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Glen Powell has done it all on screenfrom battling storms in Twisters to trading banter in the rom-com Anyone but You. But his latest role? Its a little unexpected: reinventing the American pantry. The actor is stepping into the food world as a cofounder of Smash Kitchen, a new condiment brand hitting Walmart shelves nationwide on April 2. The line includes ketchup, mustard, mayo, and BBQ sauceall made with better-for-you ingredients like organic tomatoes and mustard seeds, cage-free organic eggs, and none of the usual suspects like high-fructose corn syrup or artificial additives. The goal? To bring all your favorite condiments under one cleaner, tastier brand. Were trying to give you the flavor that you love and youre used to, with more integrity, Powell tells Fast Company. When you look at these legacy brands, they dont evolve because they dont have to evolve. The Powell-backed brand is leaping into the $12 billion U.S. condiments category, which is projected to grow an additional $1 billion by 2029, according to market researcher Mintel. Unlike other food categories like coffee, soda, and yogurt where upstart brands have made inroads, Unilevers Hellmanns mayonnaise, Kraft Heinzs namesake ketchup, and McCormicks Frenchs mustard are the market leaders and have easily retained those positions for decades. [Image: Smash Kitchen] We have a tremendous sense of loyalty to these brands, says Matthew Barry, food and beverage insight manager at researcher Euromonitor International. People are really attached to Hellmanns and Heinz ketchup. Smash Kitchen is the first business venture that Powell has announced outside of his career as an entertainer, which began with his big screen acting debut in the 2003 film Spy Kids 3: Game Over. Powell has since racked up dozens of film and TV credits and recently formed his own production company called Barnstorm. The creation of Smash Kitchen, Powell says, was inspired by his affinity for hosting dinner parties and barbecues in Los Angeles and his home state of Texas. My family life and my favorite memories always evolved around the kitchen, says Powell. Food is how we show our love. Smash Kitchen is backed by venture capital firm Collaborative Fund, an early investor in Olipop, Sweetgreen, and Blue Bottle Coffee. Powells co-founders Smash Kitchen CEO Sameer Mehta, a cofounder of dog food brand Jinx and former VP of strategic partners at mattress company Casper, and President Sean Kane, who co-founded consumer goods purveyor the Honest Company. The trio were brought together through a mutual connection with venture capital fund Iconiq Capital founder Divesh Makan. Ultimately, you shouldn’t have to choose what’s better for your budget and and better for your health, and Glenn is super excited to be able to bring that to not only his family, but people everywhere, says Kane. Smash Kitchens pitch to shoppers is not only a focus on a cleaner nutritional label that avoids high fructose corn syrup and tomato concentrate, but prioritizing the creation of condiments that taste good. Retailers, Mehta says, told the team that people arent picking up condiments for health benefits. They are picking it up for the flavor. The more distinctive flavors from Smash Kitchen, like hot honey BBQ sauce and spicy mayo, may have greater success luring shoppers, as those flavor profiles arent as intrinsically linked to childhood memories as the classic Heinz ketchup. Weve seen hot honey get household recognition within the pizza category, says Mehta. Nobody has infused it with ketchup. Its a flavor profile that we know consumers are wanting. Theres no hot honey sauce that is so emotionally resonant and widespread among the American consumer, says Barry. Its open to disruption. Anyone could be the hot honey sauce of America. Smash Kitchens range is priced slightly above what larger rivals command. The classic 20-ounce ketchup has a standard list price of $3.97 versus Heinzs $3.48 at Walmart.com. Smashs yellow mustard is priced at $3.47, compared to $2.54 for Frenchs. Barry says inflation-wary shoppers remain particularly sensitive to grocery prices, but may be willing to spend a bit more on a cleaner ingredient label. The organic claim, he adds, has lost some luster because it has become so ubiquitous across the grocery store. If you can be a little fun treat for people, a little moment of happiness and joy at a reasonable price point, thats really prominent right now, says Barry.
