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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Future of Recipes

The Complete CES 2020 Kitchen Tech Report

At this year’s big tech show in Vegas, there was no shortage of food tech. Everything from Impossible Pork to robot cooking assistants were on display, and so after spending five days in the desert checking out the latest and greatest, here’s my wrap-up of everything I saw in kitchen tech at the show:

Lots of Smart Fridges

It may be hard to believe in 2020, but Internet connected fridges have been showing up at CES for two decades. Of course, with powerful machine vision and food inventory tracking systems, today’s smart fridges are a lot more useful than these attempts from yesteryear even if they’ve yet to be widely adopted.

Some of the companies showing off smart fridge tech at this year’s CES included LG, Samsung, Bosch and GE. Bosch showed off a two-camera smart fridge powered by Chefling, a partnership that shouldn’t be all that surprising given BSH Appliances’ investment in the smart kitchen software startup.

LG’s latest smart fridge, which includes the popular Instaview transparent front door feature, now reorders food when inventory gets low. Samsung’s latest smart fridges use Whisk technology (a company they acquired last year) to suggest recipes based off of your in-fridge inventory. Smarter was also in Vegas at FoodTech Live showing off their retrofit fridge cam.

Home Grow Systems Get a Look

For the first time at CES, big appliance brands showed interest in allowing home grow systems to take root in the kitchen. Both Samsung’s BeSpoke grow system and the LG’s system were evolved proof of concepts that utilized sensors and allowed the home gardener to monitor the status of their plants within the form factor of a standup fridge.

GE’s Home Grown took the home farm out of the fridge and made the entire kitchen a multilayered food grow system. You can watch a video of a booth demo of the concept below:

CES 2020: A Tour of 'Home Grown', the GE Appliances Garden Kitchen Concept

All of the grow systems on display by big appliance brands were more proof of concepts than shipping products. I’ll be interested to see if any of them roll out these products in the next year. Of all the systems, the Samsung Bespoke home grow systems seemed to be the closest to a market-ready product.

Intelligent And Adaptive Surfaces

One of the big trends sweeping food tech is personalization, so why not apply the principle of personalization to our physical space as well? GE did just that with a concept called Shift, an adaptable kitchen that, well, shifts to adapt to each person’s specific requirements. The idea isn’t new. The first winner of the Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase, a German startup called Tielsa (now KimoCon), makes an app-controlled, adjustable kitchen platform that adjusts the height of the surface space to the specific user.

The Wireless Power Consortium had a full kitchen built out at CES 2020, showing off how their Ki kitchen standard using induction heating and wireless charging worked. Speaking of induction, one of the most innovative entries in intelligent surfaces at CES 2020 was from design firm GHSP, who showed off technology for a video-enabled induction cooktop. I know Americans are in love with their fire cooking, but hopefully new ideas like this will generate interest in what is clearly a superior (and flexible) technology in induction. You can check out a quick video of GHSP’s concept below:

Drink Tech Was EVERYWHERE

Drinks have always been a little easier to serve up in the future kitchen than cooking technology, and this year was no different as we saw well over a dozen next-gen beer, booze, coffee and tea machines sprinkled around the show floor.

On the booze front, CES 2020 had offerings from Drinkworks and Bartesian, while on the beerbot side, we saw offerings from PicoBrew, BEERMKR, MiniBrew and INTHEKEG to name a few. Noticeably absent was LG’s HomeBrew, the automated beer making appliance concept they debuted a year ago at CES 2019.

When it comes to coffee tech, longtime Spoon readers shouldn’t be surprised at my excitement over seeing a working production model of the Spinn coffee maker, a product I’ve been covering since I pre-ordered one way back in 2016 (we’ll have a video of the Spinn later this week). Terra Kaffe had a TK-01 on hand at FoodTech Live to demo the machine’s grind and brew (and milk frothing) capabilities, while MoJoe Brewing was showing off its portable coffee making system.

You can watch Chris’s interview with Spinn CEO Roderick de Rode and take a look inside the Spinn in the video below:

CES 2020: A Look at the Spinn Grind and Brew Coffee Maker

DNA & Microbiome Driven Diets

With DNA testing now fast and affordable, it’s not all that surprising to see offshoot concepts that capitalize on the information provided by a person’s profile. One of CES’s most buzzy startups in this space was DNANudge, a French company that is offering a wearable that tells a person whether that CPG product they picked up in the grocery store is a good fit for them. On the microbiome front, Sun Genomics was at FoodTech Live to show off its personalized microbiome kit.

