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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Michael Wolf

Is Food Waste Reduction About to Have Its ‘Nest Moment’?

When the Nest came out in 2011, it quickly became popular for its innovative design and its ability to allow users to track their energy usage more accurately. While the Ecobee thermostat is largely recognized as the first true smart thermostat, most would agree it was Nest—especially after Google acquired the company in 2014—that exposed a much broader swath of the population to the concept of using smart home technology to manage energy and reduce energy bills.

Nowadays, about one in six households has a smart thermostat, and using one to reduce energy bills is often listed at the top of home energy management and budget-saving tips.

Meanwhile, although most people recognize that food waste is also a waste of money, only a tiny fraction of US households use any innovative technology to avoid it. The main reason is that tracking food waste is difficult. Until recently, it required users to pull out a spreadsheet and make numerous estimations of how much food ended up in the waste bin.

But that may soon change, in part because those who helped build the Nest are now trying to bring the same type of management and tracking dashboards that helped users become more aware of how much money they could save by better managing their home heating and cooling. Mill, co-founded by Nest co-founder Matt Rogers and one of the thermostat company’s first hires, Harry Tannenbaum, helps users keep track of how much food they are keeping out of the waste bin. According to the company, this is helping them reduce waste and save money.

According to Mill, their device is resulting in changed consumer behavior. In a new report published today, Mill states that users of their device reduced the amount of food they throw out by 20% within a few months of using the food recycler.

From the report:

Mill aggregated millions of device days of data from April 2023 to May 2024 and found that the median Mill household added around 5.5 pounds of food scraps per household per week. Notably, the median amount of food scraps added to Mill decreased over time—by over 20% in the first four months—and then stabilized.

With the average US household wasting up to $1,900 in food annually, this translates to roughly $380 in savings over the course of a year. If you’re doing the math, that’s about three times the savings a household gets from using a Nest.

With such obvious bottom-line benefits, will users start embracing smarter food waste management tools? Possibly, but with a couple of caveats. While energy management is something that is easy to track via lower energy bills, the savings from food waste reduction are less direct and obvious to the consumer. It’s also more expensive to buy a Mill recycler, setting a home back a thousand dollars (or $30 a month if on a subscription plan). There are cheaper products—the Lomi costs about $379—but from my experience using it for six months, the Mill is quieter and compacts more food than competing composters.

There’s no doubt that food waste reduction is having a moment. Just last week, the Biden administration announced the first national White House strategy on food waste reduction, and businesses have finally begun taking it seriously, in part because of state and local laws forcing their hand. All this comes against a backdrop of higher consumer prices for food, which has translated into consumers buying less food and being a bit more mindful of the food they already have in their fridges and pantries.

My hope is that companies like Mill will now start eyeing how to keep food from going to the bin in the first place. Other startups like Wisely, Silo, and Ovie are making products that help consumers more smartly store in their fridges, while big companies like Amazon have been researching ways to make the fridge smarter when it comes to food waste management. If someone, Mill or otherwise, can finally build food waste management systems millions of consumers use – before and after it goes bad – then we might finally be able to make a dent in our national home food waste problem.

‘It’s Algorithmic’: Surreal Brewing’s Founder Says Process for Non-Alchohol Beer Based on Science, Not Gimmicks

Nearly a decade ago, Tammer Zein-El-Abedein and his wife, Donna Hockey, had reason to celebrate. Donna had just successfully overcome a breast cancer diagnosis, and so the couple hoped to commemorate the good news in a healthy way.

“We wanted a nonalcoholic beer,” said Zein-El-Abedei in an interview at Smart Kitchen Summit earlier this month. But, according to the former Google executive, they couldn’t find any non-alcoholic beer “outside of the stuff that’s been out for the last 30 or 40 years, which just wasn’t very interesting.”

So they decided to brew their own. Nine months later, in June 2018, the couple’s first beer (and their company Surreal Brewing) was born. It didn’t take long before the plaudits started rolling in, first in the form of a gold medal at the World Beer Awards and, in 2019, the award for the world’s best non-alcoholic and low-alcohol beer.

Since then, the pair have grown their non-alcoholic craft beer lineup, including four different types of IPAs, a Kolsch, and a couple of Porters. They’ve also expanded across the country, getting distribution into states like Virginia, and became the first non-alcoholic beer poured on tap at Disney World.

Experts generally agree there are four ways to make non-alcoholic beer, including “arrested fermentation,” extracting alcohol from brewed beer, watering down beer (um, gross), and simulated fermentation (which skips the fermentation altogether and adds ingredients and enzymes to simulate a similar result). Zein-El-Abedein doesn’t go into the specifics of the company’s brewing techniques but says its patent-pending brewing process is based on chemistry and not special gimmicks.

“The way we approached making our product is based on science,” he said. “We don’t have a special hoodaddy that you pour in, which comes out non-alcoholic. We don’t do any of that stuff. We actually engineered a process from the ground up that is algorithmic.”

If you’d like to listen to our full interview with Zein-El-Abedein, just click below.

Surreal Brewing Company and the Future of Non-Alcoholic Beer

MOTO Pizza’s Lee Kindell Talks Drone Delivery and Humanoid Robots

Last week at SKS, we had a chance to sit down for an interview with MOTO founder Lee Kindell.

Anyone who’s spent time with Lee knows he’s an enthusiastic proponent of technology, both in his restaurants and in our lives. That’s why it no surprise that he’s embracing drone delivery and hopes to see Zipline drones dropping his craft pizzas on front doors in the Seattle market by the end of this year.

While some of us may have been creeped out by the realness of Figure 01’s speech and ability to hand us fruit, Lee was nothing of the sort and said he expects the speed at which we will adopt robotics into our lives will surprise us.

You can watch our full conversation with Lee below.

