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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Connected Kitchen

GE Appliances Unveils New Version of its Kitchen Hub Screen and New Cooking AI

GE Appliances, a division of Haier, today announced the newest version of its Kitchen Hub smart kitchen and ventilation system as well as new artificial intelligence (AI) technology to assist with meal planning and cooking.

The new Kitchen Hub still sports a giant 27-inch touchscreen and fan that’s mounted over your cooktop range, but now also features a built-in microwave and three different cameras: one looking down on the cooktop, one looking straight out for video chatting, and one inside the oven so you can monitor cooking either on the Kitchen Hub screen or via the accompanying mobile app.

Other features of the Kitchen Hub include built-in Google Assistant, SideChef for recipes and guided cooking, Netflix and Spotify, smart home monitoring and control and live video chat.

Those cameras built into the Kitchen Hub aren’t just for video chats and sharing photos of your homemade pho. Cameras that are built into a number of different GE Appliances will use computer vision and AI to identify food and recommend meals based on ingredients on hand (presumably with a camera built into a fridge), help detect doneness of food and even raise or lower oven temperature.

The battle for the “Kitchen Screen” has been going on for a couple of years now as appliance manufacturers look to leverage the kitchen being the center of a home as a means of making their smart ecosystems more enticing for consumers. And it looks as though in addition to big screens, having an AI solution for your cooking is the new table stakes. Yesterday, both LG and Samsung announced their new smart refrigerators, each sporting a big touchscreen and AI to help with meal planning and grocery shopping.

With its big, horizontal screen, GE Appliances’ Kitchen Hub certainly fits in with how people currently watch movies and TV on their home screens (moreso than on the narrow, vertical screen that are typically built into fridges). The addition of the microwave and ventilation to the Kitchen Hub could give it the versatility to attract consumers and become the center of the smart kitchen.

We’ll have to wait until later this year to find out. Both the Kitchen Hub and GE Appliances’ AI come out in late 2020.

CES 2020: Albicchiere is a Connected Device to Pour and Store Your Wine

Around this time next week, there will be a ton of tech journalists exhausted from CES and in need of a glass or three of wine. They should seek out the Albicchiere, a forthcoming connected wine dispenser that will be demonstrating at the show.

Made in Italy, the Albicchiere is a countertop device that pours and stores your wine. The “Albi” as the appliance is also known, brings your wine to the proper serving temperature (between 4°C to 20°C / 39.2°F to 68°F). before dispensing, so, the company claims, you get the most enjoyment out of each glass.

The Albi is launching on Kickstarter on January 21 and will cost early backers $279. The device is supposed to ship in September of 2020 (though, as with any crowdfunded hardware, caveat emptor).

At first glance, $279 seems pretty pricey for a wine dispenser, but here’s what else the Albi can do:

You can load the Albi with either your own bottled wine or special “Smart Bags” of wine the company sells itself for the device. These bags use a special patent-pending technology that keeps wine fresh in the device for up to six months, even if you’re just pouring one glass at a time, because the wine never comes into contact with oxygen. (Other wine preservation systems like Coravin, use argon gas.)

These bags of wine are reusable (though it seems like pouring your own wine into them would introduce oxygen), and the company says you can swap out bags of wine, like going from white to red during a meal, in as little as five seconds without needing to clean the machine in between.

We’ve actually seen a similar “smart bag” approach to wine containers before with the Edgar commercial wine dispenser at last year’s CES show.

The Albi has Alexa and Google Home compatibility built in, so you can ask it to pour you wine, though this functionality seems limited as you’d need to be at the machine at some point to make the glass available (the company says you could use it to have a glass of wine ready and waiting at the right temperature when you get home from work).

The built-in screen provides you with details about your wine, so you can learn more about where it’s from and other characteristics. The Albi keeps track of your wine so you know when the wine is going going bad and when you are running low. Albi can also reorder it for you.

The smart bags also make it easier to ship wine by reducing transport costs and carbon footprints through lighter packaging. Albicchiere says that it has already signed up 200 wineries that will sell their wine in Smart Bags. The cost for wine, as with buying any traditional bottle of wine, will depend on the type and brand.

