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Kraft Heinz said Wednesday it’s pausing its plans to split into two companies.Steve Cahillane, a former Kellogg Co. chief who became CEO of Kraft Heinz on Jan. 1, said he wants to ensure that all of the company’s resources are focused on profitable growth.“I have seen that the opportunity is larger than expected and that many of our challenges are fixable and within our control,” Cahillane said in a statement.The company’s shares dropped 5.2% in early trading Wednesday as Kraft Heinz reported lower quarterly and annual results.Kraft Heinz announced in September it was splitting into two companies a decade after a merger of the brands created one of the biggest food manufacturers on the planet.One of the companies would include stronger-selling brands such as Heinz, Philadelphia cream cheese and Kraft Mac & Cheese. The other would include slower-selling brands like Maxwell House, Oscar Mayer, Kraft Singles and Lunchables.At the time, Kraft Heinz said it expected the split to be finalized in the second half of this year.On Wednesday, the company said it will pivot from the split and invest $600 million in marketing, sales and product development.In its fourth-quarter earnings release Wednesday, CEO Steve Cahillane said Kraft Heinz’s balance sheet and free cash flow potential were strong.“We are confident in the opportunity ahead and believe this investment will accelerate our return to profitable growth,” Callihane said. Dee-Ann Durbin, AP Business Writer
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E-Commerce
U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 130,000 jobs last month, but government revisions cut 2024-2025 U.S. payrolls by hundreds of thousands.The unemployment rate fell to 4.3%, the Labor Department said Wednesday.The report included major revisions that reduced the number of jobs created last year to just 181,000, weakest since the pandemic year of 2020, and less than half the previously reported 584,000.The job market has been sluggish for months even though the economy is registering solid growth.But the January numbers came in stronger than the 75,000 economists had expected. Healthcare accounted for nearly 82,000, or more than 60%, of last month’s new jobs. Factories added 5,000, snapping a streak of 13 straight months of job losses. The federal government shed 34,000 jobs.Average hourly wages rose a solid 0.4% from December to January.The unemployment rate fell from 4.4% in December as the number of employed Americans rose and the number of unemployed fell.Weak hiring over the past year reflects the lingering impact of high interest rates, billionaire Elon Musk’s purge last year of the federal workforce and uncertainty arising from President Donald Trump’s erratic trade policies, which have left businesses unsure about hiring.Dreary numbers have been coming in ahead of Wednesday’s report. Employers posted just 6.5 million job openings in December, fewest in more than five years.Payroll processor ADP reported last week that private employers added 22,000 jobs in January, far fewer than economists had forecast. And the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that companies slashed more than 108,000 jobs last month, the most since October and the worst January for job cuts since 2009.Several well-known companies announced layoffs last month. UPS is cutting 30,000 jobs. Chemicals giant Dow, shifting to more automation and artificial intelligence, is cutting 4,500 jobs. And Amazon is slashing 16,000 corporate jobs, its second round of mass layoffs in three months.The sluggish job market doesn’t match the economy’s performance.From July to September, America’s gross domestic productits output of goods and servicesgalloped ahead at a 4.4% annual pace, fastest in two years. Consumer spending was strong, and growth got a boost from rising exports and tumbling imports. And that came on top of solid 3.8% growth from April through June.Economists are puzzling out whether job creation will eventually accelerate to catch up to strong growth, perhaps as President Donald Trump’s tax cuts translate into big tax refunds that consumers start spending this year. But there are other possibilities. GDP growth could slow and fall into line with a weak labor market or advances in AI and automation could mean that the economy can roar ahead without creating many jobs.Wednesday’s report included the government’s annual benchmark revisions, meant to take into account the more-accurate jobs numbers that employers report to state unemployment agencies. They cut 898,000 jobs from payrolls in the year ending March 2025.Despite recent high-profile layoffs, the unemployment rate has looked better than the hiring numbers.That is partly because President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown has reduced the number of foreign-born people competing for work.As a result, the number of new jobs that the economy needs to create to keep the unemployment rate from risingthe “break-even” pointhas tumbled. In 2023, when immigrants were pouring into the United States, it reached a high of 250,000, according to economist Anton Cheremukhin of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. By mid-2025, Cheremukhin found, it was down to 30,000. Researchers at the Brookings Institution believe it could now be as low as 20,000 and headed lower.The combination of weak hiring but low unemployment means that most American workers are enjoying job security. But those who are looking for jobsespecially young people who can be competing at the entry level with AI and automationoften struggle to land one. Paul Wiseman, AP Economics Writer
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E-Commerce
There are few things everyone can rally behind as much as finding a lost dog. But what if that mission is actually a workaround for mass surveillance? Thats the question many people are asking following a Super Bowl commercial from Ring, Amazon’s doorbell camera and home security brand. The 30-second video shows a series of missing dog posters and claims that 10 million pets go missing every year. It pitches Rings Search Party feature as the solution. Launched in November, Search Party takes a photo of the pet and taps into Ring cameras across the area. They can then use AI to identify the missing pet and send an alert. The ad claims that at least one dog a day has been found since the feature launched. It sounds like a happy ending, except that critics of Search Party see the ads framing as a way to normalize widespread biometric identification and a loss of privacy. Take a response from WeRateDogs, a dog-lovers’ account connected to 15/10 Foundation, a nonprofit raising money to get necessary medical help for shelter dogs. In a video posted to Bluesky on Tuesday, the brands creator, Matt Nelson, states, Neither Rings products nor business model are built around finding lost pets, but rather creating a mass surveillance network by turning private homes into surveillance outposts and well-meaning neighbors into informants for ICE and other government agencies. Solutions for finding lost dogs already exist Nelson further claims that Rings success rate of one dog found per day equals about 0.03% of reports shared. Instead of using Search Party, he suggests dog owners get their pet microchippeda common means of tracking lost dogs. Vets and some shelters can microchip dogs. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit focused on defending civil liberties in the digital world, takes a similar stance on Ring. “The addition of AI-driven biometric identification is the latest entry in the companys history of profiting off of public safety worries and disregard for individual privacy, one that turbocharges the extreme dangers of allowing this to carry on, EFF wrote in response to the ad. The nonprofit continues: People need to reject this kind of disingenuous framing and recognize the potential end result: a scary overreach of the surveillance state designed to catch us all in its net. EFF points to instances such as in 2023, when Ring had to pay $5.8 million to settle with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after Ring employees were found to have had extensive access to customer footageincluding in intimate spaces. In reaching the settlement, Ring denied violating the law. [Photo: Amazon] In early 2024, Ring claimed it would stop providing footage to the police without a warrant. But both Nelson and the EFF point to Rings late-2025 partnerships with Flock Safety and Axon. The companies can request footage from Ring customerswithout a warrantfor a case and then send it to thousands of law enforcement agencies. Fast Company has reached out to Ring for comment and will update this post if we hear back. A May 2025 report by 404 Media found that police using Flocks AI license plate reader regularly put the reason as ICE. In a specific case, the Johnson County Sheriffs Office in Texas, used Flock in its search for a woman who self-administered an abortion. How to turn off Rings Search Party feature Rings Search Party feature is on by default, but users can turn it off. According to Amazons Ring support, you can turn off the Search Party feature by: Going to the Ring app and tap the menu icon (three lines) Clicking Control Center Choosing Search Party Tapping Enable or Disable Search for Lost Pets (Click the blue Pet icon next to it if you want to turn it on or off for specific cameras) Nelson’s post on Bluesky has attracted thousands of shares and hundreds of comments, with some pointing to a Reddit thread in which users are saying they plan to return their Ring camera for a refund.
Category:
E-Commerce
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