🍬 How Swede it is

Plus: A bump in stingray tourism, the latest $1B+ lottery jackpot you won't win, play Pikachu volleyball, and more. View Online The world's No. 1 golfer Scottie Scheffler took a well-deserved weekend off following two straight tournament wins that netted him $8.5m in prize money. But he wasn't the only one resting on a pile of cash — Scheffler's caddie Ted Scott made ~$850k over those two weekends of work. Here's some unsolicited life advice: Find yourself a friend who's a virtuoso on the golf course and hold onto them (and their bag) for life. In today's email: Swedish candy: Gummies are no bear market. Gardening: The pandemic trend that has taken root. Digits: AI academics, bad air, Lego's latest quest, and more. Around the web: The economics of personality tests, Pikachu volleyball, ominous eclipses, and more. 👇 Listen: How Swedish authorities' 1950s battle against tooth decay led to customers lining up around the block in NYC today. The Big Idea Chew on this: Americans are lining up to buy Swedish candy Yet another TikTok trend is selling out small businesses. 2024-03-25T00:00:00Z Sara Friedman If you see a line snaking around the block on New York City's Lower East Side, you might assume a limited-edition sneaker is about to drop. But, it turns out, the wait might be for a pink paper bag filled with technicolor gummies. Swedish candy is trending online and everyone wants a bite. The fad was, of course, born on TikTok where salivating users watched creators sample sour, skull-shaped gummies from BonBon, a confectioner with locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn. And demand quickly spread, becoming a full-blown national trend and driving customers to candy businesses, per Eater. At BonBon, customers can scoop their own candy into bags at brick-and-mortar locations or order premade gift boxes online (ranging from $18 to $75). One of BonBon's founders said that after the first viral TikTok video, online orders surged overnight from ~20 to 1k+ per day. The brand, which previously had one to two people overseeing its ecommerce orders, now has 15 staff members working six days a week to keep up. Other Swedish and Scandinavian candy shops — Sockerbit in Los Angeles, Karameller in Vancouver, and Sukker Baby in Toronto — have also seen increased demand. It's not the first time a candy trend has taken over social media: Candy salad, candy ASMR, and freeze-dried candy have all had their moments. Sweet Swedes As with any trend, someone, somewhere was doing it first. In this case, it was the Swedes. Trips to the candy store are serious business in Sweden, where "lordagsgodis," meaning "Saturday sweets," is a tradition that dates back to the 1950s when medical experts recommended only consuming sweets once weekly to limit tooth decay. The fun family outing is also a popular way to teach kids about finances. Data from 2020 shows that ~70% of Swedish children get a weekly or monthly allowance, and many spend it on candy. It comes as no surprise that where there are weekly family trips to the candy shop, there are happy people. Like really happy: Sweden came in at No. 4 on the 2024 rankings of the world's happiest countries. Free Resource Save time at work with AI content tools In a few years, when your CEO finally shakes hands with a sentient robot touted as "the most excellent executive assistant/marketing-meister ever," you will still be irreplaceable. Because back in the day, you read our AI for content guide and broke into wrestling robots. You did your homework and remain as crucial as ever in your microcosm of corporate apocalypse. Congratulations. Cop this free gift to get a leg up on being indispensable. We made it for scaling content creators and corporate teams. Wrangle your workflow → TRENDING Get ready for another week of people telling you what they'd do with a $1.1B lottery jackpot — tomorrow night's Mega Millions drawing is back in 10-digit territory. Before you spend too much time daydreaming, consider: your odds of winning (one in 302m) are about the same as asking someone to pick one second out of their past nine years of life and then guessing the correct one. SNIPPETS The number of millionaires in the US has grown 35% since 2018 — a rate ~2x China's. More than 5.5m Americans have liquid assets of $1m+, a 62% increase over the last 10 years. Tennessee, the birthplace of country music, became the first US state to enact legislation to protect musicians from AI. The law, which goes into effect this summer, will bar AI tools from replicating artists' voices without consent. SAG-AFTRA ratified an AI protections contract for voice actors, requiring producers to negotiate with the actors' union before using AI voices in TV animation, and get consent before using an actor's voice to generate an AI version. Chick-fil-A is rolling back its promise to use chicken raised with "no antibiotics ever" and is instead promising chicken raised with "no antibiotics important to human medicine" starting this spring, all to avoid supply issues. A new kind of sausage: Dutch tech company Meatable said it's cut production time of its cultivated meat from eight days to four, which will bring its cost in line with animal meat. Chips Ahoy — Mondelez International's $1B, 61-year-old cookie brand — is changing its recipe next month, adding more cocoa and vanilla content. It's a risky play for a cookie that owns 53% of the US chocolate-chip cookie market. NBC will stream its live coverage of