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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Future of Recipes

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.

We Used CloudChef’s Cooking Guidance System to Cook Like a Chef

Earlier this month, we visited Google in Chicago, where we got a chance to put the Cloudchef cooking guidance system through its paces.

For those not familiar with Cloudchef, the company uses computer vision to monitor a chef working through a recipe. Sensors and cameras monitor everything from the temperature of a protein to the moisture lost while reducing a sauce to the brownness of an onion and put it all into a machine-readable playback file that can be executed in a kitchen powered with Cloudchef’s software.

We put this playback system, which acts essentially as a cooking guidance system, into action. In the video below, you can watch The Spoon’s Tiffany McClurg being introduced to the system by Cloudchef CEO Nikhil Abraham, and then watch as she cooks a meal of fried rice using a recipe that was created and “captured” in a Google Mountain View kitchen by one of their in-house chefs.

According to Tiffany, she’d never cooked fried rice. Using Cloudchef’s system, it took her about ten minutes to make a meal that tasted pretty darn good!

You can watch The Spoon’s new newly trained chef cook the entire meal using Cloudchef in the video below.

The Spoon Cooks a Meal With CloudChef

Yummly App Adds New Features, Reminding Us It’s Still Around Six Years After Whirlpool Deal

Today, recipe and guided cooking app Yummly announced a refreshed set of features, including what it describes as AI-powered recipe recommendations, an improved meal planner feature, and integration with an upgraded Yummly thermometer.

Since Whirlpool acquired Yummly, the recipe recommendation and cooking guidance app has largely flown below the radar while adding periodic incremental improvements over the years. And as far as I can tell, the announced improvements are par for the course.

This includes the new and improved “AI-powered recipe recommendations,” which sounds a lot like the things the company was promoting almost five years ago when they were touting “AI-powered personalization.” It’s not immediately clear how these AI-powered recommendations differ from previous AI-enabled recommendations, but we’ll have to take the company’s word for it.

The app’s improved meal planner function looks like it’s primarily focused on further building out a shoppable recipe function, something that has become relatively common in recent years for many recipe apps as a way to monetize through affiliate marketing commerce. The Yummly meal-planning shoppable recipe meal planning capability is a premium feature for users through a monthly subscription.

Whirlpool is hardly mentioned in the release (outside of the About Yummly boilerplate at the bottom), and the only real evidence of the company’s influence is the integration with an improved Yummly Thermometer, which is a product that Whirlpool has gone through pains to integrate with a number of their appliances. According to the announcement, the new Yummly thermometer now has three sensors, up from the two sensors in the previous generation.

While Whirlpool seems content to let Yummly operate mainly as a standalone app with its own brand, it seems a far cry from when the company acquired the app and saw it as driving the digital transformation of the appliance giant’s product lineup. Outside of a big splash at CES 2019, which the company described as a “roll-out across multiple Whirlpool brands,” the app hasn’t added all that much in terms of feature sets beyond what it had five years ago, and there’s been scant evidence of any further integration – thermometer notwithstanding – with the broader Whirlpool family.

One reason the app has become something of an afterthought in Whirlpool might be that many of the original stakeholders have moved on. Yummly founder Dave Feller left soon after the deal was done, and Brian Whitlin, who drove much of the product innovation, left in 2021. Add in the fact that the acquisition’s primary champion within Whirlpool, Brett Dibkey – who drove much of Whirlpool’s digital transformation – left in 2020, and the company’s current caretaker mode makes sense.

CloudChef Wants to Capture a Chef’s Knowledge in Software to Recreate High-Quality Cuisine Anywhere

What if you could digitally record the best chefs in the world as they make their culinary masterpieces? And what if you took that knowledge and encoded it into software that enabled everyday kitchen workers across the globe to recreate these dishes without specialized training?

That’s the idea behind CloudChef, a new company that wants to create a “Spotify for food” with a cloud software platform that aims to enable culinary teams in remote kitchens to make a meal just as a master chef would.

“We started CloudChef with this whole notion that in the same way that you can record and playback audio and video, you can now record and playback taste,” said CloudChef founder Nikhil Abraham in an interview with The Spoon. “And if you could hypothetically record and playback taste, you could eat from the best chefs and restaurants and literally anyone from the world without having any location constraints.”

So how does it work?

