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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Strella Believes Its Machine Learning Tech Will Help Deliver The Perfectly Ripened Banana

Did you know that there’s a job in the banana industry called a ripener?

It makes sense, right? After all, anyone who eats bananas knows the time it takes to go from rock-hard green banana to brown mushy mess can be as short as a week. This means the banana industry has to work hard to ensure bananas ripen at the right time so they are peaking in bright, beautiful yellow by the time they show up on grocery store shelves.

Like many jobs, the ripener role relies heavily on judgment. Not that they don’t use some modern tools when monitoring and managing the ripening cycle of the banana, but from the looks of it, the ripener job seems ripe (sorry) for a Moneyball-style analytics and technology revolution.

Enter Strella. The company, which has gained traction in the apple industry for its IoT monitoring technology over the past few years, has gone bananas. According to company CEO Katherine Sizov, the company’s new AI-powered model helps them (and those working as ripeners) better decipher the signals the bananas send.

“We’ve built a machine learning model that helps us get bananas from that green to that perfectly yellow color every single time,” Sizov told The Spoon. “And the way that we do that is we measure what the bananas are telling us.”

According to Sizov, the hardware they use for banana monitoring is the same as for apples. The difference is software.

“The hardware is the same, but the algorithms are different,” Sizov said.

Sizov says that whether it’s apples or pears (fruit with longer ripening cycles) or avocadoes or bananas (fruit with shorter ripening cycles), the key indicators sending signals around the ripening stage are ethylene and CO2 emitted from the produce. The Strella hardware module has eight different sensors, sensing ethylene, CO2, and other environmental factors such as heat and moisture.

And just as with apples, the Strella technology can help determine what exactly is needed to slow down or accelerate the ripening cycle of a banana. The only difference is that things move much more quickly with bananas or avocados, which is why a job explicitly focuses on managing the process of ripening the produce.

“Unlike bananas, apples are picked perfect off the tree,” Sizov said. “And they can last a whole year in gigantic storage rooms.”

With bananas or avocadoes, the ripening process is much more closely managed. They are picked before they are ripe and then stored cold to slow the ripening until they get near the point of consumption. From there, they go into ripening rooms, and the ripener introduces ethylene gas and CO2 and adjusts the temperature to kick the ripening process into gear. And now, according to Strizov, Strella’s new banana and avocado machine-learning algorithms can help determine precisely how much of each is needed to adjust the ripening cycle to get the desired output.

Should ripeners be worried about technology taking their jobs away? Sizov doesn’t think so.

“When people are very good at their jobs, they’re always looking for tools to do better,” Sizov said. “Ripeners have a ton on their plate, they’re working 12 to 14-hour shifts, so I think they’re always looking for ways to get a little more sleep. Our tool is one way to do that.”

According to Sizov, Strella has worked with 85% of the US market for apple and pears suppliers and estimates the company has saved 20 million pounds of apples and pears from going to waste. Now, she hopes they can replicate that success in bananas and avocados.

“We’re growing pretty quickly, and we’re excited to get into bananas and avocados after having had our foray into apples for five years now.”

If you’d like to hear Katherine discuss how AI can perfect the ripening of bananas, she will be speaking at the Spoon’s Food AI Summit on October 25th in Alameda, CA! Get your early bird tickets today!

Robomart Debuts Fully Autonomous Mobile Grocery Store Concept As It Announces $2M Seed Round

Robomart, the company that introduced the store-hailing concept at CES in 2019 and started rolling out its first pilot store last year, announced a new model for its mobile store concept this week with the Robomart Haven. The Haven, which will join the first-generation Robomart (now named Oasis), will be available for retail partners starting in 2025.

Unlike the Oasis, which targets ice cream purveyors, restaurants, and cafes, the Haven resembles a convenience store on wheels. According to CEO Ali Ahmed, the Haven can stock over 300 separate SKUs and hold thousands of individual products for sale. The Haven will also act as a small walk-in mobile store, allowing customers to walk inside and shop.

