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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Future of Recipes

Cookpad Has 100M Active Monthly Users, Broadens into Original Hardware Design with a Hard/Soft Water Device

Cookpad, the Tokyo-based global recipe hosting site, revealed that it is developing its own hardware design ambitions with a new connected hard and soft water dispensing device called Oicy Water.

Oicy Water, which is still very much in the prototype phase, was unveiled at the Smart Kitchen Summit: Japan today. It works by affixing a bottle of hard water and a bottle of soft water to the top of the machine. Controls on the device as well as an accompanying mobile app allow you to control the hardness of the water you’ll cook with by mixing the contents of the two bottles as it dispenses.

You may know on some level the difference between hard and soft water—hard water contains minerals like calcium and magnesium, and soft water is treated and the only ions in there are sodium. It turns out, however, that whether you use hard or soft water can impact the flavor of what you cook. This is where Cookpad’s device could come in handy.

While it’s still a ways off, Cookpad’s plan is to fine tune recipes on its site with precise hardness controls. Let’s say you are making a pasta, a Cookpad recipe could tell you to boil it in water that is 20 percent hard water. Eventually, that digital recipe will talk with the water device and automatically dispense the exact amount of water with the proper hardness recommended.

The Oicy Water is the first piece of hardware designed internally at Coopad and is part of Cookpad’s larger plan of being at the center of a connected kitchen. Last year it launched its “Oicy” initiative at our Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe. As we wrote at that time:

OiCy (pronounced “oh-ee-shee”, which is a roughly translates to “おいしい,” the Japanese word for delicious), will take recipes uploaded to Cookpad’s site and turns them into a machine-readable format that connected appliances can understand.

So if you were trying to make a particular Cookpad spaghetti recipe, OiCy would pull data from the recipe, and “talk” to different connected appliances you might have in your kitchen and guide you each step of the way. Depending on the number and type of appliances you’d have, it would automatically boil your water, tell you when to add/remove pasta, dispense seasonings, etc..

This is actually the second hardware device that Cookpad has been associated with, the first being the Oicy Taste, which is a connected seasoning dispenser (it’s design didn’t originate at Cookpad). It’s easy to see how both of these devices play into the overall ecosystem Cookpad wants to create. By having a Cookpad recipe “talk” with appliances, users can automate the process of portioning out the right water, at the right hardness level and amount and type of seasoning — allowing them to focus more on the actual act of cooking.

This communication with devices doesn’t just help the end user to cook; it can also help Cookpad fine tune its recipes. As connected machines dispense precise amounts of ingredients, they will report back to Cookpad how much of an ingredient is dispensed. So if enough users don’t like the result of a particular recipe, Cookpad can track the aberrations in the amounts of various ingredients used.

In order to be truly useful, Cookpad will need to collect a lot of data from users on how they like or dislike recipes. But amassing a data set that big is something the company is already well on its way to creating. Cookpad says it has roughly 100 million active monthly users across 72 countries and 29 languages. Further, Cookpad has two million users paying $3 a month to access premium features. That’s a revenue run rate of $72 million a year.

Cookpad wanting to design a hardware system from the ground up makes sense, as they can tailor a device to their software. The harder question to answer, at least for the Oicy Water in the U.S., will be how many people actually care about the hardness of their water enough to buy bottles of soft water?

This article has been updated to say “roughly 100 million active subscribers,” and earlier version said “more than.”

Blue Apron Ends Its Jet.com Partnership to Focus on Its ‘Core’ Business

Meal kit company Blue Apron announced this week it is terminating its partnership with e-commerce site Jet.com.

On its August 6 Q2 2019 earnings call, Blue Apron CEO Linda Findley Kozlowski said the company needed to focus on its core business, which is its direct-to-consumer sales of meal kits.

“We have not kept up with the ever evolving needs and preferences of our customers over the past couple of years, and we are behind it,” Kozlowski said on the call, adding that part of the reason for that is because the company “redirected attention of way from innovating in our core offering as we tested alternative distribution channels for the past year and a half.”

Blue Apron made its meal kits available for delivery via the Walmart subsidiary Jet.com in 2018 in NYC. At the time, the company appeared to be looking for ways to revitalize its struggling business through third-party sales channels (the company sold meal kits for a time at Costco stores, too).