Food Waste Reduction & Sustainability

One area that has traditionally lacked innovation is in the management of food waste in the home. While we still didn’t see a whole lot around food waste prevention tech outside of ever-more-advanced machine vision making its way into our fridges, there was a scrappy Canadian startup was showing off a cool new concept for home composting. The Sepura, made by British Columbia based Anvytech, automatically routes your solids into a food compost bin and disposes of your liquids.

You can see CNET’s video tour of the Sepura composter below:

Food Inventory Management

In addition to a number of food recognizing fridges, there are also a few other products on display showcasing how we could better manage our food. The Ovie smart food tracking system was on display at FoodTech Live, while a new entrant into the smart food tracking space, PantryOn, showed off a new dry pantry tracking system that will notify you and reorder an item when the product is low. While the PantryOn is a bit pricey with a retail price of $900, I am glad to see some companies think about innovating in the pantry.

Smart Schnozzes

Long-term, more intelligent sensors – and the software and AI that stitches together all the information gathered from these technologies – are going to make the kitchen truly sentient, which is why I always make sure to check out the new digital nose technologies every year while at CES.

While there was no shortage of electronic noses at CES this year, one digital schnoz that stuck out Cyrano de Bergerac-style was that from Stratuscent. The company’s technology, originally developed by NASA, can be used in a variety of verticals, but the company’s initial focus is food applications. Company CEO David Wu told me they are currently talking to appliance manufacturers about the possibility of including Stratuscent tech in their products.

Countertop Cooking

On the counterop cooking front, Anova was at CES showing off its Precision Oven, which is slated to appear sometime this year. The company was demoing the benefits of steam throughout the show, including showing off how steam can help make much better bread. You can watch a walkthrough of the Anova oven from food tech innovator Scott Heimendinger below, who has been helping Anova with the oven.

CES 2020: A Look at the Anova Precision Steam Oven

One product that seemed to get lots of buzz at CES was a multicooker called Julia from CookingPal. The device looks and acts in large part like a Thermomix, with the main difference being a separate touch screen interface in the form of a 8.9″ display. The touch screen has a camera on it that, according CookingPal, will recognize food and suggest recipes. From there, the Julia offers video-powered guided cooking, and afterwards has a self-clean mode.

Cooking Robots

Much like big appliance brands caught home garden fever, many also seemed bitten by the food robotics bug. Chris covered much of what was on display, most of which struck me as futuristic visions of how robotics could be implemented in a consumer or professional kitchen to make our lives easier. Not that futuristic or far off is a bad thing – what seemed crazy ten years ago often seems pedestrian in the present, and I expect at some point some of these products will be commercialized.

One that’s worth a look is the Samsung Bot Chef. While a bit reminiscent of the Moley robot arm kitchen robot, the Samsung bot’s fine motor movements and handling of kitchen utensils was impressive, suggesting that maybe a home robot chef isn’t as far off as I might think.

Samsung Bot Chef first look at CES 2020

Key Takeaways

When I was doing my research on what to expect at this year’s CES for foodtech, I was surprised at some of the big ideas that were debuting at the show.

While CES normally is where gee-whiz technology debuts, this year appliance and home brands seemed to thinking bigger with concepts that could potentially solve real-world problems like reduce food waste or help those with special needs.

There also seemed to be a big focus, generally, on the kitchen as a place to employ cutting edge technologies ranging from AI, robotics, virtual reality and more. Big appliance, it seems, has realized what we’ve long believed: the kitchen is the heart of the home.

Finally, it seems personalization is grabbing hold in a big way. Everything from personalized nutrition to physical cooking spaces to meal plans is on the menu, something that I think aligns well with the broader push towards more personalized worlds in this era of data abundance.

We’ll be continuing the conversation about personalization at Customize, our Food Personalization Summit, in NYC on Feb 27th. Join us!

CES 2020: Bosch and Chefling Introduce Inventory Management Tech to Their At-Home Smart Kitchen System

Appliance-maker Bosch, part of the BSH Home Appliances family, and AI-powered kitchen assistant Chefling will show off the latest features of their connected kitchen system at CES this week. At the center of those features is inventory management technology that uses in-refrigerator image recognition to identify items that are added or removed from the fridge and automatically update inventory lists, according to a press release from Chefling.

Chefling’s AI-powered kitchen assistant aids the consumer meal journey in the home kitchen by helping users manage food inventory, create shopping lists, and send digital recipes to their connected kitchen appliances. As part of this package, the Chefling app can recommend recipes based on what’s in a user’s connected fridge or pantry — a feature that could potentially save consumers lots of time and money since it helps them utilize what food is already at home rather than sending them to the store. To do that, however, the system needs the most up-to-date inventory of what’s actually in the fridge when it’s time to cook.

