Kraft Heinz Ditches Artificial Dyes & The Rise of the ‘Infinite Workday’
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Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, a new workplace report found that 8 p.m. meetings are becoming more common. Microsoft Teams and chill, anyone? Then get ready for gray jello because Kraft Heinz is ditching artificial dyes from its food. It's Wednesday, June 18th. Let's ride. ♪

Good morning and congratulations to the Florida Panthers who hoisted the Stanley Cup trophy last night after beating the Edmonton Oilers in six games. Is it time to start bringing up the D word dynasty? This is the Panthers second consecutive championship and the third straight time they played in the final series. Meanwhile, oh

Canada. The Oilers loss means that no Canadian NHL squad has won the Stanley Cup for 32 years running now, despite the country having seven teams in the league. Toby, it doesn't feel right at all, but Southern Florida is the epicenter of the hockey universe.

petition to rename it the Ice Belt because the Sun Belt is an absolute hockey juggernaut. 10 of the past 21 champs have come from the Sun Belt, proving that a tan and the financial benefits of playing for a team with no state income tax are two of the most essential parts of winning a Stanley Cup. And I am sorry, Canadian fans out there.

to rub it in even more teams in Florida have now won four cups in the last five years. That is as many as the entire country of Canada has produced in the last 37 years. So to all our long suffering Canadian listeners, maybe it's time to trade Calgary for Clearwater, Montreal for Miami, Ottawa for Orlando to come enjoy some sun and some winning hockey.

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Picture this. It's 8 p.m. on a weeknight. You're logging into Microsoft Teams, coffee in hand for the first of back-to-back meetings with your coworkers in Australia, and you're thinking to yourself, am I the only one doing this right now? The answer is no. No, you're not. A massive new report on workplace trends from Microsoft found that people's jobs have blurred into one, quote, infinite workday,

where meetings, emails, and pings start early in the morning and run continuously late into the night. That 8 p.m. meeting is the perfect example. Microsoft's researchers found that the number of meetings occurring after 8 p.m. surged 16% from the year before in the 12 months ending in February, fueled by geographically distributed workplaces. And by 10 p.m., the meetings may have ended, but almost a third of active workers were monitoring their inboxes for emails.

The modern workday for many has no clear start or finish, write the authors of the Work Trend Index Special Report, which teased out trends from millions of global users of Microsoft 365 apps like Teams and Outlook. This infinite workday, quote, starts early, mostly in email, and quickly swells to a focus-sapping flood of messages, meetings, and interruptions, they added. Toby, this seems to be a downstream consequence of the rise in remote work.

On the one hand, it's lent professionals unprecedented flexibility in how they schedule their time. On the other, it's resulted in job demands that are a constant presence clouding their daily lives. Either way, the 9-to-5 is done and dusted. I mean, someone call up Dolly Parton because the 9-to-5 just isn't a thing anymore than Modern Workday. No clear start, no clear finish. And part of the reason why

work just stretch on infinitely is because you can't really get anything done in the middle of the day because you're constantly being interrupted. Half of all meetings take place between 9 and 11 a.m. or 1 and 3 p.m. And that is when research shows we are at our most productive. We have natural productivity spikes because of our body's circadian rhythm. So imagine you're sitting down trying to do some deep work and then, you know, Stacy comes over and says, hey, you want to do a little meeting, ad hoc meeting? It just totally messes up your whole flow, which

pushes more work later into the evening, pushes more work early into the mornings because you just need to focus at some point. And usually that's on the tail end of the actual workday. And funny that you mentioned ad hoc meetings because this is a new feature of the workplace. According to Microsoft, 57% of meetings are spontaneous ad hoc meetings.

One in 10 scheduled meetings are booked at the last minute. They also found that PowerPoint edits spiked by 122% in the final 10 minutes before meetings. That show that people are scrambling to get their decks ready to present. So many meetings are not planned in advance. More than half are not. And that is another reason why you just constantly get interrupted. You can't get any deep work done. And I'm sure so many people listening to this are about to get interrupted today.

later today with someone saying, hey, let's go to a meeting. And then you can point to this report and saying, actually, this is probably not the best idea for us. Yeah, this lack of focus is a huge issue. This is probably the craziest stat from this entire report. But they looked at every time a knowledge worker was interrupted by a ping from an app. So think about an email, a calendar invite, someone messaging you. That happens once every 1.75 minutes, basically once every two minutes.

