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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Ashley Daigneault

Ember Is The $150 Coffee Mug You Never Knew You Needed

Every year, a host of new “smart” products launch into the connected ecosphere. We’ve seen connected vibrating pants (yes really) and Wi-Fi diapers and smart water bottles – where does it end?

Throwing connectivity into all of our things has led to some pretty dumb “smart” stuff. But then there’s Ember. I have to admit, you probably have to like coffee a whole lot to shell out $150 for this smart travel mug, but it’s basic function? To keep your coffee the right temperature, the whole time you’re drinking it.

The mug, which looks a little like an Amazon Echo (…don’t make that mistake and pour coffee on Alexa) is able to heat up or cool down the liquid inside. The temp can be controlled on the mug itself or via an app (smart!) and is wirelessly chargeable.

Ember Company Video

The folks over at New Atlas have a full review of the Ember mug and they have good things to say, including,

if you fall into Ember’s picky target audience – and want coffee flavor to stay optimized all the way to the end – you’re getting a product that does its job well and without compromise.

Coffee does not taste the same from the beginning of the mug until the end – especially if you have young kids who don’t let you finish a cup in the morning before demanding things from you. So yeah, it’s a little spendy. But if Ember is going to keep my coffee tasting the same from start to finish? I am here for it.

I am not the only one, apparently, because Starbucks reportedly keeps selling out (the company’s only retail location as of now) and the mugs are back ordered until April on the site. Though it’s the company’s flagship product, the website indicates the company plans “to revolutionize the way the world eats and drinks,” indicating more food tech products to come.

Check out the New Atlas full review of the Ember connected coffee mug.

Google Home Adds Shopping Feature And Partnerships With National Retailers

When Google launched the Google Home voice assistant speaker, they demonstrated their commitment to the smart home and the growing trend of voice control, a trend so far led by Amazon. Taking aim at the Echo market, Google launched Home with a big vision but not as many features as enthusiasts would have liked.

Still, 2017 is the year that “works with” Google Home becomes the new “Alexa skill” and no one is counting Google out of the game. The one area where Amazon previously had an inherent lead over Google, of course, was in its powerful commerce engine. Alexa makes it easy to order items from Amazon and, if you’re a Prime member, have them brought straight to your door in two days or less.

But news last week changed that. Google announced via a blog post that it has partnered with a number of big name retailers and added the ability to voice shop from them using Google Assistant. Retail Dive has the full story on Google’s new partnerships, with brands like Costco, Walgreens, Whole Foods, Bed, Bath & Beyond and even Petsmart, Google is clearly trying to cover its commerce bases with everything from food and grocery to household and pharmacy.

Google’s blog post on the announcement gives users a quick walk-through of how to get started. With simple commands like “Ok Google, how do I shop?” Google Assistant will walk users through the process. Or you can also just say “Ok Google, order paper towels” and presumably, it will. It’s less clear exactly who you’re getting paper towels from, though it’s likely you have to set up store preferences in your Google Home account. You also have to add a credit card on file to automatically charge upon ordering.

Credit: Google

The blog also says the service is free – for now. After April 30, it appears Google may have plans to create some type of Prime-esque membership for users to be able to take advantage of voice command shopping.

Google’s massive search and data engine give Google Home inherent advantages in the long run over competitive voice assistants like Amazon’s Echo. And with this new shopping feature, they’re looking to grab some of Amazon’s native territory as well.

Former HBO and Porch Execs Create FeedMe, An Aggregator For Food Delivery

Jason Allen is no stranger to the concept of “website-aggregator” as a business model. As the former CTO of Porch.com, Allen was hired in 2014 to help the home professional marketplace pair its service of helping homeowners find people to help them with work around the house with Houzz-like portfolios to show off what’s possible in home improvement.

Now Allen and co-founder Mike Shim, a former HBO exec, are launching FeedMe, an metasearch service and aggregator for food delivery services. Why do these cofounders believe now is the time for the food delivery space to have a Kayak of its own? As it turns out, with the massive growth of food delivery companies, there’s also a wide discrepancy in who delivers from what restaurant, what they charge and hidden fees..