That’s where the new inventory management technology comes in. Previously, users had to scan a barcode or take a picture of their receipt in order for Chefling to keep track of what was in the fridge. With the new technology, users can simply put groceries into a Bosch-connected fridge (or take them out) and their at-home food inventory automatically updates within the Chefling app. The system can be used with any camera-equipped fridge that is equipped with BSH’s Home Connect system. New recipes based on the updated inventory will be available from the Chefling app.

As our awareness of the food waste problem increases and companies work to find solutions to fight the issue, technology that can help manage at-home food inventory is poised to become more commonplace in the average consumer’s kitchen. Connecting the fridge to systems that keep track of food already in the home is one way to do so, and Bosch/Chefling aren’t alone in highlighting new technology for this at CES. Both LG and Samsung are also showing off high-tech refrigerators that can recognize the food inside and suggest recipes based on those items. LG, in particular, uses a computer vision system to keep a real-time inventory of what’s inside the fridge.

BSH invested in Chefling in May of 2019, acquiring one third of the latter’s shares as part of the terms of the deal (other details were not disclosed). Since the deal, Chefling has increased both the number of users on its platform and the system’s ability to self learn, which is vital to keeping track of inventory in real time.

Bosch and Chefling will be showing off the system at the Bosch booth this week at CES.

Will 2020 Be the Year Truly Personalized Food Becomes a Reality? (Sort of.)

You’re almost certainly already used to customizing your food to some degree. Maybe you get extra guac at Chipotle, or leave off the mayo on your drive-thru burgers. You might even use platforms like Innit to easily substitute ingredients when cooking at home.

But the era of truly personalized food — exactly what you want (or need), and nothing you don’t — has yet to come. And advancements in AI, data, and food science are helping us get there.

2020 is the time for personalization to mature and become more than just a gimmick. I see a few high-potential spaces in which personalization has the opportunity to really grow over the next year (or two): drive-thrus, sit-down restaurants, and dietary guidance.

When it comes to personalization in fast-food, McDonald’s is the clear leader. Earlier this year the QSR giant acquired Dynamic Yield, a personalization platform which it’s using to tailor menu recommendations based off of things like weather, time of day, etc.

But what Dynamic Yield brings to Mickey D’s isn’t real personalization, per se. The software can customize menus based on external factors— if it’s cold out, maybe you’d like a piping hot cup of coffee? — but it doesn’t pull from customer data to create menus actually drawn from individual preferences, dietary restraints, or allergies. And as the Spoon founder Mike Wolf pointed out earlier this year, true menu personalization is the holy grail for dining establishments.

That holy grail might be closer than we think, however. Startup 5Thru‘s tech will scan people’s license plates to access their past orders, which it uses to suggest your favorite foods. KFC is testing out similar tech. The fast-food space in general is investing heavily in personalization, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see lots of individual players accelerating their efforts in 2020 to try and smoke the competition.

Non-fast-food restaurants are also trying to leverage personalization to improve the consumer dining experience (and, you know, sell you more stuff). Suggestic and THE.FIT are developing tools to generate personalized versions of restaurant menus based on consumers’ dietary goals and restrictions. That sort of customization also extends to in-restaurant experiences; this year OpenTable and Upserve partnered to share guest data so restaurant employees can have pre-warning about their preferences, allergies, etc.

As these sorts of tech become more commonplace and affordable, restaurants will only get more personalized in 2020. I’m betting over the next twelve months that in-restaurant menu customization apps like Suggestic and THE.FIT will become, while not commonplace, at least more widely available. On the digital search side I could also envision Google Maps, which already surfaces restaurants’ most popular dishes during searches, displaying customized sample menus based off of your customized dietary profile.

2020 could also be the year that personalized nutrition becomes more mainstream. Viome and GenoPalate already create customized food and recipe recommendations based on your microbiome and DNA, respectively, to help fight preventable diseases. As these technologies become more widespread and affordable, we might even see these services integrating with restaurants to help you see which menu items best suit your diet and/or avoid triggering foods.

True, that might not happen in the next twelve months. But we will no doubt see more vaguely customized products like Nourished, which creates individualized 3D printed vitamins. That sort of generalized personalization also extends to things like baby food and wine delivery. While these offerings are based off of broader markets like age and preferences, not data as granular as your microbiome makeup, they indicate a real effort by companies to take a step in that direction and offer customized CPG products, typically delivered right to your doorstep.

It’s also worth acknowledging the potential pushback against personalization. Creating things like highly customized menus and restaurant recommendations necessitates massive amounts of personal data, which could have frightening consequences if that data gets hacked. Despite those risks, I have no doubt that companies will keep pursuing the personalization trend into 2020 and beyond.

