 |
|
|
|||||
Ancestry has acquired the home-movies-and-photos digitizer service iMemories, a bet by the genealogy company that subscribers who spend their money on DNA kits and pour their time into building family trees will be further enticed by visual storytelling that weaves all those details together. The transaction will combine Ancestry, which has more than 3.7 million subscribers and generates over $1 billion in subscription revenue annually, with iMemories, the Netflix of old family memories that has more than 100,000 paying subscribers and has digitized over 100 million memories from VHS videotapes, photo prints, DVDs, and other video formats. IMemories was also featured on the 2023 list of Fast Companys Most Innovative Companies. The goal is to bring all family storytelling together into one spot, says Howard Hochhauser, Ancestrys president and CEO, in an interview with Fast Company. Terms of the transaction werent disclosed, although Hochhauser says it is Ancestrys largest acquisition in terms of revenue. Blending records with memories By integrating iMemories’ content into Ancestrys platform, the combined company will build on a strategy spearheaded by Hochhauser to connect 10,000 terabytes of Ancestry data detailing birth records, marriages, deaths, military service, and immigration with archival family photos and videos. Over time, Ancestry says it will utilize artificial intelligence to weave together visuals from iMemories and Ancestrys own bank of user-uploaded content, as well as AI-created images, to produce short films that can tell family lore stories. When a consumer sees a photo versus say, a U.S. census, they retain better, higher engagement, higher retention, says Hochhauser, who first joined Ancestry in 2009 as chief financial officer and has served as an executive at the company for an initial public offering in 2009, a going-private transaction in 2012, and the 2020 sale to asset manager Blackstone. Turning dusty records into audio This week, and separate from the iMemories transaction, Ancestry is launching a beta AI-enabled pilot to around 500 users that can create audio files from the documents found on Ancestry. Hochhauser says these assets can be especially compelling for younger consumers. He shares an anecdote of how his own 18-year-old son showed little interest in an ancestors written tale of fighting in World War II. But when the text was converted into audio, Hochhauser says his son was on the edge of his seat when learning about a great uncles experience in battle, including throwing grenades and eventually earning a Purple Heart. Thats pretty powerful, Hochhauser says. And so thats the direction we are taking the company. Hochhauser says prior to the iMemories deal, Ancestry conducted research that found that 40% of its users said they wanted to have a digitization and storage service offered by the company. It also polled non-Ancestry users and found that a third of them shared the same sentiment. AI is speeding up history Ancestry is also leaning on AI to speed up the process of digitizing census data. Thirteen years ago, in 2012, when the U.S. Census Bureau released records for every living person in the country for the year 1940, it took the company nine months and millions of dollars to digitize all of that information. But when the 1950 files were released in 2022, technology had advanced to the point where Ancestry could use computer vision and AI to transcribe the files within nine days, without any manual labor. The company is using AI in a similar manner to comb through records from France, Belgium, and other foreign markets. Privacy concerns loom large The Ancestry-iMemories transaction does come at a heightened moment of consumer anxiety concerning the data protection of personal DNA information held by genomics companies. The 2023 data breach of rival 23andMe, which later fell into bankruptcy, inflamed fears about who would gain control of genetic information when one of these genealogy companies falters. People’s confidence has been shaken, in Big Tech overall, and also in consumer genomics, says Dr. Brandon Colby, the founder and CEO of Sequencing.com, a biotech company that performs whole genome sequencing. The need to be extra obvious about transparency is really important. There’s no room for people to go and assume that we’re trying to do something shady. Sequencing stresses the companys Privacy Forever commitment to consumers, which details that it sells no data to pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, or other outside parties, which is how some genomics companies generate revenue. Colby says Sequencing generates revenue from monthly subscriptions and by selling reports it produces based on genome sequencing that can show consumers details about their reaction to medications or offer tips on better sleep or nutrition strategies. Hochhauser echoes a similar refrain at Ancestry. Users control their own biological samples and DNA data, and have the freedom to delete that information from the service if theyd like. The same approach will be taken with the AI-related content that may be generated from iMemories data. It is up to users how they want to share it, he says. We are a family history company, Hochhauser says. Consumers own their data, control their data, and we have multifactor authentication, as an example, and lots of different security protocols in place to protect and preserve data.