275 times during the workday. So if you ever feel like your brain is just scrambled and you're like, what did I actually get done today? It's probably because you're being constantly interrupted. And we were speaking about this before the show is that when you have a meeting on the calendar, even if someone's not messaging you, it feels like

your 30 minutes leading up to that meeting are sacrificed because you're like, ah, I got this meeting coming up. I can't focus. I don't want to start anything. And that just leads to this never ending cycle. If you have multiple meetings and you have maybe a creative job or a job that create, uh, requires deep work. So man, it is just,

it feels like you're navigating chaos because you actually are. And I thought this Forbes headline actually summed it up the best. Flexible work was the promise. The infinite workday is the reality. So many of us who worked remotely during the pandemic thought that it was an unlocked opportunity

to working, you know, working by our own hours and taking charge of our workday a little bit more. But what we're seeing now is the actual consequence is that your workday just doesn't really stop. And especially we can't stress enough how much a global workforce comes into this, because when you're having meetings at 8 p.m., often it is with colleagues overseas. And because of remote work, companies feel like they can have a distributed workforce with not

you know, not having people come into the office. And nearly a third of meetings now span multiple time zones, which is up 35% since 2021. So that is a major contributor. And what's the solution to this? What do you think Microsoft is saying? What do you think Microsoft is going to say? Obviously they're saying artificial intelligence can help offset some of this work, step in and take over some of those low value, quote, low value administrative tasks and free people up to do work that actually matters.

But also you have to remember that AI is fueled a bunch of anxiety of, you know, taking your job. So on the one hand, it's supposed to save you time. But on the other hand, it might be coming for your job. So tough. You're stuck between a rock and a hard place here. An infinite workday and no job whatsoever. So a little bit of a bleak future there. But, you know, such is the timeline that we're living in right now.

As the 4th of July draws near, enjoy the bright yellow mustard and firetruck red ketchup you're putting on your hot dogs because come 2027, some of your favorite foods might be rocking a different hue. The snack conglomerate Kraft Heinz announced yesterday that it will phase out artificial dyes from all its products by the end of 2027 following pressure from the FDA.

For Kraft Heinz, that's actually not too lofty a target. According to the company, nearly 90% of its U.S. products in terms of sales already don't use artificial dyes, but the remaining 10% are iconic and will take some fiddling. Kraft Heinz brands that sell products that use dyes include Crystal Light, Kool-Aid, Jell-O, and Jet Puffed. So as long as you don't go to summer camp, you probably won't see much of a difference.

The decision follows calls from HHS Secretary RFK Jr. for the food industry to cut out the potentially harmful dyes from their products, a rallying cry already heated at the state level by California, Virginia, and West Virginia. Kraft Heinz was already considering a major business shakeup after sales dropped 6.4% last quarter as legacy brands like Lunchables and Capri Sun fall out of favor with health-conscious consumers.

So now they have to add find new ways to make Kool-Aid red to their to-do list, Neil. This is a landmark moment in the move away from artificial dyes. Kraft is a massive company. It's the biggest company yet that signaled it would moving away from artificial food dyes be facing pressure from the U.S. government and states that are loading up on these laws. We'll have to see whether other companies follow in their footsteps. My question is, is this going to be easy? Like,

Can they do this? Well, back in 2016, they did remove artificial dyes from Kraft Mac and cheese, and that still looks as yellow as ever. Maybe they're using turmeric or something, but they did manage that successfully. However, people in the food industry say, like, if it was easy to remove artificial dyes, they already would have done it easy and cheap because...

