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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Internet of Food

Flatev Extends Expert Tortilla Making to the Masses

As food cultures blend into a culinary melting pot, staples such as savory tortillas have become a frequent fixture in homes, regardless of their heritage. A $4 billion business, tortillas are generally purchased at a supermarket, bakery or ethnic grocer as most home cooks lack the skill and equipment to create warm, soft pillows of corn or flour flatbread.

Flatev, a Startup Showcase finalist at the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit, believes it has the solution that can make anyone an expert tortilla maker. With its U.S. office based in Brooklyn, the company raised more than $136,000 on Kickstarter to bring its tortilla-making machine, known as an artisanal bakery, to life. Flatev (which means flatbread evolution) uses single-serving, pre-packaged dough to make individual tortillas. The dough is put into a compartment on the front of the appliance; a setting for doneness is selected and the corn or flour tortilla is created. The machine also is capable of making roti and cookies.

According to the company’s Kickstarter page, there were two prototypes and a proof of concept machine built before the final version in 2016. Based on rewards offered to backers, the Kickstarter retail price was set at $437 and is expected to ship in 2018. The company is accepting reservations from new customers with no final retail price listed. However, Flatev says the final price will fall between $399 and $599. The dough packages are expected to retail at 79 cents each.

Company founder, CEO and Chairman Carlos Ruiz sees a place in the market for Flatev as consumers strive to eat healthier without compromising convenience and taste.  “There are very few bakery options that recreate successfully the homemade flavor and taste of authentic ethnic flatbreads without compromises,” says Ruiz. “Busy and time challenged people make compromises in quality, freshness, and nutrition every day, especially at work or away from home.”

Ruiz adds that the Flaetv needs to be thought more of a home, artisanal bakery than just a machine that makes tortillas. “Flatev is more than a tortilla maker. Currently our Artisanal Baking System can bake Flatev tortillas, specialty cookies and crepe with different flavors. Our system is designed to add more varieties and create new doughs with future ingredient trends as the market dictates.”

As with some other new, tech-based kitchen appliances, Flatev uses a closed system which means customers cannot create their own dough to make their own baked goods. Ruiz says the packaging and recipe are built to “achieve the quality, safety and shelf life desired. This implicates that we have to control the amounts of every ingredient, including the water quality (hardness, temperature, etc.).”

When Flatev hits the market, it will not only fulfill orders to Kickstarter backers and those who reserve units. The intent is to also tackle the B2B space in the form of hospitality customers. The thought of fresh tortillas at a typical hotel breakfast buffet could be enough to have guests set their alarms to avoid missing out.

Josephine Looks To Change Cottage Food Laws In Effort To Expand Home Cooking Marketplace

Today’s a big day for Josephine, the startup behind the ‘cottage food’ sharing platform and marketplace that enable home cooks to sell food to their neighbors.

That’s because today is the day a bill is being considered by the Health Committee of the California state legislature called the 2017 CA Homemade Food Operations Act (edit: the bills name was changed to “AB 626—The 2017 Homemade Food Act” in the form it went before the committee). The bill, which Josephine management helped craft and introduce, would expand California’s current cottage food law to allow aspiring home-based food entrepreneurs to sell home cooked meals to neighbors.

(Ed Update: The bill passed out of assembly on April 25th. You can read our story here). 

That’s naturally of interest to Josephine, which has built a platform which can more or less be described as an “Uber for cottage food” (although it should be noted the company resists the negative connotations associated with platforms like Uber). The problem for Josephine, which is based in Oakland, is that the sale of home cooked meals to neighbors is not allowed under current California law. As a result, about a year ago home cooks using Josephine received cease and desist letters, which eventually led the company to shutting down operations in the east Bay area.

The company, which has investments of about $2 million from Kapor Capital and angel investors, believes home cooks with the proper licensing should be able to sell food to their neighbors. And why not? Just as how Uber, Airbnb and other sharing economy platforms gave entrepreneurial folks a marketplace to rent their underutilized assets – whether that be a car, apartment or a person’s own time and labor – it’s logical that there’d also be demand to do so with home cooked food. In fact, it would be hard to argue there isn’t a large potential market of people on both sides of the equation – those who can cook and need to make some extra money, and those who like to eat – to make a marketplace like Josephine successful in the long run.

I caught up with Josephine cofounder Matt Jorgensen to ask him about Josephine’s efforts to change California’s cottage food law and also get a little backstory about Josephine.
You can keep up with the status of Josephine’s efforts and the California Homemade Food Operations Act at their blog.

When was Josephine forced to halt operations?

Jorgensen: In April of 2016, several of our cooks were served Cease and Desist warnings from local health regulators, which lead us to halt operations in the East Bay. This ultimately led to our good faith collaborations with State health regulatory coalitions in CA

With the Homemade Food Operations Act (Editor Note: Bill name was changed to “The 2017 Homemade Food Act:), when is a vote expected on this bill?

First the Bill must pass through Health Committee next Tuesday April 25th, and we expect the legislature to vote at some point in the early summer.

How does California compare to other states in terms of legality around cottage food as a business?

Jorgensen: California is essentially on par with the 30+ states that have passed Cottage Food laws.

Like many states, certain California cooks with the access and means can apply for cottage food permits as hobbyists, but the law doesn’t allow for the sale of most financially viable/ culturally relevant products… instead it’s focused on certain shelf-stable foods (jams, granolas etc). So we haven’t seen CA yet push beyond others in terms of the available food types. Several states go further, with Wyoming’s “Food Freedom” law being the most open.

