Numlock News: September 24, 2026 • Malta, Wonka, Supernova

Sep 24, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Wonka

Quaker Oats financed the 1971 film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in exchange for the rights to use the Wonka name on confectioneries. In 1988, Nestlé took over the brand and continued to produce Wonka-branded items until 2015, when they phased it out amid declining sales. In 2018, Ferrero bought up Nestlé’s confectionary business for $2.8 billion, but not even a Timotheé Chalamet movie was enough to make the Wonka brand worth resuscitating; in the meantime, Ferrerro had managed to turn Nerds — originally a Wonka-branded item back in the ’80s, but since turned into a brand in their own right — into a legitimate phenomenon in the candy space with the Gummy Clusters in 2020. Now, timed to the release of a reality show called Wonka’s Golden Ticket, Ferrero is relaunching the Wonka line with four new products. It’s exactly what the author intended with his cautionary tale warning against the ills of binge consumption, greed and watching too much television: promoting Netflix.

Sarah Zimmerman, Food Dive

Go Fast Boats

In times of seemingly unstoppable inflation, nothing is more encouraging than firms large and small working together to streamline a supply chain and work relentlessly to reduce prices for their customers, with the very best managing the task without sacrificing quality. Nowhere in the economy is this accomplishment more clear than in the EMEA divisions of large pharmaceutical sales. I specifically refer to the fact that the cocaine trade is doing amazing in Europe these days thanks to drug traffickers smuggling in vast amounts of blow by using sophisticated speedboats capable of outracing Spanish authorities blasting through the Strait of Gibralter. The fiberglass smuggling boats can reach 60 knots, are built in secret workshops in Portugal and with a crew of four, will loiter off the coast in international waters for weeks awaiting cargo deliveries that weigh tons, at which point they’ll run them into Spain evading the patrols and from there on to Europe. In Spain, a kilo can sell for $15,000, down from $35,000 two years ago and $45,000 pre-pandemic. One reason for that great pricing is that transportation costs are way down, with the speedboats charging 12 percent fee on the cargo compared to the 21 percent when logistics are handled by gangs in the port of Algeciras moving shipping containers. Spain has allocated $230 million over the past decade for its Campo de Gibraltar security plan; every three-ton shipment of cocaine yields something like $250 million in retail sales.

Sune Engel Rasmussen and Antonio Pampliega, The Wall Street Journal

Cable

The traditional cable bundle has dropped to include just 31 percent of national households, with subscriptions to cable appearing in 40.1 million households. In the past five years, 31 million customers have dropped their cable, satellite or television providers, a 44 percent decline. As recently as the second quarter of 2016, 97.3 million households subscribed to the cable bundle, meaning that the net result of 10 years of churn comes out to a loss of 57.2 million subscribers.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Soy Sauce

Kikkoman is opening a third production facility in the United States, a 240,000-square-foot facility in Wisconsin that will produce soy sauce, teriyaki sauce and more seasonings. As American palates continue to favor Asian foods, Kikkoman has been a solid beneficiary, with its soy sauce brand — the marketshare leader in the U.S. — growing at an annual rate of six percent over the past decade.

Laurel Deppen, Food Dive

Land Bridge

A new analysis of the sea floor surrounding Malta looked at what was once a land bridge connecting the island to Sicily. A 90-kilometer bridge once connected the two islands as recently as 13,000 years ago, when the Mediterranean was 120 meters lower than it is today. Sicily has been inhabited for as much as 16,000 years, but Malta has been permanently populated for only about 6,000 years. The land bridge is about three times the area of Malta itself, and may have been a marshy place that would have served as a conduit for wildlife and potentially a place for gathering resources, though not crossed by humans seeking a permanent home.

Hannah Richter, Science

Hubble

The Hubble Space Telescope completed its 200,000th orbit around Earth on Saturday, traveling more than five billion miles and making over 1.7 million observations over the course of its 36 years of service. The Hubble spent its 200,000th orbit on a bit of a sentimental observation, one related to its work measuring the expansion rate of the universe, the Hubble Constant. It imaged the galaxy cluster MACS J0417 (which is so large that it acts as a gravitational lens which magnifies the light of objects located behind it) specifically hunting for the reappearance of Supernova Athena, which the telescope discovered in 2025 and which is projected to reappear between now and March 2027. Its reappearance will help researchers determine the mass of MACS J0417.

NASA

Scripted

The number of comedies and dramas aired on broadcast television has roughly halved over the past decade, but appears to have leveled off this season. In the 2016-17 television season, 93 scripted shows aired on broadcast television, which fell gradually to 83 shows in the 2019-20 season, fell sharply during the pandemic to just 49 shows by the 2023-24 season and has since leveled off, bouncing up and down a bit but coming in at 56 shows this 2026-27 season. One thing preventing the bottom from falling out is that shows that do well on streaming often start on broadcast; half of the top 25 shows of last year on cross-platform ratings started on broadcast networks.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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