Natural dyes cost manufacturers about 10 times more than their artificial equivalents, and they're not as abundant. You can make these things in a lab super easily. And food experts told Bloomberg, they're like, it's not like there are 150 million pounds of beet juice sitting around. So this is going to spark a scramble among companies to figure out a way to do this and still keep their sales at the pace that they've been going. Because while it doesn't affect taste at all, it does affect

a person's interaction or sensory relationship with their food, and that's a big deal. - Yeah, tricky to match these very vibrant hues with natural ingredients. Experts point to specifically hues like greens or blues that are difficult to recreate. But a lot of those products you mentioned

- Wait, you mean blue raspberry is not a real fruit? - It's not a naturally occurring substance, it's crazy. So I think that Kraft too is gonna maybe look at that last 10% and say, where can we reformulate, where does it actually make sense, and then what products should we just ditch 'cause it's not worth it. So you might see some products fall to the wayside and just

remove them entirely. But it does come at a rocky time for Kraft Heinz in general. Remember, Kraft and Heinz came together under this Berkshire Hathaway orchestrated merger back in 2015 and just hasn't really gone well since. The stock's down more than 60% over the last 10 years because the synergies that they hoped would come from joining two big snack brands,

have not come to fruition. A lot of their legacy brands are under a ton of pressure. Lunchables and Capri Sun are just not popular with the kids anymore, especially under this new kind of healthy era in America right now. So it does look like this is one of their issues, and they're making headlines by announcing that they're removing dyes, but they have a lot of core business issues to figure out. And now they have to make Kool-Aid with beet juice. I mean, the hits keep coming. It's tough.

Okay, now for a new segment we're calling Changing of the Guard, where I'll bring you two milestones that reflect the world we live in today. The first, Changing of the Guard, for the first time ever, social media and video platforms have become the number one source of news in the United States today.

taking over traditional TV and news websites for the first time. That's according to a report by the Reuters Institute, which found that 54% of Americans currently get news from social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, and X, compared to 50% from TV and 48% from news sites and

apps. This mirrors the broader shift toward the creator economy, where individuals empowered by social media can be heard and seen by people everywhere without going through those traditional gatekeepers of media distribution, such as TV, websites, and newspapers. A couple of other interesting tidbits. TikTok is the fastest growing social and video network for news used by 17% of people around the world to keep up to date with current events. And X, Elon Musk's social network has also been a winner with its usage for news stable or increasing across many markets,

especially in the United States, the report said. Yeah, the rise of social media is nothing new. This has been coming for a long time, but this shift of personality-based news might be a little bit newer. We talked a lot about how the last election was the podcast election, and you look at this report and you see which personalities were most widely known. Joe Rogan comes up nearly a

quarter of the population, and this survey talked to 100,000 people, had come across some sort of news from Joe Rogan in the previous week. So he is clearly influencing a lot of people. And the connection it drew to politics was, the report said, it said, populist politicians around the world are increasingly able to bypass traditional journalism in favor of friendly partisan media personalities and influencers who rarely ask difficult questions. So that's the downstream effect, because then you look at what people said were the most

the biggest sources of false or misleading information. Half of them said people, influencers online. So they're saying that we're getting our news from these people, but we also know that they're not trustworthy sources. So just fascinating ripple effects from people shifting away from legacy institutions and more towards these creators and influencers. Okay, let's go to the next changing of the guard. This has been unheard.

Boom.

boomers according to the new york times people over 65 have been the fastest growing age group for watching youtube off a tv set since 2023 with their time spent spiking 106 percent and another wild stat the amount of time boomers are spending watching youtube on tv is the same as children under 11. and since baby boomers watch so much tv more than any other age range

their shift in habits has propelled streaming to finally overtake cable and network. And it's not like they're watching Netflix or watching Sex in the City. They're actually going to free streaming services like Tubi, Roku, and Pluto. And part of the reason why industry watchers say this is happening is because boomers grew up on ads

Ad-supported television, like that's what cable used to be. These platforms do the same thing, so they're very much used to ads, whereas maybe a younger person likes Netflix where they can just put on their TV show and binge. And it's caused some really interesting wrinkles in Nielsen's TV viewing habits.

