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March 7, 2024

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.

March 7, 2024

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.”

March 5, 2024

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.

March 1, 2024

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.

February 28, 2024

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.

February 26, 2024

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.

February 20, 2024

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

February 13, 2024

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.

February 12, 2024

It’s All But Official: The June Oven is Cooked

If you’ve been paying attention to the June Oven website lately (and really, who hasn’t?), you may have noticed that it’s been a bit difficult to order a new smart oven from the company for most of the past 12 months. That’s because every single model listed (standard June, June Premium, and June Oven Plus) has been marked as “sold out.”

If June were a capital-starved startup scrimping up to start its next production run, there’s an outside chance we may see more inventory at some point. But, somewhat paradoxically, since June was acquired by grill giant Weber in January 2021 – a company that no doubt has relatively easy access to manufacturing services – that there have been no June ovens for sale doesn’t bode well since, presumably, this was a decision made by management.

And now, according to Andru Edwards, a tech influencer and writer for GearLive, the Weber team told those who asked at CES last month that the June oven is no more.

From a post made by Edwards on Reddit:

Just got the word from Weber themselves here at CES. The June Oven will continue receiving software updates, but no plans for a new model. The tech from June is now being integrated into the new Weber grills. Was hoping for June Oven Gen 4, but it’s not in the cards, unfortunately!

My own outreach to Weber has gone unanswered, so this, combined with a lack of inventory and what they were telling folks at CES, it’s probably safe to say that June is cooked.

This will no doubt come as a bummer for those hoping for a fourth-generation June. It will also raise the question of why Weber bought June in the first place. The answer is probably as simple as, at least at the time of the deal, Weber saw June’s expertise in building high-tech cooking platforms as something they could build on for their own technology roadmap.

From then-CEO of Weber, Chris Scherzinger: “June has been an invaluable partner in developing our Weber Connect platform. Adding June’s expertise and technology to our own allows us to accelerate our connected innovation programs and better address grillers’ needs with new products and services that offer simplicity and fuel grilling discovery through enhanced capabilities.” 

Since then, Scherzinger has left the company. And, while Weber went public in 2021 (after the June acquisition), it wasn’t long before the company’s stock was pulled from public trading after accepting a buyout from private equity firm BDT Capital Partners, which had been its majority shareholder at the time of the IPO. That all makes for a lot of internal turbulence, so it’s probably not all that surprising that the company pulled back a bit from its future roadmap. Add to this the fact Weber is, in essence, an outdoor grilling company, and indoor smart ovens really aren’t a core focus (maybe they should have been focused on an indoor smoker like GE Appliances?).

While June looks like it’s done shipping new ovens, those in the market for a high-tech countertop cooking appliance can still buy a Brava (now owned by cooking equipment giant Middleby), Tovala, or Suvie. And, if you’re willing to wait a little bit, you could pick up a Macrowave from Revolution Cooking (which uses infrared and microwave heating) when it ships later this year.

February 12, 2024

Mill, Maker of a High-Tech Home Food Waste Bin, Adjusts Plans and Enables Purchase Option

It’s been just over a year since the Mill, the company behind a high-tech home food waste bin, was announced to the public. The company, which made an initial splash with a unique waste-to-chicken feed service and a management team with impressive smart home pedigrees, has spent much of the past year shipping to initial customers and working on partnerships with local municipalities in Washington and Arizona to integrate their product into places with limited curbside composting pickup.

And, starting last month, the company began allowing customers to purchase the Mill bin, adding a new option for a product that had previously only been available as part of a monthly subscription fee option. Before, customers had to pay a $33-a-month subscription service to Mill that included the home bin and the Mill grounds pickup service. Now, they have the option to purchase the Mill bin for $999 a year ($899 with promotion), which gets them the bin, a year of Mill essentials like charcoal filter refills and parts and maintenance, the option to opt into Mill pickups, and a 12-month warranty. 

Where the company works with local pickup partners, plan options may be slightly different, according to Mill. Today, that primarily applies to the Phoenix market, where the company has partnered with a local compost pickup company called R.City. This Phoenix business makes a business out of picking up residential food waste and using the compost to regenerate the soil on its farm in South Phoenix.

I’ve been trialing the Mill myself, and I have to say the device works really well. I’ve tried the grounds pickup service, and it was as easy as advertised. However, since I prefer to put the grounds into the ground, buying the machine probably makes the most sense for me in the long term. That said, I imagine most folks might balk at coughing up almost a grand for a high-tech machine to manage food waste.

February 9, 2024

Fresco Deal With Panasonic Brings Device Control & AI-Powered Planning to HomeCHEF Multi-Oven Lineup

At CES 2024, Panasonic announced that it had struck a deal with smart kitchen OS startup Fresco to integrate the Fresch kitchen OS platform with the Japanese brand’s multi-oven countertop cooking appliances.

The deal covers the US market and will see Fresco’s technology bring a new set of connected features to Panasonic’s multi-oven products, the first being the HomeCHEF 4-in-1 multi-oven. According to the announcement, the Fresco AI assistant will reside within the Panasonic app, allowing users to tailor recipes according to their dietary needs, substitute ingredients based on pantry availability, and change serving sizes and cooking preferences. Users can control cooking modalities, enabling steam cooking, air frying, and more through the app and get alerts about cooking status.

The deal marks a significant win for Fresco with one of the leading microwave manufacturers in the world, one that has been relatively aggressive about adding new cooking capabilities through its HomeCHEF multi-oven line. The partnership is interesting because it’s one of the first partnerships by a major microwave company to bring device control and AI-assisted cooking to their lineup.

According to Fresco, the HomeChef 4-in-1 will first be released in the US market in late 2024.

February 7, 2024

Check Out NXP’s Presence-Sensing Cooktop Demo Powered by On-Chip AI

We’re still sifting through some of the cool product demos from CES last month, and one that caught my eye was the demo by NXP of a presence-sensing cooktop powered by an embedded MCU. According to the company, the system used a Neural Processing Unit that runs the machine learning and facial-recognition algorithms within the system rather than relying on a cloud-based compute. The demo featured a device control interface from Diehl Controls.

As can be seen in the video below (taken by TIRIAS Research Principal Analyst Francis Sideco), NXP spokesperson Thomas Herbert shows that you can turn on the burner with either touch or motion sensing (including motion sensing with cooking mitts on). From there, the system is using facial recognition to detect if a person is within local proximity of the cooktop. According to Herbert, presence detection comes into play in a scenario where there is a critical state, such as the pan getting too hot and there is water boiling over. If the system detects a critical state and no one is standing around the stove, it will shut off the heat and can send an alert to the person via a Matter (an open-source smart home connectivity standard) enabled device to alert the cook that the system has intervened on their behalf.

CES 2024 - INVITE ONLY- Part 3 of 3 NXP Autonomous Home Showcase Based on Matter

The demo is interesting to me in a couple of contexts. One is that, as we’ve written about here on the Spoon, the number one reason for fires in the home is due to cooking mishaps, and enabling your stovetop or other cooking appliances to recognize both anomalies as well as the presence of someone could be a real gamechanger, akin to the dip in automobile accidents in recent years due to the widespread prevalence of blindspot detection systems in modern cars.

The second context that’s interesting is that it could become a significant technology in assisting aging-in-place scenarios, particularly for seniors who become a little more forgetful as they age. One of the key determinants of whether folks can continue to live independently is their ability to feed themselves, and by providing “blind spot” detection like this, my guess is this could extend many seniors’ ability to live independently for years.

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