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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Michael Wolf

Let’s Order a Pizza(bot)! Picnic Reveals Pricing, Opens Ordering For Pizza Robot

So you want to deploy a pizza robot? Seattle-based Picnic has you covered (as long as you can cover their monthly fees, that is).

And now we know what that pricing looks like because the pizza robot startup just opened up reservations for their pizza bot on their website.

Starting this week, operators who want to reserve a Picnic pizza robot can choose from two off-the-shelf configurations: “The Essential” or “The Works.” The Essential configuration is your basic pizza workhorse, a robot that can build up to 100 pies per hour with cheese, sauce, and fresh-sliced pepperoni. The Works configuration has additional toppings capability, allowing operators to add sausage, mushrooms, and onions – or whatever toppings they like – up to three total. An additional toppings module is available for The Works for an additional charge.

Both Picnic models can be configured to work with varying dough thickness (up to 2 inches max) and pizza sizes of 12″, 14″, and 16″. The operator can also customize the system to add ingredients in whatever order they prefer, and both models can be configured to have the conveyor system work left to right or right to left.

Those familiar with the Picnic robot know that the system is designed today for solely adding stuff on top of the pizza. Company CEO Clayton Wood has previously told The Spoon that while Picnic robots will someday have the capability to create the dough pies and cook the pizza, the initial focus is on the most “work-intensive” part of pizza-making: adding sauce, cheese, and toppings.

Like many food robotics startups, Picnic uses a robotics-as-a-service pricing model. Baseline pricing for the Essential configuration is $3500 a month for a three-year term, while the Works is $4500 a month for three years. Both models can be reserved with a $250 deposit.

If all that sounds good and you are looking to deploy a Picnic in your restaurant, you’d better hurry. According to Picnic, the systems are sold out for Q1 of next year, and there is extremely limited inventory left for Q2. However, things start to look better in the second half of next year, and both models are widely available for Q4.

Our Ghost Kitchen Future Will Be Automated

Back at the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2019, Adam Brotman, the CEO of restaurant tech startup Brightloom, suggested if he was a young entrepreneur and wanted to start a restaurant business, he’d create a ghost kitchen powered by a food making robot.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this comment ever since.

The combination of food produced via robots with a ghost kitchen model makes so much sense, in part because both are new approaches that help reduce two of the most significant cost drivers of the legacy restaurant business: real estate and labor.

Consider the real estate costs of starting a new sit-down restaurant. Some estimates put the typical down payment required for the commercial space somewhere between $150 to $350 thousand dollars in a market like LA. And that’s before you even get to the cost of renovation and installing a new kitchen, which can cost up to a quarter of a million bucks.

And then there’s labor. A typical fast-food restaurant has to factor in about 25% of sales will go to labor. A fine dining restaurant will pay even more, often up to 40%. For a spot that generates a million dollars a year in top-line revenue, this translates to $400 thousand annually in labor expenses.

That’s a lot of money, and no doubt a big part of the reason about one-third of restaurants don’t make it in normal times, let alone in an era ravaged by a pandemic.

And so, in 2021, it’s not that surprising to see several groups experimenting with ways to combine the idea of new dark kitchen models with automation. Here are just a few:

Pizza HQ: The founders of Pizza HQ are experienced sit-down pizza restaurant operators, but they are betting the future on a robot-powered dark kitchen model. The company is creating a centralized pizza production facility in New Jersey that will utilize up to four Picnic pizza robots and also develop a network of smaller fulfillment centers around the greater northern New Jersey area.

800 Degrees: Another pizza chain, 800 Degrees, is betting its future on a combination of ghost kitchens and automated pizza production. The company is working with ghost kitchen operator Reef to expand to up to 500 ghost kitchens over the next few years, many of which will include Piestro’s robotic pizza kiosks.

Cala: This French company has created a unique pasta-making robot that enables both customer pick up and third-party delivery of its dishes. This model of automated production via kiosk as well as delivery will be a popular hybrid model that enables operators to tap into multiple customer dining revenue streams.

