Booster Juice Partners with Canadian Developer to Create Video Games Exclusively Available at The Fit & Fun Zone in Toronto Pearson International Airport

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7 years ago

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Booster Juice Partners with Canadian Developer to Create Video Games Exclusively Available at The Fit & Fun Zone in Toronto Pearson International Airport

Raoul Bhatt CEO | Bhatt.ca (Left) Dale Wishewan CEO | BoosterJuice.ca

EDMONTON, Alberta – Dale Wishewan, President and CEO of Booster Juice, announced the launch of Booster Juice Game Studios at the Fit & Fun Zone Grand Opening in Toronto. He confirmed the newly formed studio will feature several new and highly anticipated games, consisting of mind challenges, 2D retro games and an interactive Microsoft Kinetic body motion detection games, developed by Bhatt.ca Game Studio. These titles will be made available exclusively at Toronto Pearson International Airport in the Booster Juice Fit & Fun Zone, which opened in October 2016.

This Grand Opening event launched a new store concept for Booster Juice, who transformed a passenger waiting area into a vibrant and interactive destination for commuters. The Fit & Fun Zone was designed to embrace the Booster Juice lifestyle; offering nutritious and delicious smoothies, freshly squeezes juices, grilled food and grab n’ go items, in addition to a dynamic concept that extends beyond the store to feature interactive large format games. The games were created to offer travelers the opportunity to stay active while on the go.

“We are truly excited about the Grand Opening of our fourth location at the Pearson Airport” said Dale Wishewan. “Our team is dedicated to pushing the envelope when it comes to store design, so working with the GTAA on the concept and Raoul Bhatt on the launch of Booster Juice Game Studios has been fantastic. These games can be enjoyed by individuals of all ages and skill levels, so we hope people enjoy them as much as we do.”

Bhatt.ca Game Studio CEO, Raoul Bhatt, commented “Millions of customers have come to expect the best in innovation and compelling content from Booster Juice, and Bhatt.ca Studios is proud to partner on these phenomenal titles. Partnering with Booster Juice creates a complementary blend of talents, a massive audience base and a shared passion to create something incredible for their customers and beyond.”

Game Descriptions
The motion game immerses players in an intense and cinematic world, enabling players to use their body for the hyper-realistic, dynamic and interactive environments. Booster Juice Surf places the “cool” you in board shorts riding a branded surf board in the centre of a giant wave. Points accumulate as you avoid dolphins and buoys while trying to keep your balance.

Juice Bar Jumper is a 2D running style game and closely resembles the recognizable Booster Juice stores. With incredibly cute illustrations and a suspenseful storyline, a strawberry speedily whisks across counter tops, earning extra points upon collecting yummy blueberries. As time passes, the difficulty increases.

In another 2D game, the same superstar character—a strawberry with a dashing smile—rides a Booster Juice cup like a rocket, fruits firing out instead flames. He flies through the skies avoiding evil candy, collecting tasty fruit and racking up the points.

The third game unravels a darker, more riveting plot involving the destiny of the strawberry. This is a uniquely-styled, intense game, with challenges above and below, where the player has to double tap to slip in between terrifying blenders. In these vibrantly drawn worlds, players must use a variety of skills to survive and gain points.

Additional games were also designed to challenge your mind. These puzzles are formulated to make you think as you match fruit and test your reflexes. Certainly the game play experience is enhanced while sipping one of Booster Juice’s delicious smoothies.

(Left to Right: Giovanna Verilli | Associate Director for retail Food and Beverage GTAA, Scott Collier VP Customer and Terminal Services, Raoul Bhatt CEO Bhatt.ca Inc, Dale Wishewan CEO Booster Juice, Suzanne Merell Senior Manager Food and Beverage GTAA)

About Booster Juice
The first Booster Juice was opened in Sherwood Park, Alberta in November 1999 by Dale Wishewan, Booster Juice President & CEO, a guy who thought it would be a good idea to sell smoothies in the middle of a Canadian winter. Turns out, taste trumps temperature, and 17 years later there are over 300 locations worldwide. Booster Juice serves its intensely loyal customers a delicious, convenient and healthy alternative to fast food. In addition to their signature smoothies, their menu offers fresh-squeezed juices, grilled food, and snacks. A vibrant brand that attracts an active clientele, Booster Juice has earned multiple awards for the concepts unique offerings and store design.

