Raphael Stevens

Virgin Galactic ticket prices start at $450,000 for a single seat, as the company revealed last year, with three different sales offerings.
For much of the last decade, the company has had about 600 reservations for tickets on future flights, with those tickets sold largely between $200,000 and $250,000 each.
Alongside opening ticket sales to the public, Virgin Galactic also revealed it will replace the iris of Sir Richard Branson in its logo with a purple outline of its spacecraft.

Carrier aircraft VMS Eve is seen in the background shortly after releasing VSS Unity, which is firing its engine and acclerating during the company’s fourth spaceflight test, Unity 22, carrying founder Richard Branson on July 11, 2021.
Virgin Galactic

Space tourism company Virgin Galactic announced Tuesday that it will open ticket sales to the public for the first time on Wednesday, requiring a $150,000 deposit.
Virgin Galactic ticket prices start at $450,000 each, as the company revealed last year, with three different sales offerings: a single seat purchase, packaged seats for couples, friends or family, or opportunities to book entire flights. The company has said previously that — of the $150,000 deposit — $25,000 is not refundable.

Shares of Virgin Galactic jumped 32% in trading to close at $10.74. The stock has been battered over the past 12 months, dropping 80%, with the company having delayed the beginning of commercial spaceflights to late this year.
For much of the last decade, Virgin Galactic has had about 600 reservations for tickets on future flights, with those tickets sold largely between $200,000 and $250,000 each. In August, the company opened ticket sales at the $450,000 price to those who had expressed interest. It had sold about 100 additional tickets as of November.
Alongside opening ticket sales to the public, Virgin Galactic also revealed it is replacing the iris of Sir Richard Branson in its logo with a purple outline of its spacecraft. The move distances Virgin Galactic from its founder, with Branson having sold more than $1.25 billion in stock since the company went public in 2019 and achieved his longtime dream of passing the U.S. boundary of space in July.

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For Black-led startups, the lack of diversity in venture capital can pose a hurdle to access funding
The number of women and minority-owned venture and private equity funds rose 25% the year after the George Floyd protests, according to Fairview Capital Partners.
The Jumpstart Nova fund, launched in 2021 to invest exclusively in Black health-tech firms, has raised $55 million from investors including Eli Lilly, HCA Healthcare and Bank of America.

Scientist analyzing medical sample in test tube.
Morsa Images | DigitalVision | Getty Images

Dr. Derrell Porter knew he had a good idea: a company that provides a platform to help researchers develop and commercialize gene and cell therapies.
“Academic medical centers and scientific innovators — they’re not pharmaceutical companies. They tend to look for partners to help finish the development of their programs,” explained Porter, who founded Cellevolve to help make it easier for those researchers to connect with biotech companies.

Getting start-up off the ground meant making his own connection with financial backers, but his timing was bad. He began talking to investors about Cellevolve in March 2020, on the eve of the pandemic shutdown. 
When things reopened, Porter found that getting venture capitalists to invest was about more than buying into an idea.  
“They’re really making a bet on you as the entrepreneur, and therefore it’s a profoundly personal decision,” said Porter, who holds a medical degree from University of Pennsylvania Medical School and an MBA from The Wharton School. He noted, “being different or in the situation where the investor may not see themselves in you, or may not find a way to connect, that makes it harder to find capital.”
The venture capital industry is among the least diverse in finance. Nearly eight out of 10 VC investment partners in 2020 were white, 15% Asian and just 3% Black, according to the VC Human Capital Survey conducted by Deloitte, in conjunction with the National Venture Capital Association and Venture Forward.
Marcus Whitney is an African American venture partner and the co-founder of Jumpstart Health in Nashville. He says he felt a cultural shift from investors he’d talked to for years, following the George Floyd protests in 2020 and the focus that summer on racial equity.