the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony on 150+ US IMAX screens. The July 26 event will be the first Games opener not held in a stadium, with Olympians set to float down the River Seine in ~100 boats. A long, long time: AMC, Alamo Drafthouse, and other theater chains are running a 20-hour, nine-movie Star Wars marathon on May 3-4 for $84/ticket. Get free stuff... Our referral program is the ultimate win-win — we get your friends reading The Hustle and you get to fuel your insatiable desire for free stuff. Pretty ideal, right? Scroll down to keep that party rolling. (P.S. The more referrals you send, the sooner we'll unlock new prizes.) Data point Turning a new leaf: The pandemic put us in touch with several new hobbies — lookin' at you, sourdough — some of which have stuck around since those isolated days of 2020. Gardening, it turns out, is one such pastime. Lawn and gardening activities hit a five-year high in 2022, with 80% of US households taking part, according to the National Gardening Association's 2023 survey. With that uptick came increased costs: Average household spending on gardening activities rose from $542 in 2021 to $616 in 2022. The trend has taken root among new hobbyists, with younger households seeing greater spending increases — a sign that the gardening industry could continue to grow. FIT THE BILL There are thousands of companies valued at $1B+. How many clues do you need to identify today's billion-dollar brand? Clue 1: Back in 1864, its humble beginnings saw eight merchants serving fishing and timber industries in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Today, its 94k+ employees serve 17m+ clients in 29 countries. Clue 2: Its mascot, Leo the lion, has taken every form imaginable: as a cartoon teaching kids about money, as a stuffed animal, and as an IRL costumed mascot at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. Clue 3: There should be no shame in not keeping up with its southern neighbor, Bank of America, which has 2x the market cap — this institution still ranks among the world's most valuable banks. 👇 Scroll to the bottom for the answer 👇 By the Numbers Digits: Bogus papers, dirty air, the 'Charlotte effect,' and more newsy numbers How a stingray bumped tourism, an academic paper problem, and more numbers. 2024-03-25T00:00:00Z Juliet Bennett Rylah 115: Times the phrase "As of my last knowledge update" appeared in a Google Scholar search of academic journals, per 404 Media. That's the phrase that ChatGPT, which only has knowledge up to a specific date, uses when it answers questions, indicating these supposedly peer-reviewed articles were composed by AI. It's a yikes, for sure, but 404 noted that many of these journals are of poor quality, will publish just about anything, and have long been an issue in the academic community. 7: Countries that had acceptable air quality, per a report from a Swiss company that examined data from air monitoring stations. Those seven countries included Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland, Mauritius, Australia, and New Zealand, plus territories Puerto Rico and French Polynesia. The most-polluted countries were Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, which all had over 10x the amount of small-particle pollution recommended by the World Health Organization. In the US, Columbus, Ohio, was the most-polluted city last year. 40%: Bump in traffic to Hendersonville, North Carolina's tourism website, per NPR. The 15k-person Appalachian town has received oversized attention thanks to Charlotte, a stingray who's pregnant despite not having a mate. Typically, the town only sees an influx of tourists in October thanks to its beautiful fall foliage, but "the Charlotte effect" has produced more foot traffic from curious visitors awaiting Charlotte's mysterious pup. 3,745: Pieces in Lego's new Dungeons & Dragons set, developed with Wizards of the Coast in honor of the game's 50th anniversary. The set, based on an idea from fan designer Lucas Bolt, includes various fantasy settings, a team of adventurers, and popular creatures from the game, like a displacer beast and an owlbear. It'll retail for $360, but comes with free quests and downloadable character sheets. Fun fact: Lego's largest set was its Art World Map, with 11k+ pieces. It's no longer available, but you can still buy Lego's second-largest set: the ~10k-piece Eiffel Tower. AROUND THE WEB 📅 On this day: In 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. factory in NYC killed 146 employees, leading to regulations to better protect factory workers. 🌝 That's interesting: An eclipse is coming on April 8. In fiction, they're often harbingers of doom. 🎧 My First Million: Sam and Shaan get into the economics of personality tests, including one used by 89% of Fortune 100 companies. 🏐 Game: Pikachu volleyball. 🐐 Aww: Goat games. SHARE THE HUSTLE Hey. Don't keep us a secret. Refer just 3 people and we'll send Hustle essentials as a thank you. Share this custom referral link: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=7598767985 Your referral count: 0 Today's Fit the Bill answer is Royal Bank of Canada (Market cap: $140.47B) Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Sara Friedman. Editing by: Ben "This email hit the Swede spot" Berkley. Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. PODCAST JOBS CONTACT US The Hustle, 2 Canal Park, Cambridge, MA 02141, US. 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