MOTO Pizza's Lee Kindell Talks About Building a Fully Automated Pizza Restaurant

Podcast: The Smart Kitchen Summit Recap

Last week, The Spoon and almost three hundred of our closest friends spent an eventful couple of days in Seattle, talking about how technology is transforming the consumer meal journey.

After the dust had settled, Carlos Rodela and I got together to talk about some of the highlights of SKS 2024, We talked about some of the products we saw and our favorite sessions from speakers on stage.

You can listen to the audio-only podcast, but I’d recommend watching the video below, complete with pics and videos of the action at Block41 in Seattle.

A Look Back at Smart Kitchen Summit 2024

Don’t Call It a Comeback: Take-Aways and Thank Yous For Smart Kitchen Summit 2024

Last week, we produced the first in-person Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) since 2019.

It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. In some ways, we’ve lost all sense of time given what has happened over the past five years, including a pandemic, but still, five years is a long time.

Bringing the event back was something we wanted to do for the last couple of years, both because we missed it and because we were hearing from our community, who also wanted SKS back. However, before we did, we wanted to ensure the timing was right. For many reasons (more on that later), we finally felt it was the right time when we announced SKS 2024 last December.

When we held our last event, we didn’t know it at the time, but we were, in a sense, closing the first chapter on the smart kitchen. Many of the first attempts by appliance companies, food brands, and startups building enabling technology had either gained traction or, in many cases, had not, making it a good time to reassess.

The first wave of the smart kitchen focused heavily on leveraging smart home technologies, voice interfaces, and app platforms to digitize knowledge around cooking and food journey management. Many interesting startups born during this time had been acquired or built sustainable and interesting businesses on their own. More eventually went out of business.

That’s why, as I built the program for this first year back, I wanted to take a realistic look at our industry’s progress, take stock of the lessons learned, and understand the current state of innovation. I wanted to have some ‘real talk’ so we can be clear-eyed about what we did right and what we did wrong and better navigate the next ten years of building products for the future kitchen.

Many of those lessons were articulated during the two days. Scott Heimendinger, who has been building products that utilize technology to help us become better cooks for more than a decade, summed up much of the problem with the first wave (and warned those this time around) on the opening panel.

“There’s a temptation that’s especially prevalent in our industry, but in others as well, that when new technologies become available to the world, we want to kind of slap those on what we’re doing,” said Heimendinger.

Scott and others warned that we must avoid repeating the same mistakes, especially as the industry embraces new technologies such as generative AI.

Another key refrain we heard during the two days was how critical it is to understand how we can meet consumers where they are in the kitchen and understand their needs. We need to build products that enhance their ability to cook great meals and make their lives easier, all while understanding the changing nature of living today as we witness growing challenges of buying homes, inflation, and a warming, increasingly resource-challenged planet.

Two speakers who addressed consumer motivation were Susan Schwallie and Barb Stuckey.

“They are outfitting utilitarian and multi-purpose kitchens and require appliances that work hard for them,” Schwallie said during her presentation, Harnessing Consumer Trends to Design the Kitchen of Tomorrow. “Gone are the days of single-use tools like avocado slicers and artisanal coffee makers, which required time and technique. Multi-purpose tools like air fryers resonate.”

One crucial aspect to consider about Millennials is their hyper-awareness of the cost of life in 2024. This, combined with their aspiration for ‘adult’ kitchens, underscores the significance of durability in their purchasing decisions, according to Schwallie. They seek products that can withstand the test of time, and the fear of planned obsolescence is a genuine concern for them. Many reside in ‘forever apartments,’ where storage and countertop space are limited, “making utility and flexibility important.”

Barb Stuckey delved into the changing nature of housing and how it impacts what Millennials and Gen Z think about their kitchen purchase decisions. According to Barb, only 40% of renters expect to own a home someday, and this permanent rental mindset has translated to this tech-forward generation, which is eyeing practical and multi-function appliances that often sit on the countertop.

We also looked further into the future during SKS, exploring potential scenarios that could be unlocked through the application of new technologies. One scenario described by Mike Lee, author of Mise, during his talk, is a society in which a large segment of our population utilizes AI-powered personalized nutrition platforms to guide their every move. Mike expressed his belief in the great potential of personalized nutrition but also emphasized that we as an industry need to recognize that “something is lost when eating in a silo.”

Another conversation focused on how robotics and automation will be used in the consumer kitchen. It’s a particularly interesting time for this conversation, as we increasingly hear about companies like Apple, Tesla, and the Bot Company eyeing the home market for robotics. Moderator Wilson Rothman pressed those building high-end and pricey robots about the key needs they were solving and how they envisioned consumers getting these products into their homes. Robin Liss, who makes a countertop robot named Suvie, talked about the importance of a “constant feedback loop” of usage data to make products ever more usable and affordable.

This is only a sample of what we heard. We will examine and explore insights from the stage as we publish videos and transcripts of the sessions in the coming weeks. For now, though, I just wanted to reflect and thank those who made SKS 2024 possible.

When we had the first SKS in 2015, we were on the precipice of a new wave of innovation around cooking and food technology. Looking back, we’ve documented many of those stories here at The Spoon and have, in recent years, started to hear from others beginning their journeys building new products and platforms for the consumer kitchen. As we’ve listened over the past twelve months, it’s become evident to me there is a new wave of innovation building, where innovators are leveraging advances in AI, synthetic biology, heating, robotics, electrification, and much more to build the future companies and kitchens of tomorrow.

We hope to help document these stories on The Spoon, through podcasts, and at our events for the next decade, and we hope you come along for the ride!

***

Now for some thanks. Big thanks to the SKS sponsors Whirlpool, Current Backyard, Fresco, Schott, Chefman, Suvie, Else Labs, Pot Robotics and Cibotica, all of whom helped make SKS possible.

