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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Interfaces

Electrolux & Innit Partner to Help Consumers Navigate the Cooking Journey

Today at the EuroCucina trade show in Milan, Italy, Electrolux announced a strategic partnership with smart kitchen platform provider Innit in which the two companies will work together to integrate Innit’s software with the Electrolux’s connected appliances to “help consumers throughout the cooking journey.”

The first Electrolux appliance to integrate with the Innit platform will be the camera-enabled steam oven introduced by the Swedish appliance giant last month. Starting in the first quarter of 2019, consumers will be able to use the Innit app to find recipes, plan their meal and send cooking instructions to the Combisteam Pro Smart oven from Electrolux. Over time, the two companies envision that users of Electrolux appliances will be able to use the Innit app as the main app to power the entire cooking process, from meal discovery to shopping to cooking.

For Innit, its partnership with the region’s biggest appliance maker marks a significant entry into a market that requires substantial understanding of country-by-country differences. Unlike the more homogeneous US market, products for the Europe market need to account for differences in consumer cooking preferences across different countries. While some countries tend to embrace surface cooking (induction, etc), others may be more inclined to cook the nightly meal in an oven. By partnering with Electrolux, Innit can tap into the appliance maker’s localization expertise and create an app tailored towards specific user requirements in each locale.

For Electrolux, its partnership with Innit is the first time the company will work with a third party application partner for its connected appliances. The company sees the partnership as a strategic move towards a common software and user experience across appliances. The two companies plan to expand to more cooking devices as well as other appliances such as refrigerators.

One benefit Electrolux sees in tapping into a software-powered cooking experience is the ability to help consumers unlock capabilities that for the most part go unused.

“Our appliances are extremely advanced and often the consumer only uses a small fragment of their capabilities,” Patrick Le Corre, Sr. VP of kitchen products at Electrolux EMEA, told me in a phone interview. “Steam cooking is the best way to cook, but their knowledge of steam cooking is limited. If you bridge the potential of our appliances with an app, we unlock the power for consumers and secure an enjoyable cooking experience.”

The deal comes at an important time as more appliance makers are honing in on strategic partners as the industry continues to transition towards software-enabled cooking. At CES, Whirlpool showed off its Yummly integration while LG announced partnerships with Innit and SideChef, and last month Kenwood launched a new multicooker powered by Drop as part of a longer-team development deal. And now with Electrolux, Innit has locked up Europe’s biggest appliance maker in what looks to be a significant potential long-term partnership.

Podcast: The Future of (Food) Media Is Conversational & AI Driven

If you’re looking for someone who can build a media company with the future in mind, you could do a lot worse that Shelby Bonnie.

Bonnie first showed his ability to build forward leaning media properties with CNET, a company he cofounded that helped set the template for tech media for much of the past couple decades. For his next act, Bonnie cofounded Whiskey Media, a company that tapped into the power of passionate communities with brands like Tested, Screened and Giant Bomb just as social media platforms like Facebook were beginning to change the media landscape.

And Bonnie’s latest bet? A company called Pylon, which is leveraging AI-powered voice assistants and chatbots to create media properties that power content delivery in vertical interest areas such as food and cooking.

I caught up with Shelby to talk about those early days, how he sees media evolving over the next decade and how he thinks Pylon can help shape that new future.

If you are an appliance maker, food brand or any company that touches the consumer, you’ll want to listen to this podcast to get an understanding of the future of consumer media.

You can listen to the podcast below, download it here or subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speak, Swipe, Smile: Virtual Assistants Quickly Moving Beyond Voice

Amazon’s Alexa plays a central role in my family’s morning routine: she tells us the weather, plays the radio, and sets timers so we can catch the bus. Alexa is great for simple tasks, but she, and other smart speakers stumble when it comes to more complicated requests. That’s just a limitation of having only a voice and speaker interface.

But the way we interact with Alexa and Google Home is about to undergo a dramatic shift as those devices add screens and cameras. In doing so, we’ll move from talking and listening to our virtual assistants to looking, touching and smiling to get what we want.

Smart speakers like Amazon Alexa and Google Home are quickly crossing over into the mainstream. Amazon touted that it sold “tens of millions” of Alexa devices this past holiday season, while rival Google said it sold “tens of millions” of its Home devices throughout last year. According to a recent study by NPR and Edison research, roughly 39 million people (18 and older) in America own a smart speaker, and 65 percent of those surveyed “wouldn’t want to go back to life without their smart speaker.”

