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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Connected Kitchen

Thermomix Takes High-Touch Sales Method Virtual Amid Surging COVID-19 Usage

If the Thermomix sales process were a recipe, it’d feature lots of product demos, in-home mixers and healthy smidges of handshaking and pep talks sprinkled in.

Throw in a pandemic, though, and suddenly you’re left with a recipe bereft of its primary ingredient: in-person sales.

I caught up with the CEO of Thermomix North America Kai Schäffner and the VP of consumer experience Ramona Wehlig to talk about how a company famous for direct sales model has been faring at a time when people can’t get together.

According to Schäffner, the company has had to move entirely to virtual sales during the pandemic, a move that wasn’t all that difficult since it was something they’d been thinking about doing for some time.

“We were planning to make a major move next year towards virtual sales,” said Schäffner. “Coronavirus decided for us. So we took two to three weeks to move all North America to virtual. We started in Canada and the US, and are now fully virtual in Mexico.”

The virtual consultations are available by appointment via the website and, like so many meetings nowadays, are conducted using platforms like Zoom.

The company is also using cooking classes, with some led by regional managers on Zoom and also Facebook Live to reach a national audience. Below is a Thermomix demo on how to make keto friendly biscuits.

This transition to a virtual sales process comes amid a worldwide surge in usage for those Thermomixes already in homes.

“Usage has been rising from 30% to 100% depending on the country,” said Wehlig, “We have seen the highest increase in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Poland where usage has been doubling.”

Usage of the multicooker’s digital recipe platform, Cookido, has also surged, with 2.3 million daily cooking sessions during the quarantine period.

With quarantines starting to come to an end and many places around the globe slowly trying to resume some level of normalcy, I asked Schäffner if the company would get back to doing in-home sales consultations and he said yes, slowly, but it would be ultimately up to the comfort level of the sales consultants and prospects.

“It’s a choice,” he said, but admitted the in-home experience will always be better.

“The experience is totally different. The testing, the feeling, the touching. All of those points you can do better in your home.”

“Cooking,” said Schäffner, “is about tasting.”

Smart Oven & Food Delivery Startup Tovala Raises $20 Million Series B To Fund Growth

Tovala, the Chicago-based smart oven and meal-delivery startup, announced today it has raised a $20 million in Series B funding.

The round, led by agrifood venture capital firm Finistere Ventures, follows $9 million in Series A funding, bringing the company’s total funding close to $40 million.

It’s an interesting time for Tovala to raise such an impressive B round, coming during a pandemic where many venture firms have refocused their efforts on stabilizing existing portfolio investments and large corporate investment arms have either dialed back or outright eliminated venture initiatives.

But while the pandemic has chilled many industries, Tovala has only seen business accelerate the last few months in part due to its position at the intersection of two markets benefitting from quarantine-induced cooking: countertop home cooking appliances and home food delivery.

As we’ve noted here at the Spoon, the combination of stay-at-home orders and restaurant dine-in shutdowns led to an explosion in home cooking activity, which led to countertop home cooking equipment sales growth that was at multiples of normal industry volumes.

But according to Rabie, who I caught up with last week to discuss their latest funding, while Tovala has experienced strong growth during the pandemic, their business had actually started taking off in the second half of 2019.

“The business has been growing really fast for nearly a year now,” said Rabie. “The investors took comfort in the fact that this wasn’t a COVID trend where our business took off and might go away when normalcy returns, but actually the opposite. Business was booming pre-COVID, COVID accelerated that growth, and we believe it will accelerate adoption after COVID as people build new habits.”

Since Tovala started shipping a few years ago, I asked him why business took off last year. According to Rabie, the main difference is they changed how they talked about the product with their customers.

“We went through this exercise over the first half of 2019 to rebrand the company and better speak to our core customer,” said Rabie. “If you come to our website today versus a year ago, it looks like night and day, it’s different messaging, different photography, different videography, different user experience, same core product, just marketed differently.”

