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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

CES

Watch The ColdSnap Countertop Ice Cream Appliance In Action at CES 2024

It goes without saying that everyone likes ice cream, and that was never more apparent than at last night’s CES Unveiled press event.

The first thing I saw when I walked into the crowded room was a huge crowd of journalists lining up to get a serving of ice cream (another truism is journalists like free food). The ColdSnap machines were cranking away as ColdSnap workers – including ColdSnap CEO Matthew Fonte – handed over cups to attendees.

Last fall, ColdSnap expanded its production facility in the Boston suburb of Billerica, adding 20,000 square feet with an additional 24,000 square feet of space leased across the street. Now, as they look to scale, they’ve added automation equipment and project they will be able to manufacture 30 million pods per year.

Part of what makes ColdSnap intriguing is its ability to make instant ice cream from room temperature, shelf-stable liquid. As Fonte told me last year, a product like this could be potentially transformative for markets where cold chain storage is not widely available or cost-prohibitive.

“China’s ice cream market is as large as the United States, but they have 25% the amount of refrigeration per capita that we do here in the States,” Fonte said. “If you could circumvent the cold supply chain and give them shelf-stable pods, they can freeze their ice cream on demand, they can reach the masses there and grow that market four times.”

You can a peek of the ColdSnap in action below.

ChefPaw to Show Off Home Pet Food Maker at CES 2024

While most kitchen tech gadgets at CES this week are for preparing sustenance for two-legged creatures, ChefPaw is explicitly designed to create homemade food for our furry friends.

ChefPaw, which is a creation from the founders of pet health products company Innovet, is essentially something akin to a Thermomix for dog food. The product, for which the company has filed a provisional patent, features a large mixing bowl and a mixing blade, allows pet owners to mix raw ingredients like vegetables and meat. Users follow their own chosen recipes (or recipes provided by ChefPaw), and the device will cook up to six pounds of homemade dog food in about 40 minutes.

You can see the ChefPaw in action below:

If you want to buy a ChefPaw, you will have to be committed to the idea of homemade pet food because it isn’t cheap. The ChefPaw will set you back $639 plus tax and shipping, which isn’t exactly as spendy as a Thermomix, but it’s more than twice as much as a low-end Thermomix clone and 4-5 times that of an Instant Pot, another popular home appliance for making pet food.

But who knows? My guess is there is probably a market for dedicated pet enthusiasts who will spare no expense for their pet on a dedicated pet food maker. If you’re at CES and want to check out the ChefPaw, you can find it in Eureka Park at the Venetian Expo starting January 9th.

GreenSwapp Shows Off Tech to Display Carbon Impact Data on Retail Shelf Price Labels at CES 2024

Imagine walking down a shopping aisle, where alongside the price of each product is a score indicating its carbon impact. That’s the world that Dutch startup GreenSwapp hopes to usher in beginning next week at CES, where it will show how its AI-powered product carbon tracker works with electronic shelf labels and Point Of Sale (POS) systems.

The demo will be showcased at a mini supermarket installation within the company’s CES booth. There, attendees will witness the future of sustainable retail—a future where price tags display cost and climate ratings. The company hopes that the score will guide consumers in making eco-friendlier choices and serve as a nudge towards a more sustainable lifestyle. At the checkout counter, the receipt shows the purchase’s collective carbon impact (using an A-F grade scale) compared to the average shopper.

The company has already integrated its GreenSwapp AI carbon tracker with the leading online grocer in the Netherlands. They have completed a pilot for the technology with Ahold, the Netherlands’ largest retail group. The company is hoping to enter the US retail market in 2024.

The push for climate impact data for retail purchases has started to gain more traction in Europe, it may take a while before US retailers jump on board. That said, progressive states like California, which just pushed new climate emission reporting requirements into place last fall, could move in this direction much quicker.

In some ways, the push for more data on climate impact on consumer purchases is reminiscent of the move to add nutritional information to restaurant menus over the past decade. However, just as more nutrition data hasn’t necessarily changed consumer eating behavior, it remains to be seen just how motivated consumers are to change their behavior, particularly if they don’t perceive it as having an immediate impact on their lives (which, unfortunately, is how many US consumers view the somewhat more esoteric nature of climate impact data).

If you’d like to check out the GreenSwapp future store concept at CES, you can find them in Eureka Park in the Venetian Expo area at booth 61440.

CES 2024: Revolution Unveils the Macrowave, a Smart Oven That Combines Infrared & Microwave Heating

Revolution Cooking, a startup best known for its high-end touchscreen toaster, is showing it’s not a one-trick pony next week at CES with the reveal of its newest appliance, the Macrowave.

