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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Megan Giller

A 21st Century Thanksgiving Meal

Every year my grandfather spends about three days making the perfect turkey for Thanksgiving: He picks out a bird carefully, brines it in his own special salt mixture, seasons it, and lovingly places it in the oven. He even has special oven mitts that can only be used on Thanksgiving, by him (warning: do NOT try to touch them). Seven hours after he’s delivered it into the fire, it emerges, bone-dry and ready to scratch our throats with its parched flesh.

There has to be a better way! And fortunately, this year, there is. Here are seven new-school ways to make old-school Thanksgiving favorites, with the most cutting-edge devices on (and off) the market.

Turkey

First get yourself a connected oven, which you can preheat from your phone and which boasts sensors that calibrate oven thermodynamics and help cook your bird evenly. Just in case, test the meat with a nifty connected thermometer, which is much fancier than you really need but is actually pretty fun to use.

Or if you’ve gone the tofurkey route in the past, treat yourself with some SuperMeat, created by culturing a biopsy of an animal so that everyone can stay happy and alive.

Sweet Potatoes

Make sweet potatoes easy by putting whole potatoes in a pressure cooker and letting them go. They’ll come out soft and supple, ready to be combined with some browned butter and whipped into oblivion.

Stuffing

Why stuff breadcrumbs inside a bird when you can stuff them in a plastic bag and tepid water? Grant Achatz from Alinea prefers to sous vide his stuffing, and we’re totally on board.

Pumpkin Pie

Leave the whipped cream in the past and top your pie with sage foam, made by putting fried sage leaves and water in a sous vide, then whipping the mixture into stiff peaks.

Cranberry Sauce

Cranberries should not be can-shaped. Modernist Cuisine’s recipe turns the traditional one on its head by putting fresh berries and juice in a sous vide and then carbonating them in a siphon charged with carbon dioxide. Tangy and bubbly!

Gravy

No one likes lumps in their gravy. Use Dave Arnold’s new centrifuge to maximize flavor and create a smooth, silky texture.

Green Bean Casserole

First grow your own green beans and onions with a SproutsIO system, which helps you become a green thumb by giving you a nifty device that fits in your home, guiding you through the process, and monitoring your success. Next, dehydrate those onions with a DIY connected food dehydrator. Combine with centrifuged cream of mushroom soup and bake in your connected oven for about half an hour. Easy!

Butter

Start with great butter. Then make the butter-passing robot from Rick and Morty. Last, spend the entire Thanksgiving meal moving the butter away from your obnoxious brother-in-law.

Sous Vide Chocolate?

Here’s more evidence that, as Chris Young hypothesized a few months ago, sous vide is the new microwave: People are using devices like the Anova to temper chocolate.

I know, I know: We all thought that chocolate appeared in its finished form like a magical food from the gods. But it actually takes a lot of steps to make a shiny, delicious chocolate bar, the last of which is tempering, which means heating and cooling the melted chocolate to the right temperature so that certain crystals develop, making it shiny and shelf-stable. If it’s not, it will develop white blotches and streaks that change the texture entirely.

Pastry chefs and chocolatiers use all sorts of methods to temper chocolate, such as “tabling” it, which is visually and technically challenging. Theo Chocolate, for example, tables all the chocolate for its confections (think thousands of candies every month).

People who aren’t such purists use, you know, a machine to do this work. Those machines are huge, so you’ll often find home cooks tempering chocolate in the microwave.

Or at least, you used to. Recently I discovered a new recipe for tempering chocolate that seems even easier: sous vide! Simply heat the chocolate in a vacuum-sealed bag to a certain temperature in the water bath, “squish it around in the bag,” reduce the temperature of the water bath, squish a little more, and then pull it out. Who says you can only use your Anova to make a steak or some eggs?

I love the idea of this shortcut. It uses updated technology (the microwave is so 1966) in a new and no-nonsense way to transform a technically difficult task into one that anyone should be able to do. At the same time, I’m not sure it would really work. After all, when melted chocolate touches water, it seizes and gets all clumpy and unworkable: With this method, you’re submerging chocolate in the enemy.

