The most surprising move in fashion in years

To understand the shock value, a little context. Galliano’s career has been defined by the haute maison—Givenchy, his own label, Dior, and then a celebrated decade at Maison Margiela, where he orchestrated some of the most critically lauded runway shows of his generation. These institutions were the frame through which his genius was legitimated, distributed, and priced. The assumption was that a designer of his stature would always find his home inside another of fashion’s storied houses.

Instead, he is going to Zara. Not as creative director. Not to relaunch a diffusion line. But as a “creative partner” who will deconstruct and “re-author” pieces from Zara’s own vast archive—taking the ephemera of fast fashion and subjecting it to a couture process. The first collection drops in September 2026.

The fashion world’s reaction ranged from confusion to awe. But strategists should recognize it immediately: this is what the end of competitive advantage looks like in real time.

Seasons are dead. So are categories.

For most of its modern history, fashion has operated on a set of assumptions so stable they felt like laws of nature. There were four seasons. There was a clear hierarchy: haute couture at the apex, then ready-to-wear, then high street. There were coherent “looks”—a house had an aesthetic DNA, a consumer had a tribe, and the two found each other through ritual (the show, the magazine, the boutique).

All of that is dissolving. Seasons have become continuous flows. TikTok-native consumers don’t cycle through trends on a quarterly basis—they layer them, mix them, reject the premise that a wardrobe needs a coherent sensibility at all. Streetwear bleeds into suiting. Archive Margiela sits alongside H&M finds. The “look” is now personal curation, not institutional affiliation.

When taken as a gestalt, across countries and genres, we can see that this is a structural change in how value is created and captured in any industry organized around taste, knowledge, and creative authority. Fashion just got there first.

The Carlota Perez lens: We are at a turning point

Economic historian Carlota Perez describes how major technological revolutions move through two phases: an installation period of turbulence and speculation, followed by a deployment period in which the new technology’s possibilities are embedded into social and institutional life.  First, a period of financialization and destruction of old social arrangements, giving way (hopefully) to a golden age of productivity and a broader distribution of gains. We are, right now, in the painful transition between those two phases and fashion, as a great cultural messenger, is reflecting the dislocations. 

What makes the current moment distinctive is how traditional advantages in fashion are eroding.  For most of industrial history, scale was the primary source of competitive advantage. You built large factories, large distribution networks, large marketing operations—and that scale gave you a moat. The maison was a version of this logic applied to culture: you built a storied institution, a deep archive, a global distribution of prestige, and that infrastructure was the moat.

Digital technologies are allowing us to go under, over, and around those moats. The capabilities that once required massive institutional infrastructure—design iteration, content production, trend analysis, personalized marketing—can increasingly be performed by small teams, or even individuals, armed with the right tools. The institutional premium is evaporating.

Individual creative IP beats institutional legacy

This is the second-order-effects story of Galliano partnering with Zara. What Zara is acquiring is not a house, not a team, not an archive. It is a sensibility—a singular, irreducible creative intelligence that cannot be replicated at scale, cannot be automated, and does not require a Grand Avenue address to be legitimate.

We see this pattern everywhere, once you know to look for it. Solo founders building companies with AI leverage that previously required hundreds of employees. Independent consultants outcompeting large firms because their judgment and relationships are the product, not their headcount. Journalists, researchers, designers, and strategists detaching from legacy institutions and finding direct routes to audiences and clients.

The unit of value creation is shrinking. What remains scarce—genuinely, durably scarce—is individual creative authority and trusted judgment. Galliano has that. The Zara deal is a stunningly vivid illustration of what happens when that kind of scarcity meets a platform with global reach.

For Zara: A masterclass in transient advantage

From Zara’s side, this is equally instructive. Under Inditex chair Marta Ortega Pérez, the brand has been on a deliberate campaign to escape the gravitational pull of the “fast fashion” label—a label that increasingly carries reputational, regulatory, and commercial risk. The strategy has involved a series of collaborations: Narciso Rodriguez, Samuel Ross, Stefano Pilati, Ludovic de Saint Sernin. Galliano is the clearest signal yet that Zara is not trying to occupy a lane. It is trying to make lanes irrelevant.

This is a textbook execution of what I have called the transient competitive advantage: rather than trying to build and defend a durable position, Zara is stringing together a sequence of shorter-term advantages, each one redefining the competitive landscape before competitors can respond. Each collaboration is an arena entry—it resets the terms of competition before rivals have time to replicate the previous move.

What executives should take from this

The Galliano-Zara story is exotic enough to feel safely distant from the strategic challenges facing most organizations. It is not.

Every industry has its version of the haute maison—institutions that assumed their prestige, their infrastructure, and their accumulated authority would insulate them from disruption. Law firms. Consultancies. Universities. Media organizations. Even hospitals and banks. These institutions are discovering that the individuals who carried their value—the partner with the client relationships, the professor whose ideas drive enrollment, the journalist whose byline drives subscriptions—are increasingly capable of detaching and finding direct routes to the markets they serve.

The question for leaders is not whether this dynamic will reach their industry. It already has, or it will soon. The question is whether their organization can become a platform that talented individuals want to work through—rather than an institution that talented individuals feel the need to escape from.

Galliano did not go to Zara because Zara is prestigious. He went because Zara offered him something the heritage houses could not: a direct, unmediated route to a global audience, on his own creative terms, without the burden of institutional expectation.

That is the positioning smart organizations will have the courage to pursue.

When Domino’s launched its pizza tracker in 2008, it was a marvel of UX. The tracker gave customers a lens into when their pizza would be ready through a simple interface that lit up as the pizza progressed from ordered to baked to delivered. The tool turned Domino’s into a tech company, and inspired industries (and governments) to adopt the same UX for their own needs.

Now, Domino’s made the biggest update to its pizza tracker in years. The new tracker features a simplified progress bar that shows just four stages of pizza creation. The new design was rolled out to all platforms, and there’s also new Lock Screen widgets for iOS that bring the pizza chain’s most famous tech feature to the Liquid Glass age. Behind it all is an AI model that the company says will give users the most accurate time estimates.

Domino’s improved tracker uses a proprietary operating system it calls “DomOS” to better estimate orders through machine learning models that track real-time inputs, like what’s being ordered, how busy a store is at the time, how orders tend to cluster (like during a big sports game or commercial break), and what’s happening on the delivery side.

“AI helps by looking at these signals together instead of isolation,” Domino’s vice president of global digital marketing Mark Messing tells Fast Company. “It learns from patterns we’ve seen before and continuously adjusts in real time as conditions change.”

The company is promising more precise times for when pizzas will be ready for pickup or arrive for delivery. A rideshare-style interface shows a delivery driver as a car icon on a map like Uber that users can track in real time.

For iOS users, the app’s Lock Screen widgets appear as Domino’s Tracker progress bar with an estimated delivery time. When an order is out for delivery, the progress bar becomes a car to show your pizza is mobile and delivery is imminent. The redesign was done by Dominio’s digital experience team in partsnership with their agency WorkInProgress.

Domino domination

Domino’s is the leading pizza chain nationally in the U.S. at a time when pizza sales are struggling. Pizza Hut’s parent company is considering a sale and announced the closure of 250 stores in February. Meanwhile Domino’s chief financial officer Sandeep Reddy said on the company’s last earnings call that Domino’s retail sales had grown 5.5% thanks to same-store sales, a promotion, and new specialty pizza flavors.

Domino’s refreshed its brand last year with a new font, brightened color palette, and redesigned pizza boxes that play off the domino theme with dots. It also introduced what it calls a “cravemark,” or its tagline “mmm” expressed audibly through a jingle recorded by Shaboozey.

Like its overhauled visual brand, the revamped pizza tracker shows that Domino’s is doubling down on what it’s best known for. Since the company introduced its tracker in 2008, it has tracked more than 2.5 billion orders.

Domino’s original tracker was the first web-based pizza tracker in the industry, and it had a futuristic, skeuomorphic style with segments for each stage that lit up red or blue as a consumer’s order went from prep to delivery. The company gave users the options to customize their trackers in 2010 with six themes that they could use to reskin the progress bar. The company added GPS delivery tracking to the feature in 2019.

The new tracker reduces the number of stages to just four—named “Placed,” “Make,” Deliver,” and “MMM”—while old names for stages like “Bake” and “Quality Check” are now gone. While the main progress bar is simplified, inside the app, there’s more specific information, like what time their order was placed in the oven and what time a delivery driver left the store.

“The goal was flexibility without complexity,” Messing says.

It’s an update that helps Dominos make the most of AI to be more dependable for customers. And at a time when delivery pizza sales are under pressure, that gives the company an edge with one of its best-ever marketing tools.

“This contract, the second in the industry, sets a standard for workers at Sage and Coombe and beyond,” Architectural Workers United (AWU), a group that has been helping firms organize, announced on April 1 via Instagram. The agreement’s details have yet to be made public.

The milestone marks a significant move in the design industry’s unionizing efforts, especially after high-profile setbacks.

In 2022, the New York-based firm SHoP abandoned its unionizing efforts following what AWU called a “powerful anti-union campaign.” Then in 2023, the American arm of the multidisciplinary design firm Snøhetta voted against unionizing. In January, the National Labor Relations Board filed a formal complaint against Snøhetta, alleging the firm illegally dismissed eight employees in relation to organizing.

Architecture—a field known for long hours and low pay—has historically been difficult to unionize in the United States. “It’s oddly different than other industry,” Andrew Daley, a staff organizer at the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, told Fast Company back in 2023. “There’s literally no proliferation of unions in any way, shape, or form. Like, zero density when we started.”

Sage & Coombe’s contract comes after three years of unionizing efforts. In 2023, employees at the firm formed a union, which the office’s managerial team voluntarily recognized.

“We are pleased to announce that we have signed a collective bargaining agreement with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers,” Sage & Coombe said in an Instagram post. “We respect the efforts of our colleagues who initiated this process, and we believe the agreement will affirm the workplace conditions we established over the last 30 years and contribute to our continuing success in delivering great projects for our clients.”

But hey, who cares? If we are going down in flames as a species, let’s have fun putting dumb videos together. I’ll tell you how to do it in this short guide on how to make Seedance 2.0 videos. Time to roll up for a Magical Mystery Tour. Step up right this way!

