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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Garden

Natufia Raises $1.2M Seed for its Indoor Garden System

Natufia, an Estonian startup that makes smart indoor food growing systems, announced last week that it closed a $1.2 million seed round led by Butterfly Ventures, Techstars and the Dubai-based family office of Ginco Investments.

Judging from the press announcement and the company’s website, Natufia builds self-contained, vertical indoor systems that use seed pods for growing leafy greens and herbs. The hardware contains sensors that monitor factors like temperature and humidity so you can create optimal growing conditions. It even offers three musical playlists to help keep your plants calm and relaxed (we guess?).

There’s no pricing information on the Natufia, and the website just says to find a retailer near you (though doesn’t say where) and that you can pre-order one online for an unspecified amount of money.

Natufia is among a slew of companies creating smart, seed pod-based indoor grow systems that allow people to harvest their own food. The company says its system can be used either by consumers or in a professional setting. SproutsIO and Ava Byte are countertop devices for the home, while Verdical, which is aimed at commercial spaces, is more similar in size to the Natufia.

These systems haven’t really come to market yet, so we don’t know yet what consumer adoption will be like. SproutsIO was supposed to ship this summer, but its website still only lets you sign up for updates on availability. In an update, Ava said it will ship to pre-orders this October, and since winning the Startup Showcase at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, Verdical has kept pretty quiet.

AVA Technologies Raises $2.6M for Its Countertop Gardening System

AVA Technologies, maker of the AVA Byte countertop smart gardening system, has raised a $2.6 million seed round (no pun intended) led by Vanedge Capital, according to BetaKit.

The AVA Byte is an all-in-one connected gardening appliance that uses a combination of soil-less seed pods, smart sensors, artificial intelligence and a smartphone app to guide you through the process of growing herbs, mushrooms and even tomatoes indoors. AVA CEO Valerie Song pitched her company as a Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase finalist last year. You can see her presentation here:

This looks to be the first institutional round of funding for AVA, which has raised more than $130,000 on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. To date, the company has raised $2.9 million.

An update from Song on the AVA Indiegogo page says that to celebrate the funding, AVA is giving away a free HD camera for their growing systems to all of their backers. She went on to say that the AVA Byte will start shipping this October.

The indoor smart garden space is certainly sprouting (Ed. note: Sorry). SproutsIO offers much of the same functionality as AVA and is supposed to ship this summer. Then there’s AeroGarden, which is available now.

Q&A with Michael Setton, CEO of Smart Grow System TipCrop

We’ve got a brand new Q&A in our series to introduce this year’s talented crop of startup showcase finalists for Smart Kitchen Summit Europe. Next up is Michael Setton, CEO of connected indoor grow system TipCrop. They’ve developed a smart lighting tool which lets growers — like chefs, urban farmers, and anyone with a spare bit of indoor space — to fine-tune environmental conditions so they can grow microgreens, herbs, and other produce with high levels of control.

Head to the SKS Europe blog to learn more about how TipCrop is using machine learning to facilitate indoor farming, educate kids about plants, and even control how fragrant your basil is.

And if you want to meet the TipCrop team in person and see their tech in action, register for Smart Kitchen Summit Europe in Dublin on June 11-12th!

 

Farmery Wants Farm-to-Table to be Just a Few Steps

Farmery, a new modular, indoor crop growing startup, wants to redefine farm-to-table restaurants into something more akin to the-farm-is-literally-next-to-your-table restaurants. The company just launched its product of the same name last week, and promises to let restaurants easily farm their own food from inside their establishments.

The Farmery product is an expandable, self-contained, indoor hydroponic system capable of growing leafy greens and herbs. The smallest available size is five feet by six feet, and eight feet tall, which can be expanded with additional five foot by five foot modules. Each unit is enclosed and pressurized to keep bugs — and restaurant patrons’ sneezes — out of the grow area.

An accompanying app delivers updates on the status of the farms, including nutrients levels and any watering requirements. The app can also provide notifications to restaurant employees telling them which crops need to be harvested right as they start their shift.

