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    Walmart won't hold rival event to Amazon Prime Day, as it is already offering big markdowns

    Walmart won’t throw its own sales event that coincides with Amazon Prime Day.
    The big-box retailer has had weeks-long deep discounts on items including bicycles, air fryers, apparel and more as it tries to sell through excess merchandise.
    An abundance of inventory and discounts could tee up a more challenging backdrop for the retail industry, as consumers pull back on discretionary spending.

    Walmart Rollback pricing signs are displayed while customers shop during the grand opening of a new Wal-Mart Stores location in Torrance, California.
    Patrick Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images

    Walmart won’t be doing its own event to rival Amazon Prime Day this year, according to a company spokesperson.
    The big-box giant, like other retailers, has typically thrown its own overlapping sales event. Yet this year, much of its merchandise is already on sale.

    Bright yellow “Clearance” signs have become a fixture in many stores in recent weeks, and its website is touting thousands of Rollbacks, a signature term for the discounter’s 90-day price cuts, on bicycles, air fryers and more.
    “You go in stores now, it’s almost like Prime Day in some of these categories,” said Rupesh Parikh, a senior analyst for Oppenheimer & Co.
    Walmart’s heavy discounting illustrates the steps that retailers are taking to sell through excess merchandise that has racked up in the back of stores and in warehouses — even if that hurts profits. Walmart, Target and Gap are among the companies coping with higher-than-usual inventory levels. Retailers have chalked up the problem to a mix of factors, including ordering too much, getting seasonal goods too late, pandemic categories losing luster and consumers spending more on services instead of stuff.
    Target warned inventors last month that it will take a hit to its profit margins as it cancels orders and marks down unwanted items.

    Retail challenges

    The abundance of inventory and promotions creates a unique backdrop for this year’s Amazon Prime Day. The sales event will take place Tuesday and Wednesday. Since its debut in 2015, it has become a shopping holiday that has lifted sales not only for Amazon, but nearly every online retailer.
    It also tees up a more challenging period for the retail industry. Inflation has cut into Americans’ budgets, leaving fewer dollars for discretionary spending. Heavy promotions by some retailers pressure others to cut prices, too. And after a pandemic period marked by fewer discounts and higher profits, shoppers may revert to a bargain-hunting mentality as the back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons approach.
    “You’re going to train that consumer to wait for deals,” Parikh said.
    High levels of markdowns at Walmart stores caused Oppenheimer to take the company off its list of top picks for investors on Thursday. Instead, the firm’s top picks in the food retailing/discounter category are Dollar General, which draws budget-conscious customers like Walmart but has fewer big-ticket items vulnerable to markdowns, and Costco, which has shoppers who care about value, but tend to have higher incomes.

    Discounts galore

    Some retailers are still pressing ahead with sales events that coincide with Prime Day. Target is hosting Deals Days, a three-day event from Monday to Wednesday with discounts on thousands of items across every category from electronics to beauty. Best Buy is having a Black Friday in July Sale with deals on laptops, TVs, smartphones and more from Monday to Wednesday. And Macy’s kicked off its Black Friday in July event on Thursday and it will run through Wednesday, with specials in store and online on apparel, accessories, beauty and home.
    While Walmart is skipping the flashy marketing and short-term sales event, discounts will be plentiful for shoppers who hit its stores.
    Oppenheimer’s price target for Walmart is $165.00, nearly a third higher than where the company’s stock is currently trading. Parikh said the discounter could benefit from attracting more price-sensitive shoppers who seek low-priced groceries and essentials. Yet he said in the quarters ahead, it will get compared with a pandemic boom period when consumers had extra stimulus dollars and fewer places to spend them.
    As it goes up against those tough comparisons, the economic outlook has changed.
    “It’s not ‘Ok, let’s clear this out and we’re going to go back to what everything looked like.’ That’s just not the case,” Parikh said. “Food inflation is really high. Gas prices are high. These consumer pressures, as they stay elevated, it just builds on the consumer — especially the lower-income consumer.”
    Plus, there are signs heavy discounts will spill into next season. Walmart will take “a couple of quarters” to get back to more typical inventory levels, the company’s U.S. CEO, John Furner, said at an investor event in early June.
    On Thursday, Urban Outfitters-owned apparel retailer Anthropologie sent an email to customers to promote an upcoming sale: a 25% discount on fall clothing. It’s timed for this coming weekend, in the thick of summer.
    CNBC’s Lauren Thomas contributed to this report.

