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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Not Surprisingly, Starbucks Is Shutting Down Its NFT Program

Perhaps not all that surprising given the downturn in interest in Web3 and NFTs among big brands, Starbucks announced today that it’s shutting down its Web3 loyalty program Odyssey.

The Odyssey program allowed members to gain benefits through playing games and participating in activities called Journeys. When they completed Journeys, members earned points and received NFTs (called Journey Stamps) that gave them access to exclusive benefits. Members could also purchase limited edition NFTs, which provided them with additional Odyssey points and unique artwork.

According to an FAQ about the program’s transition, Starbucks says they will close the Odyssey beta on March 31, 2024, and users will have until March 25, 2024, to complete any remaining Journeys. The company says it will transition the Odyssey marketplace to the Nifty NFT marketplace, where users can buy, sell, and transfer Odyssey stamps. As part of the move, the company said they are also shutting down the Odyssey discord server on March 18.

The effort was shepherded by the former Starbucks chief digital officer Adam Brotman through his company Forum3. Like many Web3 startups in the past 12 months, Brotman and his cofounder Andy Sacks have made a hard pivot from Web3 to generative AI as their primary focus, with their new tagline being “Where AI Meets Digital Transformation.”

Some crypto sites have asked whether the program will return, and while Starbucks left the door open in its FAQ with a bland stay-tuned message – “While the Starbucks Odyssey Beta program is ending, we are excited for you to see what comes next and are grateful for your consistent engagement and feedback” – my guess is the company likely will de-emphasize things like tradeable NFTs even if it looks to use some form of underlying blockchain architecture in the future.

Keurig Unveils Plastic-Free Coffee Pods, Developed With A Little Help From The Maker of CoffeeB

If you can’t beat them, join them.

And if you’re Delica, that’s precisely what the Swiss-based company did. That’s because today, North American single-serve giant Keurig Dr. Pepper announced that they have developed a completely new single-serve coffee form factor, one that does away with the iconic (and environmentally damaging) plastic pod, by partnering up with Delica, maker of the CoffeeB fully compostable single-serve coffee ground form factor.

Longtime readers of The Spoon know that Delica launched the CoffeeB system in 2022, and it has been quickly gaining traction in Switzerland, France, and Germany with its fully compostable coffee pods balls. According to Keurig, they have entered into a long-term partnership with Delica that grants Keurig the exclusive rights to use and build upon Delica’s proprietary technology for consumers across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

Keurig's new K-Rounds and Alta Brewer Announcement Video.

Keurig’s new single-serve coffee grounds form factor is called the K-Round, which, like Delica’s, will use a plant-based compostable container. According to Keurig, the K-Round is not only a result of the collaboration with Delica, but also a multi-year research effort by Keurig Dr Pepper’s R&D team. In addition to Delica’s IP, the K-Round utilizes its internal IP to develop a product tailored for the North American market, which includes patents pending for both the brew system and the plastic-free pods.

One primary difference between the CoffeeB system and the new K-Rounds is that the K-Round is essentially a flat puck shape compared to the CoffeeB system’s ball shape. One reason for the different shapes is that they enable Keurig to utilize its BrewID technology, which scans information printed on the top of each K-Round to get information about the specific coffee type and optimize the brew.

“We’ve invented a different shape for them,” Becky Opdyke, senior vice president of Keurig Systems Marketing, told The Spoon. “And that’s because we’re going to be printing some coding on the top that will be read by the brewer so that it makes the coffee type that best matches the K-Round. There will be ones that are specifically sized for espresso versus a long coffee versus a cold brew, for example.”

Of course, the delivery of a new single-serve form factor requires a new coffee brewer, and on that front, Keurig also had plenty of news. Alongside announcing the new K-Round, the company introduced its new Alta coffee brewing system. According to Keurig, the Alta will enable a Keurig brewer to deliver espresso-style coffee extraction for the first time, including the ability to create crema. This new capability is directly tied to the new K-Round, which can withstand up to 250 psi of pressure.

Keurig also announced that the new Alta will be backward compatible with existing pods. While that might initially be a bummer for those who want to see an end to plastic pods, it’s actually critically important since consumers tend to take time to change consumption patterns. By providing a device that bridges generations of pods, Keurig is giving its new system and single-serve form factor its best chance of survival.

