Latest news with #plantbasedmeat
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Joey 'Jaws' Chestnut hopes for a comeback victory in annual Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest
FILE - Joey Chestnut, winner of the 2021 Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest, poses for photos in Coney Island's Maimonides Park, July 4, 2021, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/Brittainy Newman, File) FILE - Five-time reigning champion Joey Chestnut competes in the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating World Championship, July 4, 2012, at Coney Island, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File) FILE - Five-time reigning champion Joey Chestnut competes in the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating World Championship, July 4, 2012, at Coney Island, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File) FILE - Joey Chestnut, winner of the 2021 Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest, poses for photos in Coney Island's Maimonides Park, July 4, 2021, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/Brittainy Newman, File) FILE - Five-time reigning champion Joey Chestnut competes in the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating World Championship, July 4, 2012, at Coney Island, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File) NEW YORK (AP) — The Nathan's Famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest is back, and famed competitive eater Joey 'Jaws' Chestnut is hoping for a comeback 17th win on Friday. The 41-year-old, from Westfield, Indiana, was not in last year's event due to a contract dispute involving a deal he had struck with a competing brand, the plant-based meat company Impossible Foods. But now he's back, saying things have been ironed out. Advertisement Patrick Bertoletti, of Chicago, won the title in Chestnut's absence and is the defending men's champion. In the women's competition, defending champion Miki Sudo, 39, of Tampa, Fla., is the favorite this year and is seeking her 11th title. Last year she downed a record 51 dogs. The annual gastronomic battle, which dates back to 1972, is held in front of the original Nathan's Famous' restaurant at New York's Coney Island and draws large crowds of fans, many in foam hot dog hats. Competitors in the men's and women's categories chow down as many hot dogs as possible in 10 minutes. They are allowed to dunk the dogs in cups of water to soften them up, creating a stomach-churning spectacle. Advertisement The 15 men in the competition hail from across the U.S. and internationally, including Australia, Czech Republic, Canada, England and Brazil. The 13 women competitors are all Americans. Chestnut set the world record of eating 76 wieners and buns in 10 minutes on July 4, 2021. He has won a record 16 Mustard Belts. Instead of appearing in New York last year, Chestnut ate 57 dogs — in only five minutes — in an exhibition with soldiers, in El Paso, Texas. Chestnut told The Associated Press last month that while he was happy to compete at that event, he was 'really happy to be back at Coney Island.' Chestnut said he had never appeared in any commercials for Impossible Foods' vegan hot dogs and that Nathan's is the only hot dog company he has worked with. But he acknowledged he 'should have made that more clear with Nathan's.'
Bloomberg
27-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Struggling Fake Meat Looks to Europe for a Better Future
Europe is emerging as a bright spot for plant-based meat producers bruised by waning interest in the US.
Yahoo
23-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Nestlé cuts jobs at Czech factory amid falling demand for plant-based meat
Nestlé has revealed it will lay off 80 workers at its Krupka plant in the Czech Republic amid weakening demand for plant-based meat products. The job cuts – approximately one fifth of the Krupka facility's 400-strong workforce – is a response to a slowdown in consumer interest in plant-based meat alternatives. The layoffs are scheduled to take place from September following employee notice periods. A Nestlé spokesperson said "the current market situation in the plant-based sector is unfavourable". The spokesperson added: "We deeply regret the current situation. Unfortunately, the demand for plant-based products does not reflect our original expectations, and we are also facing slower market growth than anticipated in the post-Covid years. However, we are convinced that the plant-based food category has a place among consumers in the Czech Republic and Czech consumers will not be affected in terms of product availability or selection by this situation." As demand for plant-based meat has fallen below market expectations, Nestlé has sought to revise its position in the sector. In 2023, Nestlé pulled its Garden Gourmet meat-free and Wunda alt-dairy brands from sale in the retail sector in the UK and Ireland. In markets in North America and Europe, the plant-based meat category has not grown to the size its proponents had hoped amid some consumer pushback about the quality and price of products. Last month, Tesco cast doubt on whether the UK's largest supermarket chain will achieve its 300% growth target for plant-based meat amid a slowing of the category in the country. Philippines-based Monde Nissin has seen sales and profits at Quorn, which it acquired in 2015, come under pressure in recent quarters, hit in part by slowing demand for meat-free products. Asked how Nestlé views the prospects of the plant-based meat category, the company said today (23 June): "We recognise the need to reposition our portfolio to resonate with evolving consumer demand in this space. Furthermore, we are now prioritising those brands in this space that have more potential.' "Nestlé cuts jobs at Czech factory amid falling demand for plant-based meat" was originally created and published by Just Food, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Sign in to access your portfolio
Forbes
18-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Voice-To-Voice Models And Beyond Meat: Still Not Ready For Mass Consumption
