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Connected Kitchen

Tovala’s Keeley Kabala: Success in Smart Kitchen Requires Listening to Your Customers

Back in 2016, an early-stage startup called Tovala appeared in just the second Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase. Company CEO David Rabie showed off the first-gen oven and discussed the vision for a combination of a hardware appliance and a food subscription service.

Fast forward eight years later, and Tovala has become one of the true success stories in the smart kitchen, amassing a large and enthusiastic user base for its oven and an extremely high lock-in rate for its meal delivery service.

I caught up recently with Tovala’s COO, Keeley Kabala, to talk about Tovala’s business in 2024 and where he sees his company and food delivery going over the next decade.

One of the key takeaways for me was that Tovala still focuses heavily on adding value for its customers through its oven, even if that means enabling users to take advantage of the multi-function cooking automation that is one of the key differentiators for the Tovala. The company sells two models of oven today – a five-in-one and a six-in-one – and as of today they have over one thousand CPG products in the database that they can run scan-to-cook where the oven will have an optimised set of cooking instructions that can bring the different forms of heat (and steam) into the cooking process.

According to Kabala, many of those CPG products are available at Costco.

“Right now we have dozens of Kirkland products that can scan to cook right from the beginning,” said Kabala. “So people many times are leaving the store with scannable items that have cook cycles already programmed in for their oven to use.”

Not only does Tovala have scan-to-cook for Costco’s Kirkland brand items, but it is also selling its oven in select Costco, which Kabala believes will give them more exposure to different customer types, which will give them new data points around which to build product around customer preferences.

It’s this listening to customers, says Kabala, the is critical for their future success.

“If we’re willing to listen to our customers, they’ll give you a chance to iterate.” said Kabala. “If you don’t listen, you might not be around forever. It’s been great to see just how vocal people are, too. They really care. So they don’t hold back on their feedback. We just have to make sure we keep listening.”

You can watch the interview below as well as read the transcript of the full conversation.

If you’d like to connect with Keeley in person, he will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit next week. You can get your tickets at the SKS website.

A Conversation with Tovala's Keeley Kabala

Michael Wolf: All right, I’m here with Keely Kabala, not Keely Tovala, because it sounds like some people get that mixed up because the name sounds so familiar.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, it’s got the same last few letters, but yes, it was named before I got here. I didn’t choose the name of the company, but it’s led to confusion and many jokes along the way.

Michael Wolf: And I imagine one of those jokers is David Rabie, the cofounder and CEO of the company I’ve spoken with. He’s been at Smart Kitchen Summit to some of it, but we’re excited to have you come out to Seattle in June to talk about what you guys are doing at Tovala. Tovala is a really interesting company because they are one of the real success stories in this idea of like bringing new technology into the kitchen. And also you have this interesting pairing with a food delivery service. You guys have really been a shining star in that space, combining a food delivery service with the hardware. We’ll talk about that in a little bit, but before we jump into like what’s going on with Tovala, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got where you are.

Keeley Kabala: Sure. My whole professional career has kind of been in the consumer appliance space. Did my very first internships at Whirlpool and Fellows, making appliances and paper shredders. I went over to Whirlpool full-time and had a variety of different interesting and challenging assignments all over the world. I got to live in Europe for a year, in China for a year, launched products and dishwashers, refrigerators. And interestingly enough, David and Brian, the other co-founder of Tovala, asked me to be their first employee in 2015. I didn’t understand the concept of Tovala and turned them down. And they asked me again a few months later and again a few months later. And finally, after they launched the Kickstarter and it became a little bit more real, I ended up joining the team as the VP of Hardware Engineering. And so, at that time, they had the Gen 1 oven, which had a lot of pros but also had a lot of cons. And my job was to work with the team to create what was our second gen oven. And it’s kind of the base for the two SKUs that we have right now. So we developed that in 2017, 2018, and it launched November 2018 and kind of has been our bread and butter on the hardware side ever since. And then on the ops side, I joined the food ops team kind of in a support role in early 2019. We were trying to figure out, we had just opened our own food facility on the South side of Chicago. And I kind of came over just a little advisement type role for our COO at the time on cost and quality and kind of just took over OPS along the way. And then, you know, we really started to explode in the back half of 2019. And it’s been a wild ride throughout the pandemic and opening food facilities along the way. But yeah, that’s been my Tovala journey. Originally, I came for the hardware side, and now I spend most of my time on the food side, but both teams report to me.

Michael Wolf: And you have that engineering mindset, obviously, build products throughout your career. And I would imagine that an engineering mindset really helps as you try to optimize the food delivery side and the operation side.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, yeah, I think we have a good team of engineers that bridge both the oven and the food side. I think that’s probably one of our competitive advantages compared to just maybe a meal kit company that doesn’t have the engineering firepower that we have, whether it’s on the hardware side, the ops engineering side or the software side. You know, some of our engineers have developed very sophisticated thermal modeling to make sure our food is safe. And also the packaging is as light as possible for customers, based on zip codes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And getting to work with them has been a good challenge. I think there’s, you know, one of our unique advantages is having the control of the food because we produce the food, ship the food, and then have the kill step and the quality control in actually the customer’s house because we’re using our, you know, chef curated cook cycles to cook the food. So it’s a good engineering systems problem to solve.

