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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Internet of Food

Scientists Transform NFC Tags Into Spoiled Meat Sensors

If you’re like me, you’ve done the smell test on that week old ground beef to make sure it hasn’t spoiled. And if you’re also like me, there’s always a nagging doubt about the accuracy of old-school sniff tests, especially when the downside of rotten meat is such…um…high steaks (sorry not sorry).

Lucky for us, in the future we’ll have some tech-powered backup to make sure our sniffers are accurate.

The latest take on food spoilage sensors is from researchers out of China’s Nanjing University and the University of Texas at Austin, who published a paper last week outlining their research project in which they created a “a nanostructured conductive polymer-based gas sensor” which they embedded into an NFC tag. When the sensor detects meat spoilage vapors, it acts as a switch for the NFC tag to send an alert to a nearby smart phone (normal NFC transmission range is less than 4 inches).

From the study’s press release:

The scientists created a nanostructured, conductive, polymer-based gas sensor that can detect substances called biogenic amines (BAs), which give decomposing meat its bad odor. They embedded these sensors into NFCs placed next to meats. After the meats had been stored for 24 hours at 86 degrees Fahrenheit, the researchers found that the sensors successfully detected significant amounts of BAs. The sensors then switched on the NFCs so they could transmit this information to a nearby smartphone.

The most likely place for this type of system is further up the food value chain than my fridge, but there’s a good chance consumers will eventually use this type of tech in the home kitchen. While others like Amazon are already looking into gas sensors as a way to detect spoiled food, the concept of embedded sensor switches on NFC labeling could eliminate the need for sensors built into fridges. While I like the idea of smarter fridges, the NFC approach wouldn’t require a big up front purchase of a high-end appliance. I also think some retailers might see smart labels (like those with built-in meat spoilage sensors) as a differentiator.

And of course, there are other ways to reduce food waste without the need for gas-sensing labels. One of my favorites is Mimica’s label, which turns “bumpy” when milk approaches its expiration date. Another is Ovie’s Bluetooth tag and storage system, which accesses spoilage data from USDA and FDA to help us better predict when food might go bad.

Bottom line: as we found out at last week’s meetup, food waste continues to be a massive problem, but there are lots of innovative ideas – some close to market, others further away – that could help us become less wasteful.

Cargo Takes Its In-Car Commerce Platform to LA

If you spend even a little time in Los Angeles, there’s a 99.9999 percent chance you’ve been stuck on the freeway between meetings and desperately in need of a snack or some lip balm.

That’s good news for Cargo, whose in-car commerce platform just rolled into the City of Angels, where it’s available in rideshare services like Uber. The service gives passengers access to “must-have” items, like snacks and toiletries, and rideshare drivers an opportunity to earn extra income.

When a driver signs up for Cargo, which uses Uber’s API, they’re sent a display box with a unique code, along with a selection of snacks, cosmetics, electronics, and even a couple hangover cures. Cargo delivers replenishments monthly to drivers’ doorsteps.

Having a Cargo box in hand basically lets a driver turn their car into a convenience store on wheels: Passengers access Cargo’s mobile menu, enter the unique box code, and select items they want. They can pay via credit card or mobile wallet, and when it’s safe to stop the car (at a red light, for instance), the driver will hand over the purchased items.

“We’re spending so much time in ridesharing vehicles,” Cargo CEO, Jeff Cripe, said over the phone. “Part of what we wanted to do was innovate on that service and give people a more connected experience.”

It’s a potentially fruitful opportunity for drivers, too. According to Cargo’s website, drivers get 25 percent of retail sales, plus $1.00 per order. Active drivers are said to earn up to $300 per month (in addition to whatever they’re getting from the actual rideshare service).
Cargo is already in several markets, including NYC, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Dallas. The company also recently launched a partnership in Singapore with rideshare company Grab.

