Raphael Stevens

KFC is moving its U.S. headquarters from Louisville, Kentucky, to Plano, Texas.
Parent company Yum Brands is calling remote workers back to the office.
Many employers have been rethinking the location of their corporate headquarters due to lower taxes and changes to office space needs.

Signage outside a Yum Brands Inc. KFC restaurant in Shelbyville, Kentucky, on Jan. 29, 2021.
Luke Sharrett | Bloomberg | Getty Images

KFC is leaving Kentucky.
The fried chicken chain’s U.S. headquarters will move from Louisville, Kentucky, to Plano, Texas, owner Yum Brands said Tuesday.

About 100 KFC U.S. employees will be required to relocate over the next six months.
The relocation is part of Yum’s broader plan to have two corporate headquarters: one in Plano, the other in Irvine, California. KFC and Pizza Hut’s global teams are already based in Plano, while Taco Bell and the Habit Burger & Grill’s teams are located in Irvine.
Additionally, Yum’s U.S. remote workforce, roughly 90 workers, will also be asked to move to the campus where their work is based.
But Yum isn’t entirely abandoning Kentucky. The company and the KFC Foundation plan to maintain corporate offices in Louisville. Plus, KFC still plans to build a new flagship restaurant in its former hometown.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, many employers have been rethinking the location of their corporate headquarters, often spurred to move because of lower taxes and changes to office space needs due to the hybrid or remote workforce. With its business-friendly policies, Texas has been the most popular relocation choice, according to a 2023 report from CBRE.
In 2020, Yum rival Papa Johns moved its headquarters from Louisville to Atlanta. It later canceled plans to sell its old headquarters, instead opting to hold on to the building for the corporate workers who stayed in Louisville.

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Sentiment among the nation’s single-family homebuilders dropped to the lowest level in five months in February.
The drop was largely due to concern over tariffs, which would raise homebuilder costs significantly.
Sales expectations in the next six months took a major hit in the National Association of Home Builders’ Housing Market Index.

Sentiment among the nation’s single-family homebuilders dropped to the lowest level in five months in February, largely due to concern over tariffs, which would raise their costs significantly.
The National Association of Home Builders’ Housing Market Index, or HMI, dropped a sharp 5 points from January to a reading of 42. Anything below 50 is considered negative sentiment. Last February, the index stood at 48.

“While builders hold out hope for pro-development policies, particularly for regulatory reform, policy uncertainty and cost factors created a reset for 2025 expectations in the most recent HMI,” said NAHB Chairman Carl Harris, a homebuilder from Wichita, Kansas.
Of the index’s three components, current sales conditions fell 4 points to 46, buyer traffic fell 3 points to 29 and sales expectations in the next six months plunged 13 points to 46. That last component hit its lowest level since December 2023.
Builders are already facing elevated mortgage rates. The average on the 30-year fixed mortgage rate was above 7% for January and February after earlier being in the 6% range. Home prices are also higher than they were a year ago, weakening affordability further.
While President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico, originally proposed to take effect in early February, were delayed roughly a month, builders are still expecting higher costs.
“With 32% of appliances and 30% of softwood lumber coming from international trade, uncertainty over the scale and scope of tariffs has builders further concerned about costs,” said NAHB chief economist Robert Dietz.

Homebuilder sentiment had been gaining steadily since August on the expectation of lower mortgage rates and, as the builders noted, potential pro-development policies. Single-family housing starts are trending lower than they were a year ago, despite a lean supply of existing homes for sale.
The drop in builder sentiment, coming right before the all-important spring market, signals potentially even less supply in the market. Several homebuilders have noted the pullback in buyer demand in recent earnings reports.
“Despite Federal Reserve actions to lower short-term interest rates, mortgage interest rates remained elevated in the fourth quarter, which impacted buyer demand as homebuyers continue to face affordability challenges,” said Ryan Marshall, CEO of PulteGroup, in its fourth-quarter earnings release.
The share of builders lowering prices dropped to 26% in February, down from 30% in January and the lowest share since May 2024. Other sales incentives also fell.
This may be because incentives are becoming less effective at attracting buyers, since high prices and high rates have reduced the pool of buyers for whom these benefits move the needle, according to the NAHB.
When a buyer is solidly priced out, no incentive helps, and with rates remaining higher, the pool of marginal buyers may be shrinking. Offering incentives to buyers who would buy regardless of price or rates is of diminishing value for builders.

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Nike has signed a new “long-term” partnership with Kim Kardashian’s shapewear company Skims to launch a new brand called NikeSKIMS.
The new brand will include a collection of apparel, footwear and accessories that will debut this spring, with a global rollout planned for 2026.
Nike’s partnership with Skims comes as the company tries to win over more women and bring in new products as it faces criticism for falling behind on innovation and ceding market share to competitors.