Hyper-robotics: Hyper has created a containerized robotic pizza kitchen that can plug into a dark kitchen model or be used in a hybrid ghost and delivery/consumer pick-up restaurant.

Kitchen United/Kiwibot: While Kitchen United hasn’t announced any deals automating their food production via robotics, the ghost kitchen pioneer has started experimenting with the use of delivery robots to ship food produced in their kitchens to customers.

Nommi: Nommi is a new joint venture creating a bowl-food robot that can be utilized in a variety of ghost kitchen formats. According to company president Buck Jordan, the company also plans to work on technology that could eventually hand robot-produced food to a delivery robot to create an “end-to-end” food robot model from production to the customer doorstep.

These are just a few examples, and we haven’t even gotten to the dozens of food robot startups building systems that could power food production in a ghost kitchen space. Companies like Beastro, Mezli, Middleby and others are working on self-contained food-making robots that could serve as enabling platforms for an entire new industry built around centralized automated food production made exclusively for digital orders.

One could argue the first company to try a robot-powered ghost kitchen model was Zume. The once high-flying startup raised hundreds of millions to create a roboticized dark pizza kitchen model to deliver pizza around the bay area using its high-tech oven equipped trucks. The company eventually shut down its robot pizza business, in part because like many pioneering startups, Zume never figured out an operating model that works (in retrospect, developing custom-built delivery trucks was probably an unnecessary use of venture funding).

But now, many of the companies following in Zume’s wake are building interesting and what looks like more sustainable businesses, in large part because they are working in partnership with restaurant operators who know the business and are savvy in building virtual restaurant businesses optimized to use third party delivery. While some of these models may eventually fail, it’s pretty clear that robotics and ghost kitchens are a combination that will play a big role in the restaurant industry’s future.

Meet Nommi, a Robotic Bowl Food Kiosk Designed by Wavemaker, C3, and Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto

Today Wavemaker Labs announced the launch of a new startup and bowl-making robotic kiosk concept called Nommi. Nommi will be “a standalone robotic kitchen that is able to produce and dispense any grain-, noodle- or lettuce-based dish through a fully integrated cooking system.”

Nommi is the latest robot startup concept to emerge from Wavemaker Labs, the food automation incubation studio behind Miso Robotics (Flippy, a back-of-house fry and grillbot), Bobacino (boba drinkbot), Future Acres (farm assistant) and Piestro (pizza kiosk). What’s unique about Nommi is the company is a product of a partnership between Wavemaker, C3 and chef Masaharu Morimoto, each of whom hold equity in the new company.

“As we started developing it, we really wanted to get partners to allow this to scale quickly, and really kind of stack the deck before we start playing,” said Buck Jordan, President and Co-Founder of Nommi and CEO of Wavemaker Labs, in a recent zoom interview with The Spoon.

C3, which has made a name for itself over the past couple of years for its aggressive expansion into virtual food haul concepts, has plans to order up to one thousand Nommi units over the next few years. While Jordan and C3 envision the Nommi augmenting some physical restaurant locations, the primary focus for the bowl food robot will be food delivery.

“We’re building this to be really delivery accessible,” said Jordan. “Delivery is going to double over the next five years, and so we want to be part of that.”

According to Jordan, while the initial machine will be designed to assemble food bowls that can be handed off to humans for delivery, Nommi envisions a future that will be roboticized from end to end.

The system is “designed and go through our system to be picked up by the regular delivery apps by human,” said Jordan. “But in the long term, we are trying to figure out a way to have a robotic transfer system to some of these robotic delivery machines out there to make a full end to end.”

Chef Morimoto will run the first Nommi, featuring menu items from his Sa’Moto restaurant brand. According to Jordan, Morimoto’s input had a significant impact on the robot design.

“Chef Morimoto wants really high-quality food,” said Jordan. “There’s no compromising when it when he puts his name on it.”