A year and a half ago, I asked if CoffeeB stood a chance against Keurig. As it turns out, they didn’t have to fight that battle since they decided to partner with the North American’s single-serve giant. Ultimately, this strategy means consumers (and the earth) will be the winners in the long run with more choices and less waste.

Keurig Takes Another Swing at Cold Beverages With the Launch of QuickChill Cold Coffee Technology

Perhaps the third time’s a charm?

That appears to be what Keurig is thinking, given the news of the single-serve coffee giant’s new technology and brewing system that allows it to deliver cold-brewed coffee drinks instantly.

The new system, QuickChill, will use advanced cooling technology to flash-chill fresh-brewed coffee. According to Keurig, QuickChill will chill hot-brewed coffee from a K-Pod in three minutes, pouring coffee into the glass at 60°F. That’s a vast difference between the company’s previous efforts at ice coffee with its K-Iced coffee line, which poured hot-brewed coffee on top of ice. Keurig says that the new technology will result in coffee that comes out of the machine three times colder than coffee brewed by its K-Iced line.

The new technology, which has an internal chilling mechanism that reduces the coffee’s temperature post-brew, will result in less diluted coffee once poured over ice, which, according to Keurig itself, didn’t always lead to coffee shop results.

“Historically, really, what you’re getting is just a hot brew over the top of ice, and it created a less flavorful, watered-down version of the beverage,” said Josh Hulett, Keurig’s SVP of product management, in a video (see below) about the new QuickChill technology.

The new QuickChill technology will be used in a new hot/cold brewing system from Keurig called the K-Brew + Chill brewer. It will be available starting this fall, and pricing has yet to be announced.

QuickChill is Keurig’s third attempt at creating a platform that dispenses cold beverages. Keurig followers might remember the Keurig Kold, an attempt to compete with the Sodastream carbonated beverage appliance. After shuttering that effort, the company partnered with AB In-Bev a couple years later to create a pod-based home cocktail-making appliance with their Drinkworks joint venture. Drinkworks didn’t make it as far as Kold, shutting down soon after a newly announced new product line.

With QuickChill, however, the company looks to be sticking to what it knows: coffee. According to the company, this move attempts to tap into strong interest in cold-brew coffee, particularly among younger coffee drinkers.

“We’re really excited about this innovation launching because it is a breakthrough for us to be able to serve cold coffee to our consumers, especially to our younger consumers and Gen Z, forty-eight percent of whom had a cold coffee this past week,” said Becky Opdyke, Senior VP of Keurig systems marketing, in an interview with The Spoon. “We want to make sure we’re delivering for them at home as well.”

The news of QuickChill was part of a slew of announcements by Keurig today, including the launch of a completely new single-serve delivery form factor and a new-generation brewing system that takes advantage of the new compostable, plastic-free pod.

The Keurig QuickChill and K Brew BREW + CHILL announcement video from Keurig.

Announcing The Food AI Co-Lab, a New Collaboration Between The Spoon & Future Food Institute

If there was one thing we learned when we held the first-ever Food AI Summit last October, it is that pretty much every food company believes their business will fundamentally change due to artificial intelligence.

Whether it’s companies building farm equipment, managing food supply chains, launching new grocery shopping formats, or creating new quick-service restaurant chains, no one along the food value chain will remain untouched by the rapid pace of change brought on by AI. In other words, we are in a once-in-a-generational rethink of business as usual, a tectonic shift that demands company leaders continuously learn, strategize, and collaborate to make sure their companies survive and even thrive into the future.

Because of this, we realized that we wanted to find a way to bring together our community and others within the food system to talk about the different impacts AI is having across various parts of the food system more than once a year. While we loved the fact that the big ideas that were shared at the Food AI Summit have already resulted in new partnerships and collaborations, we wondered if we brought together folks more regularly – on a monthly basis or even more frequently – might have an even bigger impact.

Luckily for us, one of my favorite organizations – the Future Food Institute, led by one of the most consequential leaders in the future food space in Sara Roversi – had a similar idea. So when Sara approached me about joining forces for a collaborative new organization to do just that – I jumped at the chance.

So, alongside the FFI, I am super excited to announce today the launch of the Food AI Co-Lab!

What is the Food AI Co-Lab? It’s a collaboration that aims to be a meeting space and learning center for leaders who are building the future of food through artificial intelligence. We will explore different topics, engage with our community, and provide information such as industry surveys about what people are doing at the intersection of food and AI.

