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This weekend, tennis star Novak Djokovic is serving snackers something a little different: a new sorghum-based, corn-free popcorn brand called Cob, which will compete in the same aisle as SkinnyPop and Orville Redenbachers. The popcorns launch coincides with the announcement of a $5 million seed round for the startup thats led by Djokovic. Popcorn has become a particularly alluring category for celebrities over the past few years. New entrants have included Khloud Protein Popcorn backed by reality TV star Khloé Kardashian; singer Luke Bryans Boldly Grown Popcorn; and Robs BackStage Popcorn, cofounded by the pop rock band the Jonas Brothers. Why popcorn? What they are nibbling on is a growing market thats welcoming to new brands that promote bolder flavors, avoid canola oil and artificial butter flavors and colors, and include claims of higher protein or low-carb formulations. The U.S. popcorn market grew by 31% to $3.5 billion over a five-year period through 2024, according to market researcher Mintel, and is forecasted to be valued at $3.84 billion by 2029. I wanted to join the brand as cofounder, as well as lead the seed round, to give other investors confidence in our vision, says Djokovic in an emailed statement. [Photo: Cob] Cob is a gluten-free snack thats made from the grain sorghum, which is naturally rich in fiber, iron, and plant-based protein. The brand was originally conceptualized and created by entrepreneur Jessica Davidoff, who was inspired to explore snacking alternatives that could be served to her son, who suffers from an allergy to corn. My eyes were open to just how vast corn was in the American food system, Davidoff tells Fast Company. That led her to visit a local grocery store in New York that promoted international ingredients and start testing snacks that could be made in the kitchen that were similar to popcorn, but without the key base ingredient. Davidoff felt that sorghum delivered the best taste from all the alternatives she tested. It offers this new option for people who really like popcorn but want to take the nutrition component up a notch, she says. Cob will be sold direct-to-consumer through online channels including the brands website, at a price of $59.99 for a 24-pack of 1-ounce single-serve snack packs. The initial launch features four flavors, including Mediterranean herb, and olive oil and pink salt. Davidoff says the brand intends to launch more sorghum-based products in the future. Djokovic will serve as an adviser on ingredients, formulations, and product line extensions, as well as support marketing and future brand collaborations. A growing trend Healthier popcorn brands began to emerge as a force in the category after SkinnyPop launched in 2010. The brands pitch was that it featured only three ingredients: popcorn, sunflower oil, and salt. This streamlined ingredient list resonated with snackers, and sales quickly soared. The brands parent company, Amplify, was later acquired by candymaker Hershey for $1.6 billion in 2017. Since then, newer popcorn brands have promoted their use of coconut, olive, and avocado oils and have avoided artificially added butters, which are most associated with the microwavable brands. For people who really like to snack, popcorn is only 30 calories per cup, says New York-based dietitian Samantha Cassetty, noting that the calorie count is less than whats found in most other crunchy snacks. Brands like Cob have also promoted their alignment with GLP-1, one of the buzziest new trends in food as consumers increasingly embrace GLP-1 weight-loss medications like Ozempic and Wegovy. Cob says that sorghum is a resistant starch, meaning it can naturally boost a bodys GLP-1 to make a snacker feel fuller for longer. All of the CPG [consumer packaged goods] companies are looking for ways to target that consumer who is snacking less, Cassetty says. Kardashians Khloud voraciously promotes the nutritional claim of 7 grams of protein per serving thats from a blend of milk protein isolate. The popcorn brand was created to tap into three big trends: Protein snacks are growing three times faster than the market, protein is the most trending ingredient among millennial and Gen Z consumers, and popcorn is the fastest-growing salty snack category, according to Khloud CEO Jeff Rubenstein. [Photo: Khloud] For years, protein-packed foods tended to come in the form of bars and shakes, frequently promoted to gym-obsessed men, Rubenstein says. We can do this more femininely, he says, noting the brand features more vibrant packaging that includes soft pink and blue. We can attract a different audience to protein. The brand debuted in April with a 60-day retail exclusive at Target, and by January will be sold in more than 25,000 retail stores including Kroger and Walmart. Rubenstein says Khloud has an authentic founder story with Kardashian: She had an entire closet in her house that was dedicated to just snacks. She made Khloud a functional snack that is fashionable. Djokovic was drawn to the popcorn category because while he prefers home-cooked meals with simple ingredients, the pro athlete travels a lot with a very hectic schedule. At Cob, were creating packaged foods with the same ingredients and recipes wed use in our own kitchens to allow people to eat well even when theyre away from their kitchens, he says. Celebrities have craved snacks as an investment opportunity because similar to the beauty category, they can sell high volumes and drive more steady, repeatable purchasing patterns than apparel or jewelry. Snacks can also geneate gross profit margins of 40% for manufacturers, according to Alex Kushnir, a real and consumer partner at consultancy Baringa, who notes, It happens to be one of the more profitable categories in food.