And unlike the Oasis – which are retrofitted vans with drivers to pilot them – Ahmed says that the Havens will be fully autonomous. Spoon readers might remember that the Oasis (then just called Robomart) was initially intended to be a fully autonomous vehicle, but at some point, the company realized building a fully autonomous vehicle to carry its retail storefront was a lot to bite off for a first product. So instead, they chose to use drivers for their first version of the mobile store and create a fully app-controlled shopping experience (the drivers don’t interact with the customers, according to Ahmed).

But with the Haven, the plan is to make it fully autonomous, according to Ahmed.

“The Haven will not be a retrofitted van with a driver cabin,” Ahmed told The Spoon. “It will be a fully driverless offering that gives us the ability to retrofit the entire space inside to serve our customers.

Ahmed says that the company still doesn’t plan to be “an automobile company,” – meaning they still have no plans to make their own car – but instead plan to work with various automakers to convert an automobile into a Robomart Haven.

With a bigger footprint, Ahmed says future partners will be able to entirely white label and customize their Haven and will be able to have multiple types of food storage (ambient temperature, frozen, cold, or heated) within the vehicle. This differs from the Oasis, which only offers one kind of food storage (such as frozen for its ice cream partner Ben & Jerry’s).

The news of the Haven comes alongside the announcement of the company’s seed funding round of $2 million led by W Ventures with Wasabi Ventures, SOSV, HAX, and Hustle Fund, among others participating. The funding is a vote of confidence for a company that has shown significant traction over the past year, inking deals with seven partners and having a total commitment as of this week for 106 Oasis mobile storefronts.

So far, those storefronts have only been pilots, but Ahmed says they will soon be fully commercial rollouts. While he wouldn’t commit to giving a specific date, Ahmed says that the post-pilot Oasis machines will be out this year, and they will start taking orders for new ones next year. The Haven, which will roll out sometime in 2025, is also open for orders.

Barsys Makes Case For Adding Style to Bartender Robot Category With the Barsys 360

Home cocktail-making appliances have gone through lots of phases since we started writing about them in 2016. We’ve seen everything from pod-based systems from Bartesian and Drinkworks to DIY approaches like those from MrBar.io to cocktail robots with names reminiscent of 80s hip-hop artists.

And, if we’re honest, most don’t look that interesting, either presenting as something of an after-dark Keurig or a mini version of the restaurant bar dispensing system.

In other words, cocktail bots nearly always focus on utility over design.

But should that be the case? I mean, shouldn’t home appliances, especially ones focused on entertaining and leisure, actually look good? Barsys, a company that’s been making bartending appliances for the home for the past five years or so, is trying to make precisely that case with its latest product, the Barsys 360. With an interesting-looking ring-shared design allows the cocktail glass to sit within as various ingredients are dispensed from overhead, the Barsys 360 is a significant departure from any home cocktail appliance we’ve seen here at the Spoon

In fact, at first glance, it looked a little heavy on design over function, as I wasn’t sure exactly where the machine’s liquid chambers were located or how to get the liquid inside. According to the specs, it has six, and the company assured me they all sit within the 360’s ring itself. Spirits and mixers are added into the 360 via three holes at the top, using a small adapter called the “spirit funnel” seen in the rendering below. According to the company, each of the six liquid canisters can hold 900 ml in each canister (about 4 cups).

The new Barsys360 looks much different than the previous Barsys 2+, which looks like a 3D printer with a bottle-dispenser mechanism on top. The 360 also comes with a significantly lower price tag (although I’d hesitate to call the 360 cheap) at $475 for pre-orders.

With the 360 succeed? Hard to say, mainly because outside of Bartesian, the home bartender bot market has proven to be a tough market in which to gain traction. Part of the problem is most consumers have a couple of go-to cocktails they like, and, for the most part, they know how to make them. For these folks, introducing a relatively expensive machine to automate the process may seem like an unnecessary step.

However, by focusing on design and something that might look good in the kitchen or entertaining room, Barsys hopes to appeal to craft cocktail nerds who want to add a little technology-powered flair to their cocktail-making routines. And, unlike the pod-based machines, they are removing any need to rely on proprietary supplies from a startup (another big red flag for this category in the mind of consumers).

