🧊 A really cool business idea

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👋 Good morning. If you think you go above and beyond as a pet parent, think again. A man in the Bahamas made a custom submarine for his 6-year-old parakeet, Bebe. The mini sub, dubbed the “Bebosphere” and made from a paintball air cylinder, oxygen meter, and lead weights, lets the parakeet accompany his owners while they snorkel. Bebe, an apparent thrillseeker, has also tagged along for 15 sky dives. Your cat just rolled her eyes at you.

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NEWS FLASH

🍺 Bottoms up: German grocery chain Lidl will open 50 new UK stores, plus its first pub. While some US chains dabble with bars — Whole Foods, Gelson’s, etc. — Lidl’s pub is opening in Northern Ireland, which has strict liquor laws, and only qualified for approval because two nearby pubs closed.

✈️ Sit back, relax, pay up: Delta Air Lines just refreshed its Delta One suites for some long-haul planes — the first update in a decade. The new seats, which will debut on Airbus A350-1000 aircraft in 2027, have longer beds, pillow-top cushions, and will give travelers increased leg room. The updates cater to wealthier customers willing to pay for some shut-eye: Delta says premium ticket revenue was up 14% in the first quarter compared to last year.

🧠 Like an elephant? Gabriel Kreiman, a neuroscience professor at Harvard Medical School, claims he and co-founder Spandan Madan built an AI algorithm that gives humans “perfect and infinite memory” using “large memory models” that retrieve data from people’s online lives. Their startup, Engramme, is hoping to raise ~$100m, though it’s not quite clear yet how it all works.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

Ugh: Inflation has spiked to its highest level in ~2 years, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, thanks to rising energy costs. Prices were up 3.3% YoY in March.
Safety first: Roblox — which had 144m daily users at the end of 2025 — is rolling out new age-restricted accounts for younger children and teens with restricted games and chat features.
Berry nice: Fieldwork Robotics raised $4m+ to test its autonomous raspberry-picking robots, which Fieldwork says will improve productivity while reducing harvesting waste, before deploying fleets in 2027.
Crushing it: Glass recycling startup Glass for Life ran a pilot project in Miami and found that sea oats grow just as well in sand made from crushed glass as in natural sand — a possible solution for Florida’s beach restoration efforts.

MANAGE BETTER

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Shouts to every team leader who reads our newsletter. We know it’s not easy to always stay smiling, keep folks in check, and cobble together reports.

The job is daunting to some — but for heroes like you, who’ve mastered every key concept in our people management guide, it’s a welcome challenge.

Lead with confidence:

Build a positive work environment
Communicate effectively
Develop teams and track performance
Give (and get) great feedback
Embrace work-life balance

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THE BIG IDEA

A person in a green apron spins cotton candy out of meat.

The startup spinning up alt meat

Ah, the carnival. There’s a Ferris wheel, face painting, games designed to drain your life savings, and a cotton candy machine full of... fake meat??

OK, that might be a bit of a stretch, but Boston-based food tech company Lasso wants to be known as the proprietors of the “advanced cotton candy machine,” AKA Lasso SpinTech.

It’s a patented technology that uses centrifugal force in a cylindrical machine to spin fiber, transforming the texture of just about any food ingredient while maintaining more nutrition than other processing techniques.

The startup was previously known as Tender Food, a meat substitute brand. That once-buzzy market is dragging, though, per Forbes:

Plant-based meat and seafood sales slowed in 2022 before dipping in 2023, with dollar sales down 19%, per The Good Food Institute.
Beyond Meat reported a net loss of $44.9m in Q4 2024 and a 4.9% YoY decrease in net revenue.
Consumers are shying away from veggie mystery meat with unidentifiable ingredients.

Lasso CEO Mike Messersmith told AgFunderNews that “[2020] was the peak of the plant-based meat enthusiasm funding,” and that there was curiosity about a method to “process plant proteins in a way that doesn’t require an extraordinarily long ingredient list.” He also cited issues with texture and cost.

Now, whether or not a fake meat fiber donut is a worthy substitute for, well, a meat substitute is yet to be seen, but Lasso is hoping to break out of that category, leveraging SpinTech to produce fiber- and protein-packed fruit snacks, chips, pet food, and beyond. Tender, their original plant-based meat brand, is now under Lasso’s portfolio.

Their newer ventures focus on helping consumers meet protein goals, increase their dietary fiber intake, and know exactly what they’re eating.

Take their in-house fruit snack brand: they throw plant protein, fiber, and fruit into the SpinTech (about the size of your washing machine), and it spins and weaves together the ingredients to create chewy gummies without additives. Yum!

🔗

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

You don’t have to chase TikTok trends: Here’s how one entrepreneur hit $40k in monthly revenue using just one marketing channel.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Estimated starting price of a luxury bag made of “T-Rex leather,” which goes up for auction next month. The first-of-its-kind bag, developed by VML, the creative agency behind those woolly mammoth meatballs from 2023, was made using reconstructed dinosaur collagen extracted from 65m-year-old fossils, per Robb Report.

Like other lab-grown leathers, it is biodegradable, eco-friendly, and — best of all — cruelty-free! All that science will ultimately go toward making fashion accessories and car seats.

AROUND THE WEB

📅 On this day: In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre.

▶️ That’s interesting: Exploring a strange YouTube “checkpoint.”

🌳 That’s cool: A website that helps you choose which US National Park to visit.

🦘 Game: Jump!

🐿️ Aww: A squirrel eating popcorn.

SHOWER THOUGHT

Old dads had a drawer full of wires. Today's dads have a drawer full of USB cables. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Siena Giljum, and Singdhi Sokpo.

Editing by: Sara "Meat you there" Friedman.

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🥩 Alt meat's new spin