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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Connected Kitchen

Kenwood Partners With Drop to Add Scale Function to the Cooking Chef Stand Mixer

You have your smart ovens, coffee makers and fridges, but what about a smart stand mixer?

Now’s your chance.

Last week, Drop announced they’d partnered with Kenwood to build in the Drop Smart Kitchen OS platform into the latest model of the Kenwood Cooking Chef mixer, one of the older stand mixer brands in the world.

Originally invented almost 70 years ago by the company’s namesake, Ken Wood, the Kenwood Chef was an instant hit and over the past few decades the modern version of the multi-function stand mixer has continued to be Kenwood’s biggest seller.

The Kenwood Chef eventually became the Kenwood Cooking Chef with the addition of a built-in induction heating element almost a decade ago, and the modern version has a variety of attachments like pasta cutters and coffee grinders. With the Drop partnership, the focus is on the integration of the Drop scale and guided cooking functionality.

In the video below, the two companies tout the product as “Your Chef that Weighs and Cooks” (emphasis mine):

By adding a scale to a mixer that already has built-in cooking capabilities and variety of attachments, the Cooking Chef puts itself into a growing category of multi-function products that act as the cooking version of a Swiss Army knife. Products like the Thermomix and ChefIQ weigh, cook, and steam food, all things that the Cooking Chef XL can now do as well.

This isn’t the first time that Drop has partnered with Kenwood, a subsidiary of De’Longhi. Last year, the two companies launched the CookEasy+ multicooker, a product the two had started working on in early 2018.

With the addition of the Kenwood Cooking Chef XL, Drop continues to rack up impressive partnerships with some of the biggest players in countertop cooking. The company has been working with Thermomix (announced last year at the Smart Kitchen Summit) and also is working with pressure cooking giant Instant Pot.

H-E-B to Use Swisslog for Automated Micro-Fulfillment

Even though everything is bigger in Texas, the San Antonio-based H-E-B grocery chain is going small. Today, the chain announced it has partnered with Swisslog to install automated micro-fulfillment centers at an undisclosed number of stores (tip of the hat to Grocery Dive).

According to the press announcement, H-E-B will make use of Swisslog’s AutoStore solution, which will use a combination of bins and robotics to shuttle grocery items around. Swisslog says that it has more than 170 AutoStore installations worldwide. H-E-B has 400 locations across Texas.

Swisslog’s micro-fulfillment centers will help H-E-B speed up the processing of online grocery orders for delivery and curbside pickup. Keeping up with the crush of new e-commerce customers was something retailers across the country struggled with throughout a good part of this year as pandemic fears pushed people into online grocery shopping.

While the first few months of the pandemic saw record amounts of online grocery shopping, recent survey data from Brick Meets Click shows that grocery e-commerce dropped in August to $5.7 billion, down from its peak of $7.2 billion in June. Having said that, August’s online grocery numbers were higher than the the $5.3 billion in April.

Swisslog is among a number of companies angling to bring more automation to grocery e-commerce fulfillment. Alert Innovation is being used by Walmart, Fabric is working with Fresh Direct, Takeoff Technologies has lined up Albertsons, ShopRite, and Loblaw’s, and Kroger is building out its own centers using Ocado.

While we’re still waiting to see exactly how many people stick with online grocery shopping (FWIW, even Whole Foods’ CEO thinks a lot of people won’t go back into grocery stores), H-E-B’s announcement shows that retailers continue to make big investments in micro-fulfillment. Will these micro-moves yield Texas-sized returns?

Fighting Consumer Food Waste at Home Means Rethinking the Refrigerator

What’s the most effective way to fight food waste in the home? Take a look at your fridge.

Most consumers at this point are aware of the world’s multibillion food waste problem. A great many more now understand that, at least in North America and Europe, the bulk of that waste happens at consumer-facing stages of the food journey, including our own homes. What we’re less certain of is how to curb that excess.

Researching solutions for “The Consumer Food Waste Innovation Report,” which you can read on Spoon Plus, I came across a number of different methods for reducing food waste in the home. But after sifting through the many storage and preservation options out there, the meal-planning and meal-sharing apps, I’m left wondering if the trick to reducing at-home food waste isn’t just re-envisioning the refrigerator itself.

