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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Michael Wolf

BeeHex Launches DecoPod, a Cake Decorating Robot For Grocery Store Bakeries

In May 2019, Beehex expanded beyond its 3D pizza printing roots with the launch of a dessert decorating robot.

A year later, the company looks to be hitting its pastry printing stride with the release of a second product targeted at cake and cookie printing called the DecoPod.

Unlike the company’s first cake printer that was built for high-volume bakeries, the DecoPod is designed for in-store usage at your local grocery store. And, unlike the more professional cake printer, the DecoPod has a touch screen kiosk where customers can select a design and personalize the message that’s printed on the top of the cake.

You can watch the DecoPod in action below:

According to Beehex CEO Anjan Contractor, the DecoPod can finish printing a cake in around 1-2 minutes. He says that this is fast enough for a typical in-store bakery to print up to 600 cakes per week.

Like many parents, I’ve bought my share of customized birthday cakes over the years at the grocery store or Costco and have often had to wait around for someone in the bakery to put a custom message on it. If I had the option of picking up a cake and printing a customized design and special message using an in-store printing robot, I’d jump at the chance, even if I had to pay a little extra.

For Beehex, which had rose to prominence making pizza printers for NASA, it seems like they’ve picked a more earthbound and – at least for now – higher volume business for its second act. Pastry printing is really the only 3D food printing market doing any volume at this point, in part because sugar is the perfect printing medium.

The Food Tech Show: A Moment of Silence for PicoBrew Episode

This week, the Spoon editorial team got together around the virtual table and talked about some of the top stories of the past week, including:

As always, you can find The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever you find podcasts. You can also download it direct or just click play below.

Cook Magic Is A Text-Messaging Assistant That Turns Ingredients on Hand Into Recipes

As any experienced blogger can tell you, predicting what posts become popular is a crapshoot.

On the one hand, there are those heavily-researched pieces that take days to write that make a resounding thud after you hit the publish button. Then there are those afterthought posts you whip out in 30 minutes that become viral sensations.

I imagine being a software developer is similar. Sometimes you work on an app for months only to hear the crickets chirping after you ship, and then you create something in a day or two and find yourself with a hit on your hands.

The latter seems to be what happened recently with Samsung’s Whisk team with Cook Magic, a text-messaging based recipe app that allows you to simply text your list of ingredients and it responds with a link to a recipe. Last week the new app (or, more correctly, bot) went on Product Hunt, the popular tech and software discovery community, and it instantly became the second most upvoted new product of the day.

I asked Nick Holzherr, the CEO of Whisk (a company acquired by Samsung in early 2019), the story behind Cook Magic, and he told me the app was “was intended as a fun test only and built in something like 24 hours.” The Whisk team, Holzherr explained, was also looking to demonstrate how to use the Whisk API to “build an app that helps people during COVID.”

The COVID-cooking angle makes sense. Like most people, I’m cooking lots more during quarantine and find myself searching for new recipes almost daily. Often my searches involve looking for a recipe that has ingredients I have on hand, but that’s not always as easy as it looks.

I gave Cook Magic a test ride by texting it a random a list of ingredients. Despite my best efforts to stump it, the API-powered text bot gamely responded each time with a link to a recipe with the ingredients I entered.

Like many things, Cook Magic’s success seems somewhat obvious in retrospect. The idea of a text-based bot that spits back recipe suggestions based on what you have in the fridge is extremely useful, especially in this pandemic-driven moment. It’s also drop-dead simple and doesn’t require me to download an app, something that’s almost always a dealbreaker nowadays.

While bot-driven recipe recommendations are definitely interesting, the idea of culinary help by text message isn’t entirely new. Equal Parts started offering cooking help by text bundled with its cookware last year, but unlike the Cook Magic, the texts are typed by a real person with cooking experience. Before that, ChefSteps experimented with Facebook Messenger bot to help you cook with your sous vide.

If you’d like to try out Cook Magic, just text your list of ingredients to the phone number 415-634-2399, wait about 30 seconds, and then head to the kitchen and start cooking.

Here’s How People Are Using Their Instant Pots During Quarantine

By now we’ve all read about how people have changed their eating and cooking habits during the quarantine. But how exactly are they using their Instant Pots, arguably the runaway countertop cooking success story of the last few years, and the first cooking gadget many millennials ever purchased on their own?

To find out, I decided to check in with the maker of the Instant Pot appliance and they shared some data on exactly how people are using their multicookers ever since the pandemic forced the entire world to stay home and start cooking.

One of the big things that changed is the cyclicality of the normal cooking week. In a typical non-pandemic week, Sunday is the biggest day for Instant Pot by a substantial margin, with 25% off all cooking activity occurring on the day of rest.

During quarantine, cooking days have become more evenly distributed as people are home pretty much all the time and Sunday only accounts for 17% of cooking activity. Conversely, Friday, which normally represents the weekly cooking activity nadir, has jumped from 9% of all cooking activity to 13% during the quarantine.