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E-Commerce
If you blinked this week, you mightve missed a few major moves. Netflix decided its time for a stock split, Amazon trimmed thousands of jobs, and Walmart is already dropping Black Friday prices before the Halloween candy wrappers are even off. Meanwhile, housing trends, climate shocks, and AI budgets kept reshaping the conversation about whats next for growth. Heres a look at what mattered most this week, and why these stories could shape the months ahead. Mortgage-free America hits a new high A record 40.3% of owner-occupied homes are owned free and clear, up from 39.8% last year. Aging baby boomers and longer lifespans concentrate equity among older owners, and 64% of homeowners 65 and up have no mortgage. Lower-priced markets and older populations skew higher on mortgage-free rates, while places like Washington, D.C., and parts of the Mountain West skew lower. Expect more equity-tapping products to grow as retirees look for cash flow without selling. Palantir stock split chatter grows, but no commitment yet Investor chatter was growing this week that Palantir Technologies could potentially announce its first-ever stock split ahead of next weeks earnings report. Analysts say investors are eager for a cheaper entry point after the stocks 150% surge this year. Despite the speculation, the Denver-based software firm hasnt indicated any plans to split its shares. With Palantir trading at a lofty price-to-earnings ratio of about 630, some analysts warn its valuation may already be stretched. Amazon trims 14,000 corporate roles to move faster with AI Amazon announced plans this week to cut around 14,000 corporate positions within the company, focusing on shifting resources to bigger bets, including AI. The brand’s fulfillment staff remains intact ahead of peak season, which underscores an operating reset rather than a logistics pullback. Management suggested more hiring in specific areas in 2026, even as other layers come out. Investors want to see operating leverage and customer impact show up in results. Black Friday is arriving early, thanks to Walmart and Best Buy Both retailers unveiled staggered Black Friday and Cyber Monday calendars, with early DoorBOOsters and member-first windows. Pulling demand into late October and mid-November helps manage inventory and protect share in a slower-holiday-growth year. Expect heavy under-20-dollar deals and up-to-60%-off headlines to nudge cautious shoppers. Competitors now have to match earlier drops, tighter member perks, and quick delivery. Netflix is doing a 10-for-1 stock split Netflix will split shares by a ratio of 10-for-1 in mid-November, which lowers the share price per unit without changing market capitalization. The move improves access for employees through stock programs and can pull in more retail participation. Splits can also make options trading more granular for investors. Keep an eye on whether a broader holder base supports momentum or adds volatility. Chipotles stock slump flags a demand soft spot Chipotle met expectations, then cut its full-year outlook for the third straight time, which sparked a sharp stock sell-off this week. Fewer visits from households under $100,000 in income and from younger diners are pressuring comparable-store sales. Management still plans hundreds of new openings, including select international markets. Exact change, please, as pennies slow to circulate Kroger checkout signs asking for exact change reignited penny shortage questions this week. Minting has paused, and a lot of pennies are sitting in jars and drawers, which slows circulation. Retailers and banks may round cash transactions to the nearest five cents for a bit, while digital payments are unaffected. Retiring the penny would require Congress, so policy debate will continue. Starbucks confirms 520 U.S. closures in Q4 Starbucks reported 627 closures globally in the quarter, including 520 in the United States, which tops many outside estimates. The moves support a Back to Starbucks turnaround that focuses on service, simpler routines, and warmer in-store experiences. Management points to stabilizing comps as proof that the reset is working. Investors are weighing near-term disruption against cleaner long-term growth. Hurricane Melissa turns climate risk into a balance sheet story Super-warm waters helped Hurricane Melissa rapidly intensify into one of the strongest Caribbean landfalls on record. Early