The appliance hasn’t changed much over the last several decades. But in 2020, the pandemic is keeping more folks at home, we have more information about how much food we’re actually wasting (it’s a ton), and more investment in the food tech sector in general. The convergence of those factors makes now an ideal time to change that point and introduce more innovation into the world of refrigerators. Here are a few ideas:

Smarter Features That Are Actually Affordable

By now, many consumers are at least aware of high-tech refrigerators that can track items placed in the fridge, alert owners when those items are running low, and scan and identify foods to help consumers plan meals and find recipes. LG’s ThinQ and the Samsung Family Hub are two appliances that lead the smart fridge market.

They also cost thousands of dollars, making them out of reach for most consumers. True, having cameras and image-recognition technology inside the fridge is a relatively new concept, so a higher price point is to be expected. But in order for the new applications of those technologies to be most effective, they’ll need to get cheaper. By that I mean, we’ll need to see options for them build into most fridges.

Another option is add-on tech for the fridge. As we note in the report, Smarter makes a device can be retrofitted for any fridge and recognize the items inside. Fridge Eye has a similar device.

Smaller Fridge, Bigger Freezer

“Everyone loses something in the back of the fridge,” food waste expert Dana Gunders told us when interviewed for the report. Her point is that the sheer size of most modern refrigerators means older items will get pushed out of view and forgotten as newer ones are placed in the fridge.

High-tech fixes like the ones mentioned above can help, but the fridge design itself seems ripe for an upgrade. Or downgrade, as it were, since a smaller fridge compartment with a bigger freezer might be a surefire way to reduce food waste. Much of our food, even items like milk and bread, can be frozen until we need to use them. And research shows that things like frozen fruits and vegetables maintain more or less the same nutrients as their fresh counterparts. 

Better Storage to Accompany the Fridge

Back in the 1930s, when the electric refrigerator was just starting to get popular, General Electric sold fridges by promoting the then-newish concept of leftovers to consumers. Along with tips and cookbooks, the appliance-maker sold food storage containers designed to stack up in the fridge and hold leftovers. 

Maybe to curb food waste, we need a kind of rebirth of that concept, this time geared towards curbing food waste and with a high-tech twist. Major appliance manufacturers could team up with startups like Mimica, BlakBear, or Silo to sell smarter storage options — think smart labels and temperature sensors — alongside their appliances. They could also find ways to integrate some of those new technologies into fridge doors, drawers, and other compartments.

For more thoughts on the reinvention of the refrigerator as well as how else we can fight food waste at home, check out the full “Consumer Food Waste Innovation” report at Spoon Plus.

Bruvi Raises $2.2M in Seed Funding for it’s Single-Serve Drink System

Bruvi, a startup that makes its own pod-based single serve coffee/drink system, announced today that it raised $2.2 million in Seed funding at the end of July. This brings the total amount raised by Bruvi to $3.15 million.

Bruvi makes an internet-connected Keurig-like coffee system that uses eco-friendly “B-Pods” to brew individual cups of coffee, espresso, cold brew, teas and more. The Bruvi sells directly to consumers through the company’s website, with the Bruvi Bundle (brewer, 24 B-Pods and water filter) that will sell for $198. But you’ll have to wait before you buy, according to today’s press release, the Seed funding will go primarily towards manufacturing with a projected launch of Q3 2021.

There are two big hang-ups with B-Pods, K-Cups and any capsule-based single-serving system. First is the proprietary nature of the capsule itself. B-Pods won’t work in other devices and non-B-Pod capsules won’t work with the Bruvi. So buying a Bruvi means you’re locking yourself into an entire coffee drink ecosystem.

Second problem with these systems is the potential waste. Bruvi claims that it is overcoming this issue because its B-Pods are “Landfill Friendly.” The Orwellian-style nomenclature seems counterintuitive, but according to the Bruvi FAQ:

Our Bru-Pods are 100% recyclable and have been designed to be landfill friendly. That means no wasting resources with cumbersome rinsing or separating capsule parts; all you have to do is throw the whole capsule in the trash. When they hit the landfill, they will substantially degrade in 5 years instead of 500 years.

On the coffee side, Bruvi says that the coffee and tea inside those Landfill Friendly pods will offer “ethical and sustainably sourced coffee as well as licensed brand partners,” so there’s a chance your favorite roaster could have their own B-Pod if this device takes off.

Because the hardware itself is connected, the accompanying Bruvi app will let you brew your drink remotely, re-order pods and look at your drinking patterns, if that floats your coffee boat.

Bruvi is just the latest in a line of companies looking to improve your morning cup of coffee through fancy gadgets, access to specialty roasters, or creating molecular coffee in a lab. The good news for all you coffeeheads out there is that the pandemic has not actually impacted coffee crops so far. The bad news is that the pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon, but if you’re stuck at home this time next year, perhaps buying a Bruvi could make it a little more manageable.