But I get it: We’re all obsessed with chocolate, and anything to get our hands on it is going to be popular. Take 3D printing. “The first thing people want to 3D print is chocolate,” said Luis Rodriguez Alcalde, a 3D-printing expert who runs 3 Digital Cooks. Dozens of printers claim that they’ve mastered printing chocolate, which means they have to have mastered tempering, right? Some even say it’s the easiest medium to work with. But anyone who has tried tabling chocolate or making it from scratch knows that’s far from the truth.

Regardless, this kind of innovation only helps transform the tools and techniques that professional and home chefs use in the kitchen, demystifying and democratizing cooking for all.

Subscribe to the Spoon to get the latest analysis about the future of food, cooking, and kitchen. 

The Year in Home Grow Systems

I have a fantasy of plucking juicy, ripe tomatoes from the vine in my garden, snipping a few basil leaves off the plant, and making myself a fresh summer salad. The problem is, I’m not much of a gardener. I’ve killed so many cacti that I don’t even try anymore: My buying a plant is pretty much sentencing it to death.

That’s why I’ve been so excited to see the home grow landscape blossom this year, with tons of systems, apps, and other devices to make growing food at home easier for even the worst black thumb like me.

Here are the most notable happenings and advancements in the past 12 months.

Grow It All

The Edyn solar-powered sensor is perfect for the detailed gardener with a big backyard plot: It sends data about weather, soil conditions, light frequency, and moisture levels to your phone, where you can manage it all. Meanwhile using sensors, the Gro app can also put together that data and even give you suggestions about specific plants. If you’re more of a hands-off person, the Parrot Pot senses the water level in the pot and waters your plant accordingly. These three devices don’t have to be used solely for produce, but they would certainly make it easier to grow vegetables and fruit at home.

Then there’s the FarmBot, which launched earlier this year and is available for preorder now for delivery in early 2017. The open-source home-farming robot plants seeds, kills weeds, and waters plants individually for their precise needs. It’s controlled through an app and grows enough food to feed one person year-round. Sounds like it might be advanced enough to override even my black thumb.

Home farming robot

Home Garden Copycats

Throughout the past year, we’ve seen so many indoor garden systems that we’re not sure how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Sure, they’re cool, but they’re also copycats of one another, which at some point makes all of them indistinguishable.

Ikea launched its indoor garden for year-round fresh produce, SproutsIO kicked off its connected platform and app, Japanese company Foop brought its hydroponic pod to market, and Opcom launched its GrowBox. Still in the development stages, Everbloom conceptualized its grow fridge, Click & Grow raised funds on Kickstarter for its Smart Garden, and an entrepreneur at Purdue has created what’s essentially a Keurig for hydroponic gardening.

Then there are the 7Sensors Grow Box and Grobo, systems both designed to grow weed but that will work for any other plants too (yeah, like we’re gonna care about peppers when pot is in the picture).

All of these are designed for small spaces, perfect for big cities and tiny kitchens. They almost universally have some sort of pod (with or without soil) and an app to help make the growing process easier.

In short, we have a very crowded market with a lot of systems that essentially do the same thing. Over the next year or so we’ll see some of them weeded out, with only a few remaining: It will come down to the best interface, prettiest design, and most interactive and helpful support and community.

The Cool Kids Are Making Sous Vide Cocktails

Sous vide steaks are flawless, but they’re also old news and, frankly, a snooze. Now high-end restaurants and bars are taking their Anova to the next level, using it to make sous vide cocktails like the gorgeous gin and tonic at Betony, featured in the video above.

Before you get the impression that mixologists are dumping a bunch of liquor in a tepid water bath and call it a day, keep in mind that technically they’re using the sous vide to engineer tastier syrups and other elements necessary for a perfectly blended cocktail. Those finished syrups are then added to the spirits and served freshly made.

