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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Connected Kitchen

Rise Gardens Launches a Countertop Version of Its At-Home Smart Growing System

Rise Gardens is best known for its indoor smart farms that are geared towards the average consumer and roughly the size of your average bookshelf. But those living in small spaces may not be able to easily accommodate another piece of furniture, and with that in mind, Rise released a countertop version of its farm this week. According to a LinkedIn post from the company, the device, dubbed The Personal Rise Garden, can grow “8+ plants at any given time” that can be harvested in “as little as 25 days.”

The Personal device is essentially a smaller version of Rise’s flagship product, a multi-shelf smart garden that uses nutrient-enriched water and a “recipe” of LED lighting to hydroponically grow leafy greens and herbs. An accompanying smartphone app does the bulk of the work in terms of calculating the temperature of the garden, determining nutrition and pH levels, and telling the user when it’s time to water the plants. Users can purchase a subscription service that automatically mails growing supplies on a regular basis. They can also use their own plant seeds if they prefer not to be locked into a subscription. 

Speaking to The Spoon earlier this year, Rise Gardens’ Head of Product and Strategy, Diego Blondet, said he believed automated indoor farming would make its way into most kitchen designs in the future. But we’re still years away from having a smart farm built into the cabinetry like a microwave, and in the meantime, many would-be users live in small apartments that can’t accommodate farms the size of furniture.

Hence Rise’s move to release a countertop version of its smart garden. The new device clocks in at 18 x 11 x 16 inches and weights 20 pounds. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, it can grow four large plants (tomatoes, peppers, kale, etc.), eight medium-sized plants (herbs), or 12 small plants (chives, lavender). Cost-wise, the farm will run you $279, which is on par with other countertop growing devices, including those from Aspara ($259) and AVA’s Byte Smart Garden ($349).

Notably, Rise received an investment from the Amazon Alexa Fund last month to “fuel new products, accessories, and further R+D.” At the time of the announcement, Rise CEO and founder Hank Adams hinted at an Alexa integration for his company’s devices, which means voice tech might be coming to smart farms soon, with Rise leading the way. The company also recently expanded distribution to Canada, according to a Rise spokesperson.

Offering a smaller version of its standard product could also connect Rise Gardens to a potentially different audience, which is those who are new to the at-home smart farming concept and may not want to commit $500 or more to learning about it. From the looks of it, the Personal device won’t feed an entire family, but could be sufficient for one- and two-person households. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve purchased mine.

Meet the Aurora Nutrio, a Smart Cutting Board With Built-In Food Sensor

Nowadays it takes a lot for me to consider putting a new piece of technology on my countertop.

It’s not that I don’t love kitchen tech. (Heck, I did start an event on the topic.) It’s that I long ago ran out of countertop space and my wife only has so much patience for my expensive habit of buying new kitchen gear.

Which is why I’ve never made room for a kitchen scale. Intellectually, I understand the arguments for one: more precise measurements, less clutter than a hodgepodge of measuring cups and bowls, and a good way to track food calories and intake. In the end, though, I still can’t see where I’d put it.

But what if I could combine it with a cutting board? And better yet, what if I could also use this new cutting board-scale as a food inventory and tracking system?

All of this may be possible with the Aurora Nutrio, a new smart cutting board that has debuted through Indiegogo. The device weighs and identifies raw food, scans packaged food, calculates nutrition information, helps users track food inventory and ingredients on hand.

When you look at the Nutrio’s cutting surface, you’ll see the actual board part of the cutting board is made of wood. The wood board (or boards; the system offers bamboo, beech or nutwood board options and you can buy more than one board to use during a cook) reside on top of a base which houses all of the technology and sensors.

One of those sensors is a spectrometer. The spectrometer, the small circle in the upper left hand corner of the board, uses infrared light to scan the molecular properties of the food and give you the caloric and nutritional composition of food.

You can see a demonstration of how a scan would work in the Nutrio Indiegogo video below:

The device also has an on-board camera for scanning packaged goods, and a built-in NFC reader to track food inventory with the provided NFC food tags.