After Rabie and Tovala spent time talking to their key customers who used the Tovala multiple times per week, they realized the company’s value was in helping to solve the problem of weeknight dinner. They also realized they weren’t an oven company so much as a service company.

“The oven is the vehicle to access that food but most of our customers are not really in the market for an oven. It was kind of a lightbulb moment.”

After the rebrand, the company has seen an increase in annualized revenue of 300 percent since September of last year. In some ways, Tovala has been the little smart kitchen company that could, continuing to grow and raising more funding as other, more high profile companies, have struggled.

I asked Rabie why Tovala has succeeded when others haven’t.

“A lot of companies haven’t made it and I think there’s a lot of reasons why,” said Rabie. “The first reason is (you need to be) super clear on the problem you’re solving and making sure it’s a real problem.”

He also said that while he thinks a recurring revenue business is necessary nowadays, it can’t just be an afterthought.

“Whatever that subscription component is, it has to be inherent to the product and it has to make a lot of sense.”

Tovala plans to use the new funding round to increase staff, expand production capabilities and fuel growth. And while Rabie indicated they will build on top of their current technology, he made it clear the funding won’t largely be sunk into developing a next-generation oven.

Makes sense for an oven company that isn’t really an oven company.

If you’re a Spoon Plus subscriber, you can see my full interview with David Rabie discussing his latest funding round here.

Rise Gardens Raises $2.6M in Fresh Funding for Its At-Home Hydroponics Platform

Chicago-based startup Rise Gardens has raised $2.6 million in seed funding for its indoor grow system, according to TechCrunch. The round was led by True Ventures. 

Rise is one of a growing number of companies making self-contained indoor farms designed not for mass production of leafy greens, but for the average person’s home or apartment. The hardware-software system looks like a piece of furniture, requires minimal setup by the user, and is controlled via a smartphone app. In theory, at least, that means you don’t need a degree in agricultural studies or even a good track record with gardening to grow herbs and lettuces for your own personal meals.

That’s where the Rise Gardens app comes into play. When we spoke in January of this year, Rise’s Head of Product and Strategy, Diego Blondet, explained how the app automates tasks in the growing process a farmer would normally do, such as calculating the temperature of the farm, determining nutrition and pH levels, and figuring out when to water. Rise’s app works with a sensor that automates those calculations and notifies users when it’s time to water or feed their plants.

Blondet also said he believes automated indoor farming will make its way into the design of most kitchens at some point in the future. In fact, that’s already happening, with 2020 so far being a year when startups and large appliance-makers alike have unveiled indoor farming devices designed for the average home. Seedo, Verdeat, the Planty Cube, LG, and GE are all on that list. 

As The Spoon’s Publisher Michael Wolf pointed out not long ago, the COVID-19 pandemic could accelerate average folks’ adoption of indoor farming. The recent panic buying spree reminded us that grocery store supplies aren’t infinite, and that there are glaring issues with our current food supply chain. As Mike said:

“As the coronavirus has forced all of us to think more about our food supply, some consumers have gone beyond just buying a little extra food to store away. Now they are thinking about how we could ensure access to food independent of breakdowns in the system.”

Rise Gardens’ founder Hank Adams told TechCrunch that since shelter-in-place orders landed in the U.S., the company has seen a 750 percent increase in sales. 

Heads of lettuce won’t feed a family of four, of course, but according to Adams, Rise looks at itself as more of a supplement to your weekly groceries, rather than a replacement. Which is, frankly, one of the more honest takes on indoor vertical farming, an industry that’s often been praised as being the future of agriculture but still can’t grow a root vegetable. 

Since leafy greens are difficult to ship because of their delicate nature, they’re an obvious area for vertical farming to target. Few at-home systems currently allow for the volume of greens the average family, or even the average person, would need in a given week. Since Rise’s system is a little bigger as well as modular (you can add shelves to it over time), it could provide a good blueprint for what at-home vertical farms should look like when they start to become the norm in kitchen design.

