Thursday, October 8, 2026
Lamb Weston, a leading supplier of frozen fries to restaurant chains, grew North American sales volume for a seventh consecutive quarter even as fast-food traffic fell. Its executives credit chicken chains, whose traffic rose 4 per cent, for part of the gain. In Europe, where it says the industry had too much capacity, it has stopped making fries at a Dutch plant.
Eurometal says 300,000 European manufacturing jobs will go before the end of this year, and marked the claim by carrying ten coffins around the European Commission. The stunt makes the figure easy to discount. The cost gap underneath it does not depend on the stunt being fair.
Subsidy programmes brought cell manufacturing to the continent on a schedule. The electricity those factories need arrives on a different one, set by transmission queues nobody budgeted political attention for.
Freight moves by road across Europe not because the track is missing but because the places to load and unload it are. The investment now going in is unglamorous, terminal-shaped and long overdue.