But in a room like a kitchen, voice assistance only gets you so far. Think about trying to put together a recipe by just listening. Sure you can do it, but listening to a set of instructions is not the best way to make a meal. Enter the kitchen screen, which was a big trend at CES this year with LG and Samsung building them into their fridges, and GE unveiling its giant monitor that’s meant to hang over your oven.

Screens will add much needed visual component to smart speakers, turning them into smart displays. Instead of just a voice walking you through a recipe, you can see accompanying photos and videos to demonstrate technique and what the end product should look like. Since all of these screens have touch capabilities, they will make more general tasks like swiping through music and news much easier and faster than saying “next” every time you want to skip ahead.

Both Amazon and Google already recognize this and are adding screens to their smart speakers. Amazon released its Echo Show last year, and the smaller Echo Spot in time for the holidays. Instead of making its own device (for now, anyway), Google is being built into new smart displays from JBL, Lenovo, LG and Sony.

These smart displays will also come with a built-in camera for things like video calling, but eventually, these cameras will do more. Touchscreens are good for displaying information, but the “touch” part becomes a little harder in the kitchen when your hands are greasy or covered in cookie dough. The smart display camera then could become a motion sensor. Rather than touching the screen you wave your hand to go back a page, swipe through a list of ingredients or scrub a video to the exact part you want.

In addition to gesture control, the camera could also be used for facial recognition. As each member of the family looks into the smart display, a personalized view of news, messages, reminders and more will appear on the screen.

But these cameras wouldn’t just look at our faces; they will also see the contents of our kitchens. Already LG and Samsung fridges come with internal cameras to show what food you have and help you label it. Machine learning, RFID tags, and scent sensors will work in unison to automatically recognize and inventory food in our fridge and pantries. These cameras will all tie into our virtual assistant of choice to let us know when we’re running out of items, order replacements and make recipe recommendations.

The interface, in this more extreme case, becomes invisible and just predicts and presents us with the information and items that we want, with no interaction with us at all. And that will definitely be something to smile about.

Formica Group and ConvenientPower Announce Wireless Charging Countertops

The promise of wirelessly charging devices in your kitchen got a nice boost this month when the Formica Group and ConvenientPower announced a partnership to develop wireless charging countertops.

While details in the announcement were light, the two companies said that they will integrate ConvenientPower’s wireless charging technology into Formica Group’s Laminate surface and plan to bring their new products to market this year.

According to a Formica Group spokesperson, these new countertops are for both commercial (think: coffee shops, co-working spaces, etc.) and residential applications. There were no specifics on the price or how the technology will work other than being able to set your phone down anywhere on the surface to have it charge.

ConvenientPower supports the Wireless Power Consortium’s (WPC) Qi wireless power standard, which has been adopted by heavyweights like Samsung, Ikea and Apple. ConvenientPower makes Qi compatible products and the Formica Group is a member of the WPC.

While this general announcement only mentions powering “devices,” presumably the Formica Group is working with the WPC’s Kitchen Work Group, which is developing a kitchen-centric wireless charging standard for countertop appliances and low power devices on the same surface.

While the industry coalesces around the Qi standard, there are other solutions tackling the issue of wireless charging as well. If you’re at CES this week, you can check out Powercast, which is showing off its wireless charging technology. Powercast promises to charge low power gadgets over the air up to 80 feet away, no special surfaces required.

The cord-free kitchen is rapidly becoming a reality, and the Formica Group’s announcement is likely just the first of many such announcements we’ll see throughout this year.

The CES Foodtech & Smart Kitchen Trends Wrapup

Every year upon returning from my annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas, someone always asks me, “what was the big thing at CES this year?”

And this year, just like every year, I struggle to answer the question.

The reason? Because there’s never just one big thing. There are usually many big things.

This is in part because it’s such a massive show, one that’s gotten bigger both in scope and attendance over the years, and it’s hard to easily summarize the trends from nearly every corner of tech. Whether your thing is AI, IoT, VR/AR, cryptocurrencies, robotics, CES had something to make you happy.

Because of the overwhelming amount of news and stuff to see, it’s helpful to go to CES with a focus. For me, this year (and really, the last couple years) that focus was kitchen and food tech.  And because there’s no concentrated area at CES for food or kitchen tech (get with the program, CTA), that means I am usually scanning a bunch of different spaces (smart home, fitness, startups) to find interesting new companies or news.

This post is a wrapup of some of the important trends I saw. If I missed anything big (and I’m sure I did), email me, and I’ll update the post.