According to Abraham, CloudChef has outfitted its capture kitchens with technology that closely monitors a chef working through a recipe. Sensors and cameras monitor everything from the temperature of a protein to the moisture lost while reducing a sauce to the brownness of an onion and put it all into a machine-readable playback file that can be executed in a kitchen powered with CloudChef’s software.

“With our sensors, depending on what recipe it is, we can codify the intent behind the steps and also codify the intuition of the chef,” said Abraham.

Record & Playback Taste - CloudChef

On the “playback” side, how does CloudChef-enabled kitchen work?

Abraham said a CloudChef-powered kitchen is nothing but a standard kitchen, but the appliances are controlled by software. Modern appliances accessible via an API (like a newer Rational oven, for example) can connect directly and receive instructions from the CloudChef software. For appliances without the ability to interface with external software systems, CloudChef “opens it up, and we put an additional small amount of hardware in there to help us control the appliance with software.”

Abraham said that while CloudChef kitchens have the cooking guided by their software, humans still play a significant role in creating meals. The physical labor of moving food from station to station, taking stuff in and out of the freezer, and plating are all still done by workers without specialized training under the guidance of CloudChef.

“Every workstation in our kitchen is loaded with screens, and people have personal devices on them at all times,” said Abraham. “For example, they get tasks like ‘go to workstation two, and then the task would be to remove contents from this pan onto this other pan and put it inside the blast freezer.’ The physical action of moving stuff around in the kitchen, weighing things out the right way, is done by humans while all the cooking decisions are made by software.”

Abraham believes this ‘co-botic’ balance between software automation and humans is essential. For example, while he could envision a future where more cooking tasks are executed by robotics, he said the best results come when a human is involved.

“And at some point, we’ll have some amount of automation in the kitchen, but there are still a lot of different tasks in robotics that machines are particularly bad at, and humans are just instinctively good at,” said Abraham. “If you tell a human to scrape stirred rice from the bottom of a pan, it’s pretty intuitive. Most humans wouldn’t have a problem doing that. But teaching that to a robot takes time.”

Eventually, the company plans to open up the CloudChef platform to other kitchens via a licensing/SaaS model.

“The vision with that product is that if you’re a kitchen owner, you will give your kitchen spec via a web interface, and we will guide you on what all appliances you need to buy, or what all incremental things you need to put in your kitchen to make it CloudChef ready,” said Abraham. “So just like how Android has guidelines for hardware manufacturers, we will also have guidelines for kitchens that are CloudChef-powered

But for now, Abraham said the company’s current focus is on the “capture” side of things. They are working on recording as many chef recipes to the platform as possible – they currently have about 100 – which can be used in CloudChef-powered kitchens.

CloudChef currently has two company-owned kitchens, one in Mumbai and one in Palo Alto. The Mumbai location is an outsource kitchen for brands and has already served over 50 thousand CloudChef-cooked meals. According to Abraham, the brands have received higher ratings and retention rates compared with other kitchens. The Palo Alto location is operational and delivers meals via third-party delivery services like DoorDash.

While you may be partially correct if you think some chefs would resist the idea of having their cooking know-how put into a system that automates their work somewhere else, the company hasn’t had any problems getting high-profile Indian chefs like Srijith Gopinathan (Ettan), Thomas Zacharias (Bombay Canteen, Locavore), and Manjit Gill to record recipes on their platform. Part of the attraction, no doubt, is the royalty the chef receives each time one of their recipes is made. However, I imagine some may also be attracted to the idea that CloudChef technology could create a more chef-like version of their recipe, which may make them feel better about the idea of lending their name to food sent out via ghost kitchens which, if we’re being honest, don’t always have the best record of creating chef-like food.

CloudChef’s own investors include celebrity chef Tom Colicchio and Roy Yamaguchi, so they clearly also see value in the idea (though they haven’t – at least at this point – put any of their recipes on the platform).

Innit & Google Cloud Offer Personalized Nutrition Recommendations For Those With Diabetes and Other Health Conditions

Innit, a startup that makes software to digitize the consumer meal journey, announced today it has teamed up with Google Cloud to offer a new software module to food retailers to enable personalized healthy eating recommendations to their online grocer customers.

The new offering, which will be available to customers of Google Cloud via the Google Cloud Marketplace, enables grocers and other companies to create personalized nutrition recommendations for customers with health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and heart disease.