According to Revolution, the Macrowave is a smart oven that combines the same patented InstaGLO infrared heating technology it’s become known for with its toaster lineup with microwave heating. Add in convection/air frying capabilities and some interesting, innovative oven features, and the Macrowave looks like a compelling new entry to the countertop kitchen tech space.

The way it works is the electromagnetic radiation from the appliance’s built-in microwave heats the inside of the food, while the InstaGLO infrared heating crisps and heats the outside of the food. From the sound of it, that combination could provide a better answer for microwaved frozen foods like pizza or frozen burritos, which are often served molten-hot in the middle and soggy or even cold on the outside.

The video below shows how the Macrowave will result in faster and more even cooking for frozen food like pizza, proteins like chicken wings, and veggies.

Say Hello to The Macrowave

While the Macrowave isn’t the first product to combine air frying with microwave technology, it’s one of the few that use infrared heating combined with microwave and air frying. Other manufacturers like LG have combined infrared with microwave technology, but these products lacked the smart cooking algorithms and precision heating detection.

And it’s these smart cooking programs that differentiate the Macrowave from previous entries. The programs, which allow the user to choose a food item like pizza, fries or hot pockets, optimize the right combination of infrared, microwave, and convention air for each item.

The oven also allows you to combine cooking steps manually using the Micro+Bake and Micro+Air Fry modes. Add in an internal temperature probe for precision heating, and the Macrowave looks like it does present a fairly unique set of capabilities compared to anything we’ve seen on the market.

No word yet on pricing for the Macrowave, but we’ll keep you updated when we find out.

The Macrowave will make its first appearance at CES’s Unveiled event, the press event two days before the show opens.

CES Session: The Future of Farming (Video & Transcript)

The first session we will feature is titled ‘The Future of Farming’, a panel which featured experts on gene-edited crops, molecular farming, and vertical farming.

The session description:

The numerous challenges facing today’s farmers require them to be ever-more-efficient to survive. In this session, we’ll look at how farmers are employing automation, IoT, biotech and more to create the farms of the future.

The panelists for this session included:

  • Vonnie Estes, VP of Innovation, International Fresh Produce Association (Moderator)

  • Haven Baker, Co-Founder, Chief Business Officer at Pairwise

  • Amit Dhingra, CSO | Professor and Department Head, Moolec Science | Texas A&M University

  • Katie Seawell, Chief Commercial Officer, Bowery Farming

This content is available to Spoon Plus subscribers. If you would like to subscribe to Spoon Plus, you can do so here.

The CES 2023 Food Tech Review

Despite all that hard work, we still made time to check out many of the food tech startups making their way to Las Vegas in January and, now, we have included all of that research in the CES Food Tech 2023 Review.

Before you read this report, here is a quick note on how we structured this review:

Category: We included a number of different categories for the food tech review. We categorized each company into the primary category they represented themself as for CES 2023. These categories included everything from agtech to kitchen tech to food robotics.

One sentence description and company HQ location: We also included a short one-sentence description of each company’s product and where they are headquartered.

Company description: For each company, we included a description of the company and what they were showing at the show. These were sourced from the company’s announcements, The Spoon’s own articles, as well as, if possible, from checking them out on the show floor during CES.

Mike’s Take: For most companies, we included a quick take about their product or technology to provide some context around their showing at CES and how we see them fitting into the broader food tech market.

Video: Since we know that showing is often the best way for someone to get a quick understanding of a product, we tried to include a video about each company. Some of the videos were shot by The Spoon at CES, others were captured by the company or another publication. For additional context, for each video, we included who produced the video and, if possible, a general time frame for when it was created.

Mapping Them Out

Our Japan partners at SIGMAXYZ created a nice graphic mapping out the different food tech startups they found at CES. The categories, by and large, correspond with how we saw them, with only a few difference. You can click on an enlarged version of the map here.

 

If you’d like to read the full report, you can subscribe to Spoon Plus, our premium research service, here. 

Podcast: The Bloomberg Alt-Meat Hullabaloo With Rachel Konrad

In this week’s episode, we catch up with Rachel Konrad, a former journalist who spent the last decade-plus working for Tesla, Impossible Foods, and now the Production Board.

Rachel joins Mike and Carlos Rodela to talk about her background, the recent controversy surrounding Bloomberg’s article declaring plant-based meat a fad, and how she helped Impossible bring food tech to CES in 2019 with the launch of the Impossible 2.0 burger.

GreenSwapp Wants to Make Figuring Out the Climate Impact of a Bag of Chips as Easy as Snapping a Pic

While the climate impact of our food has finally made the main stage as a topic at the world’s most high-profile summit, the average joe has no idea how good or bad that bag of chips or can of soda is for the environment.

A Dutch startup called GreenSwapp wants to change that by making information about the climate impact of practically any CPG product instantly available to anyone using its technology.