If you’re interested in a 360, Barsys is launching pre-orders this week. If you do buy one, make sure to let us know how it goes.

You can watch the hero reel video provided by the company below:

Sidewalk Delivery Startup Serve Robotics To Go Public via Reverse Merger

Serve Robotics, the sidewalk delivery robot startup that began life as a research project within Postmates called X, is going public via reverse merger, The Spoon has learned. The news, first reported in Techcrunch, marks one of the first exits for a food automation startup and the first known exit for a sidewalk delivery automation startup.

According to Techcrunch, Serve is going public via a reverse merger with blank check company Patricia Acquisition Corp. Ahead of the reverse merger, which was completed earlier this month according to filings with the SEC, raised $30 million from existing Uber, Nvidia, and Wavemaker Partners.

The news is a rare bright spot in a tough stretch for food automation startups. Companies shutting down or laying off employees has become commonplace over the past 12 months as venture capital funding dries up, with hard-tech sectors like robotics getting hit especially hard. Basil Street Pizza, Pazzi, Chowbotics, and Creator have called it quits over the past year, while others like Picnic have had to lay off employees as they struggle to raise additional capital.

The journey from a skunkworks project to a publicly traded company has been quite the journey for Serve. Initially debuted in pretty much the same form factor as today’s big-eyed delivery bot in 2018, the Serve robot has gone from a Postmates project to a division within Uber to spinout to becoming a public company in the space of five years.

Company CEO Ali Kashani has been along for the entire ride, first serving as Postmates head of special projects in 2017 when Serve was first incubated within X, then serving as head of robotics at Uber, and later becoming CEO of the Uber spinout. And as of this month, Kashani is becoming CEO of a publicly traded company delivery automation startup.

Ansā’s RF-Powered Countertop Coffee Roaster Attracts $9M in Fresh Funding

Ansā, a Tel Aviv-based builder of micro coffee roasters, has raised $9 million in funding to help the company roll out its technology into the US market, according to a release sent to The Spoon.

Unlike traditional coffee roasters, which use gas to heat the roaster chambers. The Ansā e23 micro roaster uses radio waves to heat the beans. Much like a microwave oven or newer solid-state cooking systems, this form of heating, known as dialectic heating, heats the coffee bean from core to shell.

According to the company, the system’s computer vision (provided via a built-in camera) coordinates roasting with precision application of the radio waves to transmit the energy to individual beans, creating a highly precise and homogeneously applied roast.

As automation and newer, cleaner technology enables more food processing to move closer to the point of consumption, coffee figures to be one of the leading categories in coming years. We’ve seen the success of electric-powered in-store roasters like other upstarts like Bellwether and some attempts at countertop home coffee roasters (mostly with success), but Ansā is the first to use electromagnetic heating for coffee roasting in office environments.

According to the company, they have secured commercial contracts in the US in cities such as Seattle, New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta and plan to use the funding to fund their rollout in the US.

Innit Debuts FoodLM to Power More Contextually Relevant Answers from Generative AI Platforms

Today Innit, a startup best known for its shoppable recipe and smart kitchen software solutions, announced the release of FoodLM, a software intelligence layer that helps power more contextually relevant food-related answers from generative AI large language models (LLMs).

The new platform, which itself is not a new LLM, is instead a software intelligence layer built to plug into existing LLMs to do pre and post-processing of queries to help provide better answers around a variety of food-related topics.

From the announcement:

FoodLM enables powerful semantic search for retailers to go beyond keywords and understand intent. Brands can provide consumers with highly personalized AI assistance from product selection through preparation and cooking. For health providers supporting patients with chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, FoodLM provides powerful science-backed assistance for healthy eating and food as medicine.

Innit CEO Kevin Brown described FoodLM as a “vertical AI” expert layer that can integrate into popular LLMs such as OpenAI’s GPT4 or Google’s PaLM. Brown compared FoodLM to what Google has done with Med-PaLM, which is Google’s medical knowledge layer that provides focused answers that are so contextually smart around medical information that it has started to pass the medical exams.

“You’re going to need the pairing of an LLM with expert training and expert systems to narrow it down for certain functions where it’s essential to be accurate,” Brown said.

