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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Meet the SKS 2024 Startup Showcase Finalists

Ever since we launched the Smart Kitchen Summit {SKS} in 2015, one of the most popular parts of the conference is the Startup Showcase, where attendees get a glimpse at early-stage companies making innovative inroads into food and kitchen tech.

The Showcase is back this year, and we’re excited to announce the nine startups building products that are rethinking the future of food and cooking. These nine were chosen from over 100 applicants who applied to pitch their product on stage in Seattle.

You can meet the founders behind these companies, hear them pitch and visit their table at the Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4th and 5th in Seattle! Get your ticket today!

Nymble

How does Posha work? | Posha Kitchen Robot | Nymble is now Posha

Nymble makes a countertop cooking robot that automates everyday cooking.

Celcy

Meet Celcy - The Only Fully Autonomous Cooking Appliance

The Celcy is an autonomous cooking appliance that combines a countertop oven with a freezer that stores the meals until ready for cooking.

TasteGAGE from MAMAY Technologies Ltd

Taste GAGE is “the world’s first universal Taste, Odor & Feel simulator for foods and beverages. The GAGE simulator analyzes the chemical and physical properties of a product’s ingredients at the molecular level, combining that data with their taste and odor attributes.

Hefes

The Hefes’ Self-Cleaning Juicer uses steam to automatically clean its internal components after each use.

MashDaddy

MashDaddy has reimagined the world’s oldest kitchen tool, the mortar and pestle.

Wisely

Wisely is a smart food storage container that uses hardware, software, and sensors to track the conditions with which perishable foods are stored and connect to a consumer smartphone app.

Bridge Appliances

Introducing OMM, Automated Egg Cooker

Bridge Appliances makes OMM, a robot designed to automate the preparation of eggs for breakfast sandwiches.

Kitchenery

The Spoon Catches up With Akshay Bhuva of Kitchenery

Kitchenery makes wireless power transfer technology for the kitchen appliance industry. Its products include the Quantum Energy Pad and cordless appliances such as the Cordless Kettle and Silent Blender, which together enable consumers to use appliances without cords.

Ladle Cooking

Ladle helps users cook at home by personalizing recipes from their favorite creators to their individual preferences.

Once again, make sure to get your ticket today to SKS 2024 to check out these products and meet the founders behind them on June 4th and 5th in Seattle!

The Story of Chefee with Assaf Pashut

There’s been no shortage of cooking robot startups in the past few years, but most are focused on commercial kitchens. It’s for good reason: consumers tend to like appliances we’re familiar with, and the idea of having a robot make our food seems, well, like something out of a science fiction future.

But these hurdles didn’t scare away Assaf Pashut, who, after years of being a restauranteur, started to think about how robots could help us make better food at home. That ultimately led to Chefee, a home food robot that’s different from any before it. It’s not a countertop appliance or a system with big robotic arms attached to the wall. With Chefee, the robotics recede into the background.

In this conversation, Assaf discusses those early days and how he came up with the idea for Chefee, the choices he made around design, the story of pitching Chefee on Shark Tank, and his vision for the future.

You can listen to the podcast clicking play above or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. You can also watch the video of my interview with Assaf below.

Building a Home Food Robot With Chefee's Assaf Pashut

Assaf will be talking about Chefee at the Smart Kitchen Summit on June 5th. If you’d like to hear his story in person, you can get tickets here.

The transcript of our conversation is below.

Michael Wolf
All right, I’m excited to have Assaf Pashut here in the studio today to talk a little bit about what you’re building with Chefee Robotics. Chefee is a really interesting company in that it’s actually making a home cooking robot. That’s a tough category. We’re going to dive into that, but before we do, let’s hear a little bit about your background. Tell people, you know, your journey and how you got to where you are today.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I grew up on food since I was, I mean, my mom cooked for me and my brothers every single day growing up. Homemade foods. I grew up in Israel so food is just a huge part of our culture. And yeah, I ended up going to Berkeley, studied neuroscience, learned a little bit about engineering, some biology, some chemistry, some, a lot of different, a lot of different things. And then I ended up going into the obvious next step, which is open restaurants.

Michael Wolf
I thought you were going to say the obvious next step is making a food robot.

Assaf Pashut
That’s like 14 years later. I opened restaurants, and my parents were surprised, as you can imagine. And so was everyone else. But I just thought that the food industry was broken. I think now there are so many documentaries about that. But back then it was, most people didn’t understand really what was going. And yeah, I wanted to fix it. I wanted to create some healthier brand and sell and just kind of promote that. And really, my dream was to kind of tackle McDonald’s, to compete with McDonald’s. So yeah, pretty ambitious. And then I had that for many years, and did very well in Silicon Valley. And then during COVID, everything just nose dived.

I took a year off and went to live in Israel. My mom was there, a lot of cooking again. You can see a common theme. And then, at some point, I think I was looking at my kitchen and just thought, how freaking cool would it be if I could just talk to it and it can cook for me? That was the crazy epiphany.

Michael Wolf
Right. That was. That was epiphany, and you know, so interesting that you decided to head into the consumer kitchen because you spent so much of your career in restaurants, which, by the way, I think some of the most successful food robotics entrepreneurs have started restaurants and then done that. John Haw with Bear Robotics is a good example of where he created his little mobile waiter robot. But you decided to go into the consumer kitchen, not make a back of house restaurant chef robot. Why did you look at the consumer space?

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, so we actually started our V1 was a commercial kitchen. We built this entire commercial kitchen with a robotic arm on a rail. I’ll show you the video, but we basically we saw something that most people don’t see, which is everyone’s going in this direction. Commercial restaurants, fast food. And I hate fast food, personally. I just don’t think that’s something I want to contribute to or help. I don’t think it’s good for people, animals, the world in general. And so I don’t want to contribute my time there. And then, looking at the house, nobody’s touching it. Everybody knows there’s going to be robotics in the home. Everyone knows that.

Michael Wolf
It’s why you wanted to kill McDonald’s.

Assaf Pashut
But no one touched the home. And it’s a hard space, you’re right. It’s at what price point you come in, and there are so many different segments of consumers. But the appeal of one being the first, two, offering people this Jetsons kind of dream where you walk into your house, talk to your kitchen and it cooks for you. That was a sexy idea. That was something worth working for.

And I’ll tell you the first time that Chefee I ever talked to Chefee and it started cooking was just like a mind shift. It was weird. It was really, really cool. And that’s kind of when we knew that this is, this is happening. This is real.

Michael Wolf
No one’s broken into this space because it is, like you said, difficult. There have been some early temps like Moley, which started back in 2015, and the last couple of years, there have been a lot of countertop folks building essentially some level of automation within a self-contained countertop appliance. Your’s is different than what I’ve seen out there in that it’s not this big robotic arm. It’s not something that fits on the countertop. It looks like maybe some of the kind of robotic make lines I’ve seen in a sense for the commercial space, but not quite. Because it does fit into a granite countertop or whatever. It’s embedded essentially into the kitchen. Talk a little bit about that, why you decided to do what you did with your design.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, like I said, we started with a big robotic arm, right? And I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with it. And one, they’re expensive. Two, they’re difficult to maintain. Three, they’re dangerous. This thing, the first time we turned it on, we got it from China, and their safety setting was like the lowest possible safety. So it started grinding itself into the table on which it was standing. Dangerous stuff, man. And you don’t want that in your house with your kids and you’re in. Yeah.

Michael Wolf
That’s not good. o.

Assaf Pashut
And so, and then beyond that, the idea is that I think technology shouldn’t be in our face. It should be hidden, embedded in our walls, kind of like electricity. We have it, it’s the best thing ever. We don’t even realize it because it’s just in the walls, right? And then we use it when we want to use it. That’s kind of the vision.

Michael Wolf
It’s very on trend, by the way. We’re seeing that in the kitchen space. Like a lot of big appliance brands are thinking about this idea of the invisible kitchen, essentially where technology recedes into the background. You thought about it, but in a robotic context.

Assaf Pashut
Blend in. So instead of throwing some big thing at you, it’s more like, no, we’ll blend into your existing kitchen design, which people really, really spend a lot of time and thought into their kitchen designs. So we want to blend in.

Michael Wolf
When will I be able to buy this? When can I go out and say, hey, Chefee, come in and install this? And what does that involve? Does this involve a couple of folks showing up and installing it and tearing apart my kitchen a little bit?

Assaf Pashut
No, no, so not exactly. So, first of all, we’re already taking paid reservations. So there’s a bunch of people that already paid $250 to reserve their Chefee. Late next month, we’re going to be showcasing our Beta 2 model, which is basically what your Chefee would look like, stainless steel, so forth, the beautiful kind of vision. And at that point, we’ll be taking deposits. So 50% down, 50% upon delivery.

And when Chefee arrives at your door, yeah, we install it. But here’s the beauty. It doesn’t require any permanent damage to your kitchen. So the way we do it is we just remove the doors from your upper kitchen cabinet. That’s like four screws. And we slide Chefee in. And that’s it. Basically, within two hours, the whole installation takes two hours. And you have now an autonomous kitchen in your house.