Smart Kitchen Platforms Emerge

This year was a coming out for connected kitchen platforms at CES. Whether it was Whirlpool’s big debut of Yummly 2.0 (which Brett Dibkey described to me as “the glue” tying together Whirlpool’s kitchen of the future), or offerings powered by Innit, SideChef or Drop, there’s no doubt we saw the intelligent, conscious kitchen undeniably emerge as a major focus for large appliance makers.

What do I mean? Basically, it’s moving beyond simple connectivity and apps to platforms that connect the cooking, storage, commerce, planning and every other aspect of the kitchen into a holistic system. A kitchen that is aware of the food inside the fridge, one where appliances coordinate to each other to help organize the evening or week’s meal, one in which a variety of intelligent sensors and interfaces make your life easier; it was all there. This is, obviously, a big focus for us here at the Spoon, so expect more on this topic later.

Voice Interfaces Everywhere

Speaking of interfaces, we’re on the third year of “Alexa sure seems like it’s everywhere” at CES, but the first year of “Google finally seems to be taking this seriously”. It was just over a year ago that Google finally introduced its development kits for actions for Google Assistant (its answer to Alexa Skills), and twelve months later we finally see the fruits of the company’s labor. We also saw massive investment in CES as Hey Google was plastered all over Vegas, and they had a particular focus on the kitchen with on-site demos of the kitchen with partners like Innit.

Digital Sensing

Part of the intelligent, conscious kitchen is one that understands the food that is in the fridge and on the plate. Some companies were showing off food image recognition tech, infrared spectrometry, digital noses and water sensors.  Companies like Aryballe showed off their high-end professional sensor but also indicated they were working with appliance makers to build the technology into appliances. After-market players like Smarter were demoing their products to companies like Whirlpool. Expect the concept of a sensing kitchen to become more prevalent this year.

Food Inventory Management

Food waste is a big issue everywhere, and there were companies at CES showing off solutions to help us all better track what food we buy.  Startup Ovie, which I would describe as “Tile for food” was showing off its food tracking/management system, while others like Whirlpool and Samsung were talking about how their fridges can help to manage food inventory.

Water Intelligence

Given that it’s one of the world’s most precious resources, it’s always been a bit of a mystery to me why there hasn’t been more attention paid to using IoT and smart technology to manage our water better.  Mystery solved because now it seems the tech world is paying attention. Belkin finally had a coming out party for its long-gestating Phyn water management system while others like Flo had their home water management system on display. Smaller efforts like that of Lishtot, which help us detect whether water is drinkable, were also on display.

Wireless Power

One of the coolest things about the Smart Kitchen Summit last year was the Wireless Power Consortium had its first public demo of its cordless kitchen technology, which features wireless power for small countertop appliances.  I got an early demo at the WPC booth this year as they showed off wireless power for small appliances from Philips and Haier.

I also saw a cool demo using infrared wireless power form Wi-Charge. The concept here is to put an infrared transmitter in the ceiling (they put it in a light installation in the demo) and then transmit power using infrared to various devices. The Wi-Charge folks said their patented tech is currently only targeted at small portable devices, but I’m intrigued with the possibilities for the kitchen as a potential future opportunity.

Specialized Living

I’ve been writing about the massive opportunity for smart home and kitchen innovation for the aging in place market for the past couple years, so I was happy to see a number of companies focusing on this important area.  Much of the focus was on safety, which obviously applies to kitchen/cooking scenarios, but I can also see how smart assistants, robotics and augmented reality could be applied in living scenarios to help folks with limitations due to age.

Robot Invasion

Robots and process automation were everywhere at CES, ranging from cute social robots like LG’s Cloi to delivery robots to the laundry folding robots. Some, like LG, saw the robot as a natural pairing with the kitchen, while others saw robots as more general purpose assistants for the home.  And while we didn’t see the robot chef at CES this year, I expect we’ll see that probably in the near future.

Humanless Retail

AI-driven point of sale devices and “humanless” markets were big at CES. AIPoly won best of show for the second year in a row, while a Bodega-on-wheels startup Robomart had a huge crowd at its booth for much of the show. More modest efforts like the Qvie were on offer to give Airbnb hosts a way to become even more like micro-hotel operators.

New Cooking Boxes Appliances

One of my predictions for the year was a new generation of cooking boxes. I use the term box because they’re not always ovens (though they can be), but often are like the NXP RF-powered smart defroster. We also saw Hestan on the other side of the country (at KBIS) talk about using precision cooking coupled with gas, a throwback to their Meld days.  There were also lots of folks I met with still operating in stealth that plan to debut their next-gen cooking appliances this year, so stay tuned.

