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When he was a teenager, Collin McKenna’s interest in changing the food system led him to move from Colorado to Hawaii for high school. It was on that school’s regenerative farm that the now 30-year-old has entrepreneur discovered meadthe sweet, fermented honey beverage often referred to as “honey wine.” His first taste of alcohol was mead made by Hawaiian locals. With his 10-month-old brand LIXIRa sparkling ready-to-drink mead brand hes billing as hard honeyMcKenna wants to make the ancient beverage accessible while turning LIXIR into just the second Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) alcoholic beverage brand. So many different cultures made different variations of it. But we wanted to reimagine mead for a modern consumer, McKenna says. Making Mead Accessible One of McKennas first moves when starting Lixir was trademarking the term hard honey, papering over the knowledge gap around meadone of the worlds oldest alcoholic beverages, but whose popularity fell as beer and wine became easier to produce on industrial scale. But mead has been having a resurgence. Fortune Business Insights data reveals that the mead market was about $533.3 million in 2023, and is projected to nearly triple by 2032. There’s a lot of education behind trying to explain mead and where it comes from, McKenna says. As soon as we came up with the idea of hard honey, people were like, I get it. With a concept in mind, in 2021, McKenna approached Frank Golbeck, founder of Oceanside, Californias Golden Coast Mead, to begin developing the formula for his hard honey. Since 2010, Golbeck has been focused on modern mead with a regenerative approach. He saw McKennas ethos and vision, and although his small factory had limited space, was willing to begin a partnership. Golbeck says mead represents “the synthesis of ecology, creativity and history coming together. Honey is this expensive product that is hard to make. Then to turn it into an alcohol that is similarly hard to makeand to do it well, consistentlyhas escaped people for generations.” The pair ultimately created a proprietary process for formulating a 5% ABV modern mead thats less sweet and, unlike the traditional drink, slightly carbonated. LIXIR comes in three varieties: Pear Lime, Cherry Grapefruit, and Mango Orange. There are so many different honey optionsflowers and places where they forageand they can make such different mead,” McKenna says. “We went through countless renditions of just trying to make the base. It was at least a yearlong process. Since April, Lixir has debuted at Total Wine & More in its SoCal region as well as Jimbos natural grocery stores in San Diego, among several other small retailers and upscale restaurants and hotels. This Spring, it will also begin rolling out in Mothers Market stores in Southern California regions. McKenna has raised more than $650,000 in funding, about half of its current goal amid a crowdfunding round. Jack Sinclair, CEO of Sprouts Farmers Market, is an advisor and investor in Lixir. [Photo: Courtesy of Lixir] Lixir’s regenerative approach Lixir’s branding helps make mead something a casual shopper might buy, but McKenna still has to solve for how to explain to buyers that their purchase is funding responsible farming. A survey out of Purdue Universitys Department of Agriculture found that more than 70% of U.S. consumers are slightly or not at all familiar with the term regenerative agriculture. McKenna and Golbeck knew that their regenerative goals would rely on sourcing, so they decided to make Lixir with honey sourced from a Brazilian farm in the Atlantic Rainforest that pulls double duty as a nature and bee preserve. McKenna says Lixir is already a regenerative organic product, but has yet to receive certification from the Regenerative Organic Alliancesomething no bee farm or honey brand has managed to achieve. McKenna and Golbeck say thats because the ROA requires a three-mile forage radius to certify farms, something the founders view as impractical because bees fly far and wide. They have been working with groups like the Regenerative Apiculture Working Group, which focuses on promoting a regenerative honey ecosystem, to make changes to the requirements. It’s so complicated, McKenna says adds. We’ve been chipping away for 10 years. Though the ROA has certified a handful of beverage brandsamong them Harmless Harvest coconut water and Guayaki yerba mateLIXIR would become just the second alcoholic beverage brand with ROC status (outdoor lifestyle brand Patagonias beer and wine operation has received the certification). McKenna is hopeful ROC status could come within the next five years. We want to educate people in the best way possible by creating a product that everybody can enjoy and have fun with, McKenna says. We want to be the brand behind the movement.”