Michael Wolf
What was it like going on Shark Tank? Obviously, going in front of the sharks is like a once in a lifetime experience. I know that some of them are notably robotic skeptical. Mark Cuban, probably being the most so. Tell us a little about that experience going on there and what happened.

Assaf Pashut
The experience, it’s hard to describe, man. It was the hardest day of my life. Most people, you know, a lot of companies, they come with this little app or a little gadget or whatever. We built a kitchen set ourselves. My team and I built the whole set. We’ve never done it before. We had to ship all of our equipment and Chefee to Los Angeles, stayed in our investor’s home, and built it in his backyard. It was wild.

I spent two months practicing the pitch over and over. We have a bunch of videos we’re going to release where I’m like doing push-ups and reciting the pitch. My friend is kicking me and like slapping me in the face literally to get ready for the pressure because you only have one chance. He went to the Israeli army. So he was like, he’s like, we’re going to do this. This is how we’re going to do it.

Michael Wolf
It was Shark Tank Bootcamp.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, the moment itself was so stressful. So many things could have gone wrong. We had to ship it from one, we have to move it from one set to another. And then once we were there, they tell you, you only have one shot. It’s the Eminem song, right? You got one shot, don’t blow it. And then like, what if the wifi or the Bluetooth doesn’t work? And everything worked smoothly. The sharks are really, really nice. I think Mark was in a bad mood.

I think he was, he was kind of in disbelief that we could have built something like this that’s actually has some IP in it without spending millions of dollars, which is most, most companies do. And I get it. I mean, I come from the restaurant industry. Who am I? I’m, you know, to him, I’m just like a restaurateur. I’m not an engineer. But yeah, we’ve been able to do it. So it was pretty exciting.

Michael Wolf
Yeah, I mean, he probably saw, I mean, if you look at the track record, right, like the Zumes of the world spent hundreds of millions of dollars from SoftBank, and you’ve seen others race, you know, tons of money to build these things and to they burn through it. So, you ultimately did get a deal with Kevin O’Leary. Talk about that.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, with Kevin. I mean, at the end of the day, he saw what we saw, which is there’s a high end market. So we’re starting at the high end as a high end product. Obviously, our goal is to be in millions and millions of homes. And that’s what’s going to happen, but we’re going to start like this because we don’t want to have thousands of orders right off the bat. We’re not going to be able to deliver, and we’re going to have recalls, and it’s a common mistake that many hardware companies make. Let’s go slow and steady and actually pay attention to each customer. And then as we ramp up production, we’ll lower the prices and so forth. And frankly, there are people lining up to have a Chefee at this price point.

Michael Wolf
It’s the early Tesla strategy.

Assaf Pashut
I mean, we’re actually very, very, very reasonable relative to, let’s say, Moley, for example. Or even just high-end premium appliances in the home. People are spending $50,000 on a range hood. They’re spending $100,000 sometimes on La Cornue, Wolf and Sub-Zero.

Michael Wolf
What will this future channel look like? One of the things I’m trying to conceptualize and think a lot about, as we look 10 years in the future is, ‘hey, I want this cool cooking robot. Maybe I can’t cook, or maybe I’m getting older, and it’s just harder for me. How do I get this thing in the kitchen? Is it a matter of saying, hey, there’s a home system integrator for food robotics? Is it like there’s an appliance, like maybe a GE Whirlpool ultimately acquires Chefee, or builds a competing line, or you become like the next Whirlpool? Does a customer go to a Best Buy, see it and then have someone come and install it? What does this channel look like in the future?

Assaf Pashut
I mean, honestly, we’ve designed it, like I said, to be installed in existing kitchens. We want this in tiny kitchens, large kitchens, large homes, and small luxury apartments in Manhattan. It doesn’t matter. We fit into existing standard kitchens. Where it’s going to go, I don’t know. I think, I think Chefee can maintain a very high quality of the product. That’s, that’s important to me. That quality is super important. Whether it’s going to be available at Home Depot or Best Buy in the future, only time will tell. But ultimately, it’s probably going to be built in, kind of like standard ovens in microwaves and fridges that you have in every kitchen. You walk into somebody’s home in 15 years, and if they don’t have a Chefee, it’s like they’re in the Stone Age. That’s how I see it.

Michael Wolf
Yeah, people walk into like a modern high-end kitchen today, they see Wolf appliances, they see Jenn Air or whatever. You think that new status symbol 15 years from now will be a Chefee. Is that what we’re talking about?

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s going to be ubiquitous. It just doesn’t make sense that it doesn’t. You have to experience it to kind of feel it. When we started cooking with Chefee, then I went to my mom’s house, and there’s like pans and pots and all these things and like a mess in the kitchen. I’m like, I don’t know, my mind has just shifted. Like this is the old way and now there’s a new way. Obviously there’s a nice hybrid middle ground there where you can still cook.

It’s not like you have to give Chefee every single meal to make. Cooking is fun, I love cooking. It’s just that I don’t have time every single day to do it in a good way, in a high quality way.

Michael Wolf
You said you are starting at the high end. As you guys grow – obviously this is your first product out there – if we look a couple years down the line, five years down the line, is there going to be a range? At some point you have a countertop thing that people would just buy and plop down or take with them? What does that look like?

Assaf Pashut
A lot of things are possible. We want to make sure one, we’re not spreading ourself thin, right? Once you spread yourself thin, quality goes down. And second, is we don’t want to go to the Vitamix, the, the, what are they called? All these little countertop, nimbals and stuff, right? We want to stay, the value proposition of Chefee is it’s restocked once a week and you walk away.

You go to the gym, you go to the office, you go hang out with your kids, you go watch Netflix. That’s it once a week. As soon as you dumb it down and you bring it down the volume and so forth, and now it’s just a countertop, then again, you have to restock every single meal. You have to think a lot more about every single thing, which is, it’s just, it defeats purpose. So, yeah.

Michael Wolf
Great. Hey, well, I’m looking forward to hearing you and connecting with you in Seattle in June at the SmartCat to Summit. And where can people find out more about what you’re doing at chefee.com?

Assaf Pashut
You too.

Chefee.com, yeah, yeah, we’re on Instagram, we’re on Facebook, we’re online.

Michael Wolf
That’s easy. And for those of you just listening, it’s chefee.com, right?

Assaf Pashut
That’s it. Thank you.

The Story of Samsung Food with Nick Holzherr

Nick Holzherr, founder of Whisk and head of Samsung Food, is this week’s guest on the Spoon Podcast.

Those in the smart kitchen industry know Nick, in part because his company helped pioneer the early tech behind shoppable recipes, but also because his acquisition by Samsung is the culmination of one of the true success stories in this market.

Today, the technology that Nick and Whisk built is what powers Samsung Food, the AI-powered food and recipe platform that the consumer electronics giant debuted at CES 2024.

Some of the things we talk about this latest episode of The Spoon Podcast include:

  • The story of how Whisk was the first recipe startup to explore how to use AI and apply it to recipes.
  • Nick’s experience going on the British version of The Apprentice and appearing before Lord Sugar (the British version of Donald Trump) to pitch the company. 
  • The growth of the company as Whisk started working with grocers in Europe and eventually appliance brands
  • Nick fielding calls from three companies who presented offer sheets to buy the company.
  • We talk about what Nick is excited about and how he sees technologies like AI being applied in the kitchen in the future.

You can read the full transcript of the conversation below and listen to the full interview by clicking play on the podcast player below or heading to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you’d like to connect with Nick in person, he will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4th. You can get your tickets here.

Conversation Transcript:

Michael Wolf: Nick just told me whatever I throw at him, he’s ready for, especially with that new microphone. You look great in that, in your little room there, the microphone.

Nick Holzherr: It’s brand new. It was three months old. I realized I needed to start upping my game when everyone’s podcasting now, right?

Michael Wolf: Everyone’s podcasting. So when’s the Nick Holzherr podcast start, by the way?

Nick Holzherr: I haven’t got my own podcast, but if anybody wants to invite me onto theirs, I’ve now got a good mic.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, well, Nick, I feel I’ve known you probably since 2016, 2017. I think Whisk was the first company I remember that was really talking up AI and recipes. That was one of your original stories, right?

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, I mean, we started with the problem that users want to use recipes anywhere, not just from one manufacturer or one publisher or one grocery company or one tech startup with a couple hundred recipes. And the only way to really make that happen is with AI. If you want a smart experience, that is. Use AI to parse all these recipes and make them smart. So we did that, but that was before deep learning, before it was accessible to startups. We were literally flying out on planes to America, buying the latest processors, latest chips, graphics cards, and using them with basically PhDs, ex-professors that we had hired to build these models. It was really early in AI, before TensorFlow, before these libraries. Of course, now it’s totally changed. Super early.

