🍠  Purple yam reign

👋  Good morning. If you feel like you’re always working, you’re not imagining it. The typical American works 1,796 hours a year — significantly more than workers in Japan, the UK, and Germany. And some US cities grind more than others, according to WalletHub’s analysis of the 116 largest cities, which looked at everything from the average workweek length to the amounts of unused PTO. If you live in Cheyenne, Wyoming, congrats — or sorry? The city ranks as the hardest working in America, with residents averaging 40.7 hours per week.

STARTING UP

Is lab-grown fruit climate-proof?

❌  The problem: Climate change is threatening the growth of crops around the globe — from bananas in Latin America to Brazil nuts in the Amazon.

💡  The pitch: Forever Harvest is using cellular horticulture to grow fruit and nut cells in bioreactors instead of forests. Built on tech developed by New Zealand’s Plant & Food Research program, it grows specific cells instead of cultivating an entire plant or tree, making it possible to produce fruit and nuts that have specifically engineered nutrients, flavors, textures, and benefits. Plus, the tech means no need for agricultural resources like pesticides and fertilizers. 

🚀  The outlook: Forever Harvest is already collaborating with a global food brand to explore commercial applications for its cellular horticulture. If all goes to plan, your morning smoothie might be entirely lab-grown. 

NEWS FLASH

• Font of youth: Mattel hired Chicago creative agency Gertrude to create its first proprietary typeface, named after two fictional siblings the toymaker used in advertising in the ‘50s-‘70s. Matty Mattel Sans is a sans serif designed for readability, while Belle Mattel Sans includes brand easter eggs in the form of special characters and glyphs.
  

• What’ll they think of next? Researchers used gene editing to create tomatoes that smell like buttered popcorn by disabling two genes that led to the accumulation of a natural compound associated with the aroma. The idea is that such methods could produce better-tasting and thus more marketable tomatoes. Look, if Trader Joe’s can sell us ketchup chips, they could probably make popcorn tomatoes work.
  

• Now hiring “robot wranglers”: Gig workers who once delivered food are now assisting robots that deliver food — e.g., maintenance, transporting bots, helping bots out of potholes, completing in-person deliveries that the bots can’t. Coco is offering $21-$23/hour for robot specialists in LA.
  

• A wider net: Parade founder Cami Tellez and former TikTok exec Jon Kroopf launched Devotion, a platform for brands to manage influencer programs. Tellez told TechCrunch that brands must now work with “thousands” of influencers to scale as algorithms have changed, allowing anyone to achieve the same reach as creators with large followings. 
  

FINE-TUNE THOSE PROMPTS

Shining examples of skillful commands 

If you keep feeding AI questions and it keeps churning out crud, then you probably need to up the specificity. 

See our AI Prompt Engineering QuickStart Guide with Tina Huang for concrete samples of bad, passable, and excellent directions, like: 

• Weak: “Help me learn Python.”
• Mid: “Teach me Python data structures.”
• Golden: “You’re a senior Python instructor. Create a step-by-step learning plan for data structures, including…”

 Get the guide on getting to the point.

THE BIG IDEA

America’s insatiable appetite for ube 

Since the ‘70s, the American diet has gotten bigger, grain-ier, and more protein heavy. But in recent years, it’s also gotten more… purply.

That would be due to foodies’ latest obsession: ube, a purple yam native to the Philippines, where it’s long been used to make sweets. 

Now, its Instagrammable color and mild, nutty-vanilla flavor has made it an internet sensation that’s translated to high demand, particularly among American consumers, and an abundance of tasty new treats, per Bloomberg.

• The number of US restaurant menus featuring ube tripled between 2021 and 2025, per Datassential.
  
• Several brands have announced their own ube offerings, like Trader Joe’s, whose lineup includes regularly sold-out pancake mix and shortbread cookies, and Starbucks, which is introducing an iced ube coconut macchiato this month.

Supply chain woes take root

The ube craze might be a win for the businesses jumping on the trend, but it’s led to a shortage of the climate-sensitive crop. 

Exports from the Philippines, considered the world’s top producer, have quadrupled in recent years, per The New York Times, with more than half of it bound for the US between 2019 and 2024. 

But ube is typically grown on small plots, mostly for local consumption, and yields have declined due to heavier-than-normal rainfall. 

Consequently, local farmers are struggling to keep up with global demand and pushing for a geographical indication of ube, similar to Champagne, to protect production from moving abroad.   

As for US ube purveyors, it’s driven up costs, which one San Francisco-based seller told Bloomberg have doubled since 2019, to $4.99 a pound.

If this all sounds familiar…

… that’s because matcha faced a similar shortage in 2025 after blowing up online, strained by surging demand and climate-related challenges, and made worse by people hoarding and scalping the green-tea powder.  

But matcha and ube aren’t the only colorful foods feeding adventurous consumers’ growing appetites for Asian flavors: 

• Ingredients like yuzu, miso, black sesame, and pandan are steadily entering the mainstream and expected to define 2026 food trends.

Plus, as quickly as purple has become the new green for American palates, the new purple might soon be… red? Animal blood, an ingredient used in cooking around the world, has been increasingly showing up on US menus and in cookbooks. 

🔗

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

What actually happens inside boardrooms? Go behind the scenes with this board meeting breakdown.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Cost to spend a night at Barlochan Cottage in Muskoka, Ontario — better known as the cottage from the hit Canadian miniseries “Heated Rivalry” — which will be bookable through Airbnb starting today at 12pm ET. 

Those hoping to live out their gay-hockey fantasies (or simply looking for a well-priced getaway) will want to act fast: With everyone trying to come to the cottage this summer, and given the reasonable rate, which fans might recognize as a combination of the protagonists’ jersey numbers, availability of the waterfront property likely won’t last long.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1879, the US Geological Survey was established to explore the western US. Clarence King, a mining engineer and geologist, was its first director.
⚔️  Game: It’s “Minesweeper,” but with dragons.
📰  Newsletter: Subscribe to Scoreboard for the games, stats, and news you need to know.
🕺  Haha: If “Stayin’ Alive” had been written as a 16th-century Renaissance madrigal.
🐈  Aww: Sorry about your remote. 

SHOWER THOUGHT

Very few people can actually keep their watch 5 minutes fast any more. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "To ube or not to ube?" Friedman.

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