Apparently you can make bread with your Instant Pot (who knew?), and just like with pretty much every other cooking device, the multifunction cooker has seen a sharp increase in loavemaking. The chart above shows how total searches for bread recipes jumped 700% right as the US went into social distancing in early March. Interestingly, this increase is almost identical to the 800% jump in breadmaker sales that happened at the same time.

The search for comfort has also been well-documented. That embrace of more carb-centric food has meant a significant drop in vegan and vegetarian diets, where searches dropped 82% by the week after social distancing had been announced.

And it wasn’t just plant-forward diets that took a hit during coronavirus, as Keto-centric recipes saw a 70% drop in the searches in the same time period.

The big question is will all of these forced changes brought on by the jarring impact of a forced quarantine stick around? My guess is some of the behavior change will have some staying power beyond summer as consumers adjust to lower overall incomes and continue to cook at home more as they head back to work (even at reduced or moderated schedules), but that we will see (and already are seeing) some partial snap-backs to behaviors and routines that were in place before the quarantine.

The Food Tech Show: Why is Amazon Giving Away Food Network Kitchen Access?

The Spoon editor team got together this week to talk about some of the top food tech stories, including Gavin Newsom’s move to start working with restaurants to deliver food to seniors and asking why Amazon’s decided to give away the Food Network Kitchen service for free in coming months.

Other stories discuss include Cheetah’s funding round and the recent spate of chickpea protein investments.

As always, you can listen to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download it direct to your device or just click play below to listen to it right now.

If you’d like to watch the video of our podcast recording, you can check it out on Crowdcast.

Rest in Peace, PicoBrew

PicoBrew, the homebrewing appliance startup based in Seattle, is effectively shutting down the Spoon has learned today.

Back in February, the Spoon broke the story about PicoBrew entering the Washington State bankruptcy process in the form of court-managed receivership. Earlier this month, we uncovered news that the company had put up for sale via auction what looked to be most of the company’s warehouse and PicoPak assembly equipment.

And today we’ve learned that the company’s new owner, which our sources tell us is the former bridge lender who pushed the company into the receivership process, has won full ownership of the company as a result of submitting the winning bid.

According to sources, former company CEO Bill Mitchell sent a letter out this week that called PicoBrew and what happened a “noble failure.” And yesterday, the founder team (Bill Mitchell, his brother Jim Mitchell and Avi Geiger) was let go, along with the customer service team.

It’s unclear at this point what the company’s new management will do with PicoBrew. PicoBrew had assembled quite a decent patent portfolio around automated home brewing as well as in other areas such as home distilling. With the cap table effectively wiped clean, one can assume the assets (like the patents) are now fully owned by the winning bidder, so there’s a chance they’ll try to license the IP to future companies building products in home brewing. There’s also the chance they will try to sell the entire portfolio to the highest bidder.

As for continuing in the business under the PicoBrew brand, the chances for that are slim. The auction made it clear that the new owner is getting rid of all of the operational pieces of the business, something that wouldn’t make all that much sense if the plan was to continue on under the PicoBrew brand.

Finally, it remains to be seen what will happen to existing PicoBrew products. The servers that connect to the PicoBrew apps are still running for now, but it’s unclear if that will remain to be the case. Some PicoBrew users have suggested that the company open-source the software and allow the community to take over development, but it’s too soon to tell if the new owners would be open to such an idea.

We’ll keep an eye on this story and update you with any developments.

I Attended a Techstars Virtual Demo Day and It Was Actually Pretty Good

One of the hardest parts for me personally about COVID-19 has been watching my son lose a big part of a senior year in high school. Daily zoom lectures are no replacement for the camaraderie and celebration of wrapping up twelve years of a primary school education, and the cancellation of graduation ceremonies is a particularly difficult pill to swallow for young adults and their families who’ve waited a lifetime to cheer the receiving of a diploma.

I imagine those participating in startup accelerators may be experiencing a similar feeling. While it may not be the same as replacing the culmination of twelve years of primary education, the 12 or so weeks spent in an accelerator are intense and life-changing for all involved and, like with my son’s high school, many of those days and the final “graduation” have been swapped out for virtual facsimiles.

Which is why I decided to attend the recent BSH Appliances/Techstars Future Home Demo Day. I’d had the chance to attend the “graduation” of the first cohort of this same accelerator in person a year ago in Munich, so I figured I’d have the proper context to see how this virtual demo day compared to the real thing.

The accelerator cohort spent the first six weeks together in Munich, but the decision was made in mid-March to send everyone home and conduct the rest of the accelerator time virtually, including this final virtual demo day. Last year, each of the 10 groups of founders packed into a Munich movie theater and, over the course of the next couple hours, gave polished pitches about their companies as friends, mentors and potential investors cheered them on.

Curie London cofounder Dan Tang describes her startup via Zoom

This year, the event was held via (you guessed it) Zoom, where an initial kick off with comments from the accelerator organizers, and from there each founder would give a quick description of their company. The fuller pitches, the ones that essentially replaced the ones given at demo day in Munich, were pre-recorded so they would, as BSH’s accelerator organizer Tibor Kramer explained, “avoid any issues with streaming.”

