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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Michael Wolf

Set It & Forget It: Creator of The Oliver Cooking Robot Hopes to Usher in the Era of Unattended Cooking

Forget Top Chef. The most interesting contest in the kitchen in recent years has been the battle to become the all-in-one cooking appliance.

Air fryers, smart pressure cookers, slice and dice multicookers and even stand mixers have been throwing elbows in the fight for countertop space and consumer dollars.

But what if an entirely different category of cooker won the hearts and minds of consumers as the indispensable kitchen helper? That’s the hope of Khalid Aboujassoum, founder of Else Labs, who makes a little device called the Oliver.

So what exactly is Oliver?

“It’s a smart cooking robot,” said Aboujassoum in an interview with The Spoon.

The kitchen robot is something we’ve been writing about here at the Spoon since early days and, while we all like to envision science fiction futures with a robotic chef cooking for us every night, the only kitchen robots that have found any success so far are uni-taskers like the Rotimatic.

But according to its inventor, Oliver can do much more than one thing really well.

“It’s a recipe library, meal planner, shopping assistant, and expert chef all in one,” said Aboujassoum,

While you wouldn’t exactly call the Thermomix or other digital powered kitchen multicookers “robots”, these appliances are popular with chefs and home cooks alike because they can do so much. And the thing is, they’re adding more functions all the time. The Thermomix recently added shopping capabilities that allows the user to essentially make meal kits and order them on the fly.

But according the Aboujassoum, the major difference between Oliver and the multicooker is how much they can do during the cooking process.

“They (multicookers) are guided cooking,” he said. “The Oliver can do unattended stovetop cooking.”

What he is talking here about just how much a device can do without the consumer being involved. According to Aboujassoum, Oliver can cook the entire meal while the user goes off to take a nap or watch some TV.

“The user basically browses the recipes, selecting a recipe, loads the ingredients and then walks away,” said Aboujassoum.

This is where it’s worth looking at how the Oliver works. The user preloads the prepped ingredients into dispensing chambers that sit on the lid. Once the user selects the recipe on a connected app and hits cook, the Oliver dispenses ingredients into the single pot cooking chamber where a stirring arm mixes the food.

Ultimately, a conversation about unattended vs guided cooking is one about where and when the consumer gets involved in the cooking process. Multicookers like the Thermomix guide a cook through a meal with step-by-step recipes, and can do pretty much everything including chopping and grinding ingredients.

With the Oliver, the unattended part is true but, because it doesn’t have a built-in blade, the user may need to do a little more up front work to prep ingredients in advance and put into the ingredient chambers.

I do think the concept of a home cooking robot is promising. I’m sure there are many busy folks who would be happy to let a robot do the heavy lifting while they go do chores or relax.

Consumers who want to get their own cooking robot will soon be able to back Oliver via crowdfunding. The device will launch on Indiegogo on September 29th and early backers can get in on the appliance for $530.

For those of you who are wary of backing hardware on crowdfunding sites, you might be assured that folks behind Oliver have been working on the product for a good part of a decade (an early generation prototype of the Oliver was on display at Smart Kitchen Summit 2016) and, according to Aboujassoum, the product is ready to go.

“We could have launched two years ago or three years ago,” said Aboujassoum. “We refuse to sell unfinished product. That’s kind of our story, our strategic execution philosophy. And today we are done with the product.”

Aboujassoum said backers of Oliver should expect to get their cooking robot in June of 2021.

With the Oliver hitting the market and the Nymble on its way as well, 2021 could prove an interesting year for cooking robots. Others, like the Gamma Chef, are still in development and could make an appearance.

So hopefully we’ll know soon if the era of unattended cooking is upon us.

Kenwood Partners With Drop to Add Scale Function to the Cooking Chef Stand Mixer

You have your smart ovens, coffee makers and fridges, but what about a smart stand mixer?

Now’s your chance.

Last week, Drop announced they’d partnered with Kenwood to build in the Drop Smart Kitchen OS platform into the latest model of the Kenwood Cooking Chef mixer, one of the older stand mixer brands in the world.

Originally invented almost 70 years ago by the company’s namesake, Ken Wood, the Kenwood Chef was an instant hit and over the past few decades the modern version of the multi-function stand mixer has continued to be Kenwood’s biggest seller.

The Kenwood Chef eventually became the Kenwood Cooking Chef with the addition of a built-in induction heating element almost a decade ago, and the modern version has a variety of attachments like pasta cutters and coffee grinders. With the Drop partnership, the focus is on the integration of the Drop scale and guided cooking functionality.