To kick things off, we will host monthly industry-focused meetings with thought leaders creating using AI across various parts of the food system. Soon, we will also announce in-person events in the US and Italy where the community can get together, network, learn together, and build their own collaborations.

If you’d like to join us on this journey, we encourage you to join our LinkedIn group and also register for our first virtual event, AI & The Future of Food, which will take place next Tuesday, March 19th. At that event, we’ll interview two thought leaders: Dr. Patrick Story, a professor of Philosophy at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, participating in a National Science Foundation-funded project analyzing the impact of automation and AI on the food system, and Kevin Brown, the CEO of Innit, a company building a platform that plugs into generative AI large language models to make them more food “fluent” and power AI-assisted food knowledge systems and services.

I hope to see you there, and I am excited to work with you to learn, collaborate, and build the future with the Food AI Co-Lab!

Bellwether Debuts Small-Format, Countertop Electric Coffee Roaster for $15 Thousand

Today Bellwether Coffee announced its latest electric, ventless coffee roasting machine, The Bellwether Shop Roaster. The new roaster, which is the company’s third-generation electric roasting machine, will retail starting at $14,900, about one-quarter of the price of its second-generation roasting appliance.

According to the company, the Shop Roaster will be able to roast 3.3 pounds of coffee in about 15-20 minutes, meaning a throughput of up to 13 pounds of coffee per hour. As part of its new product lineup Bellwether will also offer a continuous roasting upgrade to the Shop Roaster for $5,000 extra ($19,900 for upgrade and the Shop Roaster). The continuous roasting upgrade will enable the auto-loading of green, unroasted beans into the coffee roaster, enabling up to 13 continuous roasts or 44 pounds of coffee before refilling the base with unroasted coffee beans.

We’ve been following Bellwether since the early days here at the Spoon when they were one of the early roasting infrastructure players pushing the industry towards electrification and decentralized roasting. While some of the bigger players in roasting, like Probat, have started to offer electric roasters, Whiel some players like Carbine have gone out of business, Bellwether continues to push the envelope on size and could attract even more coffee shops and retailers to experiment with roasting their own beans.

Florida Bill Banning Cultivated Meat On Its Way to DeSantis’ Desk

Selling cultivated meat in Florida is about to become a second-degree misdemeanor.

That’s because this week, the Florida legislature voted to pass a bill restricting the commercial sale of meat grown using cellular agriculture. The bill (SB 1084), which passed with a vote count of 86 Yays to 27 Nays, now heads to the desk of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to be signed into law. This was just days after the companion bill passed in the Florida Senate on February 29th.

The bill, which bans commercial distribution of cultivated meat but allows for continued research, is backed mainly by the conventional meat industry, which found willing and happy fellow travelers on this legislative journey in the form of culture-warrior politicians like Jacksonville Republican congressman and cattle rancher Dean Black.

“I think they can make it on the Moon and export it on Mars, and it’s fine to have Martian meat as well,” Black said. “If you go to the Moon, if you go to Mars, you should be allowed to get it there. But you sure as heck shouldn’t be able to get it anywhere in this country, and sure as heck not here in Florida.”

Black’s weird Florida-man-ish quote about Martian meat, which sounds like something out of a Carl Hiassen novel, refers to the exception allowed in the bill for continued research on cultivated meat because NASA and others are researching cultivated meat as a method for astronauts on long-term space missions.

The Florida ban, the first in the US, follows a similar ban in Italy passed last year. The Italian ban was championed by a far-right Italian agriculture minister in Francesco Lollobrigida, who said that the move would help protect jobs and Italian consumers from the invasion of what he described as “synthetic” food.

“We are safeguarding our food, our system of nutrition, by maintaining the relationship between food, land and human labour that we have enjoyed for millennia,” Lollobrigida said.

In both cases, the cattle lobby in each country was the driving force pushing for bans.

In the US, the Florida bill is similar to other legislation making its way through state legislatures in Arizona, Tennesee, and West Virginia. All of it concerns an industry that, at least to this point, is commercially non-existent, with the exception of sales at a couple of high-end restaurants.

While the impact is small today, those building these products are worried about the impact of these laws on cultivated meat as the industry matures.

“I’ve got more than enough challenges,” Wild Type CEO Justin Kolbeck said. “I don’t also need Florida to ban it to make the market smaller.”

