Call Center Company in Boulder, CO

Mike’s Bikes, the 18-store bike retail chain based in California’s Marin County, has acquired Boulder’s Full Cycle Bikes & Colorado Multisport in an all-cash deal.

The company has not disclosed the terms of the acquisition.

“Change is never easy, but we’re genuinely excited about the opportunities it brings — new places to ride and new riders to connect with,” Mike’s Bikes wrote on the Full Cycle transition website page. “If you have any questions about the changes we’re making, we encourage you to reach out or stop by any of our stores. We’d love to see you.”

As part of the transition, the Full Cycle Café will be temporarily closed.

“We know it’s been a beloved part of the experience here, and we’re taking time to thoughtfully explore what the future of the café could look like,” Mike’s Bikes wrote in the post.

The Café and repair shop had some draw due to the shop’s proximity to Pearl Street in downtown Boulder and the Foothills Freeway, a bike-friendly access point to “The Diagonal,” which runs from Boulder to Longmont, CO, and provides access to miles of rural roads beyond.

The bike shop and the Full Cycle Café bar are closed from June 17 to June 19 and plan to reopen as Mike’s Bikes ahead of the weekend. The retailer said it would operate on a limited capacity basis on Friday.

Mike’s Bikes is owned by Pon Holdings BV, a Dutch conglomerate in the transportation sector, according to Wikipedia. It is said to be one of the five largest bike manufacturers worldwide and “owns bicycle brands Caloi, Cannondale, Cervélo, Derby Cycle (owner of Focus), GT, Gazelle, IronHorse, Kalkhoff, Mongoose, Santa Cruz, Urban Arrow (cargo bikes), Veloretti, and Schwinn, among others.”

The company was founded in 1980 by Ben Pon, Jr., a former racing car driver and the son of Ben Pon, Sr., who had become a Volkswagen importer in the Netherlands in 1947. As of 2021, the Pon family continued to own the company.

Mike’s Bikes, founded in 1964, is one of the first Schwinn shops in Marin County, California. The chain now includes 14 shops in the state and now five stores in Colorado.

BRAIN reported that the Boulder, CO store will continue to sell Giant and Pon’s Cervélo bike brands and add Pon’s Cannondale, Santa Cruz, Urban Arrow, and Gazelle bike lines. The bike publication stated that the location will no longer sell Specialized, Ibis, Priority, Moots, or Kona bikes. For more on the transition, including competing bike brands, go to: BRAIN.

Images courtesy Mike’s Bikes

The National Weather Service in Boulder reported thunderstorms and hail along Colorado’s Front Range and across Eastern Plains earlier on Tuesday. It’s now warning the region should brace for more severe weather through the rest of the afternoon.

”Keep an eye on the sky and make sure you have a sturdy shelter to get indoors,” said Jennifer Stark, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Boulder.

Thunderstorms rolled through Colorado on Tuesday morning. The National Weather Service issued severe storm warnings for Boulder and Larimer County, which experienced heavy rain and hail during the initial round of severe weather.

Around 2:00 pm, the weather service issued severe thunderstorm warnings for the area around Denver International Airport, including parts of Adams, Denver and Weld counties. Forecasters were also tracking severe weather moving into the Eastern Plains near Fort Lupton.

A NWS alert warned of accumulating hail, torrential rainfall and deadly lightning in Southwestern Cheyenne County.

Those storms could bring quarter-sized hail large enough to damage vehicles. In the event of large hail, the weather service advises moving into a well-built structure and staying away from windows.

“ The good news is that so far the hail hasn't really been that big. It's been up to about an inch in diameter, which is right at that threshold for a severe thunderstorm warning, and a lot of it has been smaller than that,” Stark said.

Severe storms are expected to continue moving east over the next couple of hours before diminishing this evening.

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CU Boulder’s Zia Mehrabi is one of three researchers named international champions of the Frontiers Planet Prize for research that finds environmental and social benefits of agricultural diversification

Widespread agricultural diversification could improve the health of the world’s environment and that of its people, a landmark study published last year found.

Zia Mehrabi, assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been named one of three international champions in the Frontiers Planet Prize, the Frontiers Research Foundation announced today. Mehrabi and his team will receive $1 million in funding to advance their research.

