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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Ashley Daigneault

Review: Setting Up A Smart Indoor Grow System

I am not a person who keeps plants alive. Two dogs and a human, I can manage but for some reason, remembering to water an indoor plant is not something that makes it into my daily routine. So when my mother-in-law got me a “Smart Garden 3” from Click and Grow, I was slightly skeptical that I would not be successful at growing lovely herbs in my kitchen.

But once I read a little more, I realized that the entire smart indoor growing system was designed to be idiot-proof setup and equipped with enough technology to barely need any human involvement or interaction at all. (This are the kinds of tech I am here for: devices that make up for my shortcomings. I’m one personal trainer robot away from living my best life.) Click and Grow is the Keurig of indoor gardens and took the idea of putting coffee in pods and instead, put a combination of seeds and nutrient-rich soil inside “plant capsules.”

The unboxing of my indoor smart herb garden

In addition to the three basil capsules that came with my Smart Garden 3 (you can get bigger gardens and therefore, grow more capsules at one time), Click and Grow allows users to order different herbs, flowers, fruits and vegetables from their site or on Amazon. It even has a subscription program where you can sign up to receive regular deliveries of pods.

The device itself was a little smaller than I expected – but also taller, and the shelf I planned to put it on was too narrow. The bottom of the garden has a holding tank for the water as well as three circular spots for each seed pod.

The overhanging handle at the top is the grow light – a completely automated light I might add that rotates when the light is on and the intensity of light based on best grow practices for the plant you are growing.

On the top of each pod is a QR code – this is where the “smart” part of the name comes in. The garden comes out of the box just like this, so the first step in the instructions is to download the Click and Grow app.

The app is easy to navigate and once you open it, it prompts you to choose what indoor garden device you have and then you’re able to add plants to your garden. The QR code on the top of each plant capsule is scannable in the app, and the above screen appears with the plant’s “birthday” and details. You can also rename them to help you remember which plant is which – helpful especially if you are planting three of the same kind. (They also give you the old fashioned garden tags you can write on that stick up from each capsule.)

If you click the water icon, you can record when you watered your plant, therefore giving the app the ability to remind you when it’s time to water again. But because the water tank underneath holds more water than each plant needs daily and doles it out according to the plant’s needs, you don’t have to water daily. Or even weekly. Every 13-14 days, you have to fill the tank back up, but the device itself has a visual cue in addition to the app.

(The app has additional functionality like an album where you can upload pictures of the plant as it grows and a grow icon where you can put in measurements. I…am not that involved in my basil’s growth. I know, neglectful. My son is the one who checks on it daily.)

Once you scan each plant into your app, you remove the tops to each capsule which reveals another white cover, this time with a hole in the middle. This is where the plant will inevitably emerge as it grows. The kit also comes with three plastic domes and the instructions say to take each dome and place it on the top of each capsule to create a greenhouse-like environment for the seeds and soil. Once you start to see greenery and the plants begin to grow, you can remove the domes.

The next step was to add water. There is a rectangular spot on the top of the garden next to the capsule spots and the indicator inside rises as you add water. I counted the number of cups it took to fill the tank and it was around seven cups for the model of indoor garden I am using (Smart Garden 3).

The final step of setup is to plug in the garden. The instructions do warn you that the light basically rotates – 18 hours on, 6 hours off – so if you don’t want your device to go on in the middle of the night, you should plug it in for the first time in the morning. I guess that would matter more if you were keeping your indoor garden near your bedroom or you lived in a small apartment. Ours is on the kitchen counter, far from our beds and not where anyone is usually in the middle of the night, so I plugged it in the afternoon. Sure enough, ours cycles off as I’m waking up for the day. The light is pretty bright though, it’s almost as strong as the overhead light above our kitchen sink.

RESULTS: We are only a little over two weeks in, but so far, it’s been one of the easiest plant-growing experiences I have ever had. I’ve watered it a total of one time and the plants are finally started to grow little basil leaves. They look incredibly green and healthy and my four-year-old son is fascinated by them.