According to the announcement, the module utilizes an algorithm that scores various meal plans based on the shopper’s needs and then offers recommendations for personalized nutrition to consumers looking to optimize for a variety of health concerns. The module also provides assistance with cooking and meal planning.

According to Innit CEO Kevin Brown, the company increased its focus on health and wellness over the past year. They developed an app for Roche, one of Europe’s largest pharmaceutical companies, to help those with type 2 diabetes better manage their eating and meal planning.

“The Roche project allowed us to sharpen up a lot of the diet and health and science focus,” Brown said in a phone interview with The Spoon. “We worked with our science committee, worked with the doctors of the customer to put together a really good program that provides daily guidance to people that are struggling.”

After the Roche project, Innit saw it could take much of what it built and offer it to a variety of customers through its partnership with Google Cloud.

“We saw that there was kind of a big unsolved problem for actionable healthy eating,” Brown said. “So now we’re packaging that up together with Google and bringing that to all of the grocery retailers, as well as healthcare companies.”

The new offering expands on Innit’s relationship with Google, which got its start in 2018 with the addition of Innit functionality to their Google Home product. Google Cloud first offered Innit’s technology for personalized food recommendations through the Cloud Marketplace last year, and this latest offering gives food retailers and others the ability to add focused personalized nutrition plans for specific health conditions.

Innit has come a long way since the company’s early focus on developing guided cooking and smart appliance software for kitchen appliance manufacturers. The company’s acquisition of Shopwell in early 2017 kickstarted Innit’s move into shoppable recipes and personalized food data, and today the company describes itself as a personalized nutrition platform company. In many ways, this move by Innit is indicative of the broader move by smart kitchen software players to beef up their food commerce and personalized health offerings over the past few years.

When I asked Brown if Innit is still talking to appliance manufacturers about building solutions for their products, he told me that while these companies did slow down their digitization initiatives over the past few years as a result of supply chain and manufacturing difficulties related to COVID, conversations have begun to heat up again.

“There definitely was some industry slowdown, but we’re seeing it wake up again,” Brown said. “I’ve had multiple calls and new customer discussions with appliance manufacturers and so things are starting to wake back up.”

Introducing Manna Cooking, the Recipe App That’s All About Community

The idea for Manna Cooking came, in a way, from CTO and co-founder Guy Greenstein’s mom — a private chef who cooks all-vegan, all-kosher food. It dawned on Greenstein one day that his mom’s workstation was totally unmanageable, a chaos of notebooks and binders overflowing with heavily annotated recipe clips. He searched for an app that would help her to streamline things but came up empty-handed.

So Greenstein teamed up with his childhood friends and co-founders Josh and Rachel Abady to create a platform that would allow users like his mom to organize, customize, and share recipes. The app, Manna Cooking, is making its official debut today on the Apple App Store. I got on Zoom last week with Josh and Rachel (the company’s CEO and CMO, respectively) to learn more about the launch.

The name of the app was inspired by the three co-founders’ early years at a Jewish day school. “Manna is what supposedly fell from the sky to nourish the Israelites — to give them everything they needed,” said Rachel, who came up with the name. “Our app is supposed to be your buddy in the kitchen that gives you everything you need to cook.”

Rachel and Josh led me on a tour of the app over Zoom. The digital environment is bright and easy to navigate, made friendlier by Chef Mic, the app’s cartoon personality. The app draws on popular social media features to help users discover new recipes: You can flick through recipes dating app-style in swipe mode, or scroll through other users’ posts in the discover feed. Users can also create and import recipes themselves.

Manna follows through on its promise of creating a single, centralized space for users to manage their recipes. In the cookbook environment, the app allows you to edit any recipe you’ve liked and save a new version. (The app also automatically flags recipe ingredients that might be incompatible with your diet.) When you want to start cooking a dish, the app guides you through the recipe one step at a time in much the same way Google’s Maps app takes you step-by-step toward your destination, saving the need to scroll back and forth between an ingredients list and instructions.

There are currently about 10,000 recipes on the app. Some are from a collection of pre-approved websites from which users can instantly import recipes; some were created by the app’s beta testers; and some were curated by Manna’s in-house recipe creator.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced Greenstein and the Abady siblings to take an unconventional approach to fundraising. They had secured some funding pre-COVID (including from David Greenstein, Guy’s father and a co-founder of the brand incubator Wonder Brands) but the pandemic scorched opportunities to proposition restaurateurs and other funders. “But we realized, even more than it’s about food, our app is about community. So if we’re a community, why not use the community to be the source of our funding as well?” Josh said.