Do you see this bill as the first in a push towards national rolllout? (And will other states follow suit)?

Jorgensen: We’re taking a different advocacy approach in each state– while we’re supporting Garcia’s legislation in CA, we’re actually looking at various administrative paths in other states. In Portland for example, we have strong support letter from the Mayor for a proposed pilot program. In other states like Wyoming the low-risk behaviors we are proposing are already legal.

How does Josephine business work? Is it similar to other sharing economy services that take a % of the overall bill? Charge a flat service fee?

Jorgensen: There’s no cost to set up a cook account or post meals. For each meal cooks serve, they keep 90% of your total sales and 10% of your sales will go toward covering credit card fees and the cost of our services. We also partner with values aligned non-profits for no cost.

How does Josephine find new cooks?

Jorgensen: Mostly through word of mouth and through offline communities. Many cooks are already partaking in the types of activities we support before choosing to partner with Josephine.

How does Josephine ensure people are going to be quality cooks? I assume getting a “cottage cook” license (as permitted by the bill) would be one step. But are there other things you do?

All cooks go through a vetting process from the masters of public health on our team and have access to our knowledge base before posting their first meal. We work with them to ensure a quality first experience, but all meals are also reviewed by customers (built-in accountability).

Is Josephine the only cottage cooking platform app, and if so why hasn’t this market taken off (is it legal restrictions, or something more as well).

Jorgensen: Some other companies have tried to make this business work, but we believe we are still in the early days of building the cook confidence and public trust necessary for this business to succeed.

How big is Josephine and what is your funding?

Jorgensen: We have a few hundred cooks across the country, a staff of 10 in Oakland, CA, and funding from a handful of different impact, angel, and venture capital investors. We’ve raised a little over $2m so far from angel and impact investors including Kapor Capital.

Technology Brings Farm Fresh Goodness to Home Gardens

While “windowsill to table” hasn’t exactly caught on with the vast realm of food bloggers and foodies, one of the newest parts of the tech-inspired food revolution involves regular, everyday city folk becoming farmers. Elements of this movement include indoor gardening, vertical gardening and turning your small deck or rooftop into a lush patch of fertile land that yields everything from arugula to Green Zebra Tomatoes.

Urban farming has a place for everyone. Social entrepreneurs like Kimbal Musk, with urban farm-accelerator Square Roots, and Irving Fain, with his IoT-driven Bowery Farming, are jumping into this space. They are focused on testing aquaponics ecosystems which use LED grow lights and less water by using smaller spaces than conventional methods. These efforts produce top-quality veggies sold to restaurants and directly to consumers. For the home gardener, choices include all-in-one IoT-based indoor growing kits from companies such as Aerogarden and tower-garden setups from startup NutriTower.

On the more DIY side of things, consumers that want fresh herbs and greens can dust off an old aquarium. You can start with the purchase of an aquaponics kit like those from Aquasprouts or Grove, or by simply mail ordering some non-GMO seeds and taking an old cottage cheese container from the trash. From there you add dirt and water to your seeds and soon you can watch your microgreens take bloom. If you encounter a stumble along the way, there are countless YouTube videos to help you along. More sophisticated help is available with some smart gardening assistants such as Growerbot to keep track of your watering and soil conditions.

As the space matures, urban and indoor farming are likely to have different trajectories. It is unlikely consumers will move from growing herbs and microgreens indoors to buying a 100-acre farm in Iowa. It also is a longshot that hipster gardeners will buy vacant buildings and convert them the huge vertical farms with robotic water and harvesting devices. For this crowd, it’s more about crowing over those fresh sorrel greens placed on a salad for the next dinner party.

For social entrepreneurs, the endgame is different. Most visionaries in this space come from other areas (primarily technology) and bring science, fresh ideas and a sense of community to their projects. But these techfarmers also bring a keen sense of business and realize their sustainability will need to include some revenue-generating ideas. Some, such as the Square Roots collective, offer home or office delivery of greens, while Smallhold builds indoor farms onsite for restaurants to provide chefs with ultra-fresh mushrooms.

While some supermarkets may be content to hope IoT-indoor farming fizzles out, the German chain Metro refuses to bury its head in the sand. In Berlin, the company houses an Infarm installation at the end of one of its grocery aisles. And it’s not just for show; fresh greens and herbs from Infarm are for sale in the store.

The biggest threat urban and indoor farming poses is to the national meal kit business. One of the mantras for this new breed of growers is to focus on consumers and restaurant in a 10-mile radius. Serving a local community is part of the marketing message from entrepreneurs in urban farming. The vertical move, adding other local food artisans to their retail packages, could result in the sort of immediacy which the Blue Aprons and Hello Fresh cannot match—at least for now.

Podcast: Creating A Common Language For The Internet of Food

A traumatic early experience as a young medical intern set Dr. Matthew Lange on a career course to change the way the world thinks about nutrition. He realized early on that medical community had it backward: by focusing on treatment of people sick from years of poor eating habits rather than helping people to better understand nutrition and make food choices over the course of a lifetime, they were never going to solve the growing problem of obesity and diet-related health concerns.