Shim commented on Product Hunt,

“We got tired of juggling multiple apps just to find the best choices and deals on restaurant delivery, so we built FeedMe to search across all the food delivery services at once.”

FeedMe is not another food delivery service, but a website (and soon, an app) that lets consumers put in their address and select from a variety of restaurants that offer takeout in their area. It tells you who delivers from a chosen restaurant and how much you can expect to pay. The ordering itself is done via the delivery service website and FeedMe collects an affiliate fee for the referral.

Being Seattle tech natives, the pair have launched the website in Seattle only for now, but have plans to scale around the country. The True Pricing feature is a little like what Zebra is trying to do for car insurance shopping or Trivago is doing for hotels – exposing the best price for each restaurant and giving hungry users a direct line to ordering.

It’s still early days – the company said in a blog post that they were scooped on Product Hunt and not quite ready to launch but are in the throws of it now. We’ll look to see how they expand and what additional features they might build into their food delivery metasearch engine and aggregator in the future.

Why Amazon Needs Automation To Drive Retail Profit

Amazon is one of the biggest retailers in the world, with total value at the end of 2016 surpassing the value of other U.S. retail giants like Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, Target, Sears, Macy’s and Nordstrom’s combined. So at $355.9 billion market value, it’s a little surprising to see Amazon continue to post slim profit margins on its e-commerce sales, by far the largest portion of the company’s business. Amazon’s continued investment and exploration into things like automated grocery stores and drone delivery start to make even more sense when you dive into their 2016 numbers.

A recent peek into their annual filing by Bloomberg reveals some interesting stats around Amazon’s subscription and cloud services, big growth areas with much higher margins and less overhead than retail goods. Where retail margins are low, largely due to the high costs of shipping, subscription fees (including Prime) are growing at 40% annually. In 2016, Amazon brought in $6.4 billion from Prime and other subscription services such as e-books and movie rentals – a little less than the company spent on net shipping costs for the year.

Credit: Bloomberg

People flock to Amazon for their value on retail products but also their convenience – whether it’s fast shipping, greater availability or the ease of ordering on non-traditional platforms like Amazon’s Echo voice assistant or Dash button subscription service. But the company’s commerce volume only slightly makes up for the high cost of shipping those products around the globe.

Amazon is investing in higher margin areas of its business, like Amazon Web Services, which boasted almost 25% profit margins in Q4 of 2016, compared with retail’s 3%. But the company is also using technology and exploring areas where it can automate and upgrade its method of product delivery to grow retail without growing its shipping costs.

Future Of Grocery

Back in December, The Spoon covered Amazon’s move to create automated grocery stores using a combination of sensors, visual recognition and deep learning. The project, called Amazon Go, uses “Just Walk Out,” a system of technology that identifies shoppers via facial recognition, identifies products using sensors and RFID tags and ultimately learns what you buy and what you thought about buying so they can market to you later.

Amazon Go - Just Walk Out

Currently, Amazon offers consumers grocery items via its Amazon Pantry program, which lets customers fill a box of dry goods (food, cleaning, hygiene, etc) and ship everything for a flat $5.99. The appeal for Amazon Pantry shoppers is not just convenience but also price as Pantry goods are usually cheaper or on par with Wal-Mart and Target prices – taking direct aim at both traditional grocers and competitor retailers. But the program still drives hefty shipping expenditures – and only offers those “middle of the grocery store” items. Amazon Go could offer both fresh and dry goods using methods of automation technology that would greatly reduce overhead.

The Robots Are Coming

The other major area where Amazon is investing R&D is the use of robots, mainly drones, for delivery as opposed to the traditional UPS driver. Prime Air has been an Amazon initiative that takes airborne unmanned drones to drop packages at our doorsteps, using remote charging stations and coordinate technology to significantly reduce the cost of bringing those brown boxes to customers. The first package was delivered back in December to an Amazon customer in the UK and it looks like the company is still working on ways to make Prime Air a feasibility in the heavily regulated U.S. airspace.