The team used Wefunder to raise about $150,000, which helped them to create a beta version of the Manna Cooking app. That crowdfunding approach also helped the team to create a pool of dedicated beta testers: “Our first wave of testers really had skin in the game, because they had given us funds anywhere from $100 upwards,” Rachel said. “So we already had built-in super testers.”

Manna has partnered with restaurateur and chef David Burke, giving users access to simplified recipes for restaurant dishes. They’ve also identified brand-aligned social media influencers, who are creating recipes, providing feedback, and helping to promote the app.

This spring, Manna will work on raising a more conventional seed funding round. In the next couple of months, the team plans to lock in a partnership with a grocery retailer, which will allow them to launch an automatic ordering feature.

But the team’s number one priority is user acquisition, and their success there may hinge on how well the platform fosters in-app community building. At the end of the day, the promise of the app is to provide a simplified, social cooking experience, especially for users with specific dietary needs — people who want to cook gluten-free food, or vegan food, and get inspired by others who cook and eat like them.

As Josh put it: “There’s millions of people who fit each of these descriptions, and each of them should feel like they have a community that they can engage with in one, centralized place.”

Pepper the App Aims to be the Instagram for Cooking

Jake Aronskind realized that every time he went on a social media platform, most of what he was seeing was food. After the pandemic began, this was amplified. Seeing people he never thought would be cooking and baking made him realize that there needed to be a more specialized platform for sharing food and recipes. This resulted in him and several cofounders developing the Pepper app.

Specialized social media platforms exist for activities like running (Strava), reading (Goodreads), and hiking (AllTrails). Still, most foodies share their culinary creations on the most popular platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, TikTok, and Pinterest. I recently spoke with Aronskind prior to Pepper’s Labor Day weekend launch, and he said, “It’s this idea of building a platform for a specific niche in your life. At the end of the day, Instagram, Facebook, all these other platforms, are simply not made for niche activities.”

Pepper most closely follows the format of Instagram. The app features a newsfeed where you can see the posts from friends and the people you follow. Instead of just adding a caption to go along with a photo, the poster can add a full recipe or list of ingredients. Similar to hashtags, there are options to categorize the recipe with different tags, including different diets (i.e., vegan, keto, gluten-free), difficulty level, and meal type.

From the app’s explore page, trending recipes can be seen from other users. If you find a recipe you want to make on the explore page or newsfeed, you can click the “save” button on the photo. The “saved” section on your personal profile hosts these posts, acting almost like a digital cookbook.

Pepper the App Animation Video
Pepper’s how-to video

Social media is how many of us stayed connected with others during the pandemic, and in 2020, Americans spent an average of 82 minutes per day on social media platforms. Cooking and “stress-baking” became coping mechanisms for dealing with the negative psychological effects of the pandemic, so it’s no surprise that food posts have dominated social media platforms in the past year and a half.

Recon, a food social media app that launched at the beginning of summer (founded by former Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff), connects users through photos of homemade dishes and restaurant reviews. Whisk, a recipe-sharing app, partnered with TikTok at the beginning of the year to trial run the integration of its recipe saving and grocery list features. Foodqu!rk is an online platform where users find their food personality and connect with others through dietary preferences.

The Pepper app launched this week, and it is available for free in the iOS App Store. It will likely be available for Android phones by the end of the month.

Plant Jammer Expands Its Food Waste Tech to Aldi, RIMI Baltic

Aldi Süd and RIMI Baltic are among the first large food companies to implement Plant Jammer’s new food-waste-fighting widget on their websites, according to a press release from Plant Jammer sent to The Spoon. Consumers can use the widget to track and manage food waste in their own homes.

Plant Jammer is best known at this point for its AI-powered cooking assistant that helps users create recipes from the existing inventory in their fridges and pantries. The idea is to provide consumers with more ways to use all of their at-home food inventory, so less waste goes down the drain or into the landfill.

Copenhagen, Denmark-based Plant Jammer nabbed a €4 million (~$4.7 million USD) investment last year. At the time, Plant Jammer said it planned to expand by licensing its API to third parties who could then build customized experiences for their own customers.  