Since these early days, Dr. Lange has spent his career at the intersection of food, nutrition, and information. His latest project is helping to create a common language for the food industry to describe information that new and ever better technology can ow extract from the food itself. Lange and other believe that a common language describing food that can then be utilized by these emerging technologies will help usher in new ways to create, handle, distribute, cook and consume food.

The end result if Lange achieves his vision? Healthier outcomes for people equipped with better information about their food.

After you check out the podcast, you can find out more about Lange and IC-FOODS here.

Maine’s Forager the Latest to Use Tech as a Farm-to-Table Solution

Much like the zeitgeist term “Internet of Things, the use of the popular slogan “farm to table” is confusing marketing speak widely subject to personal interpretation. The farm part is fairly easy to understand, but table conjures up the image of local tomato grower driving up to your home and placing a pound of heirlooms on your kitchen counter. If only that were the case. Yes, it’s a “Portlandia” skit come to life.

In broad brush strokes, the world of farm-to-table is two businesses—tech-driven B2B logistics platforms that connect farms to retailers and restaurants, and the far-more-challenging niche world of home delivery of farm-fresh produce.

Speaking of Portland—the one in the Northeast part of the U.S.—a new enterprise called Forager is an app-based ecosystem that offers a farm-to-table solution connecting local growers to retailers, restaurants and market vendors. Forager allows commercial buyers of fresh farm goods to see what local farmers are growing and have in stock, and then place orders accordingly. Forager CEO David Stone says the system eliminates what he calls a “manual, paper intensive, error-prone process.”

“More and more people are putting local food on their plates,” Stone told a local Portland TV station. “[The farm-to-table movement] is growing really fast, but the technology hasn’t really focused on it yet.”

Stone’s goal is to make Forager a nationwide platform, but in its early days the technology is being utilized by farmers in Maine and New Hampshire. His immediate goal is to get the technology in the hands of growers throughout New England and upstate New York.

B2B farm-to-table solutions abound focusing on the part of the value chain that put fresh goods into the hands of resellers. Pointing to the glut of innovators looking at this growing part of the food tech industry, the 2017 Food + City Challenge featured such F-2-T solutions providers as Bucketload, Farm Fare, and Origintrail. There also are plenty of tech newcomers to support this new-ish-IoT supply chain. Companies such as Fresh Surety provide technology that calibrates freshness of goods as they travel from grower to marketplace.

A few daring entrepreneurs have attempted to tackle the business of delivering those farm-fresh goodies to consumers—essentially a specialized grocery delivery service. Any of the countless supermarket-to-home services will deliver a bunch of celery or a pound of oranges, but those selections hinge on the untrained eye of your average Instacart employee. For field-to-home goodness, subscription-based startups such as New York’s Farm to People and Texas-based Farmhouse Delivery have heavily curated weekly services that bring seasonal produce to your door.

Cost is the significant issue for bringing that ear of corn picked that morning directly to your kitchen. With low margins and an elusive target market, companies such as Farmhouse Delivery charge a one-time membership fee and weekly or bi-weekly service of a medium bushel (five-seven items) for $27.00 or a large bushel (nine-11 items) for $39.99. For better margins and a higher per-customer order, Farmhouse also delivers prepared foods, meat, poultry and dairy items. The target for such services is the subset of families who want to eat healthy and have the resources to buy local and organic without a weekly trip to the farmers market.

At the other end of the farm-to-retail-to-table spectrum is a potentially large and socially responsible opportunity, but one that is far less sexy. Solutions for getting fresh food to underserved “food deserts” attracts neither visionaries nor startup capital, leaving such programs as the St. Louis Metro Market, a non-profit that converts city buses into mobile farmers markets, as a placeholder for future social entrepreneurs.

Panasonic Shows Off Smart Kitchen Game Changers at SXSW 2017

No sooner has the memory of Panasonic’s smart kitchen display at CES been filed away under future dreams, we come to discover a group of new food tech innovations at SXSW the Japanese company calls “Game Change Catapult.” The goal of this incubator is for Panasonic to showcase a variety of ideas in various stages of evolution.

Housed inside a popular Austin restaurant a few blocks from the convention center, the series of products filled two rooms. While some of the cool, new IoT-based offerings aid in laundry work and healthy sleep, the majority were focused on food-related use cases. The food technology concepts on display are far from finished products that are commercially available in the U.S. There were a handful that are actually works in progress with their creators/founders present to actively seek feedback and distribution partners.

The foodtech Game Changers were:

CaloRieco—A dietary management that uses infrared technology to analyze the nutritional components of any given food. The goal of the product is to calculate and log an individual’s food intake and offer recommendations and recipes for healthy eating.

DeliSofter-A pressure cooker-like appliance that softens food for those with eating disorders involving swallowing and chewing. The technology allows the device to soften food without losing its look and nutritional value.

The DeliSofter food softener (Image Credit: Panasonic)

The Ferment-A true IoT device that ferments food in a sous vide-like appliance. Along with fermentation kits offered with the device, an app is used to find ingredients and manage the fermentation process. They also intend to form a community of like-minded fermenters to share recipes.

The Ferment (Image credit: Panasonic)

Sake Cooler-The device not only cools Japanese Sake to the ideal temperature, once the bottle is inserted. It provides the consumer with details about the brewery. Suggestions for food pairings are given and a log is kept of a user’s sake-drinking habits.