Michael Wolf: The current hardware, which like you said, is the foundation of what you helped build. One of the core ideas that I’ve always found with Tovala is it has steam, which I think obviously makes the food a lot better. You know, steam ovens haven’t really become widely deployed in consumer kitchens in the US but I think it really does make food better. So talk about, you know, the feature set within the oven and why it works so well with the food you guys deliver.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, we have a five-in-one and a six-in-one. The five in one has the bake, the broil, the air fry functionality, as well as toast and reheat. And then, on our six-in-one, we’ve added steam. So steam is just another cooking mode that allows to preserve moisture inside of some of the more delicate food items to reduce browning for other delicate food items. And actually in many ways can help accelerate the cook because you’re getting the cooking from the steam surface and the heat transfer going through the food. So, you know, we’ve gone into air frying. We were kind of, I think, a little late to getting into air frying. We were debating that for a long time on the differences between it and, you know, just bake, convection bake. But we launched the air fry model that has the two feet speed fan. It gets really great performance. And then, you know, our six-in-one has the steam functionality that does really great on some of the bread items. case ideas. It comes out really great. The salmon turns out perfect when it’s with steam and then hit with the broil at the end. I think the true advantage is the multi-step cooking where you’re able to change modes and temperatures. And that’s what most of our, you know, Tovala cycles do, whether it’s the scan to cook groceries or the Tovala meals, or some of our customers who really enjoy cooking at home, they create sophisticated cycles on their own. Some people just like to hit bake 400, 15 minutes all the time. Others get a little bit more creative. They have a ramp up with an air fry to get the high velocity airflow in the oven, hit it with bake, and then the broil at the end to get caramelization or whatever the case may be. But yeah, I think our true advantage is the multi-step cooking.

Michael Wolf: And that pairing of your food or even CPGs with the scan to cook with the ability to switch to different modes makes it fairly unique. I think most people just buy something at Costco, put it in the microwave, or put it in their air fryer, and hit go. But you have all these five to six different elements that you can combine. So each food has its own essentially recipe around the cook. Apply a certain amount of heat, you’re gonna finish with this, add some steam, and that’s optimized for each food that you deliver to the consumer.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, exactly. And it’s also from a food safety standpoint. So it’s a balancing act that our food safety team and our culinary team constantly are trading off on. It’s a unique spot for us to have that, one, that additional kill step in the home. But actually, quality control is something that we actually have. How the food turns out when you cook it, we control that in the person’s house. Most other meal delivery companies, your end result is determined based on how good of a chef you are. And we extend one layer further where our oven is cooking the cook cycles the way our chefs intend at the test kitchen here at HQ. And they’ve gone through several rounds of testing. And the important thing is pairing the protein with the side. And so you can cook chicken a bunch of different ways, but whether it’s paired with mashed potatoes or a rice pilaf or green beans, how it gets to that food safe temperature is going to be different. And so our chefs have to balance that out. And so that’s why each recipe has a unique cook site.

Michael Wolf: And you do work with stuff that people can buy at the grocery store because you have scan to cook. That to me is really helpful. And I think that would be something that consumers more broadly would like if, hey, I could buy something at the store and my cooking device can be optimized around what the optimal cook mode is for that. Maybe that’s a combination of like the food brand working with the appliance maker, but that isn’t really available today beyond like what you guys are doing. Is this something you think maybe more widely available in a 10 year time frame. Maybe that’s with a Tovala or another appliance where essentially the cook and the different elements of the cook can be applied in a more precise manner based on what consumers are putting into their cooking box.

Keeley Kabala: I think for certain customers, that’s definitely the case and definitely a benefit, like not having to check, not having to preheat. I think that’s the other thing that’s like one of our main advantages is anything we’ve scanned to cook in a Tovala, whether it’s a Tovala meal or a CPG type item where you scan the UPC, you set and forget it, you cook it from ambient heat. And so we’ve calculated the preheat and how the oven warms up into the cook cycle. And so I do think that’s another thing. It brings the convenience factor. If you had to always preheat your oven, then remember to come back 10 minutes later, put it in. It’s just one more step that I don’t think customers need or want to do. It’s really a non-value step to them. So we try to eliminate those. And then not every item is going to work. Not every oven item is ovenable. It can’t be cooked with the heaters. Some companies have very delicate packaging. And we don’t want them to melt, so that’s why we don’t pick everything that can be from CPG or from the frozen aisle. But there’s a lot. There’s over 1,000 items at this point in our database. We continue to add to them based on customer’s demand. There’s definitely times of days where this functionality is used quite often. And certain items, whether it’s snacks or breakfasts, are very prevalent use cases for these.

Michael Wolf: So looking forward, I imagine you think a bit about what the Tovala cooking side could look like in a long-term time horizon. Do you guys think you’ll continue to evolve the cooking appliance? Maybe in 10 years, will it be whether it be more automation or different modes of heating? Or do you think consumers just want a basic what you have today and just a little bit of change over time?

Keeley Kabala: I think, I mean, the biggest thing for us right now is, you know, for the history of our company, we’ve always been direct to consumer. And so people are coming to us more with a food need first. And very recently we started in retail. We’re in Costco now with our oven. And so I think we’re getting feedback from our customers on different things they want. So I think it’s like, based on where the starting point of the customer comes in, they’re going to want different functionalities, different capabilities, similar to when we went from the gen one to the gen two oven. You know, the gen one oven didn’t have a bake button on the front of it. We thought everyone wanted the super smart appliance, only app usage, and we very quickly got feedback that we needed to make some tweaks. And so we brought the functionality still in the app, but also to the front of the oven. You know, the gen one had a larger footprint. We needed to change the footprint size. The kitchen counters are so valuable in everyone’s home. We needed to make sure we were optimizing every square inch. And so going into retail now, we’re getting feedback. We’re very early into it. Only been a few months with Costco, but we’re seeing that there’s different functionalities, different features, different use cases. And so I think there will definitely be some tweaks in the hardware and the overall experience in general.