That said, we’ve got a ways to go until we reach a truly personalized dining future. I don’t think that by December 31st, 2020 we’ll be able to go to a drive-thru and see menus sporting all of our favorite dishes thanks to info it gleaned from your dietary profile. But it might remember you love the Buffalo sauce with your chicken nuggets — and that’s a start.

We’re so interested in the potential (and challenges) of food personalization that we created a whole summit around it! Join us at Customize in NYC on February 27th — Early Bird tickets are on sale for a few more days.

Newsletter: Personalization in a Tech-centric Food Era, Plus Food Tech Hacks for Your Thanksgiving Prep

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Customizing our food is a decades-old practice we’ve come to expect if not outright demand when it comes to the way we eat. Fast-casual chains like Chipotle and Sweetgreen are built on the idea of each person customizing a meal to their specific eating needs. Most of us will to some degree customize the traditional Thanksgiving spread tomorrow, using plant-based ingredients in place of meat or maybe even turning the whole meal into a bowl of ramen. Meanwhile, there are reportedly 87,000 ways to order a drink at Starbucks. Can our food and beverage consumption get any more customizable. 

Yes, actually, and largely thanks to tech. As we discuss often at The Spoon, apps and other tools powered by AI and machine learning, big data and analytics, as well as food science and research are making it possible to customize our food  right down to our DNA. That includes food not only at restaurants or holiday feasts, but also with our daily meals and snacks, our dietary needs and restrictions, and even our grocery shopping lists. 

Customizing and personalizing our food through tech, however, is a relatively new practice. While some standardization is beginning to occur — notably in the QSR drive-thru lane — this space is right now a pretty fragmented one, with many ideas and solutions but no clear idea yet as to how they come together to help us eat smarter and enjoy our food at the same time.

That’s why we created Customize, a one-day executive summit slated to take place on February 27 in NYC. During the one-day event, which will be held at WeWork’s 85 Broad St. space, The Spoon will examine topics from the world of food personalization, including microbiome-based nutrition, AI-powered grocery recommendations, new developments in CPG products, and much more.

We’re already got a great lineup of speakers to talk about the impact of personalization in the grocery store, at the restaurant table and in our own kitchens, and we’re adding more every week so make sure to check them out!

Want to learn more? Head over to The Spoon Publisher Mike Wolf’s post introducing the event, then grab tickets before they sell out (which they will).

Nutrition is one area where customization is going to be huge, and indeed is already showing up via apps and websites that help users determine the kinds of foods they should be eating and plan out meals and diets.

Trouble is, it’s one thing to download an app that promises to help you eat healthier. It’s another to actually take the time to track the food you’re eating and determine whether it has any actual nutritional value in your life (hey, iceberg lettuce).

That’s where companies like Foodvisor come in. As my colleague Chris Albrecht noted recently, the French nutritional coaching app startup lets users simply snap a picture of their food then, using computer vision and deep learning, the app analyzes it and auto-creates a nutritional report of the food. The company just raised $4.5 million in fresh funds, and it’s one of a growing number of food-tracking apps out there. Another notable example is Bite.ai’s app, which also offers consumers visual food tracking through their smartphones.

Getting consumers to actually change out unhealthy eating habits for smarter ones is, of course, a whole other mountain to tackle, and one we’ll be discussing more of at Customize. 

Last-Minute Food Tech Hacks for Thanksgiving

Of course you may have more immediate concerns around customization, like how in the heck you’re going to get dinner on the table on time and with every dish at the right temperatures.

Fear not. Chris put together this handy guide that highlights a few pieces of connected-kitchen gear that could make your cooking easier, some of which you can still grab before your Thanksgiving cooking commences.

Finally, if you are planning on going to CES and are looking to explore some food tech in Vegas, make sure to check our Food Tech Live event. If you want to showcase your product at FTL drop us a line, and if you want to attend you can request a ticket here.

Feast responsibly,

Jenn

Alexa Adds Thousands Of Buzzfeed Tasty Recipes To Echo Show

This week Amazon and Buzzfeed announced a partnership that brings thousands of Buzzfeed Tasty’s famous quick-play social videos to Amazon’s video-enabled digital assistants.

According to email sent to The Spoon, here’s how it works: First ask Alexa to find a recipe by saying something like, “Alexa, find pork recipes from Tasty.” Alexa will then show you options, and you can tell the device which recipe to select by saying something like, “Alexa, select recipe number three.”

From there, say, “Alexa, start recipe” and Alexa will read off each step in the recipe as well as list them on the left-hand side of the screen of the Echo Show. It will also show a looping video of the recipe on the right. You can also ask Alexa to read off ingredients by saying “Alexa, read ingredients” and add it to a shopping list by saying “Alexa, add to shopping list.”