Home As Food Factory

All of a sudden, everyone seems to be interested in home-grow systems, whether it’s the backyard IoT grow box from Grow to the Opcom’s grow walls, there was lots of interesting new home grow systems to see at CES. And while I didn’t see anything like food reactors or much in the way of 3D food printers, I expect CES 2019 to rectify that situation.

Smart Booze

Smart beer appliances, wine serving/preservation devices, and IoT connected wine shelves were plentiful this year. CES also gave many the first peek at the home distilling system from PicoBrew, the PicoStill.

We’ll be watching all these trends this year, so if you want to keep up, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter. Also, you can hear about many of these trends at Smart Kitchen Summit Europe, which is in Dublin on June 12th.

The Battle For The Kitchen Screen Got A Lot More Interesting At CES 2018

When I wrote about the battle for the kitchen TV last June, the launch of the Echo Show was one of the signals that told me companies were beginning to pay attention to the space. Half a year later, my own usage of the Show has helped me better understand why.

That’s because ever since Amazon’s video-enabled Alexa assistant entered our home, it’s the first thing my eyes are drawn to as I enter the kitchen. The continuous scroll of news and weather, integration with popular apps like Pandora and Allrecipes, and access to videos all have quietly made the small screen indispensable for my entire family.

And now, with a slew of standalone smart displays and kitchen-centric video screens at CES last week, I’m more convinced than ever as we enter 2018 the kitchen TV market will be a fascinating one to watch.

Here are some of the kitchen screen entrants from this year’s big consumer show:

Echo Show And The Competitors

In some ways, the Echo Show and its small screen competitors are the early favorites. Whether or not to purchase a $200 or below (today the Show is on sale for $179) countertop video-enabled voice assistant is a much easier decision to make than that of a $3 thousand fridge. And now, with Google pouring money into the space, you can expect many more choices and over time.

CES 2018 featured some new smart displays on, um, display, many of them designed to be used with Google Assistant. I suspect at some point Google will likely come out with a first-party device (like the Echo Show), but for now we have displays from the likes of Lenovo, Philips and JBL and the initial reviews are pretty positive.

Fridge TV

Hard to believe, but Samsung’s already on version three of its Family Hub fridge, a product that is fast becoming the central focus of the CE giant’s broader smart home strategy. I stopped by the Samsung CES showroom at the Aria to check out the Family Hub 3, and I have to say the new screen looks good.

And as is often the case, LG has followed Samsung’s lead with the ThinQ Instaview Fridge but took things one step further by making their smart screen translucent so you can also see what’s in your fridge. You can see a demo of the LG ThinQ Instaview Fridge here:

While the idea of fridge TVs continue to gain steam, some argue that there’s a mismatch between the life cycle of cutting-edge tech and that of installed appliances. An appliance is an investment, something most consumers expect to last up to a decade. Technology, on the other hand, can be outdated after a few years. This argument resonated after talking to someone at the Samsung booth, who told me the Family Hub gen-1 likely wouldn’t be updated to the third generation software that is coming out with the Family Hub 3, (though the Family Hub Ones in the field were recently updated to Family Hub 2 software).

Despite this, I think the centrality of the fridge in most kitchens and the early relative success of the Family Hub will fuel interest in making the fridge the star of the kitchen TV market.

The GE Kitchen Hub 

One of the more interesting concepts in kitchen TV I saw at CES was the GE Kitchen Hub, a screen/smart home controller designed to sit above your oven.  The Kitchen Hub, which was originally conceived in GE Appliances innovation hub FirstBuild, not only has voice and gesture control capability built in but works with Zigbee and Z-Wave to connect to your smart devices.

You can see Digital Trends video walkthrough with the Kitchen Hub below:

GE Kitchen Hub - Hands On at CES 2018

The concept of the Kitchen Hub sits somewhere between the Amazon and Samsung approach, a device that’s separate from a large appliance (and their long life cycles), but one that is also a built-in. The product is priced in that middle territory as well, coming in at $600.

I like the idea of the Kitchen Hub. A separate built-in screen, one that is more affordably priced than a hybrid appliance/TV product and that can also act as a smart home control center is a potential winner. Of course, a lot will rely on execution, but overall this is an intriguing product to watch.

One thing’s that clear: the battle for the kitchen TV became a lot more interesting at CES 2018. Check back at the Spoon and subscribe to our newsletter to monitor our coverage of this market over the next 12 months.

Amazon Brings Cooking Capabilities To Alexa Smart Home Skill API

While over 50% of Echos end up in the kitchen, a lack of cooking-specific commands and categories within the popular voice assistant’s smart home API has meant few people actually prepare food with Alexa today.