Michael Wolf: I was looking back in the history a little bit and I didn’t realize Whisk had started back in 2012. Back then, you were actually on a British TV show, British Apprentice on the BBC. Was it pitching Whisk at the time?

Nick Holzherr: Yep. It actually was. It’s called the Apprentice, and it’s the same thing as basically Donald Trump has in the US, right? And we have a different person running it called Lord Sugar. The guy in the UK is called Lord Sugar and he was an advisor or member of the Labour Party, which is the left side of the government. So it’s kind of a little bit the opposite of Donald Trump.

Michael Wolf: Lord Sugar. Way better name.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, he was originally Sir, I think, and then they made him a Lord. This is the British monarchy system, which is also hilarious. It was amazing fun. You do 12 weeks of tasks competing against other people. And then if you get to the final, you get to pitch your business plan. If you win, he gives you money and becomes a partner in your business. I got to the final and I didn’t win. But because it was such a popular TV show, and I got to pitch it to him and his advisors and therefore the UK, everyone wanted to invest in it, but not everyone, but enough people wanted to invest in it. Most people would take the meetings with me. So I got inbound from a lot of the grocery stores and publishers and stuff saying, hey, we’d love to work with you.

Michael Wolf: The Tescos the world came in with you say, hey, let’s meet. Was it immediate like the next day?

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, literally that night, my inbox, my LinkedIn and my inbox just filled up with loads of people who wanted to work, who said, ‘I love it. I know he (Lord Sugar) didn’t invest, but can I invest or can I work with you? And then the ones who hadn’t, when I messaged them months later and said, Hey, this is the idea, I pitched it to on the Apprentice, they would take the meeting, not necessarily because they’re interested, but just wanted to meet the guy who’s on TV.

Michael Wolf: There was a curiosity in meeting you, right?

Nick Holzherr: And for a salesperson, that’s what you need, right, a foot in the door.

Michael Wolf: I feel The Apprentice was the predecessor to Shark Tank, which is also Dragon’s Den in the UK. The value for you as an entrepreneur is it’s just a giant commercial. The value is in the millions of dollars in terms of free publicity.

Nick Holzherr: Exactly. It’s huge. And it’s also actually fun. It is really, really fun. It is also challenging because it’s not a show about business success. It’s about conflict, essentially, right? Of people conflicting and trying to make something work. It’s like a business assault course. They put you through psychometric tests and psychology interviews to basically choose people that they think will conflict with each other and create good TV. So that part is stressful, but you also get to do some really cool things on the show, like build products super quickly and pitch them to big people. So it’s really fun. But ultimately it was the platform I needed to get Whisk started.

Michael Wolf: And so you got Whisk started and I think I connected with you in around 2016, 2017. From those early days when you had the business plan, what you pitched on Apprentice BBC versus when I met you around 2016, what had changed? Obviously you’d started the company, went from business plan to actually starting this thing, but had the vision changed at all?

Nick Holzherr: The core mission was to help people cook, make it more joyful as we talk about it today, and to help them in that process. That hadn’t changed. But what had changed was we started off with a consumer app and we couldn’t get it to what we thought was enough scale. So we pivoted from trying to build a consumer app to looking at all that tech we’d built. And you started off talking about AI. We’d built a lot of AI way back, 10, 12 years ago. And so we were really early in that. And businesses wanted to use that. We knew that because we had, when we built our consumer, we had built widgets that publishers could integrate on their sites. And through that, we had loads of conversations with big publishers, big retailers and big CPG brands. And a lot of them said, ‘we love this widget. Yes, we’ll integrate it, but can we also use some of the other tech?’

So, in2014, 2015, and into 2016, we couldn’t make the consumer app work. So we pivoted into a B2B platform, offered all the tech that we had built for anybody to use, built an API platform for people to use. We were powering half a billion monthly consumer interactions at one point, at the height of it, which was pretty impressive and we were powering it for a lot of the big players in the world like a lot of big CBG brands. If you made a list of the top players, maybe half of those were using our technology.

Michael Wolf: Were you on big publisher websites?

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, the biggest, right? Food Network, Allrecipes, BBC Good Food, About.com, the big, big sites with many tens of millions of hits a month, users, those were integrating us and we were sending them across to grocery retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Instacart, the UK ones like Tesco. And the big CPG brands wanted to be part of it because they wanted to have their products featured. So when it’s butter, they want it to be the Unilever butter, or when it’s stock, the Unilever stock, right? So they cared about that. And they also wanted to connect their own websites to commerce. Because we had those integrations, they then said, can you power more of our platform? We said ‘yes’. Then all the big IoT companies came along, the appliance manufacturers came along and said, ‘hey, can we use your platform as well?’ So we were powering a whole bunch of different IoT players. And that’s, I think, where you and I first started talking.

Michael Wolf: So just real quickly, you were with the publishers and you were essentially doing shoppable recipes. So, like Bisquick, Nestle wants their yogurt or whatever. You were one of the pioneers in the whole shoppable recipe concept. And that was around the 2013, 2014 time frame.

Nick Holzherr: That’s right. I mean, there was Constant Commerce (now Constant.co), which are no longer there, but Constant Commerce was there at the same kind of time as us, super, super early. But it was basically only Constant Commerce and us. And we took a different approach to them. They were more enterprise-y in their proposition. So some of the big enterprise players wanted them. And, but we were more like open and like, let’s integrate the whole market kind of sort of game. So someone wanted us and we had a bit more of a B2C to B2B2C kind of play where we integrated onto their sites and then they added to a shopping list. It would still be our shopping list and it users could save the recipe into our recipe box. Our consumer experience is always there, but it was integrated on other people’s sites and shops and brands.

Michael Wolf: And the appliance guys showed up around in the 2015, 2016 timeframe. And what were they asking you? ‘Hey, we want apps. We want people to have recipes.’ What were they showing up with, and what questions did they have?

Nick Holzherr: It was ‘we want to connect our appliances, so can you give us recipes in a structured way?’ Or can you make it work with our products?

Michael Wolf: It was the guided cooking recipe era.

Nick Holzherr: Exactly. But also shoppable recipes. I think everybody always thinks and starts in the early stages of developing an experience that thinks, ‘I want to make money. How do I make money? I make it by connecting to commerce. So, let me connect to commerce.’

So that was definitely part of the game as well. And then what happened was really at that point what we were offering was in its infancy. It was not a mainstream thing to do. And it was really around the 2016 and 2017 mark when suddenly the e-commerce market had grown. Penetration of e-commerce had doubled or tripled from what it was back in 2012. And so you suddenly have everyone wanting it. And it was kind of a crazy time where we had struggled as a business until 2016, 2017, and suddenly they were inundated with everyone saying, ‘hey, can we use your platform?’ And we suddenly became profitable. We went from five people to 30 people in a year, not from any investment, just revenue. We had no investment at that point. Everything was bootstrapped. We were making money, and the business was profitable. It was like, wow, this is really fun. What is it like to make money? A startup making money? What is this?

Michael Wolf: It’s nice to make money. And so how were you making money? You were doing these recipes, and were you kind of taking every recipe impression that went through, you got a little bit of money? Was there a big appliance company that wanted to pay you to do a custom integration?

Nick Holzherr: All of those. So, we had three revenue models. We had the license fee model, a monthly fee for the API. We had a grocery per click or per new customer fee, which was a small fee per transaction. But when you add it all up, it works out relatively well. And then we also had an ad model where you, as a CPG company, if you’re Nestle and you want to get your yogurt sold, you pay to have your yogurt featured. It doesn’t say Nestle yogurt in the recipe, but yes, Nestle yogurt the customer gets. And so they don’t pay on a per acquisition there, they pay on a per view because you are, you’re inspiring the customer. You’re not just selling the customer.

Michael Wolf: Okay, and so this thing’s going crazy. You had 30 employees and you’re making money. Life is good. And then, at some point, or probably I imagine around this time, you’re the kind of the apex of this ride, you get a call from Samsung?

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, I mean, there’s three companies, another one of the big appliance companies, and one of the world’s slash one of the world’s biggest technology companies all rang up at roughly the same time. Like in the six month period of time, we had three serious acquirers wanting to buy us and a bunch of other ones on the side saying, ‘maybe could we, would you be open to it?’ But three of them were kind of term sheet level interest, like real interest. Flying people into our offices saying, ‘hey, can we buy you?’ And it was a really good time; we were profitable, and we didn’t need to sell. And then, ultimately, we chose to go with Samsung.

Michael Wolf: And you’re looking and you’re just thinking in your head. “Lord sugar. You should have made a better offer’. So you had these three offers; a technology platform company, two big appliance companies, it sounds like. Were you inviting them in, or was their head of acquisitions calling you up?