Mannequins displaying shapewear at a Skims pop-up shop at the Nordstrom flagship store in New York, US, on Sunday, June 9, 2024. 
Bing Guan | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Nike has teamed up with Kim Kardashian’s intimates brand Skims to launch a new line of activewear as the legacy sneaker giant looks to win over more women and better compete with Lululemon, Alo Yoga and Vuori, the companies announced Tuesday. 
The new brand, dubbed NikeSKIMS, will include apparel, footwear and accessories. It will debut its initial collection this spring, with a global rollout planned for 2026. It is not clear what exactly the products will look like or what items will be included in the initial collection. The only image contained in Nike’s announcement was a graphic of the new brand’s logo. 

Nike’s partnership with Skims, the buzzy shapewear brand created by Kardashian and Swedish entrepreneur Jens Grede, the brand’s CEO, comes as Nike looks to claw back the market share it has lost to upstart competitors and bring more women into the brand. 
A new activewear line with the Skims name attached will give Nike an in with the types of shoppers who are buying activewear from Lululemon and newer competitors such as Alo Yoga and Vuori, which cater more to women than Nike currently does. 
Nike has said previously that about 40% of its customers are women, but most apparel brands prefer to have more female consumers than male because they tend to shop more and spend more on clothes. Plus, this gender gap has allowed Nike’s competitors to get a foothold in the athletic apparel business, which could be a growth opportunity for the sneaker giant. In fiscal 2024, apparel only represented about 28% of Nike brand revenue. 
Nike debuted a new ad campaign geared toward female athletes during the Super Bowl, its first big game advertisement in decades. The campaign, called “So Win,” highlights female athletes such as gymnast Jordan Chiles and Women’s National Basketball Association stars Caitlin Clark and Sabrina Ionescu. The spot touched on the challenges women have faced in sports and called on them to win, even though they have been told what they can’t do and who they shouldn’t be. 
The campaign made it clear that reaching female athletes and capturing the buzz currently surrounding women’s sports will be a focal point of Nike’s strategy under its new CEO Elliott Hill. Not only will the Skims partnership allow Nike to better compete for women, but it will also bring in a new product line at a time when the company has been accused of falling behind on innovation and churning out the same legacy styles that are no longer exciting to consumers. 

For Skims, which was last valued at $4 billion, the Nike partnership and access to its manufacturing and development capabilities brings a growth opportunity for a brand that is popular but still relatively small compared to competitors. Other intimates brands, such as Victoria’s Secret, have tried and largely failed to branch into activewear, so Skims might be able to prove itself a winner in the space with Nike by its side. 
Plus, it bodes well for an initial public offering, which Skims has been considering. If Skims can show that it has more growth opportunities and a strategic partner like Nike, a public debut will be an easier sell to investors who are cautious on consumer companies amid tariff concerns, persistent inflation and a pullback on discretionary spending. 
Grede has said previously that the retailer deserves to be a public company, but he told WWD in December that it has not yet made a decision on an IPO.

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Deshawn “DJ” Chow is one of just over 100 sickle cell patients who have undergone treatment with new gene therapies.
CVS Health CEO David Joyner said private insurers and employer-sponsored health plans are looking at how to create a new risk pool arrangement to help manage the costs of the therapies.
The Biden administration introduced a new federal payment model to help state Medicaid programs afford the gene therapies, but Medicaid is now facing federal funding cuts in Washington.

Starting in his early teens, Deshawn “DJ” Chow wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to live a normal life. Crushing pain episodes brought on by his sickle cell disease were getting progressively worse.   
“It’s just been hard skipping school and always being in and out of the hospital,” the 19-year-old said. “And just severe pain in … my head and my lower back.”

When new sickle cell gene therapies were approved by the Food and Drug Administration just over a year ago, Chow’s adopted parents sought out City of Hope Children’s Cancer Center in Los Angeles to get him access to the new treatment. To their relief, the center accepted him as patient, and quickly secured authorization from the Chows’ employer-sponsored insurance.
“They’re covering pretty much all of this [at] almost no cost out of pocket for us. So, we’re really grateful for those benefits,” said DJ’s dad, Sean Chow. “I’m amazed.”
DJ Chow is one of a handful of the hospital’s patients who have been treated with Casgevy, the sickle gene therapy produced by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which costs more than $2 million per patient. The treatment process involved multiple hospitalizations as well as chemotherapy treatments at additional cost over the course of the past year.
Sickle cell is a blood disorder in which a person’s red blood cells become misshapen into crescent moons. It disproportionately affects Black people and causes severe pain episodes that can frequently land patients in the hospital.
Chow is one of small number of patients to complete treatment with new gene therapies. After completing the full course of Casgevy treatments in January, he is starting to let himself dream about doing the things he’s always wanted to do.