Last week, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Amazon a patent for a method of air delivery that does not involve landing a drone in your front yard but rather using parachutes, magnets and sensors to hover above and drop the package from the air. The patent application explains that this method could be a safer and less intrusive way for drones to deliver customer packages. Despite the patent and other testing and work Amazon has done with Prime Air in the U.S., the method of using unmanned machines to navigate package delivery is still illegal.

Nevertheless, Amazon’s strategy to create different avenues of lower-cost delivery models when it comes to its retail business make sense, especially when you look at where they are currently profitable and where investors would like to see higher margins. The grocery store of the future and robotic delivery certainly seem futuristic and neither are mass market options for Amazon today. But it’s clear based on its financials and initiatives in the space that Amazon is looking for ways to make retail more profitable and efficient in the not too distant future.

Does The Shape Of Your Spoon Impact Taste? Apparently, Yes.

We write a lot about high-tech solutions to change the way food is cooked and consumed, but there is interesting, science-driven work being done to explore how design and form impact food taste as well. Fast Co Design writes about the work of designer Andreas Fabian – who has a PhD in spoons – and scientist Charles Michel to use design and scientific principals to enhance how cutlery can improve the perception of food’s taste.

Together they created the Goûte, a glass spoon modeled using biomimicry, the process of using design in nature to inspire manmade products. In the case of Michel and Fabian, their natural inspiration was the thing all humans use at one time or another to taste food – the finger.

The two began to think about the intimate experiences people can have with food when they’re unconcerned about proper manners—licking your finger while cooking, licking your plate when finished. What if they could create a new kind of utensil that mimicked that feeling, bringing a new level of mindfulness and joy to eating?

After developing the Goûte, the team paired up with Oxford University’s Crossmodal Research Laboratory to test the utensil’s impact on flavor perception. Participants used both spoons and the finger-inspired tool and found “participants reported perceiving the food as tasting significantly better than when eating with a conventional spoon.” People reported that the yogurt even tasted sweeter when using the Goûte as compared with the spoon.

The processing of using low-tech design principals to change the way food tastes is a fascinating undertaking. You can read more about the Goûte and the impact of design on taste here.

Inirv Retrofit Kitchen Kickstarter Surpasses Goal

The 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit’s startup showcase was home to many exciting new companies showing off connected and high-tech devices for kitchens of the future.

One of those companies, Inirv, had a safety system designed for stoves that highlighted the importance of retrofit solutions in the smart home. While many are building connectivity and smarts into their ovens, stoves and fridges, the team at Inirv is tackling a common problem with an add-on system. With a wireless sensor that can detect the presence of gas, the absence of motion for prolonged periods of times and smoke coupled with retrofit stove knobs that can control your stove’s burners, Inirv is designed to prevent overcooking and fires from unattended food.

Credit: Inirv

The Inirv knobs give you remote control of your burners via the smartphone app so you’ll never burn your food – but the sensor will actually remind you if it senses a lack of motion around the stove for too long and left your food unattended. The product is designed to be less of a reactive solution (aka smoke alarm goes off because something is burning) and more proactive to prevent your food from turning into a house fire.

Inirv’s Kickstarter ends on Wednesday and backers can be pretty confident they’ll get a product as the campaign is fully-funded and already passed a few of its stretch goals, including adding Amazon Echo functionality. Alexa, turn off the stove! At $229 for four knobs and a sensor, it’s not the cheapest smoke alarm solution on the market, but it is much smarter than most.

The Inirv team plans to ship the product in December, hopefully in time for the holidays.

Beer And Tech Get Cozy As Future Of Drink Heats Up

This morning I opened my email to see a new Product Hunt post from angel investor and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis about a new “Inside” newsletter he’s launching called Inside Beer. Calacanis has founded a couple of tech and startup based pubs, including Engadget and “This Week In Startups” along with LAUNCH but also started “Inside,” a series of industry-based vertical newsletters.

To date, Inside has tackled issues like security, San Francisco, venture capital, VR and AR so covering the latest news around beer feels a little off-brand. That is, unless you’re paying attention to what’s happening between tech and the beverage industry.