Galley Solutions’ Founders Talk Recipes, Data, and What It Will Take to Build a Better Food System

In the food world, San Diego-based tech startup Galley Solutions is perhaps best known for its software system that uses recipe-level data to automate the restaurant back of house. But founders Benji Koltai and Ian Christopher have much bigger plans for the role they want their company to play in creating a more efficient, accurate, and safer food system overall.

I recently hopped on a Zoom chat with Koltai and Christopher — who also happen to be brothers-in-law — to talk about their vision for the future food system, how a system like Galley’s can contribute, and what foodservice businesses can do right now to make their operations more efficient.

You can watch the full video below. Some highlights include:

  • The definition of “food business” is changing as we speak, from college dining halls now offering grab ’n’ go meals to ghost kitchens operating out of grocery stores.
  • Moving forward, restaurants must learn to leverage their recipe-level data to make operations more efficient, cut overall costs, and save on labor and time to accommodate these new formats.
  • Technology is everywhere in the foodservice world, yet for all the different devices and solutions, there is no common dataset to bring those disparate pieces together.
  • A truly efficient back-of-house system will use one source for all the business’s data. For example, a centralized data source could populate the digital order forms sent to vendors and at the same time tell the kitchen robot how long to leave a burger on the grill.

Knock-Knock. Who’s There? LG’s New InstaView Oven with Air Fryer Now Available

I don’t want my current refrigerator to break, but if it should happen to accidentally fall out of a second story window, I know what I’ll replace it with: The LG InstaView fridge. The InstaView fridge comes equipped with knock-on technology that lets you see what’s inside by knocking on its surface, without ever having to open the door.

Now it looks like my current oven may become another victim of a precipitous and totally accidental defenestration. LG announced yesterday that its new InstaView Ranges with Air Fry, also outfitted with the knock-on technology, are now available for purchase nationwide.

LG said in this week’s announcement that it’s sold more than 1 million units of its InstaView fridges, and now we’ll see if the ovens prove equally popular. Like the fridge, the new LG oven lets you peek inside simply by knocking twice on the glass. From the press announcement:

Simply knock twice on the oven’s glass window to illuminate the interior and visually monitor cooking progress. And if you’re hands are full or dirty, the range will light up if gently tapped twice with an elbow, knee or even foot.

Aside from the “neat-o” factor of the InstaView, there is a practical application. Being able to check on your dinner without opening up the door means all the heat stays inside the oven and doesn’t escape. And sure, just about every oven comes with a light switch to do the same thing, but come on! This is so much more fun.

In addition to the knock-knock, the new LG ranges also come with the popular Air Fry option, so you can brown and crisp food without the need for a separate countertop device.

There are also a number of smart features such as remote monitoring and control of the oven via the LG ThinQ mobile app, as well as recipe and guided cooking functionality via SideChef, Innit, and Tovala integrations.

The LG InstaView ovens can be purchased now and cost between $899 and $1,299 depending on the make and model.

Anova’s New Connected Steam + Convection Oven Now Selling for $599

Anova announced the launch of its connected, countertop steam + convection oven today. The Anova Precision Oven is a wifi-enabled, multi-stage combi oven can now be purchased worldwide for $599.

Anova, which is owned by Electrolux, made its mark in food tech with its consumer sous vide circulator, which helped kick off a consumer sous vide boom a few years back. Anova is one of the only surviving companies of that first consumer-focused sous vide circulator cohort (RIP Sansaire and Nomiku), and a smart combi oven is the first new category product for the company… though the oven does have a sous vide mode.

As Scott Heimendinger explained to us at CES this past year, the oven – which was first announced at Smart Kitchen Summit 2016 – can create 100 percent humidity in the cooking cavity, which promises to keep foods juicy because there is nowhere for water inside the food to evaporate into. It’s like cooking sous vide, just without the cumbersome water bath or the need to finish cooking in another appliance. In addition to keeping precise temperatures to cook something like a whole chicken low and slow, Anova’s multi-stage cook programs will automatically drop the humidity and raise the temperature to create a crispy skin.

“This is our magnum opus,” Stephen Svajian, Co-Founder and CEO of Anova told me by phone this week. “Everything has led up to this point.”

Beyond traditional meat proteins, however, Anova’s oven can also cook everything from vegetables to crusty breads. Out of the box, the accompanying mobile app will have automatic cook programs for 100 items, with more to come.

