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Another day, another recall. It if seems like there have been a number of recalls recently, you’re not imagining it. In the last month alone, there has been a recall for particular brands of soup, sparkling water, and vegetables. This time, it’s for butter. What’s happened? Agri-Mark, the maker of Cabot Creamery dairy products, conducted a voluntary recall for a single lot of its Extra Creamy Premium Butter, Sea Salted, totaling 1,700 pounds in 189 cases. Testing revealed an elevated level of coliform bacteria. The recall was initiated on March 26. Coliform bacteria often are considered indicators of fecal contamination. The U.S. Food and Drug Administratio…

Last year, when Canva used a rap song to promote its new suite of products for businesses, the reaction online was about what you’d expect. “Call 911 I’m having a cringe overdose.” “This is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s fault.” The performance at Canva’s annual summit, Canva Create (Disclosure: Fast Company is a Create media partner), reminded many of corporate musical escapades of the past, like Bank of America’s adaptation of U2’s “One” back in 2006, or Randi Zuckerberg’s Twisted Sister-inspired ode to crypto in 2022. But for Canva, it drove attention and traffic to the brand. More than 50 million people saw the rap battle within 48 hours, which boosted social media…

Olivia Walch is an investigator in the Department of Neurology at the University of Michigan and CEO of a tech start-up called Arcascope. Her research has been featured on CNN, NPR, and in The Atlantic, among other outlets. Beyond sleep research, she coedited Political Geometry, a book on the mathematics of gerrymandering, and published comics with The Nib and Silver Sprocket. She is also the cartoonist of Imogen Quest, a webcomic that won her the “America’s Next Great Cartoonist” prize from the Washington Post. What’s the big idea? If you are dancing and can’t catch the beat, you are not dancing well. In this way, if your sleep doesn’t follow a regular pattern tha…

Don’t let Canva’s rainbow gradients fool you. The Aussies are relentless, and their global conquest through easy-to-use design software continues as they set their sights on markets owned by Adobe and Microsoft. Even after a controversial price increase last year, growth is still explosive. Canva has added 50 million active users over the past 12 months, bringing its total to 230 million, with $3 billion in annual revenue. But despite this success, Canva decided it was time for a redesign. And it’s launching what the company considers its biggest overhaul since the app launched in 2012. It includes a Teams-crushing approach to file collaboration, a powerful AI-fueled spre…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. Blade Runner wasn’t so far-fetched after all In Blade Runner 2049, Ryan Gosling’s Officer K has a live-in girlfriend named Joi, played by Ana de Armas. The two interact like a real couple—they share familiar banter and seem to have a history together. But Joi is a hologram, projected from ceiling-mounted emitters in K’s apartment. She’s not human; she’s an advanced form of spatial computing—a future-facing concept we’re already seeing the early stages of today. The “AI girlfriend” (or bo…

After a viral disappearance and rumors of his demise, Duo the owl is alive—and he’s finally ready to speak: “I said, ‘It’s either Spanish or vanish.’” Watch the full tell-all interview and hear from the bird behind the chaos. View the full article

The Prada Group announced a deal Thursday to buy Italy’s Versace from the U.S. luxury group Capri Holdings under terms that value the fashion house at 1.25 billion euros ($1.4 billion). Prada said the addition of Versace’s “highly recognizable aesthetic . . . constitutes a strongly complementary addition” to its portfolio, which includes the Prada and Miu Miu fashion brands. It said Milan-based Versace offered “significant untapped growth potential.” The final value of the deal will be adjusted at closing, expected in the second half of the year. It will be funded by 1.5 billion euros in new debt and has been approved by the Prada and Capri Holdings board of directors. …

One recent rainy afternoon, I found myself in an unexpected role—philosophy teacher to a machine. I was explaining the story of the Bhagavad Gita to a leading large language model, curious to see if it could grasp the lessons at the heart of one of the world’s most profound philosophical texts. The LLM’s responses were impressively structured and fluent. They even sounded reflective at times, giving a sense that the AI model knew that it was itself part of this millennia-long conversation. Yet there was something fundamental that was missing from all the answers the machine gave me—the lived experience that gives wisdom its true weight. AI can analyze the Gita, but i…

Jason Momoa is a tough act to follow. Especially if you’re a Guinness marketer. Last year, the brand partnered with Momoa to direct and star in a U.S. spot for his favorite beer that ended up getting 13 billion impressions. So this year, Guinness decided to celebrate an even more valuable partner—its actual customers and fans. For the newest iteration of the long-running “Lovely Day for a Guinness” tagline—first rolled out in a 1935 ad campaign—the brand collected stories from customers across all 50 states. Among the stories is the Treme Brass Brand in New Orleans, who share pints of Guinness before taking the stage. The Chicago Plumbers Union are in ther…

The CEO’s role is evolving. Private equity is playing an increasingly influential role in shaping the expectations, performance, and tenure of CEOs. The financial environment is also changing, with influence increasingly moving from public markets to private capital. As private equity grows in importance as the dominant form of value creation, executives who excel at driving EBITDA and delivering outsize returns have become the winners. In this landscape, CEOs are increasingly being measured by their ability to generate financial returns. But true leadership requires hitting more than financial targets. The most effective leaders understand that long-term success dep…

It took Duolingo more than a decade to grow its owl mascot, Duo, from a cute cartoon character into a social media star with tens of millions of followers. Then Duolingo’s marketing team did the unthinkable: It killed him off. The decision turned out to be the company’s most successful social media play ever—and likely one of the widest-reaching social campaigns of all time, by any brand. Duo was originally created as logo in 2011, the year that Duolingo was founded. In the years since, the friendly (if occasionally menacing) green owl has grown into a layered character with friends, enemies, motivations, even a potential lover, and legions of fans. But on February 11, D…