LA, of course, has a rep as one of the most car-centric cities in the world, which Cripe, an Angelino himself, thinks will help boost Cargo’s appeal. Compared to a more pedestrian-friendly place like NYC or Boston, he notes that, “In LA, things are a lot more spread apart. You’re on a freeway, you don’t have access [to stores]. And a lot of things close earlier.”

“From a product-market fit standpoint, we’d be more valuable to the average consumer,” he adds.

For this particular launch, Cargo has partnered with SnackNation and Snapchat, both of which are also based in LA. SnackNation is already a popular supplier of healthy edible goods for offices around the city. Says Cripe, “It’s really going to be that ‘better for you’ brand that’s going to be relevant for people in LA.”

Snapchat, meanwhile, will provide a QR code (called a Snapcode) for each Cargo box. Users will be able to view the Cargo menu, order, and pay via the Snapchat app.

Cargo is part of what Cripe refers to as the “other space” in consumers’ lives: It’s not home, and it’s not the office or your personal vehicle. But with more people leading on-the-go lives and also opting for ridesharing over their own wheels, the amount of time spent in these types of vehicles is increasing. In fact, the total distance covered from Uber trips over the last five years is greater than a trip around the planet Saturn. Meanwhile, the average citizen no longer needs to own a car to live comfortably in a growing number of cities.

Cargo raised $5.5 million in a “seed preferred financing” round earlier this year. According to Cripe and the company, Cargo will be in over 20,000 ridesharing vehicles by the end of 2018.

While there are no specifics yet, Cripe does note the company’s potential to move beyond the “need-to-have” items and into the “nice-to-have” products. In-car wifi and gaming are two possibilities, in theory, at least. “I think it definitely does go beyond the commerce aspect of the vehicle,” he says.

In other words, there’s a pretty limitless bunch of options in terms of what could eventually fill this “other space.”

How An Obscure Academic Project May Have Just Started A Kitchen Robot Revolution

Imagine it’s 2031 and you’ve sat down for dinner with your family.

It’s middle of the week so tonight’s meal is nothing too ambitious, mac and cheese or fajitas. As is the usual routine, you catch up with the family and share a few laughs until the meal is finally served, at which point everyone loads their plates and starts chowing down on what turns out to be a tasty dinner (the third one this week!).  Soon your youngest – the finicky one – asks for seconds.

Congrats parent, another successful meal, but don’t spend too much time patting yourself on the back because here’s the thing: Neither you nor your significant other spent any time preparing tonight’s dinner.  Instead, tonight’s dinner – and every dinner this week – was prepared in its entirety by a robot, the very same robot who is now in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner and preparing dessert.

Futuristic? Yes. A science fiction movie cliche? Definitely. But the above scenario may also be a very realistic possibility in large part due to an obscure research project involving 32 GoPro adorned home cooks making dinner.

Creating A Technology Big Bang

With any technology that changes the world, there’s almost always a research breakthrough or two that helps unleash innovation. In today’s world of AI and robotics, most experts would agree that one of these technological “big bangs” was a 2012 ImageNet Challenge research team led by the University of Toronto’s Geoff Hinton.

ImageNet is a crowdsourced database of millions of annotated images. The accompanying ImageNet Challenge is an annual contest where teams of researchers in the area of machine vision come together to pit their machine vision algorithms on the ImageNet dataset and against one another to try and achieve the highest degree of accuracy.

Hinton’s 2012 team had what is widely believed to be a breakthrough in AI research by utilizing deep learning techniques to achieve much greater accuracy than before (85%).  Since this breakthrough effort six years ago, there’s been leaps forward each year – today’s ImageNet Challenge teams routinely achieve 95% accuracy, better than most humans –   helping to drive significant progress in all corners of the AI world from autonomous driving to augmented reality to industrial and consumer robotics.

All of which brings us back to the kitchen.