We’ll definitely be taking a closer look at the Albichierre at CES next week, though we’ll save it for the end of our trip, when we will really need it.

LG and Samsung to Show Off New Food Identifying Smart Fridges at CES Next Week

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) happens in Las Vegas next week, so of course two of the largest appliance manufacturers in the world will be showing off their new smart refrigerators.

Both LG and Samsung today announced the latest iterations in their high-tech fridge lineup, both of which feature built-in artificial intelligence to automatically recognize the food inside to help you discover recipes, grocery shop, and plan meals accordingly.

LG will be showing off its new InstaView ThinQ refrigerator, which features a large, connected touchscreen that also goes transparent so you can peek inside the fridge without opening the door (a feature we at The Spoon love). The new LG fridge also uses computer vision and AI for real-time inventory of what’s inside. Based on that inventory, the LG fridge will make meal suggestions and alert homeowners when they are running low on particular items.

New Samsung Family Hub Smart Fridge

Not to be outdone, Samsung will also be showing off the newest edition of its Family Hub smart fridge. It too sports a connected touchscreen, and will use cameras and AI to identify food inside the fridge. Based off of that information it can suggest meals, or even a week’s worth of meals, through Whisk, which Samsung NEXT acquired earlier this year.

Pricing and availability details were not provided in either press release.

What corporate press releases can’t fully express is how well each of their computer vision and image recognition systems will work. Being able to identify a carton of milk isn’t that hard, but how will it handle bunches of grapes? Or a bag of carrots? We’ll see if we can get a hands-on demo while we’re at CES and see how well these new fridges can see.

Vertical Farms Will Become Key Parts of Your Grocery Store and Your Kitchen Cabinets in 2020

At this point we can expect vertical farming to play an important role in our future food system — one that goes beyond selling greens to upscale markets in gentrified urban neighborhoods. Exactly what that future role looks like is less certain as we move into 2020. Commercial-scale vertical farms, which grow millions of heads of greens in warehouses and shipping containers, still has a lot to prove in terms of economics and scalability.

While the industrial-scale model continues trying to prove itself in 2020, the place we may see the most compelling developments for vertical farming in the next year is actually in the consumer realm. E. coli outbreaks and bleached salad (among many other factors) have contributed to an uptick in consumer demand for fresher food that’s traveled fewer miles between the farm and the table. If the last year taught us anything, it’s that putting the farm is right next to your table, or at least at your local grocery retailer, is becoming a popular strategy for providing healthier, more traceable greens to consumers, and that trend will continue in 2020.

With startups, grocery stores, major appliance-makers, and others now exploring this area, some of these developments are already happening.

In your grocery store.

Many companies are now looking to shorten the supply chain between the farm and the consumer when it comes to produce. One way is to put the farm right in the grocery store. These aren’t massive facilities growing millions of heads of lettuce. Rather, they’re typically standalone, highly modular pods or units that can be set up right in the produce section. 

German startup InFarm highlighted this approach in 2019 when it partnered with Kroger to place units in 15 of the grocery retailers stores. The company also partnered with UK retailer Marks & Spencer for a similar venture in Britain. 

Another route is for farming startups to partner with major food distributors, as Square Roots has done by building farms near or on Gordon Food Service’s distribution centers. Gordon operates 175 of these across North America, and proximity to those facilities means Square Roots can get its greens distributed to a larger selection of grocery retailers.

In your kitchen cabinets. 

Indoor farms that fit in the home aren’t new. There are plenty of standalone, tabletop, or wall-mounted devices out there that let the average consumer grow greens year-round. What is new is that major appliance-makers are now exploring the possibilities of indoor farming as not another gadget for the kitchen but an integral part of that space’s design. 

We saw this recently when Miele acquired the assets to Agrilution, whose automated Plantcube farm is meant to be built right into the kitchen cabinetry. Just yesterday, LG announced it will be showing off its own in-kitchen smart farm at CES 2020 in a couple weeks.