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E-Commerce
This week, the startup Humanewhich raised $240 million to build an iPhone-killing Ai Pinannounced its sale to HP for $116 million. While far short of the companys original $1 billion asking price, its astonishing that the brand scrapped for anything at all. A product that had promised to change the world instead became a worldwide laughingstock, indicative of the worst tendencies of Silicon Valley-founder hubris. Universally panned, Humane sold fewer than 10,000 units. Sometimes, its returns outpaced its sales. Units could catch fire. Humane cofounders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno thanked their few loyal customers by announcing their Pins would no longer work in 10 days. Well, for anything but checking the battery level. “This investment will rapidly accelerate our ability to develop a new generation of devices that seamlessly orchestrate AI requests both locally and in the cloud,” said Tuan Tran, president of technology and innovation at HP, in a press statement. “Humanes AI platform Cosmos, backed by an incredible group of engineers, will help us create an intelligent ecosystem across all HP devices from AI PCs to smart printers and connected conference rooms. This will unlock new levels of functionality for our customers and deliver on the promises of AI.” Heh. I can understand why the world was fooled by the Ai Pin when it launched in 2024. I have a little less sympathy now for HP execs, who have just completed one of the most tone-deaf acquisitions in corporate history. The Ai Pin was flawed from the beginning Mystique around Humane had been swirling for years by the time Chaudhri took the stage at TED in May 2023 to present the idea of the disappearing computer. After spending his career at Apple working on some of its most important launches such as the iPhone, he pitched a screenless AI interface that allows us to get back to what really matters: a new ability to be present. By simply asking his computer to “catch me up,” it was able to cut through endless notifications to tell him what was important. By Chaudhri holding up a candy bar, his computer could tell him if it jibed with his lactose intolerance condition. And when his wife (and company cofounder) called, well, her name “magically” appeared right on his hand. Little did the audience realize: The computer had merely disappeared into Chaudhris jacket with a needle and thread. Even a bad magic trick can fool people who want to be fooled. And Humanes vision struck a chord with a society that felt guilty for using its phones all the time. Freeing our eyes and hands sounded like liberation, and the promise that an AI could do everything from translate languages in real time to examining the foods youd eaten that the day to determine if youre aligned with your diet seemed like the sort of just-out-of-reach magic that could finally be real. And, wait, was that a LASER BEAM THAT JUST SHOT ONTO HIS HAND? [Image: Humane/TED] The next time the Ai Pin arrived on stage, it (well, a prototype of it) would be worn on the lapel of Naomi Campbelltrue supermodel royaltyat Paris Fashion week. The closest parallel I could remember was Beyoncé donning an Apple Watch around its announcement. The product was starting to feel too big to fail. Its investorsincluding Tiger Global Management, Microsoft, Qualcomm Ventures, and Softbank, alongside individuals including Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and OpenAI’s Sam Altmanfed an $840 million valuation. It felt like something that deserved to be taken seriously. Naomi Campbell wore a prototype of Humane’s Ai Pin at the Coperni spring/summer 2024 show during Paris Fashion Week. [Photo: Francois Durand/Getty Images] Still, the TED Talk had struck me as funny for reasons I couldnt articulate. Later, Chaudhri canceled an on-stage interview with me where hed promised to speak about the product for the first time. He also declined an interview after my in-person demo (Ive experienced a hundred or more product walkthroughs in my career, and Ive never been unable to ask a question of the company after any of them, except for Humane). What I generously interpreted as shynessChaudhris soft-spoken magnetism cannot be deniedincreasingly seemed to be protecting a thin veneer. Five months before Marques Brownlee nuked the AI Pin into oblivion by calling it the worst product hed ever reviewed, Id been saying the same to friends in the industry who eagerly asked about my experience with the device. It was difficult to explain to people that this wasnt hyperbole, that when I arrived in San Francisco in November 2023, the demo was really that bad. That every query took painfully long even inside a perfectly closed environment. That all the magical dietary food stuff didnt seem to work at all. That I was expected to ooh and ahh when the Pin told me the weather. That I wasnt even allowed to use the device myself. Still, Chaudhri and Bongiorno (who, note, always wore the Pin on a thick jacket to support its weight), had already planned for countless special edition releases, with the Pin in all sorts of limited edition candy colors. It didnt work, mind you. The AI Pin was nothing more than a smartphone without a screen, stuck to your chest. Its limited capabilities somehow put technology more in the way. But the entire brand and packaging promised to usher us into a new era of computing, because Humane was focused more on optics than function. The project didnt seem salvageable, but I was actually surprised when the world of tech reviewers mirrored my initial take. These are people who review Android phones for a living! And they hated the thing. Where this leaves HP Humane was always going to sell as scrap to something or someone. There was just too much invested into the company for there to be nothing to show. Its carefully engineered chipset (the AI Pin used little off-the-shelf hardware) is unlikely to be worth much of anything outside the device itself, but perhaps HP has a purpose. Its 300 patents around various AI/UX interactions likely have an appeal to any tech company, if only because AI isnt going anywhere. And the purchase price isn’t beyond what companies will spend to acquihire tough-to-recruit technologists. Im more surprised that HP has made such a public bet on the ashes of Humane, which has been immortalized in memes as a pile of bogusness. If this was some attempt at capturing whatever lingering spirit was left in the Humane brand, the two companies snuffed it out when bricking their devices. HP says that Humane will form HP IQ, HPs new AI innovation lab focused on building an intelligent ecosystem across HPs products and services for the future of work. For a company thats still making billions in profits annually from predatory printer ink subscriptions, perhaps its a fitting end. The worst AI company of the last decade will linger as some sort of smart notification that your magenta is low.