The biggest concern with LLMs today is their tendency to hallucinate. Brown says that integrating with a vertical knowledge layer increases the likelihood of more relevant and accurate answers, ultimately leading to more trust in these systems.

“Food queries are one of the top use cases for LLMs, helping with tough problems like helping to manage people’s diets,” said Brown, “But only if you can trust them. If you can trust these systems and ensure they reflect key dietary and health factors, it becomes much more valuable.”

According to the company, answers are pre-processed and post-processed through FoodLM’s focused computation models, which it calls validators. The different validators within FoodLM include:

  • Nutrition & Diets: Analyzes more than 60 diets, allergies, lifestyles, and health profiles to provide detailed recommendations tailored to individual needs.
  • Health Conditions: Provides dietary guidelines, product scoring, and content specifically designed for conditions such as type 2 diabetes or hypertension.
  • Personalized Shopping: Automated grocery purchases, incorporating personalized scoring and selection of over three million grocery products worldwide.
  • Culinary & Cooking: Advanced logic to ensure that AI-generated recipes follow culinary guidelines and are cookable. Seamlessly integrates with smart kitchens, featuring automated cooking programs.

For now, Brown says FoodLM will be used by its partners through custom integrations via API. Over time, he sees the system as having a more approachable user interface where the system is used via a SaaS model.

From my perspective, FoodLM makes lots of sense for Innit. While we’ve already seen similar moves from some data-service and SaaS providers in the food space, Innit’s offering goes further and has more granular breakouts to provide specific contextualized offerings to power food-related services for their CPG, appliance, and health/wellness industries.

If you’re interested in the intersection of food and AI, make sure to check out The Spoon’s Food AI Summit, which is on October 25th in Alameda, California.

Why Big Idea Ventures’ Andrew Ive is Excited About the Japan Food Tech Ecosystem

Just over a week ago, we caught up with Big Idea Ventures’ managing partner Andrew Ive in Tokyo to talk food tech investing. Ive was in Japan for SKS Japan, The Spoon’s event that we started in 2017 in partnership with Sigmaxyz, which has grown to become Japan’s preeminent food tech summit.

While we were surprised to see Andrew in Japan, he told us it’s natural since his company has been focused on Asia since day one.

“Part of the reason why I’m in Tokyo is that we are a global firm,” Ive said. “We opened our Singapore office on the same day as our New York office because Asia was always going to be an incredibly important part of our business. And obviously, not just the business part, but the food communities.

Andrew told us he’s excited about Japan because he’s seen a real increase in activity over the past couple of years.

“I think the corporates here, they’re starting to think about how can they work with external partners, entrepreneurs, like SKS and so on, to sort of really increase the vibrancy of the Japanese food system.”

Ive also talked about Big Idea Ventures’ initiative to harness the intellectual property of universities in the US by launching companies. The fund, called Generation Food Rural Partners, announced last week that it had launched its first portfolio company, TerraSafe Materials, a material science company developing new products, coatings, and applications for sustainable packaging.

“These universities have got an enormous array of IP,” Ive said. “Traditionally, they only ever really commercialized about 1% of all of the work, which means there’s a huge treasure trove of solutions and things that can really fix a lot of the problems in the food sustainability space that they haven’t really figured out how to commercialize yet.”

You can listen to our full conversation below.

Andrew Ive of Big Idea Ventures Talks With The Spoon

A Tale of Two Ghost Kitchens: Why Wow Bao Wowed and MrBeast Bombed

This week, James Donaldson, known online as MrBeast, sued Virtual Dining Concepts, the company behind his virtual restaurant brand.

In the lawsuit, MrBeast and his legal team claim that “Virtual Dining Concepts was more focused on rapidly expanding the business as a way to pitch the virtual restaurant model to other celebrities for its own benefit, it was not focused on controlling the quality of the MrBeast Burger customer experience and products.”

The complaint goes on to say that low quality products have resulted in thousands of negative reviews and viral social media posts, including this Reddit article which showed photos of undercooked ground beef.

Above: Picture from Reddit post complaining about BeastBurger

Through its lawyers, VDC has dismissed Donaldson’s claims as “riddled with false statements and inaccuracies” and says that he is attempting to use “bullying tactics” to force VDC “to give up more of the company to him” and is using the lawsuit to “undermine the MrBeast Burger brand and terminate his existing contractual obligations without cause.”

While it’s too soon to tell how all this will shake out, there’s little doubt that the Beast Burger brand will suffer from its namesake celebrity creator publicly complaining about the quality of the food. While VDC has shown no intent to relent and shut down the BeastBurger brand, the current trajectory for the world’s most famous virtual restaurant brand doesn’t appear sustainable.

Ever since I first wrote about MrBeast’s growing disenchantment with the BeastBurger project, I started to think back to a conversation I had this spring with Wow Bao CEO Geoff Alexander. Like BeastBurger, Alexander’s company ventured into the virtual restaurant business a few years ago. However, unlike BeastBurger, there is no celebrity discord to deal with, and from the looks of it, Wow Bao’s ghost kitchen business appears to be thriving. In fact, according to Alexander, the company had just expanded its virtual restaurant footprint by over 106 restaurants in about four months, which brings the total number of virtual WowBao locations to over 700 at the time of our conversation.

So why is Wow Bao succeeding while BeastBurger struggles? From what I can tell, the two brands have three significant differences: Quality control, partner monetization, and product niche.

From a quality control perspective, Wow Bao and BeastBurger are very different. Unlike BeastBurger and lots of other virtual brands which rely heavily on its various restaurant partners to source and make the food, Wow Bao simplifies the process by delivering ready-to-steam products to the restaurants.

“We ship frozen products around the country,” Alexander told me. “If you can steam the product, you can make the product.”

That’s right; no cooking burgers, fries, or other foods, no assembling different ingredients with varying results. Hearing Alexander explain it, the Wow Bao model is the restaurant kitchen equivalent of me bringing home a bag of frozen dumplings from Costco and throwing them in my Instant Pot.

Another difference is the monetization model. According to Alexander, Wow Bao’s restaurant partners only pay Wow Bao for the cost of the food, a vastly different approach from many virtual brand management companies that take a cut of the overall revenue (while also leaving the cost of food and labor to the restaurants). After deducting labor and food, the third-party delivery fee, and a cut of the revenue to the virtual brand partner, there’s often not enough of a financial incentive for the restaurant operator (which usually has its own branded business to worry about) to give the love and attention a brand like BeastBurger needs.

The third big difference is product niche. Asian food’s popularity has skyrocketed in recent years but is still somewhat underrepresented in quick service chains compared to more standard American fare. A typical midsize suburb town in the US might have five to ten burger joints and a similar number of pizza places but may only have a couple of Asian restaurants (and often very few fast-casual or fast food variations). Wow Bao’s dumplings and buns are more likely to face less competition on third-party delivery apps than other categories.

Finally, one other difference is worth mentioning: Wow Bao is an actual restaurant chain complete with its own restaurants, while BeastBurger was born in the virtual world as a business concept, built around an online celebrity made famous not by food, but by playing video games and tracking his life via almost daily videos uploaded to YouTube. There’s something to be said for food born from an actual restaurant with an actual menu to one born out of a business plan to create a non-core business brand extension.

Beast Burger’s problems are not unique. Over the past year, it became clear that many ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant brands that rolled out in recent years would likely not survive. After Uber Eats and DoorDash began to more closely regulate and cut back on the virtual brands on their platform and chains like Wendy’s started to pare back their plans for virtual locations, it became clear the end of the wild west era in ghost kitchens was near. Now, with MrBeast’s efforts to shut down BeastBurger, we have what looks to be a definitive end to the first chapter of the ghost kitchen industry story.

The good news is some companies like Wow Bao and Hungry House are showing that there are other ways to operate ghost kitchen models and make it a win-win for both the ghost kitchens/virtual brands and their restaurant partners.

As for Wow Bao, it appears they will soon expand beyond their restaurant business and take a page out of MrBeast’s book by bringing their starting their own packaged goods business. This week, Alexander teased the release of Wow Bao retail products with a post on Linkedin.