Michael Wolf: That Costco relationship is really interesting to me because when I think of Costco, they obviously sell appliances, but I go there mainly for food. I usually get the same things. You guys combine the oven with a kind of consumable. Once people buy the oven through a Costco, can they then pick up the Tovala food at Costco or would only be delivered to you guys, to them?

Keeley Kabala: So right now we haven’t started any food in retail. That’s on a roadmap of things to consider. Right now we have dozens of Kirkland products that can scan to cook right from the beginning. So people many times are leaving the store with scannable items that have cook cycles already programmed in for their oven to use. But right now we only sell ovens at Costco. But I think once again, this is our advantage we have is we have the opportunity to go into the other side of the store and start getting some of our products there for quicker trials for customers who aren’t familiar yet as much with Tovala as a food product and only are learning about us first time more on the appliance side.

Michael Wolf: And that’s interesting that you guys have worked with Costco. So some of the food items available at Costco, you can scan to cook. So they’re probably excited about that.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, they’re super excited about that. I mean, not only are they getting to move our ovens through their store, but it’ll help them move some of their other products as well. And it just kind of brings some from newness and kind of a tech advantage that Costco didn’t have previously on the food side.

Michael Wolf: What are you most excited about when you think about the Consumer Kitchen five years down the road, 10 years down the road? What excites you about that space?

Keeley Kabala: I mean, I think in general, a way to reduce waste. So whether it’s personalization and understanding what people want to eat so they make sure they don’t buy or order the wrong stuff that ends up being wasted or better understanding of inventory management. But I think in general, both food and energy waste are still major opportunities in the kitchen space. And so whether it’s how people get their food, how much food they get, when they get their food, what food they get, I think are all still major opportunities across our business and other businesses. And then, you know, I have a large oven in my home. I worked for a company that made very nice large ovens. I only use the large oven now on Thanksgiving. Like there’s a lot less energy usage by having the right appliance for the right job. And I think for what I need normally, you know, Tovala answers that. I think there’s a lot of other really smart, compact kitchen appliances. And so I think adoption is, I think, been interesting to see, not just us, but other companies as well, you know, gain adoption. And the one thing I’ve always shocked by is how willing people are to try new things in the kitchen and are willing to take on early stage innovation because they are really trying to optimize the food that they eat, their time, and their space in their kitchen. And so that’s why companies like us and many others have existed and continue to get a chance to iterate. If we’re willing to listen to our customers, they’ll give you a chance to iterate. If you don’t listen, you might not be around forever, but it’s been great to see just how vocal people are, too. They really care. So they don’t hold back on their feedback. We just got to make sure we keep listening.

Michael Wolf: Great closing words, Keely Kabala with Tovala. Thank you so much for spending time with me today.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, have a great day.

Whirlpool Lays Off Entire Team for Cooking and Recipe App Yummly

Appliance giant Whirlpool has let its entire Yummly team go. According to industry sources, the company recently laid off all the employees for the recipe and cooking app and website. These sources tell the Spoon that it’s unclear what the company plans to do with the property it acquired in 2017.

The news of the layoffs marks a significant de-emphasis on creating a connected cooking experience tailored around custom-designed recipes with step-by-step cooking.

“Every day, millions of consumers around the world use Whirlpool Corporation appliances to prepare meals for their families. The Yummly acquisition will allow these consumers to dramatically reduce the stress from meal planning by helping answer the age-old question, ‘What’s for dinner tonight?'” the company said at the time of the acquisition.

After Whirlpool acquired Yummly, it beefed up the content team and hired content creators to build a recipe catalog with cooking guidance. It also added features such as built-in food image recognition capabilities and put out a Yummly-connected thermometer (which is still available for purchase). The company announced an update with new features as recently as last fall.

The move to let the Yummly team go is indicative of appliance brands de-emphasizing apps with human-powered editorial-driven content, especially as some start to investigate how they can leverage generative AI to power new features and content. The Spoon has heard rumblings that other appliance brands are starting to build generative AI-powered content libraries and consumer-facing UI with mixed results. My guess is this trend will only continue, even as appliances begin to revisit their smart appliance strategies after lessons from the first wave of product build-out.

Why a Small Startup in the Middle of Valencia May Be Leading the Wireless Energy & Invisible Cooktop Trend

About a decade ago, IKEA famously released a concept video laying out its vision for the kitchen of the future. The central concept for their envisioned future kitchen was a kitchen table that not only made the experience of cooking and eating interactive with a touch interface, but also had built-in induction transmitters under the table’s surface that transmitted energy to power appliances and powered invisible-to-the-eye heating zones.

It was a compelling peek into what could be. While induction cooktop hob technology was and is a somewhat mature technology, the idea of using an induction transmitter to provide both wireless power and heating in everyday kitchen countertop surfaces fired up our imaginations in the same way Tom Cruise’s John Anderton character did about gesture interfaces more than two decades ago in Minority Report.

Since IKEA released its video, the futuristic idea of using an ordinary surface as a source of power and cooking heat has been inching slowly toward becoming a reality without ever seeming to make it to market. While there have been some efforts in standards-building by the same organization that brought us wireless phone charging standard Qi, actual product introductions of kitchen surfaces with built-in wireless power and heating have been pretty much non-existent.