Because Morimoto wanted to delicately place ingredients in each food bowl, Nommi’s design team endeavored to build a robot capable of such high-fidelity food-making. This resulted in a wheeled cart system that moves around under food dispensing stations and rotates up to 360 degrees for precision ingredient placement. You can watch the Nommi assembling bowls via its wheeled cart system in the video below.

The Nommi Bowl Making Kiosk

Nommi fills a hole in Wavemaker’s portfolio for a fully automated bowl kitchen kiosk. Wavemaker’s most well-known food robot startup, Miso, makes back-of-house robots for fry and grill work. Piestro makes consumer-facing pizza robot kiosks. With Nommi, the company has designed a flexible bowl-food robot that, according to Jordan, is flexible enough to replicate a variety of menus from high-end chefs.

“There will be brands built from the ground up to be automated,” said Jordan. “And so we want to take the best in class food from Michelin star chefs and bring fine dining to the masses. We want to do in a fully automated way and be able to have a grain bowl made by Morimoto cost the same as a Big Mac.”

Each Nommi machine has a capacity for up to 330 bowls and lids. Each kiosk will come with up to 21 food lockers that hold finished bowls. Customers or food delivery workers can pick up the food at the kiosk using a QR code.

According to Jordan, the company hopes to start shipping its production unit in 2023.

A Conversation With Buck Jordan of Nommi

Kristen Barnett Launches Hungry House, an ‘Anti-Ghost Kitchen’ Ghost Kitchen

It seems a day doesn’t go by nowadays without a new ghost kitchen concept popping up.

While all that growth can be exciting, the ghost kitchen land grab has its downsides, at least according to Kristen Barnett. The former COO of ghost kitchen startup Zuul told me today in a video call that the industry’s rapid expansion has often meant low-quality food, a lack of transparency, and, well, just way too many chicken wing restaurants.

To counter this, Barnett has launched a new company called Hungry House, which she describes as an ‘anti-ghost kitchen ghost kitchen.’

What does that mean?

“We are actively being intentional about some of the more negative sides of the ghost kitchen industry that the public has come to know,” said Barnett. “Hungry House really was created as a reaction to that, seeing a way to flip those maybe less than ideal characteristics of the industry on its head and say ‘No, what happens if we infuse transparency, we tell customers it’s Hungry House making the food, we have a physical storefront that people can actually order at and see the kitchen and see the team?'”

To do all that, Barnett’s plan is to be transparent about where the food is made and who is making it and to have tight control over the quality. That means growth will be purposeful in the beginning as the company builds its business one kitchen – and chef – at a time.

“I wanted to create Hungry House as the partner of choice for what I believe to be the next generation of culinary leaders who have different career paths than in the past.” According to Barnett, that next-generation leader might be a food truck operator or someone who has proven themselves a culinary innovator on social media but may not want to run a full restaurant.

One such creator is Woldy Reyes.

“Woldy is this incredible Filipino chef who has really well attended pop ups throughout Brooklyn,” said Barnett. “He’s known for his signature menu items, yet he’s been running a catering business, not necessarily operating restaurants, and he’s been able to do all of that. So it made a lot of sense for him as someone who has really well developed recipes, but didn’t necessarily know exactly what it would take to run a restaurant and figuring all of that out wasn’t necessarily in his career plan.”

Barnett’s approach to creating high-touch kitchens and working closely with emerging voices with strong culinary visions is a marked contrast to the high-profile celebrity virtual restaurant concepts being spun out these days.

“These celebrities are definitely capitalizing on great content,” said Barnett. “But is it necessarily going to be executed in a way that creates true long term value in a food brand? I don’t think so. I don’t think many of these are going to be around.”

Barnett’s plan is slowly expand Hungry House over the next year into Manhattan and see where it goes from there. She said the company would be raising a seed round to grow the team, build out their tech stack and expand into new cities.