Nick Holzherr: The latter. They were ringing in us. And this was kind of what’s crazy about it because initially I was even saying no to them, not to the acquisition teams, but to the initial integrations. I was like, why do you want to integrate to an appliance? Are we going to get any users from this? I was in the user’s head and thinking I’m not going to make any transactions. How many fridges have you got live? How many users are going to click on it? Am I going to make enough money on this to make it worthwhile while visiting your office? Because often they’re these large enterprises, their request is, can you visit our office to pitch this certain person? And I was apprehensive. I was like, is it wasting my time?

Michael Wolf: You’re busy. You have 30 employees.

Nick Holzherr: We’re busy. And the funny thing is, of course, those conversations ended up with the M&A team suddenly getting interested. Because they’re looking at it going, ‘hang on, how many people in the market are using it? Our competitors are using it. They’re thinking, ;who’s going to end up owning this?’ They probably knew that M&A stuff was happening because the people in the industry know each other quite well. So they probably all started worrying about what happens if the other person wins it? And that’s a great place to be as a startup. It was literally the perfect time. I could probably have gotten a better price for it if I’d held on another few years. It’s impossible to price it. It’s impossible to get the right time, and it was certainly a good time and I’m happy with what worked out.

Michael Wolf: I think it was a good time, and Samsung is an interesting company. Did you have to fly out to Seoul to pitch?

Nick Holzherr: No, I had phone out to Seoul multiple times after we had a partnership with them, because we started powering loads of stuff for them, right? It became a really good partnership where we were powering way more than initially was requested. We were building, even building some new features based on their budgets and based on their requests and their needs. It was being used across lots of appliances. And I had a vision to being used by lots of other divisions as well, which is what ultimately ended up happening, of course. But that we couldn’t predict that at the time. But then I did fly a bunch to San Francisco because the acquisition team was called Samsung Next. It was an innovation arm of Samsung. And basically HQ, because it’s quite hard for the Korean team to buy stuff because of how something is structured, they asked the innovation arm, hey, can you guys take a look at this? And they did, and they did the acquisitions. So actually, our bosses, if you like, or our acquirers was the San Francisco entity of Samsung.

Michael Wolf: And so that deal comes through, you accept it. I think I remember being in Chicago at the Housewares show. I think when I interviewed you about that deal, I think is right. So there must have been around the March timeframe, it was at Housewares, it was 2018, 2019, one of those years. And it’s been an interesting ride.

Nick Holzherr: Yep.

Michael Wolf: A lot’s probably happened. So maybe talk about you get acquired by Samsung. What’s that like initially kind of absorbing you into this giant Borg, which is it’s a massive company, even though it’s like the next company like the San Francisco companies, but it’s still Samsung.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, it is. Actually, what I would say is, what I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by is how much autonomy they’ve given us and how much they’ve let us keep parts of the culture that matter. We were always a distributed team and they’ve let us keep that. And that was a massive advantage during COVID when it was so difficult if you were not a distributed team, but it also allowed us to kind of operate, I think, quite effectively. And keep some of the culture we have, like we go on annual offsites where we fly everyone to one place in the world. Like that’s not a normal thing in an enterprise to explain to your HQ that, hey, we’re going to fly the whole team to Greece or something. And they support that. So that’s been awesome.

Michael Wolf: You go to Greece for your offsights? What the heck?

Nick Holzherr: Well, we have to fly somewhere and actually Greece ends up being quite, we actually haven’t actually, Greece is our next one. We actually haven’t been to Greece yet, but like the previous one, Cyprus, we did actually do one in Korea. That was the most expensive one we did. We did Lisbon, Madrid, Budapest. And these places are actually, if you look at them on spreadsheet, the cheapest places to fly everyone, but it is also nice. It’s also fun to actually spend a week together and meet people in person, especially if you’re working in a distributed environment. So we spend a lot of time building a distributed culture.

Michael Wolf: Nice!

Nick Holzherr: and making sure that we, people felt valued and motivated and knew what they’re doing. And Samsung let us keep that. So I’m really grateful and respect Samsung for that. What was crazy was some of the enterprise ways of managing a business, right? That definitely added a layer of complexity and that’s inevitable with any enterprise. And then I think the other thing that was crazy was scaling. So they wanted us to scale our team from 30 people to 120, and they asked me to do it.

in ASAP, I did it in nine months. So going from 30 to 120 in nine months is an experience that I’m not, maybe I’ll do it again, but it was intense. The amount of interviews you have to do, the amount of like how to integrate that at the same time as integrating your company to a large enterprise like Samsung. So all of that in one go was probably the most intensive six months of work that I’ve ever done. Massive learning curve again, hard work, but I learned a bunch and I’m grateful for the experience.

Michael Wolf: Were you in on almost every one of those interviews and decisions? You were pretty hands-on, it sounds like. That is crazy. That’s crazy. Okay, so you grow to 120, that’s impressive. And I think the company over time, I saw more and more getting integrated. And I think the culmination of that was this past CES, when I think it essentially transformed from Whisk to Samsung food. So Samsung food was a big announcement for Samsung at CES 2024 in January.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: But the heart of that, the beating heart of that was really the Whisk acquisition, right? It’s almost a rebranding of Whisk.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, that’s right. And there are two sides to that, whether it was a good idea or a bad idea. So I built the Whisk brand, right? I own a bunch of Whisk. I’m drinking out of a Whisk flask right now. So like, hey, kill Whisk as a brand. And some users felt that too. But ultimately, there is a thing with any enterprise probably. If you’re trying to build an app that comes across as not from here, you’re going to struggle getting integration into the different hardware units and you’re going to struggle integrating into the Samsung ecosystem. And ultimately, if you’re building a consumer experience, you have to leverage the distribution of a platform like Samsung. Samsung has one of the most devices in the world of any company. I think it probably has the most devices of any company if you add all the different units, because it’s so broad in what it does in TVs and mobiles and kitchen appliances, watches and now rings, everything. So we had to use that distribution. And the most effective way of doing that was to call ourselves Samsung Foods. And actually that has worked, in terms of the integrations we have planned and the ones we’ve achieved, but ones we’ve now have on the table that are going to happen over the next six, 12 months. I think it’s part of what I’m actually most excited about in where we’re going. It’s especially with the health, because food and health are so closely coupled with obesity and diabetes and other things. Yet, no one has really solved that. Actually people have worked on it, but no one’s really solved it. And I think Samsung has got an important part to play because they have health and food appliances. And I think if we do that, that’s actually a really important thing in the world that we’re doing. Something I feel proud of and passionate about. And that I find awesome. So that is, Samsung food as a brand, I know people are split on the opinion. I think it’s a good name and there’s lots of advantages of the name. If you’re looking at 10 food apps or 20 food apps in your…

Michael Wolf: Yeah, you’re going to see Samsung food. Yeah.

Nick Holzherr: you’ll notice it and you’ll probably try it. Your propensity to try out the app is higher. But of course, Samsung hasn’t got a huge plethora of successful apps. So that’s part of also what we’re helping Samsung with.

Michael Wolf: I always have an 8:30 call, so I’m going to tell them to be a couple minutes late.

Michael Wolf: and late. I’m like, I wanted to go for an hour and then all of a sudden.

Nick Holzherr: We can do part two later, a different day if you want.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, I’ll edit that part out. So, I think that when I think of Samsung food or Samsung with your appliances, you have the wearables, you have what you built in Whisk. There’s a lot of different parts of the puzzle there. And I think you’re almost on a collision course with some of the other folks who are just coming at it from the precision nutrition side. Like I look at January AI, which is a pretty cool app. They do like take a photo of food and you can predict blood sugar. It seems like makes sense that ultimately that type of function would be built into what Samsung has because you guys have so many other parts of the puzzle. So I see you guys have a great foundation. A lot of it’s built on the appliance and the wearables and then that and the app side.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, I think that’s what’s exciting about the sensors, right? If you’ve got access to sensors and distribution through the hardware and the brand, that gives you some good starting Lego bricks. It’s not the whole solution. It’s such a big problem in the world. A big proportion of the world is going to suffer from the health challenges of not eating healthily. Of course there’s going to be thousands of companies. I hope a lot of them are successful alongside us.

Michael Wolf: I mean, I think a lot of people are just thinking, hey, now we can just take a pill and I will no longer be at risk for type two diabetes. I’ll be always 50 pounds. But I think that’s not realistic. You can’t have half the world’s population at risk for type two taking medication or a shot. I think what you guys are building could be really interesting. It’ll be a few years though, a lot of these different things need to come together. That sounds like what that’s driving you. What else is driving you as you look forward towards five years down the line, 10 years down the line in this space? What is really exciting for you?