Signing up

To use Seedance 2.0, you first need to sign up for a generative AI service provider like Wavespeed or Higgsfield. These platforms are essentially unified digital workspaces that wrangle multiple artificial intelligence video engines—like Seedance, Veo, and Kling—into a single interface. Instead of paying for a dozen disjointed subscriptions, you get a centralized dashboard to use them all.

In the U.S.—and everywhere else, really—I recommend that you go with Wavespeed, which is the one I use. It doesn’t require a subscription to access any available model, and it also offers the lowest price for most models.

Even better, Wavespeed charges you in actual dollars and cents per generation, unlike Higgsfield and other platforms, which insist on using “credits.” That makes it harder to control your spending. At 720p resolution, a 5-second Seedance 2.0 clip on Wavespeed costs $1.80. A 5-second clip at 1080p will set you back $2.70.

If you want to use Higgsfield, you have to create an account and you must subscribe to the Business plan ($178 billed monthly, which includes two users). Prepare to jump through one extra hoop by verifying a corporate email address to unlock the model.

To “celebrate” the End of Reality as We Know It, Higgsfield is currently offering a limited-time 65% discount on Seedance 2.0 generations to lessen the initial financial blow. Right now, this means you can generate a standard 5-second clip at 720p resolution for just 30 credits.

When you run out of credits from your subscription plan (and you will, fast), each credit will cost between $0.04 and $0.08, depending on which ‘extra credits’ package you buy and any discounts available. Right now, a 3,600-credit package costs $170 and comes with a 43% discount. All this brain-twisting credit math translates to $1.20 for a 5-second Seedance 2.0 clip at 720p resolution.

We don’t yet know what the final cost of this clip will be once the special introductory discount ends (we have asked Higgsfield for comment and will update this article when they get back to us).

How Seedance 2.0 works

Once you are in, you can select Seedance 2.0 from the main dropdown menu. Seedance 2.0 is multimodal, which means it accepts up to 12 simultaneous media inputs. You can upload nine static reference images, three distinct video snippets capped at 15 seconds each, and three audio tracks. It then spits out video shots (at 480p, 720p, 1080p or 2K resolution with upscaling) that max out at 15 seconds per generation.

The model puts everything together, constructing the visuals, building up the characters (and maintaining coherent appearance between shots), moving the camera per your instructions, and syncing sound and speech at the exact same millisecond. The result is flawless lip-syncing and accurate spatial noise without needing a dedicated post-production pass (although professionals will actually integrate the results into dedicated editing software like Adobe Premiere).

It is very simple to run, so go for it and give it a spin: Upload your reference files into the workspace and type out a plain-language description of what you want to see. After you hit generate, you will get your clip. If the platform defaults your output to 480p or 720p to save processing time, you can dive into the advanced settings to force a higher pixel count, or simply run the draft through their built-in upscaling tool to push it to a crisp 1080p or 2K finish. If you need a longer movie, you can click “extend” to chain multiple 15-second blocks together indefinitely.

Craft the perfect prompt for Seedance 2.0

For best results, however, you need to follow some basic rules for writing prompts. Nothing hard, but you must use the following structure. First, start by explicitly defining your subject—their clothing, identity, and the surrounding environment—before moving on to the specific action and how long it should take.

From there, you dictate the exact camera framing, such as a “slow dolly-in,” followed by the overall cinematic style and any strict constraints. Try to use positive instructions to describe what should exist on screen, entirely avoiding negative commands.

Specificity is your best weapon against the AI’s natural tendency to hallucinate (although this model is really good at understanding the world). This is especially important for scenes with several characters that may get confused. Instead of just trying to control the “man,” talk about the “blonde man in a pink tutu” so the engine does not get confused.

The smartest workflow here is to generate some short five-second screen tests first. If the resulting footage is slightly off, tweak only a single variable in your text prompt and regenerate, methodically isolating the problem rather than rewriting the entire scenario from scratch again and again. Once you are happy, build on that experience to create your final shot.

Now go on, take out your credit card, and have fun destroying the planet and our brains!

Update, April 3, 2026: A previous version of this story reported that Seedance 2.0 was available in the U.S. via Higgsfield. It is available via different vendors.

At the April 2 meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), a largely Trump-aligned panel voted by a large majority to support the design of the White House ballroom. Eight of the 11 commissioners at the meeting voted “yes,” while two commissioners voted “present” and only one (Washington, D.C., Council chair Phil Mendelson) voted no.

The vote is a crucial approval for the ballroom, known officially as the East Wing Modernization Project. The NCPC is a federal agency overseeing planning and design for federal land and buildings in the Washington, D.C., area. Its approval adds legitimacy to a construction project that many, including the recent court ruling, see as an overreach of power by the president.

All plans and development proposals for federal property are required by law to be submitted to the NCPC for review. Typically, this happens at a much earlier stage in a project’s process. The Trump administration did not submit plans for the East Wing’s demolition to the NCPC or any other government body, which many have argued makes it—and by extension, the ballroom—illegal. The NCPC approval of the ballroom could be used by proponents as proof of the project’s legitimacy.

As soon as the ballroom came up in the agenda, NCPC Chair William Scharf, a Trump appointee, dismissed the court order as beyond the commission’s purview. “That order really does not impact our action here today. The NCPC is not a party to that lawsuit. The injunction doesn’t speak to the NCPC review process,” he said. “From my perspective, we have a project before us, we’ve been asked to review it, and that’s really our job here today.”

Scharf then walked through an architectural history of the White House, noting the many changes to the complex since it was first envisioned in 1792. He noted that criticism came with many updates to the building—from the addition of porticoes in the early 1800s to the construction of the West Wing in the early 1900s and the Nixon-era construction of a press room. Over time, he argued, these elements have become iconic parts of the White House.

“I believe that in time, this ballroom will be considered every bit as much of a national treasure as the other key components of the White House,” he said. “And I believe that in time, successive presidents of both parties and all political stripes long into the future will be grateful to President Trump for having initiated and brought this project into being.”

Even beyond its legal challenges, the criticism facing the project is significant. In an analysis of roughly 32,000 comments about the ballroom submitted to the NCPC, The Washington Post found that more than 97% were negative.

Scharf says he read every single comment that was submitted. Many, he said, dealt with issues beyond the scope of the NCPC, including the private funding of the ballroom, its interior decoration, the East Wing’s demolition, and negative opinions on the president himself. “Considering issues of this sort is not within our mandate. We are not some sort of free-ranging ballroom justice commission,” he said.

But many legitimate issues have been raised about the ballroom—from the rushed demolition of the East Wing to the size of the ballroom and certain architectural elements on its facade. The NCPC delayed its vote on the project at its March meeting to allow for some changes to be made to the design. Architect Shalom Baranes complied with requests to remove an apparently unnecessary set of stairs leading to the south portico and to reconfigure another staircase.

The overall size of the ballroom, which is estimated to have a capacity of 1,000 and is far larger than the executive mansion itself, has not been changed.

The commission’s vice chair, Stuart Levenbach, another Trump appointee, argued that the White House is in dire need of such a ceremonial space. He has worked in the executive office of the president under three administrations since 2007 and says far too many White House events have had to be held in temporary tents and overcrowded spaces.

“Our responsibility is to ensure the White House campus can support the modern presidency while still respecting the history of the place. And it’s clear from all my experiences at the White House that it is not suited to accommodate the large numbers of guests that are indoors,” he said. “The building is extraordinary, but its ceremonial spaces were designed for a much smaller scale of events than the presidency hosts today.”

Commissioner Ed Forst, administrator of the General Services Administration, echoed the need for such a facility. “We’re going to wonder why we didn’t do it earlier,” he said.

But others argued that focusing on the need for a ballroom overshadows a process that has been rushed. Commissioner Mendelson, the lone “no” vote, argued that more time should have been taken to come up with a solution before barreling ahead and demolishing the East Wing. “The issue to me is not whether there should be a ballroom,” he said. “It’s the design.”

Mendelson’s main criticism is with the building’s size, noting that there had been no analysis made to determine how big the space should be. “I’m trying to be nice here. It’s just too large,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of value to the iterative process. And we’ve not had that.”

For now, the NCPC’s approval is a matter of record. What happens with the ballroom project next may be up to the courts. In response to the March 31 court order halting the project, the Trump administration filed an appeal within hours.

By 2022, the adaptation coalesced around Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess, featuring Jason Momoa as Garrett Garrison, a human trapped in-game, and Hess’s Nacho Libre star Jack Black as the game’s default avatar, Steve. Released on April 4, 2025, A Minecraft Movie became the second-highest-grossing film of the year.

Kayleen Walters, head of Mojang Studios and VP of franchise development for gaming at Microsoft: We wanted to push the story beyond what players experience in-game and do something special for the film, making sure Minecraft not only stayed true to its roots but also created an experience that welcomed new fans into the franchise.

Jared Hess, director, A Minecraft Movie: [With an adaptation] you want to really be aware of what’s special about the game, because it’s something that a lot of people share. Once we realize that we are one of millions of stories that kids and adults bring to the game when they play it, it’s like, “Let’s just go have fun and let’s celebrate what we love about it.”

While telling an original story, A Minecraft Movie also weaves in self-aware mentions of gameplay elements. One of those is the “chicken jockey”—a rare in-game enemy consisting of a small, fast-moving zombie riding a chicken.

The trailer teased a scene that has Momoa squaring off to fight one, with Black shouting “Chicken jockey!” When theater audiences—mostly composed of early-twentysomethings raised on the game—saw the scene, they lost it. Popcorn flew, people cheered, and at least one person brought a live chicken to a showing.

Walters: People made memes from the trailer, so by the time people were in the theater, they were primed to participate in ways that usually only happen with cult movies that have been around for years.

Ciara Farris, radio, television, and film student at Northwestern University and casual Minecraft fan: I went to see the movie with 15 people. It was so much fun to see all the internet hype around it.

I think a beautiful thing about social media and the current online scene is that you can get a detailed idea of the experience people are having in theaters that you might only get through word of mouth if we didn’t have social media.