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    U.S. safety regulators to probe crash involving self-driving car from GM-backed Cruise

    Federal vehicle safety regulators will investigate a crash last month in which a vehicle struck a self-driving car from General Motors-backed Cruise.
    The incident resulted in minor injuries.
    The Cruise vehicle was in “autonomous mode” at the time of the crash.  It’s unclear if a safety driver, employee or other passenger was in the car.

    A robot car of the General Motors subsidiary Cruise is on a test drive in 2019.
    Andrej Sokolow | picture alliance | Getty Images

    Federal vehicle safety regulators will investigate a crash last month in which a vehicle struck a self-driving car from General Motors-backed Cruise. The incident resulted in minor injuries.
    The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday said its Special Crash Investigation Program is probing the incident, which occurred June 3 in San Francisco – a day after California regulators granted Cruise permission to commercialize its robotaxi fleet.

    Occupants of both vehicles involved in the crash received medical treatment for “allegedly minor injuries,” according to a mandatory report filed by Cruise with the California Department of Motor Vehicles.
    According to the report, filed by Cruise Vice President of Global Markets Todd Brugger, a Toyota Prius entered an intersection after traveling straight via a lane designated for turning. The Cruise vehicle was attempting to make a left-hand turn across several lanes of traffic and had stopped to allow the car to turn.
    The Prius was traveling about 40 mph in a 20 mph speed zone when it struck the Cruise vehicle, according to the filing. The Cruise vehicle was in “autonomous mode” at the time of the crash. It’s unclear if a safety driver, employee or other passenger was in the car.
    The NHTSA, part of the Department of Transportation, confirmed the investigation but declined to offer other details.
    Cruise, in an emailed statement, said the company has provided NHTSA with “routine information” about the crash. The company also noted that the inquiries from the Special Crash Investigation team are separate from the agency opening an official defect probe into the company or its vehicles.

    “NHTSA has not opened a formal investigation into Cruise for this or any other incident,” Cruise said. “Any suggestion to the contrary is absolutely inaccurate. An office within the agency has collected routine information, which we have provided.”
    Separately on Thursday, the NHTSA opened another investigation into a fatal pedestrian crash in California involving a 2018 Tesla Model 3. It adds to more than 30 other probes into Tesla vehicles since 2016 in which advanced driver assistance systems like Autopilot were a suspected factor.
    Tesla crashes currently under investigation have resulted in 16 fatalities of vehicle occupants or pedestrians, according to the agency.

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    Stocks making the biggest moves midday: GameStop, Virgin Galactic, Bed Bath & Beyond and more

    Shoppers wait for a GameStop store to open on at the Tysons Corner Center, in Tysons, Virginia, November 27, 2020.
    Hannah McKay | Reuters

    Check out the companies making headlines in midday trading.
    GameStop — Shares of the video game retailer jumped 15.1% after the company said a 4-for-1 stock split was approved by its board. A stock split theoretically makes the stock more affordable for investors, but it doesn’t change the fundamentals of the company.

    Virgin Galactic Holdings — The space tourism company climbed 12.1% after it announced a partnership with Boeing subsidiary Aurora Flight Sciences to build additional aircraft “motherships” to support its coming spacecraft fleet. Shares of Boeing rose 2.7%.
    Bed Bath & Beyond — Shares of the home goods retailer jumped 21.7% following the disclosure of several insider purchases, including interim CEO Sue Gove’s purchase of 50,000 shares. Board members Harriet Edelman and Jeff Kirwan each bought 10,000 shares.
    Energy stocks — Oil stocks were the leaders in the S&P 500 Thursday after prices jumped back over $100 after sliding alongside other commodities. APA Corp jumped gained 7.8%. Marathon Oil, Schlumberger and Diamondback Energy all rose more than 5%.
    Chip stocks — Samsung gave chipmakers’ shares a boost after the company offered “better than feared” revenue guidance for the second quarter. On Semiconductor jumped 9.2%. Marvell rose 6.5%, while Advanced Micro Devices and Qualcomm gained more than 5%.
    Otis Worldwide — The maker of elevators and escalators saw shares fall roughly 1.6% after JPMorgan downgraded them to neutral from overweight. The firm also cut its price target on the stock to $62 from $100, implying downside of about 13% from Wednesday’s close.

