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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Kitchen Summit

SKS Returns in 2025 With Global Virtual Summit

The Smart Kitchen Summit, the pioneering executive summit focused on the digital transformation of the food world, is excited to announce its return in 2025 with a brand-new format. This year, SKS is going fully virtual, offering an interactive experience over two weeks in July 2025 with 1-2 hours of daily programming and sessions.

A New Format for a New Era

“We’re excited to bring SKS to a global audience in 2025,” said Michael Wolf, SKS founder and publisher of The Spoon. “The reality is 2025 is a year of great change and uncertainty. Brands and professionals are looking for ways to navigate and collaborate over this rapidly shifting terrain, so we decided it was more important than ever to expand our reach via a virtual event.”

For two weeks, SKS 2025 will feature up to two hours of daily programming, including thought-provoking discussions, product showcases, and deep dives into the most significant trends shaping the future of food and cooking. This approach allows attendees to engage with the content at their own pace and fosters meaningful conversations and networking opportunities at SKS 2025, all while continuing to build their own companies.

Themes for 2025

SKS 2025 will focus on the most critical topics driving the innovation-driven transformation of how we shop, cook, and consume food. Some of the key themes and questions to be explored include:

  • The Future of Cooking – How is technology reshaping the way we prepare and experience food at home and in professional kitchens?
  • AI & Food – The impact of artificial intelligence on food innovation, personalization, and efficiency.
  • Personalized Nutrition – How data and technology are driving customized food solutions for better health and wellness.
  • Electrification & Sustainability – The role of electrification in the kitchen and its impact on energy efficiency and sustainability.

What to Expect

  • Live Presentations & Panel Discussions – Engage with industry pioneers, tech disruptors, and thought leaders.
  • On-Demand Access – Catch up on any missed sessions with full access to recorded content.
  • Community & Networking – Connect with professionals in food, tech, and investment through our dedicated online platform.
  • Exclusive Product Showcases – Discover the latest advancements in kitchen appliances, AI-driven food systems, and next-gen culinary experiences.

Join Us

Registration for SKS 2025 is now open! Whether you’re an industry professional, startup founder, investor, or food tech enthusiast, SKS 2025 is your chance to be part of the conversation shaping the future of food.

For those interested in speaking at SKS 2025 can apply here. If you are interested in sponsorships, let us know and we’ll be in touch!

Three Days of Food Innovation & Discovery in Tokyo: Scenes From SKS Japan 2024

In January of 2017, little did I know that a chance meeting in the Venetian in Las Vegas would eventually lead to the creation of Japan’s most influential and well-attended food tech event.

We’d just come off our second North America Smart Kitchen Summit a couple of months prior, and two first-time attendees who had made the trip to Seattle, Hirotaka Tanaka and Akiko Okada, asked if we could meet during CES.

I said yes, and the rest is history. Half a year later, we got together in Tokyo for the first-ever SKS Japan, and I was wonderfully surprised at the excitement and innovation around the food system taking place in this beautiful country. And now, seven years later, we just had the seventh SKS Japan, and it’s incredible how this show has matured into one of the most important food tech events on the calendar.

This year’s event spanned three days and brought in over one hundred speakers from across the globe and the food system. Below are some snapshots from the show.

Above: Myself and Hiro Tanaka giving the opening keynote to kick of SKS Japan 2024 (and announce SKS 2025 dates).

Above: Robin Liss (Suvie), Kevin Yu (SideChef) and Assaf Pashut (Chefee) join me for a conversation about how the consumer kitchen has evolved over the past decade and where it will go over the next ten years.

Above: Jasmin Hume (Shiru) joins me on stage and Adam Yee (Sobo Foods) and Tarini Naravane (Grainge AI) dial in to talk about the impact of AI on developing new food inputs and products.

Above: Lee Kindell, the founder of MOTO Pizza, comes to Japan from Seattle to talk about his fast-growing restaurant and how he leverages technology such as robotics to help “scale craft”.

Above: Author and Wired’s kitchen tech reviewer Joe Ray sits for a fireside chat on his thoughts about food tech journalism and first impressions of Japan’s food and restaurant scene.

Above: A talk about new approaches using upcycling and food life extension technologies with Moody Soliman (Ryp Labs), Daichi Takada (AlgaleX Co.), and Lina Sakai (Fermenstation).

Above: Akiko Okada (UnlocX), Hirotaka Tanaka (UnlocX), Michiaki Matsushima (WIRED JAPAN), Hiroki Nakajima (University of Tokyo) during a session entitled Tokyo Regenerative Food Lab in Action

Above: The SKS Japan exhibition space. Bottom right is demo table for AlgaleX’s upcycled algae protein product line, Umamo.

Above: Exhibitors head out to the streets of Tokyo for a street fair on the final day of SKS Japan to share their innovations with a wider audience.

Podcast: The Smart Kitchen Summit Recap

Last week, The Spoon and almost three hundred of our closest friends spent an eventful couple of days in Seattle, talking about how technology is transforming the consumer meal journey.

After the dust had settled, Carlos Rodela and I got together to talk about some of the highlights of SKS 2024, We talked about some of the products we saw and our favorite sessions from speakers on stage.

You can listen to the audio-only podcast, but I’d recommend watching the video below, complete with pics and videos of the action at Block41 in Seattle.

A Look Back at Smart Kitchen Summit 2024

Don’t Call It a Comeback: Take-Aways and Thank Yous For Smart Kitchen Summit 2024

Last week, we produced the first in-person Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) since 2019.

It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. In some ways, we’ve lost all sense of time given what has happened over the past five years, including a pandemic, but still, five years is a long time.

Bringing the event back was something we wanted to do for the last couple of years, both because we missed it and because we were hearing from our community, who also wanted SKS back. However, before we did, we wanted to ensure the timing was right. For many reasons (more on that later), we finally felt it was the right time when we announced SKS 2024 last December.

When we held our last event, we didn’t know it at the time, but we were, in a sense, closing the first chapter on the smart kitchen. Many of the first attempts by appliance companies, food brands, and startups building enabling technology had either gained traction or, in many cases, had not, making it a good time to reassess.

The first wave of the smart kitchen focused heavily on leveraging smart home technologies, voice interfaces, and app platforms to digitize knowledge around cooking and food journey management. Many interesting startups born during this time had been acquired or built sustainable and interesting businesses on their own. More eventually went out of business.

That’s why, as I built the program for this first year back, I wanted to take a realistic look at our industry’s progress, take stock of the lessons learned, and understand the current state of innovation. I wanted to have some ‘real talk’ so we can be clear-eyed about what we did right and what we did wrong and better navigate the next ten years of building products for the future kitchen.

Many of those lessons were articulated during the two days. Scott Heimendinger, who has been building products that utilize technology to help us become better cooks for more than a decade, summed up much of the problem with the first wave (and warned those this time around) on the opening panel.

“There’s a temptation that’s especially prevalent in our industry, but in others as well, that when new technologies become available to the world, we want to kind of slap those on what we’re doing,” said Heimendinger.

Scott and others warned that we must avoid repeating the same mistakes, especially as the industry embraces new technologies such as generative AI.

Another key refrain we heard during the two days was how critical it is to understand how we can meet consumers where they are in the kitchen and understand their needs. We need to build products that enhance their ability to cook great meals and make their lives easier, all while understanding the changing nature of living today as we witness growing challenges of buying homes, inflation, and a warming, increasingly resource-challenged planet.

Two speakers who addressed consumer motivation were Susan Schwallie and Barb Stuckey.

“They are outfitting utilitarian and multi-purpose kitchens and require appliances that work hard for them,” Schwallie said during her presentation, Harnessing Consumer Trends to Design the Kitchen of Tomorrow. “Gone are the days of single-use tools like avocado slicers and artisanal coffee makers, which required time and technique. Multi-purpose tools like air fryers resonate.”

One crucial aspect to consider about Millennials is their hyper-awareness of the cost of life in 2024. This, combined with their aspiration for ‘adult’ kitchens, underscores the significance of durability in their purchasing decisions, according to Schwallie. They seek products that can withstand the test of time, and the fear of planned obsolescence is a genuine concern for them. Many reside in ‘forever apartments,’ where storage and countertop space are limited, “making utility and flexibility important.”

Barb Stuckey delved into the changing nature of housing and how it impacts what Millennials and Gen Z think about their kitchen purchase decisions. According to Barb, only 40% of renters expect to own a home someday, and this permanent rental mindset has translated to this tech-forward generation, which is eyeing practical and multi-function appliances that often sit on the countertop.

We also looked further into the future during SKS, exploring potential scenarios that could be unlocked through the application of new technologies. One scenario described by Mike Lee, author of Mise, during his talk, is a society in which a large segment of our population utilizes AI-powered personalized nutrition platforms to guide their every move. Mike expressed his belief in the great potential of personalized nutrition but also emphasized that we as an industry need to recognize that “something is lost when eating in a silo.”