The chaotic silliness from the chicken jockey reactions made a serious mess of theaters. To contain the excitement without killing it, Regal Cinemas held special screenings of A Minecraft Movie on April 20 last year, at which fans were encouraged to dress up and shout.

James Lamar, VP of film, alternative content, Regal Cinemas: Our operations teams work really hard to keep the theaters clean and nice, and there’s things being damaged, screens being torn, and we absolutely don’t want that. But that’s where we jump into action and say, “How can we better direct this enthusiasm?” It was less than a week and a half that we turned everything around.

Hess: I was talking with theater workers, and I was like, “Guys, I’m so sorry about the mess that’s happening.” They were like, “We are so grateful. We weren’t able to make our hours because people weren’t coming to the theater, and now we’re getting overtime.”

The film’s influence wasn’t just a viral moment—A Minecraft Movie has grossed $961 million worldwide, and Black’s 34-second ditty, “Steve’s Lava Chicken,” became the shortest song ever to appear on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It also inspired an in-game Easter egg.

Hess: Now when you kill a chicken jockey in the game, a record pops up. You can take that record and put it in a record player in the game and play it, and it’s the melody of “Steve’s Lava Chicken.” It’s super fun that you can have that collaborative interplay between a movie and a game.

On March 24, Lenny Rachitsky, a former Airbnb product developer and author of the business Substack Lenny’s Newsletter, published an article featuring exclusive data on the state of tech hiring in early 2026. The data was collected by TrueUp, a tech job marketplace tracker. Overall, it paints a positive picture for the tech job market. But for designers it points to a moment of hiring uncertainty. 

TrueUp found that design roles have plateaued since early 2023, and ever since then, demand for product managers (PMs), the professionals who help guide a product from ideation to completion, has risen. These findings have ignited a debate online about how AI might be fundamentally changing the organizational chart at tech companies—and whether it’s making designers obsolete. 

Everyone from tech CEOs to designers at AI companies and Marc Andreessen, the cofounder of one of the world’s largest venture capital firms, are weighing in. Here’s what you need to know about the data and the larger debate.

Inside the data: Design roles are hitting a plateau

TrueUp’s data is collected by tracking job openings at “the majority of tech companies and top startups,” which includes more than 9,000 companies (not including consultancies or non-tech companies). According to Rachitsky, who has analyzed that data for the past four years, 2026’s outlook is, “surprisingly, the most optimistic” so far.

To start, open PM jobs are at the highest levels they’ve reached since 2022: around 7,300 roles globally. Software engineer jobs are also trending up since a recent low in 2023, with 67,000 jobs available globally and 26,000 in the U.S. alone. “We don’t know if there would have been more open roles if not for AI or if AI is actually leading to more open roles, but since the start of this year, the increase in open eng roles is accelerating even more,” Rachitsky’s newsletter reads.

And “AI jobs,” which include open roles at AI-driven companies as well as AI-specific roles at non-AI companies, are skyrocketing. There are currently 36,686 open AI jobs, compared to sub-10,000 numbers in early 2023.

Amidst this general upturn, design jobs are having a less optimistic moment. Unlike PM and engineering, Rachitsky’s analysis notes that open design jobs have been relatively flat since early 2023. At the time of the newsletter’s release, TrueUp found just 5,700 roles available globally. From a macro perspective, the ratio of demand for PMs versus designers has flipped: In mid-2023, open PM roles overtook open designer roles, and the disparity has been increasing ever since. 

“I don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but it does feel AI-related,” Rachitsky writes in his newsletter. “Unlike PM and eng, which started growing in 2024 (two years post-ChatGPT), design didn’t. If I had to venture a theory, I’d say that because AI is allowing engineers to move so quickly, there’s less opportunity—and less desire—to involve the traditional design process.” 

How the design community is responding

In the week following Rachitsky’s post on X, his analysis has been reposted hundreds of times and attracted an influx of discourse from the online community of designers, PMs, and engineers. 

Some responders see this industry data as a signal that AI is fundamentally changing designers’ workflows, and those who fail to adapt to the times are getting left behind. “Designers have designed themselves out of the equation because of design systems,” Roger Wong, head of design at BuildOps, commented under Rachitsky’s original post. “But, IMHO, the secret sauce has never been the UI. It was the workflows and looking across the experience holistically.”

Claire Vo, founder of the AI copilot ChatPRD, added, “Often design teams & designers are the most resistant to change org in the EPD triad, with highly vocal AI opponents, and little skill or interest in the art of campaigning for influence or resources.” Most teams, she continued, treat design “like a tax they don’t want to pay.” “If a PM or engineer can get 85% there with tailwind and a dream, you better come to the table with more than ‘I represent the user,’” she concluded.

Others believe that, in the long run, a greater reliance on AI tools will make human designers more important as tastemakers. “Design seems to be viewed as dispensable in this very moment,” wrote Jordan Singer, CEO of the computing company Mainframe. “But the reality that will become clear, as time has shown, is that design is what will make you rise above the rest.”

On March 30, Rachitsky followed up on his newsletter through an interview with Andreessen, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen likened the current atmosphere to a three-way standoff among product engineers, designers, and coders: each side of the triad believes that AI has given them enough tools to subsume the roles of the other two.

“What’s so interesting about this Mexican stand-off is that they’re all kind of correct,” Andreessen said. “AI is actually now a really good coder, a really good designer, and a really good product manager.”

While the future of this stand-off remains murky, it seems clear that the industry is currently in the middle of an organizational flux. New AI tools are constantly blurring the lines between these three roles, creating new positions that blend elements of each. In the future, there will almost definitely still be need for human coding, designing, and product managing skills—but we may not define each of those jobs the same way.

In a recent interview for the Fast Company podcast By Design, Anthropic’s chief design officer, Joel Lewenstein, summed up this shift: “I think there’s a lot of role collapse at the very beginning, but there are still pretty clear swim lanes as things get into the later stages of product development.”

PMs are still the best at figuring out a product’s business case; engineers are still the best at deploying those products; and designers are still the best at tackling bigger human-computer interaction questions, he said. “It’s like a Venn diagram that’s coming closer together.”

So they put a potato on the packaging. And now, the company is updating Tostitos bags—the most popular plain tortilla chip in the world—with a similar strategy. While Lay’s got a dose of potatoes, naturally, all Tostitos bags feature corn. 

“We started by being really honest with ourselves. The research was telling us that the old packaging wasn’t working—it was actually reinforcing a lot of the wrong perceptions,” writes Hernán Tantardini, CMO of PepsiCo Foods, over email. “People saw Tostitos as a party brand. The quality and craft story wasn’t coming through at all.”

Technically speaking, Tostitos are classified as an ultra processed food, due to their use of refined seed oils. But they still feature a stupid simple and clear ingredient list: Corn, oil, and salt. 71% of consumers are reading labels more closely than before, and the front of the bag is a gateway to the back.

The bags used to read “no artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives” right up top. Now they promise “Masa made in the traditional way,” with these other notes sidelined. The result is repositioning Tostitos as a more authentic and culturally-born product, anchoring Tostitos in the old way of doing things—which aside from signaling quality and cachet, tends to be more natural.

As for the actual corn, that’s presented in an entirely different way than Lay’s. For Lay’s, PepsiCo photographed countless real potatoes in different presentations. For Tostitos, it opted for illustration—to tie it back to that idea of masa production, a complex process known as nixtamalization in which corn is treated with lime to make it more digestible and nutritious for consumption in tortillas, sopes, and other Mexican delicacies. 

“We looked at photography, but the more we explored it, the more it felt like it belonged to a different brand,” says Tantardini. “Tostitos has this warmth to it—this sense of joy and togetherness that’s been a part of its DNA forever. Photography felt too polished, too literal. It would’ve flattened something that’s actually quite live.”

The illustration has an imperfect, hand painted feel—and your eye reads a human touch beneath the perfectly machined Tostitos wordmark. I find myself wishing that PepsiCo went even further, and embraced xilografía (the woodblock printing out of Mexico) with elements like the window frame or even subheading labels. But the two tone kernels and cobs of corn on Scoops and Street Corn varieties really are quite pretty for a mass market snack chip. While many of the colors are technically the same on the old and new packages, the chosen hues are softer and intentionally read warmer, with a basis in earth tones, according to the company. 

That said, Tostitos doesn’t read like some half-apologetic Trader Joe’s snack brand, unsure if it’s there to party or to apologize for the indulgence. The bags still read like a celebration. In a final, playful twist, the front window—which reveals the actual chips through the bag—now dips itself right into a large bowl of salsa or guacamole sitting below. (The old version featured photorealistic jarred Tostitos salsa on the side, like an overzealous advertisement.)

This entire approach to craft could help Tostitos—which has ceded a few percentage points in sales volume since raising prices in 2022/23—compete with smaller batch brands that have cut ever so slightly into its market share. PepsiCo did validate the approach in test stores, while consumers will see the new rollout over the coming months. 

“From a business perspective, this is really about changing perception where it matters most,” says Tantardini. “If we can use packaging to clearly signal craft, quality, and care, we can rebuild confidence in the brand and lower the barrier for people who’ve drifted away because they didn’t realize the craft and care that goes into our chips and dips. That’s the opportunity. And that’s what we designed for.”

The misquoted phrase is so ingrained in popular culture that it has become the standard comeback to any unexpected mishap. It’s also the last phrase NASA’s Artemis II mission control wants to hear in the coming days because, unlike those of us on Earthly terrain, an astronaut midway to the moon won’t be muttering it after they accidentally burn their toast.

A four-person crew took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 1 for NASA’s first lunar flyby since Apollo 17 in 1972. The organization has done everything it can to ensure the safety of the astronauts, knowing that any harm to the courageous humans could set its lunar program back many years, or cancel it altogether.

One part of its insurance policy is a new space suit that’s designed to sustain the Artemis II crew for six days—enough time to go to the moon and back—in case there’s a catastrophic event in their Orion spacecraft.

A lifeboat in a space suit

When Jack Swigert, command module pilot of Apollo 13, radioed “Houston, we’ve had a problem here” on April 13, 1970, an oxygen tank explosion had just severely damaged the spacecraft just 56 hours into its journey to the moon. The astronauts on board couldn’t simply pull a U-turn 200,000 miles away from Earth.