But based on this week’s call, that move appears to have been a distraction, and Blue Apron seems to believe stepping away from these third-party sales channels and tapping “unrealized opportunities” within its core business model is the place to invest time and resources at the moment.

To that end Kozlowski outlined a new strategy on the call for the company’s future that includes focusing on fresh food, offering more convenience and flexibility in terms of menu options, making Blue Apron’s various digital touchpoints easier to use, and increasing marketing efforts.

But even if Blue Apron is able to pull its subscription-model business back on track, the company’s long-term viability is still uncertain. Right now, meal kits only account for 21.9 percent of online grocery services used in 2019. NPD recently reported that 93 million adults in the U.S. want to try a meal kit, but the same research also highlighted a shift away from traditional dinner-only mail-order meal kits towards ones that can be found in retail stores and/or cater to other eating times, such as lunch and snacks.

Some meal kit companies have already responded to these trends: Kroger and Home Chef started piloting new meal offerings like “heat and eat” and lunch options, which they sell in Kroger stores. Sun Basket, too, expanded its options to include breakfast, lunch, and snacks, though the company remains a direct-to-consumer subscription service like Blue Apron.

Meanwhile, Blue Apron itself has always had an issue with customer churn, partly because its kits tend to be expensive and time consuming, even for people who love to cook. That means what the company winds up offering customers in terms of more flexibility and convenience in the future will surely give an idea of how successful the company’s renewed focus on its core business will be.

Deliveroo Launches Procurement Platform to Supply Restaurants With Discount Ingredients

Deliveroo this week launched Food Procurement, a platform on which the third-party delivery service’s partner restaurants can purchase ingredients and supplies at discounted prices. It’s part of what appears to be the company’s aim to become a one-stop-shop for restaurants, where Deliveroo would provide not just drivers to shuttle food orders to customers, but also vital pieces of restaurants’ infrastructure, from internet to real estate to equipment.

With the Food Procurement platform, Deliveroo buys ingredients on behalf of the restaurants, leveraging its scale and purchasing power to negotiate better deals with suppliers. Deliveroo then negotiates its own contracts with the restaurants, who get a better rate on ingredients and items like cleaning supplies and packaging products.

As Ajay Lakhwani, VP of new business at Deliveroo, said in a statement, “By using our size and scale to negotiate great prices we can both simplify the procurement process and help independents and chains can make big savings.” Deliveroo has been piloting the platform for the last year and says it can save restaurants up to 20 percent of their total ingredients bill.

While partner restaurants are not obligated to sign up for the Food Procurement platform, several hundred already have.

Amid Brexit concerns, food prices in the UK are soaring currently, which makes Deliveroo’s platform an attractive prospect, especially for mom-and-pop restaurants with tighter margins who don’t have the purchasing power to sway suppliers into cheaper ingredient prices.

The platform also underscores Deliveroo’s aforementioned aim to be more than just a delivery partner to restaurants. The company has struck numerous partnerships with third parties to offer discounts to restaurants on everything from print services and energy costs to wifi and waste management.

While those perks will inevitably save restaurants on costs, they also shift more power into the hands of Deliveroo. Such a shift definitely has its ups and downs for both sides. It’s also probably something we’ll see more of in future. As I wrote in March, when rumors of Uber-operated ghost kitchens surfaced, “it’s not hard to imagine a third-party delivery service taking over more of the operations up and down the operational stack.”

The launch of Deliveroo’s procurement platform comes right on the heels of news that that the service’s recent investment from Amazon is now being scrutinized by the UK government’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The Food Procurement platform doesn’t appear to be affected by this scrutiny at the moment.

Sun Basket’s Menu Expansion Suggests Dinner-Only Meal Kits Are a Thing of the Past

Sun Basket, the subscription-based meal kit service that specializes in clean, organic ingredients users cook at home, announced today it is expanding beyond the traditional dinner lineup and will offer other meals.

The expansion comes on the heels of the San Francisco-based company’s $30 million Series E fund in May of 2019. At the time of that announcement, Sun Basket said the funding would in part go towards including breakfast, lunch, and snack options as part of users’ weekly menu choices.

In keeping with the company’s health-focused offerings, breakfast and lunch kits offer recipes and ingredients for granolas, salads, noodle bowls, and gluten-free snacks. Breakfast and lunch items will fall under the normal pricing plan, which offers 18 meals per week for two or four people, or six family recipes per week.