Nick Holzherr: I think the advances in AI are exciting for everyone in the space, including us. We tried to do stuff like vision AI, use your camera to detect items, food, two, three years ago and failed. It wasn’t good enough. That was not despite having good engineers on it, it was hard to do. Yet now you come along and use an open source library by open AI and boom, it works. Sure, it needs tuning, it needs some work, it doesn’t maybe it takes a little bit of work to get it to production level, but it’s so easy. Stuff that we spent 10 years building, you can now use the OpenAI API for it and get a good way there. Which is so scary for people who’ve invested a whole bunch of time and effort into building really, really advanced technology that so much of it’s now easier than ever to do, which means it’s open to anybody. The scary part is, how do you win if everyone can do it? The fun thing from a consumer side is it’s going to be possible to build some of the stuff that we all hoped would be there five years ago. Now it will finally get to a point where it’ll be better and usable and actually add starting value. The smart kitchen, there’s always the question is how far off a truly smart kitchen that actually adds value to the user are we. When will it stop being a gimmick and when will it start being smart and useful? We’re getting closer and closer to that being true. Of course it’s true in some ways already, some devices are fantastic in adding value. But on a macro level where I can talk to my mom and say, do you want a smart kitchen? And she goes, yes, I do because it adds loads of value.

Michael Wolf: It’s not just turning things on and off with an app and making things more difficult by adding more processes in the way and kind of app friction, it’s actually making it more useful. So going from those early days where you’re buying GPUs and trying to figure out to build AI and going on TV and then ultimately to where you are today, it’s been quite a ride. It’s been fun talking to you, Nick, about hearing and hearing about all this. Thanks for spending some time with us.

Nick Holzherr: Thank you, I look forward to seeing you in Seattle.

Michael Wolf: You were seeing Seattle at Smart Kitchen Summit. Everyone who wants to see Nick in person, famous TV star, Apprentice star. I’m just embarrassing him. You can see him in Seattle. All right, Nick. Thank you, man. Don’t hang up yet. Don’t hang up yet.

Nick Holzherr: Thank you, thanks Mike, bye bye.

Waring and Planit Protein Debut Fermentation Appliance for Chefs to Create Plant-Based Proteins

This week at the National Restaurant Show, commercial equipment provider Waring and Planit Protein debuted a new commercial fermentation system to create plant-based proteins in commercial kitchens. The new system, called the Planit POD Fermentation Chamber, uses single-ingredient bases provided by Planit Protein combined with a proprietary starter culture to create eight pounds of customizable protein base in 24 hours.

The origins of the Planit Pod and its development into a kitchen fermentation appliance date back 40 years when an inventor named Gunter Pfaff, along with his partner Joy DuPuis, began making homemade tempeh. Eventually, Pfaff designed an appliance constructed from plywood, which he perfected in 2015. He collaborated with a product development firm, the DuPuis Group, to finalize the U.S. patent. Although Pfaff passed away shortly after perfecting his appliance-powered fermentation process, the DuPuis Group continued to refine and test the appliance until they could ferment a variety of plant-based proteins from bases such as chickpea, lentils, and mushroom protein.

After working on the fermentation process and system, the team formed a separate company in Planit Protein and started to work on building a commercial system in partnership with Waring. Waring’s General Manager Dan DeBari recalled to The Spoon the day he got the call from the company to see if there was any interest in helping to develop the fermentation appliance.

“They had worked with (Pfaff), who had a patent on a small machine that was actually made of plywood, and they came to us and said this is something they knew they couldn’t manufacture themselves. They asked if we were interested. That was on a Wednesday, and I hopped on a plane to California the next day to go meet with them.”

DeBari explained that at the time, the company was looking for new and innovative new types of product concepts that would be differentiated in the marketplace.

“We were looking to sort of get away from the creation of the me-too products and go into some real innovation,” said DeBari.

The system, which will cost around $2 thousand when it ships in Q4 of this year, will give restaurant and food service chefs a turnkey fermentation appliance that enables them to make their own custom-built plant-based proteins in-house, something that, except for the most adventurous of chefs, doesn’t really exist today in the form of commercial kitchen system.

Initially, users of the Planit POD fermentation chamber will have three base options: a roasted chickpea base, hybrid lentils, and a “burger” blend—a proprietary mix of mushroom protein, pea protein, and chickpea. To start the process, chefs prepare the base, such as boiling chickpeas for 45 minutes until soft, adding the starter culture, and then placing them on a sheet that is inserted into the appliance. After 24 hours, they obtain a fermented base ready for making tempeh, koji, or plant-based meat.

I’m pretty intrigued by this system, especially since most chefs’ efforts to do on-premise fermentation usually involve Macgyver’d contraptions that can include fish tanks, water pumps, and humidifiers. As more restaurants look to put plant-based proteins on the menu, this type of system could help create a new appliance category and an associated protein-based supply chain that helps them turnkey the whole process.

And this says nothing of the potential for bringing this type of system into the home, something that Planit Protein already has on its product roadmap. According to Planet Protein, the “Planit Pod Home will be next and ideal for the foodie’s countertop at home.”

Planit POD by Waring Fermentation Chamber Sizzle

Spoon Tank: The Spoon Team Watches and Gives Play-by-Play on RoboBurger’s Shark Tank Pitch

Like many, we’ve been long-time fans of Shark Tank, especially when the crew brings food-related products into the tank.

This year the sharks have seen quite a few food pitches, and it seems like there’s been a particular emphasis on food robots. Because we have lots of thoughts on these pitches, we thought we’d watch it Mystery Science Theater 3000 style and throw our commentary in from the peanut gallery.

You can watch the full video of our play-by-play below. Let us know if you like it and if there are any other pitches you’d like us to comment on.

Halla’s Spencer Price: Grocers Will Create ‘Unique Grocery Store for Every Shopper’ in The Future

Next up in our Smart Kitchen Summit speaker preview series is Spencer Price, the founder of Halla.

Halla has built an AI personalization and recommendation platform for grocery store providers. According to Price, the turning point for his company and the broader grocery store industry was when Amazon acquired Whole Foods.

“When Amazon acquired Whole Foods in 2017, it sent grocers into this innovation frenzy,” said Price. “I think the main driving force for grocers to want to look at this type of tech back then was that Amazon generates over one-third of all of its product sales revenue from their recommendation with the ‘You may also like’ and ‘customers also bought’ type product suggestions. Grocers do not have a passive piece of AI that drives a third of their sales, and that is what we enable grocers to do. We give them that competitive weapon to fight back in this World War grocery.”

Price thinks that while the grocery industry is lagging behind other industries, such as entertainment, when it comes to personalization, they are looking to AI to make up ground.

“Netflix isn’t just on a one-account basis. Within an account, you have a handful of profiles in your household, and each profile sees a completely different set of suggested categories, titles within those categories, and even different cover art for each one of those titles that’s likely to resonate with you as a specific end user.

“Grocers are a little bit behind these content platforms, but I think in 10 years time, we will see a very similar thing, and it’s going to be even more exciting because if you can give every single shopper their own unique grocery store, that’s going to make for both the fastest and most efficient and of course, most inspiring shopping experience. Grocers want to move quickly.”

Price’s company was acquired by Wynshop in March. Price says the company brought over his entire team and that Halla remains an independent business unit within Wynshop.

The Spoon Talks With Halla's Spencer Price About AI's Impact on the Grocery Business

You can hear Price speak at Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4-5th in Seattle. Get your ticket today!

You can read the full transcript of our conversation below:

Michael Wolf: All right, I have with me Spencer Price, the CEO of Halla, now a part of Wynshop. It’s been a while since we caught up. We wrote a first article about you guys since then, and you guys have changed a lot since then.

Spencer Price: We have changed a lot since then, yes.

Michael Wolf: At that point, you were very much focused on being a personalized recommendation platform based on a lot of different data. I still think that’s a lot of what’s pretty true, but you guys did evolve since then.

Spencer Price: Yeah, so 2018 was a transitional period. We had developed, as you said, a personalized recommendation engine centered on food and beverage products. And we had a mobile app that would recommend restaurants and even specific dishes from those menus to users or groups of users with varying taste preferences, dietary restrictions, et cetera. And that was 2017 to 2018.

When Amazon acquired Whole Foods in 2017, it sent grocers into this innovation frenzy. There was a demand for us to gut the tech from the app, license it B2B, and we ended up sunsetting the mobile app, which feels like a lifetime ago now. And all we’ve done is deploy personalized recommendations, search and substitutions for online grocers ever since.

Michael Wolf: I didn’t know that that had such a big impact. It makes sense, in retrospect, the acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon. But like you said, there was this frenzy and a wake up call to existing grocers, and that sent you in a completely different direction.

Spencer Price: Exactly. We had some innovative nimble online grocers as well as some legacy retailers that knew they needed to step up. I think the main driving force for grocers to want to look at this type of tech back then was that Amazon generates over one-third of all of its product sales revenue from their recommendation with the ‘You may also like’ and ‘customers also bought’ type product suggestions. Grocers do not have a passive piece of AI that drives a third of their sales, and that is what we enable grocers to do. We give them that competitive weapon to fight back in this World War grocery.