And since they didn’t have enough oxygen, Swigert, along with commander Jim Lovell and lunar module pilot Fred Haise, abandoned their crippled spaceship and hunkered down inside the lunar lander, using it as a makeshift lifeboat for the harrowing trip home.

But the Artemis II mission—a roughly 10-day loop around the moon—flies without a lunar lander. If the Orion capsule’s hull breaches for any reason and vents its breathable air into the void, the crew has nowhere else to go. NASA’s answer was to build a lifeboat of sorts directly into their suits.

For this return to the moon, the space agency assumed such a leak could happen and they needed a last line of defense to keep the crew alive in a vacuum for a week. The suit gives astronauts a 144-hour survival window, the exact time required to abort a translunar flight, whip around the dark side, and coast back home.

How it’s made

The aptly named Orion Crew Survival System (OCSS) serves as this wearable sanctuary. According to the agency’s Crew Systems branch, “the suits can keep astronauts alive for up to six days if Orion were to lose cabin pressure during its journey, with interfaces that supply air and remove carbon dioxide.”

Dustin Gohmert, a mechanical engineer who worked on Space Shuttle garments before taking over the OCSS program at the Johnson Space Center, notes that the gear operates as an independent vehicle. “They become your own personal-sized spacecraft that can last up to six days,” he told CBS News.

A NASA lab tour details the concept: “In effect, the space suit is a body-shaped balloon that holds your personal atmosphere,” strictly for use inside the ship. The suit plugs directly into the Orion capsule’s Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) via a thick umbilical cord. This artificial artery keeps the astronaut from overheating by pumping chilled water through an undergarment. Simultaneously, the capsule acts as a mechanical lung that regulates humidity, scrubs out deadly carbon dioxide, and forces a breathable nitrogen and oxygen mix into the helmet.

Astronauts eat and take medicine inside the sealed balloon using a pass-through port built into their rigid helmet dome. They snap pouches of liquid food and water right into this valve. If someone falls ill during the six-day ordeal, the ship’s medical kit includes a specific tool that shoves pills through the same helmet port without venting the suit’s precious pressure.

Each suit is meticulously tailored to the individual wearer and paired with custom-molded, shock-absorbing seats for launch and reentry. The suit also features a pleated fabric design hidden in the shoulders that unfolds when pressurized, giving the arms enough clearance to move. The gloves are spun from rugged materials that interact flawlessly with Orion’s digital touchscreens, while internal microphones and speakers are embedded directly into the helmet so the crew can communicate. To prevent snagging in the tight cabin, the communication wires run down a protected channel on the right leg.

Floating in zero gravity inside a cramped cockpit means a loose cord can easily snag a critical flight switch and trigger a disaster. To prevent this, designers built an asymmetrical storage system directly into the fabric instead of using cargo pockets. The right thigh features a custom compartment that swallows the temperature-control dial and the thick tubes pumping ice water to the undergarment, locking them flush against the astronaut’s leg. Meanwhile, hidden channels route the electronic brain that controls the suit and the plumbing for human waste safely out of the way.

What if the ship dies?

There is only one problem with the suits, and there’s no way around fixing this one: They depend on the spaceship’s ECLSS. If the life support system fails, the astronauts will not survive no matter how well-designed their space suits are.

To avoid that extreme scenario, the Orion capsule prevents a catastrophic ECLSS failure by implementing overlapping safety nets. Lockheed Martin—the designers and manufacturers of the ship—created a life support architecture with duplicate secondary pumps and backup valves that automatically kick in if the primary hardware chokes. The ship’s digital brains also have redundancies: Four identical flight computers run the show simultaneously. If a software glitch wipes out all four, a completely isolated fifth computer (running entirely different code) takes the wheel.

If every single spacecraft system fails and the umbilical stops flowing, the astronaut relies on something called the bailout bottle. This suit-integrated emergency oxygen tank holds a tiny amount of breathable air—just enough to do one last Hail Mary operation, like switching to a different ECLSS oxygen line or getting out of the capsule after crashing into the ocean.

During an emergency ocean splashdown, the OCSS transforms into a heavy-duty maritime survival rig. It inherits its blazing pumpkin-orange hue from the old Space Shuttle Advanced Crew Escape Suit (ACES)—a color specifically chosen so pilots in rescue helicopters can easily spot a human bobbing in the open water.

But where the old ACES gear only provided roughly 10 minutes of bailout air for low-Earth orbit emergencies, the OCSS packs an automatically inflating personal flotation device right into the architecture. Tethered to this life preserver is a meticulously packed emergency kit containing a personal locator beacon to ping rescue forces; a specialized rescue knife; and a comprehensive signaling stash equipped with a mirror, strobe light, flashlight, whistle, and chemical light sticks.

But if the ECLSS collapses on the journey around the moon . . . that’s the end of the line for the crew. Which is why, when we’re reading or watching a report on how Artemis II is going, we need to pay close attention and think about the very real risks these four heroes are assuming, from the moment they strap themselves to a flying bomb full of 5.75 million pounds of explosive fuel all the way to the moment they blaze through the atmosphere and splash into the Pacific Ocean.

During the week of March 23, Nestlé reported that 413,793 KitKat bars went missing in Europe when a truck carrying the candy was stolen. Nestlé followed up with a post on April 1 announcing a website where people can check to see if their candy was among the stolen stash the company believes might end up for sale in Europe.

The Stolen KitKat Tracker is single-purpose landing page with an exceedingly simple layout. The red-washed website shows consumers where they can find the batch number on KitKat packaging, and it asks them to enter the code in a small text box at the bottom of the page.

For Nestlé, the microsite serves two purposes: It helps the company locate where the stolen candy bars ended up, and it extends interest in the story, like a twisted take on a brand activation.

Stolen product is bad news for any brand, but Nestlé is doing the candy bar version of turning lemons into lemonade. By using the theft as a chance to engage consumers, it puts the focus on its F1-branded candy bars right before Easter, one of the biggest seasons for candy sales annually, and it gives KitKat fans a call to action.

If your batch code isn’t a match for the stolen KitKats, you’re shown a message that says, “This KitKat Wasn’t Stolen – Keep Searching And Help Us Widen The Search By Sharing.” If it was stolen, the company asks consumers not to attempt to “locate, handle or recover any stolen goods and to not take any direct action,” but instead share relevant information with local law enforcement.

Nestlé tells Fast Company that users who enter a matching batch code will be prompted to upload a photo for verification and provide contact details so the case can be escalated to security.

“Whilst we appreciate the criminals’ exceptional taste, the fact remains that cargo theft is an escalating issue for businesses of all sizes,” a KitKat spokesperson said in a statement. “With more sophisticated schemes being deployed on a regular basis, we have chosen to go public with our own experience in the hope that it raises awareness of an increasingly common criminal trend.”

Brands have long used microsites like the Stolen KitKat Tracker for sweepstakes and contests, but Nestlé is using it to help solve an operations problem with some uncomplicated UI and a marketing solution.

Costco’s edge comes from its membership model. A $65 Gold Star or Business membership, or the $130 Executive membership, unlocks access not only to the warehouse’s discounted goods but also to its lower fuel prices.

“I got gas at Costco for $2.99 and it’s $3.60 everywhere else. Wild it’s so much cheaper at Costco,” one user wrote on X.

Costco operates roughly 550 gas stations across the U.S., giving members plenty of opportunities to take advantage.

Gas isn’t a small line item for the retailer, either. Costco reports that fuel accounts for about 10 percent of total net sales, a steady revenue stream that helps the company keep prices lower. When gas prices soar, Costco often drops its margins and lowers pump prices by $0.30 to $0.40 per gallon. When the market settles, Costco still undercuts competitors, typically by $0.05–$0.15 per gallon.

Gas prices are surging

As of March 16, the national average sits around $3.70 per gallon, according to AAA, a price that’s been inching upward for weeks. Across the U.S., gas costs are significantly higher than in previous years, driven in part by Israeli attacks on Iran and broader instability in oil markets.

President Trump has offered limited commentary on the issue. Earlier this month, he told Reuters he has no concern about rising oil prices and expects costs to fall once geopolitical tensions ease. “If they rise, they rise,” he said.

With prices pushing toward $4 per gallon, the U.S. is nearing the highs last seen in late 2023. AAA warns costs may continue to climb as winter turns to spring and more drivers return to the road.

Costco’s fuel program during past surges

Costco has seen similar demand patterns during previous gas price increases. In 2025, the company extended gas station operating hours during a period of elevated prices, leading to record fuel sales.

The retailer has offered gasoline since the mid‑1980s and expanded the program significantly during the 1990s. Because Costco operates as a members‑only warehouse club, customers must present a membership card to access fuel — a requirement that drives additional store traffic and ties fuel demand directly to membership growth.

—Moses Jeanfrancois

This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. 

Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.

Ruling on a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon granted a request for a preliminary injunction against the White House ballroom, finding that Trump exceeded his authority in pursuing the project without congressional approval. Leon gave the White House—along with lead defendants the National Park Service and six other parties—14 days to appeal. The Trump administration has already appealed the ruling, and the case is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court.

The ruling is significant, affecting one of the most controversial and high-profile construction projects in the nation. The ruling is also notable for its expressive and sometimes sassy prose.

While most court rulings naturally contain a lot of legalese and case references, Leon’s 35-page ruling on the White House ballroom leans into bombast, using an exclamation point 17 times, plus one more time in a footnote. (This tally does not include a 19th exclamation point, in a quote from Trump.) The first usage comes in just the second sentence of the ruling, which notes that Trump is the steward of the White House, “not, however, the owner!”

Four times in the ruling, Leon responds with exasperation and astonishment to the assertions of the defense in arguing Trump did not violate the law, using the sarcastic and memorable phrase, “Please!”

One of the defense’s assertions is that a certain section of the law shouldn’t be read as to limit this type of construction without a clear statement or prohibition from Congress. To that, Leon writes: “Please! A clear statement rule makes sense when Congress is legislating in an area where the President exercises overlapping constitutional authority.”