In the video below, the two companies tout the product as “Your Chef that Weighs and Cooks” (emphasis mine):

By adding a scale to a mixer that already has built-in cooking capabilities and variety of attachments, the Cooking Chef puts itself into a growing category of multi-function products that act as the cooking version of a Swiss Army knife. Products like the Thermomix and ChefIQ weigh, cook, and steam food, all things that the Cooking Chef XL can now do as well.

This isn’t the first time that Drop has partnered with Kenwood, a subsidiary of De’Longhi. Last year, the two companies launched the CookEasy+ multicooker, a product the two had started working on in early 2018.

With the addition of the Kenwood Cooking Chef XL, Drop continues to rack up impressive partnerships with some of the biggest players in countertop cooking. The company has been working with Thermomix (announced last year at the Smart Kitchen Summit) and also is working with pressure cooking giant Instant Pot.

The Inventor of the Consumer Sous Vide Circulator Heads to Anova

The Seattle Food Geek is going to San Francisco (or at least Zooming there).

Today, Scott Heimendinger announced that he’ll be assuming the role of Chief Marketing Officer for Bay area headquartered Anova, the market leader for consumer sous vide hardware.

While we usually don’t do people-moves type posts here at The Spoon, this move is interesting in part because it essentially brings two of the early pioneers in the consumer sous vide market together under one company roof.

Heimendinger, who first wrote about his early effort to create a low-cost immersion circulator on his popular food blog Seattle Food Geek over a decade ago, would go on to commercialize the idea via one of the first standalone sous vide startups in Sansaire. Alongside Nomiku and Anova, Sansaire was part of a generation of early startups to bring sous vide to the masses by moving beyond the water bath and bringing the modernist cuisine cooking technique to consumer price points

In a way, ending up at Anova makes sense for Heimendinger. Ten years after he wrote his influential article on making a DIY low-cost sous vide circulator, Anova is the last of the original three startups still standing. Acquired by Electrolux in 2018, the company has gone on to become the market share leader in consumer sous vide hardware and now is venturing into new precision cooking hardware with a smart combi oven.

And it’s the Anova Precision oven where Heimendinger and Anova first teamed up. As readers of The Spoon know, he was brought on in a consulting capacity to help develop the oven and was at CES this past year doing booth duty.

In the press release announcing the news, Anova CEO Steve Svajian had this to say about the move: “When it was time to start working on the Anova Precision Oven, I knew I wanted Scott’s expertise and insight to be on this project. Our goal was to create a countertop combi oven that would be a game-changing tool for home cooks. Scott played a key role in making that possible.”

One thing I did wonder when I saw the news is what what this meant for Heimendinger’s own product concepts. Earlier this year he’d launched a new kitchen tech company and had just filed patents for his work a couple months ago.

When I asked Heimendinger if he still hopes to build the next great cooking device, he told me that he’s continuing to work on the idea on nights and weekends. My guess is he will at some point and may just do it with Anova’s help.

Or who knows? Maybe at some point he and Svajian spin it out and try to launch the next Anova together.

The Food Tech Show: Did The Automat Ever Really Go Away?

In this week’s episode of The Food Tech Show, we talk about those new contactless systems and compare them to a technology from long ago: the automat.

Yep, that old-school idea born in New York City a century ago is back (or maybe it never left?), showing up everywhere from restaurants to condos.

Jenn Marston waxes nostalgic about the automat and other concepts that seem to be getting a second look as the food system looks to reinvent itself in the wake of COVID-19.

We also talk about these stories in today’s podcast:

As always, you can listen to this week’s podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. You can also download the episode direct to your device or just click play below.

“Alexa, Look Into My Eyes”: New Prototype Combines Human Gaze with Voice Control to Help You Cook

There’s no doubt that voice control interfaces like Alexa and Google have had a huge impact on the way we search for recipes, access our appliances and add things to our grocery lists.

But what if that voice assistant had a contextual understanding of where you where looking when you are cooking the evening meal?

That’s the big idea behind a new prototype from Synapse, a division of Cambridge Consultants. The new Hobgoblin technology concept utilizes machine vision to gather information about where a person is looking when issuing a voice command and applies that information to the cooking experience.

From the project page:

We have been exploring the use of computer-vision based sensing as context, and for this cooktop demonstration we augmented the VUI using gaze tracking to make what feels like a magical interaction. The cooktop infers which burner is being addressed in a voice command by using its camera tracking to know which burner you’re looking at. This way, when the system detects a person standing in front of it looking at a burner, commands can omit the burner designation, e.g. “turn that burner on,” or simply saying a level like “medium high.”