Why sous vide? “Ingredients like vanilla and star anise are no problem for cold infusions, but lighter flavors like cacao nibs, black pepper, or green apple pose a bigger challenge,” beverage director Vipop “Tor” Jinaphan at Sugar Ray: You’ve Just Been Poisoned, in Bangkok, told Munchies. “It’s better with a sous vide machine.” Sugar Ray serves a take on the classic Martinez cocktail called the Framboise Martinez, with a combination of raspberries, orange, vanilla, and sweet vermouth cooked in a sous vide for hours, then added to gin, lime bitters, and maraschino liqueur. The bar is one of several on the exploding Bangkok cocktail scene to use sous vide, pioneered by mixologist Joseph Boroski.

San Francisco is also chockfull of fancy sous vide cocktails like the Rae Rey at Chino, with lychee-infused Baijiu, Aperol, tea, cucumber, and lime. They used to serve the cocktail only occasionally, as they’d have to wait a year for the lychee to infuse into the Baijiu before being able to make more. Using the sous vide method allows them to make the drink at almost a moment’s notice.

So what’s next: cake?

What’s the Point of 3D-Printing Food?

Last week I reached an all-time low when my 3D printed Nutella selfie ended up looking like an art project by an untalented four-year-old. It made me reconsider why we’re so keen on 3D printing food in the first place.

After all, it’s not going to solve world hunger. It’s not going to change flavors or create new delicious textures. And it’s a long way off from being a cool, easy gadget to pull out of your kitchen cabinet and use at home.

But if used properly, it can be a provocative lens to examine both food and technology. That’s why 3 Digital Cooks’ Luis Rodriguez Alcalde is interested in it. The earnest 3D food printing expert has worked at Autodesk and Natural Machines on 3D food printing projects, and on his own site you’ll find him recording his own experiments both building printers and making food with them. Rodriguez says he got into 3D-printing food by accident: He was looking for cheaper, more accessible ingredients to use in general 3D-printing experiments. But the first time he brought one of his food printers to a maker fare, the audience was captivated. “People have a strong bond with food,” he said. “I don’t need to explain the technology to them, because they already understand food. They get it.”

He says he likes to use hummus to engage and teach chefs about the possibilities inherent in both technology and food. For example, he recently reconfigured a ZCorp 3D printer to work with sugar and made his own architecturally designed sugar cubes.

1ST PRINT!! ZCorp z310 DAY12

And that leads me to the other way that 3D-printed food could be useful: to make high-end, highly detailed decorative pieces, like on Cake Boss, but better. Confectioners, pastry chefs, and expert cake makers could use 3D printers to make elaborate sugar cake-toppers, for example.

Right now, though, it’s clear we’re still in the R&D phase of 3D printing. And the sooner we realize “it’s not the Star Trek replicator,” as Rodriguez likes to say, the better.

Why Top Chef’s Ilan Hall Loves the Thermomix

When Top Chef season 2 winner Ilan Hall told me he’s been obsessed with the Thermomix for as long as he can remember, I had to learn more. Hall says he uses the Thermomix—a combination mixer, blender, oven, and more—almost daily at home and often at his restaurants in Los Angeles and New York as well. Here’s why he loves it.

How He Discovered It: Ever since culinary school, long before the Thermomix became available in the United States, Hall was “playing around” with the machines at other people’s houses and restaurants in Europe and mastering the art of combination ovens and thermoimmersion circulators here in the States. When the Thermomix came onto the market here, he got one immediately.

What He Loves About It: Hall said he appreciates how you can do so much in one space with the Thermomix, noting that it’s “pretty advanced” in its capabilities, with a great display and high functionality as well as excellent safety precautions (for example, it won’t let you blend hot soup too quickly, which would create pressure and make it spill over the sides).

He’s also a huge fan of the Thermomix’s Recipe Chips, a digital cookbook with step-by-step instructions. “There are certain things that I want to play with and certain things I don’t want to mess up,” he explained. “The preprogrammed recipes literally make it foolproof.”