Like a lot of connected devices, the Nutrio has an associated app that unlocks more features, including the ability to log food in a diary and access nutrition information of food you weigh and scan. The app, called Lighthouse, is also where you’d track food inventory through the associated NFC tagging system.

I have to admit, all of this technology sounds pretty neat. Not only would I get the scale I want disguised as a cutting board, but I’d also get a full food-tracking and nutrition-management system.

That said, I’m still hesitant to pull the trigger for a few reasons.

The most obvious one is this is still just a prototype being offered on Indiegogo. And as we’re all too aware, super tech-forward products like this have a real mixed track record of ever making it to market. Add in that this product is promising a bunch of features using fairly complicated technology, and you have to wonder if the company will actually be able to deliver on all of those claims.

My second reason to hesitate is price. The Nutrio is expensive, with an early-bird price that’s over $400 on Indiegogo. That’s much higher than basic digital scales or even smart scales like the Renpho, which go for $20 nowadays on Amazon.

The final concern is that this product would be yet another proprietary system and app that relies on a subscription model to unlock all the features. According to the campaign’s FAQ, the system’s Pro edition of the app will cost between €5 and €10 per month, or roughly $6 to $12 USD, after the first year. I don’t know about you, but it takes a lot for me nowadays to pull out a credit card for an app, let alone for a cutting board and scale app (though the campaign promises to give lifetime access to the app if they hit €250,000).

All that said, the Nutrio is still an interesting appliance, presenting a fairly holistic approach to food tracking and management. I’ll be keeping an eye on it, and if you’d like to follow (or buy one), you can find it here at Indiegogo.

Amazon Alexa Getting Better at Guessing Follow Up Requests

One big area where virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant fall short of real human assistants is their inability to contextualize and anticipate what you’ll want next.

Currently, requests made to virtual assistants are often siloed, and go something like this:

“Alexa, how long should I steep tea?”

Alexa answers, with something like “Five minutes,” and then:

“Alexa, set a timer for five minutes.”

In a corporate blog post today (hat tip Geekwire), Amazon announced that Alexa is now getting better at bundling those types of requests together. Amazon refers to this as figuring out your “latent goal,” and actually provides tea steeping as an example. Asking Alexa how long to steep tea could have Alexa guess that your latent goal is to make tea. This, in turn would trigger an immediate and automatic follow up response from Alexa like “Would you like me to set a five minute timer?”

While this seems straightforward, as with so many AI-related tasks, understanding what people want isn’t exactly easy. From Amazon’s blog post:

The first step is to decide whether to anticipate a latent goal at all. Our early experiments showed that not all dialogue contexts are well suited to latent-goal discovery. When a customer asked for “recipes for chicken”, for instance, one of our initial prototypes would incorrectly follow up by asking, “Do you want me to play chicken sounds?”

Beyond tea, it’s not hard to think of how identifying latent goals could be useful in a smart kitchen. In the case of asking for chicken recipes, Alexa could follow up with offers to pre-heat an oven, or, more relevant to Amazon, offer to order you the necessary groceries for delivery that day (preferably from an Amazon grocery store).

Amazon says this latent goal capability is available now in English in the U.S. And while it doesn’t require any additional work from developers to activate, they can make their skills more discoverable with the Name-Free Interaction Tool Kit.

FWIW, I tried asking Alexa the tea steeping question, and it did not follow up with a timer suggestion. So its latent goals capabilities seem to still be, well, latent.

From the Lab: This Smart Fabric Can Identify Foods You Place on It

Researchers at Dartmouth College, Wuhan University, Southeast University, and Microsoft Research have developed a fabric that can identify what foods and other types of objects placed on it (hat tip to Engadget).

Dubbed Capacitivo, the technology attaches a grid of electrodes to a textile. By applying an electric field to the fabric and some machine learning, objects placed on it can be identified by measuring any shift in capacitance.

The technology can detect different types of food, even when those items are inside containers like water glasses and bowls. According to the paper, the tech also has an average accuracy of 90.71 percent.

You might be thinking, “Why would I need my tablecloth to tell me what’s on it, I can see whatever I put on it.” Well, according to the paper, the readings from the fabric could be integrated with other kitchen and cooking apps. For example, you could place a bunch of fruits on a table and based on that have a smoothie recipe suggested to you. When you eat dinner, your meal could automatically be uploaded to a diet tracking app. Or when making a meal, it could provide some form of guided cooking by telling you which ingredients to add and when.

Capacitivo: Contact-Based Object Recognition on Interactive Fabrics using Capacitive Sensing

The technology isn’t perfect. It has a hard time with metallic objects, and researchers said it isn’t very good at identifying specific liquids (e.g. distinguishing a beer from a Coke). But, this is a fist step that it still very much in the lab. With a little imagination, it’s not hard to see how a smart surface like this could be integrated to talk with your appliances to create an even more connected kitchen.

June’s Third-Gen Oven Goes on Pre-Sale with New Heat Controls and Premium Memberships

June announced today the third generation of its eponymous countertop smart oven. The latest version of the June Oven features more control over the heating elements, new cook modes, enhanced food detection and membership options.

One of the biggest changes June has made to its oven is that each of the six heating elements can now be controlled individually. This improves upon the second-gen version, where heat elements were controlled in three groups. The new individual controls allow for new types of automated cook programs like a virtual rotisserie. Instead of putting something like a whole chicken on a spit and rotating it, the heating elements alternate around the chicken. These more precise heating controls, in conjunction with an in-oven camera, also allow for zone cooking through focused heating elements.

Additional hardware improvements also include guard rails on the top heating elements and new convection fan motors that reduce vibration and sound. There’s also a new chipset to improve connectivity.

On the software side, June has added new cook programs like the aforementioned virtual rotisserie as well as a stone fired pizza setting (there’s an optional pizza and grill kit that can be purchased). The company now bills the device as a 12-in-1 appliance (up from a 7-in-1).

June is also adding membership options in 2021. The press release didn’t offer much detail, but various levels will include features like additional remote controls, exclusive recipes, live videos and more.

The new Junes are available for pre-sale today and will come in three packages that will begin shipping in late November:

  • June Smart Oven Bundle
    Price: $599
    Accessories: Food Thermometer, Nonstick Pan, Stainless Steel Crumb Tray, Wire ShelfOne Year Warranty
  • June Smart Oven Plus Bundle
    Price: $799
    Accessories: Food Thermometer, Nonstick Pan, Roasting Rack, Stainless Steel Crumb Tray, WireShelfTwo Years Warranty and One Year June App Premium Membership
  • June Smart Oven Premium Bundle
    Price: $999
    Accessories: Pizza and Grill Kit (​Enameled Cast Iron Grill/Griddle​ with Pizza Peel),​ Three AirBaskets, Stainless Steel Pro Food Thermometer, Silicone Food Thermometer, Two Nonstick Pans,Two Roasting Racks, Stainless Steel Crumb Tray, Wire Shelf
    Two Years Warranty and ​One Year June App Premium Membership

As I’ve written before, I’m a big fan of my June Oven and use it every day. Having said that, June is not the only smart oven player on the scene, and I’m intrigued by Anova’s countertop combi-oven that features steam cooking and costs $599.

Regardless, advances like the third-gen June continue to make cooking easier for non-cooks like myself.

Amazon’s Alexa Fund Invests in At-Home Vertical Farming Company Rise Gardens

Rise Gardens announced today it has received an investment from the Amazon Alexa Fund that builds upon a $2.6M seed round Rise closed in May. The amount invested by the Amazon Alexa Fund was not disclosed.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the deal is both a collaboration and a cash investment that will “fuel new products, accessories and further R+D” for Rise Gardens.

The Chicago-based Rise is best known for its standalone console (roughly the size of a standard bookcase) that contains a hydroponic grow system for consumers at home. The system does most of the hard work—calculating nutrition and pH levels, knowing when and how much to water the plants—for the user, whom it notifies via a corresponding app.

Rise’s system is also modular, so it can be added to or subtracted from over time depending on how many greens your household consumes each week. Users can also grow beets and tomatoes in addition to leafy greens and herbs.

Rise raised $2.6 million in seed funding earlier this year; Amazon’s new investment is an extension of this seed funding, according to today’s press release.