“Learn how to snowboard and surf and do all these things … experiences I never really got to do because of my sickle cell,” he said.

Slow ramp up

While more than 100,000 Americans suffer from sickle cell disease, younger patients whose organs have not been damaged by the disease are the most promising candidates to benefit from the new treatments.
Still, the ramp up of capacity to treat patients at scale has been slow. In the first year since two gene therapies for sickle cell were approved by the FDA, just over 100 patients have undergone treatment.
Vertex executives said on the company’s fourth quarter earnings call that 50 patients globally had received their first cell collections by the end of last year 2024. Meanwhile, executives at competitor Bluebird Bio said last fall that nearly five dozen patients had undergone treatment with its drug Lyfgenia, which is priced at more than $3 million per patient. Another 37 patients are slated to begin treatment with Bluebird’s therapy by early 2025.
For the first treatment centers to offer the new sickle gene therapies, coordinating with insurers on obtaining coverage has required a bit of learning curve.
“It is much smoother today than it was when we first started getting patients in,” said Jennifer Cameron, executive director of patient access at Children’s National Hospital, in Washington, D.C. “Many times, we’ll send them the billing and coding guides that are developed by the … manufacturer and we share that with the payer, if they don’t know about it.”
City of Hope’s Dr. Leo Wang, the pediatric hematologist-oncologist who works with Chow, also said the process has gotten smoother, but he worries that the price of these treatments still poses hurdles for coverage.
“The challenges for the health care system are immense. This is a very expensive therapy,” he said, “For employer-based insurance plans it may be a little bit difficult to accommodate those costs.”
So far, the slow ramp up of patients in treatment has made coverage of early cases manageable, said David Joyner, CEO of CVS Health, the parent company of health insurer Aetna. But with demand expected to ramp up, he said many in the industry are looking at developing new payment models for the sickle cell treatments and other gene therapies on the horizon.  
“There are emerging risk pools being developed … sometimes at the state Medicaid levels, and sometimes collectively across larger payers,” Joyner explained, so that the financial burden of the treatments is spread beyond just one state or one company.
“You have to think about a different payment model, because today’s payment model is not constructed to spread the cost,” he said. “But that takes time.”

A challenge for Medicaid

For state Medicaid programs, the challenge of affordability for the new sickle cell treatments may be even greater. More than half of sickle cell patients are covered under the federal-state government health plan for low-income Americans.
Southern states like Georgia, Florida and Mississippi have some the largest concentrations of sickle cell patients, according to a study by researchers at the University of Chicago.
The Biden administration developed a Cell and Gene Therapy payment model under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which will provide states with an outcomes-based discounted price and provide some funding for the new drugs. The deadline for states to apply for the program is Feb. 28, with the first federal grants to help pay for the drugs on track to begin in June, according to CMS officials.   
Under the new payment model, states could receive up to $9.5 million in federal funding, but even with discounted prices that may not begin to cover the costs of treating Medicaid patients in some cases.
Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University calculated that the 10 states with the largest sickle cell populations could see a mean budget impact of $30 million, based on an estimate of treatments priced at just under $1.9 million. 
Those increased costs would come at a time when the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress are looking for ways to cut federal spending. The administration has already begun to cut staffing at health agencies, and federal funding for state Medicaid programs is expected to be on the table in upcoming budget proposals.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said during his confirmation hearings last month that he is committed to maintaining staffing to provide coordination of sickle cell coverage across the department and other agencies, without specifically discussing funding for the new gene therapies or Medicaid overall.
“I have many friends who have sickle cell. I’ve seen the suffering they endure,” Kennedy said. “There are now promising gene therapies. They are very, very expensive, but it’s something that [National Institutes of Health] should be enthusiastically supporting — that kind of research.”
Sean Chow said he is grateful to the researchers who developed the gene therapy, which he hopes will allow his son to have a more normal future, without debilitating episodes of pain. He wants other families to have the same opportunity to access the high-priced gene therapies for their loved ones.  
“Having a child with sickle cell has been heartbreaking,” he said. “I’m hoping as more and more patients get the therapy, the cost can be driven down.” More

Coca-Cola is launching its own prebiotic soda brand to compete with Olipop and Poppi.
While soda consumption has fallen over the last two decades, the popularity of prebiotic sodas has skyrocketed, as consumers look for a healthier option.
Simply Pop’s first product lineup leans fruity, in a nod to Coke’s Simply juice brand.

Source: Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola is launching a prebiotic soda brand called Simply Pop, taking on upstarts Olipop and Poppi.
Starting in late February, consumers on the West Coast and in the Southeast will be able to try Coke’s iteration of the trendy drink.