Big thanks to my good friend and event consigliere, Surj Patel, who did a masterful job MCing for the two days. Thanks to Sandie Markle and Louis Leboa for helping corral speakers during SKS. Thank you to my good friend Carlos Rodela and awesome videographer Luca Nilon-Volpentesta for doing interviews and capturing some great video.

Thanks to Heather Moore, a long-time friend (and fellow puppet-lover) for capturing amazing photos of all the action at SKS.

Also, thanks to other volunteers such as Hamid Ali (congratulations on a great career at Google!), Cormac Wolf, and Andrew Miller.

Thanks to Renton Technical College for feeding us. We are big supporters of RTC’s mission of educating young people and preparing them for careers in food service.

Thanks to the team at Kind and Co for being awesome event ninjas and ensuring all the little (and big) things that go into producing an event got done.

Thanks to all the speakers for SKS 2024 for taking time out of their busy schedules building businesses to book flights and come to Seattle to share knowledge.

Thanks to all of our event partners, who helped spread the word about SKS, ensured we filled seats, and tapped into their networks.

Thanks to our attendees, who, through their energy and insight during the show, truly made SKS 2024 an amazing event.

Thanks to the media for coming and writing about SKS.

Thanks to the SKS Advisory Council, which helped shape my thinking about this year’s program and made connections when needed.

Finally, thanks most of all to Tiffany McClurg, who did so much to make SKS 2024 a rousing success. She not only helped make SKS so much better and kept the trains running on time during the show, but also got to step out on the first day and watch her (and my) son graduate from the University of Washington.

We’ll see you all next year!

Scenes from Smart Kitchen Summit 2024

The Smart Kitchen Summit wrapped up this week, and boy, did we have a great time discussing how new technologies will drive the next wave of cooking and kitchen innovation!

I’ll be sharing some of my thoughts next week, but I thought I’d share some of my favorite shots from the show. Thanks, as always, to Heather Moore for great work.

Above: Kicking off SKS 2024 with some great insights from Scott Heimendinger, Chris Young and Kai Shaeffner.

Above: SKS MC Surj Patel talks with Ladle Cooking’s Sumati Sharan

Above: Chef, meet Chef. Two authors connect at SKS. Chris Young (Coauthor, Modernist Cuisine) shakes hands with James Briscione (Author, The Flavor Matrix).

Above: Talking Cooking Robots. A food robotics session with Mark Oleynik (Moley Robotics), Robin Liss (Suvie) and Assaf Pashut).

Above: SKS attendees check out what’s next in cooking technology.

Above: MOTO Pizza CEO Lee Kindell shows off his t-shirt on stage.

Above: Wisely founder Rachell McCray talks about the future of food storage with Ovie’s Stacie Thompson.

Above: The sun breaks through just in time for happy hour at SKS 2024

Your Future Induction Stove May Be the Foundation for That Home Power Wall

If you’re like me, you’ve considered installing a giant home battery to help transition away from traditional grid-connected power.

And if you’re also like me, you haven’t done it because it’s expensive, and there’s a lot of housework you need to do to make it happen.

But what if you could put together a home battery power system piece by piece, starting with a big piece, such as an induction stovetop?

That’s the dream of Sam D’Amico, the CEO of Impulse Labs. Sam’s company is building a new stove with a big battery built in to help folks who aren’t wired for induction (the rule of thumb is you need a 220V outlet on a 50-amp circuit). Impulse’s induction cooktop has a built-in battery that stores up energy via a traditional circuit and draws upon it when it’s time to cook. Perhaps more importantly, it can also be the foundation of a fractionalized battery system that, when pieced together with other batteries, can store power from solar panels and power your home.

“You’re deploying a pretty large home battery system piece by piece,” Sam said in a recent episode of The Spoon podcast. “And then once that’s deployed, you’ve got something with which you can essentially make the home all electric.”

Sam says his conversations with utilities tell him they are excited about the concept of fractionalized home battery backup and that they might even be interested in subsidizing some of this transition.

“There’s definitely a lot of interest there. You can already see incentives from utilities for more efficient appliances today. That’s already a thing that’s happening.”

The push towards electric cooking is coming at the same time there’s strong demand from consumers to move towards solar, and battery prices are dropping. The end result is you might just see these trends converge towards a new home power system in which many of your big appliances (stoves, washing machines, water heaters) combine to power your cooking and more.

You can hear more about this in my full conversation with Sam by clicking play below.

MOTO Pizza Teams Up With Cibotica for Salad Bowls, Eyes Expansion into Frozen Pizza for Retail

This week, fast-growing restaurant chain MOTO Pizza announced it will soon add salads to the menu at select locations with the help of Cibotica, a startup specializing in salad and bowl food robots. According to MOTO founder Lee Kindell, the Seattle-based pizza chain will deploy its first Cibotica unit at the chain’s flagship location in the Belltown area of downtown Seattle sometime this summer.

“I went up to their shop in Vancouver and love what they’re doing,” Kindell told the Spoon. “And we’re actually developing my recipes right now for my salad. We’re looking at maybe getting it in here in the next two months.”

The partnership will span up to three years under a robotics-as-a-service operating model and is focused on producing salads for MOTO in various locations. Those future locations could include spots across Southern California. MOTO expanded to the Palm Springs area earlier this year and, according to Kindell, just locked up its first location on the Los Angeles market in the Hollywood Bowl. Kindell told The Spoon that one of the lessons learned over the past year was that a stadium or amphitheater presence (MOTO got into T-Mobile Park last year) can help serve as an expansion point into a metro area.

“What happened with the T Mobile Park is people found us there, and it gave us so much business.”