Adam Yee Makes Us Dumplings and Talks About Building His Startup at SKS Japan

Ever since longtime food entrepreneur and podcaster Adam Yee announced his new better-for-you dumpling brand Sobo Foods, I’d been hoping to head to California to try the tasty-looking Asian comfort food.

But as it turns out, I won’t have to make that trip to the Bay area to sample his curry potato and the plant-based pork and chive dumplings since I had a chance to taste some cooked up by Yee himself in Tokyo. Yee was in town for SKS Japan, the global food tech summit hosted by The Spoon and SigmaXYZ, to speak on a session and hand out dumplings to curious event attendees.

Above: Yee at SKS Japan

It was Yee’s first time at the event after trying to get in last year and (as you’ll hear in the interview) getting COVID in Cambodia. I’m glad he made it because, well, dumplings, and also, he’s got some great insights into the broader food tech scene. We discuss why Yee and his cofounder started Sobo, the company’s go-to-market strategy, and more. Click play below to listen to Adam and my conversation and below and stay tuned for more interviews from SKS Japan this week and next.

A Conversation with Adam Yee about his new Sobo Foods, a better-for-you Asian comfort food brand.

Take a Peek at TechMagic’s Robot Ramen Restaurant in the Heart of Shibuya

Last year when I visited Tokyo, I ate at a fully robotic pasta restaurant called E Vino Spaghetti. from a Japanese startup called TechMagic.

Built by a Japanese startup TechMagic, the restaurant’s pasta robot was able to make a plate of pasta in less than two minutes from the time an order was sent in via the digital order kiosk. The robot prepped the sauces and toppings, heated the noodles (which are pre-cooked and frozen, standard for noodle and pasta restaurants), combined it all in a spinner, and then delivered the meal down along a conveyor belt to the plating station where a human added final garnishes and did a final quality check. The machine also cleaned the prep bowls when it was done.

Building an almost entirely automated restaurant that pumped out a place of pasta in less than two minutes was an impressive trick for a young startup for TechMagic, so much so that I suggested that maybe when I returned to Japan this year for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan, the company may have another robot restaurant in Tokyo to show off.

And lo and behold, they did! The latest restaurant powered by a TechMagic is called Oh My Dot, an automated ramen noodle restaurant in the Shibuya district. The way it works is you order your ramen via a touch screen, choosing from a variety of different flavors ranging from sesame to spicy hot soup to curry. Once your order is entered, the robotic arm starts picking up the flavor modules and dropping them into the ramen cup. From there, the broth and noodles are added, and the last stop for the cup of hot ramen is with the human server to add garnishes and make a final quality check before it’s handed over to the customer.

You can watch it all below in a video shot by The Spoon’s Smart Kitchen Summit Japan partner, Hiro Tanaka:

As I wrote last year, the idea to build food robots first came to TechMagic founder Yuji Shiraki when he visited his 90+-year-old grandmother. Shiraki saw she could not cook for herself and so started to think about how a home cooking robot might help her. However, he soon realized that Japanese kitchens were too small to build the type of robot he envisioned, and he started thinking about building robots for restaurants. It wasn’t long before he quit his job as a management consultant and founded TechMagic.

That was five years ago. Since then, the company has raised $23 million in funding (including a $15 million Series B last September), received a patent for its pasta-making robot, and plans to create its own chain of robot-powered franchise restaurants.

In addition to the ramen robot restaurant, the company also was showing off a new stir fry robot, which you can see below (also shot by Tanaka).

Kroger Begins Testing Cake Printing Robot From Beehex at Location in Ohio

Late last month, grocery giant Kroger began to trial the use of a cake-printing robot made by Beehex in the Gahanna, Ohio, location, The Spoon has learned.

The new Cake Writer machine, which will allow consumers to input a custom message and watch as the cake is decorated in minutes on the spot, is made by 3D food printing startup Beehex. Depending on the message, the decoration process will take two to fourteen minutes. The machines will be loaded with hundreds of different pre-made designs and fonts for the customer to choose from.