Says Calacanis,

“This may seem like a “fun” vertical for an Inside newsletter, but the reality is that beer is multi-billion dollar industry and many people – from restaurant folks to brewers to distributors – have a pressing, professional need to stay up on this news. Inside Beer provides it, in one email.”

Considering the emerging startups in the space and the partnerships between Big Beverage and tech to bring things like home brewing and the smart bar to the mainstream, we’re pretty sure 2017 is the year that tech starts to play a major role in the future creation and consumption of beer, wine and spirits. We’ll be watching the Inside Beer newsletter and the future of drink space closely.

Food Retail AI Startup Shelf Engine Raises $800K

One of the biggest headaches for anyone purchasing food in bulk – whether it’s grocery stores or restaurants – is figuring out how much to buy. Perishable foods go bad quickly and if ordering is off, the food that’s thrown out has a direct impact on the bottom line. This problem is what led Stefan Kalb, a Seattle food entrepreneur and owner of a local sandwich and salad distributor, to create a software platform that could use artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to cut waste.

Shelf Engine is a Seattle startup that just announced an $800K seed round of funding to deliver a software platform to grocery stores and food distributors that would predict and in some cases automate perishable food ordering. The software works with the retailer’s existing system, pulling in historical sales data, profit margins and combines it with external factors like seasonality, volatility and gross profit by product to deliver precise food orders.

Reddit co-founder and Shelf Engine seed investor Alexis Ohanian commented about the startup’s potential on Product Hunt, saying:

As seed investors, we’re always excited to learn about new problems that have potentially valuable software solutions — food waste is one of them. The food industry hasn’t had the ability to solve this with software and this app helps retailers and distributors reduce their waste.

Kalb uses Molly’s, the food distributor he founded, as a case study for Shelf Engine. Molly’s distributed fresh, locally sourced sandwich, salad and deli products to local businesses and guaranteed their sales – meaning, if they didn’t sell, Molly’s refunded the retailers. And because they used such fresh ingredients, the food only had a shelf life of five days or less.

Often, Kalb found, the company was using waste data as the sole metric to predict future orders. If waste was high for one account, they’d lower the next order. If it was low, they’d increase the next order. But this method is highly problematic – according to the study, “when managers react to waste, they are reacting to a single point of data. That decision isn’t based on a cumulation of waste and deliveries.” It often led to volatile availability of their products at places like Seattle Children’s Hospital cafeteria – at times the shelves would be full, and other times they would be empty. There was little predictability for customers looking for Molly’s food at meal time.

The company then began using Shelf Engine, which generated a probability model for all ten of their accounts. Basically, the model looked at the likelihood of products selling or products being wasted at any given level of availability and would then find the maximum between the two.

After using Shelf Engine for just a few months, the company saw a 7% leap in profitability.

Kalb opened Molly’s at the age of 23, with a degree in actuarial science and economics and on a 2014 ski trip with friend and engineer Bede Jordan found themselves wondering why the processes and systems in the food industry were so outdated.

 Could we create a platform that enables retailers to buy food and eliminate significant waste?  Could we create a platform that eliminates redundant busy work between vendors and retailers?  Could we create a more perfect marketplace?

These questions led the pair to create a product that would move the food industry towards more efficient systems using technology. Jordan himself is a former engineering lead at Microsoft who worked on HoloLens, an augmented reality technology. He will now lead the development of Shelf Engine as its CTO.

To get analysis like this and to stay up to date on the future of cooking and the kitchen, subscribe to our newsletter, the Weekly Spoon. 

CNET Is Not A Fan Of The Teforia Infuser

As more smart kitchen products hit the market, we’re seeing more consumer-facing reviews of the pros, and of course the cons, of these connected devices. CNET has expanded their coverage into the smart kitchen and reviewer Brian Bennett took a closer look at the new tea Infuser from Teforia, the startup trying to revolutionize how consumers brew tea.

The one obvious thing about Teforia’s flagship product is the price point – $1500 is a lot of money to drop on a specialty beverage maker and CNET harps on this a lot throughout the review.