But that’s changed over the twelve months thanks to a company named Cloen. Nestled on the east coast of the Iberian peninsula, this small Spanish startup has begun to pull back the curtain on the technology they’ve been developing for the better part of a decade. The company’s technology, which it calls Cloen Cordless Technology (CCT), is built around a dual induction plate system that provides heating to cook zones and wireless energy transmission to countertop appliances.

The company’s patented technology is on display in New York City at the flagship showroom of Spanish tile maker Porcelanosa. For Porcelanosa, another (and much older) company that also makes its home in the Valencian Community of Spain, Cloen built a custom-designed set of kitchen countertops and furniture with the CCT technology under the Spanish tile and furniture company’s Gamadecor brand.

You can watch a demo video of the CCT-powered Gamadecor product below:

Cloen Cordless Technology by Gadgets

In addition to building their own countertop kitchen products and those of partners (like Porcelanosa) with built-in transmission systems, Cloen is also working on a new line of countertop small appliances under the BeCordless brand, a joint venture between Cloen and cookware company Bergner. These countertop cooking appliances, which you can see in usage in the video above, include blenders, toasters, and air fryers.

The company is working with Porcelanosa on the cooking surface roadmap to build modular kitchen cooktops with up to five invisible cooking and power transmission zones. It also works with other manufacturers to build kitchen tables with dual-cooking and power transmission zones.

Above: Rendering of a 5 dual induction modular system being developed for 2025 release

The company has also worked with TV show producers in Spain and South Korea to build custom products for chef-centric cooking programs. In fact, you can see the Cloen-powered cooktop on Netflix in the reality TV show Lady Tamara, which is about Spanish aristocrat and chef Tamara Falcó.

For its product in Korea, the company is developing a table similar to the one in the IKEA concept video. However, if you expect to cook on a wood-only kitchen table, you might be slightly disappointed. According to Cloen, the table will have both power zones on the wood surface and induction heating in an in-laid glass area.

The company, which was founded by Pablo Cerra, an engineer by training, has grown to around 20 people, over half of them engineers. The focus on engineering is due to Cerra’s intention of building everything needed for the system. Cloen owns not only the core technology concepts but also develops the software and provides the SoC circuit boards to build into its partners’ systems.

“The secret is the software algorithm and the chip (microprocessor),” Cerra told The Spoon. “That’s secret to the whole technology.”

Cerra and his team decided to build a full-stack company to be an ingredient technology for their own and other brands’ wireless power kitchen technology because he felt the foundation needed to be laid for the market.

“This technology has to be for everyone,” Cerra said. “If you buy a mobile phone now, you can charge it with a normal charger or wireless charging. The thing is, wireless power and induction for the kitchen have to be the same.”

But Cloen isn’t alone. As mentioned, the Wireless Power Consortium is working on its Ki standard, and we’ve heard from multiple appliance brands that they are investigating and actively building products that will include wireless power. Other startups and tile companies are also looking at building wireless power systems.

Stepping back, the arrival of wireless power and invisible cooking zones is also part of a broader trend towards technology and functionality in the kitchen receding into the background. Sure, it’s part of the invisible kitchen design trend, but it’s also bigger than that, part of the megatrend that has technology disappearing before our eyes, fueled by AI, voice and gesture interface platforms, technology miniaturization, and the influence of companies like Apple and, well, IKEA over the past decade.

After Hitting Ten Thousand Users, Mill Unveils Second-Generation Hi-Tech Food Waste Bin

Last week, Mill unveiled its second-generation appliance, one year after introducing its high-tech food waste bin (don’t call it a composter!). The news comes as the company reaches ten thousand customers and claims it has helped divert one million pounds of food waste from landfills.

Both the first and second generation Mill turn food waste into inputs for chicken feed called grounds. The significant difference between the two machines is that the second-generation Mill will do it faster and more quietly.

According to the company, one primary area of feedback from users of the first-gen Mill was that the appliance processed food too slowly. When the company returned to the drawing board to build the second-generation device, it redesigned the food chopping blades from horizontally mounted to two vertically mounted blades, according to an interview Mill CEO Matt Rogers gave Fast Company.

Video Credit: Mill

Another upgrade speeding the break down of food faster is a change to how the food waste is heated. While the first-gen Mill was heated only from the bottom, the new Mill’s heating element is connected to the entire bin interior, resulting in faster overall food breakdown.

Finally, unlike the first Mill, this new one comes with a purchase option from the get-go. Spoon readers will remember that the company started opening the doors to purchase the first-gen appliance a few months ago after hearing feedback from many of its customers that they’d prefer to own the appliance, especially those that used the Mill to process food waste for use in their garden rather than sending it back to Mill to use for chicken feed.

According to Mill, the new appliance will sell for $999. For those who still want to rent the appliance, the monthly service (without grounds pickup) will be $29.99, $49.99 with grounds pickup. For those who purchase the Mill and want grounds pickup for the Mill chicken-feed service, that’ll cost an additional $10 monthly.

Stepping back, my guess is the biggest challenge Mill will face is its high price point. Consumers looking for high-tech help processing their food waste into compost can find options like the Vitamix Food-Cycler or the Lomi for less than half the price. I worry that just like June and those bringing new approaches to cooking, products hovering around the thousand-buck mark are too expensive for most customers to roll the dice on what is essentially a new product category. While rental lowers the cost, Mill learned that most customers prefer to own their kitchen appliances, which is why they opened up the purchase option.

We’ll keep an eye on the Mill and how they perform with their second-gen appliance.