Amazon’s investment in Rise sounds promising, not just for the company but for the entire vertical farming sector. To start, Rise CEO and founder Hank Adams hinted today at Alexa functionality for the Rise system: “Collaborating with the Alexa Fund will better enable us to integrate our smart, connected garden with Alexa, making indoor gardening even easier. We are also excited about the opportunity to work with Amazon to evolve and expand how we reach consumers with our device and consumables business concept,” he said. The details of that Alexa integration are scant as of now, but one imagines being able to ask Alexa about your plant’s pH levels or tell the speaker to adjust the light mixture. On the flip, Rise could notify users via Alexa when it’s time to water the plants.

There’s no question that consumer-grade vertical farms are still a pretty niche product right now, since many of them cost more than the average person can easily afford. (Rise’s single unit console starts at $549.) But the pandemic and accompanying disruptions to the food supply chain have undoubtedly increased folks’ desire to control more of what they eat, which has led to an influx of new devices. From Gardyn’s stylish take on at-home farming to consumer electronics companies like LG building them into the kitchen, vertical farming is definitely making its way into the home. 

Amazon, of course, wants to control your entire home, including your kitchen, so it’s not surprising the Seattle tech giant would partner making at-home vertical farming products. As well, the company has made forays into the gardening space before, like this patent from 2017. Amazon knowing what types of plants you are growing can fuel its selling machine to recommend recipes and other groceries.

Like it or not, Amazon’s moves in food tech tend to influence others, which means the collaborations and products that come out of the Rise partnership will influence the future of at-home vertical farming for everyone. 

Chocomake’s Countertop Device Lets You Make Your Own Chocolate

One of the more exciting aspects of food tech is its increasing ability to push food production to the edge. Instead of food being created in central factories and shipped around the world, advances in consumer appliances and the internet of things means that you can create more types of food more easily in your own kitchen.

Take chocolate. Between getting all of the proper ingredients, mixing, tempering and cooling, making your own chocolate can be a complicated endeavor. It’s much easier and faster to buy a pre-made chocolate bar from the store.

And while Israeli startup Chocomake may not take all of the work out of making chocolate at home, it promises to get pretty close. The Chocomake (which will soon be changing its name because evidently some other company holds that moniker) is a connected countertop chocolate maker. Choose a recipe from the accompanying app, add the ingredients and Chocomake takes care of all the mixing and tempering. When you’re done, pour your homemade chocolate into your preferred mold to cool and then eat.

Chocomake is still in the prototype phase, so a manufactured device wouldn’t even be available for another year or so. Liora Omer, Founder of Chocomake, told me by phone this week that the company is targeting people with dietary restrictions (need lower sugar or vegan options) and foodies who are interested in putting their own spin on chocolate. Though Omer wouldn’t share a specific price, the company will make its money by selling the hardware as well as kits for specific recipes.

But Omer was also quick to point out that Chocomake will be open, so you won’t be locked into a particular ecosystem a la a K-cup. This openness also means that customers will be able to customize chocolate recipes to their liking.

If all this sounds familiar, that’s because CocoTerra is doing much the same thing. It too is a countertop device that lets you make your own chocolate (it too also doesn’t have a specific price yet). Omer said that the biggest difference between Chocomake and CocoTerra is that CocoTerra grinds cocoa nibs (Chocomake does not) and CocoTerra only dispenses into a ring mold (Chocomake’s output can be poured into different molds).

The bigger question looming over both devices, however, is one of convenience. Between direct-to-consumer channels from high-end CPG brands and the increasing ubiquity of online grocery shopping, getting high-end chocolate delivered to your door is easier than ever. Even if Chocomake takes most of the work out of making chocolate, will people still want to do any work to get their choco fix? Especially if it means spending a few hundred bucks on a single-use device that takes up real estate in the kitchen?

Having said that, this type of food production on the edge could be more appealing to small businesses. It’s not hard to see small coffee shop or grocery store chains buying one of these to make their own customized chocolate blend that can be branded and sold in stores.

Or who knows, maybe Chocomake can figure out a way to turn your homemade chocolate into a filament that can be run through a chocolate 3D printer to make something super sweet at home.

Eat Figo Launches Crowdfunding Campaign for All-In-One Sous Vide Device

Eat Figo launched a crowdfunding campaign today for it’s (almost) eponymous countertop Figo sous vide device.

