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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Home

Microsoft Unveils Echo Competitor Powered By Cortana

Microsoft is not necessarily a leader in the smart home these days, trailing Samsung, Apple and Google in platforms and hardware offerings and instead focusing on other core offerings. But as the Amazon Echo and then Google Home voice assistants jumped onto the scene, the tech world speculated about whether Apple and Microsoft would put their respective AI voice assistants – Siri and Cortana – into physical devices, too.

Rumors abound that Apple is about to do just that – but they’ll be last to the table as Microsoft previewed its Cortana-powered wireless speaker on Monday. Ahead of their BUILD developer conference, which starts tomorrow, Microsoft showed off the Invoke, a speaker manufactured by Harman Kardon and enabled by the company’s digital voice assistant.

Invoke does what Google Home & Echo do for the most part – weather reports, news, music, reminders, timers, etc – and the details thus far are fairly underwhelming. The company reported Invoke will offer “deep integration with Microsoft’s suite of knowledge and productivity tools,” making it a potentially interesting tool for home offices or businesses as a scheduling tool. The device will also have integration with Skype, allowing users to make calls via the platform.  It will certainly sound better than the Echo with Harman Kardon audio engineering and design behind the speaker – and that feature alone might drive audiophiles to Invoke over the competition.

Microsoft’s blog does not detail how or if the device will allow for third-party developers to build additional features and functions – something both Echo and Google Home are capitalizing on to add use cases and turn the speakers into sous chefs, personal assistants and smart home controllers.

Harman Kardon’s press release announcing the speaker definitely positions the audio brand to offer a competitive device to other premium smart speakers like Sonos – with a high-powered AI engine inside. The speaker will have seven microphones and advanced ambient noise technology to help Cortana hear you even in loud environments – another area where HK’s contribution could give Invoke an edge over the Echo. Pricing wasn’t given yet but the product should be available via Microsoft stores in the fall.

With the BUILD conference starting tomorrow, we’ll be sure to share updates and details about Invoke and the features it might bring to the home and kitchen.

Whirlpool Buys Yummly In Effort To Bolster Smart Kitchen Strategy

This week Whirlpool announced their intention to acquire Yummly, one of the Internet’s biggest food and recipe sites.

The acquisition comes as part of Whirlpool’s effort to accelerate its development for the smart kitchen of the future. At CES this year, the company announced new cooking automation features for its lineup of smart appliances, including new Alexa skills, scan to cook and guided cooking. This just a year after the company showed off a number of connected kitchen efforts at CES 2016, including Amazon Dash integration.

The guided cooking feature announced in January is particularly interesting in light of the Yummly deal.  The new feature enables users of the Whirlpool Smart Kitchen Suite app to send a recipe directly to a Wi-Fi powered appliance such as an oven, which will then follow the cooking instructions. It’s easy to envision how this cooking automation capability could be coupled with Yummly’s massive database of recipes.

This Is About Smart Kitchen Self-Sufficiency

Making the deal more interesting is the fact that Whirlpool recently parted ways with Innit, a smart kitchen platform company that had started working with the company’s Jenn-Air division in 2016. As I wrote in March, the breakup was in part due to Whirlpool’s decision to start forging its own technology path as it saw the smart kitchen becoming a reality over the past year:

With 2017 rolling around and the company viewing the market for connected kitchen products as more viable, it decided to more actively develop and expand their own connected product technology.  As one source told me, “if a startup can do with a few million dollars, why can’t the world’s biggest kitchen brand do it?” 

In other words, Whirlpool had decided it wanted to determine its own technology destiny rather than relying too heavily on external partners to forge a path forward. What the Yummly deal shows is that the company will not hesitate to acquire others as part of its effort to realize smart kitchen self-sufficiency.

And this deal does just that by bringing Yummly’s smart kitchen technology platform in-house. As Brett Dibkey, Whirlpool’s vice president of Integrated Business Units, said: “Yummly brings an outstanding platform on which to begin building our digital product offering.”