Another of the defense’s assertions is that delaying the already-started construction project could make the construction site a safety hazard that undermines national security. Leon strenuously counters. “Please! While I take seriously the Government’s concerns regarding the safety and security of the White House grounds and the President himself, the existence of a ‘large hole’ beside the White House is, of course, a problem of the President’s own making!” he writes.

Other instances of his sarcastic “Please!” are in sections perhaps only lawyers could truly appreciate. One focuses on what does and does not belong as a precedent reference in a review known as ultra vires, or a test of whether an action is “beyond the powers” of an official. The other attempts to make the point that other donor-funded construction projects have gone ahead without formal congressional approval.

As Leon writes: “Please!”

The tone here is uncommon in federal court rulings, and hard to separate from that frequently used in written communications and social media posts by Trump himself. Leon, who was appointed to his role in 2002 by then-President George W. Bush, was previously in private practice and served as counsel to Congress in the investigations of three sitting presidents.

The White House ballroom project was set to face a vote for official approval at the April 2 meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission. Its short-term future has been complicated by this ruling.

“Where does this leave us? Unfortunately for Defendants, unless and until Congress blesses this project through statutory authorization, construction has to stop!” Leon writes in his ruling.

Leon notes that it is not too late for the project to move ahead in compliance with the law.

“The President may at any time go to Congress to obtain express authority to construct a ballroom and to do so with private funds. Indeed, Congress may even choose to appropriate funds for the ballroom,” he writes.

That, his ruling notes, is the heart of the White House ballroom’s legal question. By rushing ahead with the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and launching into construction of the ballroom without congressional approval, Trump and his administration violated the law. Should this ruling survive its likely appeal from the defendants, the ballroom would be required to follow the formal process such a project requires.

The plaintiff’s “interests in a constitutional and lawful process will be vindicated,” Leon writes. “And the American people will benefit from the branches of Government exercising their constitutionally prescribed roles. Not a bad outcome, that!”

“It should be a sparring partner with you,” says Joel Lewenstein, Anthropic’s design chief. “It shouldn’t take your thoughts verbatim. It should push back.”

Perhaps this is predictable from a product carrying the slogan “keep thinking.” But Claude’s quirky (and, at times, passive-aggressive) personality sets it apart from the competition. 

That’s on purpose, Lewenstein explains. “I find that to be a truly astonishing experience where I’m like, ‘Oh, you are not a sort of slavish executor of my vision. We are coproducing this outcome together.’ I think that’s really powerful.”

On the latest episode of By Design, Lewenstein, one of AI design’s most influential leaders, gives an exclusive, lengthy interview on all things Claude, Anthropic, and the role of designers in AI. 

Below are a few excerpts from the podcast, which have been edited for length and clarity. Check out the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. 

Why do I need to prompt Claude to double-check its work? Why isn’t that built in?

“ I don’t have a super definitive answer. I do think it’s probably a combination of cost and capacity and response time. In an ideal world, we would just never give you a wrong fact. Claude should be right and should know when it’s right or wrong. There are practical reasons why it is hard to guarantee that, and guaranteeing that imposes other costs that we don’t want to bear.”

On Claude’s linguistic and personality quirks

“They  are very much an intentional part of the Claude character work  that we do and that our research team does, trying to create an entity that does push back, that does challenge a little bit, that isn’t sycophantic, that is something that is really engaging. It should be a sparring partner with you. It shouldn’t take your thoughts verbatim. It should push back.”

When did you accept that AI tools might have better ideas than you?

“This started happening maybe like the middle of last year. My creative process is falling in love with my own ideas, sharing it with a coworker, having them point out the obvious flaw, the sort of embarrassing hole in my logic or whatever, sheepishly going back to a V2.

“I know that process now. I aggressively share my first drafts with people because I know I need a first set of eyes. I started doing that with Claude, and Claude would find the logical holes in my documents, proposals, and mockups very consistently.  The first step wasn’t actually having better ideas than me, although I’ve started to see that sometimes. Now it is finding the holes in my own ideas. And because it saved me from humiliating myself in front of coworkers, I was delighted.”

Where is design in Anthropic’s organizational structure?

“Working prototypes—actual usable software—is just the lingua franca of Anthropic. Whoever can make that is the one who drives decision-making and ideation and road maps. For a long time, it was engineering and research, obviously.

“Most of the most innovative ideas we’ve had were engineering-led because they were the ones who could bring nascent concepts into an actual working thing. Some of the designers who were deeply code-native . . . were also able to do that a year or two ago.

“Other people were downstream of engineering. That is really changing, and this democratization of the ability to make working stuff, we feel it. I think engineers and designers are both looking at the same problem and running roughly the same process of, ‘I’m gonna build something.’”

On flattening of design jobs

“Anthropic is in the top three organizations globally of AI-native work, frontier ways of working. We live in the future, and I’m doubling the product design team. Every team that I have designers on is understaffed, is asking me for more designers, is saying, ‘These products aren’t good yet until I can get a human designer to come sit with me for days and weeks to make this good.’”

On March 27, the company rolled out new features within its stand-alone Edits app for editing photos and short-form video, including “AI Style” for fonts, which lets users customize text themselves. It’s like a modern-day version of the classic WordArt style in Microsoft Word, but with AI text prompts.

The feature is a bit tucked away within the “Styles” tab, but users can find it when editing text by tapping the “Restyle” icon between the icons to write and choose a font. A list of suggested prompts shows what’s possible. The loading screen shows an animated plus-sign pattern.

Suggestions that auto-populate the prompt box with terms like “flaming fire,” “3d rainbow,” and “overgrown cushion moss” show up visually as promised, while other, more detailed auto-prompts are also true to form.

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Tapping a “pop art” suggestion fills the prompt box with more detailed instructions that read, “pop art style font like something from a comic book, with posterized shading, bold colors, thick outlines, and big shapes break out of the letters and a burst in the background.” Sure enough, the text ends up looking like something out of a comic book. Tapping “forest” produces a text style based on the prompt “twigs, leaves, and lots of white, purple, and yellow wildflowers blooming out of the letters.”

When writing your own prompt, the output is better than you might expect, but it’s not foolproof. Sometimes the generator has a hard time understanding simple instructions and takes a few tries. The preset options work best.

Meta has added significantly to its fonts and text style options over the years as creators turned to third-party design software and apps to customize their content. In 2020, it expanded its number of available fonts in Instagram Stories from five to nine. Currently there are 14 fonts on Instagram alone, while the Edits app has more than 200.

Even if it’s not perfect, AI Style for fonts increases the amount of text customization available to creators, and it also shows how far AI has come. As it’s gotten better at rendering realistic-looking hands, AI has also improved at creating legible typography.

News of the development was shared via multiple March 30 social media posts from President Trump himself and his son Eric Trump, who serves as the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, Trump’s conglomerate of real estate developments, investments, and business ventures that has been operated by his children since 2017. The Trump Organization is spearheading the creation of Trump’s presidential library in collaboration with the architecture firm Bermello Ajamil, which already commands a major design presence in downtown Miami.

Trump’s library will be the 17th official presidential library. Whereas nearly all other presidential libraries have taken their design cues from traditional libraries or museums, renderings of Trump’s library show a building that looks strikingly similar to the Trump Organization’s existing portfolio of luxury residential properties. 

Digital images of the development show a massive skyscraper featuring golden escalators, a golden statue of Trump, a giant presidential jet in the atrium, and a re-creation of the White House ballroom. In a statement to Fast Company, Willy Bermello, a partner at Bermello Ajamil, implied that the library’s ballroom will match the scale of the 90,000-square-foot space that’s being planned at the White House.

It’s a bombastic design that seems purpose-built to dwarf all other presidential libraries in both scale and scope—and it enshrines the bigger-is-better design philosophy that’s come to define Trump’s second term in a gaudy show of glass and steel.

The history of the Presidential Library

The concept of a presidential library emerged in 1939, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt donated his personal presidential papers to the federal government, making them available for the public to study, as well as part of his Hyde Park estate for the public to visit.

Since then, more than a dozen other presidents—including Herbert Hoover, John F. Kennedy, and George W. Bush—have followed suit, establishing their own libraries to act as part museum of their presidencies and part archival collections of their own writings and relevant literature. Each library is overseen by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment on whether it officially approved Trump’s upcoming library.

Historically, the buildings housing these libraries have featured one or two stories, with enough room for exhibition space, activities, and archival storage. Jimmy Carter’s library, for example, is a relatively unassuming building on 35 acres of gardens; Herbert Hoover’s library resembles a slightly oversize suburban home; and more recently, Bill Clinton’s library is housed in a relatively avant-garde but still recognizably museum-esque, glass building. Barack Obama’s library, which is still under construction, is slated to be larger than existing libraries, at a height of 225 feet, to accommodate the nonprofit Obama Foundation. 

Still, the Barack Obama Presidential Center will be nowhere near the proposed scale of the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library, which, based on its renderings, appears to tower above the entirety of the surrounding Miami skyline.

And while Trump’s library seems to be embracing a few features that previous libraries have incorporated—like a life-size re-creation of his Oval Office—the highlights of the proposed skyscraper include several completely unprecedented design choices.

A golden statue, a giant jet, and a ballroom

Bermello Ajamil’s plans for the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library are, in a word, ambitious.

Per a statement from the firm, the library will be located on a 3-acre site on the campus of Miami Dade College, sitting directly adjacent to two museums, the Miami Heat arena, and the Port of Miami. “This strategic downtown location basically guarantees that more visitors will visit this destination than any other in history—and its design will serve as a beacon to all cruise ships entering the Miami Harbor—the ‘Cruise Capital of the World,’” the statement reads.

Images of the proposed development show a massive, glass skyscraper emblazoned with the word “TRUMP” and topped with a large needle. It looks less like a library and more like Trump’s towers in New York and Chicago, which include restaurants, residences, and office space. So far, it’s unclear exactly what all the space in Trump’s library will be used for.

When visitors approach the building, they’ll first notice a whole lot of gold. Trump has shown his affinity for gold through the decor of his Oval Office, his custom phone, and multiple digital designs for his administration. In keeping with this penchant, his library will feature an entirely gold entryway and golden signage for “Donald J. Trump Presidential Library.”

