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Future of Recipes

October 8, 2018

SKS 2018: 4 Ways Cooking in the Future Will Be Different

Yes, you’ll still have a kitchen in 10 years, but it won’t look the same. At the Smart Kitchen Summit, Jon Jenkins, Director of Engineering at Hestan Smart Cooking, and author Dana Cowin chatted with The Spoon’s Mike Wolf about ways in which our relationship to cooking and the kitchen is changing and what the heart of the home will look like in the future.

1. Our relationship to kitchen tech will be emotional.
“If you have a kitchen, you’re using technology,” Jenkins explained onstage, adding that the difference between now and the near future is your relationship to that technology. He noted that making food surfaces an emotional response for the cook, one that technology needs to be able to replicate. “If I hit a button, am I getting any joy from that at all?” Jenkins asked. “We need to be creating something better than just hitting a button.”

2. The screen is key to future kitchens.
Jenkins also noted the importance of screens in the kitchen, particularly for younger generations, who’ve grown up with iPads and video-enabled learning. “I think this notion of showing people how to do something is really important,” he said. Underscore that word “show” — although voice-enabled cooking tools do exist, the panelists generally agreed that visual help is more effective for, say, learning how to peel an apple.

3. Cooking will be a lifestyle, not an action.
Meanwhile, Cowin, who’s the former editor of Food & Wine, noted that despite the thousands of recipes the magazine has published over the years, many of its readers have never actually used them to cook. Rather, they just enjoyed the lifestyle around being a food enthusiast. “People compose rather than cook,” she said onstage.

4. Technology needs to address the entire food ecosystem.
Cowin also noted that foodtech should cater to more than just the food enthusiasts and people with substantial disposable income. How, for example, will the kitchen serve people of lesser means in the future? How will it help make the food system more sustainable? How will it affect workers? These and other “moral” questions will be ones appliance makers and other foodtech companies will need to address in future.

Check back for more posts throughout the day, and follow along for a steady stream of updates on our Twitter and Instagram feeds.

September 24, 2018

Suggestic Brings Personalized Nutrition to Your Fingertips

As we all know, it’s easy to decide to eat healthier — but sticking to your diet plan can be very tricky indeed. That’s where, Suggestic, one of the 13 companies pitching at the Startup Showcase for the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) this October, comes in. The young company is leveraging technology to help users outline individualized meal plans, then connects them with recipes, grocery stores, and restaurants to help them stick to it.

Read our Q&A with co-founder Shai Rozen to learn a little more about how Suggestic hopes to make the world healthier through personalization, augmented reality, and some serious focus. Then get your tickets to see him pitch live at SKS!

The Spoon: First thing’s first: give us your 15-second elevator pitch.
Rozen: Our goal at Suggestic is to guide consumers through personalized nutrition journeys towards their individual health goals.

With our unique service, users can forget about reading, counting and memorizing to figure out what is best to eat. They don’t need to sort through the huge amount of misinformation about what foods are “healthy” for them. We provide each person with the ease of mind that they are doing the right thing at all times, delivered conveniently at their fingertips.

Our App is backed by powerful and proprietary AI, which delivers precise recommendations of what to order at a restaurant, what to buy at a grocery store and what to cook at home, and then tracks user progress to adjust each suggestion.

Users can select a free dietary filter, or subscribe to one of our premium programs curated by renowned health and nutrition experts.

What inspired you to start Suggestic?
My co-founder and I have both seen firsthand the devastating effects improper nutrition can have, but we’ve also seen the power of food as a means of health. We both saw our fathers pass away from type 2 diabetes-related complications and we both managed to revert our own pre-diabetes through nutrition.

Our mission is to help shift healthcare from treatment of symptoms to primordial prevention through “precision eating.”

And we don’t just want people to be “healthy”. We want each individual’s health optimized rather than just reduced to an asymptomatic average.

What’s the most challenging part of getting a food tech startup off the ground?
The possibilities! There’s so much that can and needs to be done in the world of food tech that honestly the hardest part is deciding where to invest our efforts, and how to keep focused on what matters most.

