$435m+: annual sales for Cheerios, the US’s best-selling cereal. General Mills has been making this breakfast staple for 82 years, but did you know it used to be called Cheerioats? The name changed in 1945 over a copyright claim to “oats” branding by Quaker Oats, per Food Dive.
814,466: at least the number of “Baldur’s Gate III” players, despite the “Dungeons & Dragons”-based RPG being in early access for three years, and so far only being available on PC. Belgian developer Larian Studios had expected ~100k players max. Most importantly, players have petted Scratch, a dog, 750k+ times.
800: pounds of butter used for the Illinois State Fair’s “Butter Cow” sculpture. The fair’s first butter cow debuted in 1922 when J.E. Wallace sculpted Raleigh’s Sybil, a cow that produced a then-record 18.8k+ pounds of milk in 1920. Sarah Pratt sculpted this year’s cow, which you can watch rotate via livestream through Aug. 20.
$1.9m: the fundraising haul for Fieldwork Robotics’ autonomous raspberry-picking robots. The gentle, four-armed harvesting machines are a part of climate investor Elbow Beach Capital’s delightful portfolio, including a broccoli upcycling startup and Muddy Machines, another robotics company specializing in harvesting asparagus.