Click and Grow says it can take 4-6 weeks to have fully matured plants but they can last for a while, and you’re encouraged to trim them in a way that promotes regeneration.

I’m looking forward to having fresh basil right from my own kitchen and I’m already trying to decide what to grow next – lettuce or strawberries or flowers?! Too many to choose from. I can definitely see the appeal of systems like these – they are budget friendly (the startup kit was $50 for the device and the basil capsules) at least to start – and they give you the option to have fresh produce in any season with little effort.

If you read some of the Amazon reviews, many people point out that the refills themselves are pricey – up to $20 for rosemary and tomatoes. Given that plant seeds are a dollar or two at any garden shop, that price might prove unsustainable. However, there seem to be plenty of online guides on how to take the pods and make your own capsules to work with the system.

I’ll post an update when we have fully grown plants and we taste our first harvest.

In 2018, Seaweed Is The New Plastic

It’s no secret that the world produces—and wastes—mass amounts of plastic. But when you actually take a look at the numbers, it’s downright shocking.

National Geographic says that of the whopping 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic the world has produced, 6.3 billion metric tons have become plastic waste. And of those 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste, only nine percent has been recycled. That means 79 percent of all the world’s plastic ends up in landfills and ultimately, the oceans.

Fortunately, this is one problem that some foodtech startups are tackling by searching for sustainable materials to replace plastic packaging. A major contender in the running? Seaweed.

For the past eight years, seaweed’s place as the alternative raw material of choice has grown, and there are already several startups developing a wide range of applications for seaweed, from biofuel to cosmetics and food to pharmaceuticals. An early innovator, Loliware launched its first range of cups made from agar that are safe to consume; agar is extracted from red seaweed. Since then, startups have come out with edible water bottles made from brown seaweed and one group won a prestigious design award for their use of seaweed in commercial packaging for perfume and other goods.

Wondering how seaweed can possibly become the new plastic? It’s not as outlandish as it sounds.

First, seaweed is cheap, easy to harvest and extract, and readily accessible—it is available on every coastline. And, when compared to other potential sustainable materials, seaweed is the clear winner. For example, bioplastics, which are made from starches such as polylactic acid, require fresh water and fertilizer to grow—seaweed doesn’t. In fact, seaweed can grow up to three meters per day.

Because it is so abundant, just 0.03% of the brown seaweed in the world could replace all the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles used every year.

Seaweed’s biggest potential lies in disposable packaging. Inspired by peelable fruits (such as bananas and oranges), the idea is to use seaweed as a biodegradable container. By replacing unsustainable plastic containers, seaweed packaging would solve the problem of the shelf-life gap—the difference between the biodegradability of the container and that of what’s in the container.

Milk is a great example of this. Pasteurized cow’s milk has a shelf life of about one week – but the plastic jugs they are sold in? Each container could take up to 500 years to decompose. Seaweed packaging can decompose in around 4-6 weeks

Replace that plastic bottle with seaweed packaging, and you have a far more comparable shelf-life ratio; seaweed packaging biodegrades in soil in only four to six weeks. Plus, unlike plastic, seaweed doesn’t break down into micro-particles that are impossible to collect.

The problem has been getting more attention lately – two years ago the Ellen McArthur Foundation, a UK-based nonprofit put out a report and launched a new initiative called the New Plastics Economy, calls on major manufacturers to adopt circular modes or production and consumption for plastics where reuse and recycling becomes the responsibility of the makers of plastic containers (instead of hoping consumers do it) as opposed to a linear one which exists now.

Statistics in the report are sobering; according to the foundation “95% of the value of plastic packaging material, worth $80-120 billion annually, is lost to the economy” and they predict by 2050 (just 32 years from now), the world’s oceans will contain more plastic than fish.

Speaking of oceans, there’s another reason seaweed trumps plastic – it actually reduces global warming. Besides being cheaper, more accessible, and more sustainable, seaweed absorbs CO2 and mitigates ocean acidity. Some startups have started to pop up around seaweed farming and maintenance – like New York’s GreenWave, who are building autonomous seaweed farms to both reduce costs and reduce global warming.