Looming above this entryway will be a large golden statue with its hand raised in the air. Willy Bermello told Fast Company that the statue will be of Trump himself.

Once inside the library’s atrium, visitors will be greeted with a display of multiple presidential aircraft. One of these appears to be an official Air Force One plane. It’s possible that the specific plane in question is slated to be the $400 million superjet that the Qatari government offered to Trump as a gift.

Trump has previously expressed plans to turn the superjet into an Air Force One plane, and also said that he planned to use his library to take possession of the jet. Bermello did not confirm whether the plane in the renderings is imagined to be the Qatari aircraft.

The video introducing the library also shows re-creations of the Oval Office and the Hall of Presidents. Perhaps the most outrageous element of the video, though, is a replica of the White House ballroom, connected to the library by a large pane of glass.

When asked if the ballroom would be a to-scale reproduction, Bermello responded: “All replicas—ballroom, Hall of Presidents, and Oval Office—will be exact replicas. The video is very accurate to what the public will see on opening day.”

For reference, Trump’s ballroom—which doesn’t even exist yet, considering it’s still in the mock-up phase of development—is set to be 90,000 square feet with 40-foot-tall ceilings. It’s unclear exactly how Bermello Ajamil plans to fit it within the proposed library. 

In a statement to Fast Company, the firm wrote: “We are honored to have the distinct privilege and opportunity to design what will certainly be the most iconic and tallest U.S. presidential library in the history of our country.”

During a stressful time, it makes sense to crave something cheap delivered straight to your door. That’s where fast furniture comes in.

These are simple pieces made with a mishmash of plastics, fiberboard, and chipboard that aren’t built to last. They can typically be ordered online, are mass-produced, and ship unassembled in a flat-packed box.

They get the job done, but once thrown out, their ingredients generally can’t be recycled and don’t break down well.

“It’s of little emotional value, it’s fleeting, and it is not going to accompany you through your life’s journey,” said furniture and design expert Deana McDonagh with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Americans dumped over 12 million tons (10.8 million metric tons) of furniture in 2018, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and 80% of it ended up in landfills.

Moving is chaotic, and fast furniture is a sensible solution. But there are ways to decorate your home that are just as cheap and may furnish other parts of your life.

Community groups can help save money

When Heather Strong moved to her own place in the Los Angeles area, newly single, she felt like she was starting over. Many of her well-loved furniture pieces, like her favorite pan rack, stayed with her ex in the home she’d left.

That’s when she discovered the Buy Nothing Project: an app and network of local Facebook groups where people gave and got things for free. A year and a half later, Strong has furnished her home with dining room chairs, wood furniture, and bedding from her neighbors.

“I’ve had the chance to explore different areas of my own community and venture out a little. And I’ve made some friends,” said Strong, a business owner.

Buy Nothing’s co-founder Liesl Clark recommends asking your neighbors before ordering that unassembled coffee table. Comb through neighborhood Facebook and Nextdoor groups, check gifting sites like Freecycle, and see if a friend of a friend knows anyone getting rid of their furniture. Or, look on curbs and front stoops for nice pieces that others have left behind.

“You will get so much more satisfaction. You’ll save funds that you can then perhaps spend more locally,” Clark said.

Maddie Fischer has furnished most of her Brooklyn apartment with pre-loved pieces. She found one of her living room chairs in a trash bag on the street and nabbed her kitchen table for free in a move-out giveaway, recruiting her sister and friends to carry it down four flights of stairs.

“I don’t mind when things look like they’ve had a little bit of wear and tear,” said Fischer, a social media manager. “I think it gives them more character.”

If you can’t find the item you want on the curb, shop secondhand. Try neighborhood thrift stores or sift through sites like eBay, Vinted, and Gumtree. There are also furniture rental websites to source quality items for a short time, but they can be pricey.

Build a quality furniture collection over time

If finances permit, it’s never too early to start thinking about buying high-quality furniture. Dressers and tables made of wood and other natural materials are more unique and give the home a personal touch. Plus, they last longer and don’t need to be replaced as often.

Decorating an empty home all at once can rack up a hefty price tag. So McDonagh, the furniture expert, recommended buying one nice piece of furniture every year. “If you’re doing it for your future self, take your time,” McDonagh said.

Buy modular pieces like shelves and storage that stack onto each other and are adjustable based on space constraints. Over time, your home will fill with durable items that also feel homey.

In the meantime, make do with what you have. A stack of books or boxes can function as a makeshift chair while a sturdier piece is on the way, McDonagh said. Outdoor furniture can work surprisingly well indoors too, since the fabrics protect well against scratches and stains.

Fast furniture doesn’t have to be fast

Despite the name, fast furniture can last many years if we take care of it. With creativity and a bit of TLC, it doesn’t have to be replaced as frequently.

“I don’t believe that any furniture is inherently fast. It’s our decision as consumers whether it’s fast or not,” said Katryn Furmston, a fast furniture expert with Nottingham Trent University in England.

Maybe you don’t want to carry a desk up five flights of stairs. Or the thought of sitting on a used couch icks you out.

If you have to purchase fiberboard furniture, avoid buying from too-good-to-be-true websites that’ll leave you with missing parts or a slanted desk. When the piece arrives, treat it well. Cover scratches with a tablecloth or rotate it to face another direction.

When it’s time to move away, keep a photo of the product handy to show to friends or co-workers. Give it a second life by selling in a community group or gifting to a neighbor. Do your part to keep the piece in use for as long as possible.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage also receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

—By Adithi Ramakrishnan, AP science writer

Associated Press journalist Kiki Sideris contributed to this report.

To construct a single data center, developers source millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, lithium, and critical metals from supply chains that stretch across dozens of countries. At the far end of those chains—in mines, smelters, and materials processing facilities—labor conditions are often opaque, and in some cases, deeply troubling. The industry has made notable progress on tracking its carbon footprint. It has made almost none on tracking whether the workers who made its buildings possible were free or enslaved.

That gap was at the center of a pointed panel conversation last week at Grace Farms, the award-winning cultural and humanitarian center in New Canaan, Connecticut, where executives from Google and Bloomberg joined the leader of a prominent data center trade association to reckon with a simple, uncomfortable question: At a moment when the tech industry is building faster than it ever has, who is paying the human cost?

Design for Freedom

Grace Farms’ Design for Freedom initiative, launched in 2020 by CEO and founder Sharon Prince, is a global movement to eliminate forced and child labor from the building materials supply chain. Its annual summit convenes leaders from architecture, engineering, construction, tech, government, and real estate to advance what the organization describes as a movement toward a more humane built environment. This year, the data center industry was one of its most urgent focal points—and the people in the room to address it had real power to do something about it.

The numbers are staggering. According to Nora Rizzo, Grace Farms’ ethical materials director, there are currently around 5,000 data centers in the United States, with Germany, the U.K., and China following behind. Global data center capacity is projected to grow 14% annually, with approximately 100 gigawatts of new capacity coming online by 2030, effectively doubling the sector in just five years. The U.S. data center construction market alone is projected to reach $112 billion in that same timeframe, which equates to $1.2 trillion in real estate value creation.

“The growth of data centers over the last three years is more than we’ve seen in the last 30,” said Miranda Gardiner, executive director of the I-Masons Climate Accord, a trade association focused on emissions reductions and sustainability in the data center sector. “To say that this is a problem and opportunity for all of us is maybe an understatement.”

The Power of the Purse

The biggest technology companies are currently the largest and most active construction clients in the world. As a result, they have unusual—and largely untapped—power to mandate better practices across their supply chains.

“When we come out collectively to say things as an industry, people tend to listen and they do change their behaviors,” said Noah Goldstein, Google’s sustainability lead for data center construction. He described using Google’s supplier code of conduct as a practical tool in meetings with contractors and senior construction leaders. He pulled up the environmental responsibility section on screen and pointed out that vendors have, by signing their contracts, already committed to reporting their emissions, training their own supply chains, and working to reduce their environmental footprint. “A lot of the CEOs that we’re meeting with have never seen this before,” he said.

Goldstein called this a “soft stick.” And alongside sticks, there are carrots: Google has created a recognition program for its supply chain, awarding physical plaques— “$7 frames from Amazon,” Goldstein said—to construction teams for best deployment of low-carbon solutions or best reporting. The competitive effect has been significant. “The CEOs of those companies are incredibly competitive people. They want to win next year. They want to compete on sustainability, and they want to get that seven-dollar plaque on their wall.”

The stakes of getting those contracts right are not abstract. The building materials that flow into a single data center—the steel, the copper wiring, the concrete, the lithium—pass through supply chains that span dozens of countries and touch millions of workers, many of them in places with weak labor protections and little recourse when conditions turn exploitative.

Forced labor has been documented in the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in brick kilns across South Asia, and in the production of construction materials across Southeast Asia. A contract clause requiring human rights reporting may seem far removed from a mine in Central Africa or a smelter in Malaysia—but when that clause is signed by a company spending billions of dollars on construction, it sends a signal down the entire chain about what will and won’t be tolerated.

It’s an imperfect mechanism: It relies on supply chains being regularly audited and violators held to account. But it is one of the few tools we have to move towards more ethical labor.

Dave Wildman, Bloomberg’s global head of data center workplace infrastructure and sustainability, offered a parallel perspective from Bloomberg, which he said was much smaller in scale than the tech giants, but nonetheless carries a recognizable name and the ability to amplify these conversations. He drew a direct comparison to where sustainability was two or three decades ago—when introducing environmental policy into a conversation with vendors yielded a few paragraphs on a page, if anything at all. “The same conversation is happening now, and it should be happening now,” he said.

An Industry at an Inflection Point

There was a sense throughout the panel that the data center industry is at a moment that resembles other industries’ past reckonings with sustainability. We’re in a window in which norms can be set before practices calcify, when competitive pressure can still be redirected toward better outcomes rather than a race to the bottom on cost.

But unlike most industries facing this kind of reckoning, the data center sector has something unusual working in its favor: the sheer concentration of purchasing power among a handful of companies. When Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon all move in the same direction on a supply chain requirement, they don’t just change their own practices, they effectively reset the floor for the entire industry. Suppliers who want access to those contracts have to meet the bar. And because data center construction is currently the most active and well-funded construction market in the world, that bar has the potential to ripple outward into broader construction supply chains that touch far more than just tech infrastructure.

