Analysts at Alliance Bernstein published a May 15 report predicting hotel trends in the post-COVID-19 era. Emerging technological trends are likely to accelerate and become fixtures of the hotel experience, the analysts predict. In the short-term, social distancing and safety measures will pervade...

PepsiCo has pushed deeper into ecommerce with two new direct-to-consumer websites selling core brands from Doritos to Gatorade. The websites are the product of a dedicated PepsiCo operating team of tech experts in Manhattan that are chasing consumer demand for online convenience. Industry watchers and PepsiCo bottlers are privately asking whether PepsiCo’s retail partners such as Walmart will view the direct-to-consumer initiative as a competitive threat. In addition, it appears PepsiCo won’t owe invasion fees to the company’s independent bottlers for products sold direct to consumers, which could create tension...

Here’s what the entrepreneur Tal Shub imagines: A patron walks into a café holding a stylish, re-usable cup that includes a built-in lid and retractable straw. The consumer inserts their cup upside down into a port that resembles a shallow automobile cup holder. In seconds, the port disinfects the cup, straw and lid, washing away all signs of that morning’s coffee. The person then uses the port’s interface to order an iced green tea lemonade and refills the cup. Data from the port and an RFID chip in the cup are married for the café owner. Such a system will be pilot tested this year in one New York-area community by entrepreneur Tal Shub, co-founder of a startup called Uno (click for video). The company offers a window into a beverage frontier where entrepreneurs are leveraging consumer concern over plastic waste and looking beyond the bottle to create new commercial opportunities. While Uno is pre-revenue and won’t be profitable for five years, Shub estimates, entrepreneurial activity around plastic waste is instructive, as consumers are more willing than ever to embrace new paradigms that could one day challenge existing business models...