A base-model farm costs $13,950, a price that includes shipping and installation, with additional units costing $3,950 each. The base unit takes advantage of full spectrum LED lighting, and only requires a regular 15 amp socket for power. According to Farmery’s site, each base farm or farm extension section can produce 528 heads of lettuce a month. That’s 85 to 138 pounds of greens per month or 33 to 90 pounds of herbs per month, depending on what you’re growing.

Restaurants can either buy their own seeds, nutrients and other inputs, or they can choose to order Farmery’s pre-seeded plugs, nutrients and cleaning solutions for a 59-cent-per-plant space monthly subscription.

Farmery is the product of Benjamin Greene, who grew his own crops at the restaurant he ran out of an Airstream trailer for two years. “The systems are great opportunities for restaurants to grow their own food on-site,” said Greene, “Harvest at 2:00, serve at 5:00.”

Greene is one among many entrepreneurs using technology to redefine what “farming” means. Companies like Growtainers and Square Roots use shipping containers to grow crops year round in urban environments, while startups like Bablyon and SproutsIO are bringing farms inside the home. But Farmery is most like Verdical, which won our 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase. Both companies can convert dead floorspace in restaurants into productive areas that contribute to a restaurant’s bottom line.

Based in North Carolina, Farmery is just Greene plus six other advisors. The company has raised $300,000 in angel funding, and already has a customer in Costa Rica.

With the technology to produce crops indoors only getting better and easier, look for more restaurants to adopt indoor farming systems like Farmery’s. It will provide fresher ingredients that they have more control over and utilize more of the restaurant space. And who knows, maybe the new hot spot to be seated will now be next to the food you’re about to eat.

Scientists in Antarctica Grow Food Without Soil or Sunlight — Get Ready, Mars

Astronauts, you had better like salad.

AP News reported last week that a team of scientists at Germany’s Neumayer Station III in Antarctica had successfully grown their first crop of produce without any soil, sunlight, or pesticides. The goal of the project was to explore food growing methods for use on outer space missions.

In total the researchers harvested eight pounds of salad greens, including swiss chard, 18 cucumbers, and 70 radishes — enough for quite the veg-heavy feast. And this crop just the beginning. The German Aerospace Center said last Thursday that its scientists hope to harvest up to 11 pounds of produce per week by May.

The vegetables were grown inside a shipping container, which arrived in the Antarctic in January of 2018. The plants are grown through aeroponics, a method of cultivation that doesn’t require soil or sunlight. Instead, plants receive nutrients via a liquid (made of nutrient solution and filtered water piped into the greenhouse) sprayed onto their roots, and bask in LED lights in air that’s enriched with CO2. The growing system and greenhouse are part of the “Eden ISS” project, in association with the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

Aeroponic farming is beginning to enter the home and specialty food markets, thanks to startups like Grove and AeroFarms. Since they rely on aeroponic mists and LED lights instead of sunlight and soil, these growing systems can support produce throughout the entire year, and in variable weather conditions. Including, apparently, the -20 °C (-4 °F) chill of Antarctica.

The Eden greenhouse. Photo: DLR via Flickr

This successful first harvest is a boost for scientists researching ways to grow produce on interplanetary missions where astronauts would be confined to tight quarters for several years. NASA already grew lettuce on the International Space Station earlier this year, but there are only so many salads you can eat before monotony sets in. This update from Antarctica shows that astronauts could replicate this growing system in space and cultivate a wide variety of fruits and vegetables in their ships  — and possibly, someday, even on Mars or the Moon.

NASA estimates that four crew members would need 24,000 pounds of food to sustain themselves on a three-year journey to Mars. Which can get very heavy and take up a lot of space. NASA is already working on light, durable packaging for interplanetary missions, but with a viable aeroponic system, they might not have to pack quite so much. Astronauts could grow at least a portion of their food on their ship, which would lighten the load (since there’s no soil required) and also give them access to fresh produce. Because freeze-dried ice cream must get old after a while.

This isn’t the only technology that might give astronauts more culinary options in space. The Japanese company Open Meals is working towards teleporting food through digitization and connected 3D bioprinters. If they reach their goal, astronauts could theoretically be snacking on tuna nigiri (or whatever else tickled their fancy) while orbiting the red planet. At least for now, though, they’ll have to settle for salad. Lots and lots of salad.

Video: CEO Jennifer Farah Shows Off SproutsIO Grow System

Tabletop farming is a growing trend that we’re following here at The Spoon. Some of these self-contained food systems that have been germinating, as it were, for years, will soon start bearing fruit. Literally.

Take SproutsIO. This Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase alumni Kickstartered project is a soil-less, high-tech growing gizmo and accompanying app that helps you harvest your own leafy greens, root vegetables, and even tomatoes inside your home. Now, a year and a half after showing the product off at the Smart Kitchen Summit, SproutsIO is prepping to ship this summer.

We caught up with CEO, Jennifer Farah, at the International Housewares Show for a quick video demo of her product (we were on a busy tradeshow floor, so pardon the audio).

At a $799 price point, SproutsIO won’t come cheap. But if it works as promised, it’s versatility in growing different veggies could prove invaluable for any green thumb trapped in a tiny apartment.

Video: Grove CEO Gabe Blanchet Has Big Plans for Home Farming

If you’re like me, right now you have a pot of thyme (or rosemary, or basil) clinging to life on your windowsill. No matter how much I water it or how carefully I place it in the sunshine, I cannot keep plants alive—even simple indoor ones like herbs.

This is a huge bummer because, while I love to cook with fresh herbs, they can be quite pricey at the grocery store, tend to wilt in the fridge within days, and aren’t always of the highest quality. But home growing systems like Grove are trying to help those without green thumbs (guilty) transform their kitchens, living rooms, and empty garages into mini indoor farms.

A model of how Grove’s indoor farming systems would function in the home.

Though they’re not the only ones leveraging IoT to make indoor growing kits, Grove is thinking big to bring home farming systems to wide swaths of consumers. In order to get consumers to install growing systems in their house, they’ve got to a) look nice, and b) deliver good, consistent results. Grove has teamed up with major appliance and furniture companies to check both of these boxes: Blanchet and his team will provide home ag software and seed pods, and their partners will create custom indoor farming hardware to match.

Grove showed off their initial hydroponic home farming system at the Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase in 2016. He returned in 2017 and sat down with SKS founder Mike Wolf to talk about the future of small-scale indoor farming and how he’s able to grow 30-40% of his own food, right at home.

Watch the video and then head over here to check out more videos from Smart Kitchen Summits of yore.

Got a food tech startup idea of your own? Apply for our Startup Showcase for SKS Europe, June 11-12th in Dublin, Ireland. 

Review: Setting Up A Smart Indoor Grow System

I am not a person who keeps plants alive. Two dogs and a human, I can manage but for some reason, remembering to water an indoor plant is not something that makes it into my daily routine. So when my mother-in-law got me a “Smart Garden 3” from Click and Grow, I was slightly skeptical that I would not be successful at growing lovely herbs in my kitchen.

But once I read a little more, I realized that the entire smart indoor growing system was designed to be idiot-proof setup and equipped with enough technology to barely need any human involvement or interaction at all. (This are the kinds of tech I am here for: devices that make up for my shortcomings. I’m one personal trainer robot away from living my best life.) Click and Grow is the Keurig of indoor gardens and took the idea of putting coffee in pods and instead, put a combination of seeds and nutrient-rich soil inside “plant capsules.”

The unboxing of my indoor smart herb garden

In addition to the three basil capsules that came with my Smart Garden 3 (you can get bigger gardens and therefore, grow more capsules at one time), Click and Grow allows users to order different herbs, flowers, fruits and vegetables from their site or on Amazon. It even has a subscription program where you can sign up to receive regular deliveries of pods.

The device itself was a little smaller than I expected – but also taller, and the shelf I planned to put it on was too narrow. The bottom of the garden has a holding tank for the water as well as three circular spots for each seed pod.

The overhanging handle at the top is the grow light – a completely automated light I might add that rotates when the light is on and the intensity of light based on best grow practices for the plant you are growing.

On the top of each pod is a QR code – this is where the “smart” part of the name comes in. The garden comes out of the box just like this, so the first step in the instructions is to download the Click and Grow app.

The app is easy to navigate and once you open it, it prompts you to choose what indoor garden device you have and then you’re able to add plants to your garden. The QR code on the top of each plant capsule is scannable in the app, and the above screen appears with the plant’s “birthday” and details. You can also rename them to help you remember which plant is which – helpful especially if you are planting three of the same kind. (They also give you the old fashioned garden tags you can write on that stick up from each capsule.)

If you click the water icon, you can record when you watered your plant, therefore giving the app the ability to remind you when it’s time to water again. But because the water tank underneath holds more water than each plant needs daily and doles it out according to the plant’s needs, you don’t have to water daily. Or even weekly. Every 13-14 days, you have to fill the tank back up, but the device itself has a visual cue in addition to the app.

(The app has additional functionality like an album where you can upload pictures of the plant as it grows and a grow icon where you can put in measurements. I…am not that involved in my basil’s growth. I know, neglectful. My son is the one who checks on it daily.)

Once you scan each plant into your app, you remove the tops to each capsule which reveals another white cover, this time with a hole in the middle. This is where the plant will inevitably emerge as it grows. The kit also comes with three plastic domes and the instructions say to take each dome and place it on the top of each capsule to create a greenhouse-like environment for the seeds and soil. Once you start to see greenery and the plants begin to grow, you can remove the domes.

The next step was to add water. There is a rectangular spot on the top of the garden next to the capsule spots and the indicator inside rises as you add water. I counted the number of cups it took to fill the tank and it was around seven cups for the model of indoor garden I am using (Smart Garden 3).

The final step of setup is to plug in the garden. The instructions do warn you that the light basically rotates – 18 hours on, 6 hours off – so if you don’t want your device to go on in the middle of the night, you should plug it in for the first time in the morning. I guess that would matter more if you were keeping your indoor garden near your bedroom or you lived in a small apartment. Ours is on the kitchen counter, far from our beds and not where anyone is usually in the middle of the night, so I plugged it in the afternoon. Sure enough, ours cycles off as I’m waking up for the day. The light is pretty bright though, it’s almost as strong as the overhead light above our kitchen sink.

RESULTS: We are only a little over two weeks in, but so far, it’s been one of the easiest plant-growing experiences I have ever had. I’ve watered it a total of one time and the plants are finally started to grow little basil leaves. They look incredibly green and healthy and my four-year-old son is fascinated by them.

Click and Grow says it can take 4-6 weeks to have fully matured plants but they can last for a while, and you’re encouraged to trim them in a way that promotes regeneration.

I’m looking forward to having fresh basil right from my own kitchen and I’m already trying to decide what to grow next – lettuce or strawberries or flowers?! Too many to choose from. I can definitely see the appeal of systems like these – they are budget friendly (the startup kit was $50 for the device and the basil capsules) at least to start – and they give you the option to have fresh produce in any season with little effort.

If you read some of the Amazon reviews, many people point out that the refills themselves are pricey – up to $20 for rosemary and tomatoes. Given that plant seeds are a dollar or two at any garden shop, that price might prove unsustainable. However, there seem to be plenty of online guides on how to take the pods and make your own capsules to work with the system.

I’ll post an update when we have fully grown plants and we taste our first harvest.

The CES Foodtech & Smart Kitchen Trends Wrapup

Every year upon returning from my annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas, someone always asks me, “what was the big thing at CES this year?”

And this year, just like every year, I struggle to answer the question.

The reason? Because there’s never just one big thing. There are usually many big things.

This is in part because it’s such a massive show, one that’s gotten bigger both in scope and attendance over the years, and it’s hard to easily summarize the trends from nearly every corner of tech. Whether your thing is AI, IoT, VR/AR, cryptocurrencies, robotics, CES had something to make you happy.

Because of the overwhelming amount of news and stuff to see, it’s helpful to go to CES with a focus. For me, this year (and really, the last couple years) that focus was kitchen and food tech.  And because there’s no concentrated area at CES for food or kitchen tech (get with the program, CTA), that means I am usually scanning a bunch of different spaces (smart home, fitness, startups) to find interesting new companies or news.

This post is a wrapup of some of the important trends I saw. If I missed anything big (and I’m sure I did), email me, and I’ll update the post.

Smart Kitchen Platforms Emerge

This year was a coming out for connected kitchen platforms at CES. Whether it was Whirlpool’s big debut of Yummly 2.0 (which Brett Dibkey described to me as “the glue” tying together Whirlpool’s kitchen of the future), or offerings powered by Innit, SideChef or Drop, there’s no doubt we saw the intelligent, conscious kitchen undeniably emerge as a major focus for large appliance makers.

What do I mean? Basically, it’s moving beyond simple connectivity and apps to platforms that connect the cooking, storage, commerce, planning and every other aspect of the kitchen into a holistic system. A kitchen that is aware of the food inside the fridge, one where appliances coordinate to each other to help organize the evening or week’s meal, one in which a variety of intelligent sensors and interfaces make your life easier; it was all there. This is, obviously, a big focus for us here at the Spoon, so expect more on this topic later.

Voice Interfaces Everywhere

Speaking of interfaces, we’re on the third year of “Alexa sure seems like it’s everywhere” at CES, but the first year of “Google finally seems to be taking this seriously”. It was just over a year ago that Google finally introduced its development kits for actions for Google Assistant (its answer to Alexa Skills), and twelve months later we finally see the fruits of the company’s labor. We also saw massive investment in CES as Hey Google was plastered all over Vegas, and they had a particular focus on the kitchen with on-site demos of the kitchen with partners like Innit.

Digital Sensing

Part of the intelligent, conscious kitchen is one that understands the food that is in the fridge and on the plate. Some companies were showing off food image recognition tech, infrared spectrometry, digital noses and water sensors.  Companies like Aryballe showed off their high-end professional sensor but also indicated they were working with appliance makers to build the technology into appliances. After-market players like Smarter were demoing their products to companies like Whirlpool. Expect the concept of a sensing kitchen to become more prevalent this year.

Food Inventory Management

Food waste is a big issue everywhere, and there were companies at CES showing off solutions to help us all better track what food we buy.  Startup Ovie, which I would describe as “Tile for food” was showing off its food tracking/management system, while others like Whirlpool and Samsung were talking about how their fridges can help to manage food inventory.

Water Intelligence

Given that it’s one of the world’s most precious resources, it’s always been a bit of a mystery to me why there hasn’t been more attention paid to using IoT and smart technology to manage our water better.  Mystery solved because now it seems the tech world is paying attention. Belkin finally had a coming out party for its long-gestating Phyn water management system while others like Flo had their home water management system on display. Smaller efforts like that of Lishtot, which help us detect whether water is drinkable, were also on display.

Wireless Power

One of the coolest things about the Smart Kitchen Summit last year was the Wireless Power Consortium had its first public demo of its cordless kitchen technology, which features wireless power for small countertop appliances.  I got an early demo at the WPC booth this year as they showed off wireless power for small appliances from Philips and Haier.

I also saw a cool demo using infrared wireless power form Wi-Charge. The concept here is to put an infrared transmitter in the ceiling (they put it in a light installation in the demo) and then transmit power using infrared to various devices. The Wi-Charge folks said their patented tech is currently only targeted at small portable devices, but I’m intrigued with the possibilities for the kitchen as a potential future opportunity.

Specialized Living

I’ve been writing about the massive opportunity for smart home and kitchen innovation for the aging in place market for the past couple years, so I was happy to see a number of companies focusing on this important area.  Much of the focus was on safety, which obviously applies to kitchen/cooking scenarios, but I can also see how smart assistants, robotics and augmented reality could be applied in living scenarios to help folks with limitations due to age.

Robot Invasion

Robots and process automation were everywhere at CES, ranging from cute social robots like LG’s Cloi to delivery robots to the laundry folding robots. Some, like LG, saw the robot as a natural pairing with the kitchen, while others saw robots as more general purpose assistants for the home.  And while we didn’t see the robot chef at CES this year, I expect we’ll see that probably in the near future.

Humanless Retail

AI-driven point of sale devices and “humanless” markets were big at CES. AIPoly won best of show for the second year in a row, while a Bodega-on-wheels startup Robomart had a huge crowd at its booth for much of the show. More modest efforts like the Qvie were on offer to give Airbnb hosts a way to become even more like micro-hotel operators.

New Cooking Boxes Appliances

One of my predictions for the year was a new generation of cooking boxes. I use the term box because they’re not always ovens (though they can be), but often are like the NXP RF-powered smart defroster. We also saw Hestan on the other side of the country (at KBIS) talk about using precision cooking coupled with gas, a throwback to their Meld days.  There were also lots of folks I met with still operating in stealth that plan to debut their next-gen cooking appliances this year, so stay tuned.

Home As Food Factory

All of a sudden, everyone seems to be interested in home-grow systems, whether it’s the backyard IoT grow box from Grow to the Opcom’s grow walls, there was lots of interesting new home grow systems to see at CES. And while I didn’t see anything like food reactors or much in the way of 3D food printers, I expect CES 2019 to rectify that situation.

Smart Booze

Smart beer appliances, wine serving/preservation devices, and IoT connected wine shelves were plentiful this year. CES also gave many the first peek at the home distilling system from PicoBrew, the PicoStill.

We’ll be watching all these trends this year, so if you want to keep up, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter. Also, you can hear about many of these trends at Smart Kitchen Summit Europe, which is in Dublin on June 12th.

Ten Trends That Will Shape The Future of Cooking In 2018

With 2017 in the rearview mirror, it’s time to look forward and make some predictions about the next year in food and cooking. While I often wait until after CES to look into the crystal ball since there are always lots of announcements at the annual consumer tech mega-show, I think it’s safe to point to a few big trends we can expect over the next 12 months.

With that in mind, here are ten trends I think you’ll see the shape the future of the kitchen over the next twelve months (Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date on our coverage of all of these trends over the next year):

Digital Recipe At The Center Of Action

With apologies to Tyler Florence, the recipe is not dead. In fact, if anything the recipe is becoming increasingly important in the digital kitchen. It’s becoming our automated shopping list, the instruction set for our appliances, and the content is becoming dynamic, atomized and personalized depending on our personal preferences and the context of our current day, meal plan, and food inventory.

I expect all of this to continue in 2018 and even accelerate as recipes become shoppable, connected to cooking guidance systems and fuse with new interfaces such as voice assistants and chatbots to help with the cooking process.

New Cooking Boxes

While “cooking box” isn’t exactly a standard industry term, it’s an apt way to describe the wide variety of exciting products coming to market that allow consumers new ways to prepare food.

Last year we started to see new takes on steam ovens like the Tovala, the first consumer market RF cooking appliance announced in Miele’s Dialog, and even combo devices that combine fast-cooking with flash-freezing like the Frigondas. In 2018, I expect to see lots more innovation with built-in and counter top products as old-school appliance manufacturers and housewares brands realize there’s opportunity in deviating from the same-old cooking appliances and offering consumers new options when it comes to preparing food.

Smart Grow Systems Move Towards Mass Market

While home grow systems have been around for years, adoption has remained fairly narrow. That will start to change in 2018 as the idea of using technology to grow and create our food at home enters the mainstream consciousness. Driving this trend will be the ever-increasing consumer desire to source food more locally. After all, what’s more local than our own homes?

The great thing about this space is there’s already a wide gamut of interesting options available for consumers today. Whether it’s low-cost offerings like seed quilts, to the growing number of soil-less home grow systems like those from Aerogarden or Ava, to crazy backyard farm robots like those from Farmbot, I think we’ll see more innovative products – and greater consumer adoption – in 2018.

Home Fermentation

There’s no doubt one of the most interesting trends we’ve seen in consumer food over the past couple years is the embrace of interesting fermented products like kombucha, and I think this interest will start to generate more interest in consumers fermenting their food at home.