    Helen of Troy — Shares dropped 8.9% after the consumer products company lowered its sales and EPS outlooks for fiscal year 2023, despite reporting an earnings beat for its most recent quarter.
    SoFi — Shares of the fintech stock rose more than 6.1% after Mizuho reiterated the stock as a buy and said it can withstand a recession better than its peers.
     — CNBC’s Samantha Subin, Sarah Min and Yun Li contributed reporting.

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    How are rising costs impacting your household? Here's how to calculate your personal inflation rate

    Inflation is pushing up costs for groceries, gasoline, rent and other areas of household budgets at a faster-than-usual pace.
    The consumer price index jumped 8.6% in May relative to a year earlier, the largest increase since 1981.
    Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, thrust inflation calculations into the spotlight by exaggerating cost increases for a July Fourth cookout. Here’s how consumers can determine their personal inflation rate.

    Skynesher | E+ | Getty Images

    It’s likely no surprise to hear that prices have been rising across the U.S. economy, whether at the grocery store or the gas pump.
    But just how much have your personal household costs increased, and how does that stack up against the average American’s?

    Calculating your personal inflation rate can help answer these questions.
    The consumer price index is a common inflation measure. Households paid 8.6% more money in May 2022 for a broad basket of goods and services relative to that same basket in May 2021 — the largest annual jump in more than 40 years.
    More from Personal Finance:How much cash you need to ride out a recessionHow to adjust your housing budget amid rising mortgage ratesWhy experts say a higher federal minimum wage is long overdue
    However, your basket is likely different. For one, purchases and consumption habits vary from household to household, based on factors such as income, age and geography, according to Brian Bethune, an economist and professor at Boston College.
    This means your personal inflation rate likely diverges from the U.S. average, too.

    There are a few ways to calculate your inflation rate. The pitfalls of such a calculation came into focus on Monday when Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration, tweeted an incorrect estimate for a July Fourth cookout.

    (Her tweet, which has since been deleted, pegged a barbecue as 67.2% more expensive relative to last year. By comparison, the American Farm Bureau Federation said costs had increased 17% — a much smaller rise, though still elevated. President Joe Biden cited that agriculture trade group in 2021 when the White House said costs for an Independence Day BBQ had decreased 16 cents relative to 2020.)

    Calculating your personal inflation rate

    Here’s the simplest way to get a rough estimate of your personal annual inflation rate, according to economists.

    The first step is to determine how much of your spending falls into certain categories or buckets, such as food, energy, clothing, housing and entertainment.To do this, you’ll need to consult your bank and credit card statements for the past year to find exact spending amounts. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a detailed list that can help you itemize your purchases by category.
    Calculate your category “weights.” This weighting is basically the share of your spending devoted to specific buckets. (The consumer price index calls this weighting “relative importance.”)To do this, tally your total spending within categories. Divide each number by your aggregate annual spending to calculate the category weight.For example, let’s say my total household spending from May 2021 to May 2022 was $50,000. I spent $17,000 (or 34% of the total) on rent and $6,000 (or 12%) on groceries. Their category weights would be 0.34 and 0.12, respectively.
    Reference the BLS table of detailed expenditure categories again. The “unadjusted percent change” column shows the average annual percent increase in price for each item.For example, rent payments increased 5.5% in the year through May. The price of food at home (groceries) rose 11.9% in the same period.
    Multiply the category weights in step 2 by the annual percent change for those categories in step 3. Using the above example, you’d multiply 0.34 x 5.5 for the rent calculation. Multiply 0.12 x 11.9 for food. And so on for all other spending categories.
    To determine your personal inflation rate, add up the category totals from step 4. (In the above example: 1.87 + 1.428 + etc.) This total is your annual inflation rate expressed as a percentage.
    Compare your rate to the national average. For annual spending through this May, a percentage that’s lower than 8.6% means your costs haven’t increased as much as the average American.A higher number means your costs have risen more in the past year. Of course, households generally think in terms of dollars and cents, not percentages.