Michael Wolf: I love that; World War grocery sounds like a movie, starring you guys apparently. But I mean, look at the last 18 months, right? I think the world’s woken up to AI. It’s permeated all the press and the pop or consciousness largely due to the exposure of things like ChatGPT and generative AI to everyone. It seemed like like six, seven years ago, a lot of people were building ontologies and had a custom code, to make their AI to get certain outputs. But now, with generative AI, you can basically do prompts and get a lot of the same results. And these large language models just keep getting bigger. Can you talk about how your business has changed by incorporating larger langue models and generative AI?

Spencer Price: Yeah, so the way that generative AI has taken shape thus far has, of course, been through chat bots. One of the things that those, at least from a consumer-facing standpoint, one of the things that chat bot ask technology with LLMs, Gen. AI, et cetera, plays into e-commerce at large and potentially grocery down the line is conversational commerce.

We don’t see that as being a particularly exciting use case, particularly in this category where people are adding usually a couple dozen items to their basket. They’re not saying, you know, I need help finding the right sweater that matches these pants. It’s a household you’re shopping for with different dietary restrictions, taste preferences. And that’s where language models don’t necessarily perform best. That’s where recommender systems have decades of tried and true proven methods.

And so that’s still a foundational component of our science. However, for one of our solutions, search, LLMs allow for a much more robust level of understanding natural language. So we had our own raw sort of NLP models that we developed in -house a few years ago, that we’ve been fine tuning, and now we can incorporate some of these open source transformers and LLMs to take our vertical eyes, rather than a generalist sort of assistant, our vertical eyes recommender systems and layer them with this cutting edge technology that allows for the generation of synonym lists and a better understanding of things like typos. But the risk with using just generative AI to try to develop these highly specialized models in a category that’s clearly so nuanced and personal is the hallucinations. I was recommended a beef and banana soup from chat GPT. And I got to tell you that that feels a ways away. I did not. It was terrifying to be honest.

Michael Wolf: Did you make it?

Spencer Price: I did not. It was terrifying, to be honest.

Michael Wolf: Well, I’ve been talking to a lot of folks who are in this area of food and beverage that are trying to deploy AI centric solutions. And like you said, a lot of the LLMs have this problem with hallucination. They’re oftentimes, they’re ingesting the world of the broader internet, but they don’t necessarily go deep on things like food and beverage. So I’ve heard companies that are building special, small language models that can couple into large language models. They’re doing kind of these transformers that provide the intelligence. Sounds like you guys have your own kind of approach to that. And you’re using LLMs as the conversational smart interface that is just so much more savvy than it would have been in the past. And then diving deep into your knowledge set.

Spencer Price: Precisely. We are using these new state of the art technologies, both as sort of a research platform to understand what we can benefit from and leverage and also where the watch outs are, like the example I just shared. One thing that you’d imagine might be really nice, whether it’s with a small language model specific to what we’re doing, or using the best of these large language models.

One use case that probably strikes you as obvious is groceries have a notoriously dirty data problem. And so maybe there’s a way to clean up these product catalogs and inventories and descriptions and attributes. The challenge is you can’t run the risk of things like health claims, nutrition facts, or marketing descriptions being completely wrong. And we’ve seen a lot of inaccuracies in using it for that.

So everything we do with LLMs has a human in the loop to make sure that none of those inaccuracies end up facing a user. But by and large, what sets us apart is layering in, as you said, our knowledge base, which is an ontology of every single product, but more than that, the essence of each product, knowing that orange, for example, is a distinct flavor. It is a product and it’s also a color. And LLMs are not built to have those nuances at play to the level of sophistication that you need them to be. Does that make sense?

Michael Wolf: Yeah, it does. What are you most excited about if, 10 years down the road, you’re building systems that use technology like AI in terms of the grocery shopping experience? What do you think will change the most?

Spencer Price: So I think that personalization historically took a lot of different shapes, and then they all kind of converged five to 10 years ago by having truly individualized browsing experiences on content platforms. Netflix isn’t just on an account basis, but within an account, you have a handful of profiles in your household, and each profile sees a completely different set of suggested categories, titles within those categories, and even different cover art for each one of those titles that’s likely to resonate with you as a specific end user. Spotify acquired Echonest, and they were able to map out all the different attributes down to subjective metrics like the danceability of every single track in their library, now they have the most robust music recommendation engine in the world, and people love them for that, and I’ve never left as a result.

In online shopping, we’re talking about products now, not content. We’re a little bit behind these content platforms, but I think in 10 years’ time, we will see a very similar thing, and it’s going to be even more exciting because if you can give every single shopper their own unique grocery store, that’s going to make for both the fastest and most efficient and of course, most inspiring shopping experience. And we’re not there yet, but we have all the rails to get there in a lot less than 10 years. Depends how much. Grocers want to move quickly.

Michael Wolf: That’s exciting, getting Mike’s grocery store tailored towards me. That’s perfect. Tell us about the Wynshop deal. You guys got acquired, which is exciting news for you. What does that mean?

Spencer Price: So our biggest channel partner to reach retailers and have our personalization technology directly embedded into an e-commerce platform was with Wynshop. And they’re the leading provider of e com platform technology on a white label basis to grocers all over the continent and a handful of international accounts as well. And we’ve been working with them for a few years. We love the team. We think they have a clearly differentiated product and they got to know us, our team and our tech. And it was just a pretty perfect match, to be honest, to have what we’ve developed baked in as more of a base level set of functionality, as well as being able to offer premium levels of functionality for these grocers that they can opt into if they want.

So yeah, about six weeks ago, we joined the team. They brought on all the day to day, all the personnel, we remain an independent business unit within Wynshop, but obviously it’s not like there’s any walls up. We work with everybody there very well. They put some resources behind us and yeah, the goal is both to service their existing accounts and future customers as well with the tech we’ve built and the new stuff we’re building.

Michael Wolf: All right, well, Spencer, congratulations. You worked hard for years to build the product and then create a opportunity for you. So I’m looking forward to talking more with you in Seattle in June at the Smart Kitchen Summit. How can people find out more about Halla and Wynshop?

Spencer Price: Yeah, well, thank you so much for the opportunity and the congratulations. You can still find us even though we don’t go by holla .io, we’re just holla now, at halla .io and winshop .com, W -Y -N, shop.

Michael Wolf: Cool. Hey, well, Spencer, thanks so much for spending time with me, man.

Spencer Price: Thank you so much, Mike. Look forward to seeing you in June.

SKS 2024 Preview: Clayton Wood Talks The Current State of Food Robotics

We’re just one month away from the Smart Kitchen Summit, so we’re going to be checking and hearing from some of our speakers.

First up is Clayton Wood, a long-time entrepreneur who has been navigating the food robotics market for the last five years, first as the CEO of Picnic (which debuted its robot at SKS 2019), talking about the challenges and opportunities he sees in this market. You can watch the full interview by clicking play below or read some of the highlights in the transcript below.

The Spoon Talks to Food Robotics Entrepreneur Clayton Wood.

Michael Wolf: I imagine that a lot of startups in the food robotics space are probably wanting to get your advice because you ran one of the early pretty successful food robotics companies with Picnic. Talk about some of the conversations you’re having and maybe some of the, are there early stage entrepreneurs in the space that are coming to you say, hey, we have an idea.

Clayton Wood: Absolutely. I started getting inbound interest in being an advisor as soon as I left Picnic, a little over a year ago. I’ve talked to a large number of companies in the space. Many of them are at the same spot, which, given market conditions, isn’t too surprising, which is they’ve got an idea. They’ve probably got a product or a prototype, having trouble raising their first round, having trouble finding product market fit. And just trying to make that leap into kind of being a more mature company. It’s a tough spot under any circumstances, but in market conditions, the last few years have made it especially difficult.

Michael Wolf: One of the things about food robotics is it’s a long path to getting into market. It’s a lot of capital. And with the venture capital winter that is seemingly lasting forever, it seems like a tough time for food robotics companies.

Clayton Wood: It very much is. I know at Picnic, we started in what I finally refer to as the free money era, where you raised one round just to get to the next round, and raising money wasn’t really that much of a question. Now it’s a huge problem. The challenge that food robotics companies have specifically is that as the market tightened up, it became very conservative, and conservative investors don’t like hardware in general.

Food tech is seen as a challenging category of hardware. So if you’re looking at, you know, show me when you’re cashflow positive, show me when you’re profitable. It’s very, very difficult as a food hardware company to show that because it’s such a new field. Product market fit is elusive and being able to say when that those financial metrics will turn right side up is really challenging. It’s just a really tough time for all startups, but I think food robotics, food hardware is especially a challenging category, and has been for the last two or three years.

Michael Wolf: One of the things about Picnic was I felt like it was a next-generation pizza food robotics company and that it was purpose-built around building pizzas. It wasn’t one of these where someone got a general-purpose robotic arm and would just move things around within a confined space. And you’re still seeing those sometimes. What are some of the if you’re giving advice to a food robotics company in terms of building out a system and thinking it through what ultimately may succeed in the market, what would you tell them?