And Now Into the Kitchen (The Epic Kitchen)

Now, a group of research academics is trying to create what is the equivalent of an ImageNet for the kitchen. Called EPIC-KITCHENS, the project is an ambitious effort to capture people performing natural tasks in their home kitchens like cooking, cleaning and doing laundry and then release the resulting millions of annotated images into the wild. The ultimate goal behind EPIC-KITCHENS is to create an open dataset about kitchen-centric objects, behavior, and interactions upon which researchers across the world can then focus their deep-learning algorithms on in the hope of advancing artificial intelligence in the kitchen.

Why the kitchen? According to the study’s lead, Dr. Dima Damen, the kitchen is one of the most complex environments in everyday life for artificial intelligence to master because it involves so many tasks and actions.

EPIC-KITCHENS 2018 TRAILER

“The most challenging type of object interactions tend to be in our kitchen,” said Damen in a phone interview I conducted last month. “We’re doing lots of tasks, on short notice, we’re multitasking. We might be adding something to our meal and moving something around. That makes the kitchen environment the most challenging environment for our types of perception.”

Damen, who is with the University of Bristol in the UK, partnered with researchers at the University of Toronto and Italy’s University of Catania to bring the project to life. The project took about a year to complete and involved a panel of 32 home cooks across ten nationalities in four cities in Europe (United Kingdom) and North America (Canada and US). To capture their activity, each participant mounted a GoPro on their head and went through 1-5 hours of preparing meals, cleaning and whatever else came naturally.

“We gave them a camera, sent them home, and said just record whatever you are doing in your kitchen for 3-5 days,” said Damen.

From there, the participants watched the video and narrated their videos so researchers had an audio track from which to manually annotate the atomized images – 11.5 million in all- captured in the 55 hours of video.

The result is a massive database its creators hope will help researchers in training their AI systems to better understand the kitchen. Like ImageNet, the creators also hope to foster competition with challenges and will track the progress with online leaderboards.

The data itself is something many will find somewhat mundane:

Distribution of actions in kitchen. Source: Epic Kitchens

The above distribution of annotated actions and objects are what you would probably expect: a really long list of things – like vegetables, kitchenware, spices – found in the kitchen. Same for actions. The above distribution breaks down pretty much all the verbs we perform in the kitchen such as put, take, twist and so on.

And that’s the point, at least if you’re a researcher hoping to train an artificial intelligence system. Just as this type of granular data helped ImageNet Challenge teams achieve a 95% accuracy rate with their software, the EPIC KITCHENS team hopes to reach a similar level of accuracy. By helping these systems understand what everyday objects are and how people manipulate them in a series of actions every day to do the basic functions of like in our kitchen like cooking and cleaning, the EPIC-KITCHENS data and what evolves out of it can provide a foundation upon which technologists can eventually create robots that act like humans and perform human-like functions in the kitchen.

The result could be an explosion in innovation in spaces like augmented reality, personalized food identification apps and, yes, cooking robotics. And while a fully-functional Rosie the home cooking robot could be the ultimate end-result of this research a decade from now, chances are we’ll see much more evolutionary improvements between now and then in the form of smarter appliances, more capable virtual assistants and more immersive guided cooking experiences.

And oh yeah: if you’re the type who wants to keep the robots out of the kitchen altogether, don’t worry. One of the biggest challenges with machine understanding of food is that the three-dimensional human comprehension of taste, smell and texture is extremely hard to replicate with machines. Add in the difficulty of AI to understand context and it makes me think that while we may eventually get to cooking robots, they may only be average cooks at best.

The real artists, the chefs – whether home based are on TV – are probably safe from the robot invasion.

Probably.

Tastemade Shows Heading to YouTube TV

When Jay Holzer, the then-head of global production and development for Tastemade spoke at our Smart Kitchen Summit last year, he commented on how food-based content had moved from utility (learning how to make something) to entertainment (enjoying watching something get made).

Now Tastemade, a digital-first creator of lifestyle and food related content, will be entertaining people around the clock as a new, 24 hour linear internet TV channel on YouTube TV. This means that Tastemade programming will run all day, just like traditional networks, as part of the live YouTube TV package.