Category:
E-Commerce
Seated across a table from me at a rented loft near Wall Street in late July, Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown is digging into a bowl of Beyond Ground, his companys latest product, which debuts July 29, goes on sale via the company’s website in August, and promises more protein per serving than beef. But this isnt just any product demo; its a company overhaul. With this launch, Beyond Meat is becoming merely Beyond and turning its focus away from mimicking animal proteins to letting plant-based proteins speak for themselves. The radical move is cultural, agricultural, and financial, and Brown wasnt shy in discussing how Beyond now lets the company compete across the grocery store, teasing what products hes developing, explaining how Silicon Valley money helped shape the public’s ambivalence toward alt meat, and sharing how studying Roman gladiators has influenced Beyonds new direction. Brown, who started the company in 2009 and took it public in a celebrated 2019 IPO, is so committed to Beyonds rebrand and its new product that he has been consuming Beyond Grounds main ingredientfava beansas his primary source of daily calories. I gotta let my body be my argument, he says, riffing on a famous quote by physician-philosopher Albert Schweitzer that greets Beyond employees who open the company manual. In an era when protein is suddenly being stuffed into everythingfrom chips to waffles to sodasBrown says he began to wonder: If youre the best in the world at making plant proteins, why confine yourself to the center of the plate? Without pressure to mimic the exact flavors and textures of beef, chicken, or pork, and without being limited to the center of the plate, or to the dinner table at all, he realized Beyond could get fanatical about the plant proteins themselves. And that will be why people reach for the Beyond brand, he predicts. Not for a facsimile, but something authentically us. The company won’t be sunsetting its existing products anytime soon. And last summer it debuted a line of Sun Sausages that was already a step in the veggie-forward direction. But now, for the first time in Beyonds history, it is offering a product that is stripped down to four clean ingredients: the fava beans, potato starch, water, and psyllium huskfiber from a desert herb prized for its ability to help control cholesterol, blood sugar, and, most crucially, protein absorption. A 1/4-pound serving of Beyond Ground contains 140 calories, 4 grams of fiber, 1.5 grams of fat, zero cholesterol and saturated fat, and no added oils. It has 27 grams of protein, more than a serving of beef. From Beyond Meat to ‘Beyond’ Beyond Meat launched a new industry in 2009 in order to leverage the magic of science to serve plant proteins that would not only taste like burgers and chicken nuggets, but actually surpass them in health and sustainability. Two years later, Impossible Burger surfaced and became its chief rival, initiating a race to offer vegans and everyone else hoping to eat less meat the most satisfying alternative at cookouts across the country. Their burgers bled, whereas companies before them (Quorn, Gardein, MorningStar Farms) sold vegetable patties that had corn kernels poking out or looked like Spam. For a decade, the burgers, chicken, ground beef, meatballs, and sausages from these two companies filled grocery meat aisles and restaurant chain menusfirst in America, then slowly overseas. But lately sales have fallen, causing a different new period for the category generally and Beyond in particular, as the sole publicly traded player. Worth almost $12 billion following its 2019 IPO, Beyonds valuation has hovered at or below $500 million since 2023. Impossible Burger has raised close to $2 billion to date; CEO Peter McGuiness told the Wall Street Journal last month that the company is not yet profitable. Several factors have contributed to the broader sectors declineproduct fatigue, taste expectations going unmet, questions about processed ingredients. Impossible Foodss McGuinness, whos taken flak from vegans since warning a month ago that, to drum up more business, I may do a hybrid burger thats 50% beef, believes that the alt-meat industry has done a lousy job with outreach, describing their messagings premise as equating to If you ate meat, you were a Neanderthal and adding: We were insulting meat eaters. But one theory he shares with Brown, and one I previously wrote extensively about for Fast Company, is that two of Americas most powerful industriesmeatpackers and the pharmaceutical giantsfelt so threatened by the categorys quick rise that they stoked fears about plant-based burgers posing health risks, and it kind of worked. (Big Pharmas interests boil down to the fact that farm animals receive well over half of all human antibiotics produced.) Attack ads blasting vegan meat products as ultra-processed imitations, asking if they differed from dog food, and arguing they contained chemicals that doubled as laxatives went viral as Instagram and TikTok memes. But Brown also points one finger backwards, partway at least. After grabbing Silicon Valleys attention, he says the plant-based meat category morphed into “something that was different from its origins. He says hes grateful, because we received a lot of