But that could soon change.

That’s because today Amazon introduced built-in cooking controls for cooking appliances into the Alexa smart home API. Initially rolling out in microwaves from Whirlpool and others, the new cooking capabilities will let users define time and temperature parameters and will eventually use the Alexa voice interface to walk through cooking a meal.

From the Alexa developer blog:

Customers are increasingly using voice user interfaces (VUIs) as a hands-free way to manage their lives, and hands-free control is especially valuable when cooking. With the built-in cooking device controls in the Smart Home Skill API, you will make it easier for your customers to control your cloud-connected microwave. Instead of pressing multiple buttons to enable advanced microwave features, your customers can now use their voices. For example, a customer can say “Alexa, defrost three pounds of chicken” or “Alexa, microwave for 50 seconds on high.”

Initially, there are four new capability interfaces in the Smart Home Skill API – Alexa.Cooking, Alexa.Cooking.TimeController, Alexa.TimeHoldController, and Alexa.CookingPresetController. You can leverage these interfaces today for microwaves and for appliances that support preset cooking. The interfaces are designed for future extensibility as support for more cooking devices becomes available.

The new Alexa cooking capability understands food categories (for example, Alexa will take a food term from the Echo user – such as “sockeye salmon” – to categorize food in the “Fish” category) and cooking modes.  Appliance makers are able define their different cooking modes that are discoverable within the Alexa app, which means users will be able to access modes such as “defrost” in products such as Whirlpool’s line of connected microwaves. The new cooking capability from Amazon also allows appliance makers to make their presets libraries available through Alexa.

While Whirlpool’s expected to be the first to launch the new Alexa cooking capability for its connected microwaves (no exact date has been given), Amazon also announced Samsung, GE, Kenmore and LG are all working to bring the new Alexa cooking capability to market.

And finally, one last piece of news embedded in the announcement: The company has invested in June, high profile maker of the June connected oven, via the Alexa fund. This means, of course, you can expect the June oven to work with Alexa’s cooking capabilities sometime in 2018.

Enjoy the podcast and make sure to subscribe in Apple podcasts if you haven’t already.

Ten Trends That Will Shape The Future of Cooking In 2018

With 2017 in the rearview mirror, it’s time to look forward and make some predictions about the next year in food and cooking. While I often wait until after CES to look into the crystal ball since there are always lots of announcements at the annual consumer tech mega-show, I think it’s safe to point to a few big trends we can expect over the next 12 months.

With that in mind, here are ten trends I think you’ll see the shape the future of the kitchen over the next twelve months (Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date on our coverage of all of these trends over the next year):

Digital Recipe At The Center Of Action

With apologies to Tyler Florence, the recipe is not dead. In fact, if anything the recipe is becoming increasingly important in the digital kitchen. It’s becoming our automated shopping list, the instruction set for our appliances, and the content is becoming dynamic, atomized and personalized depending on our personal preferences and the context of our current day, meal plan, and food inventory.

I expect all of this to continue in 2018 and even accelerate as recipes become shoppable, connected to cooking guidance systems and fuse with new interfaces such as voice assistants and chatbots to help with the cooking process.

New Cooking Boxes

While “cooking box” isn’t exactly a standard industry term, it’s an apt way to describe the wide variety of exciting products coming to market that allow consumers new ways to prepare food.

Last year we started to see new takes on steam ovens like the Tovala, the first consumer market RF cooking appliance announced in Miele’s Dialog, and even combo devices that combine fast-cooking with flash-freezing like the Frigondas. In 2018, I expect to see lots more innovation with built-in and counter top products as old-school appliance manufacturers and housewares brands realize there’s opportunity in deviating from the same-old cooking appliances and offering consumers new options when it comes to preparing food.

Smart Grow Systems Move Towards Mass Market

While home grow systems have been around for years, adoption has remained fairly narrow. That will start to change in 2018 as the idea of using technology to grow and create our food at home enters the mainstream consciousness. Driving this trend will be the ever-increasing consumer desire to source food more locally. After all, what’s more local than our own homes?

The great thing about this space is there’s already a wide gamut of interesting options available for consumers today. Whether it’s low-cost offerings like seed quilts, to the growing number of soil-less home grow systems like those from Aerogarden or Ava, to crazy backyard farm robots like those from Farmbot, I think we’ll see more innovative products – and greater consumer adoption – in 2018.

Home Fermentation

There’s no doubt one of the most interesting trends we’ve seen in consumer food over the past couple years is the embrace of interesting fermented products like kombucha, and I think this interest will start to generate more interest in consumers fermenting their food at home.

