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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Kitchen Summit

BSH Home Appliances Invests in Chefling to Bolster the AI-Powered Pantry

BSH Home Appliances (or BSH Hausgeräte GmbH) announced today that it has made a strategic investment in Chefling, maker of an AI-powered assistant for the kitchen that helps a user manage food inventory, create shopping lists and zap digital recipes to their connected appliances. The Munich-based appliance giant will acquire one third of the shares of the Silicon Valley startup as part of the deal, the terms of which were not disclosed. This deal comes a year after Chefling raised $1 million as part of a pre-series A funding round and less than two years after the startup pitched as part of the SKS Startup Showcase.

The deal was driven by BSH’s Digital Business Unit, the group responsible for the Home Connect platform as well as BSH’s Future Home accelerator initiative. BSH sees Home Connect, their Wi-Fi based connectivity platform for their Siemens, Bosch and Gaggenau home appliance brands, as a foundation to offer digital services. The company acquired a controlling interest in Kitchen Stories in 2017 to add guided cooking capabilities to their services toolkit, and with this deal the two companies will look to build out a personalized pantry management digital services layer for HomeConnect.

“With our Hardware+ strategy, we want to offer meaningful support to our consumers in the everyday usage of their appliances,” said Mario Pieper, BSH’s Chief Digital Officer. “Chefling offers digital services that link the entire cooking journey, from inspiration to inventory management, shopping, and cooking. With Chefling’s Artificial Intelligence technology platform, both companies are in a strong position to raise the bar on personalized services and assistance in the kitchen.”

This deal didn’t happen overnight according to Chefling cofounder Amar Krishna. The two companies first announced a partnership during SKS 2018 last October, and over time realized it made sense to explore a deeper relationship. Under the deal, Amar explained that Chefling will look to leverage BSH’s reach to expand connections with grocery and CPG brands, while also building on the startup’s UltraConnect platform which they debuted at CES.

So what does UltraConnect do? According to Krishna, it can take any digital recipe and convert it it into a machine readable format to be used by a connected appliance.  It also enables ‘pantry management’ by taking ingredients on hand – not just the what of what you have, but the weight as well – to automatically generate a “smart recipe”.

The machine learning capabilities at the core of UltraConnect have taken time to build and have gotten stronger as Chefling’s user base has grown into the hundreds of thousands, said Amar. As he told Chris last January, reaching over 600 thousand users meant “giving Chefling the hundreds of thousands of data points (recipes searched for or browsed, recipes chosen, frequency of cooking, etc.) required to do more deep learning and, as Krishna put it “unleash the algorithms.””  

Of course, as with any deal like this, I have to wonder what it means for a startup’s other relationships.  Chefling announced an UltraConnect partnership with GE at CES this January, and so it remains to be seen if GE will remain open to using Chefling’s technology as the startup enters a strategic relationship with BSH. GE also works with Innit and SideChef, and could expand those relationships further. But, since Chefling-BSH wasn’t a full acquisition, it may be the Louiseville-based appliance brand could be fine with the new arrangement.

Ztove Starts Shipping Smart Cooking System In Europe

Back in 2016, I received a short message from an inventor in Denmark asking if he could make me pancakes.

While it’s not every day someone reaches out and asks to make pancakes, it wasn’t all that surprising given the inventor, Peter Favrholdt, had created a prototype for a smart cooking system and I was one of the few people writing about the technology at the time.

Ztove founder and me in 2016

As it turned out, Favrholdt had learned we were holding a meetup in San Francisco and decided to travel from Denmark to attend the event.  While I didn’t get to taste Favrholdt’s pancakes on that trip, I got a chance to hear his story and encouraged him to apply for the Smart Kitchen Summit’s startup showcase.

Long story short: he did, and he won. His system, which features a Bluetooth connected pan, an induction cooktop, and an app to orchestrate the cooking process was picked by a panel of experts and Favrholdt and Ztove were crowned the winner of the 2016 Startup Showcase alongside 3D food printer nufood (in 2016 we had a tie).

Longer story short? A week ago I saw on Linkedin that Ztove had started shipping its smart cooking system to customers.