At the top of her list? LA, New York and Miami.

“With those cities locked down, really anything as possible when it comes to using our model to launch high quality brands that come from either chefs, celebrities, CPG brands,” said Barnett. “That’s the type of world I want to create – where there is true innovation, there are new things being launched, and new stories being told.”

You can watch my full interview with Barnett below:

The Spoon Talks with Hungry House Founder Kristen Barnett

Is Home Fermentation The Next Big Kitchen Tech Opportunity?

There’s been a fermentation boom in restaurants over the past decade. Chefs everywhere are using the age-old technique to make everything from kimchi to katsuobushi, and nowadays, it’s not out of the ordinary for high-end restaurants to have a head of fermentation on staff.

And now, thanks in part to the pandemic and the rise of experimentation in food making, more people than ever are doing fermentation at home. Anyone who’s tried to create a sourdough starter, brew kombucha or make sauerkraut has dabbled in fermentation whether they know it or not.

Still, fermenting is still viewed as something of a black art. Part of it is the weird and slightly creepy terminology (mother, anyone?). Mostly, though, it’s also because the act of farming bacteria to create tasty and healthy new foods is a far cry from the usual activity of assembling and cooking our meals in our kitchen.

The New Sous Vide?

But what if it wasn’t? What if, like other pro cooking techniques that have entered the consumer kitchen, fermentation got an assist from technology to help would-be home fermenters with their craft? Could some innovation and little cool hardware help make fermentation more mainstream, like the sous vide wave that started nearly a decade ago?

That is the hope of a couple of entrepreneurs I caught up with recently at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Fred Benenson’s Breadwinner helps home bread bakers know when their sourdough starter is ready. Tommy Leung’s company Hakko Bako is making a fermenting appliance for the home.

Both see a big future for home fermenters, a future that starts with making the process a little less mysterious.

“I remember I was talking with a close friend of mine when I was starting work on Breadwinner,” said Benenson. “I could tell he was like a little sketched out by the idea that there was this jar of goo.”

Benenson knew that his friend wasn’t alone. There are millions of people around the world who see these jars as mysterious and a little scary. If he could just provide a little more clarity, they wouldn’t be as scared of fermentation. They’d also end up making better bread.

That’s where Breadwinner comes in. Originally conceived as a “social network for yeast” where home cooks could share their stories of loave-making, Benenson also started working on a hardware device that monitors starters. The idea behind both was to give more information.

“Humans have had kind of an innate relationship to fermentation for a long time,” said Benenson. “In terms of making it more approachable, you think of any situation that’s got a lot of uncertainty and confusion, and you’re trying to learn it for the first time, the more you can reduce that uncertainty, the better you feel about engaging with it.”

Leung also wants to make fermentation more approachable. To do that, he is creating both a home and professional kitchen appliance to bring precision to the process.

“Our goal is just to make fermentation easy,” said Leung. “So it means to provide temperature control and then use the technology to make the process easier.”

That precision and control is necessary, in part, because fermentation is so different from the usual act of cooking in the kitchen.

“Most of the things you’re doing in the kitchen, then you’d like to be prepping in the morning and then like serving and cooking it,” said Leung. “Fermentation happens over hours, days, weeks and months.”

Both Benenson and Leung are bullish about fermentation as being potentially the next big professional kitchen technique that could be mainstreamed through innovation.

“The top chefs are already fermenting,” said Leung. “They’re already creating these like amazing flavor experiences. I think like with food usually starts in the Michelin restaurants and then it moves to more like casual dining, and then to the home. So I definitely think it’s going to be a huge part of the future.”

“I’m bullish there,” said Benenson. “I think it will be a while before we have all of our ducks in a row to make the case but it’s what I’m hoping for. I think fermentation is gonna start to sound a lot less scary.”

So is home fermentation the next big kitchen tech opportunity? You can decide for yourself after watching my full conversation with Benenson and Leung below.