Gunsmoke, which is this Western that came out in 1955, went off the air in 1975. It's been making appearances in Nielsen's list of most watched streaming series because boomers are just saying, hey, I remember Gunsmoke. Let's put it on Pluto. Let's put it on Tubi. Let's put it on Roku. So just a fascinating shift in consumer habits, really published, really pushed by an audience that you wouldn't expect. Up next, let's talk about the underground economy happening on Roblox.

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Roblox shares just hit their highest level since 2021 thanks not to gamers thumbing their controllers, but to green thumbs tending virtual soil. A garden simulation game called Grow a Garden is booming on the platform right now, driving insane amounts of traffic. According to Sherwood News, Grow a Garden set the concurrent player record with 16.5 million people gardening at once last Friday, surpassing the old mark set by Fortnite.

Grow a Garden is one of the many mini-games that developers build on Roblox. The gameplay is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Players plant seeds, sell crops for in-game currency called shekels, and reinvest to buy more seeds and raise more animals. Might not sound all that exciting, but users are paying real-world cash to speed up their agricultural ambitions on platforms like Discord and eBay. The game was allegedly developed in just three days by a $6

This is one of the few...

if only things that kids are doing these days where I'm like, I get it. Oh, farm sim is a classic. This is gen alphas Farmville and simulation games that are just running in the background are super popular. I was a big, I,

flight simulator guy and i know many other people did these various sims in various industries or sectors i guess you want to call it so i'm not at all surprised that this particular guarding simulator is so popular it looks like the game developers did some interesting tricks to kind of supercharge that growth things like letting the time elapse on screen continue while you're not playing the game so i mean gardening does take you know a bit of time so uh

even digitally. So if you step away from the screen, it still grows and you can come back and get rewarded a little bit. And that's part of the reason why this in-game economy has sprouted up as well because for every person that is willing to wait for their plants to grow, there's another person that wants to pay to speed up the process. So there's kind of this underground black market off

the platform where people saying like, Hey, I got this dragon fly that I raised here. Dragon flies take a lot. They're very rare in the game. You can go and buy them on a discord or on eBay or something like that and receive them via trade in the game itself. So, okay. Maybe I don't get it. I know. Well, of course there's always going to be people who are like cheat to speed things up or like pay in game currency to speed things up. So the game is making a lot of money and yeah, it is just this insane sort of rise. Um,

At one point, GrowGarden was accounting for 30% of Roblox's total activity across all games. And Roblox executives were like, we have never seen this. We've seen 20% hit maybe a few times, but 30% is unheard of. Let's sprint to the finish for some final headlines. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent shivers up every American worker's spine after he told staff yesterday that his company would reduce its corporate workforce in the coming years because of AI.

Amazon, the second largest employer in the United States, said that generative AI and AI agents represented a once-in-a-lifetime technological change that's already transforming its business in ways that could make adding more humans to payroll unnecessary. Amazon said that it doesn't think mass layoffs are in the cards. Rather, it'll reduce headcount through attrition. But Jassy's announcement is the most significant CEO acknowledgement yet that

AI will replace human jobs given that the sprawling Amazon is seen as a canary in the coal mine for broader labor shifts. Toby, I think it may be time to revive your soccer career. I know. Amazon is the canary in the coal mine because 1.56 million full-time and part-time employees. Obviously, a lot of those work in the fulfillment network, but Amazon did point to AI being used right now in its internal operations, including its fulfillment network. So that's not necessarily a safe

arena for employees right now. They want to use AI to speed up the process, to make things more efficient, which will eventually lead to workers kind of getting pared away. This is obviously not the first company to talk about using AI to replace workers. I mean, Shopify CEO Toby Luecke said that employees will be expected to prove why they cannot get what they want done using AI before you are added. Headcount, obviously, Klarna has been trying to pare its entire workforce down to AI.

uh, using AI. So there looks to be a lot of, you know, groundswell of support for this, but Amazon employs so many people. So that's why a lot of people are freaking out a little bit about this.

While tensions between the U.S. and China are higher than ever, your daily brain rot delivery vehicle hasn't been caught in the crossfire so far. TikTok is set to get another 90-day lifeline from President Trump, who plans to delay enforcement of the sale or ban law as a long-promised deal to transfer control of the app to American ownership remains in limbo.

