How a Company Backed By Serena Williams Wants to Help You Eat Healthy
Superfoods company Daily Harvest, which already counts Serena Williams and Gwyneth Paltrow as investors, raised a fresh $43 million in funding, and CEO Rachel Drori told Cheddar what she plans to do with the money.
“We are going to invest more in transitional organics,” she said. “By partnering with farmers who are today conventional and saying, ‘Hey, we’ll be along with you for this ride, it takes three years to transition from conventional to organic,’ we can increase the total pie of organic availability, therefore drive prices down.’”
Higher production costs are said to contribute to higher prices for organic foods, which can be hard to access for lower-income consumers. But the sector keeps growing anyway. The Organic Trade Association says that the market grew by $3.7 billion in 2016, making it a $47 billion industry. That drove it to a record 5.3 percent of all U.S. food sales.
Drori said her company differentiates itself by focusing on frozen snacks frozen.
“With our smoothies, you open it up, you see all the whole fruits and vegetables,” she said. “You fill it with liquid, you pop it in your blender. Then 30 seconds later you have something that was developed by a chef and a nutritionist.”
Daily Harvest’s latest round, led by Cheddar investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, also includes celebrity chef Bobby Flay and actress Haley Duff.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/daily-harvest-raises-43-million).
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
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!