analyses tie higher odds and added severity to climate change, with monetary damages modeled in the tens of billions. That hits insurers, tourism, supply chains, and public infrastructure, which feeds back into local GDP. Expect more pressure on resilience spending and location strategy in 2026 plans. Meta posts record revenue, then raises the AI bill Meta delivered record revenue this week but took a large non-cash tax charge that hit net income and EPS optics. Management lifted expense and CapEx guidance, and signaled even higher spend in 2026 to meet AI compute needs. The bet is that better recommendations and ad performance will eventually outrun rising costs. The open question is timing, and how quickly monetization converts into durable margin.
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E-Commerce
Lots of research shows that doing mental exercises can ward off dementia and the effects of aging, but can it actually make you better at your job? While its hard to imagine the late musical theater virtuoso Stephen Sondheim needing any kind of extra creative stimuli, he in fact had a well-known love of stimulating puzzles and games. And he didnt just play them. The Tony-winning composer behind Broadway hits such as Sweeney Todd, Company, and a heartwarming ditty about presidential assassins also cultivated a side hustle as a designer of cryptic crossword puzzles and a frequent host of game nights and scavenger hunts. Barry Joseph, a game researcher and designer and an adjunct professor at New York University, happened to notice a few years ago that no one had documented Sondheims niche passion in a comprehensive way. So he decided to do it himself. His new book, Matching Minds With Sondheim (Bloomsbury, October 2025), draws from eight decades of Sondheims brain-teasing ventures. It includes a mix of rare and rarely seen game designs, archival research, and interviews with Sondheim contemporaries who played along. [Image: Bloomsbury] Fast Company recently caught up with Joseph to discuss the book, what inspired it, and what he hopes readers will gain from trying to match minds with a musical legend. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. You have a background as a game designer and game researcher. How did you get interested in writing about Stephen Sondheim? Sondheim passed away in November of 2021. That means March, 22, 2022, was his first birthday after he passed away. And my birthday is two days later. For a present, my wife got me three Sondheim-related books . . . recognizing that I and many other Sondheim fans were still in mourning for having lost our musical hero. One was an academic book that was a review of all Sondheim shows, but from the perspective of postmodernism. That book left me thinking how interesting it was to look at Sondheim through one lens. What other lenses might there be? Then I read Stephen Sondheim’s biography from the late 90s by Meryle Secrest, which barely talked about him having anything to do with puzzles and games. Its mentioned here and there, but in the index in the back of the book, there’s nothing for games and nothing for puzzleswhich tells you a lot about how seriously the topic was addressed. And the third book was James Lapines Putting It Togetherthe oral history of Sunday in the Park With George. Lapine had met Stephen Sondheim right after Sondheim had his critical disaster Merrily We Roll Along. For those who don’t know, it was a show that lasted under two weeks and was completely decimated by the critics, putting Sondheim in a very unpleasant state of mindso much so that when he met Mr. Lapine, he was talking about leaving the world of musical theater. Lapine asked him what he was going to do next, and he said, Maybe I’ll go into video game design. That’s not what happened! They ended up working together to do Sunday in the Park With George. Sondheim kept doing musical theater. The rest is history, and they never mentioned it again in the book. Me, as a young person who grew up in the late ’70s, early ’80s, playing my Intellivision, my Atari, my Apple II Plus computer, I read that and wondered about Stephen Sondheim designing video games instead . . . I remember Intellivision being the middle stepchild of video game consoles. Not too many people had Intellivision. I was one of those people. I always liked things being outside the box. . . . In any case, I read that, and that blew my mind. I thought, “What is Sondheim doing talking