funding, but Beyonds raison dtre quickly evolved into more of a lab thing and a technology thing. To develop Beyond Meats inaugural productdubbed Chicken-Free StripsBrown worked closely with the leading agriculture departments at the University of Missouri and the University of Maryland, two big land-grant universities. He also built rapports with farmers in the Midwest and Saskatchewan. But once the fake chicken started fooling Mark Bittman, investors from Bill Gates to Ev Williams and Biz Stone started doling out money to scale the disruptive technology. Ultimately, Brown says, it diverted consumers focus from [the realization that Beyonds plant-based meat] is closer to the field than the factory-farmed ingredients they’re used to eating. The irony is that, despite so much doubt being cast on alt-meat ingredients, the way people eat toay is, if anything, more prepackaged and tech-addled than ever. And thats why Brown believes this moment is just right for Beyonds redemption arc. He says his epiphany ranks among the most profound discoveries hes made in life, driving him to invoke Albert Schweitzer yet again, this time the passage Schweitzer wrote in Africa following a freak hippopotamus encounter that led to an “iron door” of understanding opening that showed him the path forward. The younger crowd might just call it a surge of galaxy-brain clarity. I thought, What were great at is making protein, he tells me. So, instead of thinking about a simple replacement for animal protein, what if you just thought about your daily protein consumption, and I started to try to replace as much of that as I can with plant protein, any form that I could? Enter the gladiators Fava beans, Brown says, are just the start. If you want something thats a ground product, here you have it, Brown says. (Beyond says three flavors will join the original variety in August: chipotle pineapple, Korean barbecue, and Tuscan tomato. The main product by itself is very neutral, reports Chris Petrellese, who runs Sweet Simple Vegan with his wife, Jasmine Briones and tested an early sample; he made it the star of a casserole and could imagine it being dehydrated into jerky or even blended it into smoothies.) Going forward, Brown says, the company can serve an occasion versus trying to mimic an animal. Youll see us come out with things like, maybe, lentil sausage. Or chickpea hot dogs. Brown hints at a specific new product that hes labored to develop for a while now but wont reveal: a packaged good totally unlike Beyonds previous offerings, destined for grocery store center aisles instead of the meat case. It boasts 30 grams of protein per serving and no fat, and Brown devours the product constantly (calling it cr-r-r-razy good). Beyond is all but certain to pursue a post-workout product, something Brown seems to tease as we worked through our Beyond Ground tasting. He stresses how much reading hes done lately on Roman gladiators. And then, while rattling off the agronomic virtues of fava beanshow theyre good nitrogen fixers, dont require fertilizer, and regenerative by defaulthe lets slide that they also have this amazing and romantic [link to] gladiators! It turns out that bone analysis has revealed that Romes elite athletes ate a mostly vegetarian dietof fava beans, red lentils, and barley. That a decadent, ill-fated society cheered as these powerful warriors fell in the amphitheater surely widens their underdog appeal. As Brown requests an extra bowl of Beyond Ground to consume by itself during the tasting, I note that he himself fits the part as someone whos 6-foot-5 and fit. He once told Mens Health he enjoys bench press because theres an element of not being sure you can do it. The rise in recent years of fitness culture, wellness marketing, and protein-forward products has propelled a pivot from three square meals a day toward what are often called intentional eating occasionspost-workout recovery snacks, meal-replacement shakes, even intentionally not eating (for 18:6, the Warrior Diet, etc.). A whole generation is learning to pick foods based on their function and ratio of macros, meaning the strategic tally of fat to carbs to seemingly exponentially more protein, playing to what the New York Times recently called retails protein arms race. For Brown, this represents an opportunity to claim new territory. He argues that the crowd craving red meat, collagen keto snacks, and extra-protein milkmaybe with a side of tradwifeis chasing a false nostalgia for a natural America that has been undone by industrial agriculture. In his view, it was a Big Meat/Big Pharma industrial complex that killed the same agrarian ideal people believe they’re tapping into when they purchase a bag of bison liver chips. Theres a longing for animal protein because we associate it with simpler times, Brown says. But how its being delivered to us is not [simple]. He is positioning Beyond as far as possible from an agricultural system that has shown itself willing to decimate the land, reengineer the livestock, and market the outcome as something pure and authentic. Magic beans As Beyond repositions itself to be an anytime protein source, its poised to compete directly against a new generation of recovery snack brands. Market research firm Mintel has said from 2013 to 2024, the number of food and