Fresco Locks Up Deal To Bring Kitchen OS to Middleby Consumer Kitchen Brands

This week, smart kitchen startup Fresco announced it had struck a deal with Middleby to integrate the Fresco Kitchen OS platform across the cooking equipment giant’s residential portfolio, starting with high-end kitchen appliance brand Viking.

The first Middleby product line to incorporate the Fresco Kitchen OS platform will be the Viking RVL Collection. The RVL line, a new collection introduced this week that is more modern and tech-forward than traditional Viking lines, will incorporate the Fresco OS via a firmware agent residing on an integrated system-on-chip. In addition to the built-in Fresco firmware, which will power the connectivity to other Viking and non-Viking brands that use Fresco technology, the smart kitchen startup is also providing the appliance brand with a white-labeled Viking app. According to Fresco, they will also work on a smart recipe app for another Middleby brand in AGA(Middleby acquired AGA in 2015 and acquired Viking in 2012).

The move is a nice win for Fresco, in part because it is a validation of its revamped kitchen OS, which the company announced a year ago. The deal also adds a premium built-in appliance brand in Viking to its growing list of customers. The Irish/US startup, which got its start a decade ago with the launch of its connected kitchen scale, has been steadily chalking up wins over the past few years, including with Japanese microwave maker Panasonic and the once white-hot Instant Brands.

Middleby is interesting because it represents many other potential product lineups for integration. Not only are there other built-in appliance brands like AGA, La Cornue, and Rangemaster for Fresco to expand to, but the company also has a couple of outdoor grills as well as a countertop cooking brand in Brava. For its part, Brava was not mentioned as an initial target for the Fresco technology, but my guess is that has as much to do with the complex and fairly unique commands associated with the Brava light-cooking technology as anything.

I asked Fresco CEO Ben Harris how his company has continued to grow its partner list in the connected kitchen space, and he pointed towards the system-on-chip in his hand, which featured an Espressif ESP 32 DSP. According to Harris, Fresco’s hardware engineering and silicon understanding, born almost a decade ago when the company introduced the Drop scale, has helped them win customers looking to take advantage of their technology and their knowledge in this space.

Harris said that having on-chip, on-board integration of a kitchen tech stack via their kitchen OS SoC module is not only a good way to on-board a customer like Viking, it also results in a faster system. Harris said that in the early days, when they went from building cloud-to-cloud integration between smart kitchen equipment from different manufacturers to integrating their own SoC with built-in firmware, the quickly saw how much more responsive and fast the system performed.

“It was like that, in an instant,” said Harris in an interview with The Spoon at KBIS. “It definitely feels like it’s an extension of the appliance, and it makes a big difference in the engagement of the user.”

In addition to partnering up for a product integration, the two companies also announced that Middleby will become an investor in Fresco. In this sense, the deal is somewhat reminiscent of the Instant Brands partnership, which had the pressure cooker maker investing in Fresco at the time of the deal.

You can watch my interview with Harris at KBIS below:

Interview With Fresco's Ben Harris on Connected Kitchen Technology at KBIS 2024

GE Appliances Debuts EcoBalance and Its Vision of the Kitchen as Integral Part of the Home’s Energy Management Network

This week at KBIS, Haier subsidiary GE Appliances focused much of its, um, energy on getting the message out about its new EcoBalance Home System, a new whole-home home systems energy management platform that it has been working on for much of the past decade.

The first announcement about EcoBalance was unveiled about two weeks before the big kitchen and bath show in Vegas, with the announcement of the company’s partnership with Savant. The deal, which brings Savant’s smart home and energy management expertise together with GE Appliance’s kitchen, bath, and other home products (as well as GE’s power management know-how), essentially set the table by previewing the central control interface for consumers.

But, as I saw yesterday at KBIS, news of that deal was only the beginning. It seemed that GE Appliances’s big focus at the show was introducing a flurry of products that tied together the smart home, kitchen, and cooking, as well as other key home activities, into a tighter and more coordinated relationship with both residential and grid power management.

To wit, here are just a few of the products the appliance company showed off this week at KBIS:

A couple of whole-home battery backup and appliance backup systems. The company showed off how its appliances can connect to a Savant home invertor and wall power battery and how the new integration can enable home systems’ power backup by connecting with an EV. GE Appliances has also partnered with Ford, and they were showing off how a Ford F-150 electric can provide backup power to the home through the EcoBalance system.

In addition to home power backup systems, the company also showed off a new battery backup system for refrigerators. Made in partnership with Savant, the fridge battery enables home users to keep their fridge powered and cold during a power outage, which allows users to open the refrigerator to access food without worrying about an out-of-power fridge losing its chill while powered down. According to the GE Appliances Shawn Stover (see our interview below), it will run the fridge for a few hours, and it also features plug-ins to allow owners to charge small electrics like phones.

GE Appliances Shows Off a Refrigerator Battery Backup at KBIS 2024

They also showed off a new GE Profile GeoSpring Smart Hybrid Heat Pump Water Heater, which uses a patented, electronic integrated mixing valve that can provide up to 60% more hot water versus comparable models and allows a 50-gallon tank to operate at the same effective capacity as an 80-gallon tank. The GeoSpring also includes the CTA-2045 Smart Home Solution that makes it demand response ready by communicating with utility companies and responding intelligently to power grid conditions.

A Pyramid Wall Mount Hood with indoor air quality sensing that can sense carbon monoxide and other air pollutants. When connected to the EcoBalance energy management system, the system will send you alerts and can be programmed to turn on the HVAC system when air pollutants are detected.