Clayton Wood: Yes.I think it’s one of those signs, you’re absolutely right about the arms and the big footprints. It’s one of those signs of a new, immature market. People haven’t seen food robotics, they don’t know what to think about it. We had people at trade shows looking at the Picnic robot and they’re in the pizza business, and they’re watching it make a pizza and they’re going, ‘does it make the pizza?’ It’s really hard to just wrap their head around it.

I think the challenge, it’s common to a lot of technology companies, but especially true in food robotics, you’ve got to start with the customer. What’s the customer’s pain point, and what can they actually use? And unfortunately, not uncommonly, people start with ‘what can my product do?’ and ‘how can I make it do it in a real fancy, impressive way and how fast can it do it or that sort of thing?’

Those numbers are nice and you get people excited, but it’s not really what the customer needs. And ultimately, the real challenge in food robotics is integration. How will your device get integrated into a commercial kitchen so that the kitchen can continue to operate, do what it needs to do, and do it without disrupting the process? And until there are new concepts that are really built around automation and those are starting to emerge. I used to say no one who has a kitchen has a pizza robot sized hole in their kitchen that they’re just waiting to plug it in.

Michael Wolf: You know, there are a couple of founders out there on the smaller side that I think are innovating. They’re not a big chain. So you see like Andrew Simmons, which I think you talk a lot with. You see Lee Kindell up here in Seattle with Moto. And I imagine there are others that are showing how you can be a smaller operator and almost build your new restaurant concept around utilizing kind of off-the-shelf robotics. It’s not like a Zume, where they raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Softbank and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to build our own robot, do this custom thing.’ These smaller operators are taking a system like Picnic’s and saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to build a new concept that is essentially centered around automation and kind of move forward.’ I feel like they’re pioneering in a sense. Do you think that’s going to be what we’re going to see in the future, more people pioneering concepts that are leveraging automation because they think that can help them scale better?

Clayton Wood: I love to see that. I think Andrew and Lee are brilliant, and I’d say, you know, they’re unfortunately they’re at the far end of the open-minded innovator scale. They’re both kind of willing to move things around and try things, and they’re not just open to innovation, but they embrace it and they seek it out. I don’t think that’s really the persona that I’d use to describe most people in the restaurant business.

If you have that kind of open -minded approach, there’s all kinds of things you could do and you can adapt. If you don’t want to adapt, you say, this is the way I do things. Can you help me? That’s where you run into an integration challenge. But I think what I love about what Lee is doing at Moto and what Andrew is doing with Mama Ramona’s Pizza Roboto is they’re showing how it can work. They’re sharing real world experiences.

Andrew is doing his whole build -in public diary on LinkedIn, which I think is brilliant and super useful because he’s sharing the wins and the losses. But it shows that it can work, you’ve just got to adapt. And I think that’s a lot of the product market fit in these early days is about adapting on both sides. The customer has to be willing to adapt a little bit and the product companies have to go in realizing that regardless of what they may think, they haven’t built a perfect machine and they need to be willing to tweak and change and reconfigure to make the best fit.

Michael Wolf: Okay, you’ve been in this business for half a decade now, you’re advising companies. What are you excited about in terms of food robotics? And are there spaces you think you’d like to see more entrepreneurs or inventors go in terms of building automation around food?

Clayton Wood: I’ve seen some in the home space as well as the restaurant space who are starting out with products that already solve some of the challenges that we’ve seen really block some of the earlier companies. Building devices that are drop-in replacements for a make line, for instance. Acknowledging the fact that if you have the way a restaurant operates, workers are seldom just dedicated to a station standing there all day. The automation needs to work even if the person is only giving intermittent attention. You need to see things like a holding station where if you’re making 10 salads a minute, well, if there’s nobody there to catch the 10 salads, they need to be suitably caught and retained and held there.

And it needs to work around the way the workflow goes in the kitchen, which is multitasking, short staff, and it needs to solve real problems. And the nice thing is you can solve different problems and make it work. I’ve heard people say that, well, the automation didn’t really save me any labor because I only had one person working there anyway. I still need one person working the automation, but the consistency means the cook goes well. The pizzas cook really well because they’re all consistent.

Food waste is another area where food waste is a huge problem, especially in the pizza category, but I think it’s also a problem in other categories as well. If you can eliminate food waste, just food waste alone can pay for the system. So I think if you’re an automation company or product developer, thinking about all the different ways you can add value, but it can only do that if it works with that particular operator.

So you’re going to find the customer who is doing something the way that your machine is designed to do it. If you can make 200 dishes an hour, that’s brilliant and that sounds really impressive, but how many restaurants are making 200 of the same thing every hour? Not that many. And so you may not really have a big market if that’s your claim to fame and that’s really the reason you want somebody to buy it and that’s how your economics work. If people are making 20 an hour, is it still economical? Does it still pay for itself?

Michael Wolf: You mentioned home and you’re seeing some things that are exciting you. And you don’t have to necessarily name names, but home has been really tough to crack for food robotics. And you’re seeing some interesting ones that broke over some of the barriers that were challenging in the past. What are you seeing there that’s exciting?

Clayton Wood: Home is tricky because it’s gotta be, it’s gotta be small. It’s gotta be versatile. Um, it can’t lock you into, you can only do, you can only use it if you buy our packet of pre -packaged food. Um, so I’ve seen one or two players in there who are, who are solving that, who are offering pre -packaged food or recipes, but you can also customize and add your own ingredients, but making a pretty versatile device. So I think that’s a category that has promise, but it’s especially tricky because even if you’ve got something that works brilliantly, you’ve got the whole, it’s a consumer market, and how do you break into consumer markets? You know, got to build a brand and get everybody’s attention. And that’s just, that’s a world that I’m less familiar with. And it’s a pretty daunting challenge to break into that consumer market.

Michael Wolf: All right, well, we’ll be talking about both the restaurant, robotic space, as well as the consumer space at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Lee Kindell will be there. Clayton, you’re going to be there as well, June 4th and 5th in Seattle. And I’m excited to see you there, man.

Clayton Wood: Looking forward to it.

You can hear Clayton at Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4-5th in Seattle. Get your ticket today!

Why GFA’s Unceremonious Drop of Climax is a Big Win For the Company & the Plant-Based Cheese Category

For the past week, the alt-protein world has been abuzz about the news that the Good Food Awards had quietly dropped Climax Food from the list of finalists and, according to Climax, snatched the winner’s trophy from them due to a convoluted and confusing set of rationalizations by the organization.

Washington Post broke the story last weekend in an article titled A vegan cheese beat dairy in a big competition. Then the plot curdled (is there a title for best article headlines? If so, WaPo may have just ran away with it).

The article detailed how Climax was listed among the finalists when the GFA announced them in January and how Climax was quietly informed that same month that they had actually won it all. An uproar among industry insiders ensued, fueled by a blog post from well-known cheese industry influencer Janet Fletcher, questioning whether vegan cheese is actually cheese. The post featured quotes from traditional cheesemakers who, unsurprisingly, felt that cheese not made from animal milk should not be included.

“My take is that it’s not really cheese,” said cheesemaker Mateo Kehler of Jasper Farms in the post.

The story took a turn when Climax Foods CEO Oliver Zahn was informed by the WaPo journalist working on the story that Climax had been taken off the list of finalists and, as he would soon learn, had been disqualified from the competition altogether. From there, Climax and GFA provided differing accounts of what happened, with GFA offering up a confused and convoluted explanation that seemed to hinge on the fact that Climax had included Kokum butter in its original entry, an ingredient that they claim is not designated as GRAS (generally regarded as safe). Zahn claimed that the entry requirements didn’t specify that ingredients needed to be GRAS-certified, a claim backed up by the Internet archive version of the rules as stated in January.

As WaPo was working on the story, Zahn spoke to a few other journalists (myself included) about the news in anticipation of the WaPo story’s release. When I first talked to Zahn, he was worried about the impact of the news and was frustrated that his team had bought tickets and made hotel reservations in anticipation of receiving an award. However, his biggest frustration was that he felt the award would raise the visibility of his product and be an important milestone for the vegan world.

via GIPHY

Above: The Good Food Awards

As it turns out, the controversy surrounding the GFA awards and the organization’s unceremonious retraction of the winner’s trophy might just be the best thing that’s ever happened to Climax and the plant-based cheese category. That’s because it’s clear that even though Climax didn’t receive the award in the end, the publicity from GFA’s rake-step is better and more far-reaching than if the organization had actually gone through with the right thing.

Sure, Climax winning the award would no doubt have been a nice feather in their cap, but would it have gotten them featured as a bit on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert?

Meanwhile… Amazon Cat Returned | Gull Screeching Champion | Vegan Blue Cheese Beats Dairy

When I caught up with Zahn after the WaPo story had come out and dozens of follow-on stories had appeared about the news, he seemed more at peace. Of course, a jump in sales will probably do for you.

“Sales are good,” Zahn told me.