In addition to being a connected sous vide machine you can control with your phone, the Figo is also offers vacuum sealing and cold storage capabilities. The company is looking to raise $20,000 on Indiegogo, with the base model costing super-early backers $139 and the deluxe model (which comes with the vacuum sealer attachment) costing $149. Both models are supposed to ship in March of 2021.

Avid Spoon readers may be thinking to themselves a sous vide machine that keeps food cold until its time to cook? That sounds familiar. That’s because Mellow promised to do much the same thing a while back. But as WIRED found out, the Mellow did not keep food cold enough to keep it safe and that product (and the subsequent attempt at a sequel) died.

What’s different about the Figo, however, is that the food is kept in dry cold storage (as low as 37 degrees) instead of a cold water bath. When it’s time to cook, water is added from a built-in tank and heated. When the cooking is done the water is evacuated from the heating cavity and back into the tank. I don’t know if, scientifically, this makes it easier to keep food at safe temperatures, but that’s certainly different from the Mellow.

The bigger question is whether Figo is two years to late to the sous vide party. While enjoying a bit of a mini-boom back in the 2015 – 2018 timeframe, the consumer sous vide market has subsequently crashed. After layoffs and cuts, ChefSteps sold to Breville, Nomiku shut down, and the aforementioned Mellow is all but gone. Anova is still truckin’, but it too has moved on to its combi steam oven that promises sous vide-like cooking.

Perhaps there still is a market for consumer sous vide machines. As of this writing, Eat Figo has already raised more than $7,000. But even if you love sous vide and you think that this might be the device for you (though you may want to make sure the cooling part works as promised), remember that crowdfunded hardware projects have a spotty record, at best. You don’t want to take a bath by backing a sous vide machine that doesn’t make it through manufacturing.

The Kitchen Tech Patent Watch: Meal Lifecycle Management, Fridge Order Buttons, Stoves With Stereos

The world of food and cooking patents is both wonderful and weird.

Many patents are often a big deal and can sometimes give an indication of what a company or person has in mind for a new product. At other times, those product-makers seem to be taking ideas out of the pages of science fiction books and trying to write patents just in case the imagined future ever arrives. (If you’re Nathan Myhrvold, you may even have a science fiction writer help develop the idea behind the patent.)

Since I periodically check in on what’s been issued to see if there’s anything interesting on the horizon, I thought I’d share a few of the kitchen-related patents I came across in my latest search.

Meal Lifecycle Management System

We think a lot about the meal journey here at The Spoon and often wonder how technology can be used to assist its various stages, including planning, cooking, inventory management, storage and shopping.

According a recently issued patent to Bradley Charles Ashmore, the Meal Lifecycle Management System is a holistic system to track a person’s food inventory in real time, calculate nutritional makeup of ingredients and help in the planning.

The system combines a scale that tracks both weight and overall size footprint of both packaged and unpackaged food (a “pressure-sensitive pad”) and also uses an app on a smartphone to track the meal journey.

The image below — Figure 12 from the patent — shows how it tracks the transfer of a food item (peanut butter) from jar to bread, recognizing both the type of food and the amount.

A true food inventory management and meal journey assistant are holy grails for the smart kitchen. This patent is one of many we’ve seen in recent years that try to tackle it and, from what I can tell, has one of the biggest scopes in terms of how much it tries to manage.

The Voice and Button Activated Fridge Restocking System

While Amazon and others have been working on voice assistants and reorder buttons, and fridge manufacturers have been working on cameras and sensors to tell us what’s inside our fridges, no one has really brought it all together to create a full food replenishment system that works well.

If a new patent by Midea is any indication, that company is exploring ways to build refrigerators that incorporate a restocking system that integrates with voice assistants. The system would include a variety of sensor technologies to track food inventory, as well as a human presence detector and bio-authentication tools such as a fingerprint reader. The biggest focus of the reordering system is, however, a physical button the human would press near the food compartment to actually confirm order suggestions by the voice assistant.

The idea behind a built-in confirmation buttons is to give the user more control over their purchase decisions, enabling them to confirm before they actually buy something.