Category:
E-Commerce
We will make mistakes, said Elon Musk during an Oval Office press conference last week, a toddler son slung on his shoulders like a shield. But we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.” His remarks came in response to a reporter whod noted Musks previous incorrect claim that the U.S. had spent $50 million on condoms for Gazans. (On X, Musk even suggested this money had actually ended up with Hamas.) Since then, his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has made severe mistakes, some of which are reportedly still being corrected as of this writing. Slipups are, of course, expected in the heady early days of a startup, and perhaps even in a new administration. But the mistakes Musks DOGE are making are the kind that have catastrophic consequences hanging in the balance, seemingly without any corresponding appreciation of their magnitude. What happens when his team makes one that cant quickly be corrected? As if we never said goodbye Just days after Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins acknowledged that Musks DOGE team had been working with the department for weeks, the USDA announced on Tuesday that it had mistakenly fired “several” agency employees over the weekend. Those employees had been working on the government’s response to the current, increasingly worrisome bird flu outbreak. The agency has since realized its error, and is now in the process of reversing those firings. Still, it seems like an extraordinary lapse in judgment to fire such essential workers in the first placeand evidence of profoundly misguided and underinformed cost-cutting efforts. It was not an outlier, however. The USDA firings marked the second announced instance of DOGE mistakenly cutting essential personnel just since last weeks press conference. On Friday, the Trump administration scrambled to reinstate a group of nuclear safety employees it had let go the day before, halting the firings of 350 federal employees (or those whose correct contact information it could find, anyway). Although DOGE has been cleaning house throughout the government since Trumps January 20 inauguration, last week was a particularly busy one, as DOGE executed mass firings across multiple federal government agencies. But only after workers with sensitive jobs involving, say, the U.S. nuclear arsenal were let go did anyone at DOGE seem to understand that those roles might be important. As the Associated Press reports, National Nuclear Security Administration deputy division director Rob Plonski described the firings on LinkedIn as undermining the very systems that secure our nations future. Plonski also added: Cutting the federal workforce responsible for these functions may be seen as reckless at best and adversarily opportunistic at worst. “”The previous week, a few hundred employees at the Small Business Association (SBA) were also “accidentally” fired . . . three days before they were then officially fired. Why this sounds so familiar All of these mistakes echo what happened at Twitter after Musk took over in 2022, when it turned out that some of the people he mass-fired were actually keeping Twitter functional, and he had to hire some of them back. (Babies got thrown out with the bathwater is how he later described those indiscriminate firings.) Musks recent mistakes, though, arent just limited to firings. A 25-year-old DOGE staffer named Marko Elez was mistakenly given “read/write” access to part of the payments system for the U.S. Treasurya system that disburses trillions of dollars every year. Elezs access was quickly rescinded, but its unclear whether his receiving it actually was a mistake, or if DOGE simply got caught. (Apparently, keeping on a worker who trumpeted his flagrant racism online is not considered a mistake by Musk. When Elez resigned after the Wall Street Journal exposed his racist tweets, Musk made a public display of hiring him back.) And what are all these mistakes even in service of? When will the supposed spoils from the great austerity push make a demonstrable difference? Musk claims DOGE has already uncovered tremendous fraud, but the proof does not support those claims. Most recently, on Sunday, he declared, This might be the biggest fraud in history, when tweeting about a perceived discrepancy in Social Security records. His claim proved easily debunkable. Musk and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt mainly seem to apply the fraud label to anything they find merely disagreeable, like $57,000 worth of spending relating to climate change in Sri Lanka. And some of DOGEs line-item savings announcements are riddled with mistakeslike an $8 billion contract for the Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agency that turned out to be $8 million. It should be no surprise that Musk has already walked back his earlier vow that DOGE would cut about $2 trillion from the federal budgetor that these cuts may not be as beneficial as advertised. Musk has a long track record in the tec world of overpromising and under-delivering. In 2019, for instance, he confidently predicted Tesla would produce a million autonomous Robotaxis by the end of 2020. He reiterated that done-by-next-year promise in an earnings call last year, when he promised that Robotaxis would be coming in 2025. Even accounting for pandemic-related delays, and assuming his latest promise even holds up later this year, Musks original pledge is still off the mark by miles. For now, its mainly just Democratic politicians, critical press outlets, and massive public demonstrations sounding alarm bells over Musk and DOGEs recklessness. No elected Republican officials who might hold any sway seem to be pushing back. (At least not officially; reports describe Republican lawmakers privately warning Trump officials about reckless DOGE cuts.) The question now is whether it will take a true catastrophe for top lawmakers to realize it was a mistake to ever toss Musk the keys to the U.S. governmentand whether well even be able to afford it if that does come to pass.
Category:
E-Commerce
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