In addition to its partnership with Savant and GEA’s own line of new home systems that make up the EcoBalance system, the company also talked about its partnership with electric grid connectivity specialist Tantalus Systems. The two companies, along with Savant, announced that they would be integrating the Tantalus’ TRUSense Gateway into the EcoBalance system to enable GE Appliances to connect into grid and enable energy management at the appliance level through, say, running refrigerator defrost or ice cycles during off-peak hours, charging water heaters with energy for use later in the day, and adjusting HVAC systems can be adjusted a few degrees to save energy and reduce peak demand.

According to GE Appliances, the new EcoBalance system will be available across all the brand’s lines, and it will use several go-to-market touchpoints for GE Appliance customers to learn about it. This includes through the system integrator channel with Savant, the homebuilder channel, and retail at big box stores like Best Buy, where prospective customers can learn about the system and be connected to a Savant integrator to discuss potential ways to bring the technology into their homes.

Stepping back, making power management a key focus for its appliance product lineup is both a natural for a company like GE Appliances (which has, through its original parent company in GE, a long history of power system experience) and a timely move in terms of home design and custom awareness. A key focus for the homebuilding and remodeling industry is a move towards smarter energy efficiency, if not outright net-zero building. Tie that into a broader push towards electrification of kitchens and other home systems (and the slow-but-steady deemphasis of gas in homes), and GE Appliances looks to be making an early bid at being an energy-power leader among appliance brands by centering its future kitchen and home systems messaging around this increasingly resonant design focus for consumers.

Fresco Deal With Panasonic Brings Device Control & AI-Powered Planning to HomeCHEF Multi-Oven Lineup

At CES 2024, Panasonic announced that it had struck a deal with smart kitchen OS startup Fresco to integrate the Fresch kitchen OS platform with the Japanese brand’s multi-oven countertop cooking appliances.

The deal covers the US market and will see Fresco’s technology bring a new set of connected features to Panasonic’s multi-oven products, the first being the HomeCHEF 4-in-1 multi-oven. According to the announcement, the Fresco AI assistant will reside within the Panasonic app, allowing users to tailor recipes according to their dietary needs, substitute ingredients based on pantry availability, and change serving sizes and cooking preferences. Users can control cooking modalities, enabling steam cooking, air frying, and more through the app and get alerts about cooking status.

The deal marks a significant win for Fresco with one of the leading microwave manufacturers in the world, one that has been relatively aggressive about adding new cooking capabilities through its HomeCHEF multi-oven line. The partnership is interesting because it’s one of the first partnerships by a major microwave company to bring device control and AI-assisted cooking to their lineup.

According to Fresco, the HomeChef 4-in-1 will first be released in the US market in late 2024.

Silicon Valley is Betting Big on Home Electrification. Will It Pay Off In The Kitchen?

This week, news of a new home electrification startup hit the wires.

Founded by former Google Ventures partner Rick Klau, Onsemble builds technology to convert electric water heaters into what the energy industry calls a virtual power plant (VPP). VPPs act as aggregators and coordinate between independent distributed energy resources (DERs), such as rooftop solar and electric vehicles, with the electric grid. While Onsemble won’t enable water heaters to generate energy like a solar panel on your roof, the company believes that connecting and coordinating your water heater with the grid will translate to significant savings.

It’s an interesting concept, one that is symbolic of a growing interest within Silicon Valley and the broader technology community around home electrification. This interest has been rising for years, especially in markets like California, where state and local governments have pushed regulations around the construction of residential and commercial buildings mandating electrification. But it goes beyond that, and much of the recent flurry of activity has been spurred by a flood of new money entering the market through rebates that are part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Other startups that have ridden the home electrification wave over the past couple of years include Zero Homes, which partners with local municipalities to prove a decarbonization pathway roadmap for home electric users to help guide them towards home electrification. Another is QuitCarbon, which provides Bay Area customers with electrification roadmaps that outline the types of electric appliances for their home’s specific electricity infrastructure and help consumers navigate the home rebate process. Similarly, Elephant Energy partners with contractors to help install indication ranges, car EV charging stations, and heat pumps.

And then there’s Impulse Labs, a startup creating induction cooktops that incorporate a battery to help consumers transition to electric kitchens. By including a battery will enable those homes that aren’t wired for an induction cooktop – electric stoves can pull 40 amps at 240 volts after all – enables the homeowner to use one without having to rewire their homes or install a new electric panel. Impulse’s energy-storing cooktops will also serve as another energy storage node – or DER – on the electric grid’s network that can contribute to the collective VPP.

Of all the ideas, Impulse’s strikes me as the most innovative; it provides a solution that is not only about installation planning or falling in line with local building codes, but is an altogether new approach that helps both homeowners and the utility provider by putting a new kind of system (in the package of a conventional appliance) into the network.

There’s no doubt we’ll need more of these approaches as US homeowners, in particular, struggle to sever their strong addiction to gas heating and cooking. The installed base of gas stoves in the U.S. is massive, and there are significant financial and emotional attachments to cooking with fire. By embracing truly new alternatives that offer real benefits (financial and lifestyle), the kitchen electrification movement might actually stand a fighting chance

Food Tech News: Samsung Heads Into the Kitchen, Robot Meets Artisan Pizza

The Spoon is back for another week of food tech news, and this week Michael Wolf and Allen Weiner talk about what’s going on in the smart kitchen, alt protein, CRISPR and more.