Also, when you have a mission that’s also social and positive in nature, it’s pretty amazing how many people just want to help. It’s truly inspiring. But it can easily be a distraction as well, so focus is key.

How will Suggestic change the day-to-day life of its users?
We already do, everyday. By helping our users make the best possible food choices at any moment in time we have a direct impact on their health and wellbeing.

Q: What’s next for Suggestic?
The future looks great. We have scheduled over a dozen new premium program launches with our partner authors and experts for 2019, and also have new integrations coming up with lab tests that will allow our users to further optimize their individual health journeys. And we are also working on an Android version, as well as possible a stand-alone app for our Suggestic Lens (augmented reality) experience.

Thanks, Shai! Get your tickets to SKS to hear him pitch alongside 12 emerging food tech companies at our Startup Showcase this October in Seattle.

September 6, 2018

The Look Cook Book is Like the Airplane Safety Card of Recipes

I have this thing where I always read the safety card on airplanes. Hopefully I’ll never have to open the emergency door, but at least I won’t forget how, thanks to the clear design and wordless instruction.

The airplane safety card is actually a good way to think of the Look Cook Book, which recently launched a Kickstarter campaign. The Look Cook Book uses high design and “culturally neutral” iconography to create “universally readable” recipes almost without words that is easily readable from one to two meters away.

Recipes include “Fancy Scrambled Eggs,” “Red Lentil Dahl,” and “Apple Cinnamon and Nutmeg Crumble.” According to the campaign info, each recipe has been created so they can be made for $1.50 per portion. You can preview a PDF of the book here.

The book is also being turned into an interactive cookbook app that you can swipe through and will even include built-in tappable timers.

The campaign, which launched on September 4, is looking to raise $5,487. A pledge of £12 (~$16 USD) gets you a paperback version of the book, while a pledge of £15 (~$20) gets you the paperback and digital versions of the Look Cook Book.

With 55 days left in its campaign, we’ll just have to wait and see if the Look Cook Book will takeoff.

August 31, 2018

LG to Integrate Drop into its Smart Appliances

Drop, the smart recipe software startup, today announced a partnership that will put its guided cooking software on LG’s SmartThinq line of appliances. This adds to a growing list of major appliance companies that are working with Drop and further illustrates how LG is taking a very open approach when it comes to software partnerships.

Drop’s software provides guided recipes for cooks, and hardware integreations such as the one with LG allows the user to control appliances via the Drop app. Drop CEO, Ben Harris, told me by phone that the Drop app recently hit half a million downloads and that customers can expect to see the Drop integration start with LG ovens and cooktops go live in the next few weeks.

Drop started off as a hardware maker with its connected scale, but pivoted to creating a “Kitchen OS,” with a heavy focus on recipes, for other appliance companies. The company has also been the subject of a multiyear patent infringement lawsuit brought by Perfect Company.

For Drop, the LG deal bolsters its lineup of existing hardware partnerships, which includes Bosch, GE, De’Longhi and Kenwood (not the car stereo maker).

There are plenty of startups vying to be the main software layer that cooks interact with in the connected kitchen, and they are all going for the same hardware partnerships. Rivals SideChef and Innit both announced integrations with LG appliances at CES earlier this year.

For it’s part, LG is showing that it’s open to being, well, open to all comers in the connected kitchen software space. In addition to SideChef and Innit, LG’s SmartThinq appliances work with both Amazon Alexa and Google.

Based in Ireland and San Francisco, Drop has raised $12 million in funding and has 30 employees.

August 6, 2018

Dana Cowin Thinks Technology Will Make Us Cook More, Not Less

Dana Cowin needs no introduction. But we’ll give you a quick one anyway:

Best known for her 21-year stint as Editor in Chief of Food & Wine Magazine, Dana Cowin has since branched out to become a food consultant, author, lecturer, and all-around food media expert. She currently hosts the Heritage Radio Network show Speaking Broadly, and is the Chief Creative Officer at farm-sourced restaurant chain Dig Inn.