While expanding to include granola butter or superfood cereal might seem like a small move, it’s a hugely important one right now for meal kit companies. An NPD survey from earlier this year found that 93 million U.S. adults haven’t yet tried a meal kit but want to. The same study noted that users and would-be users are looking for more than just dinner in a meal kit.

Several parties have already responded to that desire with expanded choice for customers. The Purple Carrot, who is probably Sun Basket’s most direct competitor in terms of food types, also offers breakfast and lunch options. Kroger and Home Chef, meanwhile, are piloting a new range of kits tailored to meet different lifestyle needs, among them a lunch-specific kit that features grain bowls, sandwiches, and salads that can be quickly thrown together.

As the meal kit sector continues to find footing after a long period of struggle, diversifying their offerings to appeal to a wider range of consumer appetites appears to be what companies need to do in order to survive.

How Epicured Uses Meal Kit Delivery to Make Food-as-Medicine More Accessible

Until very recently, a physician was more likely to reach for the prescription pad than a cookbook when treating a patient illness. But with the food-as-medicine movement finally starting to take hold in the U.S., and as stories of preventing cancer and reversing diabetes with food continue surfacing, parts of the healthcare and culinary sectors are finally starting to come together to not just treat illness but in many cases hopefully prevent it altogether.

Of the many, many areas in medicine, gastrointestinal (GI) disorders are especially full of potential for food-as-medicine treatment. Not only are these disorders widespread (an estimated 60–70 million Americans have one), they’re also directly tied to the digestive system, and therefore inherently connected to the food we eat.

All of this information served as Richard Bennett’s inspiration when he started Epicured in 2015 with cofounder Renee Cherkezian. The company caters its meal kit service specifically to people with GI disorders who are in need of gluten free and/or low-FODMAP diets, both of which are unwieldy diets to tackle if you’re not a nutritionist.

For example, a low-FODMAP diet permits raspberries but not blackberries. Quinoa is permitted, but wheat is to be avoided. Espresso is fine, chamomile tea, not so much. It doesn’t exactly make planning your next meal easy, or as Bennett says, “You can’t just walk through the grocery store aisle and know what you can buy.”

And even if you could, it’s probably not going to taste that great, at least not without a lot of practice and therefore a lot of time.

That’s where Epicured comes in. The service takes the guesswork out of gluten free and low-FODMAP diets by offering prepared meals for sale via a subscription service. Bennett told me all meals get vetted and reviewed by a dietitians to ensure they comply with low-FODMAP standards and are also 100 percent gluten free. He says Epicured currently addresses Crohn’s disease, IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), colitis, celiac disease, and non-celiac gluten sensitivity.

As a service, it’s straightforward process for users. Upon signing up, they choose their meals for the week from a rotating menu. (Note: Epicured’s FAQ page makes it clear the service is not substitution for physician advice.) All meals are pre-prepared, so users need only heat them when they arrive. While individual meal prices vary, the average works out to about $15 per dish.

In that sense, Bennett, who has a background in healthcare, considers Epicured less of a food company and more of a way to extend care from the doctor’s office into the home by delivering meals that both meet dietary requirements for these GI disorders and still taste good. “I didn’t wake up and want to deliver a food or meal delivery company,” he told me. “I wanted to develop a health company that could bring the best of the culinary world and the best of the healthcare world [together].”

A key piece of what makes this work is that meals are conceptualized by Michelin-star chefs — that is, people who will know how to make food taste good even under restrictions as stringent as a gluten-free or low-FODMAP diet. “Chefs understand the impact of ingredients on the human system,” says Bennett, adding that the truly great chefs know how to create restaurant-quality food that needs to also be medicinal.

So far Epicured has enjoyed a positive reception. The service has investments from major medical centers like Mount Sinai, and Bennett told me the company is launching its first-ever clinical study with a major partner (he can’t say who yet).

Epicured has had suitors outside the healthcare realm, too. Amazon approached the company a while back to feature their prepared meals in its Amazon Go stores.

The Amazon partnership could give Epicured a major boost in terms of visibility in a meal-kit-as-medicine market that’s starting to become more populated, with the likes of BistroMD, BeWellEats, and Phood Farmacy all bringing versions of the meal kit to market.