About Bhatt.ca
Raoul Bhatt has combined his design and coding skills to become the current CEO of his company, Bhatt.ca. His company has created a winning formula allowing him to win contracts with companies like Twitter, Yahoo, Bosch, Edmonton Oilers, Edmonton Eskimos, Calgary Flames, Wrestlemania, Northlands Park, Carlton University, Edmonton Police Service (plus Alberta’s 14 other police agencies), among others. One of Bhatt.ca’s software, FireText, was used during the live event surrounding President Obama’s inauguration. They specialize in video games, desktop software and web and mobile app development.

For further information, please contact:

Booster Juice

Karen Enticknap, National Marketing Lead

Phone: 780 293 3064

Email: [email protected]

Bhatt

Raoul Bhatt

Phone: 780 498 3779

Email: [email protected]

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Automotive

The EV ‘Bloodbath’ Arrives Early

Published on April 28, 2024

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

Ever since March 16, when presidential candidate Donald Trump created a controversy by predicting President Joe Biden’s efforts to force Americans to convert their lives to electric-vehicle (EV) lifestyles would end in a “bloodbath” for the U.S. auto industry, the industry’s own disastrous results have consistently proven him accurate.

The latest example came this week when Ford Motor Company reported that it had somehow managed to lose $132,000 per unit sold during Q1 2024 in its Model e EV division. The disastrous first quarter results follow the equally disastrous results for 2023, when the company said it lost $4.7 billion in Model e for the full 12-month period.

While the company has remained profitable overall thanks to strong demand for its legacy internal combustion SUV, pickup, and heavy vehicle models, the string of major losses in its EV line led the company to announce a shift in strategic vision in early April. Ford CEO Jim Farley said then that the company would delay the introduction of additional planned all-electric models and scale back production of current models like the F-150 Lightning pickup while refocusing efforts on introducing new hybrid models across its business line.

General Motors reported it had good overall Q1 results, but they were based on strong sales of its gas-powered SUV and truck models, not its EVs. GM is so gun-shy about reporting EV-specific results that it doesn’t break them out in its quarterly reports, so there is no way of knowing what the real bottom line amounts to from that part of the business. This is possibly a practice Ford should consider adopting.

After reporting its own disappointing Q1 results in which adjusted earnings collapsed by 48% and deliveries dropped by 20% from the previous quarter, Tesla announced it is laying off 10 percent of its global workforce, including 2,688 employees at its Austin plant, where its vaunted Cybertruck is manufactured. Since its introduction in November, the Cybertruck has been beset by buyer complaints ranging from breakdowns within minutes after taking delivery, to its $3,000 camping tent feature failing to deploy, to an incident in which one buyer complained his vehicle shut down for 5 hours after he failed to put the truck in “carwash mode” before running it through a local car wash.

Meanwhile, international auto rental company Hertz is now fire selling its own fleet of Teslas and other EV models in its efforts to salvage a little final value from what is turning out to be a disastrous EV gamble. In a giant fit of green virtue-signaling, the company invested whole hog into the Biden subsidy program in 2021 with a mass purchase of as many as 100,000 Teslas and 50,000 Polestar models, only to find that customer demand for renting electric cars was as tepid as demand to buy them outright. For its troubles, Hertz reported it had lost $392 million during Q1, attributing $195 million of the loss to its EV struggles. Hertz’s share price plummeted by about 20% on April 25, and was down by 55% for the year.