According to Variety, Tastemade will run some of their re-purposed library content on the YouTube TV and also launch ten new series, including:

  • Origins, which follows chef Erwan Heussaff as he travels around remote Philippine islands to “discover the people, places and ingredients that define his home country.”
  • Weird Food Jobs, which highlights nutty food jobs like “bubble-gum tester.”
  • Just Jen, a studio cooking show starring Tastemade personality Jen Phnomrat.
Tastemade | Now On YouTube TV!

YouTube TV costs $40 a month and includes live TV from major networks such as CBS, FOX and CNN. According to one Wall Street analyst last October, YouTube TV had 200,000 subscribers, and “could hit” as many as 2 million by the end of this year. For comparison, Tastemade’s free YouTube channel currently has more than one million subscribers.

The addition of Tastemade fills a hole in the burgeoning YouTube TV lineup, which does not include food-related channels like Food Network or Travel Channel. So Tastemade will be the only place YouTube TV audiences (however big) can get their cooking fix.

The deal is non-exclusive, so Tastemade can distribute it’s new, linear channel to other OTT or traditional platforms as well. It will also augment Tastemade’s revenue streams, which include its ad-supported YouTube channel as well as content subscriptions that offer a range content access starting at $4.99 a month and up to $49.99 a month.

If Tastemade’s new channel takes off, perhaps we’ll have to invite Holzer back to our 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit to see how entertaining launching a linear TV channel is.

There’s a Secretish Society Online for True Seltzer Diehards

Seltzer: mix it into a cocktail, use it as a booze replacement, or you just drink it because all your friends are doing it. There’s no denying the bubbly beverage’s presence in the market. As a drink category, it’s estimated to be worth $1.8 billion. La Croix, meanwhile, has been called a commercial phenomenon.

But look past the trendsetters and Instagramers and you’ll find seltzer’s true diehards — the members of Now Fizzing, a closed Facebook group devoted to the search for and enjoyment of the seltzer.

The group, whose tagline is “Hot Seltzer News As It Happens,” is reportedly just what you’d think: an online community where the roughly 3,000 members can share product reviews, pictures, tips on how to find rare flavors, and recommendations.

I happen to be a seltzer diehard myself, which is how I heard about the group, but since I’m lame [Or brilliant? – Ed.] and don’t have a Facebook account, there was no way for me to actually join. Fortunately, there are some members who’ve already shared their experience and thoughts with the outside world, including journalist Allee Manning, who interviewed Now Fizzing’s founder, Jon Solomon. According to the interview, Solomon started the group in 2014, after going with friends on a camping trip to a dry campground (no booze). “On paper, [Now Fizzing] sounds crazy,” he said in the interview. “But I think when you’re part of it, you realize that it’s this unexpectedly wonderful, special thing.”

That was a year or so before the whole seltzer bandwagon started really rolling, but Now Fizzing seems less concerned about following trends as it does about finding new flavors and sharing about them. Another group member, Amanda Brennan, explained the group on a podcast by saying, “We share photos of the seltzer we’re drinking, hot tips on where to find unique seltzers.” And by “unique seltzers,” think coffee flavored, hints of Boston Creme Pie, and one that tastes suspiciously like Swedish Fish.

On the same podcast, Brennan also explained the seltzer-specific lingo used by group members. Any product that markets itself as seltzer but has sugar in it is a “snake.” A “ghost” is seltzer without a flavor. And among group members, La Croix is simply known as Leroy, which is probably easier to type than the product’s actual name.

At this point, Now Fizzing is big enough to have its own line of merchandise and hold in-person meetups in places like Brooklyn and Seattle. And Brennan, in the Manning interview, noted the overall group dynamic of Now Fizzing, calling it “fun, supportive, wholesome, safe, pure, positive, friendly, and earnest,” which are not, of late, words you’d associate with either Facebook or a drinking society.

