Bloomberg Businessweek (North America)
Briefs: Toyota hails Uber; New York state looks to give Domino’s workers a big tip
Toyota is buying a small stake in ridehailing leader Uber and will begin offering leases to Uber drivers. The deal follows investments by Volkswagen and General Motors in Uber rivals Gett and Lyft, respectively. Toyota and Uber didn’t disclose the size of the investment. Hewlett Packard Enterprise will spin off and merge its business-services division with Computer Sciences in a deal valued at $8.5 billion. That lets CEO Meg Whitman exit IT outsourcing, leaving HPE to concentrate on selling servers, storage, and networking hardware, plus software. Eggless mayonnaise maker Hampton Creek is looking for fresh capital to fund its expansion. It’s been trying to raise about $200 million based on a $1.1 billion valuation, say people familiar with the matter. The company sells what it bills as sustainable foods at Target, Walmart, Whole Foods Market, and other big chains. It wants to increase the number of products it offers to more than 600, from 64. Royal Dutch Shell will cut 2,200 jobs in response to oil prices staying “lower for longer,” it said. The move raises the tally of job losses at Shell since the beginning of 2015 to 12,500. New York state filed suit against Domino’s Pizza, saying the computer system used by its franchisees undercounted hours worked by employees, reducing their wages. New York sued the franchisor rather than independent store owners, saying the parent required franchisees to use a flawed computer accounting system. Domino’s said the lawsuit was baseless and “disregards the nature of franchising.”
executives hope that ready-to- drink cold coffee in the U.S. could someday rival the brew’s popularity in Japan. That’s the largest such market in the world, according to Andrea Illy, chief executive officer of Illycaffè. Coca-Cola, which partners with Illy in the U. S. and other countries, sells more bottles and cans of coffee than anyone else globally, largely because of sales in Japan.
The Starbucks-pepsico venture is introducing sweetened and unsweetened bottled black coffee and cold brews this summer. Peet’s Coffee & Tea, owned by JAB Holding, got into cold-brew canned coffee when it agreed to acquire Stumptown Coffee last fall. La Colombe, backed with funding from Chobani yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya, will release its canned latte later this year in grocery stores around the country. The drink, which foams like a hot latte when poured, sold 10,000 cans in its first hour when it was offered online in March.
In April, Dr Pepper Snapple entered into a distribution deal with High Brew Coffee, an independent company started by David Smith. For Smith, who’s counting on Dr Pepper for its “merchandising muscle,” coffee is a second act. He co-founded Sweet Leaf Tea, which was sold to Nestlé Waters North America in 2011. While on a seven-month sailing trip with his family, often island-hopping at night, he found standard coffee wasn’t giving him the jolt he needed to stay alert. So while at sea he made his own cold-brew, which carries twice the caffeine punch of brewed coffee. “A lightbulb went off,” Smith says. “If somebody came up with a ready-to- drink, shelf- stable, cold-brew coffee that was conveniently packaged, it would really be a great addition to what is available tto consumers out there today.” The resulting product, High Brew Coffee, hhit grocery stores in 2014. Sales grew 2270 percent in 2015, says Smith, who declines to provide dollar figures.
“One tiger is no match for a pack of wolves.” ——Wang Jianlin, chairman of Dalian Wanda Group, which runs theme parks in China, commenting on the opening of Walt Disney’s first theme park there, Shanghai Disney Resort, in June
The bottom line Sales of ready-to-serve canned and bottled coffee could approach $3.6 billion in the U.S. in 2020, up sixfold from 2001.