Bennett couldn’t say whether this partnership will head to other Amazon Go locations in future, just that, his company hopes “to be aligned with their growth” and that Epicured can “deepen the partnership.”

In the meantime, Epicured will continue serving the Northeastern U.S. and focusing on the importance of marrying the idea of medicinal meals with food you’d actually want to sit down and eat.

Chef Meal Kits Brings the Virtual Kitchen Concept and Restaurant-Branded Meal Kits Together

Despite the amount of text we dedicate to documenting its struggles, there’s still opportunity to be had in the meal kit sector. Grocery stores are selling kits in their aisles, others are integrating them with shoppable recipes, and, in a trend that picked up steam last year thanks to Chick-fil-A, restaurants are starting to sell their own branded kits via mail order.

As far as Chef Meal Kits founder Meg Ginimay is concerned, the restaurant meal kit category is a hugely promising one, especially when you combine it with the concept of a virtual kitchen and offer it to restaurants at a low cost.

Chef Meal Kits operates as a marketplace for restaurants wanting to sell meal kit versions of their popular in-house dishes to customers. Currently the service operates in eight U.S. states: California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho.

The website currently offers 220 kits for purchase. Customers can filter by things like protein type, diet requirement, or a specific city. You can also, of course, filter by the restaurant itself so long as it’s participating. Most dishes are portioned for between two and four servings. Price varies based on the restaurant, plus shipping costs. Depending on the kit you choose, the price is typically higher than, say, something from HelloFresh. But as Ginimav points out, the goal is to connect customers with “a premium service that [offers] better quality ingredients” and is in some way an extension of the restaurant experience itself.

Unlike many traditional meal kit companies, Chef Meal Kits doesn’t require a subscription to use. Once ordered, Chefs Meal Kit portions out and packs up the ingredients and sends them out, and they arrive at the customer’s door one to two days later. Ginimav says the company is also considering FedEx Air once it has the volume to justify that.

For restaurants, participating in Chef Meal Kits could potentially make extra money and grow a brand without incurring unmanageably high costs in terms of both time and money.

Right now, Chef Meal Kit works with independent restaurants and/or food entrepreneurs. The company connects each restaurant with a consulting chef who helps them choose recipes from their menu (between four and eight), typically, and convert them into a meal kit recipe. From there, Chef Meal Kit takes photos of each dish, creates a restaurant-branded “storefront” on its website, and manages the portioning, packing, and shipping of orders each week. According to Ginimav, the company currently has 300 restaurants signed up to participate on the platform. Around 30 of those are active on the Chef Meal Kit marketplace; the company is in the process of onboarding the others as we speak. And as for larger chain restaurants, Ginimav says they will look into including Cheesecake Factory-level brands “down the line.”

Down the line also includes goals ramping up the virtual kitchen aspect of the operation. Right now, Chef Meal Kit handles all the work in terms of preparing the ingredients for shipment, which it does from its virtual kitchen in San Diego. In future, Ginimav wants to be able to offer restaurants the option to manage this process themselves (and save money doing so) by bringing their own staff to a Chef Meal Kit virtual kitchen. This “self-fulfillment” concept would also work for food entrepreneurs just starting out who perhaps want to test a brand without incurring the risks and costs of doing business with brick and mortar.

“No longer are the days where you have to spend $200,000 to $300,000 minimum to set up a restaurant,” he said, adding that virtual kitchens can be a “very low-cost launchpad for your brand.” He also points out that this future scenario will still be meal kit focused, and that the virtual kitchen spaces will exist for picking and portioning ingredients, not doing any of the actual cooking. The meal kit, Ginimav explains, is its own important arm of the restaurant experience: “Now you have a third option, which is you can cook at home with our meal kit. We’re just trying to be that third option. We’re not trying to replace the others.”

Beyond Meat and Fresh n’ Lean Team Up to Do Meal Delivery

Right on the heels of its much-publicized IPO, Beyond Meat has announced a new retail partnership. Meal delivery service Fresh n’ Lean has announced the addition of Beyond Meat to its online menu, providing yet-another retail path for the alt-protein giant to tread.

Fresh n’ Lean specializes in healthy meals it preps and delivers to your door, sort of like a meal kit without all the work. Customers subscribe to a weekly meal plan to get ready-made meals that just need to be popped in the oven or microwave to complete. The menu, which rotates weekly, offers several different plans, from Keto to low carb to its Performance line, for which it’s partnered with several high-profile athletes. Customers can also order items a la carte.