I wish I could tell you how well it works, but at the time of this writing I couldn’t get either of my Echo Show devices to actually find Buzzfeed Tasty recipes. The new feature is supposed to be available to anyone in the U.S. with an Echo Show as of this week, so I assume I will be able to access the program over the next few days as the kinks are worked out.

Too bad, since I am very curious about how well turning a Buzzfeed Tasty recipe into a more instructional/step-by-step format on a screen will work. Like many, I’ve watched a lot of Buzzfeed recipes online but have never actually cooked to one of them, in part because they seem designed more for entertainment than to be functional. Putting them onto the Echo Show could change that, so I’ll update this post once I can actually cook with one.

One thing that struck me about this integration is that it is simply turned on and available to work (once it works) for anyone with an Echo Show. This is different from earlier Alexa Echo Show integrations like that of Allrecipes, which required the user to add as an Alexa Skill.

My suspicion is that Amazon is having trouble getting people to add new skills to their voice assistants, so at this point the company is, in some cases, just doing it for the consumer. Makes sense, actually, since a “cloud computer” like Alexa isn’t exactly short on storage. That and it just seems a bit more magical if you one day could just ask Alexa to do something and she does it rather than going through an “add skill” extra-step.

I am also curious how the “add to shopping list” feature works. This news follows an integration with Walmart (via shoppable recipe platform Northfork) that allows Tasty app users to make recipes shoppable by adding them their Walmart shopping lists and online grocery carts. The Alexa/Tasty integration doesn’t quite look like it takes recipes all the way to the Amazon cart, but if I know Amazon, I expect that will eventually change.

SideChef Launches Guided Cooking Integration With Bixby, Samsung’s AI Assistant

This week, SideChef announced an integration with Samsung’s intelligent voice assistant Bixby. The partnership centers around the launch of a voice-activated guided cooking capsule (capsules are Samsung’s equivalent to Amazon Alexa skills) which will give users of Bixby-powered mobile phones access to approximately 15 thousand recipes, most with step-by-step video-powered cooking instructions.

From the news release:

“Users can hone in on the exact recipe they would like by adding natural language constraints, such as dietary restriction, cuisine type, and even specific ingredients. Once a recipe is selected, SideChef provides video instruction through Bixby to guide home cooks through the entire recipe preparation process, from start to finish.”

While Samsung’s voice assistant doesn’t quite have the same degree of loyal usership as, say, Google Assistant on mobile phones or Amazon Alexa in the home, it is installed on a whole lot of Samsung products. Last year Samsung CEO D.J. Koh declared that the company’s AI assistant could reach a total of 500 million devices if it were to be installed on every Samsung device.

Of course, to reach that massive audience, SideChef’s new capsule would then have to be installed by the consumer, who will be able to find it on the Bixby Marketplace (Samsung’s “app store” for Bixby Capsules). Samsung launched the marketplace in mid-2019, and the newness of the store may actually play to SideChef’s advantage as theirs is probably one of the few recipe-centric voice apps and most likely the only guided cooking capsule on the still relatively bare shelves of the Bixby marketplace.

This move comes a year after SideChef launched on Amazon’s video-enabled Alexa devices, the Alexa Echo Show and Echo Spot, and just a couple months after the smart kitchen software startup announced an integration with Haier’s smart fridges at IFA 2019. While it isn’t immediately clear if the Bixby integration will put SideChef on Samsung Family Hub refrigerators, I would expect that will happen sooner rather than later.

Finally, while SideChef continues to rack up appliance partnerships, the company is also beginning to explore partnerships with big CPG brands. Last month the startup partnered with Bacardi through its Alexa integration to enable step-by-step drink mixing.  This trend of food brands integrating with smart kitchen software platforms isn’t limited to SideChef, as SideChef competitor Innit announced a partnership in September with Mars through a Google Lens integration that will enable both guided cooking and personalized meal and nutrition recommendations.

Meal Kit Companies Try New Formats and Foods to Connect With Consumers

Continuing its push to redefine what makes a meal kit, Sun Basket this week announced the launch of two new products specifically aimed at those with little time or inclination to cook.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Sun Basket’s new Pre-Prepped meals arrive at customers’ doorsteps with veggies and other sides already sliced and diced and ready for cooking. For the user, that means putting the meal kit together is mostly a matter of removing the ingredients from the package and cooking them.

Sun Basket also unveiled Oven Ready meals, its version of heat-and-serve dishes that arrive both pre-portioned and pre-cooked. This line of meals is currently available in the Eastern United States, with a nationwide rollout planned for Q1 2020.