Beehex CEO Anjan Contractor told The Spoon that the startup plans to install 10 Beehex Cake Writer machines in the Columbus market next year and has plans to install up to 350 machines in the future with Kroger.

Contractor says that a typical machine costs roughly $10 thousand when produced at scale, and the ongoing costs include $50 a month for cloud database management and about $5-6 for each 20 oz cartridge of frosting.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shorts/yNbBofgCp4s?feature=share

I don’t know about you, but I would gladly pay for a customized cake. We just celebrated a birthday in our family, and I had to buy a tube of frosting and scrawl the name on the top of the cake with my atrophied handwriting. A customized image with legible writing is something I’d pay for.

You can check out the Cake Writer in action below in the video provided by Beehex.

Ninja’s Thirsti Drink Machine Shows Why It Went Public While Other Countertop Brands Go Out of Business

When I first got the email this morning from the Ninja PR rep, I got excited and thought maybe the company had gone and created a drink replicator similar to the one from Cana.

“SharkNinja’s First Hydration System, Ninja Thirsti, Allows Users to Create Thousands of Drinks at the Touch of a Button,” the press release declared triumphantly.

Ok, Ninja, you’ve got my attention.

Reading further, it became clear that the new Thirsti machine isn’t going to create any drink – coffee, tea, juice, beer, wine – at the push of a button. Instead, we have a machine taking on the Sodastreams and Philips of the world with a new home fizzy drink maker, only with a couple of interesting twists, including the ability to mix two flavors at once and vary the level of carbonation and flavor intensity. The new Thirsti will sell for $179 and will soon be available at major retailers like Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon.

The product isn’t a bad one – in fact, it looks like an improvement on what you can get from others in the category – it just isn’t a make-anything personalized drink machine like the Cana. But, unlike the Cana, the Thirsti will ship and be available at a competitive price point (the Cana was going to sell for $900).

In other words, the product was made for today, not the future, with a slightly different twist on what’s out on the market. And as I write those words, I may have just summarized SharkNinja’s guiding North Star principle because it seems the company does it repeatedly.

They did it when they offered up their Creami countertop ice cream and smoothie maker in 2021, which the NY Times compared to a professional machine in the Pacjojet in its ability to whip frozen treats in a similar fashion as a professional machine in the Pacojet (though with a few red flags).

They did it again when they entered the BBQ/smoker space, creating an interesting-looking outdoor grill and smoker, about which Home & Garden had to say the following: “Many grills have multiple cooking functions, but there isn’t anything on the market quite like the Ninja Woodfire Outdoor Grill. Not only does it grill, but it can roast, bake, air crisp, dehydrate, broil, and best of all – smoke meats and vegetables to perfection.”

And we can’t forget how the company was one of the first to offer a combination air fryer and pressure cooker in 2018, a year before Instant Pot got around to offering the product combo.

And it’s these products that are, in a sense, why Ninja is going public while others are puttering along with lesser market share and, in some cases, going out of business.

If you’d asked anyone back in 2019 who would go public in 2023, most would have pointed to Instant Pot, not SharkNinja. But today, it’s SharkNinja that is growing revenue (it had $3.76 billion in the 12 months ending in March) while Instant Brands is reorganizing its business under chapter 11 and laying off employees.

The spin out comes six years after SharkNinja was acquired by Chinese small appliance entrepreneur (and Joyoung founder) Wang Xuning, who used private equity financing to do the deal and create a new company in JS Global Products with SharkNinja at the center. Now, years later and with hundreds of patents to its name, SharkNinja has plans to go public.

The countertop appliance business is a very tough one to compete in. Still, Ninja has thrived due to its willingness to create new mashup concepts for products, often with interesting design choices, all packaged around unique and memorable brand names for each line. This contrasted with companies like Instant Brands, which would at times create products that seemed derivative of its initial ideas, or like Gourmia and other copycat brands, whose knockoff products didn’t have the same quality feel or brand line cohesiveness.

So while Ninja hasn’t offered a drink replicator, give them time. They’ve shown they can surprise us, and maybe someday, that will be with something straight out of the pages of science fiction.