The Sake Cooler (Image Credit: Panasonic)

Bento @ Your Office-A somewhat convoluted IoT-based ecosystem that facilitates easy food ordering for offices. The system includes a smart lock for the office fridge alongside an ordering and payment system. The system can log an individual’s menu history and manage dietary suggestions. The idea could have merit if it were offered to food delivery companies like GrubHub who can have their own temperature-controlled “lockers” on site at businesses for regular customers.

These five Game Changers are powerful ideations that represent Panasonic’s future view of the smart kitchen. The Ferment taps into Japanese foodies who have a growing interest in fermentation, but the founders have ambitions to bring the product to U.S. consumers wanting to ferment (or pickle) vegetables or brew kombucha.

Some of the products, such as the sake cooler, on display are closer to reaching the mass market.  Others have an initial goal of penetrating the Japanese market before going global. As with any vibrant displays of cool, new ideas, Panasonic hopes to spark interest in partners who can assist in taking their vision to the next level with new applications of their technology and broader distribution to consumers around the globe.

Vitamix’s Ascent Series Is Focused on Using IoT to Create Memorable Kitchen Experiences

As the premier name in high-performance kitchen blenders, Cleveland-based Vitamix has consistently shown its ability to stay close to and understand its customer base. The company was among the first to use television infomercials to illustrate its benefits. Much of Vitamix’s brand persona is linked to healthy lifestyles as demonstrated in their series of raw, vegan cookbooks.

Working with Vancouver, Wash.,-based Perfect Company, Vitamix is using IoT to strengthening its appeal to millennials and cooks who want to use the latest technology to up their culinary games. The Vitamix Ascent Series, which uses its partner’s wireless technology embedded in its new smart containers, allows the blender to read the container and automatically adjust program settings and maximum blending times. The Ascent Series blenders will not power on if the container isn’t sitting properly on the motor base.

The Ascent Series of blenders comes on the heels of the Vitamix Perfect Blend Smart Scale & Recipe App, its first collaboration with Perfect Company, announced in October 2016. The app allows users to select a recipe and tailor it to fit their needs based on portion size and nutritional needs.  In the new Ascent Series, the lid plug doubles as a measuring cup for additional convenience.

Each model in the Ascent Series includes a 64-ounce smart container with optional attachments that include 20-ounce cup and an 8-ounce bowl, including lids suitable for blending and serving, taking along or storing.

According to Tennant, the partnership between Vitamix and Perfect Company is in its early stages. “We’ve only just begun to imagine the possibilities for our Ascent Series machines and how they will continue to elevate the blending experience,” he says. “Look for new versions of the app in the future that incorporate Ascent Series machines, including our upcoming additional containers through which we can optimize the finished recipe by recognizing the container size and the amount of ingredients to create a custom blend program.”

Aside from their relationship with Vitamix, Perfect Company sells the Perfect Kitchen® PRO Smart Scale and App System, a Bluetooth-connected scale that works with apps for baking, blending and making cocktails.

As smart kitchen ecosystems go, the Vitamix Ascent Series offers a solid experience for cooks using its powerful blenders to make a variety of dishes from soups and smoothies to frozen desserts. As with any IoT-based system, some key questions will determine what level of holistic impact Vitamix will make on the kitchen of the future.

For example, how extensible is wireless connectivity between the blender and its containers? Is the IoT system based on a Bluetooth protocol or an open system that may allow other accessory companies to produce companion products? Are there plans down the road to allow Vitamix to wirelessly connect to other appliances or part of a smart home system? Imagine waking up in the morning and telling your Amazon Echo, “Alexa, make me a smoothie.”

Whatever direction Vitamix goes in, those decisions, the company says, will be based on the feedback it gets from its users. “The home cook will tell us what that invention should be,” adds Tennant. “The product that home cook is looking for may be a network of key tools in the kitchen that sequence the Thanksgiving dinner or the family heirloom cake recipe. We believe the ambitious home cook, young and old, is looking for ways to work smarter, not harder. Connected products have the chance to create those experiences.”

Chatbots Utilize Advanced Technology to Bring Instant Grub Gratification

Restaurants, supermarkets and even TV food networks are taking the concept of multichannel marketing to new heights. Using technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), companies ranging from Food Network, Whole Foods, Pizza Hut to Wingstop are using social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook Messenger to connect with their customers.

Chatbots, an application that uses AI and NLP to fuel conversations between consumers and brands, attempt to replicate human-to-human interaction. This is done by offering the hungry masses access to recipes, cooking tips and even ordering of prepared food. NLP and AI translate the meaning of a user’s request and connect to a database of possible responses, or in the case of a food order, links to a provider’s ordering system. In theory, chatbot applications are “learning systems” which get smarter with each successive interaction between customer and brand. Over time, the application should be able to predict a user’s preferences to create an even more valuable experience. “I see you like vegan recipes,” the chatbot from your grocery store will suggest. “I have a new way to sprout chickpeas you might like.”

Chatbot are aimed at impatient millennials who are always on the hunt for instant gratification. Whether it’s ordering a pizza, or looking for ideas on how to create quick meals, connecting instantly through social media is a way for incumbent grocery and fast food chains to become more accessible and relevant to this younger target audience. Executed properly, chatbots have synergy with other marketing channels — television, internet video, and web-based ads. What used to be called omnichannel marketing takes on a new meaning when strong channels work in harmony to deliver measurable outcomes.