A Year Of Change For Yummly

For Yummly, the acquisition by Whirlpool comes after a year of management change. In October of last year, the company’s Chief Revenue Officer Santiago Merea left to start a baby food startup, and then in November the company’s head of product, Ankit Brahmbhatt, left to become Innit’s head of product (yes, Innit, the company who parted ways with Whirlpool this year).  Yummly also saw its CEO David Feller step back and hand the reigns to Brian Witlin, who in a previous life was the cofounder of Shopwell, a company recently acquired by…you guessed it…Innit.

Both Merea and Brahmbhatt came to Yummly through Yummly’s acquisition of Orange Chef, a smart kitchen company who had built it’s own connected scale, and had started to build  smart kitchen operating system and platform for appliance companies. For whatever reason, Yummly never partnered with any appliance companies, which could in part explain the departure of Merea and Brahmbhatt last year. It looks as though the Yummly-powered connected kitchen will finally be built, only now as part of the world’s biggest appliance company.

Whirlpool Becomes A Content and Community Company With Yummly Deal

Lastly, one important aspect of this deal is that it gives Whirlpool a massive infusion of cooking content and community. As newer companies in the connected kitchen like ChefSteps have shown, having strong recipe content and an associated community can create fertile soil upon which to launch new hardware products. With Yummly, Whirlpool now has a built-in community to tap into as it expands is smart kitchen product lineup in the coming years.

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Want to hear about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit. 

Flatev Extends Expert Tortilla Making to the Masses

As food cultures blend into a culinary melting pot, staples such as savory tortillas have become a frequent fixture in homes, regardless of their heritage. A $4 billion business, tortillas are generally purchased at a supermarket, bakery or ethnic grocer as most home cooks lack the skill and equipment to create warm, soft pillows of corn or flour flatbread.

Flatev, a Startup Showcase finalist at the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit, believes it has the solution that can make anyone an expert tortilla maker. With its U.S. office based in Brooklyn, the company raised more than $136,000 on Kickstarter to bring its tortilla-making machine, known as an artisanal bakery, to life. Flatev (which means flatbread evolution) uses single-serving, pre-packaged dough to make individual tortillas. The dough is put into a compartment on the front of the appliance; a setting for doneness is selected and the corn or flour tortilla is created. The machine also is capable of making roti and cookies.

According to the company’s Kickstarter page, there were two prototypes and a proof of concept machine built before the final version in 2016. Based on rewards offered to backers, the Kickstarter retail price was set at $437 and is expected to ship in 2018. The company is accepting reservations from new customers with no final retail price listed. However, Flatev says the final price will fall between $399 and $599. The dough packages are expected to retail at 79 cents each.

Company founder, CEO and Chairman Carlos Ruiz sees a place in the market for Flatev as consumers strive to eat healthier without compromising convenience and taste.  “There are very few bakery options that recreate successfully the homemade flavor and taste of authentic ethnic flatbreads without compromises,” says Ruiz. “Busy and time challenged people make compromises in quality, freshness, and nutrition every day, especially at work or away from home.”

Ruiz adds that the Flaetv needs to be thought more of a home, artisanal bakery than just a machine that makes tortillas. “Flatev is more than a tortilla maker. Currently our Artisanal Baking System can bake Flatev tortillas, specialty cookies and crepe with different flavors. Our system is designed to add more varieties and create new doughs with future ingredient trends as the market dictates.”

As with some other new, tech-based kitchen appliances, Flatev uses a closed system which means customers cannot create their own dough to make their own baked goods. Ruiz says the packaging and recipe are built to “achieve the quality, safety and shelf life desired. This implicates that we have to control the amounts of every ingredient, including the water quality (hardness, temperature, etc.).”

When Flatev hits the market, it will not only fulfill orders to Kickstarter backers and those who reserve units. The intent is to also tackle the B2B space in the form of hospitality customers. The thought of fresh tortillas at a typical hotel breakfast buffet could be enough to have guests set their alarms to avoid missing out.

With Investment In Nomiku, Samsung Expands Presence In The “Connected Kitchen”

Today Nomiku, maker of sous vide immersion circulators, announced their latest generation connected cooking appliance and the launch of a subscription meal service that will deliver frozen, pre-cooked meals that owners of the new Nomiku can cook in 30 minutes or less. As part of the announcement, Nomiku also announced that Samsung Ventures had invested in the company.

Food delivery marks an ambitious new direction for Nomiku, one of the original sous vide startups that has been shipping immersion circulators since 2013. By moving into subscription food delivery, Nomiku has its first business line with recurring revenue. The move also makes Nomiku one of the first companies to create a connected hardware device tied to a subscription meal service. While other companies such as Whirlpool and Barilla have been selling RFID powered cooking systems with specially designed packaged food for a couple years, and startup Tovala announced a meal subscription service tied to their cooking appliance last year, Nomiku appears to be the first to launch a meal subscription plan with intelligent auto-reordering built into the connected cooking appliance.

By offering fast-prep meals, Nomiku is also hoping to expose sous vide cooking to a wider audience. Sous vide is often seen as the domain of foodies, the types that are willing to wait longer for a cook to finish in exchange for a better tasting meal. By accelerating the cooking process, the company hopes to change the perception of sous vide circulators from a device synonymous with slow cooking to one that offers both convenience and better tasting food than other fast-cook methods such as microwave ovens.

Nomiku Pork Shoulder pre-cooked meal. Photography by Albert Law

The company plans to start small, shipping to 100 customers in May and expanding to a broader audience in the early summer time frame. The subscription food packages will be modular in nature, consisting of both “mains” and “sides” that can be mixed and matched. The average price of a meal is $15 and, after 20 or so meals, the company says it will credit the price of the Nomiku circulator ($149) towards meals.

The circulator is equipped with an RFID reader, which allows the user to scan an RFID tag on the meals and send the Nomiku circulator specific time and temperature settings for each dish. The device will also be synced with the customer’s existing food inventory and, according to Nomiku, will automatically reorder food when the meals left available are down to four.

The Samsung Connection

One of the most interesting aspects of today’s announcement is the Samsung connection. Samsung’s investment arm invested an undisclosed sum in the company, an amount that Fetterman calls “the most money any single investor has put into Nomiku”. The move marks the second investment in a precision cooking/sous vide startup by a large appliance maker in a short time period, coming just a couple months after the acquisition of Anova by Electrolux.

According to Fetterman, Samsung “is a logical partner for us because they do the connected home.” The investment in Nomiku is, according to Fetterman, a move by Samsung “to dominate the connected kitchen.”

Fetterman said Samsung plans integrate the Nomiku with their smart home platform, SmartThings. Samsung acquired SmartThings almost three years ago, and since that time has had somewhat mixed success in establishing the platform as one which other companies will commit to building around. However, the consumer electronics giant has been fairly successful in their effort to integrate SmartThings with their various product lines in the home such as appliances and TVs. While Samsung had prevously announced an integration of SmartThings with their own Wi-Fi ovens, Nomiku appears to be the first small precision cooking appliance integrated with the SmartThings smart home platform.

Fetterman also told The Spoon that Samsung plans to launch a Nomiku app for the Family Hub refrigerator. The app will come preloaded with the Family Hub and will control the Nomiku device directly from the fridge. Fetterman also believes existing Family Hub models will see in-field software updates that will install the Nomiku app on the connected fridge.

It will be interesting to see where Samsung takes this investment/partnership. I am sure they will be watching Nomiku’s efforts to enter food delivery closely since that business represents a new potential revenue stream for the company. The South Korean consumer electronics conglomerate displayed an early and aggressive embrace of the smart TV market and the associated revenue streams tied to apps included on these new devices. With their investment in Nomiku and the growth of the connected kitchen, one has to wonder if they possibly see food delivery as an enticing new service model in an era of ever-declining hardware margins.

To see Lisa Fetterman and other leaders talk about the future of the connected kitchen, come to the Smart Kitchen Summit. Get your tickets today.

How Alexa’s New Developer Tool Will Power Voice-Assisted Food Delivery

Last week, Amazon debuted a new device location API that gives Alexa skills access to the location data in a consumer’s device settings, a move which could unleash a new wave of skill-powered food delivery services.