But price aside, Bennett does mention the sleek design (although complains that it is plastic) and enjoys watching the tea infuse and turn from leaf to liquid. But when it comes to the outcome, he’s generally unimpressed and points out that when he tried the same tea with the $200 Breville tea maker, the Breville came out on top.

When Bennett told Teforia his results, their response wasn’t super reassuring either.

According to Teforia, I’d need to run something truly exceptional through the Infuser in order to really appreciate it — something rare, handmade and close to $100 per pound.

Teforia’s move to elevate the tea business, an ancient beverage and an industry that hasn’t experienced much innovation is noteworthy, even if their first product fails to justify the high price point. Check out the full CNET Teforia review here.

Smart Kitchen | Food Tech Wrap-Up From CES 2017

Is it fair to say we’re all collectively exhausted from CES news? The first few weeks of the year are just a deluge of tech press releases about all the things manufacturers plan to do, make, ship, partner with and promulgate during the rest of the year. And even though CES has yet to carve out a specific floor area for food and kitchen related tech items, we definitely saw an uptick in announcements in this emerging space.

We saw smart kitchen products and integrations from larger companies and startups alike across the connected home, appliances and wearables – here’s the rundown.

Alexa, has the smart kitchen arrived? (And have you seen Google?)

It seems no one is sick of Amazon Echo quite yet and we saw even more manufacturers outside of the traditional smart home adding Alexa integration to their product lines. The biggest announcement came from Whirlpool, who made a splash last year with Amazon Dash integration at the show and this year adds voice functionality to its Wi-Fi connected ovens, fridges and washing machines. Alexa, is my laundry done?

And now, if you own a Ford with the Sync 3 platform, you can ask Alexa to preheat the oven from your car.

LG announced a competitor to the Samsung Family Hub with its own smart fridge (more on that later) – with a gigantic touch screen that looks like you might need a step stool to reach the top of, the appliance also integrates with Amazon Echo. Alexa, can you reach that icon for me?

Speaking of Samsung – the upped the ante this year with Family Hub 2.0, adding a bunch of new service integrations (GrubHub and Spotify, to name a few) but not much else. And LG jumped in the smart fridge game with giant touchscreen game with new Smart InstaView Model, boasting much of the same features as the Family Hub, including voice integration, cameras to see what’s inside your fridge when you’re away (or too lazy to open the door) and software to help run your house. LG’s model also has grocery ordering but theirs is Amazon-powered.

Google Home, the Echo’s main competitor, was announced in a few integrations. Conversation Actions, their equivalent to Alexa’s Skills, hasn’t shown us much that is kitchen or food related (with the exception of a Dominos pizza ordering action) as of yet, so Alexa is still your main sous chef for the kitchen. For now.

For their part, Whirlpool had a host of announcements around their “Smart Kitchen Suite”, including their first step into guided cooking. Their assisted cooking will guide users through three step recipes that will send instructions to the oven and program it for the cook. They also introduced “scan-to-cook” which will allow the user to scan barcodes to “send the right directions, temperature and cooking time settings straight to the appliance.”

The smart bar gets customized….and sees more competition

PicoBrew showed off its now-shipping Pico unit at CES and announced that it will offer customized PicoPaks, the pods used to make different types of beer with the device. Previously, PicoPaks were premade by the company’s professional brewers, making it more of a do-it-for-me experience. Now, you can create your own beer selecting flavors and ingredients on the platform with some guidance from the pros.

The area of smart beverages is one we’ve kept our eye on for a while, with device makers and beverage companies all vying for a piece of the pie. But The Spoon’s Allen Weiner found an interesting story NOT at CES, writing, “while companies such as Picobrew and Whirlpool’s Vessi were showcasing their high-tech methods for brewing beer at CES, two giants of the beverage industry confirmed a partnership.” Turns out that AB InBev, the world’s largest beer brewer and the makers of Keurig are teaming up to create a home-brewing system designed to deliver homemade beer and cocktails. Will it do for cocktails what the Keurig did for coffee? We’ll see.