If all this financial carnage does not yet constitute a “bloodbath” for the U.S. EV sector, it is difficult to imagine what would. But wait: It really isn’t all that hard to imagine at all, is it? When he used that term back in March, Trump was referring not just to the ruinous Biden subsidy program, but also to plans by China to establish an EV-manufacturing beachhead in Mexico, from which it would be able to flood the U.S. market with its cheap but high-quality electric models. That would definitely cause an already disastrous domestic EV market to get even worse, wouldn’t it?

The bottom line here is that it is becoming obvious even to ardent EV fans that US consumer demand for EVs has reached a peak long before the industry and government expected it would.

It’s a bit of a perfect storm, one that rent-seeking company executives and obliging policymakers brought upon themselves. Given that this outcome was highly predictable, with so many warning that it was in fact inevitable, a reckoning from investors and corporate boards and voters will soon come due. It could become a bloodbath of its own, and perhaps it should.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

Business

Honda deal latest episode of corporate welfare in Ontario

Published on April 28, 2024

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss and Tegan Hill

If Honda, Volkswagen and Stellantis are unwilling to build their EV battery plants in Ontario without corporate welfare, that sends a strong signal that those projects make little economic sense.

On Thursday, the Trudeau and Ford governments announced they will dole out an estimated $5 billion in corporate welfare to Honda so the auto giant can build an electric vehicle (EV) battery plant and manufacture EVs in Ontario. This is the third such deal in Ontario, following similar corporate welfare handouts to Volkswagen ($13.2 billion) and Stellantis ($15.0 billion). Like the previous two deals, the Honda deal comes at a significant cost to taxpayers and will almost certainly fail to create widespread economic benefits for Ontarians.

The Trudeau and Ford governments finalized the Honda deal after more than a year of negotiations, with both governments promising direct incentives and tax credits. Of course, this isn’t free money. Taxpayers in Ontario and the rest of Canada will pay for this corporate welfare through their taxes.

Unfortunately, corporate welfare is nothing new. Governments in Canada have a long history of picking their favoured firms or industries and using a wide range of subsidies and other incentives to benefit those firms or industries selected for preferential treatment.

According to a recent study, the federal government spent $84.6 billion (adjusted for inflation) on business subsidies from 2007 to 2019 (the last pre-COVID year). Over the same period, provincial and local governments spent another $302.9 billion on business subsidies for their favoured firms and industries. (Notably, the study excludes other forms of government support such as loan guarantees, direct investments and regulatory privileges, so the total cost of corporate welfare during this period is actually much higher.)

Of course, when announcing the Honda deal, the Trudeau and Ford governments attempted to sell this latest example of corporate welfare as a way to create jobs. In reality, however, there’s little to no empirical evidence that corporate welfare creates jobs (on net) or produces widespread economic benefits.

Instead, these governments are simply picking winners and losers, shifting jobs and investment away from other firms and industries and circumventing the preferences of consumers and investors. If Honda, Volkswagen and Stellantis are unwilling to build their EV battery plants in Ontario without corporate welfare, that sends a strong signal that those projects make little economic sense.

Unfortunately, the Trudeau and Ford governments believe they know better than investors and entrepreneurs, so they’re using taxpayer money to allocate scarce resources—including labour—to their favoured projects and industries. Again, corporate welfare actually hinders economic growth, which Ontario and Canada desperately need, and often fails to produce jobs that would not otherwise have been created, while also requiring financial support from taxpayers.

It’s only a matter of time before other automakers ask for similar handouts from Ontario and the federal government. Indeed, after Volkswagen secured billions in federal subsidies, Stellantis stopped construction of an EV battery plant in Windsor until it received similar subsidies from the Trudeau government. Call it copycat corporate welfare.

Government handouts to corporations do not pave the path to economic success in Canada. To help foster widespread prosperity, governments should help create an environment where all businesses can succeed, rather than picking winners and losers on the backs of taxpayers.