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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

CES

Where to See Food Tech on the Show Floor @ CES 2022: Day 1

While CES 2022 will be smaller this year as the show returns to in-person after hosting an all-virtual show in 2021, we’re excited to see food tech as an official category on the show floor. The Spoon team will be in the Sands Expo in Booth 53752 talking to leaders from startups to funders and execs across agtech, robotics, future food and kitchen tech.

We’ll have videos and reports as the show goes on. To start, here’s a quick list of booths where you’ll see food tech and smart kitchen innovations and the companies behind them:

  • Bear Robotics — Booth #53755 — Bear Robotics is utilizing AI and autonomous robot technology, deploying bots to take care of everything from drink and food serving to bussing. Bear Robotics works with top chefs and restaurants, providing front of house labor support.
  • MycoTechnology — Booth #53753 — MycoTechnology harnesses the metabolic engine of mushrooms, known as mycelium, using natural fermentation to create novel ingredients that solve the food industry’s biggest challenges. (Stay tuned for a story on their consumer facing brand launching at CES.)
  • Yo-Kai Express — Booth #53758 — Yo-Kai debuted as a robotic ramen vending machine and announced a 2021 expansion into other autonomous food and cooking devices at the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan.
  • Edamam — Booth #53860 — Edamam structures and organizes food and nutrition data and sells it as a subscription to businesses in the food, health, and wellness sectors. They have worked with food and retail giants include Nestle, Amazon, and The Food Network and according to the company have close to 100,000 developers using Edamam’s APIs.
  • Northfork — Booth #53959 — Northfork is a Swedish-based startup that enables shoppable recipes online, bridging the world of digital recipes and food retail.
  • Apex / “OrderHQ” Smart Food Locker — Booth #53958 — Apex Order Pickup Solutions is the creator of the OrderHQ smart food locker, a secure, contactless solution for food pickup and delivery services. The lockers combine front and back of house technology, including hot and cold storage as well as integration with fully automated order fulfilment.
  • Uvera — Booth #54058 — Uvera is a Saudi cleantech startup that wants to reduce food waste with a device that claims to increase the shelf-life of fresh food up to “97% on average within only 30 seconds of using the device, without any chemicals.”
  • Yangyoo / Armored Fresh — Booth #53761 — Yangyoo is a Korea-based food tech company launching Korea’s first vegan cheese alternative first developed by its US subsidiary, Armored Fresh. The future food brand uses a similar fermenting process that produces natural cheese on plant-based protein milk.
  • Endless West — Booth #54061 — Endless West is a beverage technology startup founded by biotechnologists using science to create a blend of wines and spirits; its first product – Glyph – is the first molecular-made whiskey, created without aging or barreling.

(Shared) Booth #51830

  • Picnic — Robotic pizza machine designed for back of house operations in restaurants; they first launched onto the scene at CES 2020 and started filling orders in the middle of 2021.
  • iUNU — iUNU (you knew) is a Seattle agtech firm creating an AI-based platform for greenhouses and vertical farms that assists indoor growers with yields, farming waste and overall operations.
  • Minnow was the winner of the 2020 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase for their contactless food delivery solution called the Minnow Pickup Pod. An IoT-enabled locker for businesses and multifamily properties, Minnow streamlines food delivery on site.

We’ll add more companies to the list as we cover news and discover additional companies! Follow us at @TheSpoonTech on Twitter and LinkedIn as well as hashtags #CES2022 and #CESFoodTech for social updates.

CES 2022: Samsung & Others Launch Home Connectivity Alliance to Foster Appliance ‘Cloud to Cloud’ Interoperability

This week at CES, Samsung, Haier (and its subsidiary GE Appliances), Electrolux, and others announced the formation of the Home Connectivity Alliance, a group focused on fostering cloud-to-cloud interoperability across different home appliances.

The organization, which was incorporated in September 2021, is focused on solving a big problem for the smart home: incompatibility across different brands’ smart appliance products. Anyone with smart home appliances from different brands knows why this is a problem. Connected appliance product lines typically have their own proprietary app that only works with that brand. The end result is multiple apps and products that don’t talk to each other.

Here’s how the group’s website describes the benefits of interoperability: A consumer may purchase a connected washer and dryer from Brand A and benefit from features like notifications that alert the user when their wash or dry cycle is complete. Unfortunately, these notifications can only be enabled via Brand A’s platform. Interoperability enables consumers to purchase a washer from Brand A and a dryer from Brand B (or vice versa) and still receive the convenient wash or dry cycle completion notification either from Brand A’s platform or Brand B’s platform.