Category:
E-Commerce
Audiences are used to Hollywood mining pre-existing material for movies. For over two decades now, the industrys go-to source for blockbusters has been comic books. And increasingly, its been video games. But occasionally, Hollywood turns to Reddit, too. This week, it was announced that the popular Hollywood actress Sydney Sweeney had acquired the film rights to a four-year-old Reddit post. As noted by The Hollywood Reporter, the Reddit post in question is a short story by a Massachusetts-based high school English teacher named Joe Cote. That short story and post, titled I pretended to be a missing girl so I could rob her family, is about a girl who shows up at the house of a family whose daughter went missing years earlier. The girl says she is their missing daughter so she can stay with them for the nighta lie she uses in her attempt to rob their house. The Hollywood Reporter says that Warner Bros. won the rights to the film deal, which was described as competitive. Warner Bros. picked up the rights after Sydney Sweeney became attached to star in and produce the short story adaptation. Sweeney reportedly then brought Oscar-winning scriptwriter Eric Roth, of Forrest Gump fame, to make the story into a screenplay. A release date and director have not yet been announced. Hollywood has been interested in adapting Reddit posts into films before But I pretended to be a missing girl isnt the only Reddit post that has been picked up for a movie adaptation before. This is actually the second confirmed time a Reddit post has attracted Hollywoods attention. The first time happened nearly 14 years ago. As reported by Variety in 2011, Warner Bros. (seems like the studio loves Reddit, doesnt it?) picked up the film rights to a Reddit post with the lengthy title Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU? This post was another short story, and this one explored what would happen if a group of modern-day U.S. Marines were transported back in time to the Roman Empire. The film adaptations working title was Rome, Sweet Rome. The short story was written by author and Jeopardy! champion James Erwin. However, those Reddit scribes hopeful that their next postshort story or otherwisewill be picked up by Hollywood and see them soon walking down the red carpet need to understand one thing: just because a studio picks up the film rights to something doesnt mean that the film will ever see the light of day. The majority of acquired film rights go on to languish in development hell, an industry term used to describe projects that get stuck in purgatory for whatever reason, often due to a revolving door of talent coming to and leaving a project. In 2018, Little White Lies reported that Rome, Sweet Rome was stuck in development hell. Of course, just getting anything picked up by Hollywood, even if it is never made into a movie, is a success in its own right. And when it comes to Reddit posts, its now happened at least twice. As the superhero genre continues to die a slow death, Hollywood is certain to be looking for something it can generate movie ideas from for years to come. As the two examples above show, Reddit may be one of those places.
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E-Commerce
It’s been a wild few years for Snowflake, from a record-breaking IPO to a plummeting stock price to a data-breach scandal. Sridhar Ramaswamy took over in the heat of the turmoil and helped steady the ship, in part by betting big on AI. Ramaswamy shares lessons from the company’s turnaround including insights behind high profile partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic, how Snowflake embraced China’s Deepseek early, and why Ramaswamy calls Snowflake the most consequential AI-data company in the world. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I had a guest on the show recently who confided that a lot of CEOs are kind of paralyzed right now by sort of external uncertainties in the world, shifting tariffs, and regulations, and executive orders. How do you deal with, and think about, the environment and all the changes relative to the things that you can control yourself? One of my firm beliefs in life is that you need to focus on the things that you are going to have an impact on. There are many things that, let’s face it, we are simply not going to have any impact on. Obsessing about unchangeable things in the short term is the recipe for being uncertain about life. There is a lot of macro uncertainty. Businesses will react, and we will have to worry. For example, if the stock market keeps going down, or if the business climate gets worse, it’ll have an impact on Snowflake, but so far, it’s been heads down, get great product work done, get great customer deployments done. You recently said that Snowflake is the most consequential data and AI company in the world. That is an ambitious assertion, especially for a business that, at least previously, was known as a data storage company. How do you back up that claim? The most important data for the most important enterprises in the world is already stored on Snowflake. Snowflake is the gold standard for analytics. We have something like 700-odd Global 2000 companies that are on Snowflake, and if you exclude the folks from China that we are not even going after, that is 700-something out of 1,600. They