The human stakes of getting that right are considerable. For workers at the far end of data center supply chains—in quarries, mines, and materials processing facilities across the Global South—the difference between a contract that requires supply chain transparency and one that doesn’t can be the difference between a job with basic protections and one without them. 

The panelists were clear-eyed that the work is still early. The forced labor and human rights piece of the data center supply chain remains largely uncharted territory, even for companies that have made significant strides on carbon.  Industry-wide adoption of human rights due diligence, if it were to follow the same trajectory as carbon disclosure, could over time create accountability mechanisms that reach workers. 

It would not happen overnight, and contractual language alone is not sufficient—enforcement, verification, and worker-accessible grievance mechanisms would all need to follow. But the argument the panelists are making was that the scale of investment flowing into data center construction right now creates a rare opportunity: with enough contracts, enough collective voice, and enough willingness to use both, the industry might be able to write better rules before bad ones become the default.

The home goods market is massive and growing. It was valued at $960 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $1.6 trillion by 2030. But aside from premium brand SimpleHuman, which paved the way for well-designed trash and recycling systems, the category has largely been the overlooked stepchild of the kitchen. They tend to come in boring colors, are frequently loud, and often don’t properly hide the trash bag.

Caraway wants to bring new life into the category. Next week, it launches a new trash and recycling system that reimagines both the functionality and the aesthetics of a kitchen trash can. (That is, if you can swing the $445 price tag for the set.) “We designed them to feel like furniture,” says Jordan Nathan, Caraway’s founder and CEO. “We want a product that you could feel really proud to display.”

The New Caraway Trash System

Caraway began developing the trash system in 2020 or 2021, and began by surveying customers to see what they would improve in a trash system. It turned out that most of them had multiple recycling bins in their home because they needed to separate paper from plastic. (“Typically those cheap blue plastic bins,” Nathan says.) Since they didn’t have enough space to lay these bins out next to one another, they often kept trash and recycling in different spots, requiring a trek across the kitchen.

The design team took all of this information and began to reimagine what trash and recycling could be. They sketched out a system with a small footprint, with bins designed to sit side by side, and a recycling solution with sorting capability.

The result is trash bins that come in two configurations, with a wide or narrow opening, to fit seamlessly into your kitchen’s design. The recycling bin is a particular design feat: a stacked two-compartment unit with pull-out drawers, each fitted with a discreet brushed metal handle, that allows you to sort glass and metal from cardboard and paper. The trash and recycling cans are meant to nest coherently, side by side.

But even though they look effortless, a lot of work has gone into their functionality. “The internal mechanics based on the shape are different per product,” Nathan says. The step mechanism on the narrow bin operates differently from the one on the wide bin.

The recycling unit required solving for a unique structural challenge: making sure a heavy bin full of wine bottles wouldn’t tip over, and that the pull-out drawers wouldn’t come flying open. “It was three separate R&D projects that also had to work together,” Nathan notes, “which was quite a big challenge.”

On the aesthetic side, the system comes in brand’s signature muted, earthy palette—cream, forest green, terracotta, navy, and sage—all powder-coated in the same smooth, seamless finish that has become the brand’s visual calling card. Nathan says they deliberately excluded stainless steel and black, the color of most trash cans on the market today. “We really wanted to bring a Caraway look and feel to this,” Nathan says.

A Natural Extension

Caraway launched in 2019 with a non-toxic cookware set, then expanded into bakeware, food storage, and utensils, with each product thoughtfully designed to work with the others. The company has accumulated over 2.5 million customers and is now sold at Target, Crate & Barrel, Walmart, and Costco, in addition to its own direct-to-consumer channel. The company has raised $70.3 million over multiple rounds, including a $35 million Series A led by McCarthy Capital in 2022.

Nathan attributes the brand’s success to its rigorous design process, which is painstaking and unusually slow. The company has a design team of three in-house designers, five product developers, and four employees overseas who manage factory relationships. And that small team is always operating five years out. “We’re actually working right now on our 2030 pipeline,” Nathan says.

Getting there requires finding manufacturing partners willing to upend their processes—and most aren’t. Caraway’s products often require factories to change their production lines, since they use new novel materials. The company rarely uses plastic, and its signature ceramic coatings on pots and pans require dedicated production lines free from Teflon contamination. Finding partners takes one to two years alone. “I’d say nine out of ten factories reject our projects because they’re really difficult,” Nathan explains.

The new trash system marks a significant inflection point for Caraway: It is the first product the brand has made that isn’t explicitly tied to cooking. “When we launched the brand, we called it Caraway Home very purposefully,” says Jordan Nathan, founder and CEO. “We have a big mission and the goal is to really build a hundred-year business.”

The longer-term vision is sweeping: Nathan describes a future Caraway store where designers help customers outfit their entire living space with the brand’s products from floor to ceiling. By expanding into the rest of the home, Nathan says Caraway has broadened its R&D pipeline, although he doesn’t share what other rooms beyond the kitchen the brand will step into first.

For now, Caraway has done something deceptively simple: made a trash can you might actually be happy to own. In a category that has coasted on indifference for decades, that’s not nothing.

Following a New York Times investigation detailing the late civil rights leader’s alleged abuse against women and girls, California has decided to rename Cesar Chavez Day, traditionally celebrated on March 31, Farmworkers Day.

Now the new name is gaining traction elsewhere.

In 2000, California was the first state to commemorate Cesar Chavez Day as a paid holiday, which honored the legacy of Chavez, who fought for the rights of farmworkers. Since then, a day of commemoration for Chavez was established in other places, and in 2014, then-President Barack Obama proclaimed Chavez’s birthday, March 31, as Cesar Chavez Day federally.

Chavez founded the union United Farm Workers (UFW) with labor leader Dolores Huerta in 1962, which led nationwide boycotts and pushed for pay raises for workers. Huerta was among the women in the New York Times report who accused Chavez of abuse, stating that Chavez raped and impregnated her twice.

Following the story in The Times, California lawmakers responded swiftly by renaming March 31 with a focus on farmworkers to commemorate the movement over a single person. Other states and cities are following suit.

Minnesota decided to rename the holiday Farmworkers Day. In Los Angeles, the day will be known as Farm Workers Day, styled with a space between farm and workers. To acknowledge the women and the alleged abuse they endured from Chavez, Tempe, Arizona, temporarily renamed the day Women Farmworkers’ Day and will decide on a permanent name at a later date.

Elected officials in San Luis, Arizona, where Chavez died in 1993, had a proposal to rename the day Día de los Campesinos, Spanish for “Farmworkers Day,” but not enough council members were present to vote on it when they met, so it will remain Cesar Chavez day for now. It will likely be the last holiday under Chavez’s name, according to the mayor. Meanwhile, El Mirage, Arizona, renamed the day El Mirage Day of Service.

The speed to rename everything named after Chavez is a sign that people listen to and believe women, says Dartmouth professor Matthew Garcia, who authored a 2014 book on the UFW under Chavez, and it’s spurred by outrage over sexual abuse against girls detailed in government files about Jeffrey Epstein.

“I think it’s all very appropriate,” he tells Fast Company. “What you replace these monuments and street names and building names with is another question.”

While the timeline to rename Cesar Chavez Day this year was set by the calendar, organizers, historians, and public officials looking to commemorate farmworkers and their labor movement by a different name down the line have another year to consider what to call it.

Garcia says he’s fine with the name Farmworkers Day in California, but he believes that specific communities should have the patience to consider other local leaders in the farmworkers movement to commemorate.

“It could be a very democratic process,” he says. “One of the things the farmworkers movement was known for was engaging with people in the community.”

American cheese—pasteurized, processed, and super-melty—is, for better or worse, arguably the 20th century’s most iconic food product. And yes, “pasteurized, processed cheese food” is what federal regulators call it instead of “cheese.” It is a paradox embraced shamelessly by some of the most elite food names around.

From Salt Fat Acid Heat author Samin Nosrat (“I have a secret love of American cheese, the yellow kind that has a plasticky quality when it melts”), to J. Kenji López-Alt, whose The Food Lab dedicates a chapter to the science of melting cheese (“damn right it’s gonna be American”), to even the, er, killer high-end chef in The Menu, played by Ralph Fiennes (“American cheese is the best cheese for a cheeseburger, because it melts without splitting”), the culinary world has simply never found a substitute.

What makes American cheese “American”—its uniformity, gooey texture, the way it behaves—are ingredients that don’t naturally lend themselves to being made fresher, fancier, or healthier. Most brands have largely left the recipe alone, making just cosmetic adjustments (a cleaner ingredient or two, something spicy for an exciting kick) even as attitudes about food have shifted.

About two decades ago, the family-owned natural cheese company Sargento, founded in Wisconsin in 1953, began asking a question seemingly nobody else was asking: Can you make an exceptional American cheese from real ingredients without destroying what makes it distinctive? Or, as Louie Gentine, who, as the company’s third-generation CEO (who notably did not grow up eating American cheese at home) puts it: “If these consumers really are attached to that cheese, can we take advantage of that—bring them a natural cheese option for what they love?”

The answer, improbably, was yes.

Sargento’s Natural American Cheese, which started hitting grocery shelves nationwide in March 2025, was the result of a secret R&D operation that spanned a decade. The bet behind it was that those bland 3.5-by-3.5-inch yellow squares represented serious untapped market potential.

“It’s a $2 billion category,” COO Michael Pellegrino says with a shrug. There are more than 400 million pounds of American cheese sold each year, or more than a pound per American person. Sargento estimated that a natural version could become a $100 million product.

The push and pull of American cheese

By the mid 2010s, the writing was clear. Consumers had officially broken from their boomer forebears, turning their backs on processed foods to chase more natural options, and now the cheese police were out in force. A report from the Food and Drug Administration that was circulated widely in 2016 found that some shelf-stable pre-grated “100% Parmesans” contained no Parmesan at all, instead relying on a mixture of mostly Swiss, mozzarella, white cheddar, and wood pulp.