According to the developer documentation, the new API (application programming interface) will require that the user to give consent for the data when the request is made for the data. There are two levels of data granularity available: the full address (street location, city, state, zip) or country and postal code only. When a user enables a skill that requests access to location data, they will be prompted to give approval in the Alexa app (it cannot be done with voice alone), an extra step that provides an obvious safeguard to ensure the privacy of the consumer.

There’s a good chance the new location API could help add some excitement to what appears to be some pretty bare shelves when it comes to skill-powered food delivery. While there are approximately 268 or so food and drink related skills available to US users of Alexa, only 13 of these today are related to food delivery, and most of those are for things such as pizza delivery or Amazon’s own restaurant delivery service. With the new location API, it’s conceivable that a new wave of third party food delivery service related skills will be born.

Amazon gave early access to the new device location API to Just Eat, a UK based food delivery service provider with 27 thousand restaurant partners. By using the device location API, the Just Eat Alexa skill will be able to better optimize restaurant selection based on the customer’s location.

Alexa’s new Skill Dashboard

In related news, Amazon also announced a new skills dashboard, which will allow skill developers to better analyze trends, visualizations and pull away insights around aggregate skill usage.  One of those new data sets they will be able to analyze in the future will be location trends, which would be useful for food delivery companies which want to know what neighborhoods are more likely to use Alexa skill ordering vs more traditional methods.

All of this fits into my theory that Amazon is shifting its connected home commerce focus towards Alexa and away from Dash, which seems to have stagnated in terms of new adopters. More thoughts on that later.

Podcast: After The Flood – Smart Home & Disaster Recovery Services

Three years ago, I walked into my home and saw an inch of standing water on the floor and water pouring out from the lights in the ceiling.

While my house being flooded was a new experience, I knew the first thing I needed to do was call someone and have them come clean things up.  That company was Servicemaster.

I’d learn later that Servicemaster does a whole lot more than just helping with disaster recovery. They also own a home warranty business (American Home Shield), pest control (Terminix), housecleaning (Merry Maid) and much more.

I often have wondered how smart home and IoT will change these types of services by making them more proactive.  That’s why I decided to find out by talking to Servicemaster CIO Jamie Smith.

On this podcast Jamie and I talk about how Servicemaster is evolving through the use of technology and where Jamie sees the market for home services going in the coming years.

The Cubit Is A Modern Tape Measure That Makes Home Design A Drag & Drop Experience

Hanging pictures or measuring for simple home decorating tasks can be arduous. Not only is it time consuming to get things exactly right using that pencil and old school tape measure, it’s also hard to visualize how things will look until you have that picture hanging on the wall, which often means there’s a hole or two to patch up when the job is done.

But what if you could pull your room into an app and see how things look in digital format before you actually starting pounding nails?

That’s the idea behind Cubit. The product, which won the best of innovations award in the smart home category for CES 2017, comes from product design entrepreneur David Xing and his company Plott. Xing and his team normally design products for companies such as Black and Decker through his other company NWi, but they knew with the technology in Cubit they had a winner that they could bring to market under their own brand.

Xing describes the Plott Cubit as a mixed reality platform. “We can take the real, put it into the virtual, so you can design with context and scale. Once you’re done with your design, you can take it and put it out into the real world.”

In other words, Cubit makes home design a drag and drop, app-centric experience.

I think the ability to convert simple home remodeling from a painful exercise in trial and error to one in which my measurement tools are integrated with a digital design application is appealing. I can see significant advantages and time savings by being able to visualize how things look in digital, especially if there’s an easy conversion of the design back into physical measurements for when I’m ready to pound nails.

Of course, there are plenty of laser-powered tape measures on the market, but this is the first I’ve seen that integrates seamlessly with a digital design application. I’m interested to try Cubit to see how accurately it translates measurements back to physical dimensions once I do the in-app design. The good news is I won’t have to wait very long. Xing told me they are talking to numerous retailers and they expect the Cubit to ship this September.

You can watch my interview with Xing above.

Want to meet the leaders defining the future of food, cooking and the kitchen? Get your tickets for the Smart Kitchen Summit today.

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Smart Home Tech Will Disrupt The Housewares Industry. Discuss.