We’re thrilled to have her at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) in Seattle this October, speaking about how technology is shaping the future of recipes, home cooking, and food media. To get you excited, we asked Cowin a few questions about delivery, automation, and her last meal on earth.

Read the full Q&A below.

Q: With online platforms, voice assistants, and guided cooking tools, there are more ways to find and catalog recipes than ever before. How have you seen this change the way that people cook?
A: There’s an ongoing evolution in the way people cook; online platforms, voice assistants, and guided cooking tools all play a role. The move is toward simplicity, convenience, personalization, and speed — whatever makes your busy life easier. So in as far as technology can help you achieve those goals, in a right-for-you way, I think that tech is a wholesome enabler.

Q: Do you think that food delivery, meal kits, and, looking even further, automation will completely replace home cooking?
A: I don’t foresee a time when home cooking will disappear completely. That said, because there are so many options for how to get meals (from delivery to meal kits to automation), cooking in the future will become the province of the passionate. It will be a lifestyle choice, a leisure activity like camping that brings friends and family together. Cooking will less frequently be a quotidian chore to provide sustenance.

Q: What’s the most exciting way you see technology transforming the way we discover, cook, or talk about food?
A: Technology enables us to go far or near, narrow or wide and shallow or deep in terms of our information, choices, and inspiration. It brings the entire world closer. I love tripping into a video of some arcane, authentic way to make a soup dumpling, seeing images of the foods of far-off Belarus or just discovering a recipe that a neighbor has tried with hyper-local ingredients. Tech makes me more knowledgeable, more adventurous, more confident, and less fearful.

Q: What’s your last meal on earth?
A: Crispy fried chicken, fluffy biscuits with strawberry butter, pickled spicy okra, mint iced tea, peach cobbler, vanilla ice cream.

Thanks, Dana! If you want to see her speak more about how technology will influence the future of cooking, recipes, and food media, snag your tickets to the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th in Seattle.

July 30, 2018

Halla Launches AI-Powered B2B Food Recommendation Platform

Let’s say you’ve bought a chicken sandwich. Based just on that purchase, what do you think is a better recommendation for another meal you might enjoy: chicken piccata, or a hamburger?

This is a typical type of problem that LA-based startup, Halla, is trying to solve with its new artificial intelligence (AI) powered recommendation platform. The new Halla I/O (which stands for “Intelligent Ordering”) software integrates with a restaurant or grocer’s existing website or app, so it’s invisible to the end user. People buying groceries or meals through those apps would continue to do so, but would receive recommendations through Halla’s algorithm.

Halla I/O does this, according to Co-Founder and CEO Spencer Price, by combining data and psychographics around how people think and interact with food. Let’s go back to the chicken sandwich example. According to Price, a traditional data science approach would recommend chicken piccata, because it’s, well, chicken.

But, “The human experience of eating food is different,” Price said. He went on to describe how the chicken sandwich is also meat-centered, covered on both sides with bread and eaten by hand. And when you think of it that way, a hamburger recommendation makes sense.

Price didn’t say that the chicken piccata was wrong, per se, but just provided it as an example to illustrate how Halla I/O’s AI works differently. Using a proprietary dataset from more than 10,000 grocery items, 20,000 ingredients, 175,000 recipes and 20 million restaurant dishes, Price said that his company has created an entirely new model and a new taxonomy that doesn’t just look at what a food item is, but also the molecules that make it up, a map of attributes linked to other food as well as how people interact with that food.

With that information, Price said Halla I/O can provide more contextual and more meaningful recommendations. On a surface level, this means Halla I/O can make very basic recommendations. If you are buying salt, it might recommend pepper. But if you put salt and ground beef and onions into your cart, Halla I/O might infer that you’re making a bolognese. Not only will it recommend more items needed to make a bolognese, Halla I/O will show you recommended recipes and automatically add all the ingredients for that recipe to your cart. If you’ve shopped with that app before, Halla I/O will know if you purchased tomato sauce recently, and automatically remove that from the recommendation.