2018 might be the year of seaweed and generally more innovation around sustainable packaging and circular life cycle strategies to steer the world away from its intense reliance on plastic.

Smart Kitchen Appliances: What If “Smart” Means Superior Instead Of Connected?

One of the core discussions around the smart kitchen at SKS over the past three years has been the function and usability of smart devices in the kitchen. What devices will actually help us cook better food more easily and what are just silly attempts at connectivity for connectivity’s sake?

Breville has a different take on what makes an appliance smart, and it goes well beyond the ability to connect to its devices via a smart app. The new Breville Smart Oven Air has unique technology that allows for incredibly precise temperature control and can actually change how the heat is distributed. In other words, depending on the requirements of the specific dish you’re cooking, you can make the oven hotter at the front, top, bottom, or back of the chamber.

Allen Weiner of The Spoon sat down with Scott Brady, General Manager of Global Marketing at Breville at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit to talk about how Breville’s smart oven makes life easier in the kitchen. According to Brady, “this precise heat distribution lets you complete a lot of simple cooking tasks a lot better.”

For example, if you’re baking a cake, you’ll want the heat focused on the bottom of the oven to prevent it from cracking; whereas, for a pizza, you’ll want the heat evenly distributed throughout. Both are possibilities with the Breville oven, so that you can get the perfect finish no matter what you’re cooking. And the guesswork of how to heat and at what temperature isn’t left up to the user – the oven will course correct and heat to perfection no matter what the dish.

Another trend in kitchen appliances seems to be more all-in-one functionality. The future kitchen will likely not have a slow cooker, an oven, a toaster, a microwave and a sous vide machine but rather one or two devices that does most of that with ease. Breville is trying to pull that off with the Smart Oven Air. For one, it’s bringing in air-frying, which is a much healthier way to prepare your favorite fried foods. Instead of using hot oil, the oven uses fast-moving convection heat to mimic the effect of a traditional deep-fryer. Precise temperature control and regulated air movement mean that this oven can also dehydrate fruit, as well as act as a slow-cooker.

The question is: The Breville oven may be smart, but where does the company stand on connectivity?

For Breville, Brady says, “We don’t want to be connected for connected’s sake.” Instead, their goal is to create products that offer unique, new technology that’s truly helpful—not cumbersome. The future of smart kitchen devices is creative technology that actually makes culinary tasks easier for the user when combined with the convenience of an app, a built-in recipe database and intelligence baked into the device itself.

Brady says Breville is working on products that meet this promise, and you can expect them in 2018.

Building A Common Language For Food

Perhaps the most overused buzzword in the past several years is IoT – Internet of Things. We’ve even seen IoE (Internet of Everything) and IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) emerge – but this year at SKS 2017, we were introduced to another Internet of phrases – one that has a chance to completely transform how we interact with food in our lives.

IoF stands for the Internet of Food, an effort to create a digital language and infrastructure for food. At the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit, Dr. Matthew Lange of UC Berkeley and IC-Foods presented on the beginnings of IoF, describing it as “bring[ing] a common data language and ontology to the world of food and the impact on activities, such as food shopping and cooking.”

Despite its name, the Internet of Food is not just about food; it’s about every process and industry related to food, such as the environment, agriculture and health. The idea is to create a language to operationalize all food-related data pertaining to these subjects and impact every industry that may touch the food chain.

This means thinking about food outside of the kitchen—before it gets into the kitchen, and after it leaves the kitchen before we eat it. Lange explains that IoF is about annotating these processes and building a vocabulary that can explain the likes of flavor components, nutrient components, energy usage, etc. By developing an ontology about how food moves through the supply chain, farmers, for example, can be given more appropriate advice about how to best grow, store, and deliver food.

When it comes to smart things in the kitchen, most people immediately jump to thinking about appliances. But Lange insists we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Suppose, for instance, you have a sensor that measures the precise humidity and temperature of a drawer in your refrigerator. Seems handy, right? “But this doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know at what humidity and temperature that spinach should be stored,” notes Dr. Lange.