Since Trump signed an order back in January to delay the ban's enforcement by 75 days, a deal almost came to fruition but fell apart at the last minute after Trump announced additional tariffs on China. That prompted another pause set to expire tomorrow. Now it looks like the president will sign another deal to keep TikTok alive until at least September 16th.

scenes so your scrolls are safe until then, Neil. I mean, this is close to a comedy sketch at this point. Congress passed this law in bipartisan fashion last year saying TikTok needs to be sold to an American owner or it's going to be banned. And no one really seems intent on enforcing it. Trump has delayed it now three times.

And lawmakers are not exactly pressing him to get a deal done or stop this delay. Everyone just kind of like, well, I guess we're just going to keep delaying this until maybe a deal forms. Maybe it's not. And TikTok is over there kind of just behaving as if this ban doesn't exist. They did a huge event for marketers in New York last week. They had Hasan Minhaj come in there and can, you know, pitching to advertisers as well. So everyone is behaving as if this law doesn't exist at this point.

Okay, y'all must be coming killer home chefs because no one is eating at restaurants this spring. Yesterday, the Commerce Department reported that spending at restaurants and bars fell in May by the most in more than two years, 0.9%. And a sign Americans are keeping a closer watch on their bank account during these uncertain times.

Across the economy, retail sales fell by the most since the start of the year. Car sales tanked 3.5%, while sales at home and garden centers, not digital ones, and electronics stores also slumped. What does this say about the economy? Fed Chair Jerome Powell should have a lot to say about that later today when the central bank wraps up.

its closely watched meeting. Yeah, this was not the greatest retail sales report, but some economists did find some bright spots. They were saying that the week May numbers were mostly due to temporary drags that came after a lot of people loaded up on tariff front running. And then also they said,

unseasonably wet weather east of the country, which we know so well, it's just rained so much, is a drag on retail spending. So sometimes there are confounding variables here outside of tariffs, outside of inflation that affect spending. And one of those is the rain, which just seems like it won't go away.

Finally, the credit card wars between American Express and JPMorgan Chase are heating up this summer, with Chase firing the first salvo yesterday. Pretty much immediately after we talked about it on the show yesterday, the bank announced the details behind its Sapphire Reserve refresh, with the main news being a 45% jump in its annual fee. Dropping over

a newly designed premium card, now with heavier metal, down on a dinner date will soon cost you $795 a year, a big increase from the $550 fee that's been in place since 2020. That's a tough fee to swallow, but Chase said point-savvy swipers will get back $2,700 in annual benefits.

including a $300 travel credit right off the bat. Other perks that come with the card include a $500 luxury hotel credit, a $300 dining credit, $300 towards tickets purchased on StubHub, and $120 towards Lyft rides. So lots of value, but also one chunky fee, Neil. If you're someone who can actually get $2,700 worth of benefits from this card, please call me because that

is remarkable. There's just a smorgasbord of different benefits that you can claim that Reserve and these other credit card companies push to you. But it is extremely complex to work through it, and there's many people employed professionally to help you through it. This price hike is quite substantial. We were foreshadowing it yesterday. Now all eyes are on Amex. Right now, the platinum costs $695 a

Where do you think it's going to end up? I mean, it's got to be somewhere between $900 and $1,000 as predicted because that reserve got a big boost from $500 to $795. These are really expensive cards, and you really need to kind of go through the details to make sure that you're getting your money's worth.

Okay, let's wrap it up there. That's all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Wednesday. If you have thoughts on today's episode, send an email with questions, comments, or feedback to morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Liu is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Hair and makeup is growing a garden. Please do not disturb. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.

There's something percolating at Morning Brew that we are very excited to share with you all. Cappuccino machine! What? No, the launch of Revenue Brew on June 17th. We talked about this. We also talked about the cappuccino machine, but no one ever listens to me. And continuing with that proud tradition, we're excited to partner with Outreach for the launch of this new vertical. Outreach is a single platform supercharging the entire revenue team.

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