With precise temperature controls and robust steam cooking tools, Anova seems to be carving out its own prosumer space in the connected countertop oven market. The Tovala is a cheaper ($299) and offers steam cooking, and is geared more towards Tovala’s own meals and other CPG meals like frozen entrees. The June is also less expensive ($499), and while it doesn’t have steam cooking, it does offer automated food recognition. The Brava is more expensive ($1,095), and cooks with light rather than steam, but also allows multi-zone simultaneous cooking (meat and veggies on the same tray at the same time).

While this is a new product for Anova, the company is not abandoning its sous vide circulator roots. Svajian said that Anova’s sous vide cookers have seen 100 percent year-over-year growth, partially attributable to the pandemic and people cooking from their homes more.

While purchases of the new Anova oven commence today, the devices won’t actually ship until a little bit later: Sept. 28 for North America and December 2020 for the rest of the world. Hopefully we can get our hands on a review unit to see firsthand how hot it really is.

UPDATE: A previous version of this post incorrectly listed the price of the Tovala as $349.

The Food Tech Show: An Almost All Coffee Pod: Spinn, Coffee Robots & Atomo

The Spoon team has a heavily caffeinated conversation for this week’s podcast. Here are the stories we discuss:

I also suggest new names for both Chris and Jenn (let us know what you think of Jenny Donuts).

As always, you can find The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. You can also download direct to your device or just click play below.

StoreBound’s Evan Dash Wants to Create a Housewares Brand for a New Generation

“Breville was doing incredibly well,” said Dash. “They were still fairly new. And a lot of brands were chasing them to the high end. And then you had this whole like lower end, that was just in shambles, fighting over price, price price.”

While Dash didn’t want to necessarily compete with Breville or fight over tiny margins in a brutal price competition, he saw an opportunity in between the two.

“It really left this beautiful gap in the middle that we felt like we could step into with great design, great quality, great value, and a social media strategy.”

Ten years later, he and his wife sold the company they had built after growing their revenue to $100 million by focusing on that neglected middle space with their flagship namesake brand, Dash.

While the terms of the sale to French consumer goods conglomerate Groupe SEB were not announced, a conservative revenue multiple of 3-5 times sales would easily put the acquisition within the half a billion dollar territory, which would put the deal possibly higher valuation than that of the Anova acquisition by Electrolux (but well below the Instant Brands $2 billion estimated deal size).

So how did Dash go from an idea to $100 million company in a decade? According to Evan Dash, it was in large part thanks to their focus on young consumers who didn’t feel any loyalty to the brands their parents had brought into the home.

“While everybody talks about how the ‘millennials are up and coming, but they really don’t have the money to spend,’ they absolutely do”, said Dash. “And they are so influential, they’re influencing their parents generation, even their grandparents generation and a lot of cases.”

A big part of attracting the attention of those customers was through the use of social media, primarily Instagram. According to Dash, that early emphasis on Instagram was influenced by his own kids.

“They were showing the way that they could build momentum,” said Dash. “And one of them had a sports page, and he was editing jerseys of doing jersey swaps of players. And he had 10,000 followers.”

Beyond speaking to younger consumers through social media, much of the focus by Dash was creating products that not only looked different than those he and Rachel had grown up with, but were designed to be more user-centric.

“We tended to look at products with fresh eyes,” said Dash. “For example, we launched a two slice toaster early on and my head designer for toasters came to me and they said, ‘Hey, Cuisinart has one through six on their control, and KitchenAid has one through seven on their control. Can we just say light, medium, dark, defrost and keep warm?’

Armed with the resources of a company like Groupe SEB, Dash doesn’t have any plans to slow down. The company will expand into products that focus on circular economy, and Dash also hinted at plans for bigger products like refrigerators.

Spoon Plus subscribers can read the full transcript of my interview with Dash or watch the full interview below. If you’d like to learn more about Spoon Plus, you can do so here.

Update to June Oven App Let’s You Check Cook Programs Remotely

June, makers of the eponymous connected countertop oven, released some new features to its mobile app last week that add remote functionality, including one to help you shop for June-ready food.

The new app features access to all of the June automated cook programs. So if you’re at the store and wondering if the June has an automated cook program for asparagus and/or frozen waffle fries, you can quickly check your phone (the answers are yes and no, respectively).

For a June owner (like myself), this is actually pretty useful. I’m not a great cook and am pretty reliant on the June for meal prep. For example, knowing what type of fish the June automatically cooks would definitely influence my buying decisions while standing in the seafood section of my store.