    A more precise way to calculate your rate

    Jamie Grill | Getty Images

    The above calculation compares your household experience to the average American, based on the differences in goods and services, as well as the quantity, that each household buys. However, the formula leverages price averages for those goods and services — meaning it’s not a hyper-individualized calculation.
    Consumers can do some additional calculations to get a more precise understanding of how their individual household spending has changed from year to year:  

    Tally all expenses from your bank and credit card statements in the past 12 months, as well as for the prior 12-month period.
    Subtract the totals and divide by the first year’s spending. For example, let’s say my spending was $50,000 from May 2021 to May 2022, and it was $45,000 from May 2020 to May 2021. Divide the difference ($5,000) by $45,000.
    Multiply that number from step 2 by 100 to determine your personal annual inflation rate.

    In the above example, I’d multiply 0.111 by 100. My personal annual inflation rate over that period would have been 11.1%.

    Using cash, shopping sales can skew results

    There are a few caveats. For one, you’re likely unable to account for any spending made in cash. It’s also likely you’ve sought out less-expensive alternatives where possible (substituting less-expensive foods, for instance), or maybe you’re driving less to save on gasoline.
    This all means your calculation might not be 100% accurate, but it will be in the ballpark.

    Further, costs aren’t rising in a vacuum. If you’re working, your income has likely increased, too. Average wages are up 6.1% in the past year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. They haven’t kept pace with the average inflation rate, but more household income erodes some of the financial pain.
    “If you have to shell out more dollars just to get the same items and your income isn’t keeping up with that, then your quality of life is deteriorating,” Alex Arnon, associate director of policy analysis for the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said of inflation’s impact.

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    World’s largest bitcoin fund slams the SEC, sues over crypto ETF rejection

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    Digital currency asset manager Grayscale is in a legal fight with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its latest rejection of the company’s prospective spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund.
    Last Wednesday, the SEC denied Grayscale’s application to convert its bitcoin trust to a spot ETF. The company filed a lawsuit the same day. 

    Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, under the ticker GBTC, is the world’s biggest publicly traded bitcoin fund.
    “We were simply asking the SEC to hold this product to a higher standard, to give it greater investor protection and give greater risk disclosure for investors,” Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” on Wednesday of this week. “Converting would unlock billions of dollars of unrealized shareholder value.”
    He identified potentially capricious treatment by the SEC, which allows bitcoin futures products to trade under specific rules and regulations but denies spot products an equal opportunity. 
    “The inconsistent treatment here by the SEC — allowing the futures products to trade but denying the spot products to trade — is not looking at what is essentially the same exact market through a like lens here,” Sonnenshein said. “In fact, the treatment is quite disparate.”
    Todd Rosenbluth of VettaFi, a financial services company, joined the conversation to share his thoughts on what could change the SEC perspective. The commission made a distinction between futures- and spot-based products, citing the regulations tied to bitcoin futures-based ETFs.

    “I wish Michael [Sonnenshein] best of luck in the lawsuit, but it’s hard to convince the SEC that there isn’t going to be fraud and manipulation when that’s what they’re clearly asking the asset managers to disprove time and time again,” VettaFi’s head of research said.
    Markets in Canada, Brazil and parts of Europe show promise for spot bitcoin ETFs, according to Sonnenshein. Rather than bring the prospective ETF to international markets right away, the Grayscale CEO hopes to repair cryptocurrency regulation domestically.
    “What we’re going to see, and what we intend to see, is working proactively with the SEC and other regulators here in the U.S. to really answer that White House executive order from earlier this year to engage on crypto issues and ultimately develop regulatory frameworks that create consistent treatment and develop frameworks that can actually allow businesses to grow and not squander innovation here in the U.S. as it relates to crypto,” Sonnenshein said. 
    Grayscale Bitcoin Trust was trading higher Thursday. However, it’s down more than 50% over the past 52 weeks.
    The SEC declined to provide comment beyond its order denying Grayscale’s application. More

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    Dallas Cowboys criticized for announcing partnership with Black Rifle Coffee after mass shooting

    The Cowboys announced a partnership with Black Rifle Coffee a day after the shootings in Highland Park, Illinois.
    The timing of the announcement faced a backlash on Twitter.