Spark Grill Wants to Improve Charcoal Grilling. Will Grillers Go For Its Proprietary Charcoal System?

Memorial Day often marks the start of grilling season, and, like most Americans, I’m ready to fire up the barbie after being stuck inside for most of the past two months.

I’m currently using a standard gas grill but lately have been thinking about adding charcoal to my backyard cooking arsenal, which is why I was intrigued when I heard about the Spark Grill. The Spark, which just opened up for preorders this week, looks to essentially add the precision heating capability and ease-of-use of gas to a charcoal grill.

Here’s what Chris wrote about the Spark after the Boulder-based company announced its eponymously-named first product:

The stylish grill ditches the lumps of briquets for a single, flat charcoal “Briq,” and uses a series of stoking and cooling fans for precision temperature control.

The Spark is capable of getting temperatures between a low 200 degrees all the way up to a ripping hot 900 degrees. The grill also has an accompanying mobile app that lets you monitor the temperatures of your cooking cavity and the food you’re cooking.

Anyone who’s tasted food grilled over charcoal would agree the flavor is generally better, but I’ve stayed away mostly because charcoal is more work and I’m pretty lazy when it comes to my backyard cooking.

But from the looks of it, the Spark makes charcoal grilling as easy as gas. This ease-of-use is made possible by the grill’s unique charcoal “Briqs”, which are single-use sheets of charcoal made for the Spark. A standard Briq lasts for about an hour, though the company has indicated they will also have “Quick Briqs”, which go for 30 minutes for the mid-week quick grill, and are working on “slow and low” Briqs, which will go for a couple hours at smoking temperatures.

In short, the Spark presents a tradeoff: gas-like ease and precision with charcoal, but you have to use what is a proprietary charcoal system. I’ve become mostly resistant to hardware that is captive to a single-source for its consumables, but I think I’d be ok with the Spark and its Briq system for a couple of reasons.

First, the company’s FAQ says, technically, one can use regular charcoal with the Spark. This gives me some comfort that my grill wouldn’t be (ahem) “bricked” if the Spark stopped making Briqs for some reason.

The second reason is the company seems well-positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for home grills in a market slightly underserved with innovative new products. As we’ve learned recently with PicoBrew, startups tend to go out business, but it appears there’s strong early demand for the Spark, which helps alleviate (at least for the time being) concerns I would have about going all-in with a startup selling a proprietary consumable.

So while some traditional charcoal devotees might bristle at the idea of a proprietary system, I think there will be enough folks like myself interested in what looks to be an easier way to grill with charcoal to take at least take a look at the Spark.

The product isn’t cheap with a $949 sticker price, but if you hurry you can get in on the third drop (the first two sold out) and snap one up for $799.

Botrista Raised $4M Seed Round for its Cloud-Connected Drink Machine

Botrista, which makes the automated, cloud-connected drink dispensing DrinkBot, raised $4 million in Seed funding earlier this year, which has not been previously reported. Botrista Co-Founder and CEO, Sean Hsu shared the news with The Spoon by phone this week, and said the company has raised $4.55 million to date.

For those in need of a refresher, here’s how we described Botrista when covering them last August:

Drinkbot is a hardware/software solution for restaurants looking to expand their drink options. The dispensing hardware connects to a library of hundreds of drink recipes (mocktails, juices, fusion teas, etc) in Botrista’s cloud, and restaurants can choose anywhere from 6 – 20 drinks they want to serve at a given time.

In addition to giving restaurants a single machine that could dispense all kinds of mocktails, one of the hooks with the service was that the actual DrinkBot was free. Restaurants buy the ingredients through Botrista and pay per drink ($1.40 – $1.90 each).

Hsu told me that the company’s model has evolved somewhat. The hardware is still free, but now there is a monthly service fee associated with the device in order to maintain it.