“We have very socially minded millennial customers,” Wingstop Chief Marketing Officer Flynn Dekker told Fortune in a June 2016 interview. He said today’s consumers are a more impatient society that doesn’t want to have to wait for their food. “We all want to cut the line. This technology allows people to cut the line,” he added.

“Consumers are looking for fast and easy ways to find recipes, and chat bots are just that—fast, and very easy to use,” Liesel Kipp, vice president of product management for Scripps Networks Interactive, the parent company of Food Network, told [a]listdaily in a Dec. 2016 interview. “Bots are another great way for us to deliver on the promise of Food Network being our user’s best friend in food.”

Austin-based Conversable has built the chatbots for Whole Foods, Wingstop, Viacom, Pizza Hut, and Victoria’s Secret. In a guest post with Venture Beat, co-founder Ben Lamm, provides some advice for companies looking at chatbots as a new channel to add to their marketing arsenal.

Answering a key question regarding what a client should look for as successful outcomes for deploying a chatbot, Lamm says, “Data, data, and more data. Once you’re live, you can collect invaluable data about the questions your customers ask, the features they want to see next, and so much more about their needs as they evolve over time.”

“Succeeding with bots is not rocket science,” adds Lamm, “A little common sense, a walk-before-you-run approach and some basic communication can get you from theory to production in less time, at dramatically lower costs, with tangible results to show for it that you can continue to build on and expand into more AI-driven experiences over time. That’s the value proposition bots were supposed to have all along, and it’s there for the taking if you have the discipline to capture it one step at a time with the right conversational intelligence behind it.”

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Full Transcript: Creating A Food Data Layer With Edamam’s Victor Penev

 

I recently caught up with Victor Penev, CEO of Edemam, about his company’s effort to create a data layer for the Internet of Food. You can hear that conversation on the Smart Kitchen Show podcast here, or you can read the full transcript of the conversation below. The conversation has been edited slightly for readability.  

Michael Wolf: How are you doing, Victor?

Victor Penev: I’m doing very well. Good to be here, Michael.

Michael Wolf: Now you started your company back in 2011, and you’re one of the early companies I think really to go after this idea of trying to organize food data. Tell us about the original concept for Edamam.

Victor Penev: So the original concept actually started a little bit before 2011. I’ll give you just a little bit about my personal history. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I had a good exit at my last company. We built the largest Internet company in Bulgaria and I had taken a year off and I was looking to do something new. Eventually because I’m a passionate cook, and I cook every day in my life, I decided I’m going to do something at the cross section of food and technology.

I started looking around the space and very quickly came across one of the biggest problems I think that’s related to food is that people even looking 50, 100 years from now will still want to know what’s in their food and how it impacts their health and wellbeing. What I realized is that the information about food is not that readily available. It’s oftentimes contradictory, inaccurate, and so on and so forth. We decided we’re going to try and organize the world’s food knowledge and give it back to people, so they can make smarter food choices and live healthier and happier lives. That was kind of the original idea. Then that was probably 2010.

Then we looked at various technologies of how to approach it and eventually ended up with semantic technology. There was a very simple hypothesis. Semantic technology is one of those things that fail quite often. People try to boil the ocean with it, but we thought that food is a fairly contained domain without too much spillover what an ontology can do, so that semantic technology can actually work in the food space. I spent some of my own time and money before launching another one formally in building a little bit of technology just to make sure that semantic would work.

Officially I think I called it October 2011, but somewhere around that date, we launched the company. We initially started as a B2C company and now after a couple of years, we switched to a B2B model.

Michael Wolf: In those early days of being a B2C company, you guys not have any success. You guys garnered hundreds of thousands of downloads through your application. Talk a little bit about those days and why you switched to be a B2B company?

Victor Penev: It’s a very simple business decision, so initially we thought we’ll organize high-quality recipes. We’ll take them for all kinds of nutrition and calories. We’re just going to provide smart suggestions for what to eat and maybe even meal plans on a weekly basis, and so on and so forth. We did have about 800,000 folks that installed our app, both on iOS and Android. What we found out after a couple of years is that as we tried to create paid product that consumers will be paying for, there were very few takers. We realized consumers just take back anything that’s related to food in terms of data to be free, so we couldn’t figure it out. A few hundred thousand users don’t have enough of people to create advertising-supported model, and I didn’t personally believe in advertising-supported model.

That was the time when we realized, “Okay, we got to do something different.”

Then just at that exact time, a few catering companies started coming to us and said, “Can you do the nutrition for our recipes?”

Then we said, “Sure! We’ll charge you $20 a recipe.”

They said, “Okay.”

Then we looked at ourselves and said, “Okay, well somebody is willing to pay for what we have,” so we re-productized everything and launched as a B2B player. That’s what happened. That was probably end of 2013, beginning of 2014, and since then we’ve been doing a B2B model. We went through API, custom implementations of the API, as well as data licensing.

Michael Wolf: I want to get into that and talk a little bit about your customers and how that’s kind of grown overtime, but talk a little bit about this idea of building an ontology of food using semantic web and association to create this database. What was the goal there and what does that mean? Was there a lot of work early on to kind of create the categories in trying to figure out where to put things?

Victor Penev: The hard work is not actually building the ontology. Like I said, the food space is relatively self-contained and fairly easy and straightforward to organize. I think a lot of the difficulty around organizing data around food is that it’s fuzzy. It’s not well structured. It’s not like physics, or chemistry, or any other hard subject that you have taxonomy and you have ways of organizing and so on and so forth.