The Empty Your Fridge widget is an offshoot of that goal. Companies can implement the technology with a single line of code. From the end-user perspective, a person simply selects the ingredients they have at home in the fridge and receive a customized recipe from the system in return. Users can also input preferences and dietary concerns, factors that will also impact what recipe gets generated by the system. 

Worldwide, food waste at consumer-facing levels, including the home, is a multibillion-dollar problem that’s also a big contributor to global emissions. The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 12.3 aims in part to halve global food waste at retail and consumer levels. Reaching that goal will be the work of governments, nonprofits, consumers, and startups building out new processes and technologies.

Helping consumers learn more about how to use their existing inventories will be a big part of this. Speaking in a statement today, Plant Jammer CEO Michael Haase noted that a “lack of cooking flexibility” in many consumers is a direct contributor to at-home food waste.

Plant Jammer says it aims to launch the widget on 100 food company websites by the end of 2021 and on 5,000 by 2023. Longer term, the company hopes to educate 1 billion people on cooking and food waste.

Reciple Announces Pre-Launch of Ad-Free Recipe Platform That Supports Creators

One reason I dislike using recipes is how frustrating it can be to access them on certain websites. As soon as I click on a recipe online, I am instantly bombarded by ad pop-ups, auto-playing videos, and way too much backstory before I can access the actual recipe. Reciple wants to change this, and today it unveiled the pre-launch of its platform that makes it easier to access recipes while simultaneously supporting recipe creators.

Reciple partners with creators and food bloggers to host their recipes on the platform. Recipe creators are normally paid through ad platforms, but in this case, they will be paid directly by Reciple. According to an email from Annie Singer, the founder of Reciple, the creators will be paid up to 10 times more than traditional ad platforms.

To generate revenue, the platform will operate on a consumer subscription model. Users will pay a monthly or discounted annual fee for unlimited access to the recipes. Singer said that most of the revenue will be distributed to the creators.

Due to the fact that recipe creators will be paid by Reciple, they will no longer need to depend on ad revenue. Therefore, the pop-ups and ads that make other sites run slowly can be fully eliminated from Reciple. On the websites and blogs of individual recipe developers, there is often a lengthy backstory behind the recipe. The purpose of this is to improve the SEO of the page in order to have it rank higher in Google searches. The new site will handle the SEO and marketing aspect, allowing creators to select how much backstory they desire to share.

Since the start of the pandemic, more people have turned to cooking at home, making recipe sites like Reciple more relevant. The trend of eating more meals at home is not expected to recede anytime soon: Research from Acosta recently found that 92 percent of surveyed families plan on continuing to eat together at home after the pandemic.

Reciple is now admitting a limited number of waitlist members to their platform. The site is also being accepting recipe creators, and the first 100 creators will get free VIP onboarding and exclusive benefits. The platform officially launches in November 2021.

Fexy Media Launches Relish+ as Premium Paid Feature on Relish.com

Relish.com, a web app created by Fexy Media for meal planning, recipes, and grocery shopping, announced today that it has launched a premium feature called Relish+. The new service will now allow users to have access to a library of over 100 meal plans for a monthly fee starting at $3.75.

The new meal plans on Relish+ are developed by nutritionists, and the recipes are sourced from popular recipe developers and food bloggers. Called “Fodcasts”, users can subscribe to the meal plans that match their interests, just like they would to a podcast.

Once subscribed to the meal plans, users can then add them to a calendar to plan all meals for the entire week or even the next month. The meal plans are customizable and can be edited to change the serving size, alter or delete certain recipes, and add or delete certain days. With the premium subscription, users can also create their own meal plans by dropping their desired recipes into a blank meal plan template.

Ingredients found within the meal plans can be consolidated to create a grocery list. This is list can simply be used by the user to go shopping or sent to a grocery delivery service that is integrated into the app (both of these features are currently available with the free version of Relish.com).

Meal planning and grocery shopping can be tiresome, especially after 15+ months of predominately eating at home, so services like Relish.com and Relish+ are very relevant at the moment. Another app, Whisk, allows users to discover and save recipes, and then shop for the ingredients through the app. Samsung announced at the beginning of this year that it added shoppable recipes and guided cooking through its SmartThings Cooking mobile app.

The Relish+ meal planning library will continue to expand after today’s launch with new meal plans added each week. The subcription starts at $3.75 per month if paid for the entire year up front, and 3-month and 6-month memberships exists starting at $4.95 per month.