This is where the Internet of Food comes in. When we bring smart into the kitchen, we have to think one step before appliances and gadgets and get smart about food itself first—and we have the data to do it.

There is already a plethora of food data available: there are traditional data sets harvested from governmental and private researchers, and there is data about food sourced from the Internet of Things. The vision for the Internet of Food is to combine all these data sets and develop an ontology to tag the data, making it interoperable between scientific disciplines and different people on the supply chain.

Beyond technical efficiency, the IoF also aims to improve perhaps the best part about food: its flavor. The question is: How can we know which flavors go well together? Lange makes an analogy to musical notes; if you dissect a musical scale, you’ll see that C plays in harmony with E, but no so much with F#. What if we can apply this systematic principle to food and food flavors? According to Lange, with a developed ontology for food, we can find an algorithm to make sense of why certain flavors are in harmony with one another.

The Internet of Food expands “smart” out of the kitchen into every process related to food harvesting, shopping, and cooking. Watch Dr. Matthew Lange’s full talk from the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit:

Oliver Aims To Take One Pot Cooking To The Next Level

The holy grail of convenience cooking has always been the one pot solution. Since the early 1970s, the CrockPot and other less famous brands of slow cooking machines dominated the kitchen as the solution for “set it and forget it” meals. Whether it was pork roasts, applesauce, stews or chili, the Crock Pot lets users combine (mostly) raw ingredients, turn the device on and come back later in the day to a fully cooked meal. In 2009, with the rise of the electric pressure cooker, the Instant Pot debuted and the debate began as to which technology was actually more useful.

The Instant Pot has a slow cooker feature, but the love of the device comes from its ability to produce cooked food in a much shorter amount of time through pressure cooking.

But whether you’re team Crock Pot or team Instant Pot, one thing remains true: one pot cooking tech hasn’t changed much in the last 40+ years. They still require users to dump a slew of ingredients all at once into a large bowl (or manually add different ingredients at different times) and hope it all cooks perfectly. But not every food item requires the same amount of time – or the same levels of heat – to cook.

This was the challenge Else Labs was trying to tackle with new one pot automated cooking machine Oliver. The technology and device design allows ingredients to be divided into dispensing canisters and then placed into the pot for cooking when the recipe-driven app tells it to.

Else Labs Founder & CEO Khalid Aboujassoum sat down with The Spoon’s Allen Weiner at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit.

“This technology takes slow cooking to a new level. You can taste every ingredient – they all have the right texture and right flavor because they were cooked correctly,” said Aboujassoum.

Oliver isn’t exactly a slow cooker; it mimics the way you’d cook on a stove top (saute onions first, add vegetables, cook meat around it, make the broth separate, etc) – but it enables automation and connectivity to take over and relieve the cook from standing over the stove for the entire process.

Oliver does what Crock Pot and Instant Pot can’t – understand the sequence and temperature of how each ingredient should be cooked and mimic those actions the way a human cook would. Oliver dispenses at the right time and heats to the right temperature with a robotic stirring arm built in to stir as needed.

“Tell Oliver ‘I need food by six’ and the machine will do the math for you in terms of when to start, stir, dispense and stop,” said Aboujassoum.

Another differentiator? Oliver records the work of pros so busy home cooks can replicate their work. According to Aboujassoum, the recipes generated from the Oliver app are all created with professional chefs. As the chefs make their recipes with Oliver, Oliver and the app capture all the actions, recording the sequence so it can be automated and replicated for Oliver users. Eventually, the plan is to let the Oliver user community contribute and add recipes using this same method to capture a more diverse range of content.

It took almost 40 years for the Crock Pot to have a serious competitor but it seems the Instant Pot may not enjoy the same length of time as a crowd favorite. Oliver is poised to launch in 2018.

 

Sears Cuts Ties With Whirlpool In Another Effort To Survive

For almost a century, Sears carried staple appliance brands from Whirlpool including Maytag, JennAir and KitchenAid. But amidst the retailer’s struggles to remain profitable in a tough environment, Sears has announced it is cutting ties to Whirlpool and will no longer carry the brand’s appliances.