According Hsu, Botrista’s free hardware model is paying off. He says that the company now has 20 customers across Northern California, and that the model has been able to generate a profit. But Botrista, like everything else on the planet, was negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The first month was horrible,” Hsu said, “Because our main customers are restaurants.” But, he said that many of their restaurants adapted with delivery and brought some of that business back. “We got almost 40 percent of our business back,” Hsu said.

Given what’s happened with the restaurants and their uncertain future, Hsu said that Botrista has accelerated its self-service option. This new line of business would be for offices that want to offer employees fresh juices. While this could be a nice perk for employees, there are bigger, more existential questions about the role of actually working in an office going forward as well.

While it remains to be seen exactly what dining out (or office work) will look like, Botrista’s low up-front cost model and fresh capital could help it weather the coronavirus upheavals.

The Zega is A Pot That Keeps Cooking Even After You Turn Off the Stove

Do we really need another cooking pot for our food?

If you had asked me a week ago, I would have said we’re good. After all, there’s the Instant Pot, which has become my weeknight workhorse during the pandemic for cooking everything from stew to rice to dumplings. Then there’s the hero of the potluck, the slow cooker, still making us happy with meatballs and party dips after all these years.

But then I saw the Zega on Indiegogo and it had me wondering if I could fit another cooking pot into my life. Zega makes what it terms “walkaway cookware,” which is pretty much just what it describes: cookware you can start a meal in and leave it (or even take it with you).

The Zega uses a design similar to that of a Yeti mug or a Thermos — double-walled thermal insulation — which allows it to maintain a high temperature for a long period of time even after you take the device off the stove. You put your food in, heat it up, turn off the heat, and the food continues to cook.

Hence the “walkaway” label.

While my Instant Pot and crockpots cover me for pretty much any pot-based meal I want to cook, I was considering adding the Zega to the repertoire for a couple of reasons. First, it saves energy. Not having to have an appliance plugged in for a few hours while I cook just seems more efficient.

I also like the walkaway aspect. Whether you’re an adult with young kids or you just want to run errands while the evening meal is cooking, this idea makes sense to me.

The Zega comes in two styles: connected and analog. The actual Zega pot is the same cookware, and it’s the knob that determines if you have a connected or analog version. You can see how each looks below.

The Zega app asks you whether you have a connected or analog version and gives you specific instructions tailored for each. If you have an analog version, you’re instructed to cook food to a certain temperature using the analog knob (“cook over high heat until the temperature gauge reaches the red zone”). The connected version remotely monitors the cooking and will send you notifications when a meal is done.

Now of course, this is a product that is available via Indiegogo and, as with any crowdfund campaign, deserves all the usual caveats. But from what I can see, the product seems well on its way towards shipping.

Before they had sent the product to Indiegogo, the team raised $550,000 on equity crowdfunding platform Venturecrowd. In my view, raising money from investors to build out manufacturing capabilities and funding the initial production run is the right order of things. Hardware campaigns often go wrong when founders raise funds from backers who want a product and then realize they don’t have enough money to actually build out their manufacturing line.

The company’s Indiegogo campaign, which has raised $69,000 as of this writing, says the products will be manufactured in July and delivered to backers in August, all of which sounds right if you assume the company used its equity funding to lock in manufacturing and has it ready to go.

Will “walkaway cookware” become its own new category? Too soon to tell, but the founders hope so. In their investment prospectus on Venturecrowd, the company forecasts the Zega could hit $3 million in sales this year and $12 million by 2022.

We’ll see. For now, I just hope they ship since I ended up backing the product, which is saying a lot from a guy who’s gotten pretty jaded at this point with hardware crowdfunding (hello, Spinn).

You can watch the Zega intro reel below:

Zega Intelligent Cookware

Johnny Grey on the Post-COVID Kitchen: No Cabinets, Bigger Pantries, More Pleasure

With COVID keeping many of us at home, kitchens are taking on a bigger role than ever before. They’re not just the place we cook meals; they’re also our offices, a place to teach kids homework, the background of our Zoom video calls as we cook along with family.

Considering we’ve long considered the kitchen the heart of the home, it’s no surprise that they’re shifting as we spend more and more time homebound. But how will the kitchen transform to better suit our new needs during quarantine?

To answer that question we turned to Johnny Grey, a British design leader specializing in — you guessed it — kitchens. Today Grey (and a few surprise guests) joined us for our latest Spoon Virtual Event, titled The Future of Kitchen Design in a Post-COVID19 World. He talked about some of the constants of kitchen design, how to embrace the DIY, and how the kitchen is a sort of “3D timepiece.” Here are a few of the highlights:

Fewer cabinets, more pantries
If there’s one part of conventional kitchen design that Grey absolutely hates, it’s cabinets. He thinks they take up too much space in the core of the kitchen itself, which should be a more social space.

In fact, Grey’s overarching goal with kitchen design seems to be to make it a more pleasant space for gathering. To that end, he’s a big fan of kitchen islands (or peninsulas), ideally ones with adjustable heights that can go from a bar space to a dining table.

When asked what he thought we could learn from the past, Grey answered in one word: pantries. He likes a walk-in pantry because you can see things in front of you — like all those bulk bags of dry goods you bought — and you don’t have to rely on dreaded cabinets to store everything.

Where does smart tech fit in?
For Grey, smart tech does have a role to play in kitchens of the future. Specifically when it comes to two things: precision and safety. Grey also emphasized that kitchen technology can help generations age in place. If individuals can cook for themselves, he theorizes that they won’t have to move to assisted living facilities as quickly — thus keeping them home for longer.

Photo: Innit and Sharp

The kitchen as a timepiece
During the virtual event Grey unveiled a new concept he’s been working on. Called the Evening Kitchen, he explained that the kitchen has multiple different lives during each 24-hour cycle. During the day it may be an area for quick meal prep, but in the evening it morphs into a bistro, a nightclub, or even a quiet living room, depending on the circumstances. Grey calls the kitchen a sort of “3D timepiece.”

For that reason, the evening kitchen must look different than the kitchen of daytime. Grey talks about the power of lighting, which gives intimacy, as well as smell and music to transform the space. If you’re curious you can watch his video explaining the concept here.

Especially now, embrace joy
Especially now, kitchens should be a place of joy. “It should be a pleasure to use your kitchen,” Grey said. To make it pleasurable, designers should think about touch, ease of movement, and even color. They could set up places to set a chair in the sun. Consumers themselves can do a lot to improve their kitchen. “Embrace the DIY,” Grey told the audience.

Grey also urged listeners not to put too much pressure on themselves to de-clutter, especially now that the kitchen table is also a coworking space and/or classroom. “It’s not really how people can live,” he said.

Overall, it was a fascinating conversation and — bonus — you get to enjoy Grey’s soothing British accent. You can watch the full video below.

Kitchen Design in a Post-COVID World: A Conversation with Kitchen Designer Johnny Grey

Finally, don’t forget to mark your calendar for our next event on May 21st 10am PT, when Gingko Bioworks program director Sudeep Agarwala will talk about fermentation as a food tech platform.

Here’s How People Are Using Their Instant Pots During Quarantine

By now we’ve all read about how people have changed their eating and cooking habits during the quarantine. But how exactly are they using their Instant Pots, arguably the runaway countertop cooking success story of the last few years, and the first cooking gadget many millennials ever purchased on their own?

To find out, I decided to check in with the maker of the Instant Pot appliance and they shared some data on exactly how people are using their multicookers ever since the pandemic forced the entire world to stay home and start cooking.

One of the big things that changed is the cyclicality of the normal cooking week. In a typical non-pandemic week, Sunday is the biggest day for Instant Pot by a substantial margin, with 25% off all cooking activity occurring on the day of rest.

During quarantine, cooking days have become more evenly distributed as people are home pretty much all the time and Sunday only accounts for 17% of cooking activity. Conversely, Friday, which normally represents the weekly cooking activity nadir, has jumped from 9% of all cooking activity to 13% during the quarantine.

Apparently you can make bread with your Instant Pot (who knew?), and just like with pretty much every other cooking device, the multifunction cooker has seen a sharp increase in loavemaking. The chart above shows how total searches for bread recipes jumped 700% right as the US went into social distancing in early March. Interestingly, this increase is almost identical to the 800% jump in breadmaker sales that happened at the same time.

The search for comfort has also been well-documented. That embrace of more carb-centric food has meant a significant drop in vegan and vegetarian diets, where searches dropped 82% by the week after social distancing had been announced.

And it wasn’t just plant-forward diets that took a hit during coronavirus, as Keto-centric recipes saw a 70% drop in the searches in the same time period.

The big question is will all of these forced changes brought on by the jarring impact of a forced quarantine stick around? My guess is some of the behavior change will have some staying power beyond summer as consumers adjust to lower overall incomes and continue to cook at home more as they head back to work (even at reduced or moderated schedules), but that we will see (and already are seeing) some partial snap-backs to behaviors and routines that were in place before the quarantine.

I Attended a Techstars Virtual Demo Day and It Was Actually Pretty Good

One of the hardest parts for me personally about COVID-19 has been watching my son lose a big part of a senior year in high school. Daily zoom lectures are no replacement for the camaraderie and celebration of wrapping up twelve years of a primary school education, and the cancellation of graduation ceremonies is a particularly difficult pill to swallow for young adults and their families who’ve waited a lifetime to cheer the receiving of a diploma.

I imagine those participating in startup accelerators may be experiencing a similar feeling. While it may not be the same as replacing the culmination of twelve years of primary education, the 12 or so weeks spent in an accelerator are intense and life-changing for all involved and, like with my son’s high school, many of those days and the final “graduation” have been swapped out for virtual facsimiles.

Which is why I decided to attend the recent BSH Appliances/Techstars Future Home Demo Day. I’d had the chance to attend the “graduation” of the first cohort of this same accelerator in person a year ago in Munich, so I figured I’d have the proper context to see how this virtual demo day compared to the real thing.

The accelerator cohort spent the first six weeks together in Munich, but the decision was made in mid-March to send everyone home and conduct the rest of the accelerator time virtually, including this final virtual demo day. Last year, each of the 10 groups of founders packed into a Munich movie theater and, over the course of the next couple hours, gave polished pitches about their companies as friends, mentors and potential investors cheered them on.

Curie London cofounder Dan Tang describes her startup via Zoom

This year, the event was held via (you guessed it) Zoom, where an initial kick off with comments from the accelerator organizers, and from there each founder would give a quick description of their company. The fuller pitches, the ones that essentially replaced the ones given at demo day in Munich, were pre-recorded so they would, as BSH’s accelerator organizer Tibor Kramer explained, “avoid any issues with streaming.”

The inital kickoff in Zoom was pretty fun. Despite presenting from their own homes virtually, I could sense the founders and the accelerator organizers participating really were happy to see each other and they all cheered each other on and fondly called each other by their nicknames when each took over and gave a brief intro to their company.

At last year’s event, many in the audience held a glass of wine or a beer in hand as they cheered along the founders from their seats. This year, many of the founders and accelerator participants cheered each other along with a celebratory beer or glass of wine as they sat in front of their computers.

Attendees file into a Munich movie theater for the Future Home 2019 Demo Day

After the demo day kickoff, attendees were encouraged to spend the next hour watching the pre-recorded pitches and then drop into private web video chats with each founder team to ask questions and congratulate them. BSH invited me to drop into a few of these meetings and ask questions so I did.

In total, I dropped in to meet four of the founder teams individually and each one seemed excited about graduating and the future despite the obvious differences in today’s landscape. Some admitted that there were definitely some challenges with going virtual, with a couple pointing to the time zone differences as the biggest struggle for them as they tried to participate remotely during Munich business hours from places as far-flung as Bangalore.