about games?” And I said, “Is there something here? Is there a topic here? What is the lens on Stephen Sondheim from a game perspective?” Ludology is the study of games. And so I thought, “Can one look at Stephen Sondheim from a ludological lens?” And at the time, I didn’t know if there’d be much of anything. But after just a few weeks of some quick Google searches, what I found was that there were a lot of fascinating, enticing tidbits. He was the founding puzzle editor of New York magazine in 1968. He created a cryptic crossword puzzle once a week. His only Hollywood-produced movie, The Last of Sheila, a murder mystery, involves all sorts of devious puzzles and games. And I kept coming across these other mentions of people talking about going to his house for game nights. And there was an interview in Games magazine in 1983. There’s a bunch of his little tidbits here and there. And then the rest of it I found irresistible. So you find all these breadcrumbs, publicly known facts here and there, and realize there’s no larger body of work that has compiled all this? I learned enough to know that there was something there, and that it wasn’t waiting for someone just to write about. Because if it was, it would’ve been written. Did you find a moment or many moments where his love of creating these puzzles informed his creative work in a really specific way? The last chapter in the book is an analysis of all of his shows, looking at it from a playful language. Where are puzzles and games in the shows? Where are they in the structure of the shows, and where do they show up in the process of creating the shows? And once you start taking this lens at his theatrical work, you see it everywhere. The end of Sunday in the Park With George is a moment where this painting that we’ve been watching constructed on the stage suddenly comes into focus. And it’s one that we know the audience has some prior knowledge ofthey expect to see a certain something. Suddenly, it all happens in that moment when all the pieces all click together. It’s those moments that Sondheim often talked about, where you’re forming order out of chaos. And that’s essentially a jigsaw puzzle being constructed. And I’m now thinking about Merrily We Roll Along, which you mentioned earlier. Its told backwards. That feels like it’s its own puzzle. Think about it from the audience’s perspective, right? When you are watching something in which he effect happens before the cause, you have to hold it in your mind. And when youre looking, its like a Wheres Waldo? What’s going to be the thing that caused that thing to happen? And then when you see it, it connects together. Sondheim didn’t write the book of Merrily, but I always wondered if that somehow influenced it. And so we see it throughout the shows, in the structures of the shows, in the way that games and puzzles are used, and sometimes in the process of how they developed. What if a reader wants to pick up your bookwho is not necessarily super into puzzles or a hardcore puzzle doer? You have the puzzles in the book. Would the casual puzzle person find these kinds of puzzles challenging? Let me answer your question in a roundabout way. . . . When I talk about all of his games and puzzles, I talk about three particular values. The first is the principle of generosity. The second is the principle of playfulness. And the third is the principle of mentorship. Generosity means that I am here to help you have an engaging time. I’m here to make you feel good about yourselfnot just feel good about how smart I am. And so it means creating opportunities to help people along the way. Helping along the way connects with the mentorship, which is building the scaffolding to help people solve the puzzles. And playfulness is just making it all fun. You mentioned that your wife bought you three Sondheim books, so you must have been a fan before you started writing this. When did you discover your love of Broadway? Im laughing because I am in my room . . . and in my closet is a collection of Playbills that go back to the mid-1980s. I cant even count how many are here. I grew up on Long Island. My mom loved musical theater, and it was a thing we often did as a family. I learned very early on that I loved what it meant to be in an audience for a musical. I loved the magic that was created on the stage. And more importantly, I loved the emotions that it brought out in me.
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