    Owner Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys attends training camp at River Ridge Complex on July 24, 2021 in Oxnard, California.
    Jayne Kamin-oncea | Getty Images

    The Dallas Cowboys are facing a backlash after the football team announced a partnership with gun-themed coffee company a day after the deadly shooting in Highland Park, Illinois.
    The company, Black Rifle Coffee, says it is veteran-owned and sells products with names including “Silencer Smooth Coffee Rounds,” “AK-47 Espresso Blend” and “Murdered Out Coffee Roast.”

    “Please welcome America’s Coffee to America’s Team,” the Cowboys tweeted earlier this week with a video montage showing the team, coffee beans and a man wearing camouflage clothing drinking coffee.
    The announcement set off criticism online, including from those who noted its poor timing a day after the Highland Park shooting, which left seven dead and wounded dozens more, and weeks after the Uvalde, Texas, shooting that killed 21, including 19 children, at Robb Elementary School.
    “This is such a dumb insensitive move on the wrong side of history,” one account tweeted. “This is the only team I’ve ever cheered for my entire life, despite letting me down for decades,” said another tweet. “But this is the line in the sand. I can’t support this. If the Cowboys don’t rescind this, I’m done.”
    Others expressed their support, including one account that tweeted that said Black Rifle is veteran-owned and that people were getting mad over the company’s name without knowing anything about it.
    “Great company with a great mission,” another tweeted.

    In a statement, Black Rifle said the deal with the Cowboys had been in the works for a long time and “was timed to coincide with the Independence Day holiday.” A representative declined to respond when asked whether the company considered delaying the Cowboys announcement after the shootings.
    The Dallas Cowboys did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment. The NFL didn’t respond to requests for comment, either.
    Jerry Jones, the Cowboys owner, had said in a statement when the team announced the partnership that the agreement represents the Cowboys’ support of the military and first responders.
    On its website, Black Rifle Coffee says it was founded in 2014 and is committed to supporting veterans and first responders. “Black Rifle Coffee Company serves coffee and culture to people who love America,” the company’s bio reads.
    The coffee company, which went public in February after a merger with a SPAC, also partners with NASCAR and the National Wild Turkey Federation, and athlete Travis Pastrana, according its website.
    Black Rifle’s stock price hit a 52-week low of $6.62 on June 27 and opened Thursday at about $9.
    – CNBC’s Jessica Golden contributed to this report.

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    Chipotle's $50 million search for the future of fast food

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    Chipotle launched a $50 million venture fund in April that aims to tackle the various challenges facing the restaurant sector.
    Last year, Chipotle invested in self-driving robotics company Nuro as a first venture investment, and this year it is piloting Chippy, a robotic tortilla chip maker that saves time and labor costs.
    The fast food giant’s investment in technologies like AI and robotics are part of a larger plan to ultimately change the world’s food systems.

    Chipotle is testing out an autonomous kitchen assistant, Chippy, which offers a robotic solution for making chips in restaurants.
    Courtesy: Chipotle

    The lengthy lunchtime lines at Chipotle Mexican Grill waiting to order could serve as a good metaphor for Chipotle’s approach to investing in innovation: though you may have to wait a bit for results, the taco and burrito brand is fostering technology from all over the world that’s going to change the way restaurants run and customers think about food.
    It’s not exactly a new sentiment from the company. Chief technology officer Curt Garner notes that Chipotle, inspired by Uber, first went digital in 2016 with its app and then quickly built space at each of its restaurants so employees wouldn’t ever have to choose between serving customers standing in front of them versus those who ordered digitally. But investing in globe-altering innovation took on new meaning for Chipotle in April when it launched Cultivate Next, its $50 million venture fund intended to soothe the margin-squeezing pressures of the restaurant sector, tackling challenges from labor shortages to rising food costs and enticing customers to spend more time eating in their stores.

