By Walt Hickey

VinFast

VinFast, the Vietnamese electric vehicle tour de force, is building a second plant in the province of Ha Tinh, a plant that will produce 300,000 electric vehicles per year. With new factories in Indonesia and India coming online — a trio that will add 400,000 EVs of production per year — VinFast’s production is poised to double to 700,000 EVs per year. In 2028, the company’s aiming to open its first American plant, capable of producing 150,000 EVs per year. It’s an interesting company; its VF3 can be bought for less than $10,000, considerably cheaper than a Chinese-made EV that averages on the order of $30,000. The vehicle is catching on, particularly in southeast Asia: In 2023, about 70 percent of the automaker’s sales were to the company founder’s taxi company, but as of the third quarter of 2024, that was down to 20 percent as more buyers go for a VF3.

Yuji Nitta, Nikkei Asia

Mosaic

A farmer planting an orchard in Turkey found, just under about a half-meter of loose topsoil, a massive 84-square-meter mosaic depicting a hunting scene, one where a mountain goat is chased by a lion, dogs attack a boar, a stag runs away from a bear, and an Anatolian leopard eats an ostrich. Further analysis of the site is underway, as a study of the surrounding area has turned up evidence of any number of buildings. The site is estimated to be about 1,600 to 1,700 years old.

Ayla Jean Yackley, The Art Newspaper

Swig

One of the fastest-growing fast-food brands in the United States is Swig, which began 2024 with 61 stores across six states and expanded another eight states to open over 100 locations over the course of the year. Swig sells so-called “dirty sodas,” which are soft drinks spiked with extra sugar, cream, or any number of flavored syrups. It began in Utah and expanded to its surrounding environs, capitalizing on a large population of people who belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a religion that forbids alcoholic beverages and caffeinated beverages like coffee and whose faithful have flocked to the shops selling an allowable vice. The chain is targeting 1,000 new stores over the next six to seven years.

Sam Danley, QSR

John Deere

Farm and industrial equipment manufacturer John Deere announced several new automations at the CES expo that could allow its increasingly sophisticated tractors and trucks to carry out tedious tasks at mines and farms. The second generation in its line of autonomous tractors first launched in 2022 is now suited for large agricultural operations, with 16 cameras and an onboard Nvidia GPU allowing it to carry out more than the fall tillage the first-generation system was designed to do. The target is to make a fully autonomous farming system for corn and soybeans by 2030. It also introduced an automated articulated dump truck capable of carrying 92,000 pounds of material, intended to automate repetitive and boring tasks in quarries and mines.

Andrew J. Hawkins, The Verge

Cottage Industry

Snacks made a comeback during the pandemic, and lately snackers have been diving ever backward to revive classic trends in nibbles. One of them is a throwback to the ‘70s: cottage cheese is back. Unit sales were up 12.7 percent in the year ending December 1, and its purveyors are targeting the same health-conscious type that went hard for Greek yogurt a few years back. Good Culture, a start-up generally considered the vanguard of the cottage cheese resurgence, managed to pull off an 85 percent jump in sales in 2023, hitting $100 million in sales.

Deena Shanker, Bloomberg

China

Sets of fine china dinnerware passed down over the course of generations have evolved from a crucial and once-in-a-lifetime luxury to a slightly ill-at-ease element of the contemporary tableware situation. Tableware was once worth a not-inconsiderable amount of money, and through the 1960s the bridal market accounted for 64 percent of all fine china sold in the United States. That market doesn’t really exist in the same way: 11 percent of couples registered for fine china this year according to The Knot, the wedding planning site, down from 26 percent a decade ago.

Rukmini Callimachi, The New York Times

Offshore

On Monday the Biden administration announced that new offshore oil and gas drilling along the coastline of the United States would be banned, blocking the sale of leases for 625 million acres of ocean. On one hand, that’s not going to do much to slow a humming offshore oil business (production in the western Gulf of Mexico isn’t affected by the order, which is at an all-time high) but would protect lots of areas where the perceived benefit of sucking some oil out of the ground might be outweighed by the ensuing damage. It’s less a fight about present production — the outer continental shelf produced 675 million barrels of oil and 796 billion cubic feet of gas in fiscal 2023, and that’s not changing — and more setting up the ground rules for future fights over ocean drilling.

Mike Soraghan and Shelby Webb, E&E News

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