“One big change was time zone management,” said Saakshi Jain, cofounder of Zelish a kitchen and meal planning app startup. “We are in a very different time zone that everyone else and it was very late for us.”

Another big difference was the loss of some of the exchanges that are only possible in-person.

“When you’re there with the other founders you really build this strength with the cohort that is hard to replicate in a virtual setting,” said Mihai Hogea, cofounder of Pepper, a voice-powered nutrition & diet management startup. Hogea gave an example of how the accelerator organizers took his cofounder (and brother) Andrei to some Munich brewhouses to celebrate his 30th birthday.

Overall, however, I found my first accelerator virtual demo day enjoyable and pretty informative. I was able to spend more time with each founder I wanted to chat with and felt I found out more about their companies than I would have in an in-person setting, in part because I was able to ask them questions and take some notes on my computer which, it goes without saying, would have been somewhat awkward in-person at a Munich movie theater.

For the founders, I think they also found it enjoyable, but I still think they would have preferred to be drinking beer in Munich. All of them told me the first six weeks spent in person really allowed them to bond and helped make the final half of the accelerator more productive and enjoyable, despite being virtual.

For future accelerators, I imagine the same success will depend somewhat on how much in-person time the cohort gets. And, hopefully next year, the third cohort of this accelerator will be able to get together in Munich and pitch their companies in a dark Munich movie theater.

Attention Nana and Pop-Pop: Facebook Portal Adds Recipe App SideChef

Over the past few years, the Amazon Echo Show has become extremely popular as a smart assistant for the kitchen, allowing consumers to quickly access recipes, watch videos, and connect to smart devices.

The Facebook Portal, on the other hand, has largely languished since its release in late 2018 as consumers resisted adding a video-enabled device to their homes from a company that has proven an unreliable steward of their privacy.

However, with the arrival of COVID-19, it seems like the Portal may finally be getting a little traction from its most reliable demographic (seniors) as many of the homebound silver-haired set looks for ways to connect with family during quarantine-times. And now, they can get in on some of that cooking action, too, as Portal added the SideChef smart recipe app to its store last week.

From the SideChef announcement:

SideChef’s signature “smart recipe” format ensures a seamless cooking experience for home cooks of all skill levels with its easy-to-follow guided video recipes, which has been adapted to also fit the screen size for Portal devices.

While the cooking guidance on a kitchen screen is a nice feature to have, I suspect it may be the integration with AmazonFresh that might be a bigger selling point for seniors. My own 70-something mom started using online grocery for the first time during the pandemic, and I’m sure she’d love to add items to her shopping list and order while working in the kitchen.

While the Portal does have Alexa built-in, I’m not sure if the Portal’s Alexa integration connects to Amazon’s delivery service via SideChef (SideChef does work with Alexa on native Amazon devices). If that is the case, it might just the recipe to sell my own Alexa-loving mom on putting a Portal in the kitchen.

For SideChef, Facebook is yet another partner in a long list of integrations for the guided cooking and smart kitchen app over the past few years including Samsung’s Bixby, Amazon Fresh (as mentioned), and GE/Haier to name a few.

According to SideChef, the app is available now for the Portal Mini, Portal, and Portal+.

Amazon to Make Food Network Kitchen’s Video Cooking Classes Free on Fire Devices

If you’ve been stuck in a quarantine meal rut and want to learn how to cook something fresh and exciting, Amazon has some good news for you. Variety reports Amazon announced today that it is giving Food Network Kitchen to all Fire TV and Fire Tablet users in the U.S..

Launched last fall, Food Network Kitchen features live and on-demand cooking classes from its roster of celebrity chefs including Bobby Flay, Rachel Ray and Guy Fieri. A subscription to the service normally runs $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year.

If you’re among the more than 40 million active Fire TV or Tablet users however, Amazon is footing that bill — for a year, anyway. The e-commerce behemoth is paying Discovery, which owns Food Network, for all the subscriptions.