Stepping back, that a panel of judges saw a plant-based cheese as not only on par but actually better than a product made with dairy is forcing the industry and consumers to have a conversation, one in which I imagine many will side with Climax. Sure, today many in the industry are claiming distinctions without a difference when it comes to the actual final product, saying things like real cheese “has a story” and plant-based cheeses aren’t “agricultural products” (huh?). But in the long run, when consumers happily begin choosing great-tasting vegan cheese, the industry (and the GFA) will have to follow their lead.

You can watch my interview with Oliver below.

Climax's Oliver Zahn Talks About Good Food Awards Controversy

‘Amazon for Proteins’: Shiru Launches AI-Powered Marketplace for Proteins

Shiru, a company that utilizes AI to discover plant-based novel proteins, has announced a new marketplace in ProteinDiscovery.ai that lets anyone search, discover, pilot, and buy molecules for food, agriculture, personal care, and advanced material applications.

Shiru claims that its protein marketplace is an industry first. It allows researchers and product builders access to a database of 33 million-plus molecules and search via sequence, functional use, and expression.

“With ProteinDiscovery.ai we’ve made the world of natural proteins for industrial applications accessible. We’ve even added the ability for users to easily purchase samples, creating the ‘Amazon for proteins,’” said Shiru Founder and CEO Dr. Jasmin Hume. “We’ve been using AI to identify high-value, novel, scalable proteins for years, fueling our own product development. With significant recent interest from CPGs and ingredients companies alike, we decided to open our toolbox to everyone.”

I caught up with Hume to learn how the new protein discovery engine works. You can watch the video of our conversation below.

The Spoon Talks With Shiru About New Protein Discovery Marketplace

Pipedream Raises $13M as It Looks to Build Underground Middle Mile Delivery Network

Underground delivery startup Pipedream Labs announced it has raised $13 million in funding. Company CEO Garrett McCurrach disclosed the funding, led by Starship Ventures, with participation from Cortado Ventures, Myelin Ventures, and others, in a post on LinkedIn.

The new capital infusion will primarily be utilized to enhance Pipedream’s “Instant Pickup” service and kick-start the construction of an ambitious middle-mile network in an as-yet-unnamed city. This network aims to facilitate quicker, more cost-effective urban deliveries.

What the company calls its Instant Pickup service is when it deploys its underground delivery technology at a grocery store, restaurant, or retail store. According to McCurrach, an Instant Pickup system enables a restaurant or grocery store to hand off an order to a customer in less than 15 seconds. The company says it has 100 preorders for Instant Pickup systems, a number which likely includes its Wendy’s pilot announced last year.

The company says it will also select a city to build its first large-scale middle-mile network installation. While McCurrach doesn’t say in which city they will first break ground, he did include a graphic of a map of the Phoenix metro area with a diagram outlining a “small middle mile network”

McCurrach: “This year, we will be selecting a city to build our first middle-mile network (a large-scale underground delivery network that makes current deliveries faster and cheaper in a city) and collaborating with local government and city officials to maximize the benefits of our low-cost, fast delivery system for all their citizens. Construction is set to begin this year, with plans to start utilizing the network by next spring.”

My guess is the company will likely find a lot more near-term traction for its Instant Pickup business, as extremely short-range delivery within a given plot of land is much easier to deploy than a city-wide installation. It also doesn’t hurt that the company’s push into curbside pickup and fast food drive-thrus comes at a time when grocery stores are growing their pickup business and quick service restaurants are reimagining how they handle drive-thru.

U.S. Online Grocery Expected to Hit $120B by 2028 as Grocers Focus on Building Out First-Party Delivery

According to a new report just published by researcher Bricks Meets Click, U.S. online grocery sales are expected to hit $120 billion by 2028. The report forecasts that the e-grocery segment will grow at a 4.5% clip over the forecast period, three times the growth rate of the in-store grocery segment, which is forecasted to grow 1.3% during the same period.

Total eGrocery sales, which Bricks Meets Click defines as including Delivery, Pickup, and Ship-to-Home, are projected to account for 12.7% of total grocery sales in the U.S., up 170 basis point (bps) versus 2023. The researcher forecasts that online grocery, excluding Ship-to-Home (orders sent via common carriers like FedEx, a service that most grocers do not offer), will represent 10.7% of total grocery sales in five years.

“Two factors are creating significant headwinds that impact our eGrocery forecast,” said David Bishop, partner at Brick Meets Click. “First, the market is maturing. Nearly all of the people interested in online grocery shopping have used it at least once by now. Second, even though inflation has recently fallen faster than expected, its cumulative effect continues to drive a flight-to-value behavior in grocery shopping and that will slow topline sales growth.”

With increased competition in a slower-growing market, retailers are likely to concentrate on enhancing their first-party (1P) platforms to better control costs and improve the customer experience. This strategy aims to counteract the pressures from third-party (3P) platforms, which have traditionally dominated the market but tend to be more expensive for consumers.

According to Bricks Meets Click, pickup sales are expected to grow faster (5.4%) than delivery (4.4%) or Ship-to-Home (2.8%) through the forecast period, and pickup is expected to account for nearly 47% of all online grocery sales at the end of five years. This growth will be fueled by an increasing number of pickup options, particularly in suburban markets where delivery services currently dominate. This shift reflects a strategic expansion by retailers to cover more geographical areas and meet growing consumer demand for convenience.

Micromart Wants to Create Just-Walk-Out Convenience Anywhere With Its Just-Plug-In Cabinets

Earlier this month, we learned that Amazon is phasing out its Just Walk Out technology at its Amazon Fresh grocery stores. The company didn’t say much about the reasoning behind it, but one likely reason is customers never valued skipping the checkout line in a traditional grocery store shopping experience as much as Amazon anticipated.

But that doesn’t mean shoppers don’t value speed to completion and low-friction shopping experiences. Getting in and out quickly is highly desirable when watching a ballgame or picking up something quickly for lunch during the workday. That’s why Amazon will continue to keep its Just Walk Out technology in sports stadiums and in its Amazon Go fast-format convenience stores, which are typically located in busy downtown office corridors.

Still, do we need whole stores outfitted with cameras and sensors? What if we could condense all this down to a couple of cabinets that can sit in any condo or office lobby?

That’s the idea behind Micromart, an eponymously named micro-market platform from the same Toronto-based team behind Kitchenmate. Micromart’s solution uses AI-powered image recognition technology, putting it into standalone refrigerated cabinets that fit anywhere with a little floor space and a power outlet to plug the cabinets in.

To open the locked refrigerated or freezer cabinet, the customer taps with their phone. They open the cabinet, grab the item(s) off the shelf, and once they close the cabinet, a receipt is generated. If the item is a meal that needs to be heated, the customer can then heat the meal in a “smart cooker” that is attached to the cabinet.

The addition of a food heating system is one of the major differentiators for the Micromart solution, something that company CEO Yang Yu says they developed for Kitchenmate. Kitchenmate, which The Spoon covered way back in 2019, started as a combination food-to-go service for condos and offices. According to Yu, it was while looking for available technology to enable easy unattended purchases of their Kitchenmate meals that the company realized they would need to make their own smart fridges and commerce system.

“We started with the heater,” said Yu. “That was the only thing we had, but then we realized we needed to put the food somewhere, so we built a fridge. When we built the fridge, we were looking at AI companies that did just-walk-out technology, but all of them had issues, and they were all very expensive. And none of them were very accurate. So we had to build our own.”

After building just-walk-out technology for their fridge and deploying it in different locations, they realized the refrigerated cabinets and the heating system were the business. Not long after, Micromart was born.

One reason that Yu and his team saw this as a potential big business is the realization that many office buildings are shutting down cafeterias, often replacing them with just a couple of vending machines. While some solutions, like Farmer’s Fridge, provide fresh options, there aren’t many choices for fresh and hot food.

“Nobody wants to eat vending food,” said Yu. “There’s definitely success stories around healthy vending, but you’re not going to get the variety and the hot food that people expect out of a cafeteria.”

In addition to the refrigerated cabinets and the food heating system, the Micromart solution comes with software as a service that lets retailers track and forecast inventory, electric price tags, and built-in digital ad displays that the operator can customize. The company’s offering also includes a Shop consumer app that can be customized with the operator’s branding. Pricing for a three-cabinet system is $19 thousand for the cabinets, plus transaction and monthly SaaS fees.

Micro-markets aren’t new. Researchers estimate that the micromarket business in the US was almost $4 billion in 2022 and expect it to grow by 13% through 2030. However, many of the solutions are not much more than refrigerators with RFID scanning or weight sensors built in. Other solutions, like those deployed at airports, require the customer to pick up the items and go through a self-checkout scan, often with a store employee eyeing them from close by. Micromart wanted to marry the lighter footprint of older cabinet systems with the more advanced Amazon Go-like vision systems.

“The whole premise behind this was that you could literally put it anywhere in North America,” said Yu. All you need is a standard electrical outlet, and you plug it in, and it works.”

According to Yu, the Micromart solution will debut at the NAMA show in May.