Maybe that’s the point. Food and drink has always been a great unifier of people; there’s no reason that historical trend can’t continue now that we’re all online (if not all on Facebook). Let’s just hope carbonated milk never goes mainstream.

The Next Big Attraction at Amusement Parks Is Foodtech

As with ballparks, food is a crucial part of the entertainment at theme parks, whether it’s sampling Butterbeer at Harry Potter World or Cheese on a Stick at Cedar Point.

As a kind of theme park enthusiast (aka nerd), I’ve eaten my way through many over the years and have always encountered the same problem: when it comes to food, the lines are often as long as the ones for the rides, which seems like a weird problem to have in this day and age of self-service kiosks and mobile payments.

Nowadays, though, consumers are less patient with that problem. Recent research from Omnico notes that 75 percent of U.S. theme park visitors say they “often or occasionally” skip food and beverage at parks because of the lines. Meanwhile, around half of U.S. visitors would quadruple their spending for the sake of convenience that comes with mobile ordering.

With that in mind, here are a few trends to look for should you find yourself searching for your next meal in an amusement park this summer:

Apps are including more dining features.
Last year, Disney rolled out the My Disney Experience app for Disney World Orlando guests. It’s not unlike the Starbucks mobile app: Guests can view menus of participating restaurants (fast-casual ones, at this point), order and pay for food, then head to a specific location to pick up the goods when they’re ready. Disney has also made this feature available for Disneyland Anaheim. So while you’re waiting in that inexplicably long line for Peter Pan’s Flight, you can peruse the park’s culinary offerings and get lunch ordered and ready before the whole family gets hangry.

Universal’s app deserves mention here, too. It’s not quite as robust as Disney in terms of dining (yet), but you can purchase the Universal Dining Plan – Quick Service, in which guests purchase a food package from the app then pick the food up at a designated location in the park. For an adult, that includes one quick-service meal, one snack, and one drink (no booze). You can also book meals with various characters via the app.

The robots are coming.
Actually, the robots are here — at least in certain parks. At Japan’s Dutch-themed Huis Ten Bosch amusement park, operator H.I.S. plans to reduce its human staff from 1,200 to 800 over the next three years. They’ll replace these vacant spots with robots. The goal is to use robots and the Internet of Things to perform a variety of tasks previously done by humans, including food service.

The company already operates a nearby hotel manned almost entirely by robots, including one that makes savory pancakes ; a theme park implementation will probably look similar. “Our goal is to boost the productivity of the service industry,” Chairman and CEO Hideo Sawada said recently. H.I.S. will also test out mobile payments and says it plans to go cashless by the end of the year.

Grocery delivery is on the rise.
Theme parks do their best to keep you locked into their ecosystem, but there are still plenty of folks out there who can’t or won’t fork out for some of the fairly exorbitant food prices. And now they don’t have to. Instacart, Prime Now, and others will now drop groceries off at your hotel room/suite, and reports are surfacing of families saving hundreds of dollars on food by having it dropped off at the front desk.

That’s great news for anyone looking to save, but honestly it wouldn’t be surprising if certain park operators figured out a way to put a stop to this since it could mean losing significant revenue for the parks.

There hasn’t been any indication of that yet, and maybe it’s overly cynical. It does, however, highlight just how many changes they may have to make in order to accommodate consumer demand without sacrificing business needs. At the end of the day, after all, these parks want and need guests wandering contentedly around their world and not at the Albertsons up the street. How about ordering groceries via an app and having a Voldemort robot deliver them? Sign me up for that any day.

Facebook’s New Patent Will Enable It To See Into Your Fridge & Suggest a Recipe

Facebook was issued a new patent today outlining a system that would allow users to access and control networked devices in the home through their mobile app and enable the social network to serve up ads based on the contents of a person’s fridge or other data gathered from inside the home.