In the concept video, a user is cooking and says “Alexa, turn up the heat.” Using a camera that is built into the cooktop, Alexa is able to infer that the user is cooking because they are looking at the cooktop.

There’s no doubt that the ability to combine contextual understanding of what is happening in a room to power commands given to digital assistants like Alexa could create much more powerful potential “smart kitchen” user scenarios. One could easily imagine combining other information to create more contextually relevant experiences, including facial recognition to, for example, apply a personalized knowledge base that understands a person’s cooking capabilities or their favorite recipes.

You can see the Hobgoblin demo in action below:

Hobgoblin Smart Appliance Interface | This New User-Interface Tech Isn't Just for the Kitchen

Waste-Free Grocery Stores & Bags Made From Skinny Jeans: Ideas From the Beyond the Bag Challenge

Ed note: This post originally had IDEO as the sole creator of the challenge. It has been updated to reflect that Closed Loop Partners launched the challenge with IDEO as their innovation partner.

It’s no secret that despite efforts by grocery stores and retailers to reduce the amount of plastic they pack into the waste stream, shoppers still use a massive amount of the stuff every single day.

Because of this, Closed Loop Partners in partnership with design agency IDEO recently put out a call for innovative ideas around generating less retail waste with its Beyond the Bag challenge. The ideas range from new plastic-free reusable bags to entire grocery store concepts that use bulk dispensing systems.

Here are some of the concepts I thought were pretty interesting:

Repurposing Bags for 3D Printed Crates

A company called re:3D has proposed a system that would take plastic waste produced at retail and repurpose it at retail for 3D-printed crates. The systems would use the company’s Gigabot X 3D printer, which can print from plastic waste that has been ground up into pellets. Their proposed system would put printers at the retail point of presence.

Gigabot X: Creating a pellet printer to 3D print using recycled plastic

A Wallet That Turns Into a Shopping Bag

Moved by Tomorrow has proposed a wallet that converts into a reusable shopping bag. According to the company, the bag would hold up to 150 pounds of total goods.

Reusing Back of House Boxes for Take Home

Already in use by some warehouse stores like Costco and some more sustainably minded grocery stores, Nathan Lee proposes a system that could be used by any grocery store: replace plastic bags with the cardboard boxes which were used to ship products to the store . While it seems simple, it’s always been surprising to me that more grocery stores don’t use this concept.

Denimcle: Turn Those Unfashionable Jeans Into a Shopping Bag

If you’re like me, you probably have lots of jeans that either don’t fit any more, are worn out, or aren’t in style anymore. Sure, you could give them to your local Goodwill (also a good thing), but another idea is to take those skinny jeans and turn them into a shopping bag.

The concept would involve a “Denimcle” kiosk at retail that would allow the user to turn in their old jeans and order a bag made of denim. While the processing of the demim to bag will be done off site, I still think there are number of people who would both donate their old jeans and those that would be open to using a bag made of denim.

The Filole Bulk-Food Waste Free Grocery Store

Smartbins, a maker of bulk bin dispensing systems, has created a proof of concept for an entire grocery store utilizes bulk dispensing and resuable take-home systems. Called Filole, the idea would utilize a system that automatically dispenses measured amounts of food then prints out a label with a price and product info the shopper can then use on reusable containers. Called the S1 system, which is modeled after the IKEA flatpack concept, Smartbins says its concept can be implemented as a whole-store system or one that can be used in an existing grocery store.

Filole Market First Edit

This is only a small sample of the ideas submitted to the Beyond the Bag challenge. I’d suggest you look at the submission page if you want to see more of the interesting concepts for reducing plastic waste in our local grocery store.

Human Improvement Founders Want to Make Cricket Protein Palatable for Masses

McCarty points to rapid attitude shifts towards cannabis (McCarty and Campbell were executives at cannabis startup Dosist prior to HI) in recent years and think a similar shift could be coming for crickets. In cannabis, “you’re seeing a massive of stigma shift that I’ve never seen having anything in that space, at that scale, and that speed,” said McCarty.

How do you get a similar stigma shift with insects? According to McCarty, much of it will have to do with marketing.

“I’m always amazed that marketing is driving people to make bad decisions,” said McCarty. “Being ethical and responsible people, shouldn’t we be driving people to make good decisions with marketing?”

Part of that marketing and messaging has a lot to do with how the product looks. HI’s sleek and colorful packaging is a departure from the typical big tubs of protein powder found on store shelves in the health and wellness aisle. And while the packaging doesn’t scream crickets, the founders also wanted to be very clear about the ingredients list on the food label.