    “We’re thinking about how to grow and scale the company through a lot of lenses,” said Garner, noting that the fund represents an opportunity for Chipotle to evolve from merely adapting to technological change to creating it. “There’s restaurant growth, there’s growing and scaling our digital business and there’s also continuing the mission of cultivating a better world and changing the way people think about where their food comes from.”
    Chipotle’s new venture fund could be a beacon for investors as the restaurant sector continues to fight significant economic headwinds. Analysts will be looking for concrete examples of Garner’s first two points — new tech that promises to streamline and expand Chipotle’s operations — when Chipotle reports its second quarter results on July 26.
    Chipotle has generally posted positive growth numbers since 2016 when the chain was dealing with food safety scares — it experienced near double-digit systemwide sales growth between 2017 and 2020, according to Morningstar. But it’s not immune to today’s broader market downswing. While consensus estimates are calling for Chipotle to post second quarter revenue of $2.24 billion, up nearly 19% year over year, and quarterly earnings of $9.04 per share, up 21%, its stock is down more than 20% year-to-date.
    “The trouble is on the margins side,” said Sean Dunlop, equities analyst with Morningstar.
    While Chipotle and the restaurant sector have seen a slight softening of comparable store sales growth, the rising costs of food, labor and utilities combined with a trend of consumers venturing out of their homes less “is pinching Chipotle’s P&L,” Dunlop said, noting that the squeeze will likely last into 2024. Owner-operated chains like Chipotle and Starbucks may also be faring worse than franchised businesses because “they bear all those below-the-line costs themselves,” he added.

    Another potential hurdle for Chipotle’s stock: unionizing workers. In early June, a Chipotle Mexican Grill shop in Augusta, Maine, filed a petition for a union election, the first of the chain’s restaurants to join the recent organizing push across the U.S. that has swept across companies from Apple to Starbucks.

    A self-driving delivery robot provided the spark

    Like every other VC investor, Chipotle is looking to get in on the ground floor of early-stage firms developing revolutionary technology. Unlike typical VC firms, though, Chipotle isn’t looking for a specific return on investment over a particular timeframe.
    “Success for us is multifaceted,” Garner said. “It’s a chance for us to improve our operating business and that improvement could become greater than what we would achieve in terms of strict financial returns on capital.”
    The venture fund notion came last year after Chipotle invested in Nuro, a SoftBank-backed startup that uses self-driving technology, in Priuses and custom vehicles, to deliver groceries and other goods.

    Domino’s tests Nuro, an autonomous car for pizza delivery in Houston.
    Source: Domino’s

    “We found a lot of traction there in terms of synergies of culture and ideas and innovation and we wondered if there was an opportunity to expand our influence and become an accelerator of those ideas,” Garner told the Silicon Valley-themed Sand Hill Road podcast in May. Chipotle’s executive team found itself being pitched all kinds of ideas but had no formal funnel to sift through opportunities either as a supplier or partner, said Garner.
    Record venture investment in restaurant technology — including hardware and software for restaurant management, bookings, staffing, mobile payments and inventory management — reached more than $4 billion in 2021, and it is on track to beat that this year. Hundreds of companies have expressed interest in Chipotle’s first round, which targets seed funds to series B startups.
    Garner said Chipotle will announce its first picks in the next few weeks. Industry watchers say to expect Chipotle’s money to follow industry pain points.
    “After the pandemic a lot of folks are making investments to modernize and improve customer experiences and doing things to take labor costs down and out of the operation,” said Eric Symon, vice president of the Enterprise Process Innovation Center at Panasonic System Solutions Company of North America.
    Symon is seeing demand for solutions like Panasonic’s temperature-controlled smart food lockers that deter take-away theft and mix-ups, which tie up employees who have to remake orders. He is also seeing demand for artificial intelligence apps to help restaurant managers forecast busy times of day so they can better staff their shops.
    To that end, Chipotle has already invested in an AI-powered labor management tool that analyzes dozens of variables like weather and available promotions to determine more efficient restaurant staffing. It’s also rolling out an AI-based training program, which helps restaurant workers to move up the ladder to management.

