1) One sign soccer superstar Lionel Messi is just like us: He was spotted in a Florida grocery store with his family, buying Lucky Charms. One signing that shows Messi ain’t like anyone else: His new $150m deal with MLS team Inter Miami will bring his career on-field earnings to $1.6B, per Sportico. Off the pitch, Messi has revenue-sharing deals in place with MLS partners Apple, Adidas, and Fanatics — and endorsement deals with Budweiser, Mastercard, and Pepsi.
2) As for the non-Messi-backed beverage titan: Coca-Cola and some of its top bottling partners are ponying up $137.7m for sustainability investments. The shared VC fund will back tech firms that offer packaging, energy, and distribution solutions that can reduce the company’s carbon footprint. Coca-Cola is behind target on one front: its bottles contain 15% recycled material today, well short of its goal to reach 50% by 2030.
3) Threads helps Threads (no relation): Meta’s Threads is surging, with 150m users so far, and its popularity is rubbing off on another Threads, an unrelated Slack alternative launched in 2019 that started the month in obscurity and now has nearly 2m downloads. The latter owns Threads.com; Zuck’s version lives at Threads.net.
4) Peeling and coring an avocado kinda sucks, but it’ll no longer be the pits for Chipotle. Until now, it has taken the chain’s kitchen staff ~50 minutes to create a batch of guacamole. That number’s about to go way down thanks to Autocado, a machine that automates the tedious avocado prep process, 25 pounds of the fruit at a time, built by robotics startup Vebu. That’ll be a productivity boon for Chipotle, which uses 100m+ pounds of avocados each year.