According to Campbell, all of this was intentional.

He notes the HI’s packaging “jumps off the shelf” and is designed to “steal [market]share from underperforming products” currently out there. Speaking of reactions to the product, he adds that the company has received everything from, “Oh my goodness, someone’s finally got it right” to “You guys have got to be crazy, no one’s ever going to buy this” and everything in between. “We’re far more impressed with the positive response we’ve had,” says Campbell.

But still, why did two executives who spent their lives at companies like Starbucks and the fast-growing cannabis space decide on crickets?

According to Campbell, the idea came in spring of 2019 when he was working with an innovation lab and looking at other alt proteins. Around that time, he started looking for the most nutrient-dense protein out there that also had a good environmental footprint.

The answer he got back: “We’ve known for thousands of years, it’s insects.”

And now, HI’s protein powder can be found in numerous grocery stores and through Amazon and the company’s website. The company has also managed to bring the product to market without raising any venture funding.

“So we’ve kept it very lean from the start, unlike a lot of companies we see in the space that go and raise millions of dollars of venture financing, have huge teams and beautiful offices,” said Campbell. “We said, ‘Let’s make sure we’ve got a product that consumers love, first and foremost, and then once we’ve got that, then let’s invest behind and build that.’ So we’ve been very diligent about our process to date.”

Spoon Plus subscribers can listen to my entire interview with Josh Campbell and Derek McCarty below. If you’re interested in subscribing to Plus, you can learn more here.

The Food Tech Show: Walmart+ and Ghost Kitchen Robots

It may be the waning days of summer, but there’s still time to get outside for a walk and listen to podcasts and the Spoon team is here to help with our latest episode of The Food Tech Show.

This week, the team discusses the launch of the strategy behind Walmart+, Walmart’s long-rumored membership program centered around grocery and food which will now launch on September 15th.

Other stories discussed on the podcast include:

You can subscribe to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or wherever you listen. If you’re a regular listener, we’d really appreciate a review!

You can also listen by clicking play below or downloading direct to your device.

SideChef’s Kevin Yu on the Future of the Kitchen in a Time of Unprecedented Change

He ran a company called SideChef, which made a recipe app, while it was early days for connected appliances and step-by-step guided cooking, Yu was already looking for opportunities to take his recipe app and use it as a central command system for appliances.

It was just six months later Yu was on stage at the first Smart Kitchen Summit talking about how this future we discussed in Austin.

Since that time, much of what we talked about in those early days in Austin has materialized: appliance manufacturers have added connectivity and SideChef has struck deals with many of them to integrate its content and technology. They’ve created their recipe format that atomizes the cooking process and allows for them to launch things like their shoppable recipe integrations.

So in a year with so much change, I thought it would be good to once again catch up with Kevin and his US manager director Carolyn Eschbach to get a read from the front lines of the connected kitchen. We talk about the company’s Facebook Portal integration and the launch of their Premium offering, as well as the rapid changes in consumer behavior. We also talk about how the current state of the connected kitchen.

Subscribers of Spoon Plus can see the full interview below. To learn more about Spoon Plus, click here.

Bond Pet Foods Creates Cultured Chicken Protein Prototype for Pet Nutrition

Don’t worry, animal lovers: No chickens (and by chickens we mean Inga the hen) were hurt in the creation of this dog food.

That’s according to Bond Pet Foods, who announced this week that the company has created what it claims to be the “world’s first cultured chicken meat protein for pet food applications.”

According to the announcement, the company took a “one-time blood sample – in this case, from a heritage hen named Inga who is alive and well at a farm in Lindsborg, Kansas – to determine the genetic code for the best types of chicken proteins to nourish dogs and cats.”

From there, the company’s scientists coupled the genetic code with food grade yeast in a fermentation tank. The end result was animal protein, which Bond’s culinary team used as a novel ingredient in a baked pet treat. The company then tested it with a handful of dogs at their headquarters in Boulder, Colorado.

Bond said that once fully developed, its fermented chicken protein will have the same primary nutrients as conventionally produced chicken meat.

Looking forward, the company hopes to scale up its prototype and plans to work towards bringing products to market based on this new cultured protein by 2023. To help fund this growth, the company also announced they’d closed a bridge round of financing with follow-on from the company’s original seed investors.

While it’s easy for most of us to think of conventionally farmed animal alternatives for human consumption since we see the end product on our plates, the pet food industry is also a massive consumer of factory farmed animal meat. According to a report from iFeeder and the Pet Food Institute, nearly 3.8 million tons of animal-derived ingredients were used in dog and cat food in the US in 2018. Because of this, a new generation of science-forward pet food startups have cropped up in recent years to create new sources of protein for our pets.