These aren’t going to be cheap products. Plantcubes cost €2,979 (~$3,300 USD), and that doesn’t include the extra money tacked onto your energy bills each month for things like water and electricity. (LG hasn’t released pricing details yet.) Most likely, these in-cabinet farms will debut in new, single-family homes with ample amounts of space in the kitchen. As more appliance-makers develop products and team up with home retailers (IKEA, I’m looking at you), we’ll likely see the price point on these farms come down and the concept go a little more mainstream. 

The 2019 Kitchen Technology Year in Review

2019 was an action-packed year in world of food tech. Among other things, we saw an explosion in new products that promise to change what we eat, rapid change in food delivery models, and something of a slow motion food robot uprising.

The consumer kitchen also saw significant change, even if things didn’t move as fast as some would hope. As we close out the year, I thought I’d take a look back at the past twelve months in the future kitchen.

It’s An Instant Pot and Air Fryer World and We’re Just Living In It

Here’s an experiment: Next time you’re making cocktail-party conversation, ask someone about their most recent cooking gadget purchase for the home. Chances are its either an Instant Pot or an air fryer.

The above chart shows why this should come as no surprise, as it plots consumer interest in the Instant Pot and air fryer categories (as determined by Google searches) over the past five years. It also shows the seasonality of that interest (both spike during the holidays) and how air fryers have closed the gap with Instant Pot.

Regardless of how the two products perform relative to one another, the big takeaway is that the Instant Pot/pressure cooker and air fryer represent the two breakaway categories in countertop cooking over the past few years, and that trend continued strong in 2019.

Why? Because both products give consumers lots of cooking power to create a variety of meals at a low entry price point. Add in what are large and vibrant online recipe communities for both product categories, and you can see why both only became more popular in 2019.

Next-Gen Cooking Concepts See Mixed Results

Outside of pressure cookers and air fryers, 2019 was a decidedly mixed bag of results for next-gen countertop cooking concepts. June and Tovala both plugged along selling their second generation ovens, Suvie started shipping its four-chamber cooking robot and Brava’s “cook with light” oven tech sold to Middleby. But unlike the air fryer and Instant Pot, none of these new products have gone viral.

Why?

First, most of these products are fairly expensive, often coming in at $300 or above. That’s probably too high to convince enough consumers to take a chance on a new product in a new product category they don’t know much about.

Second, consumers need to better understand these new products. While I don’t expect Thermomix to replicate the success they’ve found with direct-sales in Europe in North America, there’s a reason such a premium priced product has succeeded in Europe: it has made consumer education and evangelism core to the business model.

Finally, the market has yet to see a product with just the right mix of new technology and high-value user-focused features that supercharges consumer interest. That said, there are some new products like Anova’s steam oven or the Miele Dialog’s solid state cooking (I’m told most big appliance makers are working on a similar product) that could potentially capture the imagination of consumers.

Large Appliance-Makers Continue to Dabble in Innovation

So here’s what some of the big appliance brands with resources did in 2019: Whirlpool came out of the gate fast with a lineup of new smart cooking appliances at CES 2019, including a pretty cool modular smart oven concept in the SmartOven+. Electrolux launched a new Drop-powered blender and partnered with Smarter to add machine vision and connected commerce features to its smart fridge camera platform. Turkish appliance giant Arcelik debuted a combo cooking and washing product concept under the Grundig brand.

Overall though, it wasn’t a big year for appliance-makers on the innovation front. Many of us waited for these companies to launch some of their more promising technologies, like Miele’s Dialog or BSH Appliances Pai interface, but neither effort seemed to move forward much, at least in any public way, in 2019.

A Sputtering Consumer Sous Vide Market

It was a bad year for those who make sous vide gear. In mid-year we learned that ChefSteps, maker of the Joule sous vide circulator, would be laying off a significant amount of the team after they ran into money problems. And, just a little over a week ago, one of the first consumer sous vide startups in Nomiku announced it would be shutting its doors.

Why did the consumer sous vide market lose steam? My guess the primary reason is because sous vide cooking is just too slow as an everyday or multiple-time-per-week cooking method. While some like Nomiku wanted to position the sous vide as a replacement for the microwave, it just isn’t convenient enough and requires too many steps for culinary average joes accustomed to the push-button cooking of the microwave. The reality is over time many sous vide circulators ended up stuck in the kitchen drawer.

Software Powers The Meal

At Smart Kitchen Summit 2017, Jon Jenkins said we will all someday “eat software” as it becomes more important in how we create food in the kitchen. Evidence of this was everywhere in 2019 as companies rolled out new software features to do things like cook plant-based meat to companies like Thermomix and Instant Brands betting big on software for the future.

We also saw kitchen-centric software players like SideChef, Drop and Innit loaded up on more partnerships with appliance and food brands to better tie together the meal journey, while Samsung NEXT acquired a digital recipe and shopping commerce platform in Whisk.

In short, it’s fairly obvious that for a kitchen appliance brand to survive, it’s becoming table stakes to have something of an evolved software strategy.

Amazon Continues Its Push Into Kitchen

If there’s been one takeaway from watching Amazon over the past few years, it’s that they see the food and the kitchen as an important strategic battleground. This past year did nothing to dispel this belief as the company introduced their own smart oven and continued to file weird food-related patents. Amazon also pushed forward with new delivery concepts for the home that bring together the different parts of the Amazon portfolio (voice ordering, smart home, grocery and more).

Grocery Delivery Space Race

Amazon wasn’t the only one looking to connect the smart home to grocery delivery this year. Walmart also debuted a new in-fridge delivery service called InHome. Meanwhile both companies and big grocery conglomerates like Kroger continue to invest in robotics and home delivery.

The reason for this growing interest in innovative home delivery concepts is pretty simple: more and more consumers are shopping online for groceries. Big platform players like Amazon and Google see a massive new opportunity, while established grocery players are forced to innovate to play defense.

No One Has Recreated The Success of the Keurig Model (Yet)

While much of the early focus for new kitchen startups has been on copying the Keurig model of pairing a piece of kitchen hardware with a robust consumer consumables business, unfortunately none have really been able to emulate the model for food products. There’s been no shortage of cocktail making robots, coffee, 3D food printing, chai tea and others attracted the the concept of recurring revenue that food sales bring, but as we’ve seen it’s hard to emulate the pod model approach.

Some, like Tovala, look to have had some limited success on pairing cooking hardware with food delivery, while others like Brava, Nomiku and ChefSteps weren’t able to create sustainable models. Genie and Kitchenmate are making a go of it in the office environment, while Level couldn’t and had to shut its doors earlier this year.

I expect kitchen hardware entrepreneurs to try to continue to pair food sales with products, but I expect that it will be tough sailing unless the company land upon very compelling, easy-to-use solution that turnkeys the cooking solution.

Cooking Media: A Peloton For The Kitchen Emerges

Forget Buzzfeed Tasty quick-play cooking videos. In 2019, we saw the emergence of other players providing deeper, more personalized cooking guidance that emulates what Peloton or Mirror have done with home-fitness instruction. Food Network made the biggest splash with its Food Network Kitchen concept while others like FET Kitchen are creating their own hardware platforms.

For Buzzfeed’s part, they haven’t given up on Tasty quite yet. Instead, they partnered up with Amazon to push their recipes onto the Echo Show, complete with step-by-step guidance. The combo creates essentially what is a fairly quick and easy guided cooking product.

Food Waste Reduction Comes Into Focus — Everywhere But The Home

If any place is lacking in innovation when it comes to reducing the amount of food we throw away, it’s the consumer kitchen. Sure, some startups are trying to rethink how we approach cooking by helping us to work with the food we have, while others are rethinking the idea of food storage, but innovation in home food waste reduction is lacking when compared to what we are seeing in restaurants and CPG fronts. We hope this changes in 2020.

True Home Cooking Robots Remained A Futuristic Vision in 2019

While single-function taskers like the Rotimatic did significant volume and others like Suvie positioned itself as a “cooking robot” for the home, the reality is we saw no significant progress towards a true multifunction consumer cooking robot. Companies like Sony see the opportunity to create a true home cooking robot, but for now food robots remain primarily the domain of restaurants, grocery and delivery.

Bottom line: It was an exciting year in the connected kitchen and we expect 2020 to be even more exciting. Stay tuned next week for my outlook on what to expect!