The inital kickoff in Zoom was pretty fun. Despite presenting from their own homes virtually, I could sense the founders and the accelerator organizers participating really were happy to see each other and they all cheered each other on and fondly called each other by their nicknames when each took over and gave a brief intro to their company.

At last year’s event, many in the audience held a glass of wine or a beer in hand as they cheered along the founders from their seats. This year, many of the founders and accelerator participants cheered each other along with a celebratory beer or glass of wine as they sat in front of their computers.

Attendees file into a Munich movie theater for the Future Home 2019 Demo Day

After the demo day kickoff, attendees were encouraged to spend the next hour watching the pre-recorded pitches and then drop into private web video chats with each founder team to ask questions and congratulate them. BSH invited me to drop into a few of these meetings and ask questions so I did.

In total, I dropped in to meet four of the founder teams individually and each one seemed excited about graduating and the future despite the obvious differences in today’s landscape. Some admitted that there were definitely some challenges with going virtual, with a couple pointing to the time zone differences as the biggest struggle for them as they tried to participate remotely during Munich business hours from places as far-flung as Bangalore.

“One big change was time zone management,” said Saakshi Jain, cofounder of Zelish a kitchen and meal planning app startup. “We are in a very different time zone that everyone else and it was very late for us.”

Another big difference was the loss of some of the exchanges that are only possible in-person.

“When you’re there with the other founders you really build this strength with the cohort that is hard to replicate in a virtual setting,” said Mihai Hogea, cofounder of Pepper, a voice-powered nutrition & diet management startup. Hogea gave an example of how the accelerator organizers took his cofounder (and brother) Andrei to some Munich brewhouses to celebrate his 30th birthday.

Overall, however, I found my first accelerator virtual demo day enjoyable and pretty informative. I was able to spend more time with each founder I wanted to chat with and felt I found out more about their companies than I would have in an in-person setting, in part because I was able to ask them questions and take some notes on my computer which, it goes without saying, would have been somewhat awkward in-person at a Munich movie theater.

For the founders, I think they also found it enjoyable, but I still think they would have preferred to be drinking beer in Munich. All of them told me the first six weeks spent in person really allowed them to bond and helped make the final half of the accelerator more productive and enjoyable, despite being virtual.

For future accelerators, I imagine the same success will depend somewhat on how much in-person time the cohort gets. And, hopefully next year, the third cohort of this accelerator will be able to get together in Munich and pitch their companies in a dark Munich movie theater.

Attention Nana and Pop-Pop: Facebook Portal Adds Recipe App SideChef

Over the past few years, the Amazon Echo Show has become extremely popular as a smart assistant for the kitchen, allowing consumers to quickly access recipes, watch videos, and connect to smart devices.

The Facebook Portal, on the other hand, has largely languished since its release in late 2018 as consumers resisted adding a video-enabled device to their homes from a company that has proven an unreliable steward of their privacy.

However, with the arrival of COVID-19, it seems like the Portal may finally be getting a little traction from its most reliable demographic (seniors) as many of the homebound silver-haired set looks for ways to connect with family during quarantine-times. And now, they can get in on some of that cooking action, too, as Portal added the SideChef smart recipe app to its store last week.

From the SideChef announcement:

SideChef’s signature “smart recipe” format ensures a seamless cooking experience for home cooks of all skill levels with its easy-to-follow guided video recipes, which has been adapted to also fit the screen size for Portal devices.

While the cooking guidance on a kitchen screen is a nice feature to have, I suspect it may be the integration with AmazonFresh that might be a bigger selling point for seniors. My own 70-something mom started using online grocery for the first time during the pandemic, and I’m sure she’d love to add items to her shopping list and order while working in the kitchen.

While the Portal does have Alexa built-in, I’m not sure if the Portal’s Alexa integration connects to Amazon’s delivery service via SideChef (SideChef does work with Alexa on native Amazon devices). If that is the case, it might just the recipe to sell my own Alexa-loving mom on putting a Portal in the kitchen.

For SideChef, Facebook is yet another partner in a long list of integrations for the guided cooking and smart kitchen app over the past few years including Samsung’s Bixby, Amazon Fresh (as mentioned), and GE/Haier to name a few.

According to SideChef, the app is available now for the Portal Mini, Portal, and Portal+.

The Food Tech Show: The People Are Growing Yeast and Plants at Home Episode

It’s a very specific cultural moment when a Twitter thread about deriving yeast at home from the skin of fruits goes viral, but here we are.

The Spoon editorial team got together this week to discuss said Twitter thread from a Ginkgo yeast geneticist Sudeep Agarwala. We also chatted about a few other stories, including:

As always, you can find the Food Tech Show in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can also download this episode to your device or just click play below.

If you’d like to join the Spoon editorial team next week when they record the podcast, our next live podcast recording on Crowdcast is next Tuesday at 10 AM PST. You can sign up here.