Arkadiy Telegin is the cofounder and CTO of Leaping AI, a conversational AI platform supporting customer experience departments worldwide. I'm vegan. So when plant-based meat started going mainstream, I was elated. The tech was impressive, the marketing confident and, for a moment, it felt like we were on the cusp of a food revolution. Impossible Burgers hit Burger King. Beyond was everywhere. Investors poured in. The future, it seemed, had arrived. Except it hadn't. Today, plant-based meat is still a niche. Prices are high, availability is inconsistent and adoption is slower than expected. It's not that the products disappeared. They just haven't yet integrated into everyday life the way we imagined. This is a classic case of psychological distance: a cognitive bias where things that feel close because they're exciting or well-promoted turn out to be farther off than we think. In voice AI, voice-to-voice model development is going through the same thing. Despite recent latency, reasoning and sound quality improvements, there's been a stubborn insistence on using older, more established technologies to build conversational AI platforms. Why is that? After LLMs appeared, the first commercial voice AI applications all used a 'cascading' approach following a three-step sequence: • Speech-To-Text (STT): Transcribe the user's speech to text. • Large Language Model (LLM): Use an LLM to respond to the transcribed user's speech. • Text-To-Speech (TTS): Synthesize speech from your response and play it back. This is a standard, time-tested approach that's been in use even before LLMs came around, primarily for language translation. Then, last fall, OpenAI launched its Realtime API, which promised a one-step speech-to-speech AI model capable of parsing audio directly to generate real-time responses, resulting in agents that sound much more human, can natively detect emotions and can be more 'tone aware.' OpenAI's entry into the space was the most commercially significant development yet, leading many to anticipate a new era for single-step voice-to-voice AI models that could feasibly be used in real-world applications. Over six months later, while Realtime API's launch has created a lot of excitement around direct speech-to-speech AI models—the recently announced Nova Sonic model from Amazon and Sesame's base model for its Maya assistant are just a few examples—when it comes to production-level applications, my industry colleagues and customers alike are still more comfortable using the status quo of multi-step pipelines, with no plans to change that any time soon. There are a few key reasons why that is the case. Working with audio presents inherent difficulties. Text is clean, modular and easily manipulated. It allows for storage, searchability and mid-call edits. Audio, in contrast, is less forgiving. Even post-call tasks like analysis and summarization often necessitate transcription. In-call operations, such as managing state or editing messages, are more cumbersome with audio. Function calling is crucial in production use-cases—fetching data, triggering workflows, querying APIs. Currently, one-step voice-to-voice models lag in this area. Stanford computer science professor and founder Andrew Ng, who also cofounded the Google Brain project, has publicly shared some of these limitations. It is much easier to create and curate a good function-calling dataset for a text-based model than for a multimodal model. As a result of this, the function-calling capabilities of text-first models will always outperform those of voice-to-voice models. Considering that function calling is not perfect even for text models yet and is a crucial requirement for commercial applications, it will take some time until voice-to-voice catches up to meet production standards. Ng shares the example of gut-checking responses like "Yes, I can issue you a refund" to ensure refunds are allowable against the current company policy and how an API can be called to issue that refund if the customer requests one. That's more doable to build in a cascading workflow but not as reliable for one-step pipelines for the reasons stated above. Since OpenAI launched its Realtime API, there have been a number of complaints that have made developers uneasy about using it in production, including audio cutting off unexpectedly and hallucinations interrupting live conversations. Others have complained of hallucinations that don't get captured in the transcript, making it challenging to catch and debug them. This isn't to say one-step voice-to-voice AI is a dead end. Far from it. The potential for enhanced user experience—handling interruptions, conveying emotion, capturing tone—is immense. Many in the industry, our team included, are actively experimenting, preparing for the moment when it matures. Startups and major players alike continue to invest in speech-native approaches as they anticipate a more emotionally resonant, real-time future. In other words: It's a matter of when, not if. In the meantime, multi-step pipelines for voice-to-voice AI models continue to win on reliability and production-readiness. With steady improvements, particularly in behavior and function calling, the moment for single-step models will come. Until then, the trusted cascading approach will carry the load, and I'm still not eating at Burger King. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Wall Street Journal
10-06-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
As Alternative Meats Lose Favor, Impossible Foods Sets Its Sights on Flexitarians
Impossible Foods faces an unsavory conundrum: How can a major maker of plant-based meat succeed in a shrinking industry? Chief Executive Peter McGuinness is taking steps to tackle that challenge, including a new brand identity that stresses the meatiness of the company's products and a plan to woo 'flexitarians'—people whose diets only occasionally include meat. Among recent changes, the Redwood City, Calif., company switched packaging colors from green to blood red, hired a hot-dog eating champion as a brand ambassador and expanded product offerings once focused on ground-beef substitutes to steak bites, hot dogs and chicken tenders.