The Frontiers Planet Prize celebrates breakthroughs in Earth system and planetary science that “address these challenges and enable society to stay within the safe boundaries of the planet’s ecosystem.” The prize puts scientific rigor and ingenuity at its heart, helping researchers worldwide accelerate society toward a green renaissance, the Frontiers Research Foundation says.

Professor Jean-Claude Burgelman, director of the Frontiers Planet Prize, said the planet faces immense threats that require bold, transformative solutions rooted in evidence and validated by science.

“Innovative yet scalable solutions are the only way for us to ensure healthy lives on a healthy planet,” Burgelman said. “By spotlighting the most groundbreaking research, we are helping scientists bring their work to the international stage and provide the scientific consensus needed to guide our actions and policies.”

Mehrabi, who leads the Better Planet Laboratory, was recognized, alongside his co-authors, for an article published last year in the journal Science titled “Joint environmental and social benefits from diversified agriculture.”

Laura Vang Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and Ingo Grass of the University of Hohenheim in Germany were lead authors of the paper, which had 58 co-authors. Claire Kremen of the University of British Columbia was a senior author and co-principal investigator on the study.

The researchers found that diversifying crops and animals and improving habitat, soil and water conservation on individual farms can improve biodiversity while improving or, at a minimum, not coming at a cost to yields. Additionally, diversified farming can yield social benefits and improve food security—showing improved food access or a reduced number of hungry months, for example, particularly in smallholder systems.

The more diversification measures farms employed, the more benefits accrued, researchers observed. Essentially, the team found evidence to move toward agriculture that more closely reflects natural systems.

“If you look at how ecosystems operate, it’s not just plants growing alone. It’s not just animals or soil,” Mehrabi said last year. “It’s all of these things working together.”

Using data from 2,655 farms across 11 countries and covering five continents, the researchers combined qualitative methods and statistical models to analyze 24 different datasets. Each dataset studied farm sites with varying levels of diversification, including farms without any diversification practices. This allowed the team to assess the effects of applying more diversification strategies.

Diversified farming differs from the dominant model of agriculture: growing single crops or one animal on large tracts of land. That efficient, “monoculture” style of farming is a hallmark of agriculture after the Green Revolution, which reduced global famine by focusing on high-yield crops that rely on fertilizers and pesticides.

“The Green Revolution did many, many great things, but it came with a lot of costs,” Mehrabi says, noting that synthetic fertilizers and pesticides harm the environment.

Also, to increase labor productivity, large farms rely on mechanization, which tends to “replace people with machines.”

“So, the idea of trying to engineer nature into our agricultural systems is somewhat antithetical to the whole way we think about agricultural development,” Mehrabi says.

Making a case for a different way of doing agriculture is one thing. Implementing it on a widespread basis is something else. The dominant view, fostered by “big ag” (short for agriculture), is that “if you want to do ag, you’ve got to do it this way,” Mehrabi says.

“Our work challenges that idea, but it’s a bit of a David-and-Goliath situation,” he adds. “We have the stone, but it hasn’t yet landed.”

But it’s necessary to confront Goliath, Mehrabi contends, noting that agriculture affects all the things people care about environmentally, including climate change, water security, biodiversity, pollution, land use and habitat destruction.

A third of the Earth’s land is used for agriculture, and about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions stem from agriculture, he notes. Climate change has reduced agricultural yields by as much as 5% to 10% in the last four decades, research has shown.

“If we want to do something about environmental issues, agriculture is one of the big buckets that we need to really, really start in.”

Separate from the research published in Science, Mehrabi has done modeling of the future state of agriculture globallyif the world continues business-as-usual farming. He found that in the next century, the number of farms is likely to be cut in half and the average size of farms would likely double.

Given that, along with what scientists know about the loss of natural ecosystems as farm sizes increase, “the future looks a little bit bleak,” Mehrabi says. But this new research shows it could be different.

Though he does not suggest that all farms must be small farms, he does advise that agriculture strive to diversify systems that have been “massively depleted and massively simplified.”

About the Frontiers Planet Prize, Mehrabi says he and his team are gratified to be recognized as one of three international champions. Additionally, he underscores the importance of the Frontiers Research Foundation’s financial commitment to this kind of research, calling it a “signal” to other funding entities that might follow suit.

“We need to really think about innovation in agriculture,” Mehrabi said. “We all need food to eat. We really need to innovate, and we should put money behind that. It’s worth it.”