To achieve that type of cross-brand interoperability, the HCA’s focus is on making sure member companies’ data and service clouds connect. This focus on cloud-to-cloud interop makes sense in 2022, a time well into the smart home revolution where interoperability in the lower parts of the network stack – like physical layer communications (i.e. Wi-Fi, Zigbee, etc) – has largely been solved.

Since the HCA was founded only three months ago, it’s not surprising there are no technical details on how it will work (and by no details, I mean no details: The technical info page simply says “more info to come!”). One of the big unknowns will be how the group will work with other efforts to create cross-compatibility in the smart home, including the much-discussed Matter standard founded by Amazon, Apple and, yes, Samsung’s SmartThings Group.

In Samsung’s announcement about the group, they make no mention of Matter or other smart home interoperability standards (though they mention their own platform SmartThings), instead talking up the importance of interoperability across appliance brands.

“It is the support of global manufacturers like Samsung that makes HCA uniquely qualified to establish interoperability guidelines for long-life appliances and systems in the home, ultimately delivering safe, simple and elegant consumer experiences,” said Yoon Ho Choi, President of Home Connectivity Alliance (and Samsung employee).

While the group has an impressive initial roster of members, a few notable absences include BSH Appliances, Whirlpool, and LG Electronics. BSH is particularly interesting because the group has its own smart home interoperability standard it has been pushing for some time called Home Connect.

In many ways, it’s this absence of other big names that is the HCA’s (and really any interoperability effort’s) biggest challenge; any semblance of full cross-brand compatibility is, by definition, out of reach unless all of the industry’s biggest stakeholders buy in. Whether or not that happens for HCA is yet to be determined, but it’s still early days and the group is off to a good start. Let’s hope they can make it happen so we smart appliance owners can finally have products that reach their full potential.

CES 2022: As LG and Others Embrace Steam, Could 2022 Be The Year of Steam Cooking?

When asked at Smart Kitchen Summit in 2017 what appliance he was waiting for to make its way to the consumer kitchen, award-winning chef Philip Tessier said, “the combi oven.”

As it turns out, Tessier wasn’t the only chef that day who thought a steam-powered consumer kitchen was a good idea. When asked the same question a couple of minutes later, Serious Eats’ Kenji López-Alt agreed.

“I was going to say combi ovens too,” said López-Alt.

The combi oven, also known as combi steamer, combines traditional convection (dry) heating and moist heat using steam to enable the cook to do all sorts of things they can’t do with traditional ovens: Sous vide cooking, steaming vegetables, and baking moist delicious bread to name a few.

While steam cooking has been a long-time fixture in pro kitchens, it has never taken off in a big way in the consumer kitchen. But that might be changing. In 2020, Anova finally started shipping their countertop Precision Oven, and the critics embraced it. Since that time, the company has had trouble keeping the $599 appliance in stock.

Other upstarts such as Tovala and Suvie are also bringing different spins on steam-powered cooking to consumers. And LG, which introduced steam cooking into their convection ovens in 2018, is now adding Steam Cook functionality to the microwave.

In some ways, steam cooking is following the same early path pioneered by sous vide circulators. Like sous vide, steam cooking is a technique long-embraced in the pro kitchen, and it is also finally reaching consumer price points and showing up in friendlier form factors.

However, while sales of sous vide circulators eventually hit a wall because most consumers didn’t have the patience to cook meat in water baths for hours on end, my guess is steam cooking has a much wider appeal. A big reason is that unlike sous vide, steam cooking arrives in the kitchen via traditional-looking appliances (not to mention steam ovens like Anova’s allow you cook sous vide without the water bath or the plastic bag).

If 2021 was the year air-fry was everywhere, I suspect in 2022 we might begin to see the year the chefs get their wish and steam cooking begins to enter the mainstream.

Four Food Tech Gadgets We’re Excited to See at CES 2022

We’re prepping our floor walk plan for CES 2022, figuring out what food tech gadgets (other than robots, that is) we want to check out. We thought we’d share four of them with you.

CES 2022 Preview: Four Food Tech Gadgets We're Excited to See at CES

The products previewed are The Fresh Portal home delivery storage locker, the Bru smart tea maker, the Keddle baby milk warmer from Bisbee Baby, and the Tetra dishwasher from Heatworks.