all put their most important prized information on top of Snowflake. Large public companies close their books every month on top of Snowflake. Financial institutions share data with each other. Snowflake is the beating heart of at least the U.S. financial system in terms of how data moves from place to place. I mentioned at the beginning that Snowflake was one of the first U.S. companies to adopt DeepSeek. You’re also the only data platform, big one, to offer models from both OpenAI and Anthropic. What did you see in DeepSeek, and second, why have you leaned into having multiple models available? Our strength is as a data platform. We are not a foundation model company, and honestly, most companies have no business of pretending that they are foundation model companies. It takes very specialized expertise, incredible talent density, and a very, very big wallet. And so for this, we decided to go the way of partnerships. We collaborate with a lot of folks. We focus on developing data products, which, in my mind, is the place where value is going to be realized. When people think about OpenAI, they think, “Ah. These are the people that make the foundation models.” No, no, no. OpenAI is an amazing product company. ChatGPT is a legitimate product. It is going to approach the pantheon of the greats, the products that have a billion-plus users, and so helping people get value from models and the data that Snowflake has is what we are about. Hence the leaning into heavy partnerships. Things like hosting DeepSeek quickly, that’s just a little bit of making sure that you can still run the hundred-meter sprint in 10 seconds. It was a challenge. It was an amazing model. We had it out in two days flat. There was a lot of anxiety about DeepSeek. You don’t necessarily feel that same kind of anxiety, or even if you do, you feel like you have to have it available. Let’s break that anxiety down. There are many parts of DeepSeek. One is the open-source model. DeepSeek also offers services on servers that are hosted in China, where if you use their app, for example, everything that you are typing in is getting sent to China. Now, without getting too much into geopolitics, people will rightfully say that sending business data to China is a bad idea. It’s the same kind of fear that we have about TikTok. Hosting the DeepSeek model does not introduce any kind of security compromise. We host it. We take security and risk management very seriously. Us hosting DeepSeek did not cause issues like that. Any anxiety about, “Oh, DeepSeek can do things so much more cheaply than OpenAI. They’re cheaper, faster ways to build these models”? See, that’s the part of it that I actually like. That’s not anxiety. The reason I like that is because if there are highly capable-models that are freely available, the value of the data that is in Snowflake goes up. It doesn’t go down. The value of the model companies goes down, and they have to innovate even harder. But innovation is a good thing for all of us. The cheaper that models get, the more broadly adoption there is, the more benefit that we, as society, are going to get, and certainly, Snowflake as a business. You have mentioned the trend of businesses moving to India. You are an immigrant to the U.S. from India. You came from India with just a few suitcases and a couple hundred dollars, as I recall. There’s so much angst in the U.S. around immigration right now. How much do you think about it, given your personal experience? Look, I’m incredibly blessed. I came with a bachelor’s degree, yes, I think it was $700. Neither of my parents went to college. I got a doctorate from Brown that Brown entirely paid for. I got a monthly stipend and a free PhD, and I think I’ve contributed in meaningful ways to the country, helping create great, amazing businesses. I think the larger issue is that our population feels like there is enough prosperity to go around. People in our country need to feel like they have a prosperous future before they’re willing to lean in and say, “We want more immigrants to share in that prosperous uture.” But I think those are the core issues that our government needs to address, where all of us feel like they have the opportunity like how I got the opportunity. My take is there’s no generosity without prosperity. What do people and business leaders most misunderstand about the state of technology right now? I think they are both feeling pressure about things like AI, but are also flooded with options for what to do. I think there’s just so much noise coming in terms of partnerships between X and Y or this new agent, take this or the other. I think that just separating out what is real from what is hype, I think, is very hard. I would say this is less a misunderstanding than an amount of confusion, and I don’t think the AI industry helps itself with things like not talking about hallucination rates or not talking about things like what it takes for something to truly be enterprise-grade? There’s a little bit of, “look, ma. It’s so cool,” kind of attitude to some of the things that happen in AI. I think there is a maturity process that is going to happen, but figuring out what is real from what is hype is the biggest challenge that business leaders, enterprise leaders face today.
Category:
E-Commerce
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