Favorite Way to Use It: “At home I use it as a general all-purpose tool,” he said, explaining that he’s made soup, consommé, and bread. In particular he likes to use it to make herb purees, noting that it allows you to heat the herbs “at a delicate temperature” and puree them at the right speed (plus you don’t lose any of the puree to the bottom of the machine, like with some blenders).

That leaves him more time to experiment with his own creations. For example, at his Los Angeles restaurant Ramen Hood, he’s made small batches of vegan dashi broth with kombu and shiitake mushrooms, “changing the texture of the purees by implementing heat” in the Thermomix (think caramelizing onions while keeping them in constant motion, then pureeing sunflower seeds into them), giving the vegan dish “more depth and the mouthfeel of a [decidedly nonvegan] kampachi broth.”

What He’d Change About It: “I would make a pocket-size one,” he said, “one that’s smaller and more affordable.”

Other Kitchen Technology: He’s playing around with a new sous vide device called the Mellow, which is an all-contained gadget completely controlled by an app and doesn’t even require an additional vacuum sealer. He said he loves its design as well: “It looks like a gentle white fish tank.”

Is Cultured Meat the Future?

Tofu. Seitan. Tempeh. Blech. Current meat substitutes are—how can I say this—disgusting. And we all know that vegan cheezburger tastes nothing like a real burger or real cheese. But as Impossible Foods’ bleeding burger shows us, the landscape is changing rapidly. The next big trend? Cultured meat.

What the heck is cultured meat? Companies across the globe want to make real meat by growing a small tissue biopsy taken from a real animal (without hurting it) into a larger steak or chicken breast. Each has its own unique device to grow the biopsy and plans to market the product to grocery stores, restaurants, and even individual customers around the globe.

Of course, no one has made cultured meat at scale quite yet: They’re all about five years away from a finished product. SuperMeat, an Israeli biotechnology startup, raised over $200,000 and is now at the beginning of its R&D to create cultured chicken meat. Mosa Meat, a Dutch company, is working on ground beef and in 2013 made a single burger that cost more than $300,000 to produce. Meanwhile Memphis Meats, a California-based startup, is making cultured beef and pork and made a few meatballs earlier this year.

The World's First Cell-based Meatball - Memphis Meats

Though we’re pretty far away from an actual usable technology, the concept has deep implications. Vegans and animal rights groups like the idea that animals don’t have to suffer for us to eat meat, and those concerned with sustainability like the idea that we could produce meat without such a high tax on our land, water, and other natural resources.

So what do you think? Would you eat a burger made of cultured meat?

Meet 5 Entrepreneurs Changing the Urban Food System

The urban food system is a living organism, and it’s never been changing so quickly. That’s why Robyn Metcalfe started Food + City last year, a part of The University of Texas at Austin that is mostly an incubator for radical technology startups trying to change the food landscape. Last week Food + City announced the finalists in the 2017 Food + City Challenge Prize, and some of the projects are so intriguing that we had to highlight them.

You may recognize Metcalfe’s name for many reasons. She’s married to Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet, and she has a pretty impressive CV of her own: A food historian and research scholar, she’s written three books, taught at universities for years, and is a regular at events like SXSW and Tedx.

Here are five finalists whose companies echo the hottest themes in technology right now.

Food Tracking

Increasingly customers want to know where their food came from, along every step of the supply chain.

Slovenian company Prospeh’s goal is to increase food’s transparency for the end consumer: Its OriginTrail platform traces each meat, dairy, and vegetable product back to the farm, and its Foodko distribution sharing network allows you to order food and have it delivered directly to your door.

Meanwhile Florida-based FreshSurety wants to reduce the amount the fresh produce industry wastes (currently $200 billion) by allowing grocery stores, specialty stores, and the like to track a product’s shelf life by carton for only a few cents per case. Local Libations targets the producers themselves: Barfly, its keg-monitoring system, allows breweries to track their kegs’ location and volume in real time so that they can better serve the restaurants, bars, and so on that offer their beer. All of these remind me to some degree of what Juicero is doing with its juice packs.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

The call to be more judicious with our food and food packaging is never ending, and serious, as people increasingly want greener and greener products and systems.