After walking the show floor at last year’s Housewares Show in Chicago, I became pretty excited. As with most consumer industries, I’m convinced the housewares industry will witness significant change over the next decade as disruptive new technology ushers in new business models, services and creative new products that will reshape the entire space.  Based on what I saw on the show floor and heard in my conversations, it felt like we were only in the first or second inning of this shift.

All of which meant most of the change to this important industry is still to come, so when I was asked by the Home and Housewares Association to develop and moderate the keynote panel for this year’s show, I knew there would be a whole bunch to talk about. To do that, I knew I would need panelists who could provide smart, provocative and diverse but complimentary viewpoints to help the audience understand the issues and walk away with actionable insights.

That’s exactly what I got. Here are the panelists for the keynote panel entitled ‘How The Smart Home Is Disrupting Housewares’:

Nathan Smith – CTO, Wink. Wink is one of the most high-profile startups of the modern smart home wave, and Nathan has been there since the beginning.

Carley Knobloch – As HGTV’s resident smart home expert, Carley’s focus is always on the end-consumer and whether a given product is solving real problems or just technology for technology’s sake.

Chris Young – as CEO of ChefSteps and co-author of Modernist Cuisine, Chris has his feet firmly planted in both the world of culinary innovation and hardware creation for consumers. Finding that middle ground that brings professional-like skills in the form of connected hardware is something Young’s been focuses on

We discussed a bunch of things, including the shifting retail landscape, the arrival of artificial intelligence and connected commerce, consumer experiences and use-cases, the importance of product utility, virtual assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, Millennials and cooking and so much more.

Based on what I learned this year, I’m convinced the housewares space is waking up to the opportunity of the connected home. I can’t wait to see how much will change by next year’s show.

You can watch the entire panel by clicking play above.

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The Company Behind PancakeBot Brings Us A Crazy Connected Coffee Table

First they helped take pancake making next-level with the PancakeBot, a pancake robot that helps the cook go beyond those Mickey Mouse and Death Star cakes you made for your kids into the world of pancake selfies. And now, StoreBound, a home product innovation company founded by longtime housewares executive Evan Dash (a recent guest on the Smart Kitchen Show podcast), wants to help us up our coffee table game with the SoBro, a “smart home” coffee table that comes complete with a built-in refrigerator, Bluetooth speakers, device charging ports and more.

I caught up with Dash at the Housewares Show to ask about the SoBro.  He told me the idea for the SoBro was to create the ultimate mancave coffee table, one which any guy or girl would love to put in their TV room, game room or that one-room flat and become the life of the party. In fact, the name of the product, SoBro, actually speaks to its target market: Bros.

No doubt, the specs are the most impressive I’ve ever seen for a piece of furniture I usually put my beer and popcorn on. It features a full refrigerator (“It’s not a cooler,” Dash emphasized.”It has a compressor”), ports to plug in your gadgets, Bluetooth to connect to music sources that will play music out of a set of stereo speakers and a subwoofer and an LED screen on the top of the coffee table.

The SoBro will retail for $1000, but early buyers can get it for $549 on Indiegogo.

You can hear more about the SoBro from Evan Dash in the video above.

Evan Dash, CEO of StoreBound, will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Get your tickets today. 

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Housewares 2017: Somabar Pushes Robo-Bartender Into Production

This week at Housewares I caught up with Somabar, a company that makes cocktail-mixing robots.

I talked to company CEO, Dylan Purcell Lowe, who told me they’ve started production of the company’s robot bartender, which won best of show for the appliance category at CES 2016.  The device, which you can preorder for $429, is now in the hands of beta testers. The company expects to start shipping new orders by fall of this year.

According to Purcell Lowe, interest in the Somabar has come from both the consumer and professional/enterprise markets. The device, which has enough capacity to serve up to 300 drinks, would work well in hotels or restaurants according says Purcell Lowe, which is why their next generation Somabar will come in two versions: one for consumer and one for the pro market.

You can check out my interview with Purcell Lowe above and watch a quick walk-through of the Somabar below via Instagram.