After Hitting Ten Thousand Users, Mill Unveils Second-Generation Hi-Tech Food Waste Bin

Last week, Mill unveiled its second-generation appliance, one year after introducing its high-tech food waste bin (don’t call it a composter!). The news comes as the company reaches ten thousand customers and claims it has helped divert one million pounds of food waste from landfills.

Both the first and second generation Mill turn food waste into inputs for chicken feed called grounds. The significant difference between the two machines is that the second-generation Mill will do it faster and more quietly.

According to the company, one primary area of feedback from users of the first-gen Mill was that the appliance processed food too slowly. When the company returned to the drawing board to build the second-generation device, it redesigned the food chopping blades from horizontally mounted to two vertically mounted blades, according to an interview Mill CEO Matt Rogers gave Fast Company.

Video Credit: Mill

Another upgrade speeding the break down of food faster is a change to how the food waste is heated. While the first-gen Mill was heated only from the bottom, the new Mill’s heating element is connected to the entire bin interior, resulting in faster overall food breakdown.

Finally, unlike the first Mill, this new one comes with a purchase option from the get-go. Spoon readers will remember that the company started opening the doors to purchase the first-gen appliance a few months ago after hearing feedback from many of its customers that they’d prefer to own the appliance, especially those that used the Mill to process food waste for use in their garden rather than sending it back to Mill to use for chicken feed.

According to Mill, the new appliance will sell for $999. For those who still want to rent the appliance, the monthly service (without grounds pickup) will be $29.99, $49.99 with grounds pickup. For those who purchase the Mill and want grounds pickup for the Mill chicken-feed service, that’ll cost an additional $10 monthly.

Stepping back, my guess is the biggest challenge Mill will face is its high price point. Consumers looking for high-tech help processing their food waste into compost can find options like the Vitamix Food-Cycler or the Lomi for less than half the price. I worry that just like June and those bringing new approaches to cooking, products hovering around the thousand-buck mark are too expensive for most customers to roll the dice on what is essentially a new product category. While rental lowers the cost, Mill learned that most customers prefer to own their kitchen appliances, which is why they opened up the purchase option.

We’ll keep an eye on the Mill and how they perform with their second-gen appliance.

Ralph Newhouse Tells The Story of Chefman and Chef iQ (and Drops Some News About Upcoming Products)

Around 2009, Ralph Newhouse’s company hunted down excess inventory of small electrics and would re-sell them into the secondary market. However, it wasn’t long before Newhouse realized he wanted to make his own appliances, and that’s when the Chefman we know today was born.

That was just the beginning of Newhouse’s journey into creating his own products. As he and Chefman started to see how new connected products made their way into the market over the past decade, he knew he could take his learnings from Chefman and create a new brand delivering more tech-forward connected products. That thinking led to the creation of Chef iQ, a startup within a startup focused on the smart kitchen.

According to Newhouse, he saw an opportunity to take the company’s know-how for making affordable cooking appliances and create products for consumers with tech-forward features that didn’t break the bank.

“We looked at the smart hardware and the ecosystem that was developing, we felt a lot of brands were kind of missing the mark,” Newhouse told The Spoon. “There were brands out there that were creating very expensive hardware, and it was difficult to make the value case to the consumer on why they needed something with the smarts at these elevated price points. We knew that if we took our expertise at the supply chain and married it with our infrastructure and the team we had over here, perhaps we could build something that had technology underpinning the experience but that the consumer wouldn’t have to pay for.”

Newhouse also tells the story about visiting China years ago and running into some employees from smart oven maker June. After they told him excitedly about the forthcoming launch of a new June Oven, he started to think about how expensive to build these complex connected products. Soon, he started to think maybe he and his company could bring some of these same features at a more affordable price point.

Those early thoughts led to the development of a new product the company will introduce at the Housewares Show (aka the Inspired Home Show) in March: the company’s first smart oven. According to Newhouse, the new Chef iQ smart countertop oven will feature air fry capability, soft door close, a newly developed DC brushless motor, and a touch display. The new oven, which will be connected through the Chef iQ app, will sell for an MSRP of $299.

Looking forward, Newhouse sees many other new products on the horizon, including the rollout of a built-in oven from Chef iQ in 2026.

“It’s something, by the way, I’m super stoked about,” said Newhouse. “It completes the ultimate vision. We look at that industry as ripe for disruption. We think a lot of brands are kind of scared to compete in that space because it’s just really never really been done before.”