Another conversation focused on how robotics and automation will be used in the consumer kitchen. It’s a particularly interesting time for this conversation, as we increasingly hear about companies like Apple, Tesla, and the Bot Company eyeing the home market for robotics. Moderator Wilson Rothman pressed those building high-end and pricey robots about the key needs they were solving and how they envisioned consumers getting these products into their homes. Robin Liss, who makes a countertop robot named Suvie, talked about the importance of a “constant feedback loop” of usage data to make products ever more usable and affordable.

This is only a sample of what we heard. We will examine and explore insights from the stage as we publish videos and transcripts of the sessions in the coming weeks. For now, though, I just wanted to reflect and thank those who made SKS 2024 possible.

When we had the first SKS in 2015, we were on the precipice of a new wave of innovation around cooking and food technology. Looking back, we’ve documented many of those stories here at The Spoon and have, in recent years, started to hear from others beginning their journeys building new products and platforms for the consumer kitchen. As we’ve listened over the past twelve months, it’s become evident to me there is a new wave of innovation building, where innovators are leveraging advances in AI, synthetic biology, heating, robotics, electrification, and much more to build the future companies and kitchens of tomorrow.

We hope to help document these stories on The Spoon, through podcasts, and at our events for the next decade, and we hope you come along for the ride!

***

Now for some thanks. Big thanks to the SKS sponsors Whirlpool, Current Backyard, Fresco, Schott, Chefman, Suvie, Else Labs, Pot Robotics and Cibotica, all of whom helped make SKS possible.

Big thanks to my good friend and event consigliere, Surj Patel, who did a masterful job MCing for the two days. Thanks to Sandie Markle and Louis Leboa for helping corral speakers during SKS. Thank you to my good friend Carlos Rodela and awesome videographer Luca Nilon-Volpentesta for doing interviews and capturing some great video.

Thanks to Heather Moore, a long-time friend (and fellow puppet-lover) for capturing amazing photos of all the action at SKS.

Also, thanks to other volunteers such as Hamid Ali (congratulations on a great career at Google!), Cormac Wolf, and Andrew Miller.

Thanks to Renton Technical College for feeding us. We are big supporters of RTC’s mission of educating young people and preparing them for careers in food service.

Thanks to the team at Kind and Co for being awesome event ninjas and ensuring all the little (and big) things that go into producing an event got done.

Thanks to all the speakers for SKS 2024 for taking time out of their busy schedules building businesses to book flights and come to Seattle to share knowledge.

Thanks to all of our event partners, who helped spread the word about SKS, ensured we filled seats, and tapped into their networks.

Thanks to our attendees, who, through their energy and insight during the show, truly made SKS 2024 an amazing event.

Thanks to the media for coming and writing about SKS.

Thanks to the SKS Advisory Council, which helped shape my thinking about this year’s program and made connections when needed.

Finally, thanks most of all to Tiffany McClurg, who did so much to make SKS 2024 a rousing success. She not only helped make SKS so much better and kept the trains running on time during the show, but also got to step out on the first day and watch her (and my) son graduate from the University of Washington.

We’ll see you all next year!

Scenes from Smart Kitchen Summit 2024

The Smart Kitchen Summit wrapped up this week, and boy, did we have a great time discussing how new technologies will drive the next wave of cooking and kitchen innovation!

I’ll be sharing some of my thoughts next week, but I thought I’d share some of my favorite shots from the show. Thanks, as always, to Heather Moore for great work.

Above: Kicking off SKS 2024 with some great insights from Scott Heimendinger, Chris Young and Kai Shaeffner.

Above: SKS MC Surj Patel talks with Ladle Cooking’s Sumati Sharan

Above: Chef, meet Chef. Two authors connect at SKS. Chris Young (Coauthor, Modernist Cuisine) shakes hands with James Briscione (Author, The Flavor Matrix).

Above: Talking Cooking Robots. A food robotics session with Mark Oleynik (Moley Robotics), Robin Liss (Suvie) and Assaf Pashut).

Above: SKS attendees check out what’s next in cooking technology.

Above: MOTO Pizza CEO Lee Kindell shows off his t-shirt on stage.

Above: Wisely founder Rachell McCray talks about the future of food storage with Ovie’s Stacie Thompson.

Above: The sun breaks through just in time for happy hour at SKS 2024

Tovala’s Keeley Kabala: Success in Smart Kitchen Requires Listening to Your Customers

Back in 2016, an early-stage startup called Tovala appeared in just the second Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase. Company CEO David Rabie showed off the first-gen oven and discussed the vision for a combination of a hardware appliance and a food subscription service.

Fast forward eight years later, and Tovala has become one of the true success stories in the smart kitchen, amassing a large and enthusiastic user base for its oven and an extremely high lock-in rate for its meal delivery service.

I caught up recently with Tovala’s COO, Keeley Kabala, to talk about Tovala’s business in 2024 and where he sees his company and food delivery going over the next decade.

One of the key takeaways for me was that Tovala still focuses heavily on adding value for its customers through its oven, even if that means enabling users to take advantage of the multi-function cooking automation that is one of the key differentiators for the Tovala. The company sells two models of oven today – a five-in-one and a six-in-one – and as of today they have over one thousand CPG products in the database that they can run scan-to-cook where the oven will have an optimised set of cooking instructions that can bring the different forms of heat (and steam) into the cooking process.

According to Kabala, many of those CPG products are available at Costco.

“Right now we have dozens of Kirkland products that can scan to cook right from the beginning,” said Kabala. “So people many times are leaving the store with scannable items that have cook cycles already programmed in for their oven to use.”

Not only does Tovala have scan-to-cook for Costco’s Kirkland brand items, but it is also selling its oven in select Costco, which Kabala believes will give them more exposure to different customer types, which will give them new data points around which to build product around customer preferences.

It’s this listening to customers, says Kabala, the is critical for their future success.

“If we’re willing to listen to our customers, they’ll give you a chance to iterate.” said Kabala. “If you don’t listen, you might not be around forever. It’s been great to see just how vocal people are, too. They really care. So they don’t hold back on their feedback. We just have to make sure we keep listening.”

You can watch the interview below as well as read the transcript of the full conversation.

If you’d like to connect with Keeley in person, he will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit next week. You can get your tickets at the SKS website.

A Conversation with Tovala's Keeley Kabala

Michael Wolf: All right, I’m here with Keely Kabala, not Keely Tovala, because it sounds like some people get that mixed up because the name sounds so familiar.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, it’s got the same last few letters, but yes, it was named before I got here. I didn’t choose the name of the company, but it’s led to confusion and many jokes along the way.

Michael Wolf: And I imagine one of those jokers is David Rabie, the cofounder and CEO of the company I’ve spoken with. He’s been at Smart Kitchen Summit to some of it, but we’re excited to have you come out to Seattle in June to talk about what you guys are doing at Tovala. Tovala is a really interesting company because they are one of the real success stories in this idea of like bringing new technology into the kitchen. And also you have this interesting pairing with a food delivery service. You guys have really been a shining star in that space, combining a food delivery service with the hardware. We’ll talk about that in a little bit, but before we jump into like what’s going on with Tovala, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got where you are.

Keeley Kabala: Sure. My whole professional career has kind of been in the consumer appliance space. Did my very first internships at Whirlpool and Fellows, making appliances and paper shredders. I went over to Whirlpool full-time and had a variety of different interesting and challenging assignments all over the world. I got to live in Europe for a year, in China for a year, launched products and dishwashers, refrigerators. And interestingly enough, David and Brian, the other co-founder of Tovala, asked me to be their first employee in 2015. I didn’t understand the concept of Tovala and turned them down. And they asked me again a few months later and again a few months later. And finally, after they launched the Kickstarter and it became a little bit more real, I ended up joining the team as the VP of Hardware Engineering. And so, at that time, they had the Gen 1 oven, which had a lot of pros but also had a lot of cons. And my job was to work with the team to create what was our second gen oven. And it’s kind of the base for the two SKUs that we have right now. So we developed that in 2017, 2018, and it launched November 2018 and kind of has been our bread and butter on the hardware side ever since. And then on the ops side, I joined the food ops team kind of in a support role in early 2019. We were trying to figure out, we had just opened our own food facility on the South side of Chicago. And I kind of came over just a little advisement type role for our COO at the time on cost and quality and kind of just took over OPS along the way. And then, you know, we really started to explode in the back half of 2019. And it’s been a wild ride throughout the pandemic and opening food facilities along the way. But yeah, that’s been my Tovala journey. Originally, I came for the hardware side, and now I spend most of my time on the food side, but both teams report to me.

Michael Wolf: And you have that engineering mindset, obviously, build products throughout your career. And I would imagine that an engineering mindset really helps as you try to optimize the food delivery side and the operation side.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, yeah, I think we have a good team of engineers that bridge both the oven and the food side. I think that’s probably one of our competitive advantages compared to just maybe a meal kit company that doesn’t have the engineering firepower that we have, whether it’s on the hardware side, the ops engineering side or the software side. You know, some of our engineers have developed very sophisticated thermal modeling to make sure our food is safe. And also the packaging is as light as possible for customers, based on zip codes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And getting to work with them has been a good challenge. I think there’s, you know, one of our unique advantages is having the control of the food because we produce the food, ship the food, and then have the kill step and the quality control in actually the customer’s house because we’re using our, you know, chef curated cook cycles to cook the food. So it’s a good engineering systems problem to solve.

Michael Wolf: The current hardware, which like you said, is the foundation of what you helped build. One of the core ideas that I’ve always found with Tovala is it has steam, which I think obviously makes the food a lot better. You know, steam ovens haven’t really become widely deployed in consumer kitchens in the US but I think it really does make food better. So talk about, you know, the feature set within the oven and why it works so well with the food you guys deliver.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, we have a five-in-one and a six-in-one. The five in one has the bake, the broil, the air fry functionality, as well as toast and reheat. And then, on our six-in-one, we’ve added steam. So steam is just another cooking mode that allows to preserve moisture inside of some of the more delicate food items to reduce browning for other delicate food items. And actually in many ways can help accelerate the cook because you’re getting the cooking from the steam surface and the heat transfer going through the food. So, you know, we’ve gone into air frying. We were kind of, I think, a little late to getting into air frying. We were debating that for a long time on the differences between it and, you know, just bake, convection bake. But we launched the air fry model that has the two feet speed fan. It gets really great performance. And then, you know, our six-in-one has the steam functionality that does really great on some of the bread items. case ideas. It comes out really great. The salmon turns out perfect when it’s with steam and then hit with the broil at the end. I think the true advantage is the multi-step cooking where you’re able to change modes and temperatures. And that’s what most of our, you know, Tovala cycles do, whether it’s the scan to cook groceries or the Tovala meals, or some of our customers who really enjoy cooking at home, they create sophisticated cycles on their own. Some people just like to hit bake 400, 15 minutes all the time. Others get a little bit more creative. They have a ramp up with an air fry to get the high velocity airflow in the oven, hit it with bake, and then the broil at the end to get caramelization or whatever the case may be. But yeah, I think our true advantage is the multi-step cooking.

Michael Wolf: And that pairing of your food or even CPGs with the scan to cook with the ability to switch to different modes makes it fairly unique. I think most people just buy something at Costco, put it in the microwave, or put it in their air fryer, and hit go. But you have all these five to six different elements that you can combine. So each food has its own essentially recipe around the cook. Apply a certain amount of heat, you’re gonna finish with this, add some steam, and that’s optimized for each food that you deliver to the consumer.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, exactly. And it’s also from a food safety standpoint. So it’s a balancing act that our food safety team and our culinary team constantly are trading off on. It’s a unique spot for us to have that, one, that additional kill step in the home. But actually, quality control is something that we actually have. How the food turns out when you cook it, we control that in the person’s house. Most other meal delivery companies, your end result is determined based on how good of a chef you are. And we extend one layer further where our oven is cooking the cook cycles the way our chefs intend at the test kitchen here at HQ. And they’ve gone through several rounds of testing. And the important thing is pairing the protein with the side. And so you can cook chicken a bunch of different ways, but whether it’s paired with mashed potatoes or a rice pilaf or green beans, how it gets to that food safe temperature is going to be different. And so our chefs have to balance that out. And so that’s why each recipe has a unique cook site.

Michael Wolf: And you do work with stuff that people can buy at the grocery store because you have scan to cook. That to me is really helpful. And I think that would be something that consumers more broadly would like if, hey, I could buy something at the store and my cooking device can be optimized around what the optimal cook mode is for that. Maybe that’s a combination of like the food brand working with the appliance maker, but that isn’t really available today beyond like what you guys are doing. Is this something you think maybe more widely available in a 10 year time frame. Maybe that’s with a Tovala or another appliance where essentially the cook and the different elements of the cook can be applied in a more precise manner based on what consumers are putting into their cooking box.

Keeley Kabala: I think for certain customers, that’s definitely the case and definitely a benefit, like not having to check, not having to preheat. I think that’s the other thing that’s like one of our main advantages is anything we’ve scanned to cook in a Tovala, whether it’s a Tovala meal or a CPG type item where you scan the UPC, you set and forget it, you cook it from ambient heat. And so we’ve calculated the preheat and how the oven warms up into the cook cycle. And so I do think that’s another thing. It brings the convenience factor. If you had to always preheat your oven, then remember to come back 10 minutes later, put it in. It’s just one more step that I don’t think customers need or want to do. It’s really a non-value step to them. So we try to eliminate those. And then not every item is going to work. Not every oven item is ovenable. It can’t be cooked with the heaters. Some companies have very delicate packaging. And we don’t want them to melt, so that’s why we don’t pick everything that can be from CPG or from the frozen aisle. But there’s a lot. There’s over 1,000 items at this point in our database. We continue to add to them based on customer’s demand. There’s definitely times of days where this functionality is used quite often. And certain items, whether it’s snacks or breakfasts, are very prevalent use cases for these.

Michael Wolf: So looking forward, I imagine you think a bit about what the Tovala cooking side could look like in a long-term time horizon. Do you guys think you’ll continue to evolve the cooking appliance? Maybe in 10 years, will it be whether it be more automation or different modes of heating? Or do you think consumers just want a basic what you have today and just a little bit of change over time?

Keeley Kabala: I think, I mean, the biggest thing for us right now is, you know, for the history of our company, we’ve always been direct to consumer. And so people are coming to us more with a food need first. And very recently we started in retail. We’re in Costco now with our oven. And so I think we’re getting feedback from our customers on different things they want. So I think it’s like, based on where the starting point of the customer comes in, they’re going to want different functionalities, different capabilities, similar to when we went from the gen one to the gen two oven. You know, the gen one oven didn’t have a bake button on the front of it. We thought everyone wanted the super smart appliance, only app usage, and we very quickly got feedback that we needed to make some tweaks. And so we brought the functionality still in the app, but also to the front of the oven. You know, the gen one had a larger footprint. We needed to change the footprint size. The kitchen counters are so valuable in everyone’s home. We needed to make sure we were optimizing every square inch. And so going into retail now, we’re getting feedback. We’re very early into it. Only been a few months with Costco, but we’re seeing that there’s different functionalities, different features, different use cases. And so I think there will definitely be some tweaks in the hardware and the overall experience in general.

Michael Wolf: That Costco relationship is really interesting to me because when I think of Costco, they obviously sell appliances, but I go there mainly for food. I usually get the same things. You guys combine the oven with a kind of consumable. Once people buy the oven through a Costco, can they then pick up the Tovala food at Costco or would only be delivered to you guys, to them?

Keeley Kabala: So right now we haven’t started any food in retail. That’s on a roadmap of things to consider. Right now we have dozens of Kirkland products that can scan to cook right from the beginning. So people many times are leaving the store with scannable items that have cook cycles already programmed in for their oven to use. But right now we only sell ovens at Costco. But I think once again, this is our advantage we have is we have the opportunity to go into the other side of the store and start getting some of our products there for quicker trials for customers who aren’t familiar yet as much with Tovala as a food product and only are learning about us first time more on the appliance side.

Michael Wolf: And that’s interesting that you guys have worked with Costco. So some of the food items available at Costco, you can scan to cook. So they’re probably excited about that.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, they’re super excited about that. I mean, not only are they getting to move our ovens through their store, but it’ll help them move some of their other products as well. And it just kind of brings some from newness and kind of a tech advantage that Costco didn’t have previously on the food side.

Michael Wolf: What are you most excited about when you think about the Consumer Kitchen five years down the road, 10 years down the road? What excites you about that space?

Keeley Kabala: I mean, I think in general, a way to reduce waste. So whether it’s personalization and understanding what people want to eat so they make sure they don’t buy or order the wrong stuff that ends up being wasted or better understanding of inventory management. But I think in general, both food and energy waste are still major opportunities in the kitchen space. And so whether it’s how people get their food, how much food they get, when they get their food, what food they get, I think are all still major opportunities across our business and other businesses. And then, you know, I have a large oven in my home. I worked for a company that made very nice large ovens. I only use the large oven now on Thanksgiving. Like there’s a lot less energy usage by having the right appliance for the right job. And I think for what I need normally, you know, Tovala answers that. I think there’s a lot of other really smart, compact kitchen appliances. And so I think adoption is, I think, been interesting to see, not just us, but other companies as well, you know, gain adoption. And the one thing I’ve always shocked by is how willing people are to try new things in the kitchen and are willing to take on early stage innovation because they are really trying to optimize the food that they eat, their time, and their space in their kitchen. And so that’s why companies like us and many others have existed and continue to get a chance to iterate. If we’re willing to listen to our customers, they’ll give you a chance to iterate. If you don’t listen, you might not be around forever, but it’s been great to see just how vocal people are, too. They really care. So they don’t hold back on their feedback. We just got to make sure we keep listening.

Michael Wolf: Great closing words, Keely Kabala with Tovala. Thank you so much for spending time with me today.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, have a great day.

Meet the SKS 2024 Startup Showcase Finalists

Ever since we launched the Smart Kitchen Summit {SKS} in 2015, one of the most popular parts of the conference is the Startup Showcase, where attendees get a glimpse at early-stage companies making innovative inroads into food and kitchen tech.

The Showcase is back this year, and we’re excited to announce the nine startups building products that are rethinking the future of food and cooking. These nine were chosen from over 100 applicants who applied to pitch their product on stage in Seattle.

You can meet the founders behind these companies, hear them pitch and visit their table at the Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4th and 5th in Seattle! Get your ticket today!

Nymble

How does Posha work? | Posha Kitchen Robot | Nymble is now Posha

Nymble makes a countertop cooking robot that automates everyday cooking.

Celcy

Meet Celcy - The Only Fully Autonomous Cooking Appliance

The Celcy is an autonomous cooking appliance that combines a countertop oven with a freezer that stores the meals until ready for cooking.

TasteGAGE from MAMAY Technologies Ltd

Taste GAGE is “the world’s first universal Taste, Odor & Feel simulator for foods and beverages. The GAGE simulator analyzes the chemical and physical properties of a product’s ingredients at the molecular level, combining that data with their taste and odor attributes.

Hefes

The Hefes’ Self-Cleaning Juicer uses steam to automatically clean its internal components after each use.

MashDaddy

MashDaddy has reimagined the world’s oldest kitchen tool, the mortar and pestle.

Wisely

Wisely is a smart food storage container that uses hardware, software, and sensors to track the conditions with which perishable foods are stored and connect to a consumer smartphone app.

Bridge Appliances

Introducing OMM, Automated Egg Cooker

Bridge Appliances makes OMM, a robot designed to automate the preparation of eggs for breakfast sandwiches.

Kitchenery

The Spoon Catches up With Akshay Bhuva of Kitchenery

Kitchenery makes wireless power transfer technology for the kitchen appliance industry. Its products include the Quantum Energy Pad and cordless appliances such as the Cordless Kettle and Silent Blender, which together enable consumers to use appliances without cords.

Ladle Cooking

Ladle helps users cook at home by personalizing recipes from their favorite creators to their individual preferences.

Once again, make sure to get your ticket today to SKS 2024 to check out these products and meet the founders behind them on June 4th and 5th in Seattle!

The Story of Samsung Food with Nick Holzherr

Nick Holzherr, founder of Whisk and head of Samsung Food, is this week’s guest on the Spoon Podcast.

Those in the smart kitchen industry know Nick, in part because his company helped pioneer the early tech behind shoppable recipes, but also because his acquisition by Samsung is the culmination of one of the true success stories in this market.

Today, the technology that Nick and Whisk built is what powers Samsung Food, the AI-powered food and recipe platform that the consumer electronics giant debuted at CES 2024.

Some of the things we talk about this latest episode of The Spoon Podcast include:

  • The story of how Whisk was the first recipe startup to explore how to use AI and apply it to recipes.
  • Nick’s experience going on the British version of The Apprentice and appearing before Lord Sugar (the British version of Donald Trump) to pitch the company. 
  • The growth of the company as Whisk started working with grocers in Europe and eventually appliance brands
  • Nick fielding calls from three companies who presented offer sheets to buy the company.
  • We talk about what Nick is excited about and how he sees technologies like AI being applied in the kitchen in the future.

You can read the full transcript of the conversation below and listen to the full interview by clicking play on the podcast player below or heading to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you’d like to connect with Nick in person, he will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4th. You can get your tickets here.

Conversation Transcript:

Michael Wolf: Nick just told me whatever I throw at him, he’s ready for, especially with that new microphone. You look great in that, in your little room there, the microphone.

Nick Holzherr: It’s brand new. It was three months old. I realized I needed to start upping my game when everyone’s podcasting now, right?

Michael Wolf: Everyone’s podcasting. So when’s the Nick Holzherr podcast start, by the way?

Nick Holzherr: I haven’t got my own podcast, but if anybody wants to invite me onto theirs, I’ve now got a good mic.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, well, Nick, I feel I’ve known you probably since 2016, 2017. I think Whisk was the first company I remember that was really talking up AI and recipes. That was one of your original stories, right?

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, I mean, we started with the problem that users want to use recipes anywhere, not just from one manufacturer or one publisher or one grocery company or one tech startup with a couple hundred recipes. And the only way to really make that happen is with AI. If you want a smart experience, that is. Use AI to parse all these recipes and make them smart. So we did that, but that was before deep learning, before it was accessible to startups. We were literally flying out on planes to America, buying the latest processors, latest chips, graphics cards, and using them with basically PhDs, ex-professors that we had hired to build these models. It was really early in AI, before TensorFlow, before these libraries. Of course, now it’s totally changed. Super early.

Michael Wolf: I was looking back in the history a little bit and I didn’t realize Whisk had started back in 2012. Back then, you were actually on a British TV show, British Apprentice on the BBC. Was it pitching Whisk at the time?

Nick Holzherr: Yep. It actually was. It’s called the Apprentice, and it’s the same thing as basically Donald Trump has in the US, right? And we have a different person running it called Lord Sugar. The guy in the UK is called Lord Sugar and he was an advisor or member of the Labour Party, which is the left side of the government. So it’s kind of a little bit the opposite of Donald Trump.

Michael Wolf: Lord Sugar. Way better name.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, he was originally Sir, I think, and then they made him a Lord. This is the British monarchy system, which is also hilarious. It was amazing fun. You do 12 weeks of tasks competing against other people. And then if you get to the final, you get to pitch your business plan. If you win, he gives you money and becomes a partner in your business. I got to the final and I didn’t win. But because it was such a popular TV show, and I got to pitch it to him and his advisors and therefore the UK, everyone wanted to invest in it, but not everyone, but enough people wanted to invest in it. Most people would take the meetings with me. So I got inbound from a lot of the grocery stores and publishers and stuff saying, hey, we’d love to work with you.

Michael Wolf: The Tescos the world came in with you say, hey, let’s meet. Was it immediate like the next day?

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, literally that night, my inbox, my LinkedIn and my inbox just filled up with loads of people who wanted to work, who said, ‘I love it. I know he (Lord Sugar) didn’t invest, but can I invest or can I work with you? And then the ones who hadn’t, when I messaged them months later and said, Hey, this is the idea, I pitched it to on the Apprentice, they would take the meeting, not necessarily because they’re interested, but just wanted to meet the guy who’s on TV.

Michael Wolf: There was a curiosity in meeting you, right?

Nick Holzherr: And for a salesperson, that’s what you need, right, a foot in the door.

Michael Wolf: I feel The Apprentice was the predecessor to Shark Tank, which is also Dragon’s Den in the UK. The value for you as an entrepreneur is it’s just a giant commercial. The value is in the millions of dollars in terms of free publicity.

Nick Holzherr: Exactly. It’s huge. And it’s also actually fun. It is really, really fun. It is also challenging because it’s not a show about business success. It’s about conflict, essentially, right? Of people conflicting and trying to make something work. It’s like a business assault course. They put you through psychometric tests and psychology interviews to basically choose people that they think will conflict with each other and create good TV. So that part is stressful, but you also get to do some really cool things on the show, like build products super quickly and pitch them to big people. So it’s really fun. But ultimately it was the platform I needed to get Whisk started.

Michael Wolf: And so you got Whisk started and I think I connected with you in around 2016, 2017. From those early days when you had the business plan, what you pitched on Apprentice BBC versus when I met you around 2016, what had changed? Obviously you’d started the company, went from business plan to actually starting this thing, but had the vision changed at all?

Nick Holzherr: The core mission was to help people cook, make it more joyful as we talk about it today, and to help them in that process. That hadn’t changed. But what had changed was we started off with a consumer app and we couldn’t get it to what we thought was enough scale. So we pivoted from trying to build a consumer app to looking at all that tech we’d built. And you started off talking about AI. We’d built a lot of AI way back, 10, 12 years ago. And so we were really early in that. And businesses wanted to use that. We knew that because we had, when we built our consumer, we had built widgets that publishers could integrate on their sites. And through that, we had loads of conversations with big publishers, big retailers and big CPG brands. And a lot of them said, ‘we love this widget. Yes, we’ll integrate it, but can we also use some of the other tech?’

So, in2014, 2015, and into 2016, we couldn’t make the consumer app work. So we pivoted into a B2B platform, offered all the tech that we had built for anybody to use, built an API platform for people to use. We were powering half a billion monthly consumer interactions at one point, at the height of it, which was pretty impressive and we were powering it for a lot of the big players in the world like a lot of big CBG brands. If you made a list of the top players, maybe half of those were using our technology.

Michael Wolf: Were you on big publisher websites?

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, the biggest, right? Food Network, Allrecipes, BBC Good Food, About.com, the big, big sites with many tens of millions of hits a month, users, those were integrating us and we were sending them across to grocery retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Instacart, the UK ones like Tesco. And the big CPG brands wanted to be part of it because they wanted to have their products featured. So when it’s butter, they want it to be the Unilever butter, or when it’s stock, the Unilever stock, right? So they cared about that. And they also wanted to connect their own websites to commerce. Because we had those integrations, they then said, can you power more of our platform? We said ‘yes’. Then all the big IoT companies came along, the appliance manufacturers came along and said, ‘hey, can we use your platform as well?’ So we were powering a whole bunch of different IoT players. And that’s, I think, where you and I first started talking.

Michael Wolf: So just real quickly, you were with the publishers and you were essentially doing shoppable recipes. So, like Bisquick, Nestle wants their yogurt or whatever. You were one of the pioneers in the whole shoppable recipe concept. And that was around the 2013, 2014 time frame.

Nick Holzherr: That’s right. I mean, there was Constant Commerce (now Constant.co), which are no longer there, but Constant Commerce was there at the same kind of time as us, super, super early. But it was basically only Constant Commerce and us. And we took a different approach to them. They were more enterprise-y in their proposition. So some of the big enterprise players wanted them. And, but we were more like open and like, let’s integrate the whole market kind of sort of game. So someone wanted us and we had a bit more of a B2C to B2B2C kind of play where we integrated onto their sites and then they added to a shopping list. It would still be our shopping list and it users could save the recipe into our recipe box. Our consumer experience is always there, but it was integrated on other people’s sites and shops and brands.

Michael Wolf: And the appliance guys showed up around in the 2015, 2016 timeframe. And what were they asking you? ‘Hey, we want apps. We want people to have recipes.’ What were they showing up with, and what questions did they have?

Nick Holzherr: It was ‘we want to connect our appliances, so can you give us recipes in a structured way?’ Or can you make it work with our products?

Michael Wolf: It was the guided cooking recipe era.

Nick Holzherr: Exactly. But also shoppable recipes. I think everybody always thinks and starts in the early stages of developing an experience that thinks, ‘I want to make money. How do I make money? I make it by connecting to commerce. So, let me connect to commerce.’

So that was definitely part of the game as well. And then what happened was really at that point what we were offering was in its infancy. It was not a mainstream thing to do. And it was really around the 2016 and 2017 mark when suddenly the e-commerce market had grown. Penetration of e-commerce had doubled or tripled from what it was back in 2012. And so you suddenly have everyone wanting it. And it was kind of a crazy time where we had struggled as a business until 2016, 2017, and suddenly they were inundated with everyone saying, ‘hey, can we use your platform?’ And we suddenly became profitable. We went from five people to 30 people in a year, not from any investment, just revenue. We had no investment at that point. Everything was bootstrapped. We were making money, and the business was profitable. It was like, wow, this is really fun. What is it like to make money? A startup making money? What is this?

Michael Wolf: It’s nice to make money. And so how were you making money? You were doing these recipes, and were you kind of taking every recipe impression that went through, you got a little bit of money? Was there a big appliance company that wanted to pay you to do a custom integration?

Nick Holzherr: All of those. So, we had three revenue models. We had the license fee model, a monthly fee for the API. We had a grocery per click or per new customer fee, which was a small fee per transaction. But when you add it all up, it works out relatively well. And then we also had an ad model where you, as a CPG company, if you’re Nestle and you want to get your yogurt sold, you pay to have your yogurt featured. It doesn’t say Nestle yogurt in the recipe, but yes, Nestle yogurt the customer gets. And so they don’t pay on a per acquisition there, they pay on a per view because you are, you’re inspiring the customer. You’re not just selling the customer.

Michael Wolf: Okay, and so this thing’s going crazy. You had 30 employees and you’re making money. Life is good. And then, at some point, or probably I imagine around this time, you’re the kind of the apex of this ride, you get a call from Samsung?

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, I mean, there’s three companies, another one of the big appliance companies, and one of the world’s slash one of the world’s biggest technology companies all rang up at roughly the same time. Like in the six month period of time, we had three serious acquirers wanting to buy us and a bunch of other ones on the side saying, ‘maybe could we, would you be open to it?’ But three of them were kind of term sheet level interest, like real interest. Flying people into our offices saying, ‘hey, can we buy you?’ And it was a really good time; we were profitable, and we didn’t need to sell. And then, ultimately, we chose to go with Samsung.

Michael Wolf: And you’re looking and you’re just thinking in your head. “Lord sugar. You should have made a better offer’. So you had these three offers; a technology platform company, two big appliance companies, it sounds like. Were you inviting them in, or was their head of acquisitions calling you up?

Nick Holzherr: The latter. They were ringing in us. And this was kind of what’s crazy about it because initially I was even saying no to them, not to the acquisition teams, but to the initial integrations. I was like, why do you want to integrate to an appliance? Are we going to get any users from this? I was in the user’s head and thinking I’m not going to make any transactions. How many fridges have you got live? How many users are going to click on it? Am I going to make enough money on this to make it worthwhile while visiting your office? Because often they’re these large enterprises, their request is, can you visit our office to pitch this certain person? And I was apprehensive. I was like, is it wasting my time?

Michael Wolf: You’re busy. You have 30 employees.

Nick Holzherr: We’re busy. And the funny thing is, of course, those conversations ended up with the M&A team suddenly getting interested. Because they’re looking at it going, ‘hang on, how many people in the market are using it? Our competitors are using it. They’re thinking, ;who’s going to end up owning this?’ They probably knew that M&A stuff was happening because the people in the industry know each other quite well. So they probably all started worrying about what happens if the other person wins it? And that’s a great place to be as a startup. It was literally the perfect time. I could probably have gotten a better price for it if I’d held on another few years. It’s impossible to price it. It’s impossible to get the right time, and it was certainly a good time and I’m happy with what worked out.

Michael Wolf: I think it was a good time, and Samsung is an interesting company. Did you have to fly out to Seoul to pitch?

Nick Holzherr: No, I had phone out to Seoul multiple times after we had a partnership with them, because we started powering loads of stuff for them, right? It became a really good partnership where we were powering way more than initially was requested. We were building, even building some new features based on their budgets and based on their requests and their needs. It was being used across lots of appliances. And I had a vision to being used by lots of other divisions as well, which is what ultimately ended up happening, of course. But that we couldn’t predict that at the time. But then I did fly a bunch to San Francisco because the acquisition team was called Samsung Next. It was an innovation arm of Samsung. And basically HQ, because it’s quite hard for the Korean team to buy stuff because of how something is structured, they asked the innovation arm, hey, can you guys take a look at this? And they did, and they did the acquisitions. So actually, our bosses, if you like, or our acquirers was the San Francisco entity of Samsung.

Michael Wolf: And so that deal comes through, you accept it. I think I remember being in Chicago at the Housewares show. I think when I interviewed you about that deal, I think is right. So there must have been around the March timeframe, it was at Housewares, it was 2018, 2019, one of those years. And it’s been an interesting ride.

Nick Holzherr: Yep.

Michael Wolf: A lot’s probably happened. So maybe talk about you get acquired by Samsung. What’s that like initially kind of absorbing you into this giant Borg, which is it’s a massive company, even though it’s like the next company like the San Francisco companies, but it’s still Samsung.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, it is. Actually, what I would say is, what I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by is how much autonomy they’ve given us and how much they’ve let us keep parts of the culture that matter. We were always a distributed team and they’ve let us keep that. And that was a massive advantage during COVID when it was so difficult if you were not a distributed team, but it also allowed us to kind of operate, I think, quite effectively. And keep some of the culture we have, like we go on annual offsites where we fly everyone to one place in the world. Like that’s not a normal thing in an enterprise to explain to your HQ that, hey, we’re going to fly the whole team to Greece or something. And they support that. So that’s been awesome.

Michael Wolf: You go to Greece for your offsights? What the heck?

Nick Holzherr: Well, we have to fly somewhere and actually Greece ends up being quite, we actually haven’t actually, Greece is our next one. We actually haven’t been to Greece yet, but like the previous one, Cyprus, we did actually do one in Korea. That was the most expensive one we did. We did Lisbon, Madrid, Budapest. And these places are actually, if you look at them on spreadsheet, the cheapest places to fly everyone, but it is also nice. It’s also fun to actually spend a week together and meet people in person, especially if you’re working in a distributed environment. So we spend a lot of time building a distributed culture.

Michael Wolf: Nice!

Nick Holzherr: and making sure that we, people felt valued and motivated and knew what they’re doing. And Samsung let us keep that. So I’m really grateful and respect Samsung for that. What was crazy was some of the enterprise ways of managing a business, right? That definitely added a layer of complexity and that’s inevitable with any enterprise. And then I think the other thing that was crazy was scaling. So they wanted us to scale our team from 30 people to 120, and they asked me to do it.

in ASAP, I did it in nine months. So going from 30 to 120 in nine months is an experience that I’m not, maybe I’ll do it again, but it was intense. The amount of interviews you have to do, the amount of like how to integrate that at the same time as integrating your company to a large enterprise like Samsung. So all of that in one go was probably the most intensive six months of work that I’ve ever done. Massive learning curve again, hard work, but I learned a bunch and I’m grateful for the experience.

Michael Wolf: Were you in on almost every one of those interviews and decisions? You were pretty hands-on, it sounds like. That is crazy. That’s crazy. Okay, so you grow to 120, that’s impressive. And I think the company over time, I saw more and more getting integrated. And I think the culmination of that was this past CES, when I think it essentially transformed from Whisk to Samsung food. So Samsung food was a big announcement for Samsung at CES 2024 in January.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: But the heart of that, the beating heart of that was really the Whisk acquisition, right? It’s almost a rebranding of Whisk.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, that’s right. And there are two sides to that, whether it was a good idea or a bad idea. So I built the Whisk brand, right? I own a bunch of Whisk. I’m drinking out of a Whisk flask right now. So like, hey, kill Whisk as a brand. And some users felt that too. But ultimately, there is a thing with any enterprise probably. If you’re trying to build an app that comes across as not from here, you’re going to struggle getting integration into the different hardware units and you’re going to struggle integrating into the Samsung ecosystem. And ultimately, if you’re building a consumer experience, you have to leverage the distribution of a platform like Samsung. Samsung has one of the most devices in the world of any company. I think it probably has the most devices of any company if you add all the different units, because it’s so broad in what it does in TVs and mobiles and kitchen appliances, watches and now rings, everything. So we had to use that distribution. And the most effective way of doing that was to call ourselves Samsung Foods. And actually that has worked, in terms of the integrations we have planned and the ones we’ve achieved, but ones we’ve now have on the table that are going to happen over the next six, 12 months. I think it’s part of what I’m actually most excited about in where we’re going. It’s especially with the health, because food and health are so closely coupled with obesity and diabetes and other things. Yet, no one has really solved that. Actually people have worked on it, but no one’s really solved it. And I think Samsung has got an important part to play because they have health and food appliances. And I think if we do that, that’s actually a really important thing in the world that we’re doing. Something I feel proud of and passionate about. And that I find awesome. So that is, Samsung food as a brand, I know people are split on the opinion. I think it’s a good name and there’s lots of advantages of the name. If you’re looking at 10 food apps or 20 food apps in your…

Michael Wolf: Yeah, you’re going to see Samsung food. Yeah.

Nick Holzherr: you’ll notice it and you’ll probably try it. Your propensity to try out the app is higher. But of course, Samsung hasn’t got a huge plethora of successful apps. So that’s part of also what we’re helping Samsung with.

Michael Wolf: I always have an 8:30 call, so I’m going to tell them to be a couple minutes late.

Michael Wolf: and late. I’m like, I wanted to go for an hour and then all of a sudden.

Nick Holzherr: We can do part two later, a different day if you want.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, I’ll edit that part out. So, I think that when I think of Samsung food or Samsung with your appliances, you have the wearables, you have what you built in Whisk. There’s a lot of different parts of the puzzle there. And I think you’re almost on a collision course with some of the other folks who are just coming at it from the precision nutrition side. Like I look at January AI, which is a pretty cool app. They do like take a photo of food and you can predict blood sugar. It seems like makes sense that ultimately that type of function would be built into what Samsung has because you guys have so many other parts of the puzzle. So I see you guys have a great foundation. A lot of it’s built on the appliance and the wearables and then that and the app side.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, I think that’s what’s exciting about the sensors, right? If you’ve got access to sensors and distribution through the hardware and the brand, that gives you some good starting Lego bricks. It’s not the whole solution. It’s such a big problem in the world. A big proportion of the world is going to suffer from the health challenges of not eating healthily. Of course there’s going to be thousands of companies. I hope a lot of them are successful alongside us.

Michael Wolf: I mean, I think a lot of people are just thinking, hey, now we can just take a pill and I will no longer be at risk for type two diabetes. I’ll be always 50 pounds. But I think that’s not realistic. You can’t have half the world’s population at risk for type two taking medication or a shot. I think what you guys are building could be really interesting. It’ll be a few years though, a lot of these different things need to come together. That sounds like what that’s driving you. What else is driving you as you look forward towards five years down the line, 10 years down the line in this space? What is really exciting for you?

Nick Holzherr: I think the advances in AI are exciting for everyone in the space, including us. We tried to do stuff like vision AI, use your camera to detect items, food, two, three years ago and failed. It wasn’t good enough. That was not despite having good engineers on it, it was hard to do. Yet now you come along and use an open source library by open AI and boom, it works. Sure, it needs tuning, it needs some work, it doesn’t maybe it takes a little bit of work to get it to production level, but it’s so easy. Stuff that we spent 10 years building, you can now use the OpenAI API for it and get a good way there. Which is so scary for people who’ve invested a whole bunch of time and effort into building really, really advanced technology that so much of it’s now easier than ever to do, which means it’s open to anybody. The scary part is, how do you win if everyone can do it? The fun thing from a consumer side is it’s going to be possible to build some of the stuff that we all hoped would be there five years ago. Now it will finally get to a point where it’ll be better and usable and actually add starting value. The smart kitchen, there’s always the question is how far off a truly smart kitchen that actually adds value to the user are we. When will it stop being a gimmick and when will it start being smart and useful? We’re getting closer and closer to that being true. Of course it’s true in some ways already, some devices are fantastic in adding value. But on a macro level where I can talk to my mom and say, do you want a smart kitchen? And she goes, yes, I do because it adds loads of value.

Michael Wolf: It’s not just turning things on and off with an app and making things more difficult by adding more processes in the way and kind of app friction, it’s actually making it more useful. So going from those early days where you’re buying GPUs and trying to figure out to build AI and going on TV and then ultimately to where you are today, it’s been quite a ride. It’s been fun talking to you, Nick, about hearing and hearing about all this. Thanks for spending some time with us.

Nick Holzherr: Thank you, I look forward to seeing you in Seattle.

Michael Wolf: You were seeing Seattle at Smart Kitchen Summit. Everyone who wants to see Nick in person, famous TV star, Apprentice star. I’m just embarrassing him. You can see him in Seattle. All right, Nick. Thank you, man. Don’t hang up yet. Don’t hang up yet.

Nick Holzherr: Thank you, thanks Mike, bye bye.

SKS 2024 Preview: Clayton Wood Talks The Current State of Food Robotics

We’re just one month away from the Smart Kitchen Summit, so we’re going to be checking and hearing from some of our speakers.

First up is Clayton Wood, a long-time entrepreneur who has been navigating the food robotics market for the last five years, first as the CEO of Picnic (which debuted its robot at SKS 2019), talking about the challenges and opportunities he sees in this market. You can watch the full interview by clicking play below or read some of the highlights in the transcript below.

The Spoon Talks to Food Robotics Entrepreneur Clayton Wood.

Michael Wolf: I imagine that a lot of startups in the food robotics space are probably wanting to get your advice because you ran one of the early pretty successful food robotics companies with Picnic. Talk about some of the conversations you’re having and maybe some of the, are there early stage entrepreneurs in the space that are coming to you say, hey, we have an idea.

Clayton Wood: Absolutely. I started getting inbound interest in being an advisor as soon as I left Picnic, a little over a year ago. I’ve talked to a large number of companies in the space. Many of them are at the same spot, which, given market conditions, isn’t too surprising, which is they’ve got an idea. They’ve probably got a product or a prototype, having trouble raising their first round, having trouble finding product market fit. And just trying to make that leap into kind of being a more mature company. It’s a tough spot under any circumstances, but in market conditions, the last few years have made it especially difficult.

Michael Wolf: One of the things about food robotics is it’s a long path to getting into market. It’s a lot of capital. And with the venture capital winter that is seemingly lasting forever, it seems like a tough time for food robotics companies.

Clayton Wood: It very much is. I know at Picnic, we started in what I finally refer to as the free money era, where you raised one round just to get to the next round, and raising money wasn’t really that much of a question. Now it’s a huge problem. The challenge that food robotics companies have specifically is that as the market tightened up, it became very conservative, and conservative investors don’t like hardware in general.

Food tech is seen as a challenging category of hardware. So if you’re looking at, you know, show me when you’re cashflow positive, show me when you’re profitable. It’s very, very difficult as a food hardware company to show that because it’s such a new field. Product market fit is elusive and being able to say when that those financial metrics will turn right side up is really challenging. It’s just a really tough time for all startups, but I think food robotics, food hardware is especially a challenging category, and has been for the last two or three years.

Michael Wolf: One of the things about Picnic was I felt like it was a next-generation pizza food robotics company and that it was purpose-built around building pizzas. It wasn’t one of these where someone got a general-purpose robotic arm and would just move things around within a confined space. And you’re still seeing those sometimes. What are some of the if you’re giving advice to a food robotics company in terms of building out a system and thinking it through what ultimately may succeed in the market, what would you tell them?

Clayton Wood: Yes.I think it’s one of those signs, you’re absolutely right about the arms and the big footprints. It’s one of those signs of a new, immature market. People haven’t seen food robotics, they don’t know what to think about it. We had people at trade shows looking at the Picnic robot and they’re in the pizza business, and they’re watching it make a pizza and they’re going, ‘does it make the pizza?’ It’s really hard to just wrap their head around it.

I think the challenge, it’s common to a lot of technology companies, but especially true in food robotics, you’ve got to start with the customer. What’s the customer’s pain point, and what can they actually use? And unfortunately, not uncommonly, people start with ‘what can my product do?’ and ‘how can I make it do it in a real fancy, impressive way and how fast can it do it or that sort of thing?’

Those numbers are nice and you get people excited, but it’s not really what the customer needs. And ultimately, the real challenge in food robotics is integration. How will your device get integrated into a commercial kitchen so that the kitchen can continue to operate, do what it needs to do, and do it without disrupting the process? And until there are new concepts that are really built around automation and those are starting to emerge. I used to say no one who has a kitchen has a pizza robot sized hole in their kitchen that they’re just waiting to plug it in.

Michael Wolf: You know, there are a couple of founders out there on the smaller side that I think are innovating. They’re not a big chain. So you see like Andrew Simmons, which I think you talk a lot with. You see Lee Kindell up here in Seattle with Moto. And I imagine there are others that are showing how you can be a smaller operator and almost build your new restaurant concept around utilizing kind of off-the-shelf robotics. It’s not like a Zume, where they raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Softbank and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to build our own robot, do this custom thing.’ These smaller operators are taking a system like Picnic’s and saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to build a new concept that is essentially centered around automation and kind of move forward.’ I feel like they’re pioneering in a sense. Do you think that’s going to be what we’re going to see in the future, more people pioneering concepts that are leveraging automation because they think that can help them scale better?

Clayton Wood: I love to see that. I think Andrew and Lee are brilliant, and I’d say, you know, they’re unfortunately they’re at the far end of the open-minded innovator scale. They’re both kind of willing to move things around and try things, and they’re not just open to innovation, but they embrace it and they seek it out. I don’t think that’s really the persona that I’d use to describe most people in the restaurant business.

If you have that kind of open -minded approach, there’s all kinds of things you could do and you can adapt. If you don’t want to adapt, you say, this is the way I do things. Can you help me? That’s where you run into an integration challenge. But I think what I love about what Lee is doing at Moto and what Andrew is doing with Mama Ramona’s Pizza Roboto is they’re showing how it can work. They’re sharing real world experiences.

Andrew is doing his whole build -in public diary on LinkedIn, which I think is brilliant and super useful because he’s sharing the wins and the losses. But it shows that it can work, you’ve just got to adapt. And I think that’s a lot of the product market fit in these early days is about adapting on both sides. The customer has to be willing to adapt a little bit and the product companies have to go in realizing that regardless of what they may think, they haven’t built a perfect machine and they need to be willing to tweak and change and reconfigure to make the best fit.

Michael Wolf: Okay, you’ve been in this business for half a decade now, you’re advising companies. What are you excited about in terms of food robotics? And are there spaces you think you’d like to see more entrepreneurs or inventors go in terms of building automation around food?

Clayton Wood: I’ve seen some in the home space as well as the restaurant space who are starting out with products that already solve some of the challenges that we’ve seen really block some of the earlier companies. Building devices that are drop-in replacements for a make line, for instance. Acknowledging the fact that if you have the way a restaurant operates, workers are seldom just dedicated to a station standing there all day. The automation needs to work even if the person is only giving intermittent attention. You need to see things like a holding station where if you’re making 10 salads a minute, well, if there’s nobody there to catch the 10 salads, they need to be suitably caught and retained and held there.

And it needs to work around the way the workflow goes in the kitchen, which is multitasking, short staff, and it needs to solve real problems. And the nice thing is you can solve different problems and make it work. I’ve heard people say that, well, the automation didn’t really save me any labor because I only had one person working there anyway. I still need one person working the automation, but the consistency means the cook goes well. The pizzas cook really well because they’re all consistent.

Food waste is another area where food waste is a huge problem, especially in the pizza category, but I think it’s also a problem in other categories as well. If you can eliminate food waste, just food waste alone can pay for the system. So I think if you’re an automation company or product developer, thinking about all the different ways you can add value, but it can only do that if it works with that particular operator.

So you’re going to find the customer who is doing something the way that your machine is designed to do it. If you can make 200 dishes an hour, that’s brilliant and that sounds really impressive, but how many restaurants are making 200 of the same thing every hour? Not that many. And so you may not really have a big market if that’s your claim to fame and that’s really the reason you want somebody to buy it and that’s how your economics work. If people are making 20 an hour, is it still economical? Does it still pay for itself?

Michael Wolf: You mentioned home and you’re seeing some things that are exciting you. And you don’t have to necessarily name names, but home has been really tough to crack for food robotics. And you’re seeing some interesting ones that broke over some of the barriers that were challenging in the past. What are you seeing there that’s exciting?

Clayton Wood: Home is tricky because it’s gotta be, it’s gotta be small. It’s gotta be versatile. Um, it can’t lock you into, you can only do, you can only use it if you buy our packet of pre -packaged food. Um, so I’ve seen one or two players in there who are, who are solving that, who are offering pre -packaged food or recipes, but you can also customize and add your own ingredients, but making a pretty versatile device. So I think that’s a category that has promise, but it’s especially tricky because even if you’ve got something that works brilliantly, you’ve got the whole, it’s a consumer market, and how do you break into consumer markets? You know, got to build a brand and get everybody’s attention. And that’s just, that’s a world that I’m less familiar with. And it’s a pretty daunting challenge to break into that consumer market.

Michael Wolf: All right, well, we’ll be talking about both the restaurant, robotic space, as well as the consumer space at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Lee Kindell will be there. Clayton, you’re going to be there as well, June 4th and 5th in Seattle. And I’m excited to see you there, man.

Clayton Wood: Looking forward to it.

You can hear Clayton at Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4-5th in Seattle. Get your ticket today!

Smart Kitchen Summit Returns to Seattle in 2024

The Smart Kitchen Summit, the pioneering executive summit focused on the digital transformation of the consumer meal journey, is excited to announce its return in 2024. In 2024, SKS will return to its birthplace, Seattle, Washington, scheduled for June 4-5th.

“I’m thrilled that SKS is making its return to Seattle next year, where our journey began,” said Michael Wolf, SKS founder and Spoon publisher. “While we had over ten thousand of the SKS community join us for virtual events during the pandemic, there’s nothing like seeing, touching, and tasting innovation. I look forward to connecting with those helping rethink how we do things in the world of food and cooking in person.”

Themes For 2024

SKS 2024 will focus on some of the most important themes around the innovation-driven transformation of how we shop, cook, consume, and convene around food. Some of the key themes and questions that will be explored during the two full days at SKS include:

AI’s Impact on Food: Exploring how AI is transforming every part of the food value chain, including how consumers find, purchase, and prepare food. How can food companies, appliance brands, retailers, and more harness the power of this incredible technology?

Food Waste and Sustainability: How can innovation-powered changes can we make to reduce food waste along the consumer meal journey?

Food and Nutrition Personalization: The technology and tools exist to create personalized food and nutrition plans that lead to better health outcomes. How can the food industry adapt in a world in which GLP-1-based drugs are creating a murky outlook for traditional food brands?

Automation & Cooking: Automation is becoming critical in the commercial kitchen. How will it fit in the consumer kitchen and our food lives?

