A charming origin story about a mom feeding hungry college kids who later became hungry young professionals, and a passionate customer base that fell in love with those recipes, does not guarantee a happy ending.

Even in the best of times, restaurant operators face a nearly impossible challenge.

In the current market, they need to balance rising rents, increasing labor costs, pricier ingredients, and a financially stressed customer base.

“It’s an incredibly high-cost, low-profit-margin business that, in the best of times, only barely works if you have almost a full house for every meal service that you’re selling,” Sean Kennedy, executive vice president for public affairs at the National Restaurant Association, told Time.

“If you can make that happen, you have a good shot of getting a 3% to 5% profit margin.”

That’s a bleak proposition that may speak to why Hannah and Marian Cheng, the founders of Mimi Cheng’s, which grew from one location into a small New York chain, have opted to close their final location to concentrate on their wholesale business.

Mimi Cheng’s is closing its final restaurant

Hannah and Marian Cheng built their restaurant business around what they learned from their mother, “Mimi.”

“Mimi taught us early: heritage meals aren’t only about recipes. They’re about what you choose to put in them and whom you share them with. She knew what farm-fresh vegetables added to a meal. The difference family-raised chicken makes. What pasture-raised pork brings to something made by hand with real intention,” they shared on their website.

More Restaurants:

• 52-year-old international restaurant chain closing all locations
• 46-year-old casual dining chain closes underperforming locations
• Classic burger chain has closed down all its restaurants

The restaurant part of that dream will soon come to an end as the sisters close their last remaining restaurant.

“Mimi Cheng’s is closing the doors of its East Village restaurant on Friday, September 11, ending a 12-year run as one of New York City’s go-to spots for steamed and fried jiaozi. The shop at 179 Second Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets is the brand’s last remaining brick-and-mortar location in the city, and its team says the closure comes because the lease has ended,” Hoodline.com reported.

Mimi Cheng’s at a glance

• Mimi Cheng’s was founded in 2014 by sisters Hannah and Marian Cheng, who opened their first location in New York City’s East Village using family dumpling recipes from their mother, Mimi, according to Mimi Cheng’s website.
• The sisters expanded Mimi Cheng’s to multiple New York City locations and became known for handmade Taiwanese-style dumplings and creative collaborations with restaurants including Katz’s Deli, Lucali, and Pizza Loves Emily, reported Time Out.
• Mimi Cheng’s previously closed its Upper West Side location at 309 Amsterdam Ave. in November 2024, saying it was consolidating its restaurants to keep the East Village location as its flagship while building its frozen dumpling business, shared the West Side Rag.
• Its Nolita location at 380 Broome St. also closed, leaving the East Village restaurant as Mimi Cheng’s only brick-and-mortar location before that restaurant’s September 2026 closure, added The Infatuation.
• The brand isn’t shutting down entirely. The sisters are shifting their focus to Mimi Cheng’s frozen dumplings, which are sold at Whole Foods and other retailers nationwide, according to Time Out.

What’s next for Mimi Cheng’s?

“Big news: we’re turning the page on a new chapter for Mimi Cheng’s!” the restaurant team shared on its Facebook page.

“Our East Village restaurant will close its doors on September 11th as our lease has come to an end, but this is far from goodbye,” the company added.

The company said the closure is a new beginning as it focuses on its wholesale dumpling business.

“While closing this storefront will be sentimental, it means we get to pour everything into what’s next. We could’ve never imagined that our little dumpling shop would turn into a nationwide frozen dumpling business. Our focus is now scaling, so Mimi Cheng’s can land on a lot more tables than one restaurant ever could. The dumplings aren’t going anywhere. They’re just getting a bigger home,” the Mimi Cheng’s team posted.

The company sells its dumplings through Amazon and at Whole Foods, as well as through other grocery chains nationwide.

Closing the store does not close the door on the company bringing back some of its famous collaborations as a freezer-aisle product.

“[Those] have included pastrami Reuben-inspired dumplings with Katz’s Deli, calzone dumplings with Lucali, and one featuring the famed roast chicken from the NoMad,” Time Out reported.

ALSO READ: McDonald’s cuts a fall favorite for the first time in a decade

Every few years, a company decides that a boring household product is actually an unsolved engineering problem. Sometimes that instinct produces something people genuinely want. Sometimes it produces a $400 juicer that squeezes bags.

The tell is almost always the price.

When a company enters a mature category at double the going rate, it is not competing on the product. It is competing on the story, and it is betting on a slice of buyers who treat expensive as proof of better.

Oral care has been one of the steadiest corners of consumer staples for decades. Three companies own most of it.

