WW CEO: We Want to Be the 'Everything App For Wellness'
*By Kavitha Shastry*
The company formerly known as Weight Watchers is in the midst of a rebranding campaign, and CEO Mindy Grossman said it's all a matter of promoting a healthier lifestyle both for the body and mind.
"If you have Amazon for shopping, and Netflix for entertainment, and Spotify for music," she told Cheddar in an interview Thursday, "we should be your everything app for wellness, from the time you get up to the time you go to sleep."
Grossman was speaking at the WW Freestyle Cafe: BKLYN at Brooklyn's Barclays Center, where the company, now called simply WW ($WTW), unveiled a year-long partnership with the sports and concert venue. The cafe will offer a menu selected by celebrity chef Cat Cora, featuring healthy alternatives to traditional stadium fare.
Its opening comes a little more than a week after WW dropped the "Weight" from its name ー a move meant to convey that being healthy and being skinny are not necessarily one in the same. As part of that strategy, the company also partnered with meditation platform Headspace to integrate original content into its app and launched a new rewards program to incentivize users to adopt a wellness program.
Since taking over as CEO last summer, Grossman has made a point of positioning WW as more of a wellness brand than a weight-loss company. The company launched meal-kits sold at grocery stores and changed up recipes for products that contained artificial sweeteners or other ingredients. She's also upped the star quotient of the brand, adding DJ Khaled to a roster of spokespeople that already included Oprah Winfrey.
While WW stock had been on a tear for the first year of Grossman's tenure ー shares more than tripled through this July ー they have pulled back from record highs and fell sharply after the company's last earnings report. WW shed about 100,000 subscribers during the second quarter, sending shares down, despite posting better than expected earnings and revenues.
The company is expected to report third quarter earnings in early November.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/weight-watchers-becomes-ww-expands-into-barclays-center).
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug