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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Wonder Launches Membership Program, Eyes Ten Store Rollout As It Leaves Delivery Vans Behind

Wonder, the food delivery startup made famous by its original model that used customized delivery vans, has launched a membership program called Wonder+ the Spoon has learned.

The new program, which costs $7.99 monthly, entitles members to free delivery with no minimum order value. Wonder+ also entitles members to prioritized delivery or pickup via a Wonder “Fast Pass” with each member’s order.

The launch of Wonder+ comes months after the company disclosed it was giving up on cooking food orders curbside in delivery vans. While the original concept developed the company a loyal following of high-frequency customers in the New Jersey suburb in which it launched, it proved incredibly capital-intensive, even for a CEO who had shown a knack for raising eye-popping funding rounds.

“I see a much bigger opportunity to be more profitable, more capital efficient and slightly improve” the customer experience with physical kitchens compared with the food truck system, said Wonder chief Marc Lore.

The membership program launches just weeks after the company opened its second brick-and-mortar location in Westfield, New Jersey. This 4,300-square-foot storefront serves food from 13 restaurant brands, including Bobby Flay Steak, Tejas Barbecue, and Di Fara Pizza. According to the company, the Westfield location will reach customers previously serviced by its delivery vans in Westfield and the adjoining towns of Garwood, Fanwood, Winfield, Scotch Plains, Cranford, and Clark. According to the company, the new locations will support delivery, pickup, and limited dine-in.

While the company has left behind its delivery fleet, it still plans to deliver all food made in Wonder kitchens with its own employees.

“Unlike a ghost kitchen or other delivery services, Wonder is completely vertically-integrated, meaning it owns and operates every single aspect of the process – from the front-end app and prepping of food to the cooking, delivery, and every step in between,” a company spokesperson told The Spoon via email. Wonder couriers will not only handle deliveries made to customers who order via the Wonder app, but also those orders made through third-party apps such as Doordash or Uber Eats.

Wonder’s Westfield location debut follows the opening of its Manhattan location in February, and the company plans to open ten Wonder locations by the end of the year, including in Chelsea location next month and a Brooklyn location in the fall.

Food hall-ish multi-brand offerings are the same general direction some ghost kitchen operators – like Kitchen United with its Mix concept and newer operators like Hungry House – have been moving in recent years, only without the delivery piece. Wonder new direction is reminiscent of European delivery giant Deliveroo’s efforts towards vertical integration with its lineup of virtual brands via Deliveroo Experiences and in-person food halls.

MrBeast: I Want To Move On From Beast Burger, Enjoy Feastables ‘100x More’

As the virtual restaurant and ghost kitchen business has struggled for much of the past year, proponents pointed to the success of MrBeast Burger, a virtual restaurant chain started by the YouTube star that expanded to over 300 contracted restaurants and included some physical restaurants.

But now it looks like the creator behind the virtual brand wants out, tired of a business in which he claims he has little control over the quality of the end product. In a series of now-deleted tweets late last week, MrBeast – whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson – explained he was ready to move on from the brand and wanted to focus more on his snack brand, Feastables. In one of the tweets, Donaldson lamented that the company he partnered with to launch the brand (Virtual Dining Concepts) won’t let him stop “even though it’s terrible for my brand.”

In the following tweet, which has yet to be deleted, Mr. Beast explained his reasoning for wanting to move on:

MrBeast’s problems with varying food quality are a symptom of the virtual restaurant industry’s decentralized and distributed operating model and lack of a uniform set of enforceable quality standards. Still, much of his loyal fan base has been willing to cut him some slack, and up to last fall, Donaldson was still discussing plans to expand the brand to more physical restaurants.

Despite his wishes, VDC still looks to have an enforceable contract that they plan to run with. Donaldson lamented their insistence on continuing the brand, saying, “the company I partnered with won’t let me stop even though it’s terrible for my brand.”

Donaldson’s disclosure about his feelings leaves VDC in an awkward spot, even if they have the right to continue opening the brand. MrBeast’s fans tend to be pretty loyal to him, and if word gets out that he’s soured on the project, my guess is any remaining loyalty they have to the virtual brand will evaporate.

Unlike the virtual restaurant brand, Donaldson’s snack brand Feastables is one over which he appears to have much more control. The brand was internally incubated through his own management company, and he partnered with industry pioneer Jim Murray (founder of RX Bar) as a co-founder and CEO of the company.

Is the Retro-Styled Wonder Oven The Future of Countertop Multicookers?

This week, social media-savvy cookware brand Our Place dropped something entirely unexpected: a stylish 6-1 countertop multi-function cooking appliance.

At first glance, I found myself having difficulty processing what I was seeing. The Wonder Oven looked like what the cooking appliance of the future might look as imagined by someone in the distant past. The dissonance I experienced looking at the oven came in part, I think, from the advanced feature of an appliance that looked almost toy-like, or, as a Refinery29 editor described it, “an easy bake oven for adults.”

The Wonder, which can air fry, broil, roast, toast, and steam foods, comes in four different decidedly soft colors: char, steam, blue salt, and spice. The $195 price includes the oven, a baking pan, an air fry basket, a wire rack, and a crumb tray. The Wonder has a reasonably sized footprint at 11.6 in. (h)x 11.5 in. (w) x 10.6 in (depth) and a decent-sized cooking cavity capacity at 7.6 in (h) x 10 in. (w) x 10.3 in. (depth).

The Wonder is the latest in a wave of multi-function countertop cooking appliances that have come onto the market in recent years, like the Ninja Foodi and the Cosori Toaster oven. Some have steam capabilities, but usually at a higher price than the Wonder. The steam-enabled Tovala, which can be purchased for as low as $49, requires a commitment to the Tovala food service.

But the biggest differentiator for the Wonder is the stylish design readymade for viral Instagram posts. Nearly every multicooker on the market looks the same variation of the toaster oven, a big shiny steel rectangle box. With its big round dials and muted colors, the Wonder sets itself apart – much like companies like Smeg have done with their stand mixer – and from the looks of the breathless comments on their intro post on Instagram, Our Place may already have a hit on its hands.

In some sense, the approach by Our Place for its first cooking gadget reminds me of Dash from Storebound, which was acquired by Group SEB in 2020. Evan Dash, Storebound CEO, told me that his product lineup, full of kitschy-looking uni-taskers (waffle maker, sous vide egg bite maker, etc.), is designed to pop on social media, and he often took inspiration from his kids when designing the products.

However, unlike DASH gadgets, the Wonder has enough built-in utility to become a nightly go-to for young, design-conscious home cooks. And this combo of utility and attractive design might just be the future of the countertop multicooker.

UPSIDE Foods Nabs USDA Label Approval for Cell-Cultivated Chicken

Cultivated meat company UPSIDE Foods announced today it had secured label approval from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for its cultivated chicken product, according to a release sent to The Spoon. The approval comes half a year after the company became the first to get a GRAS green light for its cultivated meat from the USDA. The company becomes the second such company to receive approval after Good Meat (the cultivated meat division of Eat Just which secured their label on June 8th).

Cell-cultivated meat falls under the same USDA labeling requirements as traditional meat products, and the company’s USDA label approval shows its cultivated chicken is in full compliance with the governing agency’s pre-market labeling requirements. This means that post-inspection, UPSIDE’s chicken products will sport a USDA mark of inspection on their packaging. The USDA label will use the term “cell-cultivated chicken” to describe UPSIDE’s product to distinguish it from meat grown using traditional farming methods.

With label approval in hand, UPSIDE is working to secure the final regulatory step before the company can begin selling its cultivated meat to consumers, a Grant of Inspection (GOI) for its cultivated meat production facility, EPIC (short for Engineering, Production, and Innovation Center). Upon this final milestone, the company could move forward with commercial sales of its product. UPSIDE has previously announced it will first sell its chicken in the Bar Crenn restaurant in San Francisco. The company hasn’t indicated when it will receive its GOI but previously indicated it hopes to sell its cultivated meat to consumers this year.

With another win notched on its belt, UPSIDE continues to outpace most startups looking for US regulatory approval for its cultivated meat product. Undoubtedly, part of that success is attributable to the company’s regulatory affairs group, led by former FDA regulator (and food scientist) Eric Schulze. You can hear my conversation with Eric from 2021 on The Spoon Podcast below.

Thin Margins & Competitive Moats: Analyzing Instant Brands Journey to Bankruptcy

Instant Brands, the parent company behind the Instant Pot, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today, as first reported by Bloomberg. The company, which also owns the Pyrex glassware brand, announced they’d reached a deal for a new $132.5 million financing line of credit to support the company as it navigates the bankruptcy process and figures out a new path forward.

Signs of trouble first surfaced for Instant Brands earlier this year when the Wall Street Journal reported the company had hired advisors to help it restructure. At the time, the company had a $400 million line of credit trading at a severe discount due to rising interest rates. According to Bloomberg, the combination of high-interest rates, waning access to new lines of credit, and a dwindling cash position forced the company to finally file for Chapter 11.

So what happened? How did Instant Brands, the company behind what was once the fastest-growing countertop appliance in the US, go from high flyer to Chapter 11 in just a few short years?

Below are some of the reasons I believe led to the company’s current predicament:

The Pressure Cooker Category Reached Saturation Very Quickly

Part of the reason for the success of the Instant Pot was the fantastic value for the consumer. In one multifunction appliance, the consumer had a rice cooker, steamer, bean maker, yogurt machine, sauté pan – you name it – all for $100 or less. It was hard to beat, which is why Instant went from zero brand recognition a decade ago to becoming eponymous with the category it created (or, in a sense, reinvented) in just a few short years.

The problem with exponential growth is you can get to market saturation very quickly. The product (and its clones) was affordable to almost anyone, and before long, anyone who wanted one had one. But unlike high-margin tech products like the iPhone, the Instant Pot isn’t something most consumers want to replace every few years.

Clones, Ninjas, and Narrow Competitive Moats

While the Instant Pot’s reinvention of the pressure cooker was an innovative take on an older category, it was easy to knock off. Because of this, it wasn’t long before a slew of low-cost copycats flooded Amazon and other online retailers.

At the same time, fast-moving brands like SharkNinja kept on innovating. They jumped on new cooking appliance categories (like air fryers) more quickly than Instant Brands, which has admitted to being late to the category. Instant’s CEO has stated the company is continuing to look for its next hit, even as it enters into financial reorganization.

In some ways, the ease with which low-cost copycats and brand-savvy bigger companies like SharkNinja were able to create similar products that were instantly competitive with Instant Brand’s showed just how small, in retrospect, Instant’s competitive moat was. In other words, there was no significant technology, manufacturing or brand differentiators that companies entering the market had to overcome.

Non-Premium Pricing and Low Customer Loyalty

While Instant became synonymous with the smart multicooker category, the brand didn’t necessarily build significant brand loyalty. Customers, who often bought their Instant Pot or clone for end cap fire sale pricing, didn’t necessarily view the Instant Pot brand as something unique or irreplaceable. Other categories like built-in ovens, refrigerators, or coffee makers usually have bigger price tags and connotations of premium user experiences. At the same time, the Instant Pot often seemed cheap in price and quality. Much of the damage around the brand’s low-rent image was self-inflicted.

Buy High, Sell Low

When Corelle and Instant Pot announced the merger of the two companies, the combined value of the new entity was estimated at around $2 billion. Much of that market value was attributable to the white-hot Instant Pot, which meant Corelle would pay out the nose to bring the company and its fast-growing product lineup into the fold.

While I don’t have the projections that Corelle put together to rationalize the debt load they would take on to finance the acquisition, it’s probably not too big a leap to say they didn’t forecast sales of Instant Pot cooling off as fast as they did. And, as detailed in the Journal in March, the company hasn’t come close to finding a successor hit to help the company get on the right path again. At the same time, the lean operating model of the Instant Pot’s early days (which had four employees in 2013) is long gone, making way for the layered corporate bureaucracy of Corelle (the combined company had 1,900 employees earlier this year).

The bottom line is Instant Brands became highly leveraged right as the product started to reach market saturation. In the following years, Instant has moved slower than its competitors like SharkNinja and Dash, who have come out with often better-looking products in new categories at equal or lower prices. The result is this week’s announcement.

It’s really too soon to tell how the company will far going forward. Post-bankruptcy, Instant will have a clean balance sheet but a much smaller innovation team, and without the company founder Robert Wang (who left the company’s operation in late 2021), it’s not clear where the next big company-changing idea will come from.

Podcast: Talking AI & Food With Evan Rapoport

In this week’s podcast, we talk food and AI with Evan Rapoport.

Over the past decade, Evan has led teams in Google Research and other organizations, looking at how AI could impact biodiversity and change. During our conversation, we talked about a project called Tidal, in which he and Google used AI technology like computer vision and applied it to aquaculture, and discussed the impact of AI more broadly on the food system and how Evan thinks newer technology, like generative AI, might have an impact sooner than we think on the world of food.

You can find the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or just click play below!

Cookware Darling Great Jones Gets Scooped Up by Meyer. Is the DTC Home Goods Wave Over?

This week, Fast Company broke the story that Great Jones, a popular DTC cookware maker for the millennial set, had been acquired by cookware giant Meyer. In Meyer, Great Jones joins a portfolio of brands that includes Farberware, Anolon, Hestan (including the tech-powered products under Hestan Cue), Circulon, and Rachael Ray. According to Fast Company, Great Jones’s six employees will join Meyer, and cofounder and CEO Sierra Tishgart will become Meyer’s executive creative director.

Meyer is an interesting destination for Great Jones, a startup that experienced rocketship growth early on through viral social marketing through Instagram for products such as its “The Dutchess” Dutch oven. From there, the company rode a bit of a roller coaster through the pandemic, some internal strife, and ultimately ran into an icy fundraising environment as investors cooled on DTC startups in recent years.

The DTC cool-off struck across all consumer goods categories as it became clear, particularly after pandemic restrictions lifted, that growth would ultimately be limited unless brands established some brick-and-mortar channel strategy. DTC OG Warby Parker realized this fairly early, opening its first retail storefronts over a decade ago, which management has admitted have been so successful they have plans to open 900 of them.

But glasses aren’t cookware – you don’t need to try a pan on to see how it looks, after all – so why would the company need to show up on retail storefronts? Part of the reason is rising digital marketing costs, which have increased by 20% since 2021, and growing costs of direct shipping goods to consumers.

But perhaps the biggest reason is customer conversion in-store is often much higher than online, particularly as more and more brands have popped up across the cookware category in recent years. While Great Jones had already entered retail in places like Nordstrom, Meyer’s access to a vast array of brick-and-mortar retailers will no doubt accelerate the brand’s growth as it gets significantly more exposure to customers who primarily buy things through retail.

Still, even as one of the early success stories for DTC home goods gets scooped by a legacy home goods brand like Meyer, other DTC cookware startups like Caraway and Misen continue on. But word that Misen had a significant layoff last year shows that the high-flying DTC cookware brands of the past decade may continue to struggle unless they combine forces with a big, established retail-oriented brand or invest in building their own retail channels.

With the acquisition of Great Jones, Meyer – an admittedly staid brand outside of its venture into connected cooking with Hestan Cue – hopes to inject the DNA of an online native brand across the company, signaled by making Great Jones’ Tishgart the company’s new executive creative director. Smart move because, in the future, the companies that succeed will likely be those that have strength at retail and can also navigate social media and online channels.

Sweetgreen: We’re Going Full Robot

Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman told investors this week at William Blair’s Growth Stock conference that the company plans to have its Infinite Kitchen robotic makeline installed at all new locations within a five-year timeframe. The proclamation marks the first time the fast-casual salad chain has indicated they plan to deploy automation across all of its new locations.

According to the analyst’s note about Neman’s disclosures at the conference, the early results from the Infinite Kitchen have been extremely positive:

Sweetgreen’s first Infinite Kitchen (robotic assembly makeline) has proven that the technology works, with zero downtime so far and significant benefits related to faster throughput and improved portioning and order accuracy (order portioning and accuracy have historically been the company’s weakest links in NPS). With less labor intensity and greater job satisfaction so far, we believe the Infinite Kitchen has the potential to structurally change sweetgreen’s labor model, as roughly half of variable labor stems from assembly.

Another interesting disclosure from the conference was the success of the company’s membership program. According to William Blair, Sweetgreen’s sweetpass and sweetpass+ “are yielding incremental guest frequency, with gamified and personalized challenges yielding a 15% frequency lift while sweetpass+ ($10 monthly membership offering a $3 daily discount) is exceeding expectations with a significant lift in frequency (management indicated it would be happy with an incremental two visits per member per month) and low churn.”

These results show the company has improved food production, customer experience, and loyalty by deploying new technology. The result is a stronger bottom line, as Blair predicts the company will continue its fairly impressive 20%+ EBITDA margins in established locations and new build locations in the coming years. For a company that has long stated it’s as much a technology company as a restaurant company, it looks like its approach has continued to yield dividends and keep Sweetgreen one of the most interesting chains in the restaurant business.

World’s Biggest Meat Packer JBS Building Cultivated Meat Plant Capable of 1,000 Metric Tons

Lab-grown meat is all grown up.

This week Brazilian meat processing conglomerate JBS announced they had broken ground in Spain on its first commercial-scale cultivated meat production facility. According to the company, the new facility will produce more than 1,000 metric tons of cultivated meat per year, potentially expanding to 4,000 metric tons of production in the medium term, according to Reuters.

The new facility will be built by BioTech Foods, the packing giant’s Spanish subsidiary which the company acquired a 51% stake in 2021. In that $100 million deal, $41 million was earmarked for the production of the facility, which will be built in the heart of Spain’s culinary epicenter in San Sebastian.

While the facility is not the biggest cultivated meat factory in the world that’s been announced – that honor goes to (at least for now) Good Meat’s future facility, which they claim will produce 30 million pounds of cultivated meat – the JBS facility looks like it could be the biggest in Europe. While Gourmey’s plant announced last year looks like it will have a fairly massive physical footprint, the company has only vaguely alluded to a production capacity in the “10s of thousands of pounds” in cultivated meat. If JBS’s facility hits its initial production capacity target of one thousand metric tons, that pencils out to over two million pounds of cultivated meat annually. Expanding to its planned four thousand metric tons will mean 8.8 million pounds.

In reality, the actual pounds don’t matter so much as the symbolic nature of this move by the world’s biggest meatpacker. Also, considering that JBS is investing so heavily in cultivated meat just after the company closed its plant-based meat production facility in Denver, it’s a pretty bullish sign for a technology that has seen a rising chorus of critiques in recent months around its viability and climate impact claims.

BioTech Foods co-founder and CEO Iñigo Charola points to the instability around traditional ag supply chains as the impetus for JBS investing heavily in a cultivated meat future.

“With the challenges imposed on global supply chains, cultivated protein offers the potential to stabilize food security and global protein production,” Charola said in a statement.

All grown up, indeed.

Robot Restaurant Concepts Have Struggled. Will Kernel Buck The Trend?

Last month, the NY Post revealed that Chipotle founder Steve Ells is plotting a comeback with an automation-heavy restaurant concept called Kernel.