The Amsterdam-based company started as an online grocery app for climate-friendly products, but more recently has focused on building a climate impact data platform for both consumers and companies. To that end, the company debuted a new scanning tool at CES which gives instant scoring (low, medium, or high impact) of practically any packaged food product when the product’s barcode is scanned with a smartphone.

Here’s how it works: Curious about the climate impact of a tub of yogurt? Head to the GreenSwapp website (www.greenswapp.com) with a mobile browser, and at the top of the page, click on the bar code scan symbol. Your phone will ask you if scan.greenswapp.com can use your camera. Click yes and scan away.

Once a product is scanned, GreenSwapp will show a score and an estimate of how much of your daily carbon footprint a serving of the product eats up. Below that, you’ll see a breakdown in a “climate deep dive” that shows where that carbon was emitted.

Above: Scan of Brown Cow Maple Yogurt with Greenswapp.com Scanning Tool

So how does GreenSwapp figure all of this out? According to company CEO Ajay Varadharajan, they factor in estimates of carbon output for each food for every part of the product’s journey to our plates.

We “go through the entire journey of every food product, the impact of processing, the impact of transportation, the impact of packaging, and then we display it as a single number on a single color for the consumer to be able to understand if it’s good or bad,” he said.

While the web tool is something I’m sure some climate-conscious consumers would save as a browser favorite, I’d be more likely to make GreenSwapp a part of my daily routine if it was a discrete app or integrated as a feature on one of my online grocery apps. While GreenSwapp’s current app is only available for grocery shopping in the Netherlands, the company has an open API that any online grocery or delivery company can use to integrate Greenswapp’s data into its offering.

But will they? While most grocers don’t offer climate change impact data, my guess is it’s only a matter of time. There is already a discussion of having climate impact data on food labels (and some brands have already tried it), and my guess is at some point, progressive states like California and Washington State will force the hand of CPG companies and retailers, much as they did around nutrition and calorie labeling for food service.

If and when that happens, GreenSwapp could be well-positioned to fulfill Varadharajan’s vision of making his technology the ‘Fitbit of sustainability.’

You can watch a demo of the GreenSwapp web tool below.

Demo of GreenSwapp carbon-tracking platform for food products.

BlenderCap Wants You to Make Margaritas on the Go With Its Half Horsepower Portable Blender

Want to make margaritas on the go? Then you might want to check out the new small form factor blender unveiled last week at CES by a company called Cruz.

The Cruz BlenderCap is a new portable blender that has it all in the name: It’s a bottle cap with a blender built in. The product was developed by two former Apple employees, Dakota Adams and Matthew Moore, on the side while they set up a battery factory in China for Apple. The two eventually left their day jobs and went full-time on BlenderCap a year ago.

The BlenderCap’s strength is – perhaps not surprisingly, given the former day jobs of its creators – its battery technology. The blender uses what the company describes as a ‘next-generation electric vehicle Cell-to-Pack battery architecture’, which provides a half horsepower of power.

“You can blend an entire Costco bag of ice and fill an entire Home Depot bucket with margaritas on a single charge,” Adams told The Spoon at CES. According to Adams, the BlenderCap will work with almost any vacuum-plated bottle like a Hydroflask or Thermoflask.

The BlenderCap will start shipping next month from Shanghai, where the two founders leased manufacturing space and are making 6 thousand BlenderCaps in its first production run.

“We’re leasing factory space at a really high-end manufacturer in Shanghai, and we own all the equipment and the robots building this,” Adams told Techcrunch. “So we actually have on our assembly line — we designed the entire assembly line — and we’ve got more robots than people putting this together. It’s crazy. There are glue dispensing robots, automatic screw dispensers. It’s beautiful.”

The BlenderCap is available for preorder for $129 from the company’s website.

A high-powered PORTABLE BLENDER at CES #shorts

CES 2023: GROW UP Wants You To Make Plant-Based Milk at Home

If you’re an adult, there’s a good chance you’ve weaned yourself off of cow milk in favor of a plant-based alternative. After all, not only is plant-based milk less disruptive to the digestive tract, but it’s also often healthier.

But it’s not all good news. Plant-based milk is often filled with weird-sounding additives like xanthan gum and lecithin, while some have more recognizable ingredients like sugar and salt that you may want to cut out of your diet.

So if you want plant-based milk but want more control over what goes in it, one option is to make your own. One way to make your own is to try using your blender and a milk nut bag. But if you want to automate the process and have less mess to clean up, you might want to buy a countertop machine to create nut milk for you.