The patent, called “Controlling Devices Through Social Media” (US patent #9,967,259), explains a number of scenarios in which Facebook users may access and control networked devices in the home. They also outlined how the could provide recommendations for the user based on data gathered from in-home sensors and cameras, as well as information from the person’s Facebook profile.

One such example has Facebook accessing a camera within a refrigerator and providing a meal recommendation. From the patent:

As an example and not by way of limitation, a refrigerator may include cameras to take pictures of items placed in the refrigerator and upload the images to the cloud, where image recognition may be performed upon the images, and an identification of the items may be provided to the refrigerator. As another example, a refrigerator may retrieve recipes from the cloud based on the items in the refrigerator and user-preference information from the user’s social network.

Facebook’s patent also outlines how it could notify the user when their milk is about to expire or they’re out of eggs. If that isn’t weird or creepy enough, they also outline scenarios where they would send targeted advertising to people within the person’s social graph.

From the patent:

“…as an example and not by way of limitation, a user may purchase a particular brand of hot sauce, and a target group of users may receive a notification based on their affinity for that brand of hot sauce or for hot sauce in general.”

Now, it may seem a bit strange for Facebook to be pushing even further into our lives at a time when many of us (including the government) have a heightened concern about how much information we provide to the social network. But in its defense, the patent was filed back in a simpler time – July 2014 – when many of today’s privacy concerns weren’t as front and center.

It also should be noted that at the time Facebook filed its patent, it had grand designs on making Facebook an IoT platform. However, in 2016 the company decided to shelve Parse, the IoT platform it had spent a few years developing.

All that said, it’s worth keeping an eye on this patent in case Facebook decides to revive its push to connect itself to our physical world.

Video: CNET’s Ashlee Clark Thompson on Her Best Cooking Gadgets

We at The Spoon have long been fans of Ashlee Clark Thompson, Associate Editor at CNet and hilarious twitter poster. (You may have seen her on stage at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit talking about the future of food.)

Like us, Thompson is fascinated by the smart kitchen market. “The kitchen has become the center of the home,” she said. “We’re seeing all these screens pop up everywhere. For me, as a person that loves to cook, that’s exciting. But it’s also a little scary, because I want products that will last.”

Chris Albrecht caught up with Thompson at this year’s Housewares Show Smart Home Pavillion to debrief about said products. Check out the video to see Albrecht and Clark Thompson discuss the best cooking gadgets to invest in, their hesitations about connected products, and how tech can make us better cooks.

CNET at the IHA Smart Talks Theater

Interested in hearing more about the Smart Kitchen Summit? Our first European event is coming up June 11-12th in Dublin, and we’ll be returning to Seattle for our fourth year in October.  

Nathan Myhrvold Has A Patent For a Personalized Food Manufacturing System

Nathan Myhrvold is the definition of modern Renaissance man.

Equal parts mad scientist, gastronomy pioneer and patent troll, the former Microsoft CTO and driving force behind the seminal Modernist Cuisine books is an indisputable polymath that is nothing if not prolific when it comes to exploring new ideas around how to make food.

So, when I happened upon a patent recently issued to Myhrvold called “Quantified-self machines, circuits and interfaces reflexively related to food,” I knew I’d stumbled upon something worth investigating.

Like many patents issued to Elwha LLC (an entity tied closely to Myhrvold’s intellectual property firm Intellectual Ventures, an organization which some people, not completely incorrectly, refer as a patent troll), this one is dense and hard to decipher.  But, the more I looked at it, the more I realized it’s an expansive, potentially important patent (as much as you believe patents are important) that describes a system that collects data about a human’s biomarkers, preferences and behavior and connects to a food manufacturing system to create food based on this data.

In short, Myhrvold has a patent for a personalized food manufacturing system.

If you’re still confused, I don’t blame you. The patent itself is 266 pages long and mostly consists of extremely confusing language about electronic interface systems and semiconductors. Thankfully, the patent had some graphics that helped me decipher what exactly this system is all about.