Food Network Kitchen has more than 2,300 on-demand cooking classes, but had to halt production of its live offerings because of the COVID-19 outbreak. Variety writes that the live shows will return at the beginning of May, though they will be shot in the home kitchens of its celebrity chefs, rather than in a studio.

In addition to cooking content, Food Network Kitchen also has shoppable recipes for an e-commerce component and will be launching a meal planning feature soon. Ingredients for meals can be purchased directly through the app via Amazon Fresh, Peapod or Instacart. Though given how sheltering in place has caused a national surge in grocery e-commerce (Amazon now waitlists new Fresh customers and Instacart is adding another 250,000 of its shoppers to keep up with demand), this feature may not be useful to consumers until things settle out.

One curious bit about today’s news is that reports only mention that the deal covers Fire TV and Fire Tablet users. Food Network Kitchen is also available on Amazon’s Alexa devices that feature a screen, like the Echo Show. Are those devices not included? We reached out to Discover to find out more. UPDATE: A Discovery rep told us that the offer will be extended to Echo Show customers later this year.

A Food Network exec told Variety that its app has been downloaded more than 5 million times since launch, and that both viewtime and subscriptions are up 50 percent each during this coronavirus lockdown. Free access to Food Network’s celebrity chefs combined with Amazon’s massive promotional capabilities should be a huge shot in the arm for the service.

If Discovery wanted to make even more of an impact, it would fast track a show about making bread.

From Arduino to TinkerCAD, a DIY Checklist to Help You (Yes, You!) Build the Next Great Kitchen Gadget

There is something liberating about being forced to shelter in place. I mean, there is a lot of stress that goes along with it too, but there’s no pressure to go out and enjoy the world or socialize when neither of which are allowed.

All of which is to say that if you’ve ever had a great idea for a business, now could be the time to start on it. And if you’ve ever had a great idea for a kitchen gadget (or any piece of hardware, really), then you should definitely check out the “Building The Future Kitchen: Rapid Prototyping Your Way to A Next-Generation Kitchen Product” virtual fireside chat we held this week with Seattle Food Geek, Scott Heimendinger and Larry Jordan Jr.

Seriously, watch the video because not only will it inspire you, but Heimendinger and Jordan also provide super practical advice, highlighting low and no-cost tools available to any budding inventor. Best of all, as the two point out, you don’t need a computer science degree to do it.

Here’s a brief checklist of the tools and materials they talk about that could help you prototype the next amazing kitchen device:

  • Arduino‘s cheap micro controllers, buttons and sensors easily add functionality to your device
  • Raspberry Pi‘s simple single board computers and accompanying “HATs” for computer capabilities
  • TinkerCAD is a browser-based hardware design tool that lets you drag-and-drop pre-made starter circuits, design housings, and download code to run Arduinos
  • EasyEDA is another browser-based design tool to help you design more complex printed circuit boards that you can even have fabricated and shipped to you
  • Shapeways is an online 3D printing service because you shouldn’t buy a 3D printer right away, especially when you don’t know what materials your device will need (plastic vs. aluminum, etc.)
  • The LoRa communication protocol is good for intra-device communication without the need to add WiFi components
  • The Things Network provides tools to create an Internet of Things application
  • Access to a CNC machine to create housing for your hardware
  • If you do want to learn how to code, Jordan likes Python for his devices and there are lots of resources online to help you learn it

Again, watch the full video for more context and information, plus, you get to see the cool things Heimendinger and Jordan are working on (a texture analyzer and big-ass connected meat smoker, respectively).

Building The Future Kitchen: Rapid Prototyping Your Way to A Next-Generation Kitchen Product

And this virtual fireside chat is just the beginning for us. The Spoon is hosting three more talks over the next month:

All of these talks are free to watch, so register for them today and follow us on CrowdCast to catch up on all virtual events we hold in the future.