We’ve already seen companies like Panasonic show off fermented food cookers, and beer appliance startup PicoBrew is starting to offer Kombucha as an offering. With interest in fermented products likely to increase, I expect more innovators will look to make creating these products at home easier.

Desserts Meet Tech

Like most, I love myself a good dessert, and I expect we will see an increasing number of interesting ways to fuse technology with sweets in the coming year. Some of these innovations will focus on convenience (like the CHiP cookie maker), but some will enable consumers to create hard-to-make sweets like chocolate, ice cream and other types of desserts that are normally time and knowledge intensive.  Expect to see some interesting announcements in this space in the next 12 months.

Sensing Kitchen

When the Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman got on stage at the Smart Kitchen Summit with startups creators of digital food sensing tech and demoed live in front of a huge audience, you could hear the audience murmur as Wilson and crew smelled cheese with a digital nose or tried out the Scio infrared spectrometer. This technology that has long been gestating for commercial and supply chain applications is finally making its way into the home, and I expect that to continue in 2018, particularly as some find new ways to apply AI to better prediction and understanding around flavors and food characteristics.

Meal Services And Connected Hardware

One of the trends we’ve been watching for a while is the pairing of meal kits with connected hardware.  That trend accelerated in 2017 as Tovala shipped product, Nomiku created their sous vide ready meals and Innit hinted at new products powered by Chef’d as we ended the year.

It makes sense. Recurring revenue has long been the mantra of venture capitalists (just ask Tovala, which just got a $9.2 million series A), and in the connected cooking space, the way to get recurring revenue is offer food.  I also expect meal kit companies to also increasingly look for ways to partner with kitchen tech innovators (much like Chef’d has with Innit) as they look for ways to raise adoption and retention for consumers.

Speaking of food delivery…

Automated, Smart Grocery Delivery

With the acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, Amazon stopped dabbling around the edges with lab experiments like Amazon Go, Amazon Dash and Amazon Fresh made its intentions clear: it wants to take a big bite out of the $700 billion grocery business in the US.  And while the company has had mixed success with efforts like its Fresh delivery business, these long-gestating experiments have given them a potentially huge advantage as they start to set up central hubs and physical points of presence for the grocery business post-Whole Foods.

And now, Amazon and others see the opportunity to fuse home delivery with smart home access control and automatically deliver groceries all the way to the fridge. Combine that with the ability of fridges to actually tell us when food needs a refresh, and you can unlock some interesting scenarios.

New Interfaces

While this past year saw the continued march forward towards of popular voice interfaces like Alexa, I think we’re only at the beginning of a large-scale change in the control layer for how we buy, prepare and cook our food.  Sure, we’ll see more and more Alexa skills for cooking gadgets in 2018, but also expect more manufacturers embrace chatbots and projection interfaces as ways to interact with our cooking equipment this year.

Cooking Robots

We cover cooking robots here at The Spoon a bunch, and while many are fun and likely never to see wide adoption over the next decade, there are a variety of interesting cooking bots we’ve seen that might have real applications for specific use cases.  Some are simple food automation devices. Others are more social robots. And, in some cases, companies are working on human-like robots that could be intriguing additions to the kitchen of the future.

Needless to say with CES less than a week away, we’ll likely see many of these trends reinforced with news.  I’ll be at CES catching up on many of these announcements myself, so if you hear of any or want me to know about your product, DM me on Twitter.

IKEA’s Startup Bootcamp Gives Us a Glimpse Into Some Hot Future-of-Food Trends

Swedish furniture-maker IKEA is right in the middle of its very first “IKEA bootcamp” startup accelerator, a three-month program the company is running with global cooperative Rainmaking. The three-month program, announced back in May, has been underway since September.

Ten startups were picked from a pool of several hundred applicants. The chosen few arrived in Älmhult, Sweden in September to work closely with IKEA and Rainmaking within the accelerator codeveloped by the two companies. The program runs until December, when the startups will show off their progress with a demo day.