Here are the stories we talk about:

  • Samsung and LG play nice in the kitchen, and Samsung launches food app. 
  • MOTO Pizza, where you wait a month for your pizza order, is crazy about Picnic’s pizza robot
  • Pairwise reups partnership with Bayer for CRISPR-based innovation
  • GFI says plant-based meat sales were up in 2022
  • DoorDash is bringing AI to their apps and call centers

As always, you can just hit play below to listen to the podcast, head to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or listen on your favorite podcast app.

As mentioned in the show, the Spoon is once again leading the charge for food tech at CES, the world’s biggest tech show. If you are interested in showcasing your future food or food tech innovation, head over to The Spoon’s CES page for more info.

Also, on October 25th, we’ll be bringing leaders at the intersection of food and AI together for a day of conversation. Please use the discount code PODCAST for 15% off tickets to the Food AI Summit.

With the Launch of Samsung Food, Samsung Hypes AI & Consolidates Food Features Acquired Over the Years

Over the years, Samsung has acquired and launched several products in an effort to become the king of the tech-powered kitchen.

First, there was the launch of the Family Hub refrigerator, the company’s attempt to create a smart fridge built around the company’s own operating system and packed with technology like fridge cams to identify food and help you with your shopping.

Then, there was the acquisition of Whisk, an intelligent food and shopping app that helped pioneer the shoppable recipe space. Whisk had not only amassed an extensive food database, which would ultimately become a foundation for some of Family Hub’s (now Bespoke Family Hub) shopping and recipe capabilities, but it also served up the foundational ‘Food AI’ that is now being pushed to the forefront by Samsung.

Then, there were various attempts to use AI through automation in the kitchen, as the company announced (and never released commercially) different cooking and kitchen-task robots at CES.

And we can’t forget that Samsung also took some of the smart home technology from its SmartThings smart home group (another Samsung acquisition) and paired it with Whisk’s recipe intelligence to create SmartThings Cooking, a guided cooking app.

This leads us to this week, in which Samsung announced what amounts to packaging up this collected knowledge and technology – save for (at least for now) the robotics – into a newly expanded app and platform called Samsung Food. Samsung Food, which the company describes as “a personalized, AI-powered food and recipe platform,” looks like a significant step forward for the company’s efforts to build a centralized digital food management app. It also is a logical move to consolidate much of the collected efforts under the Samsung brand after the company had collected a variety of platforms that served as a foundation for what we see today.

Let’s take a look at precisely what the company unveiled. In the announcement, Samsung detailed four primary areas of activity for Samsung Food: Recipe Exploration and Personalization, AI-Enhanced Meal Planning, Kitchen Connectivity, and Social Sharing.

For recipe exploration, Samsung looks like it’s essentially using what was an already somewhat evolved feature set in Whisk. Samsung says that it can save recipes to a user’s digital recipe box anytime and from anywhere, create shopping lists based on their ingredients, and is accessible via Family Hub. In addition to mobile devices, users can access Samsung Food with their Bespoke Family Hub fridges, which will provide recipe recommendations based on a list of available food items managed by the user and shoppable recipe capabilities.

With the Personalize Recipe function, Samsung Food looks like it builds on the personalization engine created by Whisk and plans to take it further through integration with Samsung Health. According to the announcement, by the end of this year, Samsung plans to integrate with Samsung Health to power suggestions for diet management. This integration will factor in info such as a user’s body mass index (BMI), body composition, and calorie consumption in pursuit of their health goals and efforts to maintain a balanced diet.

The AI-Enhanced meal planning feature looks like a longer-view planning feature that consolidates personalized recipe recommendations, and it will no doubt similarly benefit from the integration of Samsung Health.

With Connected Cooking, Samsung has rebranded and extended the features of the SmartThings Cooking app, adding new devices like the BeSpoke oven and incorporating some of the same guided cooking features.

And, of course, a consolidated food-related platform from Samsung wouldn’t be complete without a social media component. My guess is the Social Sharing feature – which will allow users to share with their community – is the least necessary addition to the app and will ultimately not be all that successful, as consumers will continue to use mainline social apps (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook) for their food-related social sharing.

The company also teased expanded computer vision capabilities in 2024 in the announcement. The company’s Vision AI technology “will enable Samsung Food to recognize food items and meals photographed through the camera and provide details about them, including nutrition information.”

Overall, I’m impressed with the overall cohesiveness and trajectory of what I see in Samsung Food. I think it’s a sign that Samsung – despite having the occasional misstep and strategic vagueness around their food vision – looks like they remain committed to becoming the leader of the future kitchen, something that they started way back in 2016 with the launch of the Family Hub line.

SEERGRILLS Unveils the Perfecta, an ‘AI-Powered’ Grill That Cooks the ‘Perfect Steak’ in Two Minutes

AI is seemingly everywhere nowadays, so it was only a matter of time before it would show up at the backyard BBQ to help us cook the perfect steak.

That’s the vision of a UK startup named SEERGRILLS, which debuted the Perfecta this week, which the company describes as the world’s first AI-powered grill. The grill combines high-temperature infrared cooking with its AI system called NeuralFire, which automates the cooking process.

According to SEERGRILLS CEO Suraj Sudera, the AI works through a combination of sensor data, cook preferences inputted by the user, and intelligence built into the software around different food types.

“The device will capture the starting temperature of, say, chicken breast and adjust the cooking in line with the preferences you’ve inputted in the device,” said Sudera. “Whether it’s a three-inch or five-inch chicken breast, it doesn’t matter. It will be whatever adjustments it needs, just like your cruise control on your car will adjust to keep you at the preferred speed.”