Brooklyn-based Rise makes “beer flour” out of barley mash, a byproduct of the brewing process. They claim their dark-roasted porter and premium ale flours, for example, are gluten free and contain more protein than chicken. People have been using that spent grain to make dog treats, but who knows: Even cricket flour (yes, for human consumption) has become a big thing lately.

On a more serious note, Evaptainers wants to reduce the amount of electricity that we use with its mobile refrigeration technology that employs only sun and water. It’s not super high tech, but it is part of the growing trend to use solar power in the kitchen.

All of the finalists are pretty fascinating; check out the full list here. Over the next 12 weeks they’ll be meeting with mentors to prepare for Showcase Day in February, when one will win a cash prize, among other opportunities designed to jumpstart their business.

 

 

 

Eat My Face: I Made a 3D-Printed Nutella Selfie With the Discov3ry

This series explores the world of 3D printing through the most navel-gazing image possible: the selfie.

“Nutella selfie! Nutella selfie! Nutella selfie!” I repeated to myself in time to my footsteps as I walked to New Lab, a multidisciplinary design and technology center in Brooklyn, where Ultimaker is based. Apparently all I needed to do to make this a reality was hook up a paste extruder to the Ultimaker desktop 3D printer and my face in three-dimensional Nutella would be a reality.

Structur3D made a big splash in 2014 with its universal paste extruder called the Discov3ry. In reality it’s mostly a solution for 3D printing gaskets, but it garnered coverage everywhere from Mashable to Food & Wine with headlines such as “New 3-D Printing Accessory Will Create Your Portrait in Nutella,” all of them featuring a slick design that showed an amazing amount of detail and precision. So I thought this installment of “Eat My Face” would be a breeze.

Boy, was I wrong.

Yes, if you hook up the Discov3ry to an Ultimaker 3D printer, you can, in theory, print a selfie. But you need a 3D-printing Sherpa slash genius to guide you through the process.

Fortunately I had one: Luis Rodriguez Alcalde, who runs 3 Digital Cooks and has worked for Loomia, Autodesk, and Natural Machines. Luis helped me design a selfie that would work (think a simple cartoon with thick lines) while he connected the two setups and did some engineering magic to get them to work together. Then he took a photo of my picture and redesigned it in Tinkercad to, you know, actually work for 3D printing. Last he used Slic3r to generate G-code to convert our model into printing instructions for the Ultimaker. The PancakePainter this was not.

img_2735

Finally we were ready to print. And everyone in the entire open-air space of New Lab knew it: They were treated to the lovely sounds of the Ultimaker working, somewhere between a fax machine and dial-up modem. Plus it works really S L O W L Y, so they were able to enjoy these sounds for a good five minutes.

But whatever. Selfie. IN NUTELLA.

“Nutella was a smart choice,” said Matt Griffin, the director of community for Ultimaker, as we watched the machine do its work. “It behaves like a thermoplastic,” which means it’s the ideal consistency to print.

Uh, something like that. The Discov3ry didn’t offer nearly the precision as other getups I’ve written about, and the Nutella expanded on the cake after it was extruded from the tube. Here was the result:

img_2736

One 3D printer, one 3D printing add-on, two experts, one writer, six hours, and one Nutella “selfie.”

The Year in Food Delivery

Despite a distinct cooling off of investment in the food delivery space this year, some big names like Uber, Google, and David Chang threw their hats in the ring.

That’s because the online food delivery market is estimated around $210 billion, with companies like FreshDirect raising $189 million in the past 12 months. It’s become such a pervasive part of our way of life that Google even added a food-delivery shortcut to Maps. And there are plenty of food-delivery crowdfunding projects to go around.