It appears that the retailer’s decision stemmed from Whirlpool’s attempt to raise margins in an increasingly competitive appliance market environment. In a statement, Sears commented, “Whirlpool has sought to use its dominant position in the marketplace to make demands that would have prohibited us from offering Whirlpool products to our members at a reasonable price.”

The decision is effective immediately and Sears reported that it would sell off the rest of its Whirlpool inventory while immediately pulling subsidiary brands including Maytag and KitchenAid from store floors. Sears will continue to sell its Kenmore brand and other popular appliance brands including GE, Bosch, Samsung and Electrolux.

These recent changes may not be enough to keep Sears from going under and the announcement comes in the last quarter of a rocky year for Sears; the company has been in the process of closing less profitable stores, including all those in Canada and has attempted to reinvigorate its e-commerce efforts through a partnership with Amazon. In a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” mentality, Sears signed a deal with the Seattle based e-commerce giant to sell Kenmore appliances on Amazon.

Sears business dealings with Whirlpool aren’t entirely over though, the company still manufactures the Sears Kenmore line of appliances and will continue to do so according to Sears. Kenmore is attempting to remain competitive in the connected appliance space, launching a new suite of smart kitchen appliances with Amazon Alexa compatibility at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit.

Whirlpool, on the other hand, has spent the past several years dipping their toes into the smart kitchen space, first partnering with food platform startup Innit, then announcing voice connectivity inside their devices and after dissolving the Innit partnership, buying Yummly, one of the internet’s biggest food & recipe sites.

Hot Off The Press From #SmartKitchen17

We were lucky to have an incredible cadre of journalists at the Smart Kitchen Summit this year, many of them joining on stage as panelists and moderators. Including the event itself, we saw coverage of several company announcements that happened at SKS from groups like Kenmore and NutriBullet.

Here’s a quick highlight reel and some stories to read more about what happened at this year’s Summit:

SmartBrief highlighted the discussions around the future of food retail & grocery, saying:

“The future of food was the overarching topic of discussion at the Smart Kitchen Summit last week in Amazon’s backyard, Seattle, Wash., and while many sessions honed in on new appliances in the consumer kitchen and new technologies to make cooking easier, one session focused on the future of grocery. Focusing on the consumer and how their behavior, demands and perceptions have changed to influence the industry today, Erik Wallin, co-founder of Northfork, a Sweden-based personal shopper service for retailers; Josh Sigel, COO of Innit; and Mike Lee, founder of The Future Market, a forecasting agency that builds concept products and experiences to imagine what the world of food will look like in the next 10-25 years, spoke about the challenges and opportunities that technology represents for the food retail industry.”

Digital Trends covered several new product announcements at SKS, including GE FirstBuild’s introduction of precision bakeware and NutriBullet’s new smart blender.

From the FirstBuild announcement:

“While it won’t be ready for Thanksgiving at your relatives’ abode, GE Appliances and FirstBuild will soon release a line of smart Precision Bakeware — pans that alert you when the brownies are done via an app. FirstBuild was at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle this week to announce the new products. There are smart pans, ovens, and grills, but this is one of the few pieces of the connected kitchen focused on baking.”

From the NutriBullet story:

NutriBullet, along with Perfect Company, wants to make keeping tabs on nutrition a bi”t more seamless with its new NutriBullet Balance blender. The smart blender — introduced this week at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle — has an accompanying app and integrated scale and can recommend recipes based on what you like and your diet.”

CNET’s Ashlee Clark Thompson was on hand not only to moderate a stellar panel on the role of the display (countertop, on fridges, etc) will play on video content for the kitchen, she was also cranking out stories for CNET on announcements like Kenmore’s lineup of smart kitchen appliances. From the piece:

“Kenmore, the appliance brand owned by Sears, has strengthened its ties to Amazon. Its new line of internet-connected refrigerators will work with the Alexa voice-activated digital assistant, the company announced this week at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle.