When I asked Favrholdt for more details, he told me the Ztove was now available in Denmark through the company’s website and would soon be available in physical retail.  He also told me they’d managed to create a product line that included two intelligent pans and a large saucepan, as well as three different cooktops.

“On the smart cooktop side we offer a table top dual burner called “DUO,” which sells as a bundle including a frying pan and a saucepan (USD 1599),” said Favrholdt in an email.

More intriguing is that two of the cooktops are built-ins.

“For home use, most people want built-in smart induction cooktops,” he wrote. “Ztove currently has two models – a “normal” 24 inches (USD 1049) and a “wide” 31 inches model (USD 1599) both with four cooking zones but having different width and arrangement of the burners.”

When I asked Favrholdt about how he was able to fund development of the product, he pointed to winning the Startup Showcase at SKS.

“Bringing home the SKS trophy also had a significance,” he said. “Ztove won a couple of grants in Denmark, and in 2017 we were enrolled in the Odense Robotics Startup Hub – an accelerator program for early startups in the field of robotics. In 2018 we got a small investment allowing us to increase the pace and building the company bringing the Ztove products to market.”

With their funding, they were able to find manufacturers for the components of the Ztove systems and start a small factory in Denmark where the final units are assembled by hand.

Favrholdt and the Hestan Cue team at SKS 2016

By finally shipping, Ztove joins Hestan as one of the few companies delivering smart cooking systems that focus on surface cooking, including intelligent cookware, cooktops, and an app. But that’s not the only connection between these two companies; As it turns out, Favrholdt connected with the Hestan team back on that 2016 trip to San Francisco.

“I brought Ztove’s first prototype and was thrilled to get to meet the Hestan Cue team,” said Favrholdt. “It was terrific talking to someone as passionate about smart cooking as myself.”

Video: Bellwether Cuts Out the Coffee Roasting Middleman

“A lot of people don’t realize just how big coffee is,” said Nathan Gilliland, CEO of Bellwether Coffee at the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit. Seriously, though: according to him, coffee is the most consumed beverage in the U.S., with people drinking more cups of joe than bottles of water, wine, and beer combined.

Not only are people drinking a lot of coffee, they’re also drinking better coffee. Consumers — especially millennials — are looking for fresher, higher-quality beans that are roasted locally. And they’re willing to pay for it.

But getting that freshly-roasted product into the hands of consumers isn’t easily done. The majority of coffee today is roasted at a highly centralized place and then shipped all over the world. This “hub and spoke roasting model,” as Gilliland calls it, is expensive and not condusive to freshness.

Enter Bellwether. The company makes internet-connected coffee roasters that can be installed in cafes, grocery stores, or small local coffee shops, and also has a marketplace for green (unroasted) coffee beans. By roasting in-store, Gilliland explains that the shop can provide more sustainable, fresher coffee and save money by cutting out the roasting middleman. “It’s like a roaster meets an iPhone,” he said.

Watch the video below to get the lowdown on the future of sustainable coffee consumption — and how data and IoT can help us get there.

From Soil To Sip: Disruptions In The Coffee Value Chain

For more videos of panels, fireside chats, and startup pitches from the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit head to our YouTube channel!

The Future of Cannabis Edibles is Wellness, Not Recreation (Podcast)

“The [cannabis edibles] consumer is probably not who you think it is,” said Linda Gilbert, formerly Managing Editor, Consumer Insights cannabis data company BDS Analytics. “The average age of a cannabis consumer is 42. This is not an 18 year old living in his parent’s basement.”

As marijuana legalization expands, so does its consumer base. More and more users of all ages and backgrounds are looking to experiment with this trendy new ingredient — but they’re not necessarily coming to it in order to “get stoned.” Many turn to cannabis as a natural way to take the edge off of anxiety, manage their pain, or just relax. “They’re doing it for more health and wellness reasons than recreational purposes,” emphasized Gilbert.

But unless they’re a historic marijuana user, they don’t necessarily want to smoke something. Instead they’ll turn to edibles. “[There’s a] cultural shift of acceptance,” said Merril Gilbert, founder of cannabis dosage labeling company TraceTrust. And more and more companies — even Big Food companies — are starting to notice.

Scott Riefler, VP of Science for cannabinoid company Tarukino, pointed out that cannabis is rapidly becoming a food ingredient in its own right. “It’s something that can be added to the culinary experience,” he said. In fact, cannabis can be a functional ingredient in everything from wine to chocolates. And as it becomes more widely legalized, its applications (and user base) will spread.

In this conversation from Smart Kitchen Summit 2018, I talk with these three panelists about the burgeoning cannabis edibles market — and where we can expect it to grow from here.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below, download here or find it on Apple Podcasts.

Video: For Investors, the Food Space is “The Next Big Thing”

“As investors, we always look for the next big thing… and the food industry is the next big thing to get involved in.”

That’s how Brian Frank, founder of FTW Ventures, kicked off the food tech investment panel at the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit. He was joined onstage by Carmen Palafox, partner at Make in L.A.; Tom Mastrobuoni, CFO of Tyson Ventures; and the Spoon’s Ashley Daigneault.

Indeed, it seems like the time is ripe for investment up and down the food supply chain. Like, for example, the shift towards meat alternatives; a growing consumer demand with which protein giant Tyson Foods is very familiar. But instead of simply staking out their territory, Tyson, which produces 35 million chickens per week, decided to capitalize on this trend and invest in its disruptors: from plant-based Beyond Meat to cell-based Memphis Meats.

“We look at technology from two angles; how applicable is this to our supply chain, or how disruptive is this to our supply chain going forward?” said Mastrobuoni. “We all diversify.”

Palafox agreed that timing is a key aspect of investment. “A lot has to do with cultural shifts and the way that people are thinking about food safety,” she added. For example, her firm, which focuses on hardware, recently invested in Pathspot, a device which scans restaurant employees’ hands to test for pathogens. “They’re trying to change culture from within food chains.”

Of course, not all food innovations work seamlessly (cough, meal kits). During the panel, Frank admitted that he had accidentally stolen a shopping bag from the Amazon Go store. “Amazon spends millions and millions of dollars to develop a system to track you in their store, yet they don’t track the bags,” he said. “And this is where I think that technology as a service for these things is still evolving.”

There are a lot of other really rich observations and smart takeaways in this panel, plus some smart insight into food system investment. Check out the video below to hear what this diverse group of investors is most excited (and worried) about in the food tech space, and how they think we’ll all be sourcing, cooking, and eating food in the future.

Defining Strategies For Investing In Food Tech

For more videos of panels, fireside chats, and startup pitches from the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit head to our YouTube channel!

Video: Soggy Food Sucks Uses Thermodynamics to Keep your Fries Crisp During Delivery

“When we talk about the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS), it’s not just about being smart or connected,” said Michael Wolf before he announced the winner of the SKS 2018 Startup Showcase. “It’s about finding an interesting product that hasn’t been there before that solves for a real consumer need. And this winner really showed me that.”

Indeed, Soggy Food Sucks, who took home the title of Overall Winner at the Startup Showcase, makes a product that seems almost deceptively simple. Their frozen patch sticks to the inside of a food containers and wicks condensation to keep takeaway eats crispy, crunchy, and decidedly non-soggy. No artificial intelligence, virtual reality, or robots in sight.

Despite its lack of bells and whistles, Soggy Food Sucks captured the judges’ attention because it solves a real, relatable problem in the food delivery space: how to keep food crisp during its journey from the restaurant to your home.

“We’ve all experienced the disappointment of food delivery, when our food arrives after being ravaged — ravaged I say — by the horror of condensation,” preached Birgen onstage. So he decided to use his engineering know-how (he used to be an actual rocket scientist) and solve the problem with some basic chemistry.

Watch the full video to see Birgen’s charismatic pitch for a product that we think has the power to massively improve the food delivery business. See ya never, soggy fries.

SKS 2018 Startup Showcase: Soggy Food Sucks

For more videos of panels, fireside chats, and startup pitches from the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit head to our YouTube channel!

Video: How Epic Fails Helped Markov Make a Robot that Cooks

“Innovation” is a word that’s thrown around an awful lot in the technology world, and food tech is no exception. But creating actual innovation — that is, solving a problem in a new way — is really, really hard. And it usually requires a lot of failure.