Are Beyond Meat’s Flagging Sales a Sign Big Cattle’s Negative Messaging is Working?

This week, Beyond Meat had some lousy news for Wall Street: US sales were down 13.9% year over year.

According to the company, the culprit for the sales drop was a softening in their grocery and foodservice markets.

For some, a sales drop for a high-flying alt-meat pioneer like Beyond might come as a shock. Like Impossible Foods and others in the fast-growing plant-based meat industry, Beyond has had mostly good news over the past few years as revenue went up and to the right on the back of new sales channels, geography expansion, and growing consumer demand.

So what’s going on here? Why is an alt-meat bellwether like Beyond suddenly seeing its sales drop?

The company cites a number of issues, including supply chain constraints, restaurant labor challenges, and ordering uncertainty in the face of never-ending pandemic. They also say new competition is putting downward pressure on market share.

I have no doubt these reasons are true in varying degrees, especially increased competition. More alt-meat alternatives are coming to market all the time, giving grocers and consumers more choice.

Still, from what I can tell, Beyond Meat products are ubiquitous on the shelves of every grocery store or warehouse club I walk into. So if the product is still widely available, I have to wonder: is this a Beyond Meat-specific problem? Or, more specifically, are consumers buying more plant-based meat in general and just less Beyond?

Maybe. Market watchers have estimated that plant-based market grew 12.1% year over year for the month ending July 31st 2021, which shows the industry doesn’t necessarily have a sales problem, at least yet. Personally, I’d love to know what Impossible’s sales have done over the same period. The two companies are the Coke and Pepsi of alt-meats, and if Beyond’s sales drop while Impossible’s continue to go up, that would be a bad sign.

At this point, it’s worth emphasizing I have no idea if this is the case, only that it’s a possibility. Remember, unlike factory-farmed cow or chicken meat, plant-based meats are unique. They are essentially designer products, different in taste, mouth feel and other flavor attributes. I know some people who like Impossible but won’t eat Beyond, and vice versa. Maybe there’s just more of the former than the latter.

I also suspect there might be another non-Beyond meat factor at play here, which is this: a growing negative perception of some plant-based meat products.

Like many who follow the plant-based meat industry closely and are overly aware of the techology-powered ingredient list and carbon footprint of the products, I’ve had friends who don’t spend nearly as much time thinking about plant-based tell me they’ve heard these products are highly processed, unhealthy (or outright bad for you) and less natural compared to the “real thing”.

All of which sounds a lot like the messaging I’ve watched come from the Cattleman’s Association over the last few years. The large meat-growers trade group and other lobbying organizations have continued to push out thought pieces and commentary putting plant-based (and cell-based) meat in a negative light. The messaging is all focus-group tested and aimed to directly appeal to a variety of consumer values and it appears it may be working.

So: Is this a Beyond problem, or is it a canary in the coal mine indicating a growing perception problem for alt-meat? I suspect it may be a little of both. Either way, I am sure the plant-based meat – as well as the factory farming industry – are all watching what happens very closely.

Mezli, a Maker of Robot Restaurants, Wins the Smart Kitchen Summit 2021 Startup Showcase

Mezli, a maker of robotized container restaurants, has won the 2021 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase.

The company, which currently operates a prototype restaurant in San Mateo’s KitchenTown, was started after two of the company’s cofounders, Alex Kolchinski and Alex Gruebele, met while studying at Stanford. Like most college students, the two were always on the hunt for food to fuel their studies but usually found the options lacking.

“Both of us had this problem that we’re trying to solve that it was really expensive to eat good food out,” said Kolchinski from the Smart Kitchen Summit virtual mainstage. “We were pretty busy as Ph.D. students, we can cook all the time. But if we wanted to eat out, it was kind of a choice between going to McDonald’s, which didn’t make us feel great if we ate it every day, or going places like the Stanford dining halls.”