In addition to adding robot-made salads in some locations and inking more stadium deals, Kindell is exploring ways to freeze his craft pizzas and sell them through the grocery channel. The genesis for exploring the frozen food aisle as an expansion area for his business traces back to an interaction Kindell had with one of his more prolific customers at a MOTO restaurant in Seattle.

“She would order nine or ten pizzas, and I asked, ‘How big is your family?’ She said, ‘It’s just me, my husband, and my son. So I order your pizza and I freeze it.’ I said, ‘You’re kidding me. How is it?’ She said, ‘My son likes it better.'”

Whether it’s through using robots to make his pizza (and now salads), drone delivery, or exploring frozen for expansion into retail, Kindell says there’s one motivating factor behind all of it.

“Like a dog on a bone, I’ve grabbed this idea of scaling craft.”

Kindell will be speaking next week at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Grab your tickets here if you want to meet Kindell in person.

A Decade Before The ChatGPT Recipe Craze, a Cooking Show Champ Helped IBM Train Chef Watson

By now, most everyone has tried their hand at prompt engineering ChatGPT or another LLM to create a decent recipe.

But a decade and a half ago, well before the current craze of making recipes with generative AI, IBM was trying to figure out how to make Watson start cooking. The supercomputer-powered AI, which was probably the first real-world AI most of us knew by name, had just broken into the broader American consciousness after it had beaten human players Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a Jeopardy tournament. Now, IBM was looking for ways to showcase how the technology could help people be more creative, and they identified cooking and recipes as the next world to conquer.

Around this time, the Watson team teamed up with the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) to help train Watson. James Briscione, who had won Chopped season 2 a couple of years before and was the ICE’s director of culinary research, remembers those early days when IBM computer scientists filed into his kitchen.

“The first day we set up, the Watson team came to the kitchens at ICE, walked in with a laptop, flipped it open, logged into an interface that IBM was hosting, and we started parsing datasets.”

This meant going through and looking at ingredient combinations based on cuisine style, dish type, and flavor profiles of different dishes, as well as breaking down each type of ingredient into the various flavor and aromatic compounds into building blocks, which allowed Watson to then process millions of flavor combinations and recommend them to ICE chefs. During the process, the Watson team made sure the human chefs remained as ana integral and necessary part of the AI feedback loop.

“For the majority of the project, it did not give us recipes, it gave us ingredient combinations,” said Briscione. “And then I did the work then to translate that into the recipe.”

Briscione said taking Watson’s combination suggestions and combining them into a recipe helped unlock the creativity of him and the other chefs.

“As a sort of a thought experiment, it was even more interesting because then we could take an ingredient output, I would take it and interpret that ingredient output one way. Another chef could take that exact same ingredient output and interpret it completely differently. So in inspiring creativity, it was really, really powerful.”

Nowadays, Briscione is applying what he’s learned to build a new company that helps train large language models to better understand food. He will discuss this new company at the Smart Kitchen Summit next week.

You can watch the entire interview and see the transcript below. .

The Chef Who Helped Build Chef Watson: A Conversation With James Briscione

Transcript

Michael Wolf: I’m excited to have James Briscione who is a chef I’ve been following for a while. James, you do so many things. You’re an author. You’re a Food Network personality. And you’re one of those rare chefs that have been dabbling with AI longer than pretty much most people even working with AI at all. So it’s exciting to have you. Thanks for coming.

James Briscione Yeah, Michael. Excited to chat here excited about SKS coming up in June. This will be a great event and can’t wait to get there.

Michael Wolf Yeah, we’re going to hear you on stage talking about your experiences and what you’re looking forward to with the integration of AI. But for those who don’t know you, tell us a little bit about your background and what you’ve done over your career.

James Briscione As you said, I’m a chef first. I started as a dishwasher at the age of 16, worked my way up to some of the top kitchens in the country. James Beard award winning kitchens that I was at the helm of. Four Star Fine Dining in New York City. Kind of did it all. With that really elevated fine dining background, I moved into education at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan and really was in the right place at the right time when IBM came knocking and said, ‘we’ve got this crazy idea. We’ve got this thing called Watson, that just conquered Jeopardy. And now we want to see if it can help people. We know it can answer questions. We want to see if it can help people be more creative.’

And they thought about music, they thought about visual arts, but you know, felt those were too subjective and culinary arts was a very objective area for this. So when they came to meet with us, they met with all the instructors, kind of talked about the process of development and creating dishes, and how you work as a chef. Having just been the first two-time champion on the show Chopped on the Food Network, the way I sort of process and put together flavors and ingredients was exactly what they were trying to build with Watson. So that started about a four-year relationship working with the core team there at IBM to develop Chef Watson, which I now know was recipe generative AI. Almost 11 years ago, before we started building it, I had no idea what those words even meant. And AI was only something you saw in Will Smith movies.

Michael Wolf So those early days, you’re helping with Watson. Are they bringing you into a kitchen at IBM headquarters? What does that exactly mean? Are they monitoring you with cameras, or are you saying, ‘hey, these are what flavors are trying to tell a computer what a flavor is?’

James Briscione First, as we talked about it, I was still in that Chopped competition mode. So I was like, ‘if I’m going to cook against this computer, I’m going to kick its ass. I’m actually going to prove that this thing can’t do it better than a human. The first day we set up, they came to the kitchens at ICE (the Institute of Culinary Education), walked in with a laptop, flipped it open, logged into an interface that IBM was, was hosting, and we started parsing datasets and going through and generating ingredient combinations based on a number of different factors based on cuisine style. so original cuisine, a type of dish and, and, and a core ingredient to inform, the flavor profile of, of the dish. So we’d say Italian grilled lobster. And then it would generate trillions of possible ingredient combinations that could be used to create a dish that were typical Italian ingredients that kind of fit in with what it knew about a grilled lobster recipe or a grilling recipe and a lobster recipe overlay. And then use that lobster to as kind of the core flavor profile to then build sort of that flavor tree off of that core ingredient, which that process, that’s how I tend to think about creating a dish, but getting down to the molecular level, understanding all of the aromatic compounds in the food, how those flavors relate to one another, why they go well together. I never looked at information that way or understood it in that form. And it was mind blowing to process tens of thousands of aromatic compounds in every dish, just like that.