Such as this one:

The diagram above describes a system that gathers data from a person, including biomarker data as well as health and activity levels, and then can communicate the data to a “food fabricator” or “food ingredient supplier.” The data can also be used to create end-user applications that include subscription services from “kiosk food fabricator networks” or “manufacturers of food fabricators.” Some of the companies that the patent cites as examples of makers of food fabricators include 3D Systems (a 3D printing company that has worked on a food 3D printer), Natural Machines (a 3D food printer company) and other home appliance brands such as Whirlpool, KitchenAid, and Samsung.

If you, like me, are a little confused about what exactly a “kiosk food fabricator network” is, perhaps this diagram from the patent can help:

From what I can tell, the above graphic shows a futuristic kiosk network of vending machines that can manufacture food based on preferences determined by the analysis of the data provided by Myhrvold’s personalized food system.

If that idea isn’t crazy enough, what makes that idea even more intriguing is Myhrvold’s company was issued another patent the same day which describes a vending machine for personalized food creation. The patent, called “Ingestion intelligence acquisition system and method for ingestible material preparation system and method”, includes a graphic of what looks to be a vending machine for personalized food manufacturing:

While this concept of a personalized food vending machine is fascinating, just as fascinating is the names included on this patent such as Chris Young (founder of ChefSteps and coauthor of Modernist Cuisine) and Neal Stephenson, the prolific cyberpunk writer and futurist for Magic Leap.

So, is Myhrvold and his network of inventor friends looking to create a future where food is manufactured for us based on personal data gathered from our own bodies, past behavior, and environmental data?

Maybe.

As I mentioned earlier, the founder of Modernist Cuisine also has a pretty significant business around creating and buying patents for all sorts of interesting new ideas, many of which may never see the light of day. But, given Myhrvold’s pedigree as both a gastronomy pioneer and prolific collector of crazy patents for just about everything, it’s worth at least paying attention to and wondering what exactly type of future the guy behind Modernist Cuisine envisions for our personalized food future.

Smarter CEO Christian Lane Coming To SKS Europe

At the age of 19, Christian Lane became the youngest person to ever pitch for investment on British TV’s Dragons’ Den, on which he won an investment from Dragon Theo Paphitis.

Back then, Lane was pitching a foldable stationary product called Foldio, but nowadays he’s the CEO of a company building products to make the kitchen smarter and more connected.

Lane’s company, Smarter, launched their first product — a WiFi-enabled kettle — back in 2013, and their latest product is a retrofit fridge cam that lets you remotely check what’s in your fridge via mobile phone.

How did Lane build a startup in the connected kitchen? That’s what he’ll tell us at Smart Kitchen Summit Europe on June 12th at the Guinness Storehouse. You can buy your tickets here.

See you in Dublin. 

Byte’s Smart Fridge Is Upstaging the Vending Machine. That’s Great News for Offices

It’s hard to get amped about the food options inside an office building. Unless you work for a Google-like company and get subsidized or free meals, you’re probably stuck with vending machines. And we all know Fig Newtons do not a healthy lunch make.

Byte Foods, founded in 2015 by husband-wife team Lee and Megan Mokri, is trying to introduce a new option to the office food mix. Their company supplies offices with smart fridges full of fresh, healthy food options from local producers, like coffee from Blue Bottle and falafel snack packs from Sinbad Specialty Foods.

To use the fridges, employees simply swipe a credit card and pick what they want. A receipt for each purchase is sent to their email address. Each food item has a disposable RFID tag on the bottom, which Byte supplies to their producers. Before and after the fridge door opens, Byte scans the tag to determine what the employee took, then charges them accordingly. Each fridge also features a screen with nutrition and dietary information as well as prices. “It’s basically a really high quality food court in the office,” Lee Mokri told me over the phone. A food court that knows exactly what kind of kombucha you like.