Soda consumption has broadly fallen in the U.S. over the last two decades, hurt by health concerns and an increase in alternatives on the market, from cold brew to energy drinks to water. But in the last five years, sodas containing prebiotics have taken off, thanks to industry newcomers Olipop and Poppi.
Olipop recently raised $50 million at a valuation of $1.85 billion, the company announced Wednesday. And Poppi made its second straight Super Bowl appearance in this year’s game, shelling out up to $8 million to reach the game’s record audience.
Digestive health soft drinks have grown from a $197 million category in the U.S. in 2020 to one of roughly $440 million in 2024, according to Euromonitor International data. Still, it’s a fraction of the overall soda market, which is worth billions of dollars.
Simply Pop’s first product lineup leans fruity, in a nod to Coke’s Simply juice brand. Flavors include pineapple mango, lime, strawberry, fruit punch and citrus punch.
“We went out and really listened to consumers. They love this space, they’re really looking for stuff that tastes good, and that’s something we know how to deliver on at Simply and at Coke,” said Becca Kerr, CEO of Coke’s North American nutrition unit, which includes its Simply and Fairlife brands.

Simply Pop drinks have no added sugar and contain 25% to 30% real fruit juice, the company said. They also contain vitamin C and zinc, which can boost the immune system.
They also have six grams of prebiotic fiber — triple Poppi’s fiber content but less than Olipop’s nine grams.
Prebiotics have taken off thanks to claims that they can boost “gut health” by helping beneficial bacteria grow in the gut. Their health benefits haven’t been conclusively proven.
“We do see that there tends to be an appetite for these type of products with younger consumers, like millennial and Gen Z,” Kerr said. “We see an interest in these types of products from multicultural consumers.”
But health claims can prompt pushback. Poppi is in settlement talks over a lawsuit filed in late May that challenges the company’s marketing, arguing that Poppi’s products are not as healthy for the gut as advertised.
Coke has had the prebiotic soda category on its radar for several years, according to Kerr. Olipop CEO and co-founder Ben Goodwin told CNBC in 2023 that both Coke and PepsiCo had already approached the company about a potential sale. Pepsi is reported to be planning its own prebiotic soda launch in 2025.
While it’s a newcomer to the segment, Coke has some obvious advantages: more than 100 years dominating the soda category, marketing and distribution muscle, and $47 billion in revenue in 2024 — compared with the more than $400 million in sales that Olipop netted in 2024.
Still, Coke has failed before when trying to chase a drink trend. It pulled its Coke Spiced flavor off the shelves in 2024 just months after declaring it a permanent addition. And in 2023, it slashed distribution of its Aha sparkling water brand after the product failed to take off with consumers. More

A Delta Air Lines flight with 80 people on board crashed on landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport Monday afternoon, officials said.
At least 15 people were injured, local officials said.
The regional jet was traveling from Minneapolis to Toronto.

First responders work at the Delta Air Lines plane crash site at Toronto Pearson International Airport in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada February 17, 2025.
Arlyn Mcadorey | Reuters

At least 15 people were injured after a Delta Air Lines regional jet crashed upon landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport Monday afternoon, officials said.
All 80 people on board — 76 passengers and four crew members — were evacuated from the plane, a CRJ-900 regional jet, after the accident, which occurred at about 2:45 p.m. ET, the Federal Aviation Administration said. Two people were airlifted in critical condition, according to Peel Regional Paramedic Services.

Emergency crews responded at the scene. Flights to the airport were temporarily halted but resumed as of 5 p.m. ET.
Delta said in a statement it was cancelling the remainder of its flights to and from Toronto Monday and issuing travel waivers to affected passengers.
“The hearts of the entire global Delta family are with those affected by today’s incident at Toronto-Pearson International Airport,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in the statement. “I want to express my thanks to the many Delta and Endeavor team members and the first responders on site.”
Delta Flight 4819, operated by the carrier’s regional subsidiary Endeavor, originated in Delta’s hub of Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport.
The Toronto airport said it had been expecting a busy day and a storm that dumped more than 8 inches of snow on the region, with an expected 130,000 travelers on board around 1,000 flights.

Weather reports showed wind of between 20 mph and 30 mph Monday, with gusts of up to 40 mph.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada will lead the crash investigation, the FAA said. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a post on social media X that FAA investigators were en route to Toronto and that he is working with his Canadian counterparts to assist in the investigation.
The accident comes weeks after a fatal midair collision in January at Washington D.C.’s Reagan International Airport, which killed all 64 people on an American Airlines regional jet and another three people on board an Army Black Hawk helicopter.
Separately, the FAA was recently hit by layoffs spearheaded by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, with several hundred air traffic controllers receiving firing notices over the weekend.
A U.S. Department of Transportation spokesperson told NBC News the FAA “continues to hire and onboard” air traffic controllers and that the agency has “retained employees” who perform critical safety functions. More