According to the Post, who viewed the startup’s pitch deck, Ells plans to build a chain of restaurants that makes the food centrally in a ghost kitchen and finishes the food in small-footprint retail storefronts. The centralized production facility and the restaurants will feature a significant amount of robotics and automation to produce the food and keep the overall employee count down. According to materials reviewed by the Post, the company states that they believe “a 3-person labor model can work.”

The company has already started building its production facility in NY and plans to launch its first restaurant in NYC in the fall of 2023. Ells is funding the company for now but is looking for investors (hence the investor deck).

As I wrote yesterday, robot-restaurant concepts have often struggled. But given Ells’ experience building a hugely successful restaurant chain, it’s worth asking: Will Kernel buck the trend?

I think they just might. Here are a few reasons Kernel might have a chance at succeeding where others have failed:

Ells is a Proven Restaurant Operator

Unlike the founders of Eatsa, Spyce and Zume, Ells is a restaurant operator with a proven track record of building a restaurant brand from the ground up. During his tenure as the company’s CEO, Chipotle pioneered the fast-casual concept and had one of the most successful IPOs ever for a restaurant chain. Clearly, he knows something about building restaurant concepts.

Ells Has An Intuitive Understanding of Food Unit Economics

During the early days of Chipotle, Ells focused heavily on the unit economics of the burrito business, calculating just how many he needed to sell daily to make a profit. It’s that kind of focus on the different cost-levers that is required when forecasting the cost of building an automation-centric restaurant business that will have higher up-front capex costs but, over time, should ultimately create more efficient restaurants with lower daily operating costs, and isn’t susceptible to the high employee turnover of employees.

The Hub & Spoke Model Can Work If Done Right

Some ghost kitchens have struggled for various reasons ranging from low-quality and high costs. However, fast casual brands have shown to be a logical pairing with centralized commissary kitchens, especially in high-rent markets like NYC (where Kernel plans to open multiple locations). Chains like Fresh&Co have grown fresh-forward concepts across metro areas like NYC through centralized batch cooking of ingredients and doing final-prep in smaller footprint storefronts. If Ells can leverage automation to take on the majority of food prep and save capital to invest in a greater number of smaller stores, he might prove this model as a recipe for the future.

Don’t Build It, Rent It

While many of the early venture-funded robotic food restaurant concepts spent most of their capital building out proprietary platforms, nowadays, a restaurant builder can leverage any of the available platforms to deploy in their food production and food service workflows. One has to look no further than a small operator like Andrew Simmons to see that restaurants can be built by piecing together systems that use robotics-as-a-service payment structures, which lower the overall capex required and allows flexibility to create a workflow over time as needs change and lessons are learned. My guess is Ells is planning on leveraging systems where others have paid all the upfront cost of development, and he can be a customer who benefits from a service and maintenance agreement.

There are still many unknowns about the Kernel concept, including what automation platforms they plan to use (or create) and just what the consumer experience will be like. But if Ells shows the brand-building prowess from his Chipotle days wasn’t a fluke and can be flexible in architecting a production workflow that carries a lower upfront capex hit than early robot restaurant efforts, he may be on his way to building one of the first true robot-powered restaurant chains.

A Food Tech Case Study: Four Lessons From the Demise of Zume

Late last week, news broke that Zume, the company famous mostly for raising a whole bunch of money for its pizza robot & cook-on-the-road food trucks concept, had shut down. The company’s demise, first reported by The Information, comes after burning through $450 million and a well-documented pivot away from its pizza robot and delivery technology products to sustainable packaging in 2020.

Here at The Spoon, we’ve followed Zume since its inception and even had its CTO speak at our event just months before the company laid off 500 employees and dropped its automation business.