The Wi-Fi-enabled refrigerators will send alerts to your phone if you leave a door open, when you need to replace a filter and if there are power outages. You’ll also be able to adjust your freezer and refrigerator temperatures when you’re away.”

Celebrity chef and Food Network star stopped by to chat with the NYT Cooking Executive Director Amanda Rottier on stage at SKS and discussed the role of technology and recipes and how the former is impacting the latter. Food & Wine covered their talk and Florence’s announcement that he is joining Innit as their Chief Content & Innovation Officer:

“‘Recipes served a purpose back in the day,” Florence told the audience “but inflexible recipes don’t work with the modern lifestyle anymore.’ Today’s recipe content is one dimensional because it doesn’t know who I am, my family’s nutrition needs and likes/dislikes, the food I have in my fridge, or the appliances I have in my home.’

Innit, on the other hand, does know all of these things. The smart kitchen maker aims to use technology to create a centralized hub for the kitchen, from software that knows what groceries you just bought and can suggest combinations and preparations based on your taste, to automated stoves and ovens that cook the food while you’re away.”

We were excited to have New York Times National Food Correspondent Kim Severson at the Smart Kitchen Summit this year to scope out how tech might be changing cooking for mainstream consumers. While Severson was skeptical about the role of technology and if the vision from some at SKS was took focused on replacing what people love about cooking, it’s always great to have insight from journalists who have their finger on the pulse of consumer behavior.

Severson’s piece in the NYT included:

“The conference, now in its third year, brings together people on the front lines of kitchen technology to try to figure out how to move the digital revolution deeper into the kitchen. The kitchen is where Americans spend 60 percent of their time at home when they are not sleeping, said Yoon Lee, a senior vice president at Samsung. That’s why so many tech companies are focused on it.

Almost everyone here this week at Benaroya Hall, the home of the Seattle Symphony — whether an executive from a major appliance manufacturer, a Google engineer or a hopeful young entrepreneur with a popular Kickstarter concept — agreed that it was only a matter of five to 10 years before artificial intelligence had a permanent seat at the dinner table.”

Huge thanks to all our friends in the press who attended the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit, we look forward to sharing insights into next year and beyond about the future of cooking, food and the kitchen.

This Company Uses Blockchain To Fight Global Food Fraud

Sometimes bad food is caused by undercooking or leaving fresh foods out too long – but often it’s because the item was either fake or contaminated before it even reached retail or a restaurant. After suffering a terrible case of food poisoning likely due to this problem while visiting Shanghai, Mitchel Weinberg was inspired to do something about international food industry fraud.

A former trade-consultant, Weinberg founded Inscatech, a global network of investigators that down evidence of food industry fraud and malpractice. Inscatech’s agents inspect a variety of reports of counterfeit and contaminated food products before they reach retailers and food producers with most problems originating in China.

“Statistically we’re uncovering fraud about 70 percent of the time but in China, it’s very close to 100 percent,” Weinberg told Bloomberg Technology. “It’s pervasive, it’s across food groups, and it’s anything you can possibly imagine.”

Currently, Inscatech is in the process of creating molecular markers and genetic fingerprints to help more effectively identify natural products and determine what’s real and what’s not.  Other companies are taking a digital approach and developing technology to monitor where that product originated.

As more Chinese food companies become part of the global supply chain, big supermarket companies, including Wal-Mart Stores, are recognizing the reputational danger of food fraud. Wal-Mart recently completed a trial using the technology, blockchain to monitor their pork supply chain in China. Blockchain, an eight-year-old technology that cryptographically records transactions, helped Wal-Mart to reduce their tracking time from 26 hours to only a few seconds.

Blockchain works as a database of records. It can potentially improve traceability by creating a chain of history that is impossible to alter without destroying the current sequence. Alibaba has also recognized the potential for blockchain within their platforms and is planning to implement a project with food suppliers in Australia and New Zealand, as well as Australia Post and auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“Food fraud is a serious global issue,” said Maggie Zhou, managing director for Alibaba in Australia and New Zealand told Bloomberg Technology. “This project is the first step in creating a globally respected framework that protects the reputation of food merchants and gives consumers further confidence to purchase food online.”