Though Halla I/O works for both restaurants and grocers, right now Halla I/O is only in pilot programs with four grocers. Interestingly, one of the pilots was with Green Zebra in Portland OR. Instead of online cart recommendations, Halla provides shelf recommendations. For example, they may see that lots of people are buying bananas and peanut butter, and set up a physical display to take advantage of that.

Halla is at the nexus of two trends we’re following at The Spoon: personalization and shoppable recipes. If its software works as promised, not only will it deliver better recommendations, but the ability to automatically recommend and adjust cart items based on recipes could be another step towards customized meal kits.

Halla is just seven employees, and has raised $500,000 in angel funding. It’s going to need more than a scrappy startup spirit, however, as the AI-powered recommendation space has plenty of competition. Startups like Dishq, Foodpairing and Plantjammer are all running their own algorithms to deliver more relevant recommendations.

Pretty soon, grocers and restaurants will need an AI-based recommendation engine to recommend the best AI-based recommendation engine.


An earlier version of this article stated that Green Zebra does not have online ordering capabilities. The grocer does through Instacart, and we have updated the post.

July 27, 2018

This Avocado Pop-Up Event Is More Proof Food Companies Need Instagram Strategies

If you’re like me, interacting with a bus full of avocados sounds like the perfect way to spend an afternoon. And if you happen to be on the West Coast this summer, you’ll get that opportunity.

Wholly Guacamole, maker of all-natural avocado-based dips and spreads, will take its products on the road this summer for the Guaclandia Tour 2018, which offers an “Instagram-able Avocado Experience” (via Food and Wine).

Guaclandia will travel to select U.S. cities handing out unlimited free samples of Wholly Guacamole products and providing endless photo-ops for fans. According to a release, features to interact with will include a chair shaped like an avocado pit, a retro claw machine full of tote bags, pins, and pool floats, and an avocado-inspired wall for snapping selfies. There’s also a swimming pool, a jumbo ball pit, and “tips on ‘keepin’ it real,” which presumably has to do with food.

The #Guaclandia bus was spotted on the road by Super Fan Betty! We’ll see you tomorrow at @thesfmarathon #TSFM2018 #sfmarathon #sanfrancisco

A post shared by Wholly Guacamole (@eatwholly) on Jul 26, 2018 at 4:22pm PDT

Ten years ago, the concept might have seemed ridiculous to many, but in 2018, a traveling avocado circus that encourages people to snap and post pictures actually amounts to a clever branding scheme for a food company. As I wrote last year, Instagram is already an influential platform when it comes to small(ish) businesses gaining visibility and spreading awareness of a particular food culture. And avocados are definitely a food culture at this point, for better and for worse. And as Catherine Lamb recently said, these “delicious, weird, and informative food-focused Instagrams” keep us inspired.

Plus, Guaclandia is hardly the first time a food company’s taken its show on the road. The Museum of Ice Cream launched in 2016 in NYC. Still going strong, it features things like an inflatable pool filled with sprinkles, hula-hooping, and the Limbo. The photos I’ve seen also trigger my taste buds for ice cream and pastel colors. You can catch it right now in San Francisco.

Our pints may not go pop, fizz, clink, but they certainly bring the CHEER 🌈 And there’s no better way to honor the your love for ice cream than with your favorite pint on NATIONAL ICE CREAM DAY 🍦💗 So whether you’ll be with us in LOS ANGELES for the BIGGEST ICE CREAM SOCIAL EVER, or just with us in spirit, RAISE A PINT this SUNDAE by #pintshare and picking up a pint @target ✨🎉🙌 #museumoficecream #targetrun

A post shared by MUSEUM OF ICE CREAM (@museumoficecream) on Jul 12, 2018 at 5:45am PDT

Frozen food maker Birdseye got in the game even earlier, in 2014, when it opened a temporary London restaurant featuring a pay-by-picture concept. In other words, diners settled their bill by snapping a picture of their meal and posting it with the hashtag #BirdsEyeInspirations. They even had a professional food photographer at the event, to offer tips and tutorials on how to take the best Instagram photos.