You can hear the entire conversation from Newhouse by clicking play below, over on Libsyn, or through Apple Podcasts or the usual podcast spaces.

GE Appliances Debuts EcoBalance and Its Vision of the Kitchen as Integral Part of the Home’s Energy Management Network

This week at KBIS, Haier subsidiary GE Appliances focused much of its, um, energy on getting the message out about its new EcoBalance Home System, a new whole-home home systems energy management platform that it has been working on for much of the past decade.

The first announcement about EcoBalance was unveiled about two weeks before the big kitchen and bath show in Vegas, with the announcement of the company’s partnership with Savant. The deal, which brings Savant’s smart home and energy management expertise together with GE Appliance’s kitchen, bath, and other home products (as well as GE’s power management know-how), essentially set the table by previewing the central control interface for consumers.

But, as I saw yesterday at KBIS, news of that deal was only the beginning. It seemed that GE Appliances’s big focus at the show was introducing a flurry of products that tied together the smart home, kitchen, and cooking, as well as other key home activities, into a tighter and more coordinated relationship with both residential and grid power management.

To wit, here are just a few of the products the appliance company showed off this week at KBIS:

A couple of whole-home battery backup and appliance backup systems. The company showed off how its appliances can connect to a Savant home invertor and wall power battery and how the new integration can enable home systems’ power backup by connecting with an EV. GE Appliances has also partnered with Ford, and they were showing off how a Ford F-150 electric can provide backup power to the home through the EcoBalance system.

In addition to home power backup systems, the company also showed off a new battery backup system for refrigerators. Made in partnership with Savant, the fridge battery enables home users to keep their fridge powered and cold during a power outage, which allows users to open the refrigerator to access food without worrying about an out-of-power fridge losing its chill while powered down. According to the GE Appliances Shawn Stover (see our interview below), it will run the fridge for a few hours, and it also features plug-ins to allow owners to charge small electrics like phones.

GE Appliances Shows Off a Refrigerator Battery Backup at KBIS 2024

They also showed off a new GE Profile GeoSpring Smart Hybrid Heat Pump Water Heater, which uses a patented, electronic integrated mixing valve that can provide up to 60% more hot water versus comparable models and allows a 50-gallon tank to operate at the same effective capacity as an 80-gallon tank. The GeoSpring also includes the CTA-2045 Smart Home Solution that makes it demand response ready by communicating with utility companies and responding intelligently to power grid conditions.

A Pyramid Wall Mount Hood with indoor air quality sensing that can sense carbon monoxide and other air pollutants. When connected to the EcoBalance energy management system, the system will send you alerts and can be programmed to turn on the HVAC system when air pollutants are detected.

In addition to its partnership with Savant and GEA’s own line of new home systems that make up the EcoBalance system, the company also talked about its partnership with electric grid connectivity specialist Tantalus Systems. The two companies, along with Savant, announced that they would be integrating the Tantalus’ TRUSense Gateway into the EcoBalance system to enable GE Appliances to connect into grid and enable energy management at the appliance level through, say, running refrigerator defrost or ice cycles during off-peak hours, charging water heaters with energy for use later in the day, and adjusting HVAC systems can be adjusted a few degrees to save energy and reduce peak demand.

According to GE Appliances, the new EcoBalance system will be available across all the brand’s lines, and it will use several go-to-market touchpoints for GE Appliance customers to learn about it. This includes through the system integrator channel with Savant, the homebuilder channel, and retail at big box stores like Best Buy, where prospective customers can learn about the system and be connected to a Savant integrator to discuss potential ways to bring the technology into their homes.

Stepping back, making power management a key focus for its appliance product lineup is both a natural for a company like GE Appliances (which has, through its original parent company in GE, a long history of power system experience) and a timely move in terms of home design and custom awareness. A key focus for the homebuilding and remodeling industry is a move towards smarter energy efficiency, if not outright net-zero building. Tie that into a broader push towards electrification of kitchens and other home systems (and the slow-but-steady deemphasis of gas in homes), and GE Appliances looks to be making an early bid at being an energy-power leader among appliance brands by centering its future kitchen and home systems messaging around this increasingly resonant design focus for consumers.

Can Whirlpool’s Deal to Use BORA’s Downdraft Ventilation Add Momentum to Induction in the US?