Of course, this type of human approval is not always what companies like Amazon have in mind. Heck, the company has even been issued patents for systems that anticipate what you may want and buy it for you.

While some may see a built-in order button this as adding friction to purchasing, I like the idea of having a final confirmation before a transaction goes through, rather than simply offloading the entire decision-making process to a bot.

Stoves With Stereos

And from the ‘is this really necessary?’ department comes this patent that was issued this month for incorporating an audio system into a cooktop.

From the patent:

“It is known that individuals often use their kitchen every day to cook food. It is also known that an integral component in the cooking of food in a kitchen is the stove. Individuals often like to enjoy audio media when cooking in the kitchen. However, none of the usual appliances in the kitchen are configured to play audio media for a user. Therefore, there is a need for a stovetop oven having an integrated audio system to create a more comfortable environment for a user.”

Not sure about you, but with more and more smart speakers coming to market at very low cost and the wide availability of Wi-Fi powered stereo systems, I’m not seeing the need for actual integration of a stereo into the stovetop itself.

Amazon’s Echo Show 10 Swivels to Follow You. That Might be Useful in the Kitchen

Amazon introduced the latest version of its Echo Show at its hardware event today. The new Echo Show 10 features the usual Alexa-powered smart assistant, screen and speakers, but includes one new feature that might be particularly useful in the kitchen: it rotates to follow you around.

Think about how you move around when cooking from a recipe. You shift between your prep area to the fridge to the oven to pantry. Being able to always have the recipe in view means no problem if you forget what temperature to set the oven or how many eggs you need to grab.

Even if you aren’t following an on-screen recipe, the ability for the screen to swing around so you can watch a show as you cook or hold a video call is pretty neat.

We haven’t had a chance to play around with the Echo Show 10 yet, so it may not work all that well in reality. And not everyone will be comfortable with an Amazon device watching you and silently following you around with its camera eye.

But, if you’ve already given in and have an Alexa powered assistant, this seems like it could give you a little more mobility and utility. I mean, it doesn’t seem as strange as the indoor drone Amazon also announced today that pops up and flies around your house acting as a security camera.

The new Echo Show 10 will cost $249.99, will be available in Charcoal and Glacier White. Amazon says it will ship in time for the holidays.

Aveine Launches New Lower-Cost Connected, Essential Wine Aerator

Aveine, which promises to help you enjoy your wine more thanks to tiny air bubbles, announced its new, lower cost Essential wine aerator today.

Aveine’s aeration system has two components. The hardware is the aerator that plugs into the top of an open wine bottle and injects tiny bubbles into the wine as you pour. Then there is the connected mobile app that you use to scan a wine label. The app identifies the type of wine and, based on that information, tells the aerator exactly how much air to add as you pour the wine.

This precise aeration, according to the company, means you don’t have to wait for the wine to “breathe” after opening a bottle. You’ll also get a more rounded wine taste with more flavor.

The first generation of the Aveine, released back in 2018, isn’t cheap, costing $449. That’s a lot of money for a bunch of tiny bubbles. Though, if you are a collector or someone who is really into their wine, that might seem like a fair deal.

The rest of us, however, probably wouldn’t spend that kind of scratch for our $12 bottle of pinot. With its lower cost, the new Essential aerator is a play to reach a wider audience.

Like its more expensive predecessor, the Essential also offers precise aeration as well as connection with the app for automatic adjustments, according to press materials sent to The Spoon.

However, the Essential is more limited in its aeration scale (the number of aerated hours the device replicates), and has a shorter free trial (30 days versus 60) and warranty (one year versus five years).

But the biggest factor for most people in the wider audience Aveine is trying to reach is the cost. The Essential will be available at a pre-sale price of 199€ (~$232 USD) from Sept. 24 – Oct. 31. After that, the Essential will cost 249€ (~$290 USD).

That’s still not cheap for most people. But given how wine sales surged during the pandemic over the summer, and the colder months ahead (coupled with continued COVID), perhaps people will pony up to get a little more flavor in their lives while they are housebound.