Even restaurants are getting onboard. Recently London-based Jones and Sons teamed up with Knorr, whose software suggests recipes to indecisive eaters. This past April, the two unveiled “Eat Your Feed,” a pop-up that let attendees connect their Instagrams to Knorr’s software, which would then scan the feeds and create a menu based off the photos.

These pop-ups have met with varying success rates. The Museum of Ice Cream, for example, really is as fun as it sounds. And while I wasn’t there for the Birdseye event, frozen vegetables seems a way less appealing sell, even when dinner comes at the mere cost of a picture. Wholly Guacamole has an advantage in that its pushing a product that’s both a bonafide trend and, in this company’s case, a fairly healthy product focused on another current food movement: real ingredients.

So if that plus a mobile Instagram party sounds like a win, check the dates to see where you can keep it real this summer.

July 18, 2018

Cooklist Officially Launches to Connect Your Grocery Shopping with Recipes

Cooklist, a new mobile app that automatically keeps track of the groceries you buy and recommends recipes based on them, officially launched today. It also announced it has raised $250,000 “pre-seed” round, half of which will come from joining the TechStars Retail Accelerator in Minneapolis.

The Cooklist app connects with more than 80 grocers including Amazon, Walmart, Costco, and Kroger. Using those retail loyalty programs, Cooklist automatically keeps track of the groceries you purchase. Cooklist will then recommend one of 1.3 million recipes (and counting) based on the food you’ve bought and to help you avoid food waste, it will even alert you when products are going to expire.

I talked with Cooklist founders Daniel Vitiello and Brandon Warman, who explained that the expiration information isn’t precise. Instead, it uses general guidelines — like onions expiring in 1 – 2 months — to give people warnings about when items will go bad.

Cooklist 1min Walkthrough

Vitiello and Warman built the first prototype of Cooklist last September and started developing the app in earnest this past January. The company is just the two founders at this point. Along with the money, their TechStars membership will get them office space at Target HQ (with whom TechStars partners), which is a little ironic as the app does not work with Target groceries yet.

Cooklist is free right now and Vitiello and Warman said that they are looking at a premium model when they move to monetize. A premium version could be a monthly subscription that would generate a smart shopping list and push those purchases to your preferred grocer for delivery or pickup.

Cooklist is facing a lot of competition as there are a number of apps looking to make a more direct connection between the food you have and the food you can make. Chefling does a very similar thing to Cooklist in keeping track of what you buy, but requires manual input. Innit’s guided cooking app lets you automatically adjust recipes by swapping in ingredients already have on hand.

Further up the stack, companies like Fexy Media, Whisk and AllRecipes are making recipes directly shoppable, enabling you to assemble all the ingredients you need for any recipe that same day.

July 10, 2018

Are Meal Kits a New Form of Medicine?

A reported 30.3 million Americans had diabetes in 2015, according to the most recent numbers. Obesity, high blood pressure, lots of sodium and sugar, and, of course, a lack of fruits and vegetables are all culprits in the growing number of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.

Could the humble meal kit make a difference?

A lot of times, keeping chronic illness at bay requires a “lifestyle intervention” — that is, changes to a person’s physical activity and diet. And while that’s an easy sentence to write, it’s a lot harder to put into action, whether you’re following the doctor’s orders or just taking preventative steps.

Meal kits, meanwhile, are still undergoing their evolution from pricey, time-consuming subscriptions with flailing sales to attainable options perched on the shelves at grocery stores and drug stores. Now, many are asking if the medical field and the food industry could join forces to deliver meal kits that turn food into medicine.

There are a few different approaches already on the market:

Be Well Eats
The most obvious combination of food and medicine is in the form of doctor-recommended meal kits. Be Well Eats is one such company offering this. Celebrity chef Tricia Williams and NYC-based Dr. Frank Lipman teamed up to create all-organic meals that are grain free and dairy free, and focus on elements like fermented foods, healthy fats, and adaptogenic herbs. A team of certified nutritionists and holistic health coaches are also behind the operation. And while you still have to prep and cook the food yourself, if you’re looking for a way to turn your diet on its head and have a little cash to spare, this is probably one of the most straightforward kits out there.