One of the more intriguing long-term technology trends in the kitchen industry has been the up-and-down market evolution of induction cooking. Though introduced almost a century ago at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, residential induction cooktops only became widely available in the early 2000s and have never really taken off here in the States due to, among other things, America’s love affair with gas cooking.

There are other factors – like the requirement for new cookware with induction cooking and the technology’s historically higher price point – but the bottom line is gas has long enjoyed pole position in American homes and on appliance show floors across the US.

However, induction cooking has slowly but surely been gaining ground over the past couple of years. Lower prices, health benefits, and local government building restrictions have given the technology momentum.

And now, at least if you’re Whirlpool, induction cooktop may have another ace up its sleeve in the form of downdraft ventilation. That’s because the appliance giant announced today they’ve teamed up with downdraft ventilation specialist BORA to bring the German company’s technology to the US market. From an article I wrote for Forbes (ed note: where I’ve long been a contributor and the publication Whirlpool agreed to an exclusive):

By adding downdraft technology, Whirlpool hopes to capitalize on the growing popularity of a venting technology that does away with the traditional vent hood and puts additional wind at the back of induction cooking here in the US. Reviews for downdraft ventilation, which like induction has taken off faster in Europe, have been mixed, but gradual improvements in the technology have caused some to give it a second look.

For BORA, the deal marks the first time the company has agreed to license the technology to an external company.

“This is the first time since the beginning of BORA that I have given away the right for the technology,” Willi Bruckbauer, company founder, told me in an interview. “I founded the company in the year 2007. More and more people liked the idea, like the product, and now it’s ready to go from Europe to the US.”

For much of its life, reviews for downdraft technology have been pretty mixed. Clogged filters and an inability to capture all smoke and cooking smells have been top complaints. However, BORA’s patented technology has been earning rave reviews in the European market, so Whirlpool may just have locked up a deal that could help it create separation from other kitchen brands that already have downdraft technology for their gas cooktops and are planning rollouts of downdraft technology with induction cooktop models.

And let’s be honest: kitchen hoods, while effective, often obstruct views and seem out of place in kitchen islands. And, with kitchen islands making a comeback as more home designers and kitchen remodelers are opting for open designs lately, the timing for this partnership seems especially good for Whirlpool.

According to Whirlpool, they are slotting the rollout of the BORA-powered downdraft technology in its JennAir and KitchenAid brands in the second half of 2025. By combining what some see as the world’s leading downdraft technology exclusively with its induction cooktops, Whirlpool could set itself up for additional momentum for its induction models and help drive interest in the electrified cooking technology in the US market.

The Origin Story Behind OMM, the Countertop Egg-Making Robot from Bridge Appliances

A few years ago, Lance Lentini was a year out of college when he started working at DEKA Research & Development, a technology development firm. This wasn’t just any engineering firm; it was the incubation hub for Dean Kamen, one of America’s most renowned inventors, responsible for a plethora of inventions such as the Segway, the iBOT wheelchair, and the dispensing technology used in the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine.

And it was there, while working on projects like self-balancing wheelchairs and delivery drones, that Lentini started to think about how automation could be used to make food production more efficient. He and a couple of coworkers started to discuss the opportunities and started to imagine what it might be like to work on their own project under their own company.

The only question was, where should they start?

According to Lentini, it was in 2020 that the concept for their first product started to come together. Around that time, Lentini and his eventual co-founders were standing in line for coffee and started to wonder what the reason was for the long wait times.

“After watching people just walk away from the line after waiting so long, we were like, ‘let’s poke and prod and see what’s really going on, what’s the biggest problem behind the counter,'” said Lentini in an interview with The Spoon.

After talking to employees at the coffee shop, they learned that eggs were often the bottleneck in the kitchen as a result of how labor-intensive they are to make. It was then they saw an opportunity to innovate.

“That was where we went down the rabbit hole of designing for restaurant owners,” Lentini said.

Lentini took the first leap. He left DEKA and began working on the idea, and within a few months, he received a small investment from a close friend. Before long, he was joined by his other co-founders (Connor White, Keller Waldron, and Chris Plankey) and built their first prototype. This prototype helped them raise a $2 million seed round in 2021 from Steve Papa, a longtime wireless industry executive and one of the original investors in Toast.

After two years of development, the company, now called Bridge Appliances, finalized its first product late last year, a robot designed to automate the preparation of eggs for breakfast sandwiches named OMM. Last month, the company was granted a utility patent for the technology in the OMM, which covers the process of cooking an egg in an end-to-end fashion in a countertop appliance.

