Hello, and thank you to everyone who wrote in with nostalgia-fueled kind words about our Lego Deep Dive from yesterday! Today we're exploring:
Undercooked
Meal kit maker Blue Apron is set to be acquired by Wonder Group in a deal that values Blue Apron at $103 million — a 95% discount from its lofty $1.89 billion IPO price in 2017.
Blue Apron was one of the first “meal kit delivery” businesses to launch in the US, sending out its first boxes of ingredients in 2012 with a simple pitch: grocery shopping is time-consuming, difficult, and expensive, so why not get a box with everything you need delivered straight to your door? Not a bad idea, but — as it turns out — a hard one to make a buck on.
Unsticky customers
After going public in 2017, the company began to struggle as competition intensified in the sending-boxes-of-food-to-people space. In the first quarter of that year, the company reported $245m of sales but — despite being the largest revenue recorded by the company — it couldn’t translate that into anything better than a $52m operating loss. And things only got tougher from there as ingredients costs fluctuated and industry giants like Amazon and Kroger entered the market. In the end, many customers came for the introductory discounts… and never stuck around.
Even a pandemic boost wasn’t enough to get the company consistently out of the red. Now, Wonder Group envisions using the Blue Apron assets to help them build a "mealtime super app".
New name, same game
Last Friday saw the worldwide release of FIFA 24… sorry, EA Sports FC 24 — the first title in the video game mega series since developers EA split from soccer’s international governing body, Fifa, in 2022.
Fans of the franchise don’t seem to have taken to FC24 particularly well, rushing to sites like Metacritic, where the title currently has a 2.4 user rating (out of 10), to "review bomb" the game. Players are reportedly disappointed with how similar the game is to previous titles, despite the name change and EA’s pledge that it would mark the start of “a new era”.
Franchise goals
Rebranding the best-selling sports video game series of all time, even after 30 years of success, was always going to be a risk. However, after years of increasingly eye-watering rights deals with Fifa, the most recent of which was worth some $150m a year to the governing body, it became one that, ultimately, EA executives decided was worth it.
Although reviews are mixed, the hype for the game appears to be alive and well. Fans habitually flock to the online livestreaming platform Twitch every September when new Fifa instalments are released. FC24’s release has followed the same pattern too, with 95,700 average concurrent viewers so far in October — whether it can keep that up for the rest of the month, though, remains to be seen.
Firing off
Canada’s wildfire season, which we were charting about back in August, was already the country’s worst on record. However, in the past week — when, historically, wildfire rates should decline as temperatures start to drop — it’s gotten even worse.
Fires have ravaged forests across five Canadian provinces and territories, from British Columbia to the Northwest Territories to Nova Scotia, continuously throughout the last 21 weeks of long, hot summer. Indeed, the past week alone has seen a total land area burned comparable to nearly an entire typical fire for Canada.
Up in smoke
The recent fires have brought the total for the season to nearly 18 million hectares — equivalent to the state of Washington or about 80% the size of Minnesota — resulting in more than 230,000 people being evacuated and over 4,300 international firefighters being brought in to quell the out-of-control blazes. Beyond the devastating loss of land, the fires have also tripled the record for carbon emissions from previous wildfire seasons: Canadian fires have emitted almost 410 megatons of carbon in 2023, accounting for over a quarter of the year’s global wildfire emissions to-date.
Smoke from the fires is expected to blanket regions of the Northeastern US in the next few days, including New York. Alongside currently managing severe flooding, NYC is forecast to suffer through an Air Quality Index of around 55 — still much lower than the recordings seen in June, when wildfire-borne plumes from Canada caused New York to briefly have the worst air quality of any city in the world.
• It's a wash in Washington: the US government has avoided a shutdown — for now — by passing a temporary deal for the next 45 days that won 335-91 votes in the House and 88-9 in the Senate.
• U2 opened their 25-date run at the Las Vegas Sphere on Friday, making first use of the $2.3bn venue’s 18,000 seats, 160,000 speakers, and colossal wraparound LED screen.
• Ahead of the ‘fraud trial of the century’ this week, Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers have requested 4 shirts, 3 suit jackets, and 2 pairs of shoes for their client — despite the billionaire infamously dressing less formally.
• Tree strikes, you’re out: just hours after a 16-year-old was freed on bail, a second man has been arrested over the felling of a beloved 300-year-old tree near Hadrian's Wall in England.
• See how your country’s prices are rising relative to the rest of the world using the FT’s global inflation tracker.
• One Reddit user has plotted the number of sauce packets that they ordered against the number they actually received over years of eating at Taco Bell.
Off the charts: The cost of one major category has outstripped wider inflation in the last 45 years — what is it? Hint: millions of people haven't had to worry about payments for it for more than 3 years. [Answer below].