Cooksy Uses Cameras and Thermal Sensors Above Your Home Stove for Guided Cooking

While there is quite the range of guided cooking assistants for home cooks, Cooksy is looking to deliver guided cooking by adding a device above your home’s range. Launching a crowdfunding campaign today on Indiegogo, Cooksy is a small camera and thermal sensor that you affix above your cooktop. As Cooksy’s cameras and sensors monitor the temperatures of your pan and food, it talks with an accompanying mobile app, alerting you if your pan is too hot or too cold, when to flip foods and when to remove them.

Cooksy has a level of intelligence, so it can identify some foods the user places in a pan, like salmon, for instance. The device also comes pre-loaded with some recipes. But as Cooksy President, Jeff Knighton, explained to me by video chat this week, Cooksy is mostly about user-generated content. Yes, Cooksy can identify salmon in the pan, but if you’re not following a specific recipe from the app, it won’t provide specific guidance.

What it will do is provide data around the user’s experience cooking that food — the aforementioned salmon, for instance. That data might include how hot the pan is, when the salmon gets flipped, and when it gets removed from the heat. Cooksy saves all that information so that the user can bring it back up once they cook salmon again. Cooksy will ensure the pan is at the same temperature as before and that the user flips the salmon and removes it from the heat at the same times they did before.

Cooksy’s goal is to have users share their cooking experiences with a larger community. In addition to recording your cook, the system has basic editing tools that allow you to chop the video down to just its essentials and easily input ingredient and other recipe information. This means that if a professional chef cooks a steak and uploads their video doing so, users could replicate the same cooking process at home.

Of course, that also requires people to do the work of creating recipes and uploading them to the app. Which may or may not be a big deal, depending on how user-friendly the Cooksy app is.

Cooksy is coming to market just one week after Miso Robotics launched a similar cameras+tablet solution for professional kitchens. Miso’s artificial intelligence capabilities seem more robust, with the ability to recognize foods and automatically tell when they are done cooking (no recipe required), but Cooksy could theoretically help home cooks make sauces, stir frys, basically any dish you cook on the stove.

Cooksy, however, won’t come cheap. Early birds backing the project on Indiegogo can pledge $389 for a standard Cooksy, or $479 for the Cooksy Pro, which features greater thermal resolution and more on-board storage. If you are at all interested, you may not want to wait, because the retail price is 40 percent more ($649 for the basic and $799 for the Pro). That is not cheap. Especially if you consider you can pick up an entire six-piece set of Hestan Smart Cookware or a June Oven for $600. And you don’t have to wait. Cooksy is supposed to ship in November of this year, though as avid readers of The Spoon know, crowdfunded hardware campaigns have a tendency to miss their deadlines.

Hestan Cue Adds New Multi-Cooker Chef’s Pot to its Lineup

Hestan Cue, which makes connected pans and cooktops for guided cooking, announced this week the addition of a 5.5 quart Smart Chef’s Pot to its lineup. According to a press announcement sent to The Spoon, the new Chef’s Pot can act as a multi-cooker, performing a number of different function in the kitchen.

The new Chef’s Pot is similar to Hestan’s other smart pans in that it features embedded temperature sensors and Bluetooth connectivity. Hestan Cue’s pots and pans, induction burner and recipe app work in conjunction with one another to precisely control the temperature while cooking. The system automatically adjusts the temperature to avoid over and under cooking items.

With its deeper basin, Hestan Cue is positioning the new Chef’s Pot as a multi-function device in the kitchen. According to the press announcement, the new Chef’s Pot can perform more than eight different cooking functions, including deep frying, slow cooking, and candy making.

Dubbing its smart Chef’s Pot a “multi-cooker” seems to be more of a marketing gambit on the part of Hestan to ride the coattails of wildly popular devices like the Instant Pot. It’s not wrong, per se. Smart, precise temperature controls does give the Hestan Cue system flexibility to tackle a number of different cooking functions. So if you buy into the Hestan Cue ecosystem, there is greater flexibility to be had. Plus, the connected recipe apps will walk you through what you are cooking.

This type of functionality isn’t cheap, however. The 5.5 quart Chef’s Pot and Induction Cooktop will set you back $499. If you already have the Hestan Cue Induction Cooktop, the 5.5 quart Chef’s Pot on its own costs $299.