However, Inscatech has its concerns about blockchain. Their agents focus on working with informants who bring attention to the exact location where the food-fraud is taking place and believe that blockchain is only as reliable as the person providing that data. As of right now, blockchain is still the best system in place against fighting food-fraud. In a global food industry that relies mostly on just paper records, blockchain will help identify those putting data into the system and if incorrect, allow them to be held responsible.

Cooking Tech That Lets You Keep Taste & Save Time

The Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase provides a platform for exciting startups, inventors, culinary makers and cutting-edge product companies to showcase what they are working on and let others experience it firsthand. Now in its third year, the Startup Showcase + PitchFest take place during SKS on October 10-11, 2017 in Seattle and is sponsored by the leading maker of soups and simple meals, beverages, snacks and packaged fresh foods, Campbell Soup Company. Campbell’s will provide a $10,000 cash prize to the winner, announced at live at SKS. Below we take a look at one of these finalists, IXL Netherlands.

What does the future of cooking really look like? Current heating techniques often blunt flavor and take away a food’s core nutrition. One startup in Europe hopes to change all that with a new cooking technology known as Pulse Electric Field (PEF). IXL Netherlands combines the effects of electroporation and pulsed ohmic heating in the eCooker, allowing cooked food to maintain its nutritional value, flavor, color, structure and taste.  The appliance features three individual compartments. Each compartment works independently of one another, consisting of two vertical electrodes that are connected to a high voltage pulse generator inside the apparatus featuring electronic communication. The machine has the capability to program different process parameters and their results can then be stored.

Food Valley Award winner 2011 Nutri-Pulse e-Cooker, IXL Netherlands

This sounds overly technical -- but the process for users is fairly straightforward. Users start by placing the food in one of the baskets along with a liquid sauce that acts as an energy transferring medium. They can then select a cooking strategy based on the type of food they’re cooking from the program on the tablet. The eCooker then cooks the food using electrical pulses, evenly heating the contents without destroying taste or nutrition. Once the required temperature is reached, the unit automatically turns off to save energy. And, as it turns out, cooking via electrical pulses is pretty quick.

The result is a healthy, hot meal using low temperatures cooked in just a short period of time.

To learn more about IXL Netherlands, visit http://www.e-cooker.eu/

Use this link to get 25% off to the Smart Kitchen Summit & see the startups in action!

Move Over Coffee Pot, Chime Is The Keurig For Chai

Coffee gets all the glory -- the fancy machines, the social media memes, the cute mugs. But outside the U.S., different forms of tea are even more popular than coffee. First created in India, chai tea is renowned for its unique, spice-based flavor and has a cult-following of devotees across the globe. The team at Camellia Labs believe that the chai tea latte is just as special as a cup of coffee and deserves its own unique experience and they inveted Chime, the first authentic chai tea brewer to create just that.

INTRODUCING CHIME - AUTHENTIC CHAI IN 3 MINUTES!

Like a Keurig or similar cup-based brewing machine, Chime is a single touch brewer. Chime simmers milk for the beverage while combining whole tea and spices in a brewing chamber. When the two are ready, the milk and steeped tea come together for the ultimate chai tea. The machine uses recyclable capsules called Chime Caps that are filled with Indian tea, similar to K-Cups. The current flavor lineup includes black tea, cardamom, ginger, cardamom ginger, and masala.

Chime lets users tweak the temperature, strength and milk content of the beverage to further customize their chai tea latte. The system adapts to a user’s chosen preferences and remembers for the next cup. With Chime, Camellia Labs is looking to increase the chai market presence and make chai tea more accessible to people who are currently unfamiliar with the drink to create a whole new wave of fans of the unique beverage.