I Cooked With the BonBowl for an Entire Week and Now I’m Attached

I’m simultaneously the best and worst person to write a review of the BonBowl, a newly released personal induction cooker designed to make single-serving meals in about 15 minutes or less. On the one hand, I tend to make a lot of single-serving meals and, like any good Spoon scribe, I’m into kitchen gadgetry. On the other hand, I still tend to do a lot of actual cooking the analogue way and rather enjoy making a colossal mess in order to put a meal together.

Still, I pre-ordered the BonBowl, which arrived a few weeks ago, and decided to spend a week putting it through its paces. 

The device comes in two parts: a cooktop base that plugs into a wall and uses induction heating, and an accompanying bowl from which you can both cook and eat the food. The whole thing currently goes for $149 at the BonBowl website.

Before we get into the food, let’s talk about the setup. That won’t take long, because it’s literally a matter of removing the device from the box and plugging it into a wall. Bonus: I don’t have a ton of counter space in my kitchen. The BonBowl fits nicely into a little corner, where it now lives even when I’m not using it:

As far as what you can cook with it, the BonBowl site offers a range of recipes, including a handful by Trader Joe’s. There’s no app integration (yet), but if you don’t want to drag your computer into the kitchen, a handy card accompanies the device and lists multiple recipes with quick cooking instructions. Think single-serving pasta, mac ‘n’ cheese, or oatmeal.

I picked one of the Trader Joe’s recipes for my inaugural BonBowl meal, a simple tomato soup with gnocchi. The recipe has just four ingredients, and I was also struck by the convenience factor of not having to guess at a single-serving size (which I mess up on a daily basis). The meal took 15 minutes to make.

One huge plus is that the bowl itself is a non-stick dish with thermal insulation, so it heats the food but doesn’t become too hot to handle. Ever yank a glass bowl that’s been in a microwave out with your bare hands? Between the thermal insulation and induction heating of the device, that scenario doesn’t happen with the BonBowl. Cleanup is a matter of washing the bowl and spoon.

I made a couple other recipes from the BonBowl site, but what I really wanted to discover was whether the BonBowl could accommodate my weekly eating habits without my having to change them very much. For instance, every Sunday I make a huge pot of garlic rice and garbanzo beans, which serves as my go-to meal when I don’t have much time. Normally I reheat portions in a skillet, guessing at the serving size. (I don’t like microwaves and have never owned one.) For that week, I simply chucked the food into the BonBowl, set the time for 10 minutes, and went about my day until the machine beeped. 

One small quirk, if you can even call it that, is that a couple times the machine heated the food so well the meal had to cool for quite a while, though that problem was easily solved by adjusting the timer.

Beans, in fact, are an ideal food for the bowl. Garbanzo, black, pinto, the inimitable Heinz baked beans. I tried them all, and in fact the BonBowl is all I use now for heating beans, sauces, and other simple items. I reheated leftover pasta from a takeout order. I made a rice krispie treat that wouldn’t win awards for presentation but tasted great. I even scrambled an egg.

Less successful was my attempt at making a single-serving portion of a chicken recipe that’s been in my family for generations and is therefore about 150 years old, maybe older. The resulting sad little meal (see above) was probably a combination of a very old recipe, my trying to turn a four-serving dish into a one-serving meal, and the fact that the BonBowl is probably not the ideal gadget for highly experimental kitchen projects.

Which is totally fine, because I don’t think the makers of the BonBowl designed the device for complex recipes loaded with ingredients that have to be combined “just so” in order to create an edible meal.

Rather, the BonBowl seems designed as a way to make simple-but-healthy meals at home quickly and with minimal fuss (or cleanup).

But why, you ask, would I not just buy a hotplate for $30? Being able to cook and eat out of the same dish is one reason. Another is that the induction heating and precision cooking sensors properly cook the food, rather than zapping it to death (microwave) or burning it (hotplate). It’s also safer because rather than an entire hot surface, only the tiny button where the bowl sits heats up.

It’s also versatile. I can’t personally attest to using it in a college dorm room, but it seems ideal for that setting. I can attest to having in the past lived in some NYC apartments with dodgy kitchens, where a BonBowl would have saved a lot of money in takeout fees. These days, the BonBowl is not a necessity, but it’s proven itself a valuable addition to my kitchen and my weekly meal planning.