“I tapped into an awareness that there was a willingness to do something that I’ve never really felt at any point in my life,” said Whitney.
He seized on that willingness as an opportunity to raise capital to invest in Black-led firms.  
“The number one question was, hey, this sounds great. I want to be a part of it. But are there actually enough deals out there?” he said.  
He had no trouble finding companies and launched the Jumpstart Nova fund to invest exclusively in Black-led health firms. He wasn’t the only one to capitalize on the greater willingness to invest in under-represented founders last year.
In 2021, venture capital and private equity saw a 25% jump in woman- and minority-owned firms in the industry, according Fairview Capital Partners. The actual numbers remain small — 627 women- and minority-led firms, 84 of which were Black-owned. Their capital raises were also smaller; the median was $100 million, compared with $170 million industrywide.
One of Whitney’s first investments was Cellevolve, which included taking a seat on the company’s board.
“Without Marcus … taking the bet on Cellevolve and me personally, I mean, we never might have gotten a company off the ground,” said Porter.  
The Jumpstart Nova Fund now has $55 million investments from backers including Eli Lilly, HCA Healthcare and Bank of America. The plan is to back 20 start-ups this year, but Whitney’s already identified more than 150 prospects.
“We think we can catalyze more capital going to these founders beyond what we can do from an investment perspective,” Whitney said.  
He hopes forging a network that brings more focus to under-represented founders will help even the playing field when it comes to accessing and raising capital.

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When Matt Horn opened up his first restaurant in Oakland, Horn BBQ, the pandemic was in full swing. It was fall of 2020 and he’d overcome a long list of challenges from location to regulations and more to see it through. So when it came time to launch his second, highly-anticipated concept, Kowbird, just down the street, Horn was ready with a pandemic playbook.
The fried chicken restaurant, much like his original BBQ spot, opened to a line of fans and support from the community. He says for now the focus is on pre-orders, but the hope is to resume a sense of normalcy in the year to come.

“It’s been awesome to open Kowbird in the pandemic, a lot of people are happy with the opening, especially in the community,” Horn said. “To be able to have something positive in the midst of adversity, and you know this constant bad news, is really cool.”

Matt Horn opened up his second restaurant during the pandemic, Oakland’s Kowbird.
Source: Matt Horn

Business at Horn BBQ has grown over the last year, he said, even in the face of ongoing labor challenges and major inflation headwinds, as the restaurant was added to Michelin’s Bib Gourmand list of best affordable eateries. Waiting in line to eat at one of Horn’s concepts is nothing new to locals, but it provides a fresh sense of pride and urgency for the chef each time he sees it.
“When I see the line, the first thing that goes through my mind, of course, is grateful that people showed up, then on my team, like, okay, come on, let’s push orders through,” he said.
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Restaurants like Horn’s, seeing success and growth throughout the pandemic, have been a rarity. The National Restaurant Association projects some 90,000 locations have shuttered in the last two years, some temporarily and others for good. Half of all operators think it will be a year or more before sales return to normal.

More broadly, Main Street sentiment has been stagnant, according to the latest CNBC/SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey for Q1. Overall confidence was unchanged at 44, but labor and inflation issues persist. Nearly three-quarters of small business owners say they’re experiencing higher costs for supplies and 47 percent are raising their own prices as a result, up 8 percentage points from Q4 2021.

April Anderson’s Good Cakes and Bakes in Detroit saw its delivery business thrive during the pandemic.
Source: April Anderson

April Anderson’s Good Cakes and Bakes in Detroit, Mich., is also thriving and growing much like Horn has over the last year. After realizing many customers had been asking about shipping the bakery’s cakes nationwide, Anderson decided to pivot and lean more into delivery in the face of the pandemic.
“We realized we needed to move at a faster pace,” Anderson said.
She reached out to Goldbelly, which ships regional and artisanal foods across the U.S. Connecting with the platform allowed Anderson to grow her cake delivery from 20 cakes a day to up to 100 cakes a day. She grossed more than $1 million for the first time in 2021. Anderson is even preparing to open up a facility dedicated to the shipping business later this year.
“The way that we’ve been able to grow, it has really let me know that the clarity and forward thinking I had before the pandemic has really paid off,” she said.
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Walmart is testing reusable tote bags as part of its direct-to-fridge delivery service, InHome, which is expanding across the country.
The pilot project is part of a broader effort by the retail giant to deliver on a pledge to move toward reusable, recyclable or industrially compostable packaging and reach zero waste in its own operations in the U.S. and Canada by 2025.
Other companies, including Estee Lauder, New Balance and Rent the Runway, are also looking for ways to move to a circular system of reusable packaging.