Michael Wolf So it was essentially building, I don’t know if the right word is ontology, but kind of trying to dissect food at a more atomic level and then understanding what the commonalities are. You know, saying ‘lobster often goes in these types of dishes’ or ‘Hey, maybe it works with these types of dishes.’ So really trying to create the data building blocks so Watson can then say, hey, here’s a unique flavor idea, recipe idea you may not have thought of with your small human brain.

James Briscione Exactly. And, you know, for the majority of the project, it did not give us recipes. It gave us ingredient combinations. And then like, you know, it was kind of, I did the work then to translate that into the recipe. But as sort of a thought experiment, it was even more interesting because then we could take an ingredient output, I would take it, and interpret that ingredient output one way. Another chef could take that exact same ingredient output and interpret it completely differently. So in inspiring creativity, it was really, really powerful. And actually, there were some cool examples of where we would take the same generation, go to separate sides of the kitchen, and come back in the middle with our finished dish. You couldn’t even tell that they started at the same place.

Michael Wolf You’ve watched over the past decade, this expansion of folks trying to use technology to understand the way we cook better. Those early days of watching Watson were pretty seminal and informative, and that was the first time I remember seeing articles, maybe in the New York Times, saying ‘Watson beat Jeopardy, now it’s trying to cook’. So as you’ve watched this evolve over the past decade, what have you been thinking about? And what have you learned maybe about AI and its intersection with food? Is it something now you’re more excited about than ever?

James Briscione 100% more excited than ever. I think the potential here to simplify, to streamline, which to me is kind of the ultimate promise of AI, to make our lives better, to organize and streamline. I think where obviously it gets tricky, is one, it’s new. So there’s going to be some inherent distrust of it. One bad recipe, one recipe that doesn’t work and people are going to bail on it as well.

Michael Wolf Right, right. We’ve all done those bad recipes with ChatGPT. Like that just sounds awful.

James Briscione Yeah, and you know, I mean, it’s going to be interesting to watch this landscape too now because the majority of what’s out there are just some, you know, some basic GPT wrappers. And if any of these copyright lawsuits get through, a lot of these datasets, these sources, start to dry up or become more restricted. So one thing I’m starting to work into is building a new dedicated model for recipe generation with nutrition and flavor inputs that really can optimize your food specifically for you. If you want to get down as far as the genome, I think that’s some functionality that is off in the future, but generally, as an active 44-year-old male who lives in a hot climate, AI can tell me exactly what I should be eating on a day-to-day basis to optimize me for what I do.

Michael Wolf That’s interesting. And I think the startup you’re working on is called CulinAI. And so that’s exactly it. And so is this something you’re building your own large language model or you’re building something that can integrate with maybe some of the other large language models? Tell us a little bit about it.

James Briscione Yeah, so, and I’m actually working with the original developer of Chef Watson. It’s kind of a hybrid model where we are going to be employing some large language models, but also some kind of dedicated pieces that would be unique to this model, particularly the flavor science and the nutrition data input. And then, really, kind of the secret sauce is in the selection because, again, we know that the large language models can generate lots of great things that look like good recipes, but training it to then go back through those and select out the ones that are actually right is where it all comes together.

Michael Wolf Well, I’m excited to hear more about that at Smart Kitchen Summit. You are someone who works in a professional kitchen. You’ve been on TV, won awards, you have your own restaurant. But there’s also the consumer, right? Someone who, like me, doesn’t know what they’re doing. And one of the reasons I got interested in the Smart Kitchen in the early days is because I thought that maybe technology can help me become a better cook. How do you think average everyday consumers who aren’t like you can use technology tools like AI to help them cook better?

James Briscione We talked about kind of one of the biggest benefits AI is to make our lives better, to simplify processes and personalization, right? And I think that’s really where it comes in to find the right information. Even just how to get your ingredients organized at the beginning of the week to set up for, hey, ‘here’s what I’m going to, here’s what I’m going to cook for the week’, building out a meal plan that utilizes all of the ingredients that you have so that you don’t, at the end of the week, have half a pint of cherry tomatoes, three quarters of a head of celery, two onions, and half a butternut squash. It’s all just sitting there because you bought it all because you had to have it for that recipe, and now it all is just kind of like laying to waste, and you leave it there until it’s time to finally throw it away. And I think some of those, I think a lot of those things are what discourage people or kind of keep people from cooking. So, AI tools that can teach you to approach that process the way I do as a chef of not just looking at, okay, here’s what I’m gonna do for dinner for Tuesday night, but okay, as I’m doing dinner for Tuesday night, here’s how we get lunch for Wednesday ready.

Michael Wolf Right, right.

James Briscione And another chunk of dinner for Thursday, all kind of set up and set aside so that that’s easier too. And I think a lot of those tools are some of the things we’re looking at building into CulinAI, and I think those are the pieces that I’m excited about.

Michael Wolf Well, I’m excited to hear you in Seattle in June at Smart Kitchen Summit. James, where can people find out more about you?

James Briscione Most social media platforms at James Briscione. That’s probably the best way to find me, LinkedIn, all of the typical places, just right under my name, I’m there. There’s not many Brisciones around, so.

Michael Wolf All right, man, we’ll see you in a bit. Yeah, there aren’t. That’s a great, unique name. All right, James, we’ll see you soon.

James Briscione All right.