The Spoon will be here all week reporting on all the food tech innovation we can hunt down, so make sure to check back often and follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin.

The Walkaround Guide of Food Robot Companies Exhibiting at CES 2022

At CES 2022 this week, there will be a bunch of automated food-making machines on display. So with the big tech show starting in just two days, I thought I’d make a quick walk-around guide for those looking to do the food robots tour at CES 2022.

Beyond Honeycomb

While we don’t know a lot about this Korean-based company and their restaurant robot, we are intrigued by the company’s description: AI-driven kitchen robot that learns to reproduce world-class chef dishes. With its food sensors, the robot digitizes the texture and taste of the original dish and replicates at the molecular level. The company aims to innovate commercial kitchens to create a digital platform.

Beyond Honeycomb will be exhibiting at booth CP-29 at CES 2022, and it’s one we have on our list to check out while in Vegas.

Cecilia

Suppose you can imagine Siri fused with a weird Polar Express-like animated character. Then imagine this character served you drinks. In that case, you might have some idea of what the Celicia.ai bartender experience is like. If you want to check out this voice-assistant powered animated robot bartender for yourself, you can do so at booth 61708.

Yo-Kai

Readers of The Spoon may remember that Yo-Kai gave a sneak peak at the Takumi home ramen machine at last year’s Food Tech Live. At this year’s CES, the company will be primarily focusing on its fast-growing autonomous ramen robot for public and retail spaces, the Octo-chef. You can visit Yo-Kai in the food tech exhibition space at booth 53578.

Carbon Origins

As I wrote late last week, not only is Carbon Origins building a refrigerated sidewalk delivery robot by the name of Skippy, the company is also assembling a roster of remote robot pilots who will utilize virtual reality technology to pilot Skippy around to businesses and consumer homes. If you’re at CES, you can visit Carbon Origins and even possibly get adorned in VR gear and drive a Skippy at booth 15883.

Picnic

Picnic made its CES debut in 2020 when it teamed up with convention center catering company Centerplate and made thousands of pizzas to feed hungry trade show attendees. The Seattle-based pizza robot startup returns this year and will be making pies once again at LVCC West Hall #5043. If you want to hear what Picnic CEO Clayton Wood has to say about their robot and the food robotics landscape, you can see him speak at the Food Tech Conference at CES on a panel entitled Welcome to our Food Robotics Future led by yours truly on Thursday, January 6th.

Bear Robotics

After a big 2021 which saw the maker of front-of-house food robots showing up at Chili’s, Denny’s and lots of other places, Bear Robotics is kicking off 2022 by showcasing its Servi robot at CES. You can find Bear at booth 53755 and also hear the company COO, Juan Higueros, on the panel Welcome to Our Food Robot Future on Thursday.

Yummy Future

Yummy Future, which was co-founded by a group of students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, makes a robotic coffee kiosk that serves up both hot and cold coffee beverages and can make a cup of joe in about 30 seconds. If you want to check out Yummy Future, they will be at booth 63149 in Eureka Park in the Venetian Expo Center.

Ottonomy

Readers of The Spoon are familiar with Ottonomy, maker of autonomous delivery robots that can navigate through both outdoors and indoor environments. You can check out Ottonomy’s robot at booth 9648.

If we’ve missed any food robots, drop us a line and we’ll put them on the list.

Food Tech To Make Official Debut at CES as The Big Tech Show Gets Underway This Week in Vegas

In 2022, CES, like most everything nowadays, is a bit different than in the before times.

For one, it’s going to be shorter. There will be fewer big companies and way fewer people. And forget about the after-parties.

But even with all those changes, CES is still happening (after going entirely virtual last year), and food tech will be a part of the official program for the first time ever.

We know that because The Spoon is CES’s official food tech programming partner and is putting together a half-day food tech conference (all attendees will need to be fully vaccinated and will be required to wear masks). On Thursday, we’ll be talking about the future of cooking, the amazing innovation helping us move beyond factory-farmed meat, how technology can help us waste less food, and taking a peek into our food robot future.

We’ll also be running around the show, bringing you videos and stories about what we’re seeing both on the show floor and off it. We’ll also be sharing stuff on Instagram and Twitter, so make sure to follow us.

If you’re heading to Vegas for CES, we hope to see you there, and If you see any cool food tech products at CES, let us know. See you in Vegas!

