Numlock News: March 22, 2024 • Gallium, BPM, Chips Ahoy!

By Walt Hickey

Fruit

Luxury fruits, long a product within Japan, have become exportable commodities particularly as the 8.9 trillion yen ($60 billion) agriculture industry of Japan attempts to diversify amid a slowly shrinking domestic base. Ikigai Fruits represents a collective of small farmers around Japan keen to export their luxury fruit, and it’s starting with strawberries, melons and satsuma mandarins. Prices start at $89 for a pound of Kotoka strawberries and go up to $780 for boxes of nine Kotoka, nine Awayuki and nine Pearl White strawberries.

Kat Odell, Bloomberg

Ranch

Since 1972, the largest producer of ranch dressing — Hidden Valley — has been inexplicably owned by Clorox, which I guess sees some benefit in hawking food products that could stain clothes? Hidden Valley sold $1.3 billion worth of ranch in the U.S. last year, and it’s the flagship in Clorox’s play to compete in the condiment aisle, where it also sells $1.26 billion in bottled ketchup and $969.9 million in barbecue sauce. The new goal for Hidden Valley: get Americans to start consuming ranch dressing at meals that otherwise do not usually involve ranch dressing whatsoever, specifically breakfast, but also on pizza, fries, nachos and pretzels. Listen, I don’t want to yuck any yums, and as a proud American taxpayer I obviously use ranch dressing, but ranch dressing on eggs is an abomination and fiendish attempts to make that mainstream behavior will make me go full-on Footloose on this trend.

Natasha Khan, The Wall Street Journal

Swimmingly

The main way that scientists studying the effects of antidepressant drugs in rodents assess the efficacy of those drugs is through the forced swim test, where animals are dropped in water and timed to see how long it takes for them to give up. It’s still used in roughly 600 papers per year, but has seen rising opposition among people who think it’s a barbaric way to determine if the drugs are working. At least 13 pharmaceutical companies have announced they no longer use the test, the U.K. government have announced requirements that researchers justify their use of the test, and the Australian government simply won’t fund most research that uses FST.

Sara Reardon, Science

Charting

A new analysis of songs that charted on the radio versus songs that charted on streaming found that pop and country music appeared disproportionately on radio, while hip-hop and rap performed disproportionately well on streaming. Pop was responsible for 37 percent of charting radio songs but just 27 percent of charting streaming songs, country 31 percent of radio to just 20 percent of streaming, and hip-hop 23 percent of radio but 27 percent of streaming. The slow stuff has also mounted a return to the radio charts; songs with a tempo under 79 beats per minute were 39 percent of songs on the radio in 2023, up from 29 percent of songs in 2022 and the highest level in a decade.

Gary Trust, Billboard

Cookies

After experimenting with 60 recipes across 5,000 hours of development in the kitchen, not to mention what can only be a staggering amount of market research, Mondelēz will roll out a new recipe of the Chips Ahoy! brand of cookies. This tweak to the formula of a 61-year-old cookie recipe that makes $1 billion per year is obviously a risk, but the company is confident that higher cocoa levels and more vanilla extract will make a better cookie. The space is crowded, but Chips Ahoy! has a rare majority share of the market, owning 53 percent of the chocolate chip cookie business in America.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Gallium

A company in Utah is reporting an exciting find of gallium reserves, a soft metal that’s used in all sorts of electronics and defense applications. As it stands, 98 percent of the production of gallium worldwide is controlled by China, and with new trade restrictions that’s causing consternation in the U.S. as prices spike. The company that announced the find, U.S. Critical Materials Corp., needed a gallium concentration of 50 parts per million in the ore to turn a profit. The Sheep Creek deposit in Montana has gallium in 27 times that concentration. The company was originally hunting for thorium deposits when they happened upon this mother lode of gallium.

Alexander C. Kaufman and Chris D’Angelo, HuffPost

Engines

The final version of the EPA’s proposal to curb greenhouse gas emissions from light-duty vehicles has shifted a bit over the course of its development, relying more on plug-in hybrids than simply straight-up electrics. The EPA estimated that by 2032, 56 percent of new cars and light trucks will be fully electric and 13 percent will be plug-in hybrids. That’s a shift from the original proposal, which would have 67 percent of new passenger car sales be electric. The hope is that the additional flexibility gives the industry time to catch up and make the shift.

Mike Lee and Jean Chemnick, E&E News

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to David Montgomery, who wrote “Is something out there? Americans aren’t sure, but most say the government isn’t open about UFOs” for YouGov. We spoke about what UFOs, the Oscars, and kitchen utensils reveal about Americans and the state of pop culture. Montgomery can be found at YouGov, on Twitter, or at thesiecle.com.

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