Byte’s model is full service: they provide the fridge, stock it every day, and take any unsold food away at the end of the day to donate to various shelters. All their corporate clients have to do is pay a monthly service fee. This makes things super convenient for employers who want to provide fresh, healthy food options for their workers, but puts a lot of pressure on the Byte team—if no one wants a ham sandwich, Byte ends up paying for all the leftover ones at the end of the day.

Byte fridges have a screen displaying nutrition facts and prices.

For this reason, Byte relies heavily on data to optimize what they put on offer. “We have pretty robust demand-planning algorithms deciding exactly what we want to put in the fridge every day,” said Mokri. “That’s something that sets us apart from a catering company.” This custom curation smacks of a few other stories we’ve covered on The Spoon, such as Amazon‘s predictive meal ordering and dishq’s AI-powered food recommendations.

Much like Uber, Byte uses dynamic pricing to help push food off the shelves. For example, if a batch of Blue Bottle coffees is about to expire they can discount it to encourage sales. Byte can also hand this power off to their corporate clients, giving them the power to subsidize their employees meals. For example, Tesla, a client, discounts all food in their Byte fridges by 30 percent after 6 p.m., to support their teams burning the midnight oil. Dynamic pricing is currently managed by human employees, but Mokri says they “have a very clear path” for how to automate it.

Byte has also begun licensing their fridges and technology to companies across the country. These partners have access to the Byte dashboard, but can brand the fridges however they like and even fill them with their own food products. Mokri says this is an ideal model for place like hospitals and universities, who have a lot of people to feed but already do their own food production. Basically, their clients are paying for a simplified interface as well as a tool to help track customer food preferences.

The San Rafael-based company isn’t the only one working on improving grab-and-go food options. Chicago’s Farmer’s Fridge and French Foodles are also offering turnkey fridges stocked with freshly prepared meals, and electronics giant Panasonic is even getting in on the action with an IoT-enabled food ordering ecosystem Bento @ Your Office.

This rush to shake up the office dining routine makes sense: the vending market closed 2016 with a seven-year high of $21.6 billion. That means a big opportunity for those players looking to usurp the vending machine. At the same time, there’s a growing consumer demand for healthier food options.

Byte has branched into 500 locations in the San Francisco area and has raised a total of $10 million, according to Mokri. He said that they’re adding about 50 new clients per month. So next time you go to punch in C5 and get a “healthy” snack of Sunchips, you might be able to get something that’s actually healthy, instead.

Video: Grove CEO Gabe Blanchet Has Big Plans for Home Farming

If you’re like me, right now you have a pot of thyme (or rosemary, or basil) clinging to life on your windowsill. No matter how much I water it or how carefully I place it in the sunshine, I cannot keep plants alive—even simple indoor ones like herbs.

This is a huge bummer because, while I love to cook with fresh herbs, they can be quite pricey at the grocery store, tend to wilt in the fridge within days, and aren’t always of the highest quality. But home growing systems like Grove are trying to help those without green thumbs (guilty) transform their kitchens, living rooms, and empty garages into mini indoor farms.

A model of how Grove’s indoor farming systems would function in the home.

Though they’re not the only ones leveraging IoT to make indoor growing kits, Grove is thinking big to bring home farming systems to wide swaths of consumers. In order to get consumers to install growing systems in their house, they’ve got to a) look nice, and b) deliver good, consistent results. Grove has teamed up with major appliance and furniture companies to check both of these boxes: Blanchet and his team will provide home ag software and seed pods, and their partners will create custom indoor farming hardware to match.

Grove showed off their initial hydroponic home farming system at the Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase in 2016. He returned in 2017 and sat down with SKS founder Mike Wolf to talk about the future of small-scale indoor farming and how he’s able to grow 30-40% of his own food, right at home.

Watch the video and then head over here to check out more videos from Smart Kitchen Summits of yore.

Got a food tech startup idea of your own? Apply for our Startup Showcase for SKS Europe, June 11-12th in Dublin, Ireland.