We’ve already seen companies like Panasonic show off fermented food cookers, and beer appliance startup PicoBrew is starting to offer Kombucha as an offering. With interest in fermented products likely to increase, I expect more innovators will look to make creating these products at home easier.

Desserts Meet Tech

Like most, I love myself a good dessert, and I expect we will see an increasing number of interesting ways to fuse technology with sweets in the coming year. Some of these innovations will focus on convenience (like the CHiP cookie maker), but some will enable consumers to create hard-to-make sweets like chocolate, ice cream and other types of desserts that are normally time and knowledge intensive.  Expect to see some interesting announcements in this space in the next 12 months.

Sensing Kitchen

When the Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman got on stage at the Smart Kitchen Summit with startups creators of digital food sensing tech and demoed live in front of a huge audience, you could hear the audience murmur as Wilson and crew smelled cheese with a digital nose or tried out the Scio infrared spectrometer. This technology that has long been gestating for commercial and supply chain applications is finally making its way into the home, and I expect that to continue in 2018, particularly as some find new ways to apply AI to better prediction and understanding around flavors and food characteristics.

Meal Services And Connected Hardware

One of the trends we’ve been watching for a while is the pairing of meal kits with connected hardware.  That trend accelerated in 2017 as Tovala shipped product, Nomiku created their sous vide ready meals and Innit hinted at new products powered by Chef’d as we ended the year.

It makes sense. Recurring revenue has long been the mantra of venture capitalists (just ask Tovala, which just got a $9.2 million series A), and in the connected cooking space, the way to get recurring revenue is offer food.  I also expect meal kit companies to also increasingly look for ways to partner with kitchen tech innovators (much like Chef’d has with Innit) as they look for ways to raise adoption and retention for consumers.

Speaking of food delivery…

Automated, Smart Grocery Delivery

With the acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, Amazon stopped dabbling around the edges with lab experiments like Amazon Go, Amazon Dash and Amazon Fresh made its intentions clear: it wants to take a big bite out of the $700 billion grocery business in the US.  And while the company has had mixed success with efforts like its Fresh delivery business, these long-gestating experiments have given them a potentially huge advantage as they start to set up central hubs and physical points of presence for the grocery business post-Whole Foods.

And now, Amazon and others see the opportunity to fuse home delivery with smart home access control and automatically deliver groceries all the way to the fridge. Combine that with the ability of fridges to actually tell us when food needs a refresh, and you can unlock some interesting scenarios.

New Interfaces

While this past year saw the continued march forward towards of popular voice interfaces like Alexa, I think we’re only at the beginning of a large-scale change in the control layer for how we buy, prepare and cook our food.  Sure, we’ll see more and more Alexa skills for cooking gadgets in 2018, but also expect more manufacturers embrace chatbots and projection interfaces as ways to interact with our cooking equipment this year.

Cooking Robots

We cover cooking robots here at The Spoon a bunch, and while many are fun and likely never to see wide adoption over the next decade, there are a variety of interesting cooking bots we’ve seen that might have real applications for specific use cases.  Some are simple food automation devices. Others are more social robots. And, in some cases, companies are working on human-like robots that could be intriguing additions to the kitchen of the future.

Needless to say with CES less than a week away, we’ll likely see many of these trends reinforced with news.  I’ll be at CES catching up on many of these announcements myself, so if you hear of any or want me to know about your product, DM me on Twitter.

Delta Faucet Will Soon Let You Pour Water With Your Voice (Exclusive)

Want to pour yourself a glass of water with your voice? It looks like you soon can with a Delta Faucet.

The Spoon recently discovered a new Alexa skill from Delta Faucet company that will allow you to do such things are pour a glass of water or fill your coffee machine simply by asking Alexa. The skill looks like it will work with forthcoming voice-enabled Delta Faucet product or products enabled by what the faucet maker is calling its “voice module” and the Delta voice web app.

The only problem is if you want to buy the Delta voice module or register for your Delta voice account with the web app, neither of those exist today. In fact, the only clue to Delta’s voice-enabled faucet – at least as of now – is the Alexa skill called Delta. My guess is the company is preparing to launch a new voice-enabled line of faucets in a few weeks at CES or the upcoming Kitchen and Bath Show.

There’s also a good chance these faucets will connect to Wi-Fi. As far as I can tell, Delta doesn’t seem to have any Wi-Fi enabled faucets on the market today (but they do have a Wi-Fi leak detector), so it’s quite possible the mysterious ‘voice module’ is also a ‘Wi-Fi module’.

