• 🥫Heyday Canning Co. Pops Up To Trade Beans
• 📺 Peacock-ing: Instacart Goes Streaming
• 🧑‍💻 Unilever Taps AI To Drive Scale and Efficiencies
• 🥞 Pancake My Day: Canada Pays Back Americans for Ordering Pure Maple Syrup

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Heyday Canning Co. transformed the Big Apple into the Big Bean this past weekend. Its first pop-up shop came complete with a unique form of currency – legumes – that consumers exchanged for cans of Heyday beans, bean-themed apparel and totes, in addition to signed portraits of Beans from Even Stevens and Beanie Feldstein.

🤝 All beans acquired during the event (upwards of thousands of cans and plenty of loose legumes) were donated to City Harvest, New York’s first and largest food rescue organization.

🥳 The shop went viral on TikTok, resulting in lines of bean enthusiasts stretching down an entire block; Heyday sold through all of its cans and nearly all of its merch by day two and had to overnight more beans for the third and final day.

💭 “We knew we had a super fun idea and were excited to connect with our (relatively small) community of fans and hopefully get a lot of folks off the street who would be intrigued by the concept of a bean store,” co-founder and CEO Kathryn Kavner said. “We thought we had planned conservatively for the number of visitors and number of beans that would be walking through the door....WRONG!”

👏 The recently-minted NOSH Best of Award winning brand was founded in 2020 with a six-SKU line of seasoned and sauced beans and legumes. It has recently landed on the shelves of Whole Foods Market, Sprouts, the Fresh Market, Fox Trot and Pop Up Grocer. 

Who doesn’t love ordering food and drinks from the comfort of their couch while watching Law & Order: SVU reruns? Instacart just made that a bit easier through a partnership with NBC streaming service Peacock, which will be offered free to Instacart+ members.

📶 The new partnership adds to the grocery delivery’s premium membership service, which offers unlimited free delivery on orders over $35 and lower service fees for a flat standard fee of $99 per year or $9.99 a month.

💻 Instacart also recently launched a new digital platform for suppliers and retailers that includes digital sell sheets, direct access to prospective distributors and more efficient product browsing capabilities.

⬆️ The e-commerce delivery company has been steadily honing in on its advertising capabilities to build value within the platform; those capabilities will also be leveraged by Peacock.

Unilever is going deep on tech. Today the multinational CPG business announced a new collaboration with Accenture to utilize Unilever’s AI research and implementation tech to enhance productivity as well as pinpoint and accelerate disruptive innovations. 

🎛️ The two companies have worked together for over two decades and now aim to scale the use of generative AI within Unilever’s business, creating a switchboard that allows users to combine different models to address unique circumstances.  

💰 The initiative will begin at Unilever’s new global AI lab – dubbed Horizon3 – in Toronto and is backed by a $3 billion investment from Accenture. 

In some pretty flipping fantastic news, Maple From Canada – a brand of the Québec Maple Syrup Producers – announced it will reimburse Americans for the extra fee often tacked onto pure maple syrup orders when they opt against standard table syrup for pancakes. 

🤔 More than half of U.S. respondents misidentified table syrup as pure maple syrup, the latter of which comes from maple tree sap instead of processed and refined sugars, according to a recent study. 

📱 To participate in the Bill the Maple initiative, American consumers can upload a picture of their receipt to billthemaple.com and get the fee reimbursed.