So alongside a third cofounder, Max Perham, they got to work on building a robot restaurant. Unlike many robotic restaurants or kiosk concepts, the trio decided to create a completely customized robot purpose-fit for the job.

“We’ve got kind of a lot of opinions on how to do things in a way that makes the most sense for the problem we’re solving, which is making good with meals on-site that tastes great that are good for you and we do it efficiently,” said Kolchinski. “We’re not using any robotic arms. We’re using custom hardware, some of which we’ve designed in-house and filed some patents on. And some of which we’re adopting from off-the-shelf things. We’ve done some pretty hacky things in here. And I think we’re going to continue to take this kind of hybrid approach in the future too.”

And what does that future entail?

“We’re building up to where we have a whole fleet of these across the country, even across the world, where these are all over the place because they’re cheaper and smaller than restaurants, you can put them in more places.”

According to Kolchinski, Mezli plans on building thousands of containerized restaurants, starting with their current Mediterranean bowl concept and experimenting with other ideas along the way.

“We are building the robotics in a way that can do a lot of different stuff. Basically, anything that goes in a bowl of soup, salads, you name it, curry bowls.”

Mezli joins a series of other innovators participating in the industry’s longest-running food tech startup showcase. In its seventh year, the Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase has been a launching pad for a variety of food tech startups such as Tovala, SAVRPak, Bostrista, Cultured Decadance, Millo and Freshstix.

You can watch Alex Kolchinski’s full interview below.

Mezli Wins 2021 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase

SKS 2021: Meet Ottonomy, Maker of Autonomous Food Delivery Robots

Time to meet Ottonomy, one of the ten startups pitching tomorrow at Smart Kitchen Summit!

Ottonomy is a maker of autonomous delivery robots. Unlike most other sidewalk delivery bots, Ottonomy can navigate through both outdoors and indoor environments. The company, led by longtime robotics entrepreneur Ritukar Vijay, was founded last year and has already racked up mobile ordering partners like Crave.

So why did Vijay, who has worked on autonomous mobility solutions for car makers like BMW, decide to focus on a delivery bot?

“One thing which struck me is that autonomous cars will still take some time to hit the mainstream,” said Vijay. “So what is the best way to actually utilize that know-how to solve a problem of today? That’s how we came down to delivery. Because that’s something which is a real use case that autonomous driving can solve.”

While competition is heating up in this space, Vijay believes his product is hitting the market at just the right time.

“The labor shortage is hitting the restaurants and wages have increased massively,” said Vijay. “So it becomes very, very difficult for large businesses to give a solution the customer expect and have a sustainable future. At the same time, from the customer side, they want a cleaner, faster and cheaper way of getting those kinds of services. So it’s a win-win from both customer and the restaurant side.”

You can watch Carlos Rodela’s full interview with Ritukar Vijay below. If you’d like to connect with Vijay at the Smart Kitchen Summit, get your ticket today!

The Spoon Interviews - Ottonomy

SKS 2021: Meet Culineer, an App That Connects Home Cooks With Local Food Producers

Time to meet our next startup for the Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase: Culineer. Culineer is an app that helps home cooks find recipes and connects them to local farmers and food producers.

When asked why she created Culineer, company cofounder Jodi Frank said it started with her own challenges as a home cook.

“I wanted to solve my own frustrations with cooking,” said Frank. “Most home cooks share my frustration that it takes so much time and energy to decide what to make, find your recipe, get ingredients. By the time you get home, you don’t have any time to cook. So I wanted to make all that a lot more simple.”

As she started to focus on solving her own cooking struggles, it didn’t talk for the former industrial safety executive long to realize that so much of what you cook at home is rooted in your local community. “I really started to think about my own needs,” said Frank. “Food like super persona, and it’s inherently connected and communal.”

And because no one is more integrally connected to the local food community than farmers, Frank knew it was critical for Culineer to make that connection.

“Culineer helps bridge that gap between the farmers and what they are producing with the home cook.”