Beyond Meat patties will be available via the service in bulk or as part of a plant-based version of the aforementioned performance line. It appears Fresh n’ Lean is betting hard on the popularity of Beyond on its menu, with company CEO Thomas Asseo saying in a press release that the company will sell 100,000 Beyond Meat patties in 2019. Good thing Beyond fixed its product shortage issue that was hampering supply and demand a little while back.

Fresh n’ Lean isn’t the first meal kit-like company Beyond has worked with. In April, Beyond announced a partnership with meal-delivery service Trifecta, who also emphasizes health and fitness in its menus.

With the plant-based meat sector poised to explode this year, alt-meat products from major players like Beyond and Impossible are becoming a common option these days on menus and in grocery store aisles. Impossible, who was just valued at $2 billion, has invaded the quick-service restaurant space and is now available at White Castle, Red Robin, Qdoba and, soon, Burger King.

Beyond, too, is in QSRs, including Carl’s Jr. and Del Taco. It’s also maintained a significant retail presence over the last couple years, with products in grocery stores like Whole Foods and Publix. While direct-to-consumer meal delivery is a relatively new area for plant-based proteins, I expect we’ll see both Beyond and Impossible making their way online to more services’ menus throughout the rest of the year.

Fresh n’ Lean’s plant-based Performance meals will launch in summer 2019.

Kroger and HomeChef Are Piloting New Meal Kits to Meet Different Lifestyle Needs

Yesterday, Kroger and Home Chef announced a pilot program that will add options to their existing meal kit line, which are sold in Kroger stores around the U.S. According to a press release, the new pilot will be tested in 68 Kroger stores.

The new meals offerings target different people’s cooking and eating needs based on their lifestyles. This is an important factor in the evolution of meal kits, since one of the concerns around meal kits is the amount of time it takes to prepare a recipe, even when ingredients were pre-portioned.

As such, Home Chef’s new meal offerings fall into three different categories:

Oven-Ready: Home Chef Oven-Ready meals come in oven-safe packaging and require less than five minutes of prep time. Meals are designed for two people and start at $8.50 per serving. Given that you don’t have to use pots or pans to cook the food, this one seems perfect for those who just want to heat some food in the oven and chow down.

Heat and Eat: The Home Chef Heat and Eat line is kind of like Oven-Ready, except that items can be heated in a microwave, too. More interesting about this line is the mix and match option: customers can buy full meals, just the proteins, or a bunch of sides. So if you’re a master of making side dishes but laughably bad at cooking meat (like I am), you can pick and choose what to cook and what to just heat based on your level of culinary skill. Kits go for $6.50 per serving.

Lunch Kits: Who doesn’t love a grain bowl? Home Chef’s new Lunch Kits offering has plenty of those, along with salads, sandwiches, tacos, all with fully cooked proteins. You just have to toss the items together, which can be done at home quickly or even at work. At $6.00 per serving, this is quite a bit cheaper than buying a big salad or grain bowl from a lot of fast-casual places, especially in bigger cities, where said offerings can go as high as $15.

Kroger purchased Home Chef a little less than one year ago and started rolling out the latter’s meal kits to stores at the end of 2018.

However, focusing on retail isn’t a guarantee for the meal kit category. Albertsons bought meal kit company Plated in 2017 but just recently laid off 10 percent of its staff to cut back on expenses, though, as my colleague Chris Albrecht pointed out when he reported the news, it’s hard to imagine Albertsons giving up on meal kits altogether.

Rather, future growth from meal kits could come from providing new categories of meals and snacks. A recent study by NPD found that 93 million adults in the U.S. want to try meal kits and, more importantly, that meal kits can be more than just dinner. The new Home Chef offerings seem to be in line with this argument, particularly Heat and Eat’s mix-and-match options and the Lunch Kits offering. All of which is to say the savior of the meal kit might just be more meals, tailored towards different times of day and a wider variety of needs.

The new meal “solutions,” as Home Chef calls them, will be available at Kroger locations (including subsidiary stores) first in Illinois and Ohio starting in May. In the press release, Kroger said it plans to expand to additional markets over the rest of 2019.

Jumprope Raises $4.5M for Guided Cooking through GIFS

As a teen I was briefly obsessed with making a very complicated, cream puff-heavy pastry called a croquembouche. I tried to make it using text-heavy cookbooks and bad internet photos, but to no avail.

