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January 16, 2018

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.

January 15, 2018

The Battle For The Kitchen Screen Got A Lot More Interesting At CES 2018

When I wrote about the battle for the kitchen TV last June, the launch of the Echo Show was one of the signals that told me companies were beginning to pay attention to the space. Half a year later, my own usage of the Show has helped me better understand why.

That’s because ever since Amazon’s video-enabled Alexa assistant entered our home, it’s the first thing my eyes are drawn to as I enter the kitchen. The continuous scroll of news and weather, integration with popular apps like Pandora and Allrecipes, and access to videos all have quietly made the small screen indispensable for my entire family.

And now, with a slew of standalone smart displays and kitchen-centric video screens at CES last week, I’m more convinced than ever as we enter 2018 the kitchen TV market will be a fascinating one to watch.

Here are some of the kitchen screen entrants from this year’s big consumer show:

Echo Show And The Competitors

In some ways, the Echo Show and its small screen competitors are the early favorites. Whether or not to purchase a $200 or below (today the Show is on sale for $179) countertop video-enabled voice assistant is a much easier decision to make than that of a $3 thousand fridge. And now, with Google pouring money into the space, you can expect many more choices and over time.

CES 2018 featured some new smart displays on, um, display, many of them designed to be used with Google Assistant. I suspect at some point Google will likely come out with a first-party device (like the Echo Show), but for now we have displays from the likes of Lenovo, Philips and JBL and the initial reviews are pretty positive.

Fridge TV

Hard to believe, but Samsung’s already on version three of its Family Hub fridge, a product that is fast becoming the central focus of the CE giant’s broader smart home strategy. I stopped by the Samsung CES showroom at the Aria to check out the Family Hub 3, and I have to say the new screen looks good.

And as is often the case, LG has followed Samsung’s lead with the ThinQ Instaview Fridge but took things one step further by making their smart screen translucent so you can also see what’s in your fridge. You can see a demo of the LG ThinQ Instaview Fridge here:

While the idea of fridge TVs continue to gain steam, some argue that there’s a mismatch between the life cycle of cutting-edge tech and that of installed appliances. An appliance is an investment, something most consumers expect to last up to a decade. Technology, on the other hand, can be outdated after a few years. This argument resonated after talking to someone at the Samsung booth, who told me the Family Hub gen-1 likely wouldn’t be updated to the third generation software that is coming out with the Family Hub 3, (though the Family Hub Ones in the field were recently updated to Family Hub 2 software).

Despite this, I think the centrality of the fridge in most kitchens and the early relative success of the Family Hub will fuel interest in making the fridge the star of the kitchen TV market.

The GE Kitchen Hub 

One of the more interesting concepts in kitchen TV I saw at CES was the GE Kitchen Hub, a screen/smart home controller designed to sit above your oven.  The Kitchen Hub, which was originally conceived in GE Appliances innovation hub FirstBuild, not only has voice and gesture control capability built in but works with Zigbee and Z-Wave to connect to your smart devices.

You can see Digital Trends video walkthrough with the Kitchen Hub below:

GE Kitchen Hub - Hands On at CES 2018

The concept of the Kitchen Hub sits somewhere between the Amazon and Samsung approach, a device that’s separate from a large appliance (and their long life cycles), but one that is also a built-in. The product is priced in that middle territory as well, coming in at $600.

I like the idea of the Kitchen Hub. A separate built-in screen, one that is more affordably priced than a hybrid appliance/TV product and that can also act as a smart home control center is a potential winner. Of course, a lot will rely on execution, but overall this is an intriguing product to watch.

One thing’s that clear: the battle for the kitchen TV became a lot more interesting at CES 2018. Check back at the Spoon and subscribe to our newsletter to monitor our coverage of this market over the next 12 months.

January 12, 2018

LG Integrates Innit and SideChef Guided Cooking At CES

LG, which showed off its ThinQ line of smart appliances at CES this week, announced it will integrate with SideChef and Innit guided cooking platforms, allowing them to operate LG appliances. So, when you’re following recipes from SideChef or Innit, those apps will talk to LG SmartThinQ ovens and ranges to automatically set heating temperatures, modes and cooking times.

SideChef and Innit are part of a wave of guided-cooking apps that use a combination of interactive elements such as timers, photos and video to help cooks of all levels prepare meals more easily. In partnering with LG, these guides now move off the screen and into the real world to do some of the actual work of cooking for you.

The guided cooking space heated up this week with with other major players making big announcements. Elsewhere at CES, Whirpool announced that its Yummly guided cooking app will be able to send instructions to its appliances. And over at the Kitchen and Bath Show in Orlando, Hestan announced that its guided cooking technology will move inside appliances, the first of which is a cooktop from a new residential line from Meyer called Hestan Indoor.

Notably absent from all the guided cooking news this week is Samsung. The company showed off its latest Family Hub fridge that could mirror your phone or Samsung TV, but there was no mention of any connections within a smarter kitchen.

Right now, the press announcement only mentions SideChef and Innit interacting with the hot side of cooking, though it’s easy to see that integration extending into the fridge. The new LG ThinQ refrigerator already recommends meals based on the food you already have. Presumably, SideChef and Innit will also get access to that same ingredient list, and customers could see a more valuable end-to-end solution by using their guided recipe app of choice.

And there is value in helping transform anyone into a decent cook by breaking down the silos between recipe and actual cooking. The instructions are no longer an inert list separate from the result, they are now actively involved in the result.

LG says it’s committed to an open strategy when it comes to creating the smart home. So you can expect more announcements like this to come out this year. Which is good, because partnerships like these also helps allay any fears of getting locked into an ecosystem when buying an expensive, connected appliance.

As these smart cooking platforms expand, partner up and open up, recipes talking to your appliances is something we’ll all be talking about.

January 10, 2018

Kohler and Delta Debut Voice Controlled Faucets

Filling a measuring cup to the right level with water can sometimes require ninja-like dexterity. Water shoots out of the faucet too fast, you have to pour some out, then pour out a little more. Whoops, too much, have to add some back. Then you hold it up to eye level to make sure the the bottom of the meniscus is on the right line.

New faucets from Kohler and Delta announced at CES this week are poised to eliminate that hassle by giving you voice control over your water. You can tell both the Kohler Sensate and the Delta Touch20 faucets to turn water on and off as well as dispense a precise amount of water. Ask for 8 oz of water and the faucets will dispense 8 oz.!

Both the Kohler and Delta faucets work with Alexa, and Kohler also supports Google Home and Apple HomeKit. Mike Wolf here at The Spoon actually uncovered the Delta Alexa skill last month, and now we can see it in action.

No word on pricing or when they will be available. For those of us with plain ole dumb faucets, both Kohler and Delta are looking at ways to provide the voice activation retrofits without needing to buy a whole new product.

As we’ve noted before, voice command is actually a perfect interface for the kitchen faucet. Turning the kitchen sink on and off with your voice is super helpful when your hands are messy, or contaminated by something like raw meat. And, filling up a measuring cup won’t require ninja-like skills anymore.

January 9, 2018

August Home Expands In-Home Delivery Platform, Adds Deliv as Partner

Not long ago, my mom ordered a box of tea online, which a guy in a pizza delivery car tried to steal from her front porch while she was at work. Obviously, she’s not the first person to ever experience this. In her case, a neighbor happened to catch the guy in action and set the cops on his trail, recovering the package in process. Most folks, though, aren’t so lucky, and lots of them are ordering much more than a $20 box of tea.

All the same, risk of theft doesn’t deter most who order goods via same-day delivery. As we get busier and more mobile, we rely more and more on the convenience factor for anything from stereos to dental floss. And since this is as unlikely to change as mankind’s need to steal, it makes sense that that same-day, in-home delivery is rapidly becoming an option for both consumers and retailers.

News from August Home should help accelerate that option. The smart-lock maker just announced that it is opening up it’s in-home delivery platform to any retailer, and that it has formed a partnership with same-day delivery service Deliv for last mile delivery fulfillment.

It’s a pretty straightforward operation. August owners can order at a participating retailer and choose “same day” at checkout, along with their desired time window. Once the transaction is completed, they can opt to authorize “secure in-home delivery.” If no one answers the doorbell, the delivery driver can access a one-time-use passcode to unlock the door and leave the package. Users are notified via phone, so they know a delivery is occurring, even if they’re up the block folding the last of their laundry. If they have the equipment, customers can also choose to watch the delivery in real time through the August app (or view a recording of it later).

August’s move to expand its platform comes after Amazon launched Amazon Key in late 2017, which uses its own combination of smart lock and cloud camera, and helped make the concept of in-home delivery more prominent with mainstream consumers. Just last month, Amazon also purchased the maker of Blink security cameras, in a move that could bolster Key offerings.

August and Deliv partnered with Walmart this past September to test drive their new service. Not only did consumers have the option of in-home delivery, they could also get “in-fridge” delivery, where the driver enters your pad and puts any perishables in the fridge or freezer. Presumably, the same option will exist for this wider rollout of the August-Deliv service.

I’d love to say I’m weirded out by the idea of some dude walking into my house and opening my fridge, but I’m not. People open their homes to strangers all the time— cleaning services, maintenance work, and pet care, for example. And while a camera and a one-time passcode don’t guarantee complete security, they beat having your groceries swiped off the front porch by, of all things, the local food delivery guy.

January 8, 2018

Wireless Power For The Kitchen On Display At CES 2018

If you’ve been to CES as much as I have, chances are you’ve walked by the booth of Wireless Power Consortium (WPC). That’s because the booth sits in one of the most highly trafficked spots in all of CES, sandwiched between the CNET interview booth and the press room, and is always packed to capacity every day of the trade show.

So as I happened by the WPC booth on today’s annual day-before-opening-day trip to the press room, I was excited to see a technician setting up a kitchen demo. Longtime readers of the Spoon know that the group is busy working on a wireless kitchen standard, one which takes the technology developed for things like wireless charging mats to recharge mobile phones and will put it directly into the a kitchen counter to power small appliances.

Crew setting up at the kitchen demo at the WPC booth

For those who were at the Smart Kitchen Summit, you might recall a demo of the same technology, since the SKS had the first public showing of the WPC working group’s kitchen effort. As one would expect for CES, this week’s demo is much bigger, featuring countertop appliances from Haier and Philips being powered by the WPC tech.

Under the surface of the counter resides magnetic power coil which then powers the appliance by coupling with a second coil in the appliance. You can see a pic of the power coil under one of the counters here:

Because the kitchen standard will use a different power level than that of Qi , users won’t be able to charge their phones from the same coil. However, as envisioned in the demo,  counters will have both Qi and the kitchen standard built in, allowing for scenarios with phone charging and appliance power directly from the counter. In the pic below, you can see a phone charging and a Philips proof of concept appliance drawing power from the kitchen counter.

Phone and appliance getting cordless power from the kitchen counter

Finally, they also showed me the Haier appliance powered by the WPC kitchen standard. You can see my video of that below.

With the Qi (pronounced “Chi”) wireless power charging standard becoming widely adopted, it’s exciting to see the WPC focusing their efforts on the cordless kitchen. While most of the tech and mainstream press have yet to hear about the WPC’s effort to push wireless power into the kitchen, I expect by the end of this year’s CES word will have gotten out and many more people will be talking about wireless power and the cordless kitchen.

The demo was codeveloped by the Wireless Power Consortium and Urbaneer, a developer of next-gen living concepts like the Bungalow based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Urbaneer intends to build a series of living spaces using the wireless kitchen technology being developed by WPC.

January 3, 2018

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.

December 26, 2017

Amazon Sold “Tens of Millions” Alexa Devices This Holiday Season

Amazon released a lengthy list of vague stats about its holiday selling season this year. And while details may be scant, it was a big season for Alexa (and the Instant Pot).

Amazon says it sold “tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices” worldwide with the company adding that the Echo Dot was among the top-selling Amazon devices this holiday season. Additionally, Amazon said that Prime memberships continue to grow, and that 4 million people “started Prime free trials or began paid memberships.”

Okay, yes. That statement from the company is kind of silly. But it was estimated that Amazon had 80 million Prime members back in April. Combine the boost for Alexa devices with the ever-growing Prime member audience, and Amazon is poised to dominate the smart kitchen, same day delivery, grocery and meal kit delivery and so much more.

So what were people doing with their Alexa devices this holiday? Here are some brief bits on kitchen usage, according to Amazon:

  • Alexa helped mix tens of thousands of cocktails this holiday season, with Martini and Manhattan being the most requested drinks.
  • The recipe for chocolate chip cookies was the most requested recipe this holiday season.
  • Customers asked Alexa for cooking-related advice 9x more this year as they did last holiday season.
  • Alexa customers set 3x as many timers this year compared to last holiday season.

In addition to recent stats, Amazon seemed to be looking ahead in its press release. The recently launched Amazon Key in-home delivery service also got a specific shout out in the press release quote from Jeff Wilke, Amazon CEO Worldwide Consumer. Perhaps this is indicative of a bigger push to come for Key, especially in light of Amazon’s recent purchase of Blink security cameras.

And, if my Facebook feed is any indication, many of you received Instant Pots this holiday. Amazon shared some of info about the popular rice/slow/pressure cooker. According to Amazon:

  • The best-selling kitchen item in the U.S. and worldwide was the Instant Pot DUO80.
  • Instant Pot Electric Pressure Cooker Cookbook by Laurel Randolph, independently published through Kindle Direct Publishing, has been topping Amazon Charts throughout the holiday season – reaching #1 on the most sold non-fiction list the week of Cyber Monday.
  • And, oh by the way, an Amazon Air cargo plane can hold more than 10,000 Instant Pots.

Even if the details are few, it was an undeniably big holiday for Amazon that capped off a huge year for the company. Given all their moves around food and the kitchen, one specific stat you can expect in 2018 is more stories from us about Amazon.

December 11, 2017

Delta Faucet Will Soon Let You Pour Water With Your Voice (Exclusive)

Want to pour yourself a glass of water with your voice? It looks like you soon can with a Delta Faucet.

The Spoon recently discovered a new Alexa skill from Delta Faucet company that will allow you to do such things are pour a glass of water or fill your coffee machine simply by asking Alexa. The skill looks like it will work with forthcoming voice-enabled Delta Faucet product or products enabled by what the faucet maker is calling its “voice module” and the Delta voice web app.

The only problem is if you want to buy the Delta voice module or register for your Delta voice account with the web app, neither of those exist today. In fact, the only clue to Delta’s voice-enabled faucet – at least as of now – is the Alexa skill called Delta. My guess is the company is preparing to launch a new voice-enabled line of faucets in a few weeks at CES or the upcoming Kitchen and Bath Show.

There’s also a good chance these faucets will connect to Wi-Fi. As far as I can tell, Delta doesn’t seem to have any Wi-Fi enabled faucets on the market today (but they do have a Wi-Fi leak detector), so it’s quite possible the mysterious ‘voice module’ is also a ‘Wi-Fi module’.

So far the Delta Alexa skill has one review, which again is strange because Delta hasn’t yet released its voice module or voice web app. Chances are the review, which calls the Delta skill “Easy Peasy”, was written by a Delta employee familiar with the initiative.

I don’t know about you, but I think using my voice to pour water is one of the cooler and more practical uses for Alexa in the home. I could imagine scenarios where my hands are full or simply messy, and using my voice to turn the water on or off with my voice just makes sense. I guess I’ll just have to wait until Delta actually releases the product that works with the skill before I get my hands on one.

November 14, 2017

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.

November 8, 2017

Exclusive: Nest Working On “Smart Chime System” With Unique Sounds For Events, People, Zones

While it took a while for Nest to jump into the home security game, it looks like they may just be getting started.

What’s one potential trick up their sleeves?

Smart chimes.

That’s right, the folks within the Nest security team have filed for a patent that was published on November 2nd of this year that would transform a home security’s chime system into one that assigns unique chimes to specific people, locations, and events.

According to the patent filing, Google/Nest is working on a smart chime system that would play unique sounds depending on the location, type of event, whether a person is unidentified or identified, etc.

The description excerpted below describes the shortcomings of a conventional home chime system and how the one envisioned by Google/Nest would be different (bold emphasis added by me):

At least one problem common to conventional door chime systems is that door chimes offer only one type of sound effect for all doors and windows. As a result, the chime does not provide any information as to exactly which door or window was opened. Furthermore, the homeowner does not know if the chime sound indicates a person leaving the house, coming inside the house, just a window opening, or exactly who opened the door or window.

Another problematic feature common to many conventional door chime systems is disabling a chime from being sounded if one door or window is already open. In the scenario in which the front door is open and then a second door is opened, the opening of the second door does not cause the chime effect to be sounded, thus the residents are not informed.

The disclosed smart door chime system remedies these problems and provides many other improvements. The disclosed system can provide a customized chime or other sound based on current data obtained by sensors, historical data obtained by sensors, user input data, and additional factors as will be described below. The disclosed smart door chime system can process and store data that has been captured by sensors and analyze the data to extract information about the environment, such as activity of a person, identify of a person, activity of a pet, motion, etc. Based on the data, the disclosed smart door chime system selects an output profile that determines a specific sound to be played on a specific set of speakers. Accordingly, many different scenarios may be addressed and customized chimes or sounds can inconspicuously convey to users a wide variety of information about occurrences at a premises.

In short, Nest wants to be able to utilize motions sensors, cameras, facial recognition and other technologies to create a highly specific chime system to let the user create highly tailored audio signals to understand better what is going on around the home. Does Fido keep sneaking into the bedroom and eating your slippers? There’s a chime for that. Want to know when your youngest kid has walked out the backdoor? There’s a chime.  A stranger’s entered your home. Chime.

Not only that, it looks like the system could allow for some fun. For example, the patent application describes how you could tee up specific songs or audio files to play.  Spouse home from a long business trip and you want drop some clues for a romantic night at home? Just tee up a little Business Time from Flight of the Conchords when they walk through the front door.

You can see from the image below how the system would allow for tailored “zones” throughout the house:

Zones within the Google/Nest smart chime system

The image below shows how you can create specific rules and zones depending on the event. As you can see, you can play a chosen chimes/audio files in specific locations based on predetermined rules around events:

Rules for Google/Nest smart chime system allows user to tailor rules by event/zone/speaker

I’m not sure about you, but this sounds like a pretty useful feature. I can see how folks with young kids, pets or special needs family members could use a smart chime system to help them monitor the goings on in the home.

One such example would be to use a smart chime system to monitor autistic children. Parents with autistic kids often struggle with their children’s tendency to wander, and one could imagine using special chimes to alert when an autistic child gets near a door.

While this is only a patent application, let’s hope the team at Nest plan to turn the smart chime system into an actual product.

November 2, 2017

Right now, Amazon AR is Kinda Silly for the Kitchen, but Just Wait

Amazon released augmented reality (AR) capabilities through its iOS app yesterday that allow consumers to place virtual versions of objects in real world settings through their phones. The number of products you can place is currently limited, but there is a Kitchen category where you can preview how virtual wares will look on your countertops or in cabinets.

Right now, the feature is more fun than truly useful in the kitchen (I can see it having more of an immediate impact in the living room). Mostly because a lot of the kitchen items are small, like a Cookie Monster mug which I don’t really need augmented reality to show me how much space I need on my counter.

If you’re looking for some utility, the app might be useful for bigger countertop appliances like toaster ovens or slow cookers to get a sense of how they would fit and look in a smaller kitchen. Or if you want to get a sense of how a style of kitchen barstools would look. Or you can get a sense of how a red toaster will work with the current color scheme of your kitchen.

The virtual mockups are definitely rough, and there really aren’t that many items to preview right now. But right now isn’t really the point. Amazon is a company that definitely does not live in the present, it’s always got one eye on the future and setting itself up for success then.

You can see how this would be helpful with larger appliances such as a refrigerator, or oven hood or cooktop to see how it will look. And the ability to provide real-life room mapping would be of great use, for example showing it a space and Amazon pulling up all the appliances that would fit there, or appliance colors that would go well with your existing decor.

There was one bit of unexpected coolness from my brief AR experiment. When I Airdropped the pictures from my phone to my MacBook, it immediately brought up the corresponding page to buy the product on Amazon in my browser. Well, “coolness” may not be the right word, but never let it be said that Amazon is not the master of the frictionless purchase.

You can check out the AR capabilities right now in iOS. Jut go the Amazon shopping app and click on the camera. From there you can find the best place for that Cookie Monster mug.

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