Both of the new offerings speak to a continued effort on the part of meal kit companies to branch out from the traditional meal kit format — pre-portioned dinner ingredients in a box — and offer dishes that cater to a wider range of lifestyles, cooking skills, and budgets. Sun Basket earlier this year expanded its menu to include lunch, brunch, and snack options subscribers can add to their meal plans, a move we’ve also seen from Kroger-owned Home Chef.

In another bid to attract a wider audience, meal kit company Plated this week announced a partnership with Beyond Meat to offer one plant-based protein recipe per month to subscribers. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Plated will kick the partnership off with a recipe that uses Beyond Beef, and will even include tips on how to cook the alt-protein for optimal taste, such as adding Worcestershire sauce to give Beyond’s product “a meatier umami flavor.”

Plated, which is owned by Albertsons, laid off 10 percent of its corporate staff earlier this year in a cost-cutting move but said it remained committed to meal kits. The inclusion of Beyond Meat in recipes could give the company more reach with the growing flexitarian audience, though Plated won’t be alone in doing so. Blue Apron and HelloFresh already partner with Beyond for their kits.

More importantly, both the Sun Basket and Plated news speak to a growing demand among meal kit customers for more variety when it comes to both food options and how much time is spent cooking the meals. Research this year from NPD found that 93 million adults in the U.S. haven’t tried a meal kit yet but would like to. The research firm noted in the study that expanding from the traditional dinner-only offerings into new meal categories is still a huge opportunity for meal kit companies.

Meal kits may not be the ultra-trendy food item they were even a couple years ago, but offering subscribers more food options and more convenience might help them hold on.

Thermomix Partners with Drop for Smart Appliance Control and Grocery Ordering

Thermomix is adding Drop’s smart kitchen software to its all-in-one kitchen appliance, the two companies announced from the stage today at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) in Seattle.

Through the partnership the Thermomix TM6 will connect with other smart kitchen appliances and third-party applications through the device itself. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Thermomix will now soon be able to preheat an oven, order groceries and optimize recipe content with the push of a button. Thermomix said the first integrations will hit the market in 2020.

The TM6 has more than 20 culinary features including chopping, mixing, blending, different types of cooking including sous vide and fermentation. The device also features guided cooking for more than 50,000 recipes. All that functionality ain’t cheap, however, as the device itself costs $1,500.

But that hasn’t been a daunting price tag for people outside of the U.S. where the device is more popular. What’s more, people aren’t just buying the device, but as we also learned at SKS this week, the company has a crazy high subscription conversion rate:

In addition to appliance control, Drop’s software also does recipe discovery and re-sizing, ingredient swapping, and grocery lists. Thermomix is not the first all-in-one cooker to integrate Drop’s software. Last month Drop announced that it would expand its partnership with Kenwood to be on the CookEasy+ multi-function cooking appliance. Today’s press announcement also said that 40 million Drop-enabled appliances from brands such as GE Appliances, Bosch, Electrolux and LG Electronics will ship over the next three years.

Discovery Announces Food Network Kitchen, a New Content, Recipe, and Grocery Platform

Have you ever watched Alton Brown or Ina Garten on Food Network and thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if these chefs were in my kitchen, walking me through the cooking process themselves, preferably over a glass of Chardonnay?”

You’re in luck, minus the Chardonnay. At today’s Amazon event in Seattle, Discovery, Inc., which owns Food Network, announced the impending launch of the Food Network Kitchen. The multi-faceted platform will offer 25 weekly live interactive cooking videos featuring celebrity Food Network chefs, as well as over 800 cooking classes and 3,000 instructional videos. It’s a separate, additional service from Food Network itself, which requires a cable subscription to watch.

Food Network Kitchen will launch in late October 2019 in select (unnamed) U.S. cities. The service will cost $7 per month. Subscribers will be able to access the content through voice control with Amazon Alexa and Echo devices, Amazon Fire TV, and iOS and Android mobile devices, with more device integrations to come in 2020. The platform also offers grocery delivery through Amazon Fresh.

In a press release sent to the Spoon, David Zaslav, President and CEO of Discover, Inc. called the Food Network Kitchen “not just another entertainment service” but something closer to “the ‘Peloton of Food.'” Like the fitness company’s streaming service, Food Network Kitchen will give users access not only to pre-recorded videos but also live instructional classes.

A lot of folks, myself included, watch Food Network not for actual cooking instruction but purely for entertainment. So I’m not sure how many people will want to cook along to Guy Fieri making chicken wings at 6 p.m. in their kitchen. However, the live aspect certainly has potential, especially if the Food Network includes a way for users to ask questions and have them answered via the chef in real time.

I’m also skeptical about whether kitchen purists who love watching chefs cook meals from scratch would also embrace next-gen technologies in the kitchen, like using Alexa to access recipes or ordering groceries online. Then again, kitchens are getting more and more connected as things like voice integration and grocery delivery grow more commonplace. As these connected tools become more frictionless, it’s likely that more traditionalist home chefs will embrace them, too.