Tovala’s Keeley Kabala: Success in Smart Kitchen Requires Listening to Your Customers

Back in 2016, an early-stage startup called Tovala appeared in just the second Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase. Company CEO David Rabie showed off the first-gen oven and discussed the vision for a combination of a hardware appliance and a food subscription service.

Fast forward eight years later, and Tovala has become one of the true success stories in the smart kitchen, amassing a large and enthusiastic user base for its oven and an extremely high lock-in rate for its meal delivery service.

I caught up recently with Tovala’s COO, Keeley Kabala, to talk about Tovala’s business in 2024 and where he sees his company and food delivery going over the next decade.

One of the key takeaways for me was that Tovala still focuses heavily on adding value for its customers through its oven, even if that means enabling users to take advantage of the multi-function cooking automation that is one of the key differentiators for the Tovala. The company sells two models of oven today – a five-in-one and a six-in-one – and as of today they have over one thousand CPG products in the database that they can run scan-to-cook where the oven will have an optimised set of cooking instructions that can bring the different forms of heat (and steam) into the cooking process.

According to Kabala, many of those CPG products are available at Costco.

“Right now we have dozens of Kirkland products that can scan to cook right from the beginning,” said Kabala. “So people many times are leaving the store with scannable items that have cook cycles already programmed in for their oven to use.”

Not only does Tovala have scan-to-cook for Costco’s Kirkland brand items, but it is also selling its oven in select Costco, which Kabala believes will give them more exposure to different customer types, which will give them new data points around which to build product around customer preferences.

It’s this listening to customers, says Kabala, the is critical for their future success.

“If we’re willing to listen to our customers, they’ll give you a chance to iterate.” said Kabala. “If you don’t listen, you might not be around forever. It’s been great to see just how vocal people are, too. They really care. So they don’t hold back on their feedback. We just have to make sure we keep listening.”

You can watch the interview below as well as read the transcript of the full conversation.

If you’d like to connect with Keeley in person, he will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit next week. You can get your tickets at the SKS website.

A Conversation with Tovala's Keeley Kabala

Michael Wolf: All right, I’m here with Keely Kabala, not Keely Tovala, because it sounds like some people get that mixed up because the name sounds so familiar.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, it’s got the same last few letters, but yes, it was named before I got here. I didn’t choose the name of the company, but it’s led to confusion and many jokes along the way.

Michael Wolf: And I imagine one of those jokers is David Rabie, the cofounder and CEO of the company I’ve spoken with. He’s been at Smart Kitchen Summit to some of it, but we’re excited to have you come out to Seattle in June to talk about what you guys are doing at Tovala. Tovala is a really interesting company because they are one of the real success stories in this idea of like bringing new technology into the kitchen. And also you have this interesting pairing with a food delivery service. You guys have really been a shining star in that space, combining a food delivery service with the hardware. We’ll talk about that in a little bit, but before we jump into like what’s going on with Tovala, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got where you are.

Keeley Kabala: Sure. My whole professional career has kind of been in the consumer appliance space. Did my very first internships at Whirlpool and Fellows, making appliances and paper shredders. I went over to Whirlpool full-time and had a variety of different interesting and challenging assignments all over the world. I got to live in Europe for a year, in China for a year, launched products and dishwashers, refrigerators. And interestingly enough, David and Brian, the other co-founder of Tovala, asked me to be their first employee in 2015. I didn’t understand the concept of Tovala and turned them down. And they asked me again a few months later and again a few months later. And finally, after they launched the Kickstarter and it became a little bit more real, I ended up joining the team as the VP of Hardware Engineering. And so, at that time, they had the Gen 1 oven, which had a lot of pros but also had a lot of cons. And my job was to work with the team to create what was our second gen oven. And it’s kind of the base for the two SKUs that we have right now. So we developed that in 2017, 2018, and it launched November 2018 and kind of has been our bread and butter on the hardware side ever since. And then on the ops side, I joined the food ops team kind of in a support role in early 2019. We were trying to figure out, we had just opened our own food facility on the South side of Chicago. And I kind of came over just a little advisement type role for our COO at the time on cost and quality and kind of just took over OPS along the way. And then, you know, we really started to explode in the back half of 2019. And it’s been a wild ride throughout the pandemic and opening food facilities along the way. But yeah, that’s been my Tovala journey. Originally, I came for the hardware side, and now I spend most of my time on the food side, but both teams report to me.

Michael Wolf: And you have that engineering mindset, obviously, build products throughout your career. And I would imagine that an engineering mindset really helps as you try to optimize the food delivery side and the operation side.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, yeah, I think we have a good team of engineers that bridge both the oven and the food side. I think that’s probably one of our competitive advantages compared to just maybe a meal kit company that doesn’t have the engineering firepower that we have, whether it’s on the hardware side, the ops engineering side or the software side. You know, some of our engineers have developed very sophisticated thermal modeling to make sure our food is safe. And also the packaging is as light as possible for customers, based on zip codes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And getting to work with them has been a good challenge. I think there’s, you know, one of our unique advantages is having the control of the food because we produce the food, ship the food, and then have the kill step and the quality control in actually the customer’s house because we’re using our, you know, chef curated cook cycles to cook the food. So it’s a good engineering systems problem to solve.