The OMM can prepare two eggs in about two minutes, which means a single machine can handle approximately 60 eggs in an hour. The plan is to place the machines in locations ranging from small mom-and-pop shops that might only make fifty eggs on a Saturday morning to higher-volume locations that do three to five hundred eggs in a day. Those higher-volume locations, Lentini says, will have two or three machines working side-by-side.

Bridge Appliances has set up manufacturing in the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, area, and they plan on rolling out the OMM to a set of trial customers over the next few months. From there, the company plans to expand into other areas within the US by the end of 2024 and early 2025. The initial business model will be a “cooking-as-a-service” model, and Lentini says Bridge will charge a nominal fee on a per-egg-cooked basis.

With his first products heading out the door, Lentini can reflect on those early days working as a freshly graduated engineer for a technology pioneer like Dean Kamen.

“Part of the reason we wanted to do this is that we just saw such a lack of innovation in this sector,” Lentini said. “And we were inspired by Dean’s interest and willingness to really try to do moonshots, and we really wanted to give this a try to build the first kind of end-to-end robotic appliances.”

“And we went, and we tried it, and it worked out.”

You can get a peak at the OMM robotic egg cooker in the video below.

Introducing OMM, Automated Egg Cooker

Chef Robotics Hits 10M Meal Milestone in Under Two Years. The Secret? AI-Powered Robots Trained With Lots of Field Data

This week, food automation startup Chef Robotics told The Spoon it had reached the ten million-meal milestone, less than two years after the company’s first robot was deployed in June 2022.

If you think that type of growth is achieved by steady month-over-month increases in production over time, you’re wrong. In fact, according to founder Rajat Bhageria, after taking nearly a year to reach its first million, the company’s been on an up-and-to-the-right full-throttle ride of hockey stick exponential growth ever since. The next million took about one hundred days, the next after that three weeks, and, nowadays, Bhageria says it takes just about two and half weeks or so per additional million food items.

That’s a whole lot of meals made in a short time, which made me wonder what type of customers and food facilities the company serves with its robotics. Bhageria says their typical customers are those running centralized food processing facilities, where Chef Robotics assembles the type of yogurt parfait or protein platter SKUs you might pick up at your local coffee shop. Other end-products include airline meals, hospital food service, and other pre-packed meals. In other words, Chef Robotics’ robots aren’t making salad bowls or pasta from a menu in a restaurant, but instead assembling pre-packed meals at high volume across a wide variety of food types.

“If Tesla’s core technology is batteries, our core technology is food manipulation,” Bhageria said. “Which is to say, we need to be able to go from shredded chicken to diced chicken, to cubed chicken, and from julienne onions to chopped onions to sticky cheese grits in marinara sauce. The whole point of Chef Robotics is to be as flexible as possible.”

Bhageria says their food assembly and manipulation systems differ from traditional dispensing systems, which are limited by a hardware-centric approach and lack sensitivity to the variability in food ingredients. He says Chef Robotics focuses much more on software while leveraging a combination of computer vision, motion planning, and a robotic arm equipped with various utensils. This technology integration mimics the dexterity and intelligence of human food handling, enabling the robots to adapt to different ingredients and recipes rapidly.

Chef Robotics’ CEO says that the company has essentially overcome the infamous AI “cold start” problem by accumulating a massive amount of data by having its robotics in the field enable it to become more flexible over time and understand the different challenges around different types of food manipulation. He says this has resulted in what they call its (what else?) ChefOS.

“ChatGPT can basically just download the Internet,” Bhageria said. “But there’s no training data for food manipulation. You can’t really do it in the lab because the way one customer, julienne’s an onion, is very different than the way another customer, julienne’s an onion. The way to learn how to manipulate food is you have to deploy robots.”

The more robots you have in the field, the more data you have, which makes the AI smarter, which means the existing robots work faster and faster; in other words, it’s the virtuous circle of scaled automation and AI.

When I asked Bhageria the names of his specific customers, he told me they aren’t disclosing who they are because the companies using Chef Robotics technology wish to remain under the radar for now. We do know that the company has robotics in five cities across the US and Canada and plans to triple its fleet of robots this year.

With this type of growth, it won’t be long before Chef Robotics’ robots are pumping out a million meals assembled in just a matter of days.