Really though, this new platform demonstrates that Food Network is trying to evolve from just a television network and recipe hub to a more interactive, connected platform that meets consumers not on their couch but in their kitchen. Food Network Kitchen is the food and cooking brand’s first big push to go beyond the static screen and interact with consumers in this dynamic way — and I doubt it’ll be their last.

FoodNetwork.com’s Michelle Buffardi on Why Recipes (and Cooking) Won’t Be Obsolete

I can credit Food Network with kickstarting my obsession with food. When I was young I used to stay up and watch Emeril throwing his spices into pots with a “Bam!” and follow the fast-paced cooking challenges on Iron Chef. And of course cook along with all the recipes on FoodNetwork.com.

Back then, Food Network was one of the few players in the online recipe game. Now there’s a lot more competition, including new digital recipe sources like guided cooking apps and smart speakers. That’s why we’re so excited to have Michelle Buffardi, who oversees editorial and programming strategy for culinary content at FoodNetwork.com, Food.com and CookingChannelTV.com, speaking about the future of food media at the 2019 Smart Kitchen Summit next month.

Check out our Q&A with Buffardi below and get your tickets to see her in Seattle. Save 25 percent with code THESPOON25!

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

You oversee culinary content for FoodNetwork.com. What does a day in the life look like?
No two days ever look alike! A day could include brainstorms (those are the best meetings!) or greenlights for things like recipes for video or otherwise, holiday programming since we work several months in advance, new video series or chefs and hosts we want to work with for digital series. I also have many meetings with other teams, such as our product and tech teams, about site enhancements and other projects to make sure the content and tech come together for the best user experience.

When I’m not in meetings, I’m working on editorial calendars or plans for different platforms—my team works on content across our website and apps—researching trends and new talent. When I have time in my day, I stop by our test kitchen for a tasting, which is where our recipe developers present the recipes they’ve made that day for various digital needs and projects. We taste them and give feedback.

Consumers have a plethora of different platforms at their fingertips to discover recipes. How do you entice them to come to FoodNetwork.com?
Our fans come to us for two main reasons: our culinary credibility and our variety of chefs and hosts. We have recipes for anything anyone is looking for developed by the best chefs on the planet, such as chefs from linear shows or exclusive digital projects and chefs from our test kitchen who develop recipes, write how-tos and do product tests for us.

We work hard to make sure we have recipes and content for trends, special diets, every holiday and of course, weeknight dinner recipes specialized to popular appliances (like the InstantPot). No matter what people are looking for, we have it.

In addition to people coming to us from search, our amazing team is great at promoting all of our content on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter), often with original content developed for each platform, and our editors work to share the best content in our weekly and daily newsletters. In short, we ensure that we’re giving our fans access to the best content in all of the places they visit and connect with us.

Two years ago at SKS Tyler Florence made the bold claim that the recipe is dead. What do you think?
I don’t want to disagree with Tyler! However, I don’t think cooking is dead, so I don’t think the recipe is dead. There is a trend, especially as more people gain confidence in the kitchen, of cooking without a recipe. That is winging it with familiar ingredients and methods, or taking a known recipe, like that stir-fry you have memorized, and swapping in different proteins, vegetables, sauces or seasonings.

The bowl and composed-food trends also lend themselves to no-recipe cooking — just layering delicious homemade or store-bought elements like grains, raw or roasted vegetables, sauces and salsa, roasted chicken or a fried egg. Even so, there are new cooks every day who need a recipe to get them going. Plus, even for experienced cooks, whenever we want to make something new or unfamiliar, we need that blueprint.

In short, I say the recipe is not dead; long live the recipe!

How do you think that recipes will continue to adapt to meet shifting consumer demands in the age of digitization and convenience?
This is so interesting and exciting to me. Recipes used to be made for magazines and consumer packaging, so they had to fit a specific format and word count. That’s not the case anymore. The formula is the same — people will always need to have the ingredients, measurements and the cooking method listed — plus a photo is important, too.

However, [I predict that] formats will change: recipes will start to look different depending on the platform they’re intended for, or will be written differently so that they can be read by a voice-enabled device, for example. The ways people consume information and the devices they use are constantly changing which means we’ll keep evolving the ways in which we deliver that information. Including recipes.

Want to see Michelle Buffardi speak about the future of the recipe in the digital age live? Get your tickets to SKS in Seattle on October 7-8th. We’ll see you there!