Michael Wolf: The current hardware, which like you said, is the foundation of what you helped build. One of the core ideas that I’ve always found with Tovala is it has steam, which I think obviously makes the food a lot better. You know, steam ovens haven’t really become widely deployed in consumer kitchens in the US but I think it really does make food better. So talk about, you know, the feature set within the oven and why it works so well with the food you guys deliver.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, we have a five-in-one and a six-in-one. The five in one has the bake, the broil, the air fry functionality, as well as toast and reheat. And then, on our six-in-one, we’ve added steam. So steam is just another cooking mode that allows to preserve moisture inside of some of the more delicate food items to reduce browning for other delicate food items. And actually in many ways can help accelerate the cook because you’re getting the cooking from the steam surface and the heat transfer going through the food. So, you know, we’ve gone into air frying. We were kind of, I think, a little late to getting into air frying. We were debating that for a long time on the differences between it and, you know, just bake, convection bake. But we launched the air fry model that has the two feet speed fan. It gets really great performance. And then, you know, our six-in-one has the steam functionality that does really great on some of the bread items. case ideas. It comes out really great. The salmon turns out perfect when it’s with steam and then hit with the broil at the end. I think the true advantage is the multi-step cooking where you’re able to change modes and temperatures. And that’s what most of our, you know, Tovala cycles do, whether it’s the scan to cook groceries or the Tovala meals, or some of our customers who really enjoy cooking at home, they create sophisticated cycles on their own. Some people just like to hit bake 400, 15 minutes all the time. Others get a little bit more creative. They have a ramp up with an air fry to get the high velocity airflow in the oven, hit it with bake, and then the broil at the end to get caramelization or whatever the case may be. But yeah, I think our true advantage is the multi-step cooking.

Michael Wolf: And that pairing of your food or even CPGs with the scan to cook with the ability to switch to different modes makes it fairly unique. I think most people just buy something at Costco, put it in the microwave, or put it in their air fryer, and hit go. But you have all these five to six different elements that you can combine. So each food has its own essentially recipe around the cook. Apply a certain amount of heat, you’re gonna finish with this, add some steam, and that’s optimized for each food that you deliver to the consumer.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, exactly. And it’s also from a food safety standpoint. So it’s a balancing act that our food safety team and our culinary team constantly are trading off on. It’s a unique spot for us to have that, one, that additional kill step in the home. But actually, quality control is something that we actually have. How the food turns out when you cook it, we control that in the person’s house. Most other meal delivery companies, your end result is determined based on how good of a chef you are. And we extend one layer further where our oven is cooking the cook cycles the way our chefs intend at the test kitchen here at HQ. And they’ve gone through several rounds of testing. And the important thing is pairing the protein with the side. And so you can cook chicken a bunch of different ways, but whether it’s paired with mashed potatoes or a rice pilaf or green beans, how it gets to that food safe temperature is going to be different. And so our chefs have to balance that out. And so that’s why each recipe has a unique cook site.

Michael Wolf: And you do work with stuff that people can buy at the grocery store because you have scan to cook. That to me is really helpful. And I think that would be something that consumers more broadly would like if, hey, I could buy something at the store and my cooking device can be optimized around what the optimal cook mode is for that. Maybe that’s a combination of like the food brand working with the appliance maker, but that isn’t really available today beyond like what you guys are doing. Is this something you think maybe more widely available in a 10 year time frame. Maybe that’s with a Tovala or another appliance where essentially the cook and the different elements of the cook can be applied in a more precise manner based on what consumers are putting into their cooking box.

Keeley Kabala: I think for certain customers, that’s definitely the case and definitely a benefit, like not having to check, not having to preheat. I think that’s the other thing that’s like one of our main advantages is anything we’ve scanned to cook in a Tovala, whether it’s a Tovala meal or a CPG type item where you scan the UPC, you set and forget it, you cook it from ambient heat. And so we’ve calculated the preheat and how the oven warms up into the cook cycle. And so I do think that’s another thing. It brings the convenience factor. If you had to always preheat your oven, then remember to come back 10 minutes later, put it in. It’s just one more step that I don’t think customers need or want to do. It’s really a non-value step to them. So we try to eliminate those. And then not every item is going to work. Not every oven item is ovenable. It can’t be cooked with the heaters. Some companies have very delicate packaging. And we don’t want them to melt, so that’s why we don’t pick everything that can be from CPG or from the frozen aisle. But there’s a lot. There’s over 1,000 items at this point in our database. We continue to add to them based on customer’s demand. There’s definitely times of days where this functionality is used quite often. And certain items, whether it’s snacks or breakfasts, are very prevalent use cases for these.

Michael Wolf: So looking forward, I imagine you think a bit about what the Tovala cooking side could look like in a long-term time horizon. Do you guys think you’ll continue to evolve the cooking appliance? Maybe in 10 years, will it be whether it be more automation or different modes of heating? Or do you think consumers just want a basic what you have today and just a little bit of change over time?

Keeley Kabala: I think, I mean, the biggest thing for us right now is, you know, for the history of our company, we’ve always been direct to consumer. And so people are coming to us more with a food need first. And very recently we started in retail. We’re in Costco now with our oven. And so I think we’re getting feedback from our customers on different things they want. So I think it’s like, based on where the starting point of the customer comes in, they’re going to want different functionalities, different capabilities, similar to when we went from the gen one to the gen two oven. You know, the gen one oven didn’t have a bake button on the front of it. We thought everyone wanted the super smart appliance, only app usage, and we very quickly got feedback that we needed to make some tweaks. And so we brought the functionality still in the app, but also to the front of the oven. You know, the gen one had a larger footprint. We needed to change the footprint size. The kitchen counters are so valuable in everyone’s home. We needed to make sure we were optimizing every square inch. And so going into retail now, we’re getting feedback. We’re very early into it. Only been a few months with Costco, but we’re seeing that there’s different functionalities, different features, different use cases. And so I think there will definitely be some tweaks in the hardware and the overall experience in general.

Michael Wolf: That Costco relationship is really interesting to me because when I think of Costco, they obviously sell appliances, but I go there mainly for food. I usually get the same things. You guys combine the oven with a kind of consumable. Once people buy the oven through a Costco, can they then pick up the Tovala food at Costco or would only be delivered to you guys, to them?