Food waste prevention goes mainstream

The prevention of food waste has been an area I’ve been fascinated with for a while – especially as it relates to technology’s potential to really change our bad habits and help us stop bludgeoning our environment with trash. But so far, most of the solutions are niche or designed for commercial use. But -CES saw the introduction of some smart solutions that might actually change things.

First, there’s the Zera Food Recyler from Whirlpool – which is basically a fancy name for a tech-savvy composter that can live in your kitchen and turn food scraps into fertilizer with very little involvement from you. Composting is a cool idea, and the earth-friendly concept of it appeals to this generation of more health-conscious, organic-buying consumers, but is generally not pursued by the vast majority of us. Whirlpool smartly saw this as a way to use technology and create a one-button solution to this. Zera is on Indiegogo now for a little under $1k (fully funded and still taking backers as of this posting) and expected in stores later this year.

Also pretty cool – the GeniCan, a smart device you place on your trash can that scans items as you toss them in the bin and creates a grocery list from which you can reorder. You can also set it up to connect to Amazon Echo and have it automatically reorder items for you (from Amazon, of course). This might not prevent food waste in the traditional way, but it could stop you from ordering too much food and help you be more accurate with the stuff you need. If you scan everything you throw away first.

The robots are here, and they’re going to teach you how to cook

Robots at CES are not a new thing. For years, companies have been using them – sometimes in the form of product announcements, sometimes just as booth eye candy to lure traffic in – to make a splash. This year, the name of the robot game was giving arms and legs to Alexa – and making her dance, apparently.

But one appliance maker decided to create its own smart robotic assistant for the kitchen, bypassing the popular “put Alexa behind everything” trend. Bosch launched its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-connected appliances last year and this year introduced Mykie (my kitchen elf, shortened) which is basically an Amazon Echo voice device with a small touchscreen that helps you out in the kitchen. Need a recipe? Want to know what’s in the fridge? Want to listen to some music? Mykie’s got you covered. It seems odd that Bosch would want to compete with Amazon in this category, but Mykie does do some cool stuff that the Echo doesn’t, including project images onto a wall via the tiny projector in its rear, allowing you to blow up a recipe video you’re following. Mykie also offers virtual social cooking classes so you can learn to cook with an actual human instructor and the AI assistant. Is it enough to compete with the Echo? Time will tell.

Cooking tech heats up

Drop adds a second appliance manufacturer to its roster – announcing its recipe platform can now control GE Wi-Fi appliances (it announced Bosch integration in September last year.)

Panasonic showed off an entire smart kitchen with technology like a smart wine fridge with different temps for each shelf and a cool display, inductive heating built into countertops and tables to discretely heat and keep food warm and a machine learning / camera combo that lets appliances react to and adjust cooking based on the recipe you’re trying to follow.

The Smart Kitchen Show hits the CES floor

The Spoon’s Mike Wolf hit the CES floor in search of interesting conversations on food tech and smart kitchen – check out The Smart Kitchen Show’s newest podcasts.

Hear from the CEO of nutrition and food delivery startup Habit about their offerings and how they’re building the next generation of personalized nutrition.

Mike caught up with AppKettle’s founder Robert Hill to talk US shipping dates and what’s behind the company’s initial delay to bring the product to market.

Mike and I catch up on all that we saw at CES in our CES smart kitchen wrap-up.

Over the next few weeks we’ll continue to analyze what we saw in smart kitchen and future of food at CES. Stay tuned! If you want to get all our analysis in your inbox, make sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

What Happened To Smart Fridges In 2016?

As we continue our end of year wrap-up series, we wanted to drive into some smart kitchen appliance categories to see what happened (or didn’t happen) to the category as a whole and make some predictions for what’s on the horizon for 2017.

Hey Alexa, what’s in my fridge?

If there was a darling of connected tech in 2016, the Amazon Echo was it. Voice control was barely a whisper at CES last year and by September, if you didn’t have voice control baked into your smart home or entertainment device (or at least have it on your product roadmap), you were irrelevant. And Alexa fit right into the kitchen, with hands-free control in the one room if the house you don’t want to be touching your smartphone.