Launched by the Frontiers Research Foundation on Earth Day 2022, the prize encourages universities worldwide to nominate their top three scientists working on understanding and putting forward pathways to stay within the safe operating space of nine planetary boundaries that are outlined by the Stockholm Resilience Center.

These nominations are then vetted at the national level, and the top scientists face an independent jury of 100—a group of renowned sustainability and planetary health experts chaired by Professor Johan Rockström—who vote for the National and International Champions.

Read a guest opinion by Zia Mehrabi and co-authors at this link. See a Q&A with Mehrabi about adding carbon-footprint labels on food at this link.

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The James Beard Foundation (JBF) Awards swept Chicago into a frenzy on Monday, June 16, at the Lyric Opera. Of all the Colorado contestants, upscale Italian restaurant Frasca Food and Wine in Boulder was named Outstanding Restaurant. This makes the restaurant’s collective fourth James Beard Award. Though there were six finalists headed into the final night of the ceremony, most of the Colorado contestants lost out.

That means Josh Niernberg for his work at Bin 707 Foodbar in Grand Junction did not win the Outstanding Chef award. In the Best New Restaurant category, Denver’s Alma Fonda Fina did not take home the gold, either. Further, Penelope Wong of Yuan Wonton did not win Best Chef: Mountain (CO, ID, MT, UT, WY), nor McLain Hedges and Mary Allison Wright for their drinks at Yacht Club. In Parker, Carolyn Nugent and Alen Ramos’s creations at Poulette Bakeshop lost in the Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker category.

The awards just keep rolling in for Frasca, though. In 2008, Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson won the then-applicable Best Chef: Southwest for his work at the restaurant. In 2013, the JBF awarded Frasca in the Outstanding Wine Service category. And in 2019, the Boulder restaurant loved for its inventive, seasonal dishes won the Outstanding Service award. In 2023, that old tire company Michelin came to town and honored the business with a star and an Outstanding Service award.

The night was a testament to the cuisine and work immigration brings to the United States. Only a few winners failed to mention the foodways that make their restaurants not just popular but possible. “If you are new to the country and you don’t speak the language, the hospitality industry is here for you,” Frasca Food and Wine’s partner and master sommelier Bobby Stukey said on stage.

• Frasca Food and Wine, Boulder, CO

Disclosure: Some Vox Media staff members are part of the voting body for the James Beard Awards. Eater is partnering with the James Beard Foundation to livestream the awards in 2025. All editorial content is produced independently of the James Beard Foundation.

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The restaurant and chef awards celebrate excellence across all types of dining experiences, from fine-dining to casual establishments.

BOULDER, Colo. — A Boulder restaurant has received one of the most prestigious honors in the culinary world.

Frasca Food and Wine won a 2025 James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant.

The restaurant, located at 1738 Pearl St. in Boulder, received the award for a "restaurant that demonstrates consistent excellence in food, atmosphere, hospitality and operations."

The 35th annual James Beard Award winners were announced at a ceremony in Chicago Monday night.

This was the 11th James Beard nomination for Frasca Food and Wine which was also honored with a coveted Michelin star in 2023.

“Congratulations to this year’s winners for this well-deserved recognition,” said chef Elizabeth Falkner, Awards Committee chair and James Beard Foundation trustee. “As someone who understands the transformative power of these awards, I’m thrilled to celebrate your exceptional talent and the catalyst this recognition provides for your continued growth.”

“We toast this year’s exceptional Restaurant and Chef Award winners,” said Dawn Padmore, VP of Awards, James Beard Foundation. “We’re also proud to welcome our first winners in the new beverage categories and celebrate their invaluable contributions to our industry. I also extend my thanks to our subcommittee members and judges, whose dedication and thoughtful work makes these Awards possible.”

> Full list of James Beard Award winners

Credit: Frasca

Six Colorado chefs and restaurants were nominated in April for the 2025 James Beard Awards, including restaurants, bakeries and cocktail bars in Denver, Boulder, Grand Junction and Parker.

The 2025 Colorado nominees were:

Other repeat nominees are Josh Niernberg (4), Penelope Wong (3), Carolyn Nugent (2) and Alen Ramos (2).

Alma Fonda Fina became Colorado's sixth Michelin-starred restaurant last year.