To learn more about Camellia Labs and Chime, visit http://brewchime.com/

The Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase provides a platform for exciting startups, inventors, culinary makers and cutting-edge product companies to showcase what they are working on and let others experience it firsthand. Now in its third year, the Startup Showcase + PitchFest take place during SKS on October 10-11, 2017 in Seattle and is sponsored by the leading maker of soups and simple meals, beverages, snacks and packaged fresh foods, Campbell Soup Company. Campbell’s will provide a $10,000 cash prize to the winner, announced at live at SKS

Use this link to get 25% off to the Smart Kitchen Summit & see the startups in action!

Bubble Lab Wants Robots To Brew, Pour & Serve You Coffee

The Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase provides a platform for exciting startups, inventors, culinary makers and cutting-edge product companies to showcase what they are working on and let others experience it firsthand. Now in its third year, the Startup Showcase + PitchFest take place during SKS on October 10-11, 2017 in Seattle and is sponsored by the leading maker of soups and simple meals, beverages, snacks and packaged fresh foods, Campbell Soup Company. Campbell’s will provide a $10,000 cash prize to the winner, announced at live at SKS.

Imagine your Starbucks coffee one day being served to you by a robot – that’s the vision that Beijing based Bubble Labs had when they created the Drip barista robot. Drip is a precision engineered fully self-functioning mechanical arm that can brew, pour and serve coffee all while maintaining product consistency. It mimics the movement of a human performing every piece of the coffee brewing process.  Drip first wets the filter and warms the server. Then, it distributes the coffee cups, pours the coffee and cleans up the space, while wiping down the counter, and even discarding the filter offering a complete coffee creation experience. Every detail is considered – down to the ability to create recipes and customize parameters that Drip then utilizes to create product that is consistent.

Robotic barista making hand drip coffee by Bubble Lab

Busy café owners often run into the issue of creating consistent, quality-made product for mass quantities of coffee, while also maintaining a level of cleanliness in their establishment. Drip aims to enhance the experience of café-goers while also streamlining and simplifying operations for managers. Drip also gives baristas back their time, freeing them up to create different kinds of coffee drinks rather than wasting time on the same product. For example, Drip could be calibrated to only create black coffee so baristas in a shop are able to create lattes adorned with eye-catching designs that may be more time consuming.

Although the Drip arm is set to work for coffee making now, Bubble Labs have shared that additional robots for varying scenarios are also in the product pipeline. Robot taco makers, anyone?

Learn more about Bubble Lab at http://www.bubblelab.com/

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Chefling Is The Smart Kitchen Personal Assistant You Never Knew You Needed

The Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase provides a platform for exciting startups, inventors, culinary makers and cutting-edge product companies to showcase what they are working on and let others experience it firsthand. Now in its third year, the Startup Showcase + PitchFest take place during SKS on October 10-11, 2017 in Seattle and is sponsored by the leading maker of soups and simple meals, beverages, snacks and packaged fresh foods, Campbell Soup Company. Campbell’s will provide a $10,000 cash prize to the winner, announced at live at SKS.

Created in 2016 by a group of Northwestern University grads, the Chefling app was designed to be the ultimate smart kitchen assistant. The app, available on both Android and iPhone aims to resemble life spent in the kitchen of an average family and comes with three main features: a home inventory management system that syncs across devices, a colorful shopping list and a smart cookbook that suggests recipes based on available ingredients.

The home inventory management system monitors what a user buys and then keeps an eye on freshness levels, based on purchases. It also syncs across every family member’s device so any quick trips to the grocery store are simplified. The shopping list feature allows users to organize and create a list that is not only easy to browse, but easy to share. The cookbook feature browses a user’s inventory using an algorithm that calculates recipe matches based on what is in the pantry.

Chefling also has Amazon Echo and Google Home skills so users can operate the app hands-free through voice control.

Chefling’s long-term goal is to bring the platform outside of the phone and into smart fridges, as well as incorporating advanced A.I. elements and image recognition technology to create an assistant that is truly integrated with the home kitchen.

Learn more about Chefling at http://www.chefling.net/.

Use this link to get 25% off to the Smart Kitchen Summit & see the startups in action!