When a cook is done, users can rate the quality of the cook, which informs and optimizes the NeuralFire algorithm for the next cook. Suraj says that SEERGRILLS is also constantly updating its food database, so if, say, a new type of steak from Japan becomes popular, the AI engine will be updated to optimize the cook for that meat type. The company says its AI will also optimize to reach each type of meat’s sear and doneness, as well as help to perfect the Maillard reaction.

The hardware itself is somewhat unique compared to other infrared grills on the market in that it cooks meat vertically. The user puts the meat in a holder, which will sense the temperature and thickness of the meat. Once inserted, both sides are cooked simultaneously using infrared heat, powered by propane, which SEERGRILLS says can reach 1652ºF. According to the company, the grill can cook three ribeyes in one minute and fifty seconds, six burgers in a minute and thirty seconds, and four chicken breasts in two minutes and thirty seconds.

In addition to the grill itself, the company is also building accessories such as a rotisserie module, a pizza module, and a grill station. The company will start taking preorders in July and plans to begin shipping the Perfecta by the end of this year. Pricing for the grill and its accessories has not yet been disclosed.

🚀 Introducing Perfecta™ - The World’s First AI Powered Grill. 🚀

Thin Margins & Competitive Moats: Analyzing Instant Brands Journey to Bankruptcy

Instant Brands, the parent company behind the Instant Pot, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today, as first reported by Bloomberg. The company, which also owns the Pyrex glassware brand, announced they’d reached a deal for a new $132.5 million financing line of credit to support the company as it navigates the bankruptcy process and figures out a new path forward.

Signs of trouble first surfaced for Instant Brands earlier this year when the Wall Street Journal reported the company had hired advisors to help it restructure. At the time, the company had a $400 million line of credit trading at a severe discount due to rising interest rates. According to Bloomberg, the combination of high-interest rates, waning access to new lines of credit, and a dwindling cash position forced the company to finally file for Chapter 11.

So what happened? How did Instant Brands, the company behind what was once the fastest-growing countertop appliance in the US, go from high flyer to Chapter 11 in just a few short years?

Below are some of the reasons I believe led to the company’s current predicament:

The Pressure Cooker Category Reached Saturation Very Quickly

Part of the reason for the success of the Instant Pot was the fantastic value for the consumer. In one multifunction appliance, the consumer had a rice cooker, steamer, bean maker, yogurt machine, sauté pan – you name it – all for $100 or less. It was hard to beat, which is why Instant went from zero brand recognition a decade ago to becoming eponymous with the category it created (or, in a sense, reinvented) in just a few short years.

The problem with exponential growth is you can get to market saturation very quickly. The product (and its clones) was affordable to almost anyone, and before long, anyone who wanted one had one. But unlike high-margin tech products like the iPhone, the Instant Pot isn’t something most consumers want to replace every few years.

Clones, Ninjas, and Narrow Competitive Moats

While the Instant Pot’s reinvention of the pressure cooker was an innovative take on an older category, it was easy to knock off. Because of this, it wasn’t long before a slew of low-cost copycats flooded Amazon and other online retailers.

At the same time, fast-moving brands like SharkNinja kept on innovating. They jumped on new cooking appliance categories (like air fryers) more quickly than Instant Brands, which has admitted to being late to the category. Instant’s CEO has stated the company is continuing to look for its next hit, even as it enters into financial reorganization.

In some ways, the ease with which low-cost copycats and brand-savvy bigger companies like SharkNinja were able to create similar products that were instantly competitive with Instant Brand’s showed just how small, in retrospect, Instant’s competitive moat was. In other words, there was no significant technology, manufacturing or brand differentiators that companies entering the market had to overcome.

Non-Premium Pricing and Low Customer Loyalty

While Instant became synonymous with the smart multicooker category, the brand didn’t necessarily build significant brand loyalty. Customers, who often bought their Instant Pot or clone for end cap fire sale pricing, didn’t necessarily view the Instant Pot brand as something unique or irreplaceable. Other categories like built-in ovens, refrigerators, or coffee makers usually have bigger price tags and connotations of premium user experiences. At the same time, the Instant Pot often seemed cheap in price and quality. Much of the damage around the brand’s low-rent image was self-inflicted.

Buy High, Sell Low

When Corelle and Instant Pot announced the merger of the two companies, the combined value of the new entity was estimated at around $2 billion. Much of that market value was attributable to the white-hot Instant Pot, which meant Corelle would pay out the nose to bring the company and its fast-growing product lineup into the fold.

While I don’t have the projections that Corelle put together to rationalize the debt load they would take on to finance the acquisition, it’s probably not too big a leap to say they didn’t forecast sales of Instant Pot cooling off as fast as they did. And, as detailed in the Journal in March, the company hasn’t come close to finding a successor hit to help the company get on the right path again. At the same time, the lean operating model of the Instant Pot’s early days (which had four employees in 2013) is long gone, making way for the layered corporate bureaucracy of Corelle (the combined company had 1,900 employees earlier this year).

The bottom line is Instant Brands became highly leveraged right as the product started to reach market saturation. In the following years, Instant has moved slower than its competitors like SharkNinja and Dash, who have come out with often better-looking products in new categories at equal or lower prices. The result is this week’s announcement.

It’s really too soon to tell how the company will far going forward. Post-bankruptcy, Instant will have a clean balance sheet but a much smaller innovation team, and without the company founder Robert Wang (who left the company’s operation in late 2021), it’s not clear where the next big company-changing idea will come from.