You can watch our conversation Frank in the video below. If you want to connect with Frank in person and see her pitch at the Smart Kitchen Summit, get your ticket today!

The Spoon Interviews - Culineer

GE Appliances Sends a Turkey-Cooking Sous Chef to Half a Million Wi-Fi Connected Ovens

GE Appliances announced this week it had released an over-the-air software update that will assist half a million owners of GE Appliances’ Wi-Fi connected ovens cook their holiday turkey.

Called Turkey Mode, the new software update gives users step-by-step cooking instructions for their big holiday bird. The update also utilizes a software algorithm to estimate the cooking time needed to reach an optimal 170 degrees internal temperature for any size bird. Temperature measurement is done via a probe that comes standard with all GE Appliance’s connected oven models. Turkey Mode update works with most GE Appliances Wi-Fi connected oven models, 64 model families and 336 SKUs in all.

To see Turkey Mode in action, I jumped on a video call with GE Appliances’ food scientist Sabrinah Hannah and GE Appliances’ director of digital transformation, Taylor Dawson. Hannah told me that the company has been baking turkeys as a product development tool for decades, and they knew that turkeys are one of the biggest challenges home cooks face all year.

One of the lessons learned in the company’s testing was where to place the probe. The slowest heating part of the bird is deep in the breast, so part of the update on LCD-enabled models is a visual of where to place the probe. According to Hannah, if users follow Turkey Mode steps, they won’t need to baste the turkey or cover it with foil.

According to Dawson, the update went out to both LCD-equipped Wi-Fi ovens as well as Wi-Fi models without LCD screens. Users with LCD-equipped ovens can follow the step-by-step instructions on their ovens or the GE Appliances SmartHQ app, while users without LCDs can follow along on the app. For those who get the update on their LCD-enabled ovens, a button that says “Turkey Mode” will appear in the choice of cook mode on the screen. In addition to seeing the new cook mode, the user also gets a season-themed holiday background and a turkey “gobble” sound that plays when the turkey is finished cooking.

Turkey Mode is the second big update GE Appliances has sent over-the-air to their installed base of connected ovens this year. Earlier this year, the company sent an update that added an ‘air fryer’ cook mode to Wi-Fi-connected ovens in the field. While countertop smart ovens like the June have offered upgrades via over-the-air updates for a few years, the ability to send new cook modes and other updates to installed ovens is just beginning to take off as the installed base of connected built-ins reaches a critical mass. The ability to add new cooking features represents a potential business and customer support model opportunity for an industry where customers previously had a fixed set of product features that never changed once they walked out of the store.

SKS 2021: Meet Blix, A No-Cleanup Smart Food Maker

We’re just five days away from SKS 2021, which means it’s time to preview another Startup Showcase finalist.

Today’s featured startup is Blix, a company which makes a no-prep, no-cleanup smart food maker. The Blix food maker uses a patent-protected smart lid which incorporates an integrated blade and RFID tag to enable the user to make a variety of instant meals. The user just adds liquid into the mixing cup, pours in pre-prepared ingredients from a Blix meal pouch and the Blix machine prepares the food in minutes.

Watch The Spoon’s Carlos Rodela discuss the Blix story with company founder Ariel Sterngold. If you’d like to connect with Ariel at Smart Kitchen Summit, get your ticket today!

The Spoon Interviews Blix

SKS 2021: Meet ChocoMake, a Smart Chocolate Machine for the Home Kitchen

If there’s one thing the world can use more of, it’s chocolate tech, and we have it for you with our latest Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase finalist interview: ChocoMake.

In this interview, Carlos Rodela talks with ChocoMake founder and CEO Liora Omer. ChocoMake is a countertop home chocolate making appliance that enables the amateur chocolatier to control taste & texture, shape and the composition of their chocolate creations.

You can watch the video below and learn more about ChocoMake at their website. If you would like to connect with Liora Omer at the Smart Kitchen Summit, get your ticket today!

The Spoon Interviews ChocoMake