Walmart is trying to reduce its reliance on single-use plastic bags. It has a pilot program through its subscription grocery service, InHome.
Nicholas Pizzolato

When Walmart rolled out a new grocery delivery service, it tested a bold premise: customers letting a stranger walk into their homes to deliver milk, eggs and other products directly into the fridge.
Now that expanding service, InHome, is testing whether the country’s largest grocer and its shoppers can phase out reliance on single-use plastic bags and other kinds of disposable packaging that wind up in shoppers’ homes — and ultimately, the landfill.

Last fall, Walmart swapped out disposable bags for tote bags that it collected, washed and used again for the subscription service.
The pilot project, which was limited to a single store near the New York metro area, is part of Walmart’s broader effort to deliver on a pledge to move toward reusable, recyclable or industrially compostable packaging for its private brands and reach zero waste in its own operations in the U.S. and Canada by 2025.
In the first half of 2022, Walmart plans to test alternatives to single-use plastic for curbside pickup and home delivery, said Jane Ewing, Walmart’s senior vice president of sustainability. Those services are fast-growing parts of Walmart’s grocery business, after shoppers got used to the convenience during the pandemic.
Wall Street, lawmakers and consumers have put pressure on publicly traded companies to set lofty sustainability goals. A growing number of states, major U.S. cities and countries are banning or charging fees for single-use plastics. Consumers, particularly millennials and Gen Zers, are paying more attention to companies’ environmental impact. And investors are considering environmental, social and governance policies as a factor when deciding when to buy or sell a company’s stock.
Judith Enck, president of the nonprofit Beyond Plastics, said companies are “reading the writing on the wall,” much as they did when states and cities began passing laws that phased in higher minimum wages.

Yet she said she has grown weary of seeing retailers and consumer-packaged goods companies make promises that come with yearslong timetables and incremental steps toward compliance.
“Companies need to be bolder and they need to move faster,” she said. “These shouldn’t be pilots. They should be standard store policy.”

From cucumbers to clamshells

At Walmart, Ewing said her team scours store aisles and backrooms for ways to eliminate plastics from its supply chain, from films that wrap up pallets of merchandise to clamshells that hold leafy greens.
She said Walmart is especially focused on finding ways to keep fruits and vegetables fresh with packaging like what it devised with start-up Apeel: an invisible, edible plant-based coating on a cucumber instead of shrink-wrapping it in plastic.
Yet progress can be slow. For example, Walmart recently removed a plastic window from a box that holds plastic cutlery sold by its private label, Ewing said. That small change will be multiplied across inventory throughout its more than 4,700 U.S. stores. But that doesn’t solve the underlying problem — the plastic utensils themselves.
What’s more, private brands only drive a fraction of Walmart’s total sales. That means it must ultimately coax suppliers to change packaging to shift the balance of single-use plastics at Walmart’s stores. Eliminating or cutting back on packaging is one of the key parts of Project Gigaton, an effort that Walmart launched five years ago that aims to reduce one gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions from the company’s supply chains by 2030.
Walmart is part of Beyond the Bag, an initiative by retailers including Target, CVS Health, Kroger and others to look for ways to remove single-use plastic bags from the environment.
For its part, Walmart has tried Goatote and Chico Bags, two different kiosk systems that allow shoppers to borrow and return reusable bags, and Fill it Forward, an app-enabled tag that customers can add to their own bag, which tracks and incentivizes use by giving rewards.
“Most customers want to do the right thing; they want to lead a more sustainable life,” Ewing said. “But as a retailer, we have to make it easy for them. If it’s too complex, too hard, they’re not going to do it. So we have to figure out how can we build this into the flow of their regular shopping experience and take out the pain points for them.”
By the end of this year, Walmart plans to expand the InHome delivery service’s availability from 6 million to 30 million households. The subscription program costs $19.95 per month.
In the coming months, the grocer envisions that millions more customers will get their milk, pasta and other purchases delivered to the kitchen or garage with reusable tote bags, Ewing said.
Walmart has yet to decide its geographic markets or how many customers will receive the tote service, but Ewing said it will expand the pilot in the Northeast. Ultimately, she said she would like to see the totes used by InHome across the country.
Sustainability is built into other parts of the InHome initiative. For example, Walmart has reserved 5,000 electric delivery vans from General Motors for the service.

