical ventilation. But it can reduce how much ventilation needs to be used, saving energy. “If you can automatically regulate humidity, it can lighten the load on the HVAC systemand that’s not insignificant,” Stein says. “The fraction of energy that goes to managing humidity in a building is typically . . . about 10% to about 40%.” In an older building, Lilypad coating can reduce moisture without the need to install expensive new HVAC systems. Adept Materials is now in discussions with the Boston Housing Authority about a pilot that would test the paint inside public housing apartments that don’t have exhaust fans in bathrooms. “It’s accessible by design,” Stein says. “My hope is that while we are releasing this and people are going to be putting it in fancy remodels, there’s also the opportunity to put it into public housing.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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