LG Will Unveil an Indoor Farm for the Consumer Kitchen at CES 2020

With CES right around the corner, the announcements are pouring in for new gadgets and products to be on display at the Las Vegas show, including those that will change the way we cook, eat, and think about our food. 

Appliance-maker LG is the latest. The company announced this week it will unveil a smart gardening appliance for the consumer kitchen at CES 2020, one that uses advanced lighting, temperature, and water control to let consumers grow greens year-round inside their kitchens.

The as-yet unnamed appliance takes many of the functions found in commercial-scale indoor farming and applies them to a device specifically made for the average consumer. Software, controlled via the user’s smartphone determines the precise “recipe” of LED lights, air, and water the plants need and when that recipe should change based on the time of day. The goal is to replicate “optimal outdoor conditions by precisely matching the temperature inside the insulated cabinet with the time of day,” according to the announcement from LG.

This kind of control means users can grow herbs and leafy greens year-round if they choose, and with considerably more ease than they would have with an outdoor garden. Not only does a controlled indoor cabinet mean no pests (or pesticides for that matter), the companion app basically offers a step-by-step guide each day for growing, monitoring, and harvesting plants. It’s not unlike the many guided cooking apps out there offering granular advice every step of the way so that experts and less experienced users alike can use the tool successfully. 

LG’s new appliance marks the company’s first foray into the indoor gardening space — and possibly a new trend for the future of the home kitchen. Up to now, smart indoor farms for consumers have been mostly standalone devices that don’t necessarily have any connection with the home’s main kitchen. From the pictures, LG’s appliance can be built right into the cabinetry and modular enough to fit many different kitchen formats. 

LG isn’t the only company exploring how to do this. At the beginning of December, appliance-maker Miele acquired the assets of Agrilution, whose Plantcube indoor vertical farm can be directly built into home kitchens.

It will likely be a long time before we see such devices become standard parts of all kitchens. That idea of building indoor farming into the design of the kitchen was a concept explored in depth at SKS 2019 this past October. It looks expensive, time consuming, and complex right now, but more major appliance-makers entering the space means we’re slowly but surely inching towards the day when the cost of such systems can come down and the average consumer might someday see at-home smart farming become a reality. 

Podcast: What Does Nomiku’s Demise Mean For Consumer Sous Vide?

Last Friday, Nomiku announced it was closing its doors.

Alongside Anova and Sansaire, the San Francisco based startup founded by Lisa and Abe Fetterman was part of an early class of consumer sous vide startups looking to democratize the high-end cooking technique through technology. Now, nearly a decade after the publication of Modernist Cuisine, only Anova is left standing (after being acquired by Electrolux) while Nomiku and Sansaire are no more. So what does it all mean?

No spoilers here! You’ll have to listen to The Spoon editor podcast to find out.

In addition to discussing the end of Nomiku and the broader meaning of it all, the Spoon editor team also discuss the following stories:

As always, you can listen to this episode of the Food Tech Show on Apple podcasts or Spotify, download directly to your device, or just click play below.

Audio Player

Newsletter: Why Blue Bottle Coffee is Like the Tesla Cybertruck

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The new Tesla Cybertruck is a polarizing vehicle. People seem to either really like or hate the triangle-shaped truck. (I’m squarely in the like side because I’ve always wanted a vehicle from Megaforce.) Tesla CEO Elon Musk is definitely a polarizing figure in his own right, but between electric cars, solar powered roof tiles, and hyperloops, Musk isn’t waiting patiently for the future to arrive. He’s shooting it full of harpoons and trying to drag it towards us right now.

I thought of Mr. Musk when I read about Blue Bottle Coffee’s big announcement last week that the coffee company was trying to make its locations have zero waste by the end of 2020. Not 2024 or 2022. But twelve months from now.

As my colleague Jenn Marston wrote, Blue Bottle is achieving this by having people bring in their own containers for coffee beans, their own reusable cups for coffee (or pay a “modest deposit” for one of Blue Bottles reusable cups), and packaging grab and go items in reusable containers.

This is a bold move that even Blue Bottle’s CEO concedes is risky. In a blog post last week announcing the change, Bryan Meehan wrote: “We are proud to announce an experiment that may not work, that may cost us money, and that may make your life a little more complicated.”

Good for him for not sugar-coating this experiment. Also kudos for pushing the plastic-free movement forward. Big companies have been doing little things to reduce their plastic waste output over the past year: Burger King phased out cheap toys in kids meals in the U.K., Live Nation banned single-use plastics at music festivals, and Ben & Jerry’s eliminated single-use plastic cups and spoons.

But Blue Bottle is going one step further and actually “inconveniencing” its customers by pulling them out of their normal routine. As Jenn wrote, the result could wind up being that busy people get pissed and take off for Starbucks. But I’m hopeful that people and other businesses will be inspired by Blue Bottle’s actions, and buy a Cybertruck-load of coffee from them.

Nomiku’s new RFID-scanning circulator

RIP Consumer Sous Vide?

Spoon Founder Mike Wolf broke the news last Friday that Nomiku, one of the early pioneers of the home sous vide movement, was shutting down all operations.

Last year Nomiku had pivoted from a hardware company to become a meal delivery service that used the company’s sous vide technology. But while growth in that sector was strong, it wasn’t enough.

As Mike pointed out, Nomiku’s demise isn’t an isolated incident:

The exit of Nomiku from the market marks the end of what has been a fairly rough of couple years for the first wave of startups in the connected cooking market. Sansaire, which started around the same time as Nomiku, shut down in February of 2018. Hestan Cue, maker of a guided cooking system, downsized its team in April, and just a few weeks later ChefSteps, another sous vide startup, had to layoff a significant portion of its team before it got acquired by Breville.

The bloom is definitely off the consumer sous vide rose at this point. The only question is whether the carnage will continue and expand into other parts of the connected cooking appliance market in 2020.

The Year in Kitchen Tech Crowdfunding

Speaking of hardware: If you are an entrepreneur looking to crowdfund an idea, may we suggest creating some gadget around beverages? I took a look back at our 2019 coverage of Kickstarter projects and there were five drink-related projects that crowdfunded more than $100,000 this year:

Mosi Tea mobile tea brewer – $458,200
uKeg Nitro cold brew coffee maker – $643,498
Stasis Glycol homebrew chiller – $184,369
Travel Decanter cocktail tumblers – $377,071
Ode coffee grinder – $609,094 (with 55 days to go in the campaign)

However, it hasn’t been all good news for the companies that made a bunch a moola on Kickstarter. Mosi Tea will miss its Dec. ship date, Stasis has encountered production issues, and some people who have received their Travel Decanters have complained about it leaking.

Crowdfunding food tech will surely continue through the next year. Hopefully those inspired by the Kickstarter successes will learn from the crowdfunding failures.

Whisk Launches Consumer Facing App That Makes Any Recipe Shoppable

Today Whisk, maker of a B2B food and cooking commerce platform that was acquired earlier this year by Samsung NEXT, announced it was launching its first consumer-facing app on both iOS and Android. The app allows consumers to take any recipe they discover online and make it into a shopping list that they can use to buy food online or take with them on a trip to the corner grocery store.

The new app includes integrations with voice assistants like Alexa and Bixby, allowing users to add ingredients or items to a shopping list with their voice. It also includes a browser extension so users can clip recipes they find on the web and turn them into shopping lists and push into online shopping carts.

Once a user converts the recipe into something shoppable, they can then choose from one of the 32 grocery commerce partners that Whisk has integrated into the app. Online grocery partners for Whisk include Walmart among others.

While there are plenty of shopping list apps out there, the ability to clip and import any recipe discovered on the web and convert it into a shopping list seems pretty useful. Add in the social/family sharing capability, and it’s like a Pinterest meets Pocket for food making.

Previously a user would use Whisk as part of the experience on a Samsung or BSH Appliances fridge or through the website of a publisher partner, but really didn’t connect directly to the brand itself. That all changes with this rollout, as Whisk becomes a consumer facing platform for the first time.

“In the past, a user would have to use Whisk through one of our publisher partners,” said Whisk founder Nick Holzherr in an interview with The Spoon. “Today, anyone can use Whisk anywhere – regardless of whether it’s a user’s own recipe or something they’ve imported from the web.”

Interestingly, while Whisk was acquired by Samsung back in March, the consumer technology giant stayed decidedly low-key when it comes to pushing its brand as part of this new consumer app push. Outside of the new app’s integration with Samsung’s Bixby, a user would be hard pressed to see any real connection to Samsung in the new Whisk offering.

Despite Samsung’s hands-off approach, I imagine Whisk will look to tap its parent company’s resources as it endeavors to get the new app into the hands of consumers. Having consumers download an app is a much bigger ask than having them use a well-know online recipe platform such as Allrecipes (one of Whisk’s publishing partners), so creating trust and enabling discovery will take work. And, once a consumer installs an app, the biggest challenge is making sure they use it.

If you’d like to try out the new Whisk app, you can find it in the following locations: iOS and Android app stores, on the web, Chrome extension, Bixby, Alexa, & Google voice assistants.

Chime Does Right By its Crowdfunding Backers, Delivers First Product Next Month

Chime is doing the right thing when it comes to asking people for money. I wish that didn’t make them stand out in the world of crowdfunding, but it does, and hopefully other Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigners will take note and learn to be more like Chime.

Chime has developed an eponymous connected countertop Chai tea maker. The device uses tea pods to precisely brew tea and heat (any kind of) milk to deliver what the company says is “authentic chai made from real tea leaves.” There’s even an accompanying mobile app so you can customize your tea and even make tea with any Chime device.

But lots of companies make products and get them crowdfunded. So what did Chime do right? Well, first of all, they are actually delivering what they promised. Going from a prototype to an actual manufactured product in the market is sadly not always a given in the crowdfunded hardware space (see: Rite Press, iGulu, HOPii). The Chime tea maker is already in production, with the first shipment set to arrive in January and the second batch of pre-orders slated for April.

But perhaps more impressive was the way Chime respected its backers. I spoke with Guarav Chawla, CEO and Founder of Chime, who told me that instead of crowdfunding his company, Chime only used the crowdfunding platform just for the product. It kept people’s money off to the side and raised investor money to run the company. “We didn’t want to take money and then if it’s late, people get impatient,” Chawla said, “So if people wanted money back, they could get it.”

I wish this was an approach more companies would take when crowdfunding hardware, as it shows a level a respect for customers and can help placate them should any problems occur.

Chime did indeed encounter production problems along the way, but instead of going back to backers and asking for more money, Guarav was able to get additional seed money from investors.

There’s just one thing Chime does that, while I won’t say it’s wrong, is unfortunate. The device uses single-serving plastic capsules to hold the tea leaves. Chawla is aware of this plastic problem, but said that there was currently no other food-grade material available to maintain the tea’s freshness. Additionally, he said, that unlike other pod brewing systems, the Chime’s tea extraction happens in a separate chamber in the device, and not the capsule. This means the capsule stays clean and can be recycled. “We haven’t found a compostable material yet. As soon as that happens, we’ll switch,” Chawla said.

Now we’ll just have to see if customers think spending that much for their chai is the right thing. People interested in the Chime can visit the Indiegogo page and pre-order a device for $199 through the end of the year for April delivery.

Instant Pot and Drop Partner for New Guided Cooking Recipe App

Instant Brands, the company behind the Instant Pot, and Drop, which makes smart kitchen software, today announced that the they have developed and launched a new Instant Pot recipe app.

Available for both Android and iOS, the new Instant Pot recipe app will feature roughly 1,000 recipes for Instant Brand appliances such as the Instant Vortex Air Fryer, Instant Ace Blender, and, of course, the full line of Instant Pot pressure cookers. The app will include step-by-step guided cooking recipes powered by Drop that adjust accordingly based on the number of people being served as well as ingredient substitutions.

One Drop feature this new Instant Pot will not have is device control. So while the Instant Pot app will walk you through the steps of making a particular recipe, it won’t allow you to, say, automatically turn on an Instant Pot from the app’s recipe. (Being at the device itself is probably a good idea for something like controlling a blender.)

Powering the Instant Pot app is another nice feather in the cap for Drop. The company announced an integration with Thermomix, another popular standalone appliance, last month. Drop also has deals with Bosch, Electrolux, GE Appliances, and LG Electronics using its software, the Instant Pot has a massive installed base of millions of appliance owners. Those appliance owners are also vociferous in Facebook groups, so if the Instant Pot app works well (or doesn’t), believe me that community won’t be shy about sharing their experience online.