Procter & Gamble (PG) sells Oral-B and Crest. Colgate-Palmolive (CL) sells Colgate. Koninklijke Philips (PHG) holds the third spot with Sonicare.

The economics have been stable for years. Manual brushes and toothpaste move steady volume at low prices, and power brushes carry the margin.

Growth comes from walking people up the ladder, from a $5 manual brush to a $60 rechargeable to a $400 flagship. Every rung is a mix-shift win.

That ladder just got a new top rung, and neither incumbent built it.

Dyson launched the CameraJet on Sept. 1 for $499, putting a 100,000-pixel macro camera and a machine learning system inside the handle of a toothbrush. The camera reads the gaps between your teeth while you brush and fires a conical burst of mouthrinse at them.

Dyson has done this before with expensive hardware

The privately held company has a well-documented habit of walking into categories it has no obvious claim to and pricing itself above everyone already there.

It did it with hair dryers. It did it with air-purifying headphones that TheStreet covered when they reached the U.S. market. Now it has done it with the thing sitting next to your bathroom sink.

Related: Amazon is selling an ‘effective’ Oral-B electric toothbrush for just $60

The engineering claim is real enough. Dyson says the camera captures 28 images per second and can trigger the jet within 100 milliseconds of spotting a gap, with the targeting system trained on 470,000 dental images.

“Flossing is an awkward and time-consuming chore,” founder James Dyson said in a statement, according to The Next Web.

Oral-B power brush volume is moving the wrong way

Here is the part of this story I have not seen anyone else connect, and it is the part that actually matters if you own consumer staples.

Dyson is entering premium oral care at the exact moment the category leader is shrinking in it.

P&G’s oral care organic sales “decreased mid-single digits driven by a volume decline,” led by North America and Greater China, according to the company’s fiscal 2026 fourth-quarter results. Health care was P&G’s worst-performing segment that quarter, with volume down three percent.

That is the segment that houses Oral-B.

More Health & Biotech:

• Mark Cuban just picked a fight that goes beyond his usual beat
• A cancer vaccine years in the making just proved itself
• BofA biotech scorecard: Two buys and odd one out

Colgate’s growth, meanwhile, is coming from the bottom of the ladder rather than the top. Its oral care gains were driven by “toothpaste and manual toothbrush categories,” the company said in its second-quarter 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Colgate held 41.3% of the global toothpaste market and 32.7% of manual toothbrushes on a year-to-date basis, per that same filing.

Read those two disclosures together and a picture forms. The cheap end of oral care is holding up fine. The premium end, the part that carries the margin, is where the pressure is.

Dyson has walked directly into that gap with a device priced roughly $100 above the Philips Sonicare Prestige 9900 and the Oral-B iO Series 10, according to Engadget.

The refills are the actual business model

The $499 is the part that will drive the headlines. It is not the part I would watch.

Dyson built the CameraJet so that ordinary toothpaste and mouthwash interfere with it. Standard formulas foam too much for the camera to see through, so the company has developed its own low-foaming mouthrinse and a toothpaste made without sodium lauryl sulfate.

That is a razor-and-blades model wearing a lab coat. Here is what the ongoing bill looks like:

• Replacement brush heads run about $25 for a pair and need swapping every three months, according to TechRadar. 
• Dyson’s own toothpaste and mouthrinse each cost roughly $11.50, per that same TechRadar review.
• A 400-milliliter bottle of mouthrinse covers about 32 brushing sessions, per TechRadar.
• Annual spending on Dyson consumables could reach $200, according to Stuff, which tested the device for a week before launch.
• Each brush head carries an RFID tag that tracks usage and prompts replacement, per Engadget.

Run that math and the five-year cost of ownership clears $1,400 before you replace the handle.

That is the number that should interest anyone holding PG or CL. Not because Dyson will take meaningful share from either one in the next year. It will not.

Because Dyson just demonstrated that a household with disposable income will accept a subscription-shaped relationship with its toothbrush. Incumbents with distribution in every drugstore in America will notice.

What Dyson’s 69% plaque claim rests on

The company says lab testing found the CameraJet removed nearly 70% more plaque in hard-to-reach areas than premium electric toothbrushes, according to Fox Business.

That claim deserves a closer look before anyone treats it as settled.

The testing was conducted by Dyson, using a synthetic plaque substitute the company developed over five years with the National University of Singapore’s dentistry faculty.

That is a controlled comparison against a proxy material, not a clinical trial measuring outcomes in actual mouths over time. It is a reasonable engineering benchmark. It is not the same thing as evidence that your gums will be healthier in two years.