In addition to Bond, Wild Earth has developed a line up of pet food with plant-derived protein in the form of a fungi called Koji, while Because Animals, a startup creating both plant-based and cultured protein-based pet food, has already created a cultured-mouse meat prototype for cats.

All of this innovation in pet food protein hopefully means a future where not only our Fido and Felix are happy, but is also good news for the Ingas of the world.

Pairwise Gets Greenlight from USDA for CRISPR-Engineered Mustard Greens

While health benefits of mustard greens have long been known, the strong bitter taste and pungent smell has kept this leafy green from going as mainstream as lettuce or kale.

But that could change soon. That’s because CRISPR-focused produce startup Pairwise got approval in mid-August from the USDA for their gene-edited version of Brassica juncea, more commonly known as mustard greens.

According to a release sent to The Spoon, the USDA sent confirmation to Pairwise in mid-August that the company was approved to move forward with their new take on a leafy green that has not been on many menu due to a pungent smell and bitter taste. With changes engineered by CRISPR technologies, Pairwise hopes to create a nutritious alternative to kale and Brussels sprouts that also tastes good.

Pairwise Greens in the field

According to Pairwise, their new mustard greens will feature a strong nutrition profile with supple leaves that hold up well to salad dressings and toppings and will have green and deep purple colors.

When I interviewed Pairwise CEO Tom Adams a month ago, he told me one of the reasons the company focused on mustard greens was the high yield of the crop.

Mustard greens “look just like lettuce, they they feel like lettuce, so if we could eliminate that flavor and make them taste like lettuce that they that they would be like lettuce,” said Adams. “It turns out they actually have another attribute, which is they yield on an acre basis. They yield about three times as much as kale.”

According to Pairwise, they currently have five varieties of the gene-edited produce in field trials. They have plans to expand the field trials in a few months to include the edited product and will provide sample products to partners this fall.

Nymble Eyes 2021 Launch For Its Home Cooking Robot

Looking for a little help in the kitchen? Maybe Julia could help.

No, Julia isn’t your neighbor or a chef matched with you through some online marketplace. In fact, Julia isn’t a person at all.

What Julia is is a robot. A cooking robot.

Developed by an India-based startup called Nymble, Julia creates single pot meals using spice and ingredients chambers that dispense food into the cooking bowl, where a robotic arm mixes the meal within the pot. All of this is monitored by a built-in camera.

You can see a video of Julia cooking rice here:

Fried Rice - Julia in-built camera footage

The camera does more than just capture footage. It’s how Julia becomes a better cook.

“The camera provides us with a thermal image of the food which basically represents the temperature of every pixel in the image,” said Raghav Gupta, CEO of Nymble.

Julia uses precise measurements of temperature and location to closely regulate the heat of the food. It also uses the data to create a better quality cook over time.

“It helps us cook food with a repeatable and consistent quality irrespective of the nature and size of ingredient, geography and other external factors,” said Gupta.

Early on, Julia’s programmers hard coded their cook times for specific intervals depending on the recipe. Over time they’ve gathered more data from the camera and heat sensors, and this has helped Julia become of a feedback driven system. The developer team has also created tools for non-technical users, including a “recipe visualizer” that uses camera and sensor data to help create recipes.

While all this technical work is impressive, it remains to be seen if consumers actually want a cooking robot. It’s easy to envision most of us welcoming a high-end cooking bot like that from Moley, Samsung or Sony, but these concepts are still years off from the mass market. And while there have been systems similar in concept to the Julia, the Sereneti never shipped a finished product and Else Labs’ Oliver has yet to ship.

The only cooking bot that’s sold at volume is the Rotimatic from Zimplistic, which is nearing 100 thousand total units in the field. However, the Rotimatic -- a unitasker that spits out flatbread over and over -- is a much different type of device than the more complex Julia.

In short, since there hasn’t been a product in the market similar to Julia, it’s hard to say if consumers will embrace the idea. My guess is its success will depend on how well it works and how useful it is and whether it makes consumer lives easier. I am particularly curious about how well these systems with pre-loaded ingredient chambers work and if they are easy to clean.

Nymble will try to figure all of this out for themselves as it eyes a 2021 launch. To help do that, the company recently finished some field tests for Julia and is in the process of rolling out additional prototypes to alpha testers in its home market of India (apply here!).

Hopefully Nymble -- and we -- should know soon.