beverage products carrying a high protein label quadrupled. A new survey released by Bain, titled Peak Protein? Not Even Close, found that 44% of Americans want to increase their protein intake even furthera 10-point jump from 2024. Recently valued at $725 million, Davidco-created by RXBars founder and relentlessly plugged by podcaster Andrew Hubermanhas released a new product that is nothing but raw, frozen cod, sold in $50 four-packs, perhaps as a dramatic way of proving how well its popular bars stack up in terms of protein content. The presumed stunt shows how companies are scrambling for consumer attention. Brown is unfazed. Right now, the protein industry largely consists of one product category created for the clean-eating protein purists who reject fake food and carefully scour labels, and a second category for the protein-maxxers who, in a single day, might devour Kodiak Frozen Power Waffles (12 grams of protein), Wilde chicken-breast chips (13 grams), a Bucked Up protein soda (25 grams), and a Fairlife Core Power shake (26 grams). The fewest number of ingredients that any of these products contains is 10and thats the soda. The highest number is 28. Among them are gums, gels, and substances such as bovine collagen hydrolysate and acesulfame potassium. Yet a third group is emerging that wants clean, thoughtful high-protein ingredients of the sort Beyond just relaunched to focus on. The companys fava beans actually come from one family farm in Munich, North Dakota. Five generations of Zimmers have worked this land. Just last week, Brown stood with them amid their fava rows. He called up a photo for me to see. That field used to have cattle, he says, gesturing to the tableau of green now sprouting up in all directions. Then he segues into the wolves, bison, and elk that were wiped from these plains, casualties of an extractive farming style farming that in turn helped trigger the Dust Bowl. Later, Brown puts it more directly in an email. We can restore nature, he writes. But first we have to give it a chance to live again.
Category:
E-Commerce
The U.S. has an important choice to make regarding agriculture. It can import more people to pick crops and do other kinds of agricultural labor, it can raise wages enough to lure more U.S. citizens and immigrants with legal status to take these jobs, or it can import more food. All three options contradict key Trump administration priorities: reducing immigration, keeping prices low and importing fewer goods and services. The big tax-and-spending bill President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, included US$170 billion to fund the detention and deportation of those living in the U.S. without authorization. And about 1 million of them work in agriculture, accounting for more than 40% of all farmworkers. As the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants ramps up, one emerging solution is to replace at least some deported farmworkers with foreigners who are given special visas that allow them to help with the harvest but require them to go home after their visas expire. Such guest worker programs have existed for decades, leading to todays H-2A visa program. As of 2023, more than 310,000 foreigners, around 13% of the nations 2.4 million farmworkers, were employed through this program. About 90% of the foreign workers with these visas come from Mexico, and nearly all are men. The states where the largest numbers of them go are California, Florida, Georgia and Washington. As a professor of Latin American politics and U.S.-Latin American relations, I teach my students to consider the difficult trade-offs that governments face. If the Trump administration removes a significant share of the immigrants living in the U.S. without legal permission from the agricultural labor force to try to meet its deportation goals, farm owners will have few options. Few options available First, farm owners could raise wages and improve working conditions enough to attract U.S. citizens and immigrants who are legal permanent residents or otherwise in the U.S. with legal status. But many agricultural employers say they cant find enough people to hire who can legally work at least without higher wages and much-improved job requirements. Without any undocumented immigrant farmworkers, the prices of U.S.-sourced crops and other agricultural products would spike, creating an incentive for more food to be imported. Second, farm owners could employ fewer people. That would require either growing different crops that require less labor or becoming more reliant on machinery to plant and harvest. But that would mean the U.S. could have to import more food. And automation for some crops is very expensive. For others, such as for berries, its currently impossible. Its also possible that some farm owners could put their land to other uses, ceasing production, but that would also necessitate more imported food. Trump administrations suggested fixes U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has predicted that farm owners will soon find plenty of U.S. citizens to employ. She declared on July 8 that the new Medicaid work requirements included in the same legislative package as the immigration enforcement funds would encourage huge numbers of U.S. citizens to start working in the fields