The latest nut milk machine to make its debut is from GROW UP. The machine, which was at CES last week in Vegas, “brews” up to 10 different kinds of plant-based milk. To do so, it uses what its creator calls a “cold extraction” process in which it grinds the ingredients and then vacuums the liquid through a built-in filtration system. Once the milk is dispensed – which takes about 3-4 minutes – the leftover pulp can be taken out and dried to use in baked goods.

The person behind the GROW UP Milk Brewer is Luiz Felipe Rapacci, a former F&B industry veteran who has worked for big CPG brands such as Coca-Cola and General Mills in Brazil. In 2017 Rappaci moved to the US to attend UC Irvine, where he studied innovation management and entrepreneurship. After working for a food tech startup and a basmati rice producer, Rapacci started working on what would become the Milk Brewer in 2020. GROW UP is beginning to manufacture the Milk Brewer for customers and expects to have it to market by mid-spring of this year.

The price for the countertop milk maker will be $599 and is available for pre-order. The price is a bit on the high-end, considering there are other plant-based milk makers on the market today for less than half that. That said, none of the ones I’ve seen make as many types of plant-based milk as Grown Up claims their brewer will make (10). GROW UP also has what looks like an easy-to-use touchscreen with pre-configured options that allow users to easily choose different types of plant-milk.

You can watch our interview with Rapacci from the show floor at CES below.

Milk Brewer Makes 10 Types of Plant-Based Milk!

Haura Unveils a Modular Food Factory for the Kitchen at CES 2023

Nestled in the basement of the Venetian Expo center last week at CES, a startup from Italy showed off a machine that its inventor hopes will empower home cooks to do pretty much anything their heart desires: making home-made pasta noodles, roasting coffee beans, making cheese, brewing beer and lots more. In short, the machine, called the Haura, is intended to be a modular food factory in a box.

The Haura comes with three major features that unlock all of that flexibility: a motor to power different add-on modules (lasagna-maker, blender, cocktail shaker, sauce and frosting shippers, etc.), an induction heating surface for cooking, and a built-in extruder to enable home cooks to make food that usually requires pro-style equipment.

“The extruder means that you can automate a lot of processes that you only industrial food-making machines,” Haura spokesperson Matteo Pressacco told the Spoon. “For example, if you need to make pasta, candies, snack bars, are confectionery packed, baby’s food, everything can be automated.”

A Look at the Haura Food Factory at CES 2023

The company is working on a number of different modules, ranging from a lasagna maker to a beer brewer, that can be plugged into the appliance’s motor or extruder. This modularity gives the box its flexibility and sets it apart from other all-in-one cooking appliances.

The machine will have its own 10″ touch screen that shows the progress of any food-making project, including information such as temperature and humidity. The Haura will have what the company calls the F-OS, short for Food Operating System, that will enable the operation of the appliance. Different cooking instruction sets, called F-Apps, will come with pre-set processes for operating the machine and allow the user to cook a variety of foods through repeatable, step-by-step processes.

The inventor of the Haura is Angelo Pressacco, a mechanical and electrical engineer, who worked with chef Dario Zuliani on the conceptualization of the Haura.

The patented machine is still in the design phase, and it’s not clear at this point when it will be shipped to consumers. Let’s hope they can pull it off, because if Pressacco and his team can bring their idea to market, they may just create an entirely new category of home food-making appliance.

Kara Water Shows Off Its Air-to-Water Dispenser at CES 2023

At CES 2023, Kara Water showed off its Kara Pure water dispenser that takes moisture from the air and turns it into drinking water.

The Kara Pure combines three functions into one machine. The machine uses the process of desiccation to gather water from the air and accumulates up to 2.5 gallons (10L) of water per day. The machine also acts as a water purifier and dispenser, making it an all-in-one water machine, only without the need to replace water jugs every few days.

Air-to-Water Dispenser at CES 2023 #shorts

Kara Water isn’t the first company to show off water-from-air technology at CES. Watergen, which sucks in air and cools it to a dew point to create water droplets, demoed their machine in 2019 and debuted the working model a year later. Zero Mass Water, which uses solar power to capture moisture and turn it into drinking water, showed off its machine at CES 2019.

Kara Water was founded in 2017 by Cody Sooden and Michael Di Giovanna. The two wanted to create a machine that could produce clean drinking water free of contaminants. Sooden’s interest in the technology started after he began experimenting with capturing water from air while studying architecture. He eventually wrote a research paper on harvesting moisture from the air, which eventually became the genesis of the company’s technology.

The company ran a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo and raised $722 thousand dollars. The company announces it had finished production of its first units and started shipping to backers last month.

The Kara Pure is available now, but at a price of $3,799, it’s most likely priced a little high for consumers and will probably show up in offices or coworking spaces. The company’s founders have already started working to sell the technology in emerging markets like India, where contaminated water is a significant issue.