When Zume inevitably shows up in business school case studies in years to come, here are a few lessons we can extract from the company’s journey:

Startups Should Pick One Thing To Be Good At

You always hear startup founders talk about how important it is to focus, partly because their first product needs to be really good, but also because distractions can keep a team from executing the way they need to execute. Zume was trying to reinvent both food making and food delivery, which meant they were basically running two highly capital-intensive startups in one. They were early enough at pizza automation to have a shot at success, but then they made their job infinitely more complicated by also trying to create an entirely new kind of delivery truck complete with built-in ovens. That’s a lot of time and capital to achieve marginally fresher pizza.

Creating Custom-Designed Delivery Fleets (with Built-in Cooking!) is an Expensive Fool’s Errand

We don’t just have Zume to prove this, but also Wonder, a company that decided they would differentiate by creating an entirely custom-built delivery fleet in which the food was cooked after it left the kitchen. Both of these companies burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and, in the end, realized that they probably should not have invested all that investor capital in something other companies are pretty good at (delivery) just to make sure the food was maybe a little fresher by the time it got to the customer’s door.

Pivots Should be Somewhat Adjacent to Core IP

After spending years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build a food automation and delivery tech business, the company pivoted to a completely different business in sustainable packaging. The company, which had developed a fairly interesting realtime delivery intelligence platform in addition to a food automation platform, likely could have pivoted to a less-capital intensive business in either of these areas and continued to maintain momentum. Instead, they started over in a fairly crowded vertical and never got enough traction to make a go of it.

Tech Companies Rarely Succeed in Creating Customer-Facing Restaurant Businesses

Time and time again, we’ve watched as startups try to build the “restaurant of the future” and fail because building a consumer brand requires focus and capital, capital they don’t have because they’ve spent it all developing technology. Zume, Eatsa, Wonder, and others have shown it’s probably best to choose between being a technology company or a restaurant business, but probably not both. Some may point to Sweetgreen as something of an exception, but even they had to acquire a company in Spyce which had tried and failed to build a consumer-facing brand for their own restaurant robot technology.

The ChefDoodler Could Finally Make Sugar-Based 3D Food Crafting Approachable

One of the first products to make 3D printing approachable was the 3Doodler. Unlike conventional 3D printers that required knowledge of digital design software and the operation of what were often finicky printing systems, the 3Doodler let folks draw in 3D space freehand.

This simplicity appealed to non-technical and creative types, making the product one of the most successful 3D printing projects ever on Kickstarter.

Fast forward a decade, and Wobbleworks, the company behind the original 3Doodler, is back at it. Only this time, instead of helping you make making figurines or art with melted plastic, they want you to draw something to eat with their newest product, the ChefDoodler.

The ChefDoodler, which looks like a combination between a frosting gun and a soldering iron, lets you draw with sugar to decorate baked goods, cookies, and candy or make stand-alone three-dimensional creations.

The sugar drawing pen uses a sugar substitute called isomalt, which comes in five colors: carrot, crystal, rose, grape, and forest. ChefDoodler users will get a bag of sugar capsules with the purchase of the sugar pen, and the company says they will sell refills for $14.99 or lower at retail (with additional savings for Kickstarter backers.). The ChefDoodler, which has raised over $21 thousand as of this writing, will retail for $99 ($59 on Kickstarter). The creators expect to ship to backers starting in October of this year.

3D food printing today mainly exists in high-end culinary kitchens, usually done by chefs creating desserts that are essentially works of art. My hunch is the ChefDoodler could have a similar impact to the original 3D drawing pen, helping to open up a craft to a new audience who doesn’t have access to the necessary tools or the technical know-how required to make fancy sculptures. The relatively low cost and ease of use of the pen also give it the potential to make basic sugar sculpting a new go-to for parents looking to keep kids busy on summer breaks or rainy weekends.

As always, we have to urge a note of caution for any Kickstarter product since it’s not out yet, and there are no guarantees backers will get something for their money. Still, given the success of the original 3Doodler and subsequent campaigns, chances are good backers will have their sugar drawing pen in their hands by the end of the year.

ChefDoodler - The Sugar Pen for Bakers