On-Demand, Decentralized Food Manufacturing: The packaged-goods food ecosystem is wasteful. Can new forms of on-demand, decentralized food production technologies like 3D printing reduce the packaging and waste of traditional CPG models, and how will these systems scale in commercial and consumer settings?

Food Discovery & Meal Planning: We’re more likely nowadays to find a new recipe on TikTok than in a cookbook. As food retailers & CPGs lock into these new discovery channels to enable purchase journeys, will the consumer of the future join them?

Kitchen Electrification: Induction cooking systems are both more efficient and better for the environment, but consumers are hesitant to adopt them. When will the electrification of the consumer kitchen happen, if ever?

Startup Showcase

In addition to two full days of TED-style presentations, panels, workshops, and networking, SKS is bringing back our pioneering Startup Showcase. Launched in 2015, the SKS Startup Showcase has been instrumental in connecting startups with investors, corporate partners, and even opportunities like appearing on Shark Tank. Startups who are building the next great technology that they believe will change how we shop, cook, store, or consume food in the home are encouraged to apply today.

Location Details

SKS 2024 will be held at the beautiful Block41 event center in the heart of Seattle. Block41 has two full floors of event and exhibition space, two full kitchens, and an outdoor space for our celebration and happy hour on June 4th.

Join Us

Mark your calendars and save the date for June 4-5th in Seattle. If you are interested in speaking at SKS, submit a speaker application today. If you’d like to bring your company’s product to Seattle and share it with the SKS and Spoon community, please fill out our sponsor form. And if you’d like to purchase a ticket, you can get our Super Early Bird pricing between now and February 29th, 2024.

We look forward to welcoming you in 2024!

Silicon Valley is Betting Big on Home Electrification. Will It Pay Off In The Kitchen?

This week, news of a new home electrification startup hit the wires.

Founded by former Google Ventures partner Rick Klau, Onsemble builds technology to convert electric water heaters into what the energy industry calls a virtual power plant (VPP). VPPs act as aggregators and coordinate between independent distributed energy resources (DERs), such as rooftop solar and electric vehicles, with the electric grid. While Onsemble won’t enable water heaters to generate energy like a solar panel on your roof, the company believes that connecting and coordinating your water heater with the grid will translate to significant savings.

It’s an interesting concept, one that is symbolic of a growing interest within Silicon Valley and the broader technology community around home electrification. This interest has been rising for years, especially in markets like California, where state and local governments have pushed regulations around the construction of residential and commercial buildings mandating electrification. But it goes beyond that, and much of the recent flurry of activity has been spurred by a flood of new money entering the market through rebates that are part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Other startups that have ridden the home electrification wave over the past couple of years include Zero Homes, which partners with local municipalities to prove a decarbonization pathway roadmap for home electric users to help guide them towards home electrification. Another is QuitCarbon, which provides Bay Area customers with electrification roadmaps that outline the types of electric appliances for their home’s specific electricity infrastructure and help consumers navigate the home rebate process. Similarly, Elephant Energy partners with contractors to help install indication ranges, car EV charging stations, and heat pumps.

And then there’s Impulse Labs, a startup creating induction cooktops that incorporate a battery to help consumers transition to electric kitchens. By including a battery will enable those homes that aren’t wired for an induction cooktop – electric stoves can pull 40 amps at 240 volts after all – enables the homeowner to use one without having to rewire their homes or install a new electric panel. Impulse’s energy-storing cooktops will also serve as another energy storage node – or DER – on the electric grid’s network that can contribute to the collective VPP.

Of all the ideas, Impulse’s strikes me as the most innovative; it provides a solution that is not only about installation planning or falling in line with local building codes, but is an altogether new approach that helps both homeowners and the utility provider by putting a new kind of system (in the package of a conventional appliance) into the network.

There’s no doubt we’ll need more of these approaches as US homeowners, in particular, struggle to sever their strong addiction to gas heating and cooking. The installed base of gas stoves in the U.S. is massive, and there are significant financial and emotional attachments to cooking with fire. By embracing truly new alternatives that offer real benefits (financial and lifestyle), the kitchen electrification movement might actually stand a fighting chance

In the World of Food Tech, The Big Guys Innovate Just Like Everyone Else. Sometimes

Two Stanford grads starting a Fortune 500 computer company in 1939 in their garages is a more than a twice-told tale. Same with a group of Harvard students coming up with a foundation to build Microsoft or Facebook. Less sexy, but equally important, are the innovations that happen at those same giant powerhouse organizations.

During the recent SKS Invent virtual conference, a pair of leaders from two such giants, Electrolux and BSH, spoke about the challenges and rewards that come with sparking innovation at a large, global brand. This post is a look back at my conversation and key insights gleaned from Tove Chevalley, Head of Electrolux Innovation Hub, and Lars Roessler, Head of Corporate Venturing for BSH Startup Kitchen.

What’s it like when a large, established organization pursues innovation? How does it happen? How does it start? Does it just kind of come to somebody in the shower?

Lars: No matter what type of innovation you’re talking about, it’s got to be consumer-centric, has to be customer-driven, customer focused. Suppose you innovate in a space where the consumer is not at the center of your thinking. You can do many things. But it won’t be successful.

Again, it starts with the consumer; we think about how we can improve quality of life, which is our old mantra, but how can we improve the consumer journey across the customer lifecycle? Of course, we are a big corporation and have resources and smart people. But in the end, you need to have the garage mentality is somehow getting inspiration from the outside world.

Tove: I don’t think it’s that different than what it is in the startup community. You know you need a good idea; you need an entrepreneurial spirit; you need to be a bit gutsy and be able to drive that forward.

Ensure you have availability for funding if you have ideas. We know which areas that we are interested in, in driving innovation. So we get to focus on everything that we do, which I think is critical for us when we crack that, that made a huge difference in our innovation funnel

What role does market research play?

Lars: Having market data is super important, but I think we all know typically, market research is kind of like backward-looking. Right? So, we know what happened in the past and what sales have been and what users might be thinking about. But you got to be more forward-looking as well. You could call it foresight management. Also, you can be more experimental, thinking about new needs.

Tove:  We also have a foresight team that helps us look at the biggest opportunity spaces in the future. Because I think that is key. What Lars is mentioning is, as a startup community, you need to look at the market right now as well. But it would help if you looked at other signals that are happening on and going on, you know, economically, politically, consumer, what’s happening around the world. And that gives us signals of where the future growth areas are.

Let’s talk about money. How are your projects and innovation financed? Or do you get kind of a budget? Is it a free flow of cash? Does it come with strings attached? And how do you set up goals and milestones?

Tove: We struggled with this setup because we started funding projects. That had a higher uncertainty. We realized quite quickly, of course, that that kills off ideas very quickly. What we did is we started looking at what the startup world looks like and venture capital. And how can we structure our funding, not only the funding we do with startups, but the funding that we do with their projects, in the same way, and looking at how you move through the funnel, you have different funding rounds. I think it takes a lot of training for leadership and how you look at projects, but also training for people internally and being comfortable in working that way. But that has given us risk mitigation and how we do risk in the company is a lot better.

Lars: When it comes to funding new innovation projects and startup collaborations, we run a very decentralized approach, meaning that money needs to come from business. So, we have had a learning curve on our end and many discussions. For projects, it depends, of course. How far out are you looking with the innovation you want to develop and a new business model you want to develop? But typically, if you don’t have a landing spot, how can you convince anyone within the company to fund, like the first couple of steps of an innovation project? How would you ever be able to convince them to do it by you when you got to be writing the really big checks?

What’s it like to pull the plug on a project?

Lars: No one likes to do it. When people work together, they form some bond. Right? But at some point in time, and that’s, I guess, also the role of units like ours, to be that mediator, buffer in between the startup, the external partner, and the internal innovation team. So I mean, in the end, it’s like a failed relationship, where hopefully, all come to the same conclusion. But in the end, it’s to the benefit of all parties to move

Tove: It’s about killing your darlings, and I think we all have the darlings we work with. I think for us, it’s a lot of building that culture internally and ensuring that we have, you know, mental security coming into these projects because you are working with a lot of uncertainty. And we want people to be comfortable being uncertain. And one of the most important things when you work with uncertainty, is to feel trust in each other and that you trust both the stakeholders that you work towards, but also the team that you work with, and trust that we all have the same goal in this and that we do this together. And I think for us, it’s a muscle that you need to train over and over again to ensure that you have this trust among yourselves, but also trust with your managers. So, we worked a lot on the kind of governance of projects and working with leadership to ensure that they provide that trust to the people who work with us. Also, looking into our, you know, Swedish heritage, we come from a culture where we do work as a team, and we don’t look and celebrate an individual accomplishment; we celebrate team efforts.

You can watch the full season below.