Tovala Smart Oven and Subscription
Those investing in a Tovala smart oven and corresponding subscription kit don’t even need to set aside the typical 30 minutes for cooking. All meals arrive on your doorstep already prepared; you need only pop them in the internet-connected steam oven and scan the tray sleeve to give the oven instructions. Cooking time usually takes 10 to 20 minutes, according to Tovala’s site, and none of that time requires any actual effort from the user.

Tovala seems a sound bet for those who need clean, healthy meals but don’t have a lot of time for shopping and prepping, or for those who love the idea of clean eating but find the task of coming up with a meal plan daunting. The elderly or disabled could benefit, too, as it would mean easier access to healthier food on a regular basis. That said, you’re limiting your meal choice substantially by sticking only to Tovala, so this one’s perhaps best combined with another offering or approach.

Weight-loss Meal Kits
BistroMD targets long-term weight loss. Users first pick a plan based on their dietary needs. Plans include Standard, Heart Healthy, Gluten Free, Diabetic, and Menopause. Once your order is submitted, registered dietitians then customize your program, which you then edit and adjust through the BistroMD portal. Weight Watchers, too, offers meal kits for those looking to lose weight, and recently teamed up with California company FreshMeal to put said kits on store shelves.

Meal Planning
Platejoy doesn’t ship food; instead, they offer a nutrition plan that’s designed to prevent diabetes, and which is covered by five Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance plans. Users first answer questions about the diet they’re aiming for (diabetic friendly, 30-day cleanse, etc.), allergies, and even the kind of grocery store they would prefer to shop at (Whole Foods versus Kroger, for example). Platejoy then provides meal planning tools and recipes that best fit the individual’s diet needs. The service costs $69 for six months or $99 for 12, which is a little steep for a meal-planning service but a pretty useful supplement to your weekly shopping and cooking routine, especially if you can get it covered by your insurance company. The plan syncs with Fitbit and can also send ingredient lists directly to your Instacart basket.

The Suggestic app, meanwhile, uses machine learning to find recipes and create daily meal plans based on a user’s dietary preferences and restrictions.

There are plenty more meal kits and planning tools out there that might count as medicine to a huge portion of the population. Purple Carrot offers vegan meal kits and recently got a shot of investment from Del Monte. Sun Basket is ideal for those with diet restrictions.

Not all of these players are on doctors’ radars as of yet, and meal kits are obviously not a replacement for drugs that treat more serious illnesses. But as preventing chronic illness becomes a greater priority and subscription food services become more commonplace, we’re bound to see more doctors recommending, if not prescribing, meal kits as medicine in the future.

July 10, 2018

Ckbk Launches Kickstarter to Become Spotify for Recipes

Ckbk, the digital platform that wants to be the Spotify for recipes, launched its Kickstarter campaign today.

We reported on ckbk back in April, explaining the impending service as:

“… an app which compiles a massive database of recipes from well-known and up-and-coming cookbooks. Matthew Cockerill, co-founder of 1000 Cookbooks, polled hundreds of food experts to get their picks for the best, most essential cookbooks ever written.”

Ckbk is looking to raise $25,000 as it continues to license recipe content and build out its app. People who pledge $59 or more can be a “Founder subscriber,” which includes pre-launch access to ckbk, as well as a year-long subscription after the official launch scheduled for October or November of this year. Early backers will also get early access to ckbk starting in September.

July 6, 2018

Suggestic Experiments with Augmented Reality to Help You Stick to Your Diet Plan

What if you could wave your phone over a restaurant menu and see “through” the descriptions, instantly assessing which dishes are best (and worst) for you to eat?

That’s exactly what Bay Area startup Suggestic is working on. When users first open the free app, they set up their goals (lose weight, have more energy) and dietary preferences or restrictions (vegetarian, no dairy, allergic to peanuts). The app then recommends a series of dietary plans to match those preferences and goals, such as Anti-Inflammation or Low-Carb Mediterranean.