A circular system

The tote bags for the InHome pilot are made by Returnity, a company that is trying to move retailers and consumer-packaged goods brands away from disposable boxes and bags and toward a circular system of containers that can be reused. Returnity has developed packaging for Estee Lauder, New Balance and Rent the Runway.
Mike Newman, CEO of Returnity, said for the model to work, reusable packaging must make sense financially. That means packaging that is used frequently, designed with recycled plastics or other sustainable materials, with a return rate of more than 92%. With the Walmart program, he said, the return rate was nearly 100%.
Returnity counts James Reinhart, CEO and co-founder of online thrift store ThredUp, as one of its early investors.
At ThredUp, reusable packaging flopped and became a telling lesson, Newman said. Too many customers just tossed company-provided bags rather than reuse them, he said.
“You have to be cost competitive,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how green it is. If it can’t be economically viable, it’s never going anywhere.”

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About 25% of Taco Bell’s international footprint is stores that have opened in the last two years.
The chain has been accelerating its international presence, narrowing its focus on key markets and driving digital sales.
Taco Bell said it’s on track to open 1,000 international restaurants “within the very near future.”

People eat at a newly-opened Taco Bell restaurant in Beijing on August 21, 2020.
Greg Baker | AFP | Getty Images

Taco Bell is accelerating its growth outside the U.S., opening 25% of its international restaurants in just the last two years.
The Yum Brands chain announced Tuesday that it opened its 100th restaurant in Spain. The chain said it’s on track to build 1,000 international units, although it did not share a timeline to reach that goal. At the end of 2020, about 8% of Taco Bell’s 7,427 restaurants were located outside the U.S.

In its home market, Taco Bell has built a strong following of loyal fans, who even get married at its Las Vegas location. Fans include vegetarians, whose vocal disappointment in menu cuts helped bring back its potato options last year. Still, the chain’s U.S. business took longer than Yum’s other two large brands, KFC and Pizza Hut, to bounce back from the pandemic. The loss of late-night and morning demand hurt Taco Bell sales.
While Yum reports systemwide sales growth by country for Pizza Hut and KFC, the company doesn’t break out those results for Taco Bell. In the fourth quarter, Taco Bell reported same-store sales growth of 8% across all of its locations.
“We are on track to 1,000 stores, and that is within our sights within the very near future,” said Julie Felss Masino, Taco Bell’s international president, in an interview.
She added that Taco Bell CEO Mark King has set a goal for the chain to see $20 billion in annual revenue, and international growth is an important component to reaching that target.
Felss Masino became head of Taco Bell’s international business in January 2020, after two years running the chain’s U.S. operations in the wake of Brian Niccol’s departure to Chipotle Mexican Grill. Under her leadership, Taco Bell’s international division has focused on several key markets: Spain, the United Kingdom, India, and Australia and New Zealand.

Taco Bell’s international strategy includes betting on digital orders. In the U.K., 60% of transactions come from online customers. The chain has been opening digital-only locations and restaurants with pick-up windows dedicated to delivery drivers.
“That’s what being an easy, accessible brand is all about, and that’s a cornerstone of how we’re growing internationally,” Felss Masino said.
Unlike its U.S. business, all of Taco Bell’s international locations are run by franchisees. Some of those operators have been a part of Yum for decades, running KFC or Pizza Hut restaurants in their countries.
“We’ve been working with our franchise partners to get to scale very quickly,” Felss Masino said. “Scale helps the consumers because the brand feels bigger, it’s something they want to be a part of. Sometimes we can do more things in the market with marketing.”
Felss Masino also said Yum’s scale and expertise has helped Taco Bell as it accelerates its international growth. Yum is the largest restaurant company in the world by number of locations. In 2021, Yum opened more than 4,100 locations worldwide — that’s higher than the number of Tim Hortons locations in Canada.
Shares of Yum have risen 14% over the last 12 months, giving the company a market value of $35.5 billion.

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