Which is why Arvind de Menezes Pereira, CTO of automated systems company Markov, started off his solo talk at the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit with videos of SpaceX’s test rockets exploding, one after another. “Most of us would see a failure like this which is so expensive and think: there’s no point doing this,” he said. But SpaceX kept chugging along and, eventually, they were able to land a rocket on a target in the middle of the ocean.

Though they weren’t dealing with space rockets, that sort of persistence came in handy when the Markov team began developing the LEVEL: a device that could cook fast like a microwave, precisely like a sous vide, and prepare multiple food items simultaneously. “We didn’t know [it] was possible in the beginning,” said Pereira. “But we decided to do it anyway.”

Cut to many destroyed egg whites later (“cheaper than rockets,” Pereira joked), and the Markov team had their SpaceX moment. Check out his full talk to hear how he identifies and tackles grand challenges in the smart kitchen (don’t worry, there’s a handy food-related acronym in case you forget).

Watch the full video below.

Innovating The Hard Way: How Tech Companies Can Solve Real Problems in Cooking

Look out for more videos of the panels, solo talks, and fireside chats from SKS 2018! We’ll be bringing them to you hot and fresh out the (smart) kitchen over the next few weeks.

Video: Can You Sell Things in the Smart Kitchen Without Being Annoying?

Most of us have heard the adage that the kitchen is the heart of the home. But it’s also a space that’s ripe for commerce, especially with all the new appliances, software, and services rolling out as the kitchen gets smarter.

In this video from the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, Richard Gunther of Digital Media Zone speaks with Iri Zohar of Freshub, Benton Richardson, of Amazon Dash, and Shawn Stover of GE Appliances about the future of in-kitchen commerce models: be that automated grocery replenishment, personalized suggestions, or shoppable recipes.

But how do you sell things to people in their kitchen in a way that, as Gunther put it, “isn’t annoying?”

Watch the full video below to find out.

Kitchen Counter Point of Sale: Analyzing In-Kitchen Commerce Models

Look out for more videos of the panels, solo talks, and fireside chats from SKS 2018! We’ll be bringing them to you hot and fresh out the (smart) kitchen over the next few weeks.

Kitchens Aren’t Going Away, But They Will Adapt To Better Fit A Changing Consumer

When you have a conference focused on the future of food and cooking, people inevitably ask you what the kitchen of the future will look like.

That usually means talking a lot about emerging cooking technologies, new appliances and futuristic kitchen designs — but what if the answer to the question about what happens to the most central room in the home is that, in a world with push-button food delivery, grocery store meal kits and the eventual rise of cooking robots, the kitchen as we know it might cease to exist?

It’s certainly a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past few months, so I figured what better question to ask during the opening session of the Smart Kitchen Summit.

When I put the question to Hestan Smart Cooking‘s Jon Jenkins, he said that when framed in pure economic terms, doing away with the kitchen makes lots of sense.

“It’s hard to make any kind of economic case that it makes sense for you to be doing cooking at home if all you’re cooking for is to get food to fill your stomach up,” said Jenkins.

In other words, if a kitchen’s sole purpose is sustenance, there are lots better ways to spend your money than sinking a whole bunch of it into a space that’s almost always the most expensive room in the house.

That’s why, according to Jenkins, the act of cooking and creating food needs to be about more than just putting fuel in the tank.

“We better hope there’s something more that you get from cooking, that there’s some amount of pride in the thing you created,” said Jenkins. “If that’s the thing we manage to enable with these technologies, then I think all have a really bright future.”

According to Dana Cowin, host of the Speaking Broadly podcast and longtime editor of Food & Wine magazine, it’s this emotional connection to cooking that needs to be the focus for those industries with the most to lose.

Penny the robot brings water to thirsty panelists

“What that means is anyone who is invested in appliances, in cooking, in teaching, in gathering, needs to create even more of a movement of explaining what the value is, and really not actually selling the appliance,” said Cowin. “It’s really what is the emotional transaction that happens here because the physical transaction can be so easily replaced.”

Cowin also felt that the most likely evolution path for the kitchen is that it will morph over time to better fit how people use them.