My reading of the disclosure is that Dyson is being careful with its language, which is usually a sign a company knows exactly where the limits of its data sit.

What this means for the oral care trade

The CameraJet will not move P&G’s or Colgate’s numbers this quarter. Dyson sells through its own website and its own stores, which is a rounding error against Walmart, Target, Amazon, and every pharmacy chain in the country.

The signal is what matters.

Consumer staples companies have spent three years telling investors that premiumization is the growth story, that shoppers will pay up for better versions of ordinary things. P&G’s fiscal 2026 numbers just showed that thesis failing in oral care specifically.

Then a vacuum company walked in and priced a toothbrush at $499 anyway.

One of those two readings of the consumer is wrong. If Dyson sells through, the incumbents have a product problem rather than a consumer problem, and that is fixable with better hardware.

If the CameraJet sits on shelves, then the ceiling on what an American household will pay to clean its teeth is lower than the staples pitch has assumed. That is a harder problem, and it shows up in mix and in margin.

Watch the reorder rate on those brush heads. That number will tell you which one it is long before either company puts it in a filing.

Related: Why an electric toothbrush is a smart investment — most cost $50 or less

Panera Bread has spent much of the past year changing what customers see when they walk into its restaurants.

To keep freshness alive and as part of its broader Panera RISE transformation strategy, the fast-casual restaurant is working overtime to cater to its customers.

The latest change is in how it tries to keep customers coming back.

Panera has rolled out a new points-based MyPanera rewards program for its more than 70 million loyalty members.

The change comes shortly after Andrew Rebhun joined Panera as chief marketing officer, putting the chain’s brand, digital business, loyalty program, and menu innovation under new leadership.

Rebhun, who has previously worked at Cava and held roles at McDonald’s, replaces Mark Shambura, who helped launch Panera’s RISE strategy.

His appointment puts an executive with experience in loyalty and digital growth in charge as Panera tries to get more out of an already massive customer base.

This new move places greater focus on customer retention as Panera continues its broader reset, which has included menu changes, restaurant closures, layoffs, and a major overhaul of its bakery production network.

What is Panera’s new reward program?

Panera’s new loyalty program launched nationwide in August, replacing its previous rewards structure with a more traditional points system.

Members now earn 10 points for every $1 spent. 

Rewards start at 250 points for a free bagel or mini bakery item and rise to 2,000 points for a full entree.

More Retail:

• Home Depot is making a big bet on cautious consumers
• Another state just banned a controversial retail pricing practice
• JPMorgan just flagged a slow-build food crisis

And don’t worry, previously earned rewards will carry over into the new program.

“From everyday favorites to exclusive offers, we have reimagined MyPanera to deliver more value with every purchase,” said Chief Digital Officer Joshua Fine.

The newly revised program offers what customers want most: “more transparency, better rewards, and more choice,” Fine added.

The chain also introduced MyPanera+, available to members who spend at least $300 in a calendar year. This will include additional benefits such as a birthday You Pick Two meal and bonus points on delivery purchases.

And its MyPanera+ Sip Club combines those benefits with Panera’s existing beverage subscription.

The new structure gives customers a clearer connection between spending and rewards at a time when restaurant chains are competing harder for repeat visits from value-conscious diners.

Panera’s reset goes beyond rewards

The loyalty overhaul is only one part of Panera’s broader transformation. Earlier this summer, the chain expanded its menu with new Market Bowls, premium salads, proteins, and frozen coffee beverages.

TheStreet previously reported that Panera also brought shrimp back to its menu after roughly a decade as it sought to expand its protein offerings.

Behind the scenes, Panera has been making even bigger changes.

Panera is closing all its regional Fresh Dough Facilities as it moves away from its longtime in-house dough-production network and toward outside artisan baking partners.

The company has also been reshaping its restaurant footprint. TheStreet reported in June that Panera had closed at least two dozen bakery-cafes across several states since the previous summer, even as it continued to open new locations.

However, based on TheStreet’s tally, Panera had 2,208 bakery cafes as of July 2025.

By July 28, 2026, that number had risen to 2,251, a net increase of 43 locations, despite the closures.

It suggests that the company is not simply shrinking its footprint, but repositioning it.

Panera is changing several parts of its business at once, including where it operates, how it produces its food, what it serves, and now how it rewards customers.

Currently, it already has more than 70 million MyPanera members.

The bigger question is whether a simpler rewards system and a new marketing chief can turn that enormous membership base into more frequent visits.

Related: McDonald’s quietly brings back snack discontinued 2 years ago