Maybe if guided cooking service Jumprope had been around I would have fared better. The startup creates how-to slideshow videos showing you how to do everything from makeup looks to crafting to cooking. It already has a mobile site and just launched its iOS app yesterday — at the same time it announced a $4.5 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (h/t Techcrunch).

Jumprope is pretty similar to most guided cooking apps. You can search for and select a recipe, after which you can see a visual ingredient list and click through the various recipe steps, each of which has a gif for reference.

Guided cooking has been gaining momentum over the past few years. There’s Innit and SideChef, Allrecipes, Yummly, and Project Foodie, to name a few. Companies like Amazon and Google are also making smart displays to bring guided cooking (and their smart speakers/devices) into the kitchen.

In fact, Jumprope, which was founded in 2017, is kind of late to the game (though admittedly they’re offering how-to’s for a lot more than cooking). But what could set Jumprope apart is its UX, which reminded me a lot of cooking how-to videos on Instagram from companies like Buzzfeed Tasty or Bon Appetit. Each how-to bit is illustrated with a short gif on a loop. It’s also super low-touch: no fancy paired induction cooktop or pan required — just a smartphone.

Youtube tutorials get billions of views teaching people how to do, well, everything. Jumprope is streamlining that process and chopping it up into little bite-sized gifs, so you can easily fast forward or rewind, even with greasy fingers. It also gets all its content from users, meaning it’s likely cheap to produce and easy to get a ton — though the quality of said content won’t necessarily be great.

I could see Jumprope integrating with an e-commerce service like Instacart or Amazon Fresh to make their recipes shoppable. That would mean users could decide to make meatballs, order all the ingredients for delivery that day (cause millennials love convenience), then cook them, all from one app.

It’s too soon to tell if Jumprope will be able to compete in the how-to cooking space with giants like Instagram or more established startups like SideChef and Innit. But I’m betting it will be a hit with millennials and especially Gen Z who are friendly with other gif-ified networks like Snapchat.

Here’s hoping they add a how-to gif guide for croquembouche…

Target (Finally) Enters the Shoppable Recipe Game with Cooklist

Yesterday Target announced that it was kicking off a partnership with shoppable recipe startup Cooklist (h/t Dallas News). The retail giant will launch the new service first in 47 Dallas-Fort Worth stores and Target’s delivery service Shipt.

The Dallas-based Cooklist is a mobile app that lets people search from the million-plus recipes in its database, select their favorite, then compare prices and order the ingredients for either pickup or same-day delivery from nearby participating grocery stores. The app also keeps track of what groceries you have in your house and helps remind you when food is about to expire.

As of now the app can generate shopping lists of goods from 81 national grocery chains, but only offers grocery delivery through Target.

Cooklist’s partnership with Target isn’t exactly surprising. Last July the startup announced that it had raised a $250,000 “pre-seed” round, half of which came from the Techstars Retail Accelerator in Minneapolis. As part of the membership, Cooklist got office space at the Target HQ.

This is Target’s second shoppable recipe partnership announcement in as many days. Earlier today, guided cooking platform Innit revealed new shoppable recipe capabilities that basically let users create their own individualized meal kits(ish) and pick them up or order them for delivery from more than 30 retailers, including Target.

However, “Tarjay” has some catching up to do: Walmart and Albertsons/Safeway have been working with shoppable recipe platform Myxx for months, and Amazon Fresh has a whole bevvy of shoppable recipe partnerships with Fexy Media, Whisk, and SideChef.

It’s no secret that grocery competition is heating up, with retailers big and small trying to find ways to get you your goods list faster, cheaper, and more conveniently. Compared to some of its competitors, Target’s recent dive into the deep end of shoppable recipes is definitely on the later side — but I don’t think that’s a dealbreaker. The entire space is pretty young with lots of room for growth. With two partnerships in two days, Target shows that it’s taking shoppable recipes seriously.

Quenched Combines Mixology Skills With Smart Technology for Its At-home Bartending Kit

This week, Norwegian company, Quenched, launched a crowdfunding campaign for its smart-cocktail kit. Dubbed Q-Kit, the all-in-one cocktail set combines physical bartending tools with software, making it easier for at-home mixologists to create the kinds of drinks bars charge $17 for.