“One of the things to keep in mind is all kitchens and all people are not created equal,” said Cowin. “Right now we have one kitchen model that people plug into. What we’re gonna see with kitchens of the future is lots more flexibility and a reinvention of what that kitchen model looks like.”

So how might the kitchen adapt to changing consumer behavior?

According to Cowin, kitchens in the future will have smaller appliances, have a bigger focus on recycling packaging from delivery, and may even have managed fridges stocked with food from a service provider.

“I can see a kitchen supplied easily by an outsider like a Farmer’s Fridge, except the home version,” said Cowin.

Ultimately, while both panelists felt that more technology in the kitchen is inevitable, the future of cooking and the kitchen itself will depend on how well the technology serves the consumer beyond simply automating tasks.

“Everything we use in the kitchen aside from our hands is technology,” said Cowin. “It’s investing the intellect in the way food is being made rather than pressing the button.”

You can listen to the full conversation with Dana Cowin and Jon Jenkins on the latest episode of the Smart Kitchen Show podcast by clicking play below or subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

Video: Tyler Florence Advocates for “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” Cooking through Tech

Last year at the Smart Kitchen Summit, chef Tyler Florence made waves when he proclaimed that “the recipe is dead.”

This year he returned to the SKS stage for a fireside chat with Michael Wolf to discuss the evolving role of recipes — and the home cook — in the tech-enabled kitchen.

His new take is that recipes aren’t dead, they’re just like vinyl records or paper maps — nostalgic and practical, but antiquated. Down the road cooking will be all about personalization and “choose-your-own-adventure” food experiences, which will give us, according to Florence, “a higher creativity rate than we’ve ever had.”

Watch the video below to hear this celebrity chef’s vision for the future of cooking.

The Connected Chef

Video: To Succeed in the Smart Kitchen, “You Have to Get Multi-Modal Fast”

Voice is becoming more and more present in consumer electronics. At the same time, appliances are also coming with a whole host of AI-powered, software-driven interfaces and interactions.

How do these components work together in the kitchen? In this video from the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, Stacey Higginbotham of the IoT Podcast moderates a panel with Shelby Bonnie of Pylon AI, Adnan “Boat” Agboatwalla of Samsung and Jason Clarke of Crank Software about the evolution of smart appliances and interfaces in the heart of the home.

There’s a lot to consider. As Clarke said, “there’s all these interfaces that I want to jump between depending on the task and the environment of the moment.” For example, if his daughter is being loud, he doesn’t want to rely on voice to turn on his oven; if his hands are dirty, vice versa.

In short: the smart kitchen can’t function just with video screens or voice, but both working together. “You have to get to multi-modal fast,” said Bonnie.

But for the ultimate user experience these appliances all have to work together, too. “There should be a platform that connects everything… multi-branded appliances should be able to talk and work together,” said Agboatwalla. Easy? Maybe not. But with conversations like these, we can pave the way to a more connected kitchen and a better cooking experience.

Watch the full video below.

Beyond The Dial: Exploring Voice and AI-Powered Interfaces For The Kitchen

Look out for more videos of the panels, solo talks, and fireside chats from SKS 2018! We’ll be bringing them to you hot and fresh out the (smart) kitchen over the next few weeks.

Video: Food Blockchain — Just Hype, Or True Path To Food Transparency?

Blockchain is everywhere, from currency to copyright protection. Many also see the decentralized ledger as the key to food system transparency — that is, an incorruptible record of where food comes from, which can help increase food safety and promote customer knowledge. Others are skeptical, but blockchain is nonetheless a hot topic on the (dinner) table.

Two companies betting on blockchain as the future of food transparency are Walmart and Ripe.io. The former recently announced they would be using blockchain to keep track of spinach and lettuce sold in their stores, and the latter has been working for two years to create “The Blockchain for Food” (and racking up funding, too).

Watch as Stacey Higginbotham of Stacey on IoT talks to Walmart’s Tejas Bhatt and Ripe.io’s Raja Ramachandran about the impact of blockchain on the food ecosystem.

Food Blockchain: Hype Or True Path To Food Transparency

Look out for more videos of the panels, solo talks, and fireside chats from SKS 2018! We’ll be bringing them to you hot and fresh out the (smart) kitchen over the next few weeks.