instead of losing their health insurance through that government program. Farm trade groups say this scenario is far-fetched. For one thing, most adults enrolled in the Medicaid program who can work already do. Many others are unable to do so due to disabilities or caregiving obligations. Few people enrolled in Medicaid live close enough to a farm to work at one, and even those who do arent capable of doing farmwork. When farm owners tried putting people enrolled in a welfare program to work in the fields in the 1990s, it failed. Another experiment in the 1960s, which deployed teenagers, didnt pan out either because the teens found the work too hard. It seems more likely that farm owners will try to hire many more foreign farmworkers to do temporary but legal jobs through the H-2A program. Although he has not made it an official policy, Trump seems to be moving toward this same conclusion. In June, for example, Trump said his administration was working on some kind of a temporary pass for immigrants lacking authorization to be in the U.S. who are working on farms and in hotels. Established in 1952, numbers now rising quickly The guest worker system, established in 1952 and revised significantly in 1986, has become a mainstay of U.S.agriculture because it offers important benefits to both the farm owners who need workers and the foreign workers they hire. There is no cap on the number of potential workers. The number of H-2A visas issued is based only on how many employers request them. Farm owners may apply for visas after verifying that they are unable to locate enough workers who are U.S. citizens or present in the U.S. with authorization. To protect U.S. workers, the government mandates that H-2A workers earn an adverse effect wage rate. The Labor Department sets that hourly wage, which ranges from $10.36 in Puerto Rico to about $15 in several southern states, to more than $20 in California, Alaska and Hawaii. These wages are set at relatively high levels to avoid putting downward pressure on what other U.S. workers are paid for the same jobs. After certification, farm owners recruit workers in a foreign country who are offered a contract that includes transportation from their home country and a trip back assuming they complete the contract. The program provides farm owners with a short-term labor force. It guarantees the foreign workers who obtain H-2A visas relatively high wages, as well as housing in the U.S. That combination has proven increasingly popular in recent years: The annual number of H-2A visas rose to 310,700 in 2023, a more than fivefold increase since 2010. Possible downsides Boosting the number of agricultural guest workers would help fill some gaps in the agricultural labor force and reduce the risk of crops going unharvested. But it seems clear to me that a sudden change would pose risks for workers and farm owners alike. Workers would be at risk because oversight of the H-2A program has historically been weak. Despite that lax track record, some unscrupulous farmers have been fined or barred from participating in the H-2A program because of unpaid wages and other abuses. Relying even more on guest farmworkers than the U.S. does today would also swap workers who have built lives and families north of the border with people who are in the U.S. on a temporary basis. Immigration opponents are unlikely to object to this trade-off, but to immigrant rights groups, this arrangement would be cruel and unfair to workers with years of service behind them. Whats more, the workers with guest visas can be at risk of exploitation and abuse. In 2022, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia described conditions for H-2A workers at an onion farm the government had investigated as modern-day slavery. For farm owners, the downside of ramping up guest worker programs is that it could increase costs and make production less efficient and more costly. Thats because transporting Mexican farmworkers back and forth each year is complicated and expensive. Farm groups say that compliance with H-2A visa requirements is cumbersome. It can be particularly difficult for small farms to participate in this program. Some farm owners have objected to the costs of employing H-2A workers. Rollins has said that the Trump administration believes that the mandatory wages are too high. To be sure, these problems arent limited to agriculture. Hotels, restaurants and other hospitality businesses, which rely heavily on undocumented workers, can also temporarily employ some foreigners through the H-2B visa program which is smaller than the H-2A program, limits the number of visas issued and is available only for jobs considered seasonal. Home health care providers and many other kinds of employers who rely on people who cant legally work for them could also struggle. But so far, there is no temporary visa program available to help them fill those gaps. If the U.S. does deport millions of workers, the price of tomatoes, elder care, restaurant meals and roof repairs would probably rise substantially. A vast increase in the number of guest workers is a potential but partial solution, but it would multiply problems that are inherent in these temporary visa programs. Scott Morgenstern is a professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||