After selecting your plan, the app will create weekly meal plans with 3 to 4 recipes per day. “All recipes are found via machine learning,” Suggestic’s co-founder Shai Rozen told me over the phone. In fact, after they started the company four years ago, they spent the first year and a half applying for patents (which are currently pending) around their recipe-curating analytics. For a $100 annual fee, Premium members get access to food recommendations and recipes from selected health influencers. Users can turn their weekly meal plan into a dynamic grocery list, and Rozen said they’re working on making it shoppable.

Suggestic also provides videos and tasks to keep you on-track with your selected health program, a chatbot to guide you through meal and restaurant selection, plus a place for users to log their sleep quality and water intake. Its restaurant feature uses algorithms to analyze menu items at over 500,000 restaurants in the U.S., and will give each dish a score 1-10, depending on how well it’ll fit into your chosen diet. They’re also working on integrating genetic insight with DNA sequencing service Helix.

But the coolest part isn’t what they already offer — it’s what they’re working on. Suggestic is currently beta testing an augmented reality (AR) feature that allows users to point their phone camera at a menu and see color-coded indications of which dishes are best for their diet. “Then you can interact with the menu as if you were RoboCop or Terminator,” said Rozen. As of now, this service is available in 10% of the restaurants Suggestic covers.

It’s a little further out, but Suggestic is also developing tech to integrate AR into their grocery shopping service. So if you pick up a bag of gluten-free crackers and want to see how well it fits into your diet, all you’d have to do is bring out your smartphone and Terminator it.

The startup currently has a staff of around 20. Rozen told me that they have raised “around $3 million” over two funding rounds. The app launched about two months ago and has roughly 20,000 downloads.

AR is starting to pop up in more and more places throughout the food system. Huxley is combining AR, AI and machine learning to help increase indoor agricultural outputs. Big Food companies like Campbell’s are also exploring AR as a way to engage consumers from the grocery store to guided cooking, as is Williams Sonoma. Chinese startup Coohobo is using AR to make the grocery shopping experience easier and more social. App Waygo translates menus around the world into English, complete with pictures. And down the road, virtual reality (VR) in nutrition, cooking, and grocery shopping will be pretty common, too.

At the end of the day, Suggestic might be trying to do too much — they’ve got the buzzwords down (algorithms, AI, etc.), but combining them into a useful tool that can actually enable longterm healthy lifestyle changes will be a big lift.

That said, dining out can be a minefield for people with specialized diets or food restrictions; if Suggestic can nail the augmented reality aspect of their app and expand it to more restaurants, that could have huge benefits for those trying to watch what they eat.

 

July 1, 2018

Campbells Gets Into Shoppable Recipes

Campbell’s announced last week that it has added shoppable recipe functionality to its site, in another move that has the iconic soup brand playing a broadening role in our meal journey.

Available now, the shoppable recipes are created using Chicory’s AI technology. Once you pick a recipe on Campbell’s website, you can click the “Get Ingredients” button at the bottom, enter your zip code and select your preferred grocer for delivery. Right now, Campbell’s works with retailers including AmazonFresh, Peapod, Instacart, Meijer, Walmart, and Wakefern.

If there’s one big trend we’re following here at The Spoon this year, it’s the evolution of the recipe into a robust discovery and e-commerce platform. Online grocery shopping and same-day delivery mean that midday recipe inspiration can be turned into dinner that very night. Shoppable recipes are quickly becoming the industry standard as SideChef, Fexy Media and AllRecipes have launched shoppable recipe programs.

And now Campbell’s wants in on this action. With this move, Campbell’s doesn’t just want to be a part of your meal, it wants to be a vehicle that delivers your whole meal, and generate revenue along the way.

Prior to this, Campbell’s invested $10 million in meal kit company Chef’d, and then teamed up with them to form its own line of slow-cooker meal kits.

Meanwhile, companies like Chicory and Whisk are taking advantage of the shoppable recipe boom by providing the back-end technology which enables food and recipe brands to enable immediate purchase via thousands of recipes. In addition to Campbell’s, Chicory also provides shoppable recipe tech for brands such as Betty Crocker and Time Inc.

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