Keeley Kabala: So right now we haven’t started any food in retail. That’s on a roadmap of things to consider. Right now we have dozens of Kirkland products that can scan to cook right from the beginning. So people many times are leaving the store with scannable items that have cook cycles already programmed in for their oven to use. But right now we only sell ovens at Costco. But I think once again, this is our advantage we have is we have the opportunity to go into the other side of the store and start getting some of our products there for quicker trials for customers who aren’t familiar yet as much with Tovala as a food product and only are learning about us first time more on the appliance side.

Michael Wolf: And that’s interesting that you guys have worked with Costco. So some of the food items available at Costco, you can scan to cook. So they’re probably excited about that.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, they’re super excited about that. I mean, not only are they getting to move our ovens through their store, but it’ll help them move some of their other products as well. And it just kind of brings some from newness and kind of a tech advantage that Costco didn’t have previously on the food side.

Michael Wolf: What are you most excited about when you think about the Consumer Kitchen five years down the road, 10 years down the road? What excites you about that space?

Keeley Kabala: I mean, I think in general, a way to reduce waste. So whether it’s personalization and understanding what people want to eat so they make sure they don’t buy or order the wrong stuff that ends up being wasted or better understanding of inventory management. But I think in general, both food and energy waste are still major opportunities in the kitchen space. And so whether it’s how people get their food, how much food they get, when they get their food, what food they get, I think are all still major opportunities across our business and other businesses. And then, you know, I have a large oven in my home. I worked for a company that made very nice large ovens. I only use the large oven now on Thanksgiving. Like there’s a lot less energy usage by having the right appliance for the right job. And I think for what I need normally, you know, Tovala answers that. I think there’s a lot of other really smart, compact kitchen appliances. And so I think adoption is, I think, been interesting to see, not just us, but other companies as well, you know, gain adoption. And the one thing I’ve always shocked by is how willing people are to try new things in the kitchen and are willing to take on early stage innovation because they are really trying to optimize the food that they eat, their time, and their space in their kitchen. And so that’s why companies like us and many others have existed and continue to get a chance to iterate. If we’re willing to listen to our customers, they’ll give you a chance to iterate. If you don’t listen, you might not be around forever, but it’s been great to see just how vocal people are, too. They really care. So they don’t hold back on their feedback. We just got to make sure we keep listening.

Michael Wolf: Great closing words, Keely Kabala with Tovala. Thank you so much for spending time with me today.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, have a great day.

Meet PZZA, the Latest Pizza Robot Built by a Rocket Scientist

So what’s the deal with rocket scientists and pizza?

No, that’s not a Jerry Seinfeld punch-line setup, but an actual question I have after seeing Andrew Simmon’s recent post on Linkedin about the latest pizza robot he’s stumbled across. Simmons, who’s made a name for himself documenting his learnings as he tinkers with his restaurant chain tech stack, wrote about a new pizza robot named, well, PZZA.

According to Simmons, the PZZA robot, which automates saucing, adding cheese and toppings, and cooking the pizza, was designed by long-time aerospace engineer Omid Nakhjavani. Nakhjavani, who worked on NASA space travel projects for Boeing over a decade ago (and apparently still works for Boeing), has been perfecting his pizza robot for seven years and hopes to ship it later this year.

Readers of The Spoon might remember another pizza robot built by rocket scientist Benson Tsai. After building a combo pizza robot and food truck called Stellar Pizza, the former Space X engineer sold his company this March to Hanwha Foodtech. Hanwha Foodtech, a subsidiary of Korean conglomerate Hanwha, plans to launch a pizza chain built around Stellar’s technology in both the US and South Korea.

Before PZZA and Stellar, rocket scientist Anjan Contractor built a pizza 3D printing robot for NASA in the early aughts as part of a contract awarded to aerospace systems subcontractor SMRC. From there, Contractor went on to launch his own startup, BeeHex, focused on building robotic food printing systems.

That there seems to be a fairly robust rocket scientist to pizza robot founder career pipeline shouldn’t be all that surprising, in that a) the mechanical engineering discipline is foundational to both rocket and robot building, and b) engineers love pizza.

Nakhjavani’s engineering mindset influenced some of the design choices for the PZZA robot, including the shape of the pizzas. His robot makes rectangular and square pizzas, in part because—as Simmons recounts—”round pizzas are not efficient and waste things like boxes by being square.”

You can check out the video of the PZZA in action below and read more about its specs on its website.

From Smart Toasters to Cookbox Mash-ups: The Story of Revolution Cooking

If you follow food Instagram or TikTok, chances are you’ve seen the touchscreen toaster from Revolution Cooking over the past couple of years. The company made a name for itself by creating the world’s most high-end, tech-enabled toaster, and just this past CES, it announced its second-generation toaster with Wi-Fi.

The CEO of Revolution, Tom Klaff, never thought he’d make toasters for a living. As a long-time tech entrepreneur, Klaff has spent his career building education software and telecom companies, but one day, his business partner Bruce Levenson told him about an idea for a new type of toaster, one with a new approach to heating the bread. Wanting to learn more about the toaster business, Klaff went to the housewares show in Chicago and saw that every bread crisper used the same type of heating element that’s been used for most of the past century.

When he returned from Chicago, he told Bruce he was in, but that he wanted to think bigger than just toasters. Tom thought that the heating technology, which combines infrared heating with algorithmic cooking optimization for specific types of food, could not only help create a new type of toaster but could also be applied to ovens. In other words, the heating technology could be a platform.

In this conversation with Tom, you can hear the entire story of Revolution, from those early days when they decided to add a touchscreen to his meeting with Oprah to this January’s launch of the company’s first non-toaster product, a countertop cookbox mashup of an appliance called the Macrowave.

Click play below to listen or hear our conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.