I mean food has been around since humanity existed, so people talk about food in all kinds of different ways. They have a lot of implied meanings. There’s a lot of cultural background around it. The difficulty around structuring food data is not just the ontology itself, but actually the layering and what we build a natural language understanding on top of it. The ability to capture any data in terms of what people say about food and then transform it into something that’s quantifiable ‑ nutrition in our case.

We went with semantics because we were looking 10, 20 years down the road to be able to provide smart suggestions to people what they should be eating that necessarily imply influencing. We want to be able to know things about the person, maybe they’re allergic to something, if they’re on a diet, if they have a heart condition, but also their biochemistry. They are like sensors that take real-time blood samples, what have you, and also know what their goals are in terms of fitness and health and start inferring from all the structure that we have, what will be the best meal for them to eat. That process is endless.

I mean new data can be added constantly. I think there’s a big new field coming on board, which is the microbiome, which will be probably in the next 10 years change drastically the notion of how we should be eating. Obviously, there are sensors that are trying to constantly measure what’s in your blood and that’s a new thing that will probably hit the market again in the next 10 years.

Our goal was to organize and structure all these data in a way that can do meaningful suggestions to people what they should eat and that required inferencing, that’s why semantic technology.

Michael Wolf: And over time, you accumulated a huge database. I think you said you have a database of about 1.7 million recipes and you’re working with companies like the New York Times, Epicurious. Talk about how you provide that information and then how it’s used by these companies.

Victor Penev: that’s one of our major use cases is companies that have lots of recipes. The New York Times and Epicurious are great clients, but we do the same thing also for catering companies, for restaurants, anyone that has a lot of recipes that need nutritional analysis. We really replace the human nutritionists so to speak because that’s the alternative for most of those companies. For some of them, it’s just not affordable like if you’re Epicurious, you have 300,000 or 400,000 recipes. Even hiring an army of nutritionists, it becomes very expensive and obviously a no-go proposition.

The way we work with all those companies is very simple. It’s an API integration based on their recipe in the format they have it. We process it on our end. We do the analysis. It takes less than 400 milliseconds per recipe to get analyzed and it’s not just cooking up ingredients to nutrients. We also take into account techniques such as what happens to the food if it’s fried, or marinated, or baked in salt, and so on and so forth, and we return back the data.

The data that we return to them has up to 70 different nutrients. It’s automatically tagged for about 40 most popular diets, so all the allergens, anything that is for example low-sodium, low-sugar, paleo, vegan, and so on and so forth, I mean any diet that you can imagine that has been the popular culture, we tag the recipes for.

We just return this data to them, and then after that they decide whether to display the data to the end-consumer. Some of those companies use it to improve their searchability and also for SEO purposes because that’s metadata that is very relevant to the content they have, so that’s how we work with them.

Michael Wolf: And so, when you look at the evolution of the connected kitchen, you guys have started to look at that space. Increasingly companies who were adding connectivity also were trying to add value on top of that. How would you envision yourself possibly working with a company that is making a device for the consumer and then the consumer wants to understand what they’re reading from the nutrients and health perspective?

Victor Penev: I mean there’s a couple of major use cases here. Again we’re coming from the perspective that people want to know what’s in their food and how that will impact their health and wellbeing, there are a couple of things that people can do. One is obviously find what they should be cooking, and that’s where our database of 1.7 million recipes comes in. They’re all nutritionally tagged and analyzed. You might be sitting in front of your smart fridge and a touchscreen or you might be talking to a virtual assistant that’s part Alexa or Cortana or whatever it is, and you might be saying, “Hey, I have broccoli in my fridge.”

We can actually know that you have broccoli in your fridge if the fridge is smart enough.

“I’m diabetic, and my husband is on a paleo diet, and my kids are allergic to peanuts. What can I do?”

We can suggest very high-quality meals that you can cook, and then from that point on, there is transactional capability to create a shopping list. They might be kind of what you mentioned earlier about the ability about guided cooking, so that particular aspect has a set of video instructions that take you through the cooking process, and so on and so forth. That is one use case.

The other use case, which probably is even simpler and more prevalent, would be people would be just cooking things and then finding out what’s in their food. It’s surprising to me that in this day and age, the majority of meals that people eat are home-cooked meals and there is no way for them to figure out the nutrition of those meals. Maybe you read a box of cereal and maybe you know what’s in a cup of milk but if you do anything a little bit more complicated, you start to track actually what you’re eating. You got to have to be very, very precise, take a lot of time doing it or kind of give up. That’s where we come in.

You can just in natural language speak, “This is what’s in that recipe and this is what I did with it,” and within a second, we will return the nutrition.

We can tell you, “Okay, well the [unintelligible 0:14:03] that you did is actually 700 calories per serving and it’s got that much salt and that much fat.” Then you can decide whether next time you’re going to cook it or modify the recipe, or maybe serve less of it, and so on and so forth.

Michael Wolf: This seems like the perfect Alexa Skill [laughter] I hear you talk about that. Have you guys talked about either through your partner or kind of have been the backend for an Alexa Skill that I can ask in making this, I have these ingredients, what is the calorie count?