So far the Delta Alexa skill has one review, which again is strange because Delta hasn’t yet released its voice module or voice web app. Chances are the review, which calls the Delta skill “Easy Peasy”, was written by a Delta employee familiar with the initiative.

I don’t know about you, but I think using my voice to pour water is one of the cooler and more practical uses for Alexa in the home. I could imagine scenarios where my hands are full or simply messy, and using my voice to turn the water on or off with my voice just makes sense. I guess I’ll just have to wait until Delta actually releases the product that works with the skill before I get my hands on one.

“Alexa, How Can You Be Used in Restaurants?”

There’s a good chance that an Amazon Alexa or Google Home device is on a holiday wish list of someone you know. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimates that 15 million Amazon Echo units have been sold across the U.S. (Amazon does not disclose sales figures). As of now, Alexa’s use in dining out is centered more around at-home, consumer experiences. A quick glance through the restaurant related Alexa skills show an emphasis on discovery, information and ordering. Find a nearby restaurant. Order a pizza. Etc.

But is there a bigger opportunity for Alexa and Google Home inside the restaurant?

According to the National Restaurant Association, there are more than 1 million restaurant locations in the U.S. generating $799 billion in sales. One million on its own isn’t huge, but with some creative thinking, you could easily envision multiple devices deployed per restaurant, plus all the data captured from in-store interactions and you can see restaurants becoming a front in the voice assistant battle worth fighting over.

As a fun thought experiment, I put together a few potential uses for Alexa inside dining out:

An interactive table alert. Instead of a dumb, inert buzzer that flashes and vibrates when your table is ready, modify an Echo Dot to be the messenger. Instead of bugging the host, patrons could ask Alexa how much longer the wait time is, and be alerted when they can be seated. If you wanted to get real adventurous, in the right setting, you could even do ongoing interactive trivia games to keep people entertained.

Informed ordering. With its touch screen, an Echo Show would be an excellent way to show menu items, explain more about ingredients, and highlight popular dishes. You could also enable ordering and payment for a more streamlined experience. In a cruel, horrible world, one can imagine restaurants offer a cheaper meal if customers allow ads to be displayed while they’re eating (please don’t do that).

Back of house. Alexa could be used for quick ordering of ingredients, equipment or other sundries which, of course, could be fulfilled by Amazon that day. It could also be used to alert employees about their break times and inform them of any news or specials.

Communication back home. By gathering real time data inside a restaurant, Alexa at home could provide better, more informed real-time decisions about where and when to eat at a particular establishment.

Having said all this, there are some real world limitations to this type of implementation:

There’s a pretty small needle to thread in terms of the types of restaurant voice control will work. Too loud and voice control is useless and you can’t hear Alexa talk. Too quiet and voice control is annoying for everyone else.

It’s hard to imagine restaurants buying and modding Echo devices or writing their own skills. However companies such as Toast or Square could weave Alexa into their platforms and embed them on customized devices that are sold into restaurants.

We are still in the early stages of voice assistants and how far into our lives they will go. But as they get better, restaurant owners may not want to wait until the holidays to get their own.

Have you seen Alexa or Google Home used in interesting ways inside restaurants? Or have a wild idea about how they could? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think.

Meet TastyFloats, A Food Levitation System

When people say technology can give us superpowers, they usually don’t mean actual superpowers. After all, technology can’t give us superhuman strength, turn us invisible or help us to levitate things.

Ok, so maybe they can help us levitate things. That’s because in recent years, researchers have figured out ways to levitate items with acoustic energy and, just this month, a group from the SCHI Lab at the University of Sussex published a paper showing what they describe as a “contactless food delivery system” that applies this technique to food.

Called TastyFloats, the systems works as follows:”two-phased arrays of low-cost ultrasonic transducers opposite each other form a standing wave of ultrasound between them, and very small amounts of liquids and solids can be suspended in the nodes of the wave. Changing the phase can move these nodes in three dimensions, pulling the contents along with it, and allowing the materials to be transported in 3D space as long as they stay between the arrays.”

You can watch TastyFloats in action here:

TastyFloats: A Contactless Food Delivery System

One of the goals of the research was to study how acoustic levitation impacted taste perception. Variability in temperature, air pressure and altitude all have an impact on how taste is perceived; for example, beer taste is amplified while saltiness is suppressed on airplanes. The researchers tested different flavor characteristics such as sweetness, bitterness and umami (aka savory) by delivering food morsels via levitation and through a pipette.