The other remote feature that June released that makes less sense to me is the ability to remotely start a cook program. The new functionality allows you to start a cook program from your phone, but it doesn’t work unless the food is in the June. This raises the question, why do you need to use your phone to start a cook program when you are standing in front of the oven putting your food in it? And why would I even want to start up my oven when I’m not around? I’m sure there are edge cases, but it still seems odd.

In a somewhat counter intuitive manner, the June has actually become more useful during this pandemic. You’d think being stuck at home would mean I have more time for cooking, but between working from home (i.e., office hours are kind of all hours) and nice weather, I don’t really want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. This will probably be doubly so once school and remote-learning for my son start up again next month and there are even fewer hours in the day.

Given all that, one feature request I would like June to fulfill is for the oven to automatically and frequently clean itself thoroughly.

As Buffets and Hot Bars Close Down, LeanPath Launches New Mobile Solution

LeanPath today announced a new mobile version of its product that helps fight food waste in commercial kitchens. The new LeanPath Go is an item-based mobile tracking system that the company claims was specifically designed for the changes COVID-19 has brought to food operators, namely the shutting down of buffets and hot bars.

Typically, LeanPath’s product offerings use a combination of food scale, camera and cloud computing to help combat waste in high-volume food operations like cafeterias. Kitchen staff puts pre-consumer (i.e., to be served) food on the scale. The camera then snaps a picture of that food and sends the photo to LeanPath for analysis. LeantPath categorizes the reason for the waste (food was burnt, or spoiled, etc.) so that kicthens can better understand why food is getting thrown out and from that information train their staff to reduce waste.

All that, however, was before COVID-19.

Now, the global pandemic has shut down high-volume food operations like cafeterias and even hot bars in grocery stores. Instead of leaving big trays of food out all day long for hundreds of people to interact with, restaurants and grocers are turning more towards pre-packaged to-go items. To adapt, the new LeanPath Go system has ditched the food scale in favor of a mobile device.

From the LeanPath blog post announcing the new system:

Leanpath Go measures waste on an “each” basis when the unit and unit cost are distinct. A pre-packaged turkey sandwich with chips and a pickle spear, for example, is a single unit with a cost-of-goods already assigned to it. Leanpath Go’s picture-based interface allows the user to tap to track one item, or tap-and-hold for fast, multi-item tracking.

LeanPath’s new system then can help identify which items are selling (or not), and the costs associated with making that item so operators can better manage their inventory.

LeanPath isn’t the only company offering high-tech tools to fight food waste. Winnow and Phood both offer similar AI-enabled systems that use a scale and camera to automatically identify food waste in large food service operations.

In today’s crazy, unpredictable world, getting a handle on food waste and by extension the food budget, is something restaurants and other foodservice companies can actually control. And given the thin margins restaurants operate on in good times, being able to control food costs during this downturn could certainly help keep the lights on longer.

Connected Compost: Vitamix Launches an At-Home Device to Turn Food Scraps Into Soil Nutrients

Vitamix is the latest appliance-maker to address the issue of food waste in the consumer kitchen. The company today announced the launch of its Vitamix FoodCycler FC-50, a device that turns food scraps into additives for soil consumers can then use in their gardens. 

The device itself is compact enough to fit on a kitchen countertop. As the explainer video below shows, food scraps go into a portable bucket, which, when full, goes into the FoodCycler device. The user then simply attached the lid and hits the power button, and the device agitates the scraps into a compound that can be used as soil additive:  

Introducing the Vitamix® FoodCycler® FC-50!

Vitamix says the entire process can be done in four to eight hours, and works on not just produce but also meat and dairy items. A carbon filter built into the device gets rid of methane gases and odors.

The device is available now for $399.95, including a three-year warranty. 

Vitamix is positioning the device as an alternative to composting, which remains challenging to a lot of consumers. At-home compost piles require quite a bit of time and maintenance. They can also attract rodents, and most guides tell you to avoid putting meat and fatty foods in your pile (see: rodents). Some cities provide bins for compost scraps that are picked up on a weekly basis just like trash or recycling, but that’s not yet a widespread practice outside major cities.

U.S. households waste roughly 76 billion pounds of food per year. And with more people now staying home to cook and eat, it wouldn’t be surprising if that number went up in the future.

The key is to help consumer break longstanding behaviors and habits around simply throwing scraps in the garbage bin or down the drain, and the painstaking nature of traditional composting is not likely to do that on a widespread basis. The seeming ease-of-use of Vitamix’s latest device could be instrumental in helping consumers change some of those behaviors.