But enough with the numbers. Here are the highlights in this space over the past 12 months.

More Big Players Joined the Party

This year everyone wanted a piece of the pie. Google started to ship fresh food to customers in California through Google Express. Instacart and the Food Network launched a meal-kit delivery service, and Square acquired startup Maine Line Delivery in Philadelphia to boost Caviar. Meanwhile Facebook and Foursquare made it easier to order food from within their apps through Delivery.com.

NYC darling chef David Chang decided to blow up the entire idea of a nice restaurant by launching Ando, a restaurant that only does deliveries, and he raised the bar on delivery food everywhere by launching Maple, his own delivery service that promises a daily delicious menu.

Plus, where would the year be without a few gimmicks? Taco Bell and Whole Foods both came up with ChatBots that help you order food or suggest recipes, respectively, solely through the power of emojis. And Domino’s will now let you order pizza with one tap on your Apple Watch.

The Year of UberEats

So far I haven’t mentioned the biggest player, though: Uber. The company has had quite the year in food delivery. It shut down Instant Delivery in New York City, then launched UberEats in both the U.S. and London. Next UberEats drivers staged protests over the way the pay structure has been changed, and in November a courier filed a lawsuit against the company for missing food delivery tips. Yikes.

All of this commotion from big names and turmoil within UberEats suggest that the food delivery space is still young enough that no one has solved some of the primary problems within it. Companies are grabbing on to any stronghold they see (emojis! self-driving trucks! drones! more drones!), without regard to the longevity of the solution. Uber has faced the brunt of this fast-paced growth, but we expect to see more struggles in the coming years for other players as well.

Eat Local

This year the quest to eat healthily expanded even more into food delivery. Whole Foods hinted at a “meal solution spectrum” with some sort of delivery component in the future. Good Eggs, which many thought was defunct by this point, rose from the ashes with a $15 million round of funding to help it deliver local, quality food.

And Amazon, never one to be shown up, expanded its Amazon Fresh program to Boston, among other major cities. The difference here is that Boston customers can shop from local markets, a feature that we imagine will be implemented elsewhere if it’s successful in Beantown.

You Say Potato, I Say Share Economy

In such a young and moneyed space, different business models are flying around faster than those drones I mentioned earlier.

Some want to deliver fresh ingredients to customers to help simplify cooking at home. Juicero, for example, delivers prepackaged ingredients for green juice, made in its blender that doesn’t even require cleaning. Similarly, Raised Real wants to deliver ingredients for homemade baby food, thereby making it that much easier to make your baby’s food from scratch (sounds ambitious to me).

Speaking of raising babies and tapping new markets, Drizly raised $15 million for its liquor delivery service, among other parts of its ecommerce model. And DoorDash added alcohol to its food delivery options in California (what about the rest of us?!).

Meanwhile Foodhini calls itself a “for profit social enterprise” and delivers ethnic food made by immigrant chefs: Foodhini and the chefs each receive $2.50 from each meal, after costs.

And BringMe wants to out-Uber Uber by combining delivery with the share economy in Fairfax, VA, enlisting regular folks to deliver food as “bringers.” There are already a few models out there like this, such as Favor in Texas and Tennessee, and we expect to see more too.

Of course, while all of these business models are innovative and interesting, none of them beat the ultimate and original delivery food: pizza.

The Year In Smart Bar

Ah, 2016, the year we all needed to take a big ol’ drink. Fortunately a flurry of innovation in gadgets, apps, and platforms has helped make that easier in more ways than one. Here are the most notable happenings and advancements in the past 12 months.

Make It From Scratch

People have been home-brewing for decades, but in the past few years it’s reached a fever pitch, with every wannabe hipster (sorry, Mike) fermenting in their basement. The Pico simplifies this process with a plug-and-play model, including ready-to-brew PicoPak ingredient kits and the ability to brew five liters of craft beer in about two hours. Meanwhile Hopsy premiered its HomeTap so you can enjoy the mouthfeel of a freshly poured pint out of a tap, even if you didn’t brew the beer yourself. And just in case there’s not enough foam, get yourself the Sonic beer foamer device to add the perfect amount.