CES 2022: Steambox To Show Off Self-Heating Lunchbox

If one of your new year’s resolutions is to pack better lunches for your kids or yourself, here’s one way you might do that: with a steam-heated lunchbox. That’s the idea behind the Steambox, a connected lunchbox that will heat food up with a push of a button.

Here’s how the Steambox works: Working like a bain-marie boiler, the Steambox creates steam using its built-in electric heating technology. The user simply adds water in the morning and, when they are ready to eat, turns the Heatbox on and the food will be warm in 8-12 minutes. The box is rechargeable and can heat up to three times on a single charge.

Of course, before you plunk money down for your Steambox, you should know that the company has been working on the products for a couple of years and has a bit of history. The Steambox got started via a Kickstarter campaign back in 2019 and since that time, has showed up CES before, changed its name, had some sort of mysterious dispute, and now is back at CES to show off its lunchbox with promises of an April 2022 delivery.

We’re heading to Vegas and we’ll be checking the Steambox out as well as other food and kitchen gadgets as part of our CES 2022 coverage. We’ll be there all week, so check back on the site, check out our Instagram and Twitter, and send us your tips.

The Spoon & CES Bring Food Tech To The World’s Biggest Tech Show For First Time Ever

Each January for the past couple of decades, I’ve packed up my suitcase and headed to the Nevada desert to take part in the world’s biggest tech show, CES.

I’m not alone. CES is the singular tech show that pretty much every major industry attends along with those who watch and follow those industries.

This includes the food world. Many remember the debut of the Impossible 2.0 burger in 2019, a watershed moment for both the company and the plant-based meat industry. There’s also been food robots, ice cream makers and much more that have made a big splash at the big show.

However, up until this year, any food professionals coming to CES were attending despite the lack of a dedicated food technology and innovation area in the exhibition space or in the conference tracks. Because CES is *the* great convener in the tech world, we felt food tech needed representation. This led The Spoon to rent out the ballroom of Treasure Island for a couple of years running to produce Food Tech Live. We wanted to give the food industry a central place to connect and check out the latest and greatest in food innovation.

But now that’s all about to change as food tech hits the big time this coming January. CES announced in June that food tech is going to be a featured theme for the first time ever at the big show. We couldn’t be more excited, in part because we will get to see even more cool food tech innovation, but also because CES has chosen The Spoon as the dedicated CES partner for the food tech exhibition and conference portions of the show!

We’re busy helping to develop a half-day conference and talking to lots of companies about coming to show their products at the four day CES food tech exhibition and we can’t wait to show what we’ve helped CES build.

But we need your input too! If you are interested in showing off your latest and great food and kitchen-related product or solutions, make sure to let us know. Just head over to this form on the SKS website and drop us a line. We’ll get right back to you and let you know how you can be a part of food tech at CES.

You can read more about the program below with our official announcement, or just drop us a line to see how to get involved.

We’ll see you in Vegas!

Food tech has arrived at CES®. Leaders in kitchen, food and cooking are coming together in Las Vegas from January 5th to January 8th at CES  2022 to examine how technology is changing the global food chain. CES has teamed up with The Spoon, the leading food tech media and events partner to showcase, demo and discuss the way technology has transformed the world of food. 

While we’re sure the excitement and buzz around food tech will be everywhere, we are working with CES on two key initiatives at the show, including: 

  • The Food Tech Exhibit, an exhibit space showcasing the latest innovations and demonstrating new products from across the kitchen and food tech spectrum. This will be live on the CES show floor in the Venetian Expo. 
  • The CES Food Tech Conference, presented by The Spoon, will bring together visionary thinkers, chef entrepreneurs, appliance vendors, delivery and food retail disruptors at CES 2022. Each session will highlight the innovation and disruption happening across the food industry as a result of tech advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, mobile accessibility and more. 

CES is fast approaching — and there are many ways to get involved before, during and after the show. The CES Food Tech presented by The Spoon area will focus solely on companies building the future of food and cooking. Booth spaces are diverse in terms of size and ability to customize – get in touch and we’ll work with the CES exhibitor team and our team to ensure you put together a space that serves you. 

If you aren’t able to secure a demo or company/showcase spot but still want your brand to be part of the inaugural year of food tech at CES, you can sponsor the CES Food Tech Conference on Day 2 of CES in the Venetian. Conference tickets for CES programming will be on sale soon.