    The labor of an automated tortilla chip maker

    When it comes to the type of innovation that Chipotle is looking to foster, Garner nods to Chippy, a robotic tortilla chip maker that saves time and labor costs by handling repetitive kitchen tasks.
    “It started with, ‘how do we remove some of the dreariness of a worker standing at the fryer and frying chip basket after chip basket?'” Garner said, noting that Chippy will be piloted at one Chipotle location later this year once it becomes certified as food safe. “It allows our crew to spend more time doing culinary tests, serving guests.”
    Chippy might help Chipotle deal with the industry’s labor shortage, but ultimately what the company is aiming for with its venture fund is changing the world’s food systems.
    “When you think about the environmental opportunities for how food is sourced and how it’s served, those are huge areas for technology to be accelerated and enabled,” Garner said, specifically pointing to environmentally focused farming techniques coming out of Europe. “Guests want to understand the provenance of their food and feel good about what they’re shopping for.”
    Buying into sustainable farming practices will allow quick service restaurants brands better affordability of ingredients, a guaranteed supply, and the opportunity to offer customers something unique vs. competitors, said Sanjeev Krishnan, chief investment officer at S2G Ventures, a 9-year-old venture fund dedicated to supporting sustainable and healthy food systems.
    “More interesting is that these quick serve restaurants can bring an era of biodiversity into our food system — ours is boring,” Krishnan said. “Just 15 crop plants provide 90% of the world’s food energy intake, with three — rice, maize and wheat — making up two-thirds of this,” he added.
    Investment in non-meat protein products has ballooned over the past few years, with Chipotle, McDonald’s, Burger King and Dunkin all recently trialing burger and sausage substitutes on their menus. Many brands are extending plant-based experimentation to other product categories, and PitchBook Data tracks venture funding in a newish category: 3D bioprinting, which involves printing living cells, growth factors and other biomaterials to produce whole cut cultivated meat, according to the firm’s Q1 Foodtech Report. 3D food-printer companies logged $185.7 million in VC funding last year, it said.
    When it comes to investing in higher-risk emerging technology, it may help to think of Chipotle’s role as akin to other companies’ R&D costs, according to Dunlop.
    “Nothing is off the table,” Garner said. “One of the things that [CEO Brian Niccol] has brought to our culture is this idea that we have a lot of pride in what we do and very little ego. We can be proud of what we’ve done — like plant-based chorizo — but if someone out there has a cool idea, we want to hear from them.” More

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    Volkswagen CEO says EV outlook is ‘very good,’ expects to reduce delivery times this year

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    Supply chain constraints — including those related to semiconductors — have proven to be a major challenge for automakers in recent times.
    “We’re trying to keep delivery times short,” VW CEO Herbert Diess tells CNBC, “but we have a lead time of a year or so currently, so we are ramping up production.”
    German automotive giant’s focus on electric vehicles is a world away from the “dieselgate” scandal that rocked it in the 2010s.

    An ID. Buzz photographed at a plant in Hanover, Germany, on June 16, 2022. Supply chain constraints — including those related to semiconductors — have been a major challenge for automakers in recent times.
    Ole Spata | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

    The CEO of German automotive giant Volkswagen sought to assuage concerns about electric vehicle sales and semiconductor supplies on Thursday, predicting delivery times for EVs will get shorter as the year progresses.
    “The outlook is very good, we have [a] very good order intake in Asia,” Herbert Diess told CNBC’s Annette Weisbach on Thursday.

    Supply chain constraints — including those related to semiconductors — have proven to be a major challenge for automakers in recent times.
    “We’re trying to keep delivery times short,” Diess said, “but we have a lead time of a year or so currently, so we are ramping up production … five assembly plants are coming into production now.”
    Shares of Volkswagen traded up 5% during afternoon deals in London. The Frankfurt-listed stock price is down over 28% year-to-date.

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    “We will see a ramp-up in the second half of the year to really be able to reduce delivery times for our EVs,” he added. “There’s high demand in Europe and also in the United States.”
    Semiconductors, Diess noted, still represented a bottleneck, but said this was likely to change soon. “We will see an alleviation through the next weeks,” he said.

    Diess’ comments came on the same day his company broke ground on a cell factory in Salzgitter, Germany, and launched a battery company called PowerCo. In a statement, it said PowerCo would be “responsible for global battery activities of the Volkswagen Group.”
    It added that, in the period up to 2030, PowerCo would “invest more than €20 billion [$20.4 billion] together with partners in the development of the business area, to generate annual sales in excess of €20 billion and to employ up to 20,000 people in Europe alone.”
    By the year 2030, VW says it wants at least 70% of its European revenue to come from electric cars. In China and North America, its goal is at least 50% of revenue from EVs.
    Earlier this year, VW announced plans to re-launch the iconic Scout brand as a fully-electric pick-up and “rugged” SUV, with prototypes due to be revealed in 2023 and production planned to begin in 2026.
    The company is also concentrating on the development of vehicles such as the fully electric ID Buzz, which is inspired by the T1 Microbus or “hippie” van.

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