BuzzFeed Tasty and Walmart Serve Up Shoppable Recipes

If you’ve ever been inspired by one of those seemingly simple, overhead cooking videos produced by BuzzFeed’s Tasty but then were crestfallen because you didn’t have all the ingredients, you’re in luck! Walmart announced today that it is bringing shoppable recipes to the Tasty platform, deepening the relationship between the two companies.

Right now, the shoppable recipes features works with the Tasty iOS app. Once a user finds a recipe they want to make they can view the list of ingredients and tap the “Add items to your grocery bag” button, which redirects them to either the Walmart Grocery app or online store.

The “shoppable” part of the recipes is being powered by Northfork‘s software, which provides a white label platform for grocery retailers. The app maps a user’s location to the nearest Walmart and is tied into that’s store’s inventory to ensure that customers can get all the ingredients necessary. The app even lets users swap out items based on quantity needed or dietary, nutritional or brand preferences. Once purchased, the groceries can be scheduled for delivery or pickup as early as that same day.

Walmart’s relationship with Tasty goes back to December of 2017 when the two entered into an e-commerce agreement to sell the basic cookware and utensils needed to make Tasty dishes. In March of last year, that relationship expanded when the two partnered to sell an exclusive line of Tasty branded cookware. Shoppable recipes seemed like the logical next step in their relationship.

Tasty has been relatively quiet lately; the last we heard from them was in October of 2018 when Cuisinart launched a version of the Tasty OneTop cooktop. Adding to any mystery about what is going on with Tasty is the fact that it was announced last week that Ben Kaufman, who provided BuzzFeed’s quote for the Walmart press announcement, was stepping down from his role as BuzzFeed’s Chief Marketing Officer. As Variety reported at the time: “During [Kaufman’s] tenure at the digital-media company, he helped develop the Tasty line of products for Walmart and the Goodful brand at Macy’s.” Kaufman will now focus on the BuzzFeed Camp retail stores.

Regardless, the shoppable recipe sector continues apace. Samsung bought shoppable recipe site Whisk in March of this year, and just today, Mealthy announced it had equity crowdfunded $1.07 million for its full-stack consumer solution for shoppable recipes, guided cooking and kitchen appliances.

And it looks like Walmart and Tasty will have more announcements to come as today’s shoppable recipe press release says “This feature is the first of many upgrades to the Tasty app that will continue to deepen Tasty’s partnership with Walmart and sweeten the shopping experience for the Tasty audience.”

Shoppable Recipe and Kitchen Appliance Startup Mealthy Hits $1.07M Crowdfunding Cap

Today Austin, TX-based kitchen appliance company Mealthy raised the maximum amount allowed by the SEC for equity crowdfunding: $1.07 million. They raised the funds from 4,440 investors on crowdfunding platform Republic and reached the cap with 61 hours of the campaign remaining.

Founded in 2017, Mealthy is trying to provide a full-stack solution to making cooking simpler. It sells kitchen appliances, such as a Mealthy Multipot electric pressure cooker and Mealthy Crisplid, a standalone lid which turns a variety of pressure cookers into air fryers. The company also has an online tool, available via the Mealthy app or mealthy.com, to help users select Mealthy-created recipes, plan their meal, and shop for ingredients through InstaCart or Amazon Fresh. It also includes step-by-step videos to guide users through the cooking process.

Basically, Mealthy is a shoppable recipe platform that also sells kitchen appliances. It’s not exactly offering anything revolutionary. There are more shoppable recipe sites than you can shake a stick at: Myxx, Whisk, and Fexy Media, just to name a few.

Nonetheless, Mealthy’s fundraise was big enough to make us take note, especially considering the company started out with a crowdfunding target of $25,000.

Mealthy’s expectations-busting fundraise emphasizes that consumer desire for convenience in the kitchen isn’t going anywhere. It’s the same demand that skyrocketed the InstantPot to viral fame — and the InstantPot consumer seems to be exactly who Mealthy is targeting.

Mealthy’s flagship product, the multi-pot, is slightly more expensive than the InstantPot (Mealthy costs $99.95 for a 6-quart pot, whereas InstantPot is roughly $75). However, language on the company’s crowdfunding site indicates that Mealthy’s hook is that it’s easier to use than the InstantPot, and also offers a more robust selection of Mealthy product-compatible recipes.

According to a press release, Mealthy will be sold in over 10 countries by the end of August including the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and India. The company will use its latest cash influx to develop new products and build brand awareness.

When it comes to crowdfunded hardware startups, it’s always a bit of a toss-up whether or not the company actually ends up shipping the product on time — if at all. However, Mealthy already sells and ships its Multipot on Amazon, which means it has a better chance of following through on its projected product timelines than most. Next up, they’re planning to launch a blender, a tea kettle, an air fryer, and will also enter the cookware category with a line of frying pans.