The new Instant Pot recipe app launches today, those using the older version of the app will be migrated to this newer version.

Newsletter: What Comes Next for Ghost Kitchens? Plus, Third-party Delivery and At-home Agtech

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I’m not gonna lie: putting together our market map on ghost kitchens was hard. The concept as we know it is relatively new, and the lines between the different categories of ghost kitchen might be easy enough to draw in a graphic but are never as solid in real life. For example, CloudKitchens provides kitchen space but it’s also a network of virtual restaurants. Starbucks runs its own kitchens but relies on Alibaba’s Heme supermarkets to provide the space. Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash deliver food but also operate in other areas of the stack.

That overlap, though, is a big part of what makes this area of the restaurant industry such an interesting one to watch. Not only is the 2019 ghost kitchen redefining the restaurant experience as we know it, it’s also redefining the way restaurants operate, the technology they use to do that, and even what their menus offer in any given area. Fat Brands, for example, uses Fatburger locations on the West Coast to also fulfill delivery-only orders for sister brands that would normally only be available to customers in the East. 

As we head into the next year, we can expect the overlap of companies and categories to increase as more multi-unit chains try their hand at ghost kitchens, more kitchen infrastructure providers try out their own virtual restaurants, and literal mobility (kitchens on wheels) becomes more commonplace. 

Head over to The Spoon for more predictions on what comes next for ghost kitchens (RIP POS?) and to download the map. And since this is such a nascent market that changes weekly, expect more iterations of this map to hit your inbox in the future.

Third-party delivery is staying put. Sort of.
It’s no secret that consumer appetite for delivery is driving the growth of off-premises orders. And while they may be controversial, third-party services like DoorDash and Postmates are a big part of this growth.

The biggest part, by some accounts. This week, CBRE Group noted in a new report that 70 percent of delivery orders will come from third parties by 2022. That’s a no-brainer. These services provide the tech infrastructure, logistics, and actual drivers that are often too expensive for restaurants to operate on their own. Third-party delivery may be expensive for restaurants and paddling through a sea of bad press lately, but it is in many ways necessary for businesses who want (need, actually) to offer off-premises ordering for customers. 

Like ghost kitchens, this is a messy, fast-changing market whose model will continue to evolve as restaurants adopt hybrid strategies and new laws are passed regulating how these companies do business.  

At-home vertical farms: Big convenience or big expense?
If you still prefer the old-fashioned method of actually cooking food for yourself, Miele’s latest news will be of some interest. As my colleague Chris Albrecht reported this week, the German appliance-maker known for everything from washing machines to coffee systems has acquired Agrilution, a Munich, Germany-based agtech startup known for its Plantcube indoor vertical farm. 

As Chris notes, the Plantcube looks like one of those at-home wine fridges, and like any vertical farm uses software to regulate temperature, climate, water levels, and nutrient delivery to crops. The system grows a variety of leafy greens and fits right inside your existing kitchen infrastructure. 

Question is, Do people want vertical farms built into their kitchens?

Potentially.

No, setting up a grow system in your home is not as convenient as buying a bag of kale from the store. For those so inclined, though, an at-home vertical farm like Agrilution’s means being able to pick fresh, better tasting ones right out of their own cabinetry. Those living in dense urban areas, where the fire escape is the closest thing to outdoor space, could have an actual at-home garden.

First, though, we have to get over the cost hurdle. Right now, price points of various at-home vertical farming systems go for anywhere between roughly $500 (Ponix Systems) and $3,000-plus (Miele). What we don’t have is abundant data on how much these farms cost consumers in terms of electricity, water, or repairs if the system breaks down. There is also the issue of space. Agrilution’s Plantcube may fit nicely into the under-counter space of a single-family home in Nashville. Your average New York apartment, on the other hand, would be hard-pressed to accommodate one.

Still, it’s a great sign that a major appliance-maker like Miele is showing interest in getting cabinet-to-table greens to more homes in the future.

Until next time,

Jenn