Voice control makes more sense for devices that do stuff – telling Alexa to pre-heat the oven is a pretty useful skill. So, the Amazon Echo compatibility for fridges is a shorter list, but worth a look:

  • GE – GE launched their Geneva skill to control a range of GE Wi-Fi appliances, including fridges but also ovens and washing machines. For fridges, Alexa can control the temperature, turn the icemaker on or off, prep hot water for coffee or tea, or just give you a status on how the fridge is doing.
  • The Samsung Family Hub connects to Amazon Echo and you can use Alexa to control all the things on the Hub’s OS like Pandora but you can also order groceries through the Groceries by Mastercard app, mirroring Amazon’s own ordering services available through voice.

Speaking of Samsung…

The fridge as the home hub

The concept of the connected fridge isn’t a new one, with appliance makers adding Wi-Fi connectivity to their products for the last several years. One of the companies on the early smart fridge bandwagon was Samsung, who began talking about an internet refrigerator back in 2001. Later during that decade, Samsung was demoing smart fridges at CES; the fridge displayed a small-ish touch screen with basic connected functionality.

Then came the Samsung Family Hub. A beast of a machine (in both size and price), this fridge first debuted last year at CES 2016 with its official launch in May. With its giant 1080p touchscreen on the front, it looked at first glance, like a version of their other Wi-Fi connected fridges on steroids. But the Family Hub actually packs some interesting features that while might seem frivolous at the outset, actually hint at some larger tech trends for fridges and other appliances in the future.

The giant touchscreen features interesting apps like the Groceries by Mastercard app which allows you to order food from FreshDirect and ShopRite, right from your fridge. The fridge also gives users the ability to photo tag their items to keep track of what’s there.

The other future-facing features are the cameras placed in the fridge’s doors to let you see what’s inside when the doors are closed. Why would we want to do that? Well to check when you’re at the grocery store to see what you’re out of, for one. You can also look inside the fridge from the touchscreen on the front, negating the need to open the doors. LG debuted similar functionality at CES 2016, with theirs using a “knocking” feature and a clear window on the front of the fridge to let someone knock, illuminate the interior lights and see what’s in the fridge without opening the door.

But ordering groceries from your fridge’s touchscreen and being able to see what’s inside from your phone in a supermarket isn’t really the compelling story here. The story is what Samsung (and others) haven’t yet put inside this device – and what will make refrigerators way smarter in the future.

The fridge as a part of the kitchen’s OS ecosystem

Moving from connectivity and entertainment to a true smart appliance, the fridge of the future might actually have a database of knowledge and machine learning behind it that will allow it to know things about your food. Startups like Innit are pioneering a new category using food data along with image recognition software to allow an appliance like a refrigerator to recognize food without any user inputs and generate useful information from that. Information like a recipe that could be made with the contents left in the fridge on the day before shopping day would help prevent food waste and also give users helpful ideas for dinner.

The technology concept driving Innit is what’s missing from the Samsung Family Hub and every other Wi-Fi connected fridge. Cameras and connectivity are great, but when something requires the user to constantly input and maintain a database in order to fully deliver on its usefulness, it falls apart. Consumers don’t want another thing to have to update, they want tech that makes things easier.

Innit’s partnership with appliance giant Whirlpool is proof that manufacturers are recognizing the shortcomings of current technology. And the opportunity in the kitchen isn’t going unnoticed; Microsoft announced in a blog post in early September it too is planning to build a fridge with a connected, machine learning based platform. Microsoft will collaborate with Liebherr’s appliance division to create a platform that uses computer-based deep learning algorithms with imaging software to recognize food that’s placed inside a refrigerator.

Unique to Microsoft is the modularity they’re building into every “SmartDevice ready” appliance, theoretically making any refrigerator purchased today easily upgradable in the future. Products like the Samsung Family Hub fridge have been criticized for offering a host of features without any clear answers on how the device will keep pace with future innovation and developments. With the price tags on connected appliances still one to three times what consumers pay for their dumb counterparts, future-proofing these products seems critical to their long-term success. This coupled with the longer buying cycles of white goods mean appliance manufacturers might start thinking about their revenue streams and what kind of role that plays, whether that’s through a grocery replenishment partnership or technology upgrades that offer new functionality.