The result? The researchers found subtle variations in flavor intensity and that overall food taste characteristics were more intense when delivered via levitation rather than through a plastic tube.

Real world applications for food levitation are hard to wrap the mind around. The researchers suggest a few, including chef-designed levitated food experiences in which the various food ingredients land on the diner’s tongue in a preferred order.  That seems a bit far-fetched, but one can also see how culinary innovators exploring the edges might be excited about the possibility of entirely new experiences with levitation.

A more practical application not mentioned by the researchers is using levitation to help people who have difficulty feeding themselves. One can envision how elderly, handicapped and other special needs could use this contactless – or “hands-less” – feeding technology to feed themselves.

No matter what form this technology takes, you have to admit food levitation is pretty cool. Now if we could just figure out the invisibility thing.

If Cooking Utensils Were Game Controllers, Would Millennials Cook More?

We have a cooking crisis on our hands.

At least that’s if you believe those who suggest Millennials are not mastering basic physical world skills – like cooking – as they wile away the hours staring at screens.

While surveys, including our own, have shown that Millennials are in fact cooking, there’s no doubt they (and my fellow busy Gen-Xers) could benefit from mastering some basic cooking skills. Coming up with reasons for cooking skills education is easy – you can save money, impress friends, try new kinds of food – but perhaps the most convincing argument is there’s a growing body of research showing a correlation between cooking at home and better health outcomes over time.

So, if cooking is good for us and society at large, doesn’t it make sense to get young people cooking more? And if so, the question becomes how to do that?

One way is to bring cooking and food information to young people in a format they can appreciate. Buzzfeed and others racking up billions of views monthly by creating highly shareable content in the form of visually fun cooking videos. YouTube and Facebook are enabling the rise of independent content creators as well as food-focused multichannel networks like Tastemade which tap into a growing hunger for food-specific content.

Another idea is teaching kitchens, which have become fashionable in places like Japan. ABC Cooking School has 125 locations in Japan, and the primary customer for the schools are young Japanese women (9 out of 10 students are women) who want to learn basic cooking skills.

But as most of us in the tech world knows, maybe the most surefire way to create more engagement in an activity is to add a layer of gaming to it.

One way to do that is through gamification. Gamification is the concept of adding game dynamics to almost any online activity. Whether it’s in the form of virtual rewards for your bank or badges from that online class you’re taking, most of us have used some form of gamification, and now cooking apps like SideChef are using game dynamics to get consumers cooking.

Then there are actual video games created to increase interest in a given topic. There’s no shortage of basic video games that integrate some cooking concept, from Nintendo’s Cooking Mama series to Overcooked from Steam, but where these games fall short in that they don’t put cooking tools in your hands. While you may be chopping veggies insanely fast on Cooking Mama, this doesn’t directly translate since you can’t use a game controller to make dinner.

But what if we were to make game controllers out of actual cooking tools? In other words, what if the knives, spoons, spatulas, and pans we used to make dinner with became part of the video game itself?

I know it sounds crazy, but bear with me. If you look at other physical crafts like knitting, creators have already started to make the actual craft tool one in the same as the video game controller.

Take Loominary, an open source game where the video game controller is a tabletop loom. The game’s creators created a computer software game that takes inputs from RFID tags on the loom shuttles and then registers choices made by the user as they start weaving on the loom.

You can see Loominary in action below:

Loominary Prototype Demo

Loominary uses RFID tags embedded in loom shuttles, but there’s no reason cooking tools couldn’t also use other sensors much the way today’s smart footballs and basketballs pack in sensors like accelerometers to track performance, speed and technique. Add in things like machine vision – and there’s no shortage of efforts to layer machine vision with food – and you may have the makings of an interesting video game concept: making dinner.

Imagine being immersed in a video game where you are egged on by a virtual Top Chef panel of judges as you cook a meal. You can compete against yourself, someone in another city, or against a virtual Heston Blumenthal.

At the end of the game, you not only have a score, but you have a dinner to eat.

While the Tasty One Top isn’t a game platform, there’s no reason it couldn’t be. If the company mapped all those Tasty cooking videos to work with the cooktop, why couldn’t they eventually track behavior and even have competitions for the best rendition of Tasty meals made at home?

And who’s to say you couldn’t combine cooking with virtual reality experiences. I’m sure Apple has thought about how the iPhone X’s augmented reality could be applied in the kitchen.

So maybe cookware companies aren’t gaming companies. But, with increasing investment in software and sensors, the arrival of machine vision and augmented reality, I’m betting some companies will look to create a tasty combination of cooking and gaming to get millennials to put on the cooking apron.