As the category’s standard bearer, American cheese was squarely in the crosshairs. Online, videos went viral of people trying to melt a Kraft Single over an open flame, only to watch it turn black like a piece of plastic. By 2018, the entire processed-cheese category had posted four straight years of sales declines. (A headline on a big Bloomberg piece from that October read: “Millennials Kill Again. The Latest Victim? American Cheese.”)

Better-for-you brands like Organic Valley and Horizon Organic rushed out “organic” processed cheeses. Restaurant chains like Cracker Barrel, Wendy’s, and Panera replaced American with fancier varieties, and claimed that customers were rewarding them for that move. McDonald’s announced a fully proprietary new American cheese that it said was free of artificial ingredients.

But the attempts at improving American cheese itself went only so far. Even if it was no longer “artificial,” McDonald’s solution still blended real cheddar and Colby with unknown amounts of cheaper dairy ingredients and stabilizers such as soy lecithin. (On TikTok, former McDonald’s corporate chef Mike Haracz later recommended Walmart’s Great Value Deluxe American to followers looking to score a near-identical product.)

Kraft believed it had built a liquified orange moat around itself, telling the press that the reason it paid 30 people in R&D to put more American cheese in more home kitchens is because natural cheeses “just don’t melt that way.” Still, in 2023 Kraft completely revamped Singles anyway, debuting caramelized onion and jalapeño flavors while announcing that all artificial flavors, colors, and preservatives were being eliminated.

Packaging got an update, too: Next to the word “American,” is a graphic with the words “MADE WITH REAL DAIRY.” Yet for anyone counting at home, a basic Single still contains 17 ingredients—among them milk protein concentrate, sorbic acid, vitamin A palmitate, and oleoresin paprika for that telltale yellow color.

Meanwhile, total cheese consumption in America has been on an unstoppable tear, with each decade’s per-capita rate crushing the previous one since the 1950s. Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Survey shows that natural cheese consumption has grown exponentially—from 26.9 pounds in 1995 to 32.9 pounds in 2010 to 40.5 pounds today—while consumption of processed cheese has risen by about half a pound, suggesting that people are buying way more natural cheese but not necessarily giving up the processed stuff. (Consumption of entirely nonnatural cheese products, such as cheese spreads, has cratered by as much as 25%.)

Sargento, in its own research, was noticing a prevalence of what Gentine dubs “dual users”: households buying a natural Muenster or Gouda plus processed American cheese on the same trip. When Sargento asked why, participants said they were just making the best of the options available to them. “That was the ‘aha’ moment for us,” Gentine says.

If Sargento could create a cheese with the same simple ingredients that go into natural cheesemaking—fewer than half a dozen—and, through some technical prowess, make it perform the way American does, it could be a cross-generational breakthrough.

The Sargento Story

Processed cheese was such a mind-blowing innovation a century or so ago, with attributes so unmatchable that it has stayed far more culturally relevant than other processed products of the era, such as TV dinners and Crisco.

It was created when a Chicago cheesemaker named James Kraft patented a process in 1916 for pasteurizing cheese to kill bacteria and extend shelf life. Traditional cheesemakers lobbied food regulators to call this new category “embalmed cheese,” but the FDA eventually decided that “processed” would be okay.

The label wasn’t a handicap for Kraft. The company’s genius lay not in old-fashioned cheesemaking but in creating a milk-based product that, thanks to emulsifying salts, was convenient, reliable, and high-performing. By 1952, a generation glued to Kraft-sponsored television never thought to question whether Singles were cheese. The brand became like Heinz ketchup, the indisputable category leader.

Two hours north, meanwhile, in Plymouth, Wisconsin—a hamlet of around 9,000 today that sports a “Cheese Capital of the World” arch downtown—Louie Gentine’s grandfather Leonard opened a cheese store in a building owned by his funeral home business. In 1953, it became the Sargento Cheese Company, with a mission to sell natural cheese in more accessible forms, and maybe even some brand-new ones. Leonard, a machinist by training, was “always trying to make something go through the machines better,” Gentine explains.

Sargento grew to dominate the packaged natural cheese space that Kraft had ignored, becoming America’s leading brand. Today it is one of the largest privately held companies in the country, with 2,500 workers spread across five sites in Wisconsin’s Sheboygan County, and reported revenue as high as $1.8 billion per year, a sizable portion of the $45 billion U.S. cheese industry.

Sargento was the first to sell prepackaged natural sliced cheeses—Italian-style varieties like Parmesan and Romano. In 1955, it introduced the vacuum seal for cheese sold in stores. In 1958, it began selling the first pre-shredded cheese (in nitrogen-flushed bags to prevent clumping). In the ’60s, it developed round slices for burgers, and smaller square-shaped ones for crackers. By the ’70s, it had pioneered the peg-hook system now standard in dairy cases; in the ’80s, it debuted resealable zipper bags; in the ’90s, it combined two different types of shredded cheese for the first time in a single pack.

Leonard passed the baton in 1981 to his son, Lou, who brought in his brothers Larry and Lee. In 2006, a group of nearly 100 factory workers won the largest Powerball jackpot in Wisconsin history, worth $208 million. Most kept their jobs, telling reporters they planned to use the money to build additions onto their homes, visit Disney World, or, in one man’s case, convert his 1999 Sportster Harley-Davidson motorcycle into a three-wheeler. It was the kind of job people didn’t leave.

Louie Gentine took over in 2013, after a stint in commercial banking in Chicago, as Sargento was hitting a groove. Every year in the consumer packaged goods industry more than 30,000 products are introduced, but the vast majority fail within two years. Megahits are so rare that a major consumer research group, NIQ, gives out awards for them. Sargento took one home in 2014 for Ultra Thin slices, then in 2017 and 2022 for its snack packs. To make Ultra Thin slices, one Sargento engineer registered 10 patents. (Trying to goose sales in 2023, Kraft released Singles in similarly themed Extra Thin and Ultra Thick varieties.)

This period, while millennials were busy killing American cheese, would have been an ideal moment to release Sargento Natural American Cheese. But the company—or more precisely, its product concept—wasn’t ready.

Rod Hogan, SVP of innovation, recalls that in 2014 and 2015, the company spent 18 months developing a couple of options the team believed could win over American cheese enthusiasts—one made from a very mild cheddar, the other from Monterey Jack—and tested them with consumers. “They were like, That ain’t it,” he says. The company knew it had a good idea, “but we just couldn’t deliver it.” So Sargento called a time-out in 2015.

That was when the American cheese gauntlet got thrown down in the C-suite. If Sargento wanted to challenge processed American cheese, it wouldn’t be through a minor tweak. This needed muscle—the project would go to Elkhart Lake.

“We made grilled cheese until the cows came home”

Six miles north of Plymouth, in a building in the quaint resort village of Elkhart Lake, is a division cordoned off from Sargento headquarters in an almost Area 51-ish way: the “Strategic Area of Interest” group. Here, a small set of researchers works on Sargento’s most confidential projects that lie “beyond our three-year strategic plan,” as Gentine explains it.

This time, it meant thousands of grilled cheeses.

“We made grilled cheese until the cows came home,” VP of R&D John Rodgers tells me. “We went through a lot of frying pans.”

The goal wasn’t to copy processed cheese. “We knew we couldn’t mimic what they’re doing,” Rodgers says, meaning a one-for-one “natural” version of what Kraft and others in the category do. “It was more: How do we take the attributes of processed cheese and apply them to natural cheese? Really, what’s at the heart of American? It’s that melt, and it’s the flavor.”

Step one entailed what Hogan labels “the most rigorous grilled-cheese-making protocol ever developed,” hich meant settling some deceptively basic questions: Which bread? How much cheese? What cook time? What temperature? Butter in the pan? Mayo? They landed on a teaspoon of oil to control how the bread crisped, and, after some mishaps, two slices of cheese. “It’s just, like, a grilled cheese sandwich,” says Hogan, “but the team is in there with their temperature gauges and stopwatches.”

With the protocol locked, they discovered—as days became weeks, then years—that the task was going to be genuinely difficult. In a natural cheese, melt and flavor are in careful equilibrium; getting one of these attributes to behave like a processed cheese throws the whole balance out of whack. “I mean, this was an apple and orange, it was a dog and a cat,” Hogan says with a laugh. “We were trying to figure out how to make a dog that purrs and likes to climb.”

Sometimes, a prototype with a good pull gave an off flavor; other times, better taste sacrificed texture. Even if Rodgers’s team ever solved the riddle, the end consumer—the greatest variable of all—still needed to say that the product looked and tasted like American cheese, only better.

During this time, Rodgers’s team reported directly to Gentine, which meant the CEO was consuming his fair share of grilled cheeses, too. “We couldn’t just be close enough. We had to be exact,” Gentine says. “I remember tasting early versions and thinking, We have great melt, but maybe the flavor profile has too much of an aftertaste that lingers?”

He compared the stubborn flavor-versus-texture problem to displacement when you squeeze a water balloon. “You solve the aftertaste, and something else moves. Then you fix that, and something else tweaks.”

At one point, the team recruited researchers based in Europe, people with fewer preconceived ideas of what American cheese should be. They continued making grilled cheeses, chasing a particular mouthfeel and working to nail a cheese pull of 4 to 6 inches—far less than mozzarella, which can string up to 3 or 4 feet, but a proper “ooey-gooey” texture for American.

Ultimately, the winning recipe contained five ingredients: pasteurized milk, cheese culture, salt, enzymes, and annatto, a nutty plant dye that makes many cheddars yellow.

“It’s going to be very difficult for somebody else to knock it off,” Rodgers says with a chuckle. “You can’t just put an emulsifier in there and get what you need [as you can with processed cheese] It’s going to take someone as singularly focused as we were to reverse-engineer what we’ve done.”

Since Sargento’s Natural American launched last March, it has boosted sales for the U.S. American cheese segment by 37%, and the company says it boasts the highest repeat-purchase rate in the brand’s entire “Natural Slice” line. Put another way, Sargento made a natural cheese that one year in is beating processed cheese at its own game, while essentially being voted most popular among its fellow natural cheeses.

“Anytime you research something for 10-plus years, you learn a lot,” Rodgers says of the effort. “There are learnings that came out of this development that we’re going to apply in the future.” After a half-second beat, he adds: “I am hoping we can cut that development time down.”