It’s significant that two of the 10 companies chosen are specifically about food tech, and that a third product touches the food sector. IKEA has always been about improving the everyday, whether that’s affordable routes to smarter lighting, energy efficient home appliances, or a range of smart-kitchen devices.

IKEA’s food business is almost as famous as the brand itself. The infamous horsemeat scare in 2013 led the company to change parts of its food business. It axed Pepsi and Coca-Cola products, replacing them with Swedish fruit waters, and, in 2015, introduced a veggie version of its much-loved meatball dish.

And thanks to these startups currently hard at work, new food developments are probably not far away—starting with bugs.

One of the startups, Israel’s Flying SpArk, produces protein ingredients from fruit flies. The ingredient, which comes in powder and oil form, is rich in minerals and proteins, and fruit flies require minimal water and almost no land to farm.

“I don’t know if the future is a crispy bug ball, but I know we are going to work with lots of different partners to bring changes to our food business,” Food Services Managing Director Michael la Cour said at the recent Sustainability Summit.

Insects, of course, are getting a lot of attention of late. Michelin Star restaurant Saison now offers crickets on the menu. Meanwhile, Tesco’s outgoing executive chairman, John Chambers, got a lot of attention after his talk at last week’s Techonomy conference. He believes consumers around the globe will transition to a more orthopteran diet “definitely within 20 years and maybe within 15.”

But it’s not all creepy crawlies over at the IKEA bootcamp. Another startup is Niwa, who makes a connected hydroponic system that completely automates gardening. The technology is compact enough to fit inside a small apartment and can be controlled with a smartphone. The company is currently accepting pre-orders for the product.

Niwa, however, isn’t just another smart-home gadget for consumers. Ambitious growers can opt to build their own system. And Niwa Pro, which is considerably more complex, is aimed at those growing on a larger scale.

The other Bootcamp company deserving a mention is Germany-based Goodbag, whose product aims to eliminate plastic shopping bags. Buy a cute, tote-like bag from the company’s online store, and scan it at the checkout. For every scan you make, a new tree is planted. Bag owners also get access to discounts at participating stores. The bags work in any shopping scenario of course, but grocery stores tend to be monstrous consumers of plastic shopping bags, especially in the U.S.

Getting backing from a mega-company like IKEA shows that these concepts are, if nothing else, growing increasingly important to the conversation around food and technology. If we’re all soon bringing bug powder home in our connected totes and cooking it up with smart veggies, we’ll know IKEA chose its startups well for this inaugural event.

GardenSpace Will Water Your Plants and Squirt Away Pests

Move over garden gnomes. GardenSpace, a new smart watering-camera-deterrent device for your garden on Kickstarter, is looking to stake a claim in garden beds to help home food growers improve their bounty (hat tip to Digital Trends).

You “plant” this solar-powered stationary device in your garden, connect it to a hose and the accompanying app to tell it what you are growing. GardenSpace has a 360 degree camera and thermal sensors to determine how much water each plant needs. The swiveling head and spout rotate and angle waterings to deliver the precise amounts of water required to keep everything in your garden healthy. The “smart” camera can even detect a pest such as a rodent and squirt water to shoo it away.

The people behind GardenSpace say they created the device to help aspiring gardeners yield better crops by taking the guesswork out of watering. Ideally, GardenSpace will reduce water consumption by eliminating over watering, while keeping plants more healthy through proper hydration.

What we can’t tell from the video is how much area one GardenSpace can handle, and how many you’d need to cover larger garden areas.

Regardless, helping people grow their own food is an admirable goal, and one that many companies are getting into. Elsewhere on Kickstarter, the creator of Roomba has Tertill, a mobile robot that goes through your garden to whack down weeds.

One trend we’ve seen up close and personal here at the Spoon is moving the whole garden process indoors. Both AVA Byte and Verdical were in the Startup Showcase at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit (Verdical even won the top prize). Each company creates self-contained indoor gardening systems that basically do all of the growing work for you.

With the campaign just a hundred or so dollars shy of its $25,000 goal, things are looking good for the GardenSpace. And anything that helps people grow their own food is a good thing (especially if it can replace those gnomes).