Appliance-As-A-Service (AAAS….?) 

Mike Wolf wrote a post here at The Spoon and an even larger analysis at the NextMarket blog on the concept of paying monthly fees to obtain a consumer good, or what’s known as the “X as a service” model. Much of the consumer market is trending towards a service or subscription model, from streaming videos to clothing and furniture. Could kitchen appliances follow suit?

Bad acronym aside, it’s not completely crazy. We’re finally seeing appliances evolve to provide significant value beyond the existing reactive position they’ve held in the kitchen for the last fifty or sixty years. There’s machine learning and artificial intelligence set to change how we cook and how tasty and well-prepared the food we sit down to eat will be along with connectivity giving us capabilities and efficiencies that might make us want to cook more with more convenience. But the current trajectory requires consumers to piece together a smart kitchen and then also keep tabs on upgrades and seek out tech support for issues they encounter. What if appliances like smart fridges could be purchased as a service, with upgrades and support and maybe other services baked in?

Though we haven’t seen any company make a serious move towards AAAS just yet, we think it’s an area to watch in 2017 and beyond. If for no other reason than it’s actually a pretty awesome acronym.

With CES 2017 just a week away, we’re sure to see more developments in the smart fridge and more broadly, smart kitchen appliance category.

Perfect Company Buys Prep Pad IP From Orange Chef Founder

Perfect Company, a company specializing in smart devices for cooking and preparing food in the kitchen announced today that they have acquired the IP for the Orange Chef Prep Pad. Orange Chef, founded by Santiago Merea started out in 2011 as an iPad kitchen accessory brand. Merea recognized early on that consumers were bringing their phones and tablets into the kitchen to follow recipe videos and instructions and started by making a sleeve for iPads to help the device stay clean. Orange Chef demoed the Prep Pad at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2013, introducing the concept of a connected scale with a companion app to make cooking and following a recipe even easier.

The company has experienced a lot of change since that launch three years ago, including an acquisition by recipe discovery platform Yummly at the end of last year. After struggling to launch a line of new countertop products, 60% of Orange Chef staff joined Yummly including Merea himself, as chief revenue officer. Prior to the Yummly acquisition, Orange Chef had also faced challenges with the Prep Pad, dealing with many user complaints around app support.

Merea has since left Yummly to become a startup founder once again, this time to start a baby food company which The Spoon reported in October of this year. The company details are vague, but based on the website will likely “offer an ingredient delivery service and 10-minute prep time for fresh-from-scratch baby food at home.” Despite leaving Yummly, Merea retained the Prep Pad’s related IP including its patented technology and app. So how will Perfect Co use the acquired assets? Automated food tracking, for one.

Mike Wallace, CEO of Perfect Co responded in an email to The Spoon: “As you know we entered the health and nutrition space in 2016 with the launch of Perfect Blend™, which tracks nutrition as the user makes a blended recipe.  Food tracking is the most challenging part of using any diet solution, and we see a huge opportunity in automating this process. The Orange Chef’s patented IoT technology, which not only measures nutrition of the food you prepare, but also records the recipes you make for next time, fits in nicely.”

Perfect Company’s acquisition of the brand makes sense; the company currently offers several different versions of the connected scale and app solution, including one to prepare alcoholic beverages, one to help with blended drinks and another to assist with baking. In a market where several of the popular connected scale hardware brands have abandoned their plans, including Orange Chef and Drop Kitchen, Perfect Co seems to have figured out how to make products that thrive.

Wallace explained, “A lot of Perfect Company’s success can be attributed to the company’s DNA. Prior to entering the connected scale space, the Perfect team had successfully designed, developed and delivered to market multiple technology products in the toy industry (accounting for over $500MM in retail sales)….The ability to execute is also what is propelling Perfect’s next phase of growth.  Having successfully established a retail presence, the company is now aggressively extending its market footprint through partnerships with leading brands.”

We’ll keep an eye out in 2017 to see what becomes of the Prep Pad assets and how Perfect Company leverages them in new product offerings and partnerships.