We checked out the Somabar robotic bartender at #ihhs2017. #futureofdrink #foodtech #robotics

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Housewares 2017: Behmor Dropping Price On Connected Brewer As It Rolls Out Alexa Integration

The Spoon is at the Housewares Show in Chicago this week and is stopping by some of the booths at the Smart Home Pavilion to see what the companies have brewing.

At my first stop I visited with Joe Behm, CEO of Behmor, a maker of high quality coffee brewers and roasters for specialty coffee connoisseurs.  Back in October, Behmor was the first coffee maker manufacturer to announce Alexa integration and, according to Behm, the Alexa integration will roll out in about 30 days.

Behm also disclosed some other news: the company expects to drop the price on their connected brewer from $299 to $199 from mid-April onward.

“That price point is going to change the dynamic,” said Behm. “Once you drop below $200, then they (the consumer) start to see the benefit.”  Behm explained that the Behmor Connected Brewer is the only certified “Gold Cup” connected brewing machine on the market today. Gold Cup certification is a designation overseen by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA).

In a way, Behm sees his connected coffee maker as having a similar benefit to that of sous vide circulators. Much like a sous vide circulator adds greater precision to the cooking process, he believes his connected brewer can more easily bring greater precision and control to the coffee brewing process by enabling the user to tailor the brew with the machine’s app that highlights the specific flavor notes and, by adjusting the brewing temperature slightly, creating different coffee profiles from the same coffee.

You can hear our interview with Behm by clicking play above.

Panasonic Shows Off Smart Kitchen Game Changers at SXSW 2017

No sooner has the memory of Panasonic’s smart kitchen display at CES been filed away under future dreams, we come to discover a group of new food tech innovations at SXSW the Japanese company calls “Game Change Catapult.” The goal of this incubator is for Panasonic to showcase a variety of ideas in various stages of evolution.

Housed inside a popular Austin restaurant a few blocks from the convention center, the series of products filled two rooms. While some of the cool, new IoT-based offerings aid in laundry work and healthy sleep, the majority were focused on food-related use cases. The food technology concepts on display are far from finished products that are commercially available in the U.S. There were a handful that are actually works in progress with their creators/founders present to actively seek feedback and distribution partners.

The foodtech Game Changers were:

CaloRieco—A dietary management that uses infrared technology to analyze the nutritional components of any given food. The goal of the product is to calculate and log an individual’s food intake and offer recommendations and recipes for healthy eating.

DeliSofter-A pressure cooker-like appliance that softens food for those with eating disorders involving swallowing and chewing. The technology allows the device to soften food without losing its look and nutritional value.

The DeliSofter food softener (Image Credit: Panasonic)

The Ferment-A true IoT device that ferments food in a sous vide-like appliance. Along with fermentation kits offered with the device, an app is used to find ingredients and manage the fermentation process. They also intend to form a community of like-minded fermenters to share recipes.

The Ferment (Image credit: Panasonic)

Sake Cooler-The device not only cools Japanese Sake to the ideal temperature, once the bottle is inserted. It provides the consumer with details about the brewery. Suggestions for food pairings are given and a log is kept of a user’s sake-drinking habits.

The Sake Cooler (Image Credit: Panasonic)

Bento @ Your Office-A somewhat convoluted IoT-based ecosystem that facilitates easy food ordering for offices. The system includes a smart lock for the office fridge alongside an ordering and payment system. The system can log an individual’s menu history and manage dietary suggestions. The idea could have merit if it were offered to food delivery companies like GrubHub who can have their own temperature-controlled “lockers” on site at businesses for regular customers.

These five Game Changers are powerful ideations that represent Panasonic’s future view of the smart kitchen. The Ferment taps into Japanese foodies who have a growing interest in fermentation, but the founders have ambitions to bring the product to U.S. consumers wanting to ferment (or pickle) vegetables or brew kombucha.

Some of the products, such as the sake cooler, on display are closer to reaching the mass market.  Others have an initial goal of penetrating the Japanese market before going global. As with any vibrant displays of cool, new ideas, Panasonic hopes to spark interest in partners who can assist in taking their vision to the next level with new applications of their technology and broader distribution to consumers around the globe.