Even big players like Whirlpool entered this space in 2016: In July its crowdfunding project reached over 220 percent of its goal, and soon you’ll be able to buy the Vessi beer fermentor and dispenser for $1,800. (In other words, crowdfunding is finally legit, with Wired even profiling one of the first companies to run a successful crowdfunding campaign — for 3D-printed cocktail ice.) And foodie inventor Dave Arnold launched a crowdfunding campaign for his Spinzall, a small centrifuge designed for restaurant and home use for under $1,000.

Robotic Bartenders

The ready-to-drink (RTD) market is somewhere around $3 billion, and the hottest thing in the smart bar this year was clearly robotic bartenders. There are a spate of different companies vying for space: Bartesian raised an undisclosed sum, reportedly in the “millions”; Somabar raised $1.5 million; and Monsieur raised $1.2 million. In less professional news, the Open Bar robot was submitted to the 2016 Hackaday Prize contest and is actually open source, so all you eager coders can help perfect it.

Expect the playing field to become even more crowded in the next year with lookalike companies proving our eternal interest in robots.

Pour Yourself the Perfect Drink

Apps for the perfect cocktail, beer, and so on abounded this year. Competing with the Perfect Drink smart bartending platform, the Bernooli device and app make it easy to make a balanced drink, and even Alexa can help you figure out how to make a cocktail or give you wine recommendations. And Spanish chemists have created an app that will tell you if your beer is, for lack of a better word, skunked.

Meanwhile Hooch doesn’t want you to drink at home, alone: The company raised $1.5 million to expand its subscription platform that gives you one drink for free at bars all over New York and Los Angeles.

Totally Unnecessary Technology

What kind of year would it be without some totally ridiculous, over-the-top technology that we don’t need? A boring one, that’s what.

Enter the data cocktail machine that makes cocktails from tweets. Yes, the Arduino-powered robot pulls the latest five tweets from around the world that mention ingredients and then mashes them into a cocktail. Surprisingly, there aren’t any plans to commercialize the machine.

But who knows: 2017 is a whole new year.

Good Housekeeping: Connected Devices Should Be “So Easy Even an Adult Can Do It”

Last week I wanted to defrost a few chicken breasts. I took them out of the freezer, shoved them in the microwave, and programmed it to run for 4 minutes at power level 7. Sure, there’s a “defrost” button on my microwave, and it even has a setting for poultry. But I’ve never quite figured out how to use it.

At the Smart Kitchen Summit in October in Seattle, Good Housekeeping’s Sharon Franke argued that ease of use is the central barrier to adoption for any cooking device, in particular a connected one.

A survey conducted by Good Housekeeping found that 63 percent of people say it would be helpful to have recipes programmed into cooking devices. But Franke pointed out that slow cookers, ranges, and countertop ovens have had those capabilities for years. “Microwave ovens with sensor technology and combination cooking have been around for about 30 years but it’s rare that anyone uses anything but the number pads or a minute plus,” she said. She attributes the problem to small buttons, hard-to-find recipes, and small screens. If these new devices are as intuitive as an iPhone, though, things could change, she said, citing Innit and Whirlpool’s connected oven as an example.

Franke’s point reminds me of Con Edison’s new slogan: “Our app is so easy to use, even an adult can do it.” Its app simply lets customers pay their bill, check payment histories, and send meter readings to the company: not brain surgery, by any means.

Similarly, ease of use is vital for connected devices: Without the app letting you know that you need to, for example, physically hit the “start” button on the device itself, no one will ever use these products in real life. Sure, it’s neat to have an oven that will set the ideal temperature and tell you when your ribs are finished cooking, but if it doesn’t work without an IT team on the phone and isn’t fun to use, forget about it.

In other words, “the future is not just about convenience or mechanics of cooking,” Franke said. “It has to be about the whole experience too.”