Victor Penev: Yeah. I mean we’ve talked to Alexa from day 1 ever since Alexa was launched. Our challenge there was that we never figured out a business model, much like with the B2C space Alexa is a platform that says build an app and that app can be used by our consumers except there is no transaction. We don’t get paid by the consumers to do that and we know the B2C companies. We couldn’t figure out the business model on Alexa, but that is top of our minds.

We’re building for our nutrition research, which is a tool we sell to dieticians and nutritionists and restaurants, which leverages natural language. We are building voice recognition capabilities into mobile devices, and eventually we want to do in the kitchen as well. I will want to do it in every room actually, but we have to figure out the business model. In addition to Alexa, I know Microsoft is working on Cortana and they are pushing very hard in that direction.

If we figure out a way for a business to use our capability or somebody to sponsor an app that is voice-powered app for the Echo device or any other device that any company is putting out there that is powered by voice recognition, we’ll very quickly build it. It is very easy because we’ve done all the natural language, understanding the work upfront, and so for us, it’s just hooking up the voice recognition to that.

Michael Wolf: Couldn’t you basically build a white label skill that you then go to appliance company X or CPG Company Y said, “This is just you plug in. Here’s your skill. You put your skin on it, Maybe you add a few kind of cast components and then they create their own Alexa Skill with all this nutritional information?

Victor Penev: That’s a wonderful idea. The only thing I would correct with the idea is that I personally want to have the appliance manufacturer or the retailer to come to us and say, “We’ll pay for that for you to build that skill,” and then we’ll build the skill.

We scrapped the startup and we try not to put resources against something that is not going to have guaranteed revenue. That is the only thing, but I can definitely see ourselves working with Whirlpool, or Samsung, or Bosch, or any of those companies and be able to power that particular skill for them.

Michael Wolf: It’s still so hard to figure out what is the nutrition of this thing I’m making every night, and then you start to throw in all this different branch predictions. I’m going to fry it, I’m going to put it in an oven, I’m going to put olive oil on it. I mean there’s just so many and if you guys have the data, I mean I think we’re going to get to the point where consumers can access that information in a fairly quick labor. We’re not there yet, so it takes companies like you in combination with the consumer-facing brands whether that’s a hardware supplier, or apps, or whatever to do that.

Victor Penev: Uh-huh.

Michael Wolf: I definitely am in line with you. I think that’s going to happen. I think most consumers will want that.

Victor Penev: Absolutely, I think so, too. To my mind, that’s not a question of if but when and whether 2017 is going to be the year or we’re going to have to wait another year. That is the big question I think.

Michael Wolf: You mentioned a little bit about sensors and being able to kind of detect. Have you been observing what’s going on in that space? I think it’s an interesting space. We had a company called Nima at our event that does gluten sensing. I saw at CS this year finally the company is making the SCIO, which is making basically an infrared food scanner, which there’s been a lot of debate whether or not you can a low-cost infrared food scanner like the kind they’re doing. It’s usually that will be an interesting area as well. Have you guys looked into that that space?

Victor Penev: We looked into that space. I think like many other space in that area, that is still very early stages and it’s evolving. The challenge for all those companies, they serve a particular use case. If you are checking for gluten, there is a 0.8 percent of probes that have celiac disease. That’s a godsend product for you. The problem with most of those solutions is that they’re not serving the general public because to serve the general public, you have to do full chemical analysis of the food. You have to be able to say not just the content of gluten or if there is like a pathogen in it, but also to tell how much fat, or how much carbs and sugar, and how much vitamin A.

Right now, this has been done in chemical analysis labs and the largest one in Wisconsin is 1 million square foot, so it’s a lot of equipment that you have to fit essentially into a small device. Is that going to happen? I think so. It’s just going to take time to kind of get this million-square foot fitted into devices ‑

Michael Wolf: In your pocket?

Victor Penev: In your pocket, yeah, in your hand, or something like that [laughter]. I think that will happen. The other thing that’s interesting about sensors and I think that’s actually more evolved is it probably requires a lot more regulation and idea of program whatnot is those kinds of implantable sensors in the human body and/or stickers that constantly take blood samples in real-time, and so they track your biochemistry. To an extent, it’s not even that important what you eat; it’s important how what you eat impacts your body and your own blood chemistry.

It’s important to know how it impacts what’s in your food, so that you can make informed decisions whether you’re going to eat that or not eat it, but once you’ve eaten it, it’s interesting to understand how that impacts your blood chemistry and what corrective action you want to take if you need to take that corrective action. There are many people that monitor particular nutrients like that people with diabetes or kidney disease that is absolutely necessary. But for folks that are just checking calories or fat or sodium, that can be very useful, and so that’s a whole different set of sensors other than the ones that are analyzing food.

Michael Wolf: Speaking of sensors, in a way I think what Apple is doing with HealthKit is an interesting health layer. I think it would be interesting once you start to fuse the type of data you have with what for example they’re doing with HealthKit. Have you guys looked at integrating?

Victor Penev: Yeah. We’ve looked at obviously HealthKit. We looked at Fitbit. We’ve looked at every single platform out there that does health record management and personalized record management, and we’re very careful not to get into the space where we have to manage electronic health records. We need to be HIPAA compliant and whatnot. But obviously, food intake is an important thing.