There are many at-home bar kits on the market right now, from Keurig’s countertop machine, which is basically cocktail mixes in pods, to Barsy’s automated cocktail maker, which lets you press a button to get a cocktail. And we’d be remiss not to mention on-demand-cocktail maker Bartesian, which start shipping next month.

But mixology is one of those things where you don’t necessarily want tech to take care of the whole job because understanding what “shaken not stirred” actually means and knowing how to pair different ingredients together can be, well, just, pun totally intended, good Old Fashioned fun.

As of now, though, there aren’t a lot of professional-grade cocktail kits out there that also give you access to easy-to-use recipes. Providing that was the driving motivation for founder Kai Myhre when he got the idea for Quenched back in 2017. On a business trip to Spain at the time, he ordered, according to a video on the Indiegogo page, “the most wonderful mojito I had ever tasted”

But recreating that proved a challenge: “Searching online for tools, all I could find were insufficient tool kits with tiny ice containers, and when searching for online recipes I often found them inaccurate [and] difficult to understand and follow.” Myhre decided to do something about that, by combining proper bartending tools with ample recipes and instructions, and bundling them together in one package.

The resulting Q-Kit, which launched on Tuesday and is currently available to back via Indiegogo, comes with all the tools a professional bartender would use, from a three-piece shaker to a julep strainer to a muddler (read the full tool list here). The tools come in a box that doubles as an ice-chest, and also makes the kit portable.

One the software side of things, users get access to the Q-Kit app upon purchase of a kit, and includes pictures, ingredient lists, and step-by-step videos on how to mix drinks properly:

The crowdfunding effort may have launched just a few days ago, but Quenched as already exceeded its $15,000 goal, which just goes to show you how many folks dream of becoming at-home mixologists. There’s still a month left to back the project, and those who do will get their Q-Kits for $245 as opposed to the $395 they’ll retail for once they hit shelves. Kits are expected to ship in September 2019.

SimplyCook Closes Series A Round for Its Flavor-Focused Meal Kit Service

London-based meal kit company SimplyCook just closed a 4.5 million Series A funding round, led by Octopus Investments (via TechCrunch).

Rather than ship full meal kits a la Blue Apron or HelloFresh, SimplyCook focuses on the extras involved with making a meal: herbs, spices, and sauces. Each “kit” is shipped with recipe cards and whatever flavorings the meals call for.

It’s yet another example of what the meal kit could be, and joins others that cater to mealtime extras: coffee, baked goods, and booze are also popular.

But don’t think SimplyCook simply ships powdered flavorings you could just as easily scoop out of a jar yourself. The company says it creates its own flavor blends of different ingredients that take the form of pastes, oils, rubs, and stocks, in addition to dried herbs and spices. Flavorings are pre-portioned, as well. Customers need only add the whole food ingredients called for on the recipe card. The company also sells its kits in-store at retail outlets in the UK.

There are some folks who can glance at a shelf full of spices and create an amazing meal with them on the fly. Most of us can’t, and so a subscription service that exposes customers to more flavor combinations and tastes could appeal to a pretty wide swath of people. Because there are no proteins or produce shipped in the kits, the monthly price is a lot cheaper than, say, HelloFresh or The Purple Carrot. That in turn translates to less risk in the consumer’s mind about spending money on a meal kit service that may or may not line up with their tastes. And since SimplyCook ships non-perishable items, there’s less risk for both the company and the consumer: the former doesn’t have to worry about food spoiling in transit; the customer doesn’t feel pressure to immediately make the dish the day it arrives.

Stateside, there are many SimplyCook-like options. RawSpiceBar, based out of the Bay Area, is $8/month for three fresh-made spices and corresponding recipes. You can build your own spice kit based on your dietary needs and/or preferences, and from there get even more granular in terms of what you want in a recipe, be it casserole dishes, grilled items, or, of course, raw foods.

Spice Madam is more expensive, at $20/month. Each month’s box contains spices and recipes from a different region, plus cultural info about that part of the world and a music playlist. Plus, 5 percent of each box goes to charity.

SpiceBreeze also focuses on different regions of the world, including flavors for between two and four different areas in one box. The only downside to this one is that you get just two dishes per month.

As for SimplyCook, it’s only available in the UK right now, though this new funding round will, the company expects, “fuel international launches.”