I think for a lot of those companies, it’s an important thing. I think for a lot of those companies, they’re still trying to figure out who’s going to win the race on the device wearable, and the wearables for better or worse, are just too focused on sensors measuring energy output, how many steps, if I jump, if I’ve done 100 crunches and so on and so forth. The energy input, which is essentially food, is lagging behind, and part of the reason why it’s lagging behind is because it’s hard to do the energy input. Unless you find a way to do it automatically, which will be measuring the bloodstream of somebody, it will be ‑ people are not disciplined enough.

We made a conscious choice to hold off until we see enough of a use case of people being willing to input data through their mobile devices. The interface is still not there, and I think we probably have the most advanced interface with voice recognition with the accuracy. There’s a lot of people that do voice recognition but we have a very, very high accuracy in management and situational analysis. Even that is still more of a case where people that are health nuts or they have particular disease than the general public.

I think there’s going to be a watershed moment when Apple probably or one of the other companies in this space that’s really big. Apple and Fitbit look like are going to be the winners, but they go and say food is important to us now, so let’s build tools around food. I think when they start pushing it into their devices, that’s going to be the moment we’re going to jump on the bandwagon.

Again, we’re very careful. There’s a lot of trends we can put our resources against, so many different things, and we decided that this is not something that’s going to happen in 2017.

Michael Wolf: But I like that, the way you phrase that. They’re all geared today toward measuring energy output. Food really is the energy input, and I wasn’t necessarily suggesting – I guess I was a bit suggesting going into healthcare and competing with them but like a fusion of the capability and the data that you have with HealthKit data maybe in the consumer-facing app, maybe it’s on an iOS device, that would just be very powerful. It sounds like you’re thinking the same thing: you’re just kind of waiting for the right time.

Victor Penev: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: Maybe it’s one of your partners. Maybe it’s Apple using your data to do that.

Victor Penev: Yeah. I mean that’s exactly our play. We hope that eventually we’re going to plug into HealthKit. We’re going to plug into every single platform. We also integrate with Validic. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this company. But essentially, we’ll have data output that will go into personal profiles when people eat something and we’re starting to do that. But right now, we’re focused on providing these tools to dieticians, to restaurants, professionals that are paying for this service because they need it to run their business. That same thing is a B2C product very easily, which has dropped the price I think. We removed some of the feature that food service professionals or dieticians may need then. It becomes a B2C experience that can be plugged into HealthKit or anything else and just become an app that does that.

We do have something very similar with Samsung. We did maybe 2 or 3 years ago, a partnership with them for S-Health, which is essentially the equivalent of HealthKit. We were the first food app there and our recipes search based on nutrition with ability to log in the recipe account directly into S-Health, so with all the nutrition.

We’ve done that sometime ago and that was part of the experience of why we think the market is not ready yet. But we’re closely monitoring that market.

Michael Wolf: Take a step back and just kind of if you look 5 years from now, what does the kitchen look like with regards to nutrition information, all this kind of devices and data layers like yours? I mean will it have arrived at that point?

Victor Penev: Well, I don’t know if it’s going to be 5 years, but I’ll tell you what I think ultimately the situation is going to be, and I think the kitchen is moving maybe 2 years behind the smart car in terms of there was a lot of investment in the space and eventually started to become a reality and now it’s a question of somebody just putting the right regulation in place and the smart cars can become reality.

I think the smart kitchen is probably a couple of years behind, so maybe in 5 years it will happen because there was a lot of investment from big name companies into the space. I think that every single device in the kitchen will be connected. It’s the IoT dream that the devices in the kitchen don’t need to be connected to that many other things. They need to communicate with each other, and so the fridge and the stove, and the sous vide and your food processor only to have kind of have the same platform and be able to communicate with each other. If the fridge has onions, what can you be doing with those onions and have some kind of a communication to the oven where maybe you’ll be I don’t know putting them in the oven or whatnot and that will form a particular recipe, or a particular way or cooking, or they might be chopped in a food processor.

There’s got to be connection there, but I think every single device will have an interface. A device probably will have a touchscreen, will probably have voice recognition interface, or both. It will have probably some kind of a display to display to you important information. It might be a video that teaches you how to cook something that’s on top of your stove, but it might be like a shopping list that is displayed or recipe suggestion, which I hope we will be powering a new fridge, or even just a timer on your kitchen appliance, or in-built weight measurement that tells you how much of whatever you’re cooking with.

Those are the things, and I think that in addition to those interfaces, there’s going to be an overall software that runs them and the kitchen operating system and there’s going to be a data layer because this kitchen operating system an interface with a human will have with all devices will necessitate data, and it’s data about specialized nutrition but it can be data about cooking, about the provenance of the food, anything that might be related to your experience in the kitchen becoming much more seamless.

I’m going away from technology, but in kind of winning the kitchen back for the human. We used to enjoy being in the kitchen and sharing food and whatnot and we kind of went away with that with microwaves and TV dinners and whatnot. I think actually technology can bring us back to the kitchen and the joy of cooking because it’s going to make it a lot easier, food is going to be delicious every time you make it, and everybody will love it.

That’s kind of the vision I see and I hope us to be part of that solution specifically on the data layer with regard to foods and recipes and nutrition, so that we can help people make those smart food choices and eat better.

Michael Wolf: It sounds good. We’d love to have you out in Seattle, the Smart Kitchen Summit, to talk a little bit about it, so thanks for spending some time with me today.

Victor Penev: Thank you, and yes, we’re planning to be in Seattle.

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