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Connected Kitchen

July 16, 2019

Breville Acquires ChefSteps, Maker of the Joule Sous Vide

Kitchen appliance giant Breville announced today that it has acquired ChefSteps, maker of the Joule connected sous vide wand. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

From the press release:

Breville’s acquisition of ChefSteps will enhance the long-term R&D capacity that brought the Joule product to market, allowing for continued and sustained focus on innovation, while increasing global commercial scale to further maximize the value of the ChefSteps content platform and portfolio of fast-growing connected Joule products. It also forms a natural consumer-focused extension to Breville’s existing commercial sous vide range of products following its acquisition of the PolyScience Culinary division in 2014.

The privately funded ChefSteps started out as an online culinary community and recipe site and went on to become an early pioneer in the sous vide space through the company’s well regarded (and well designed) Joule.

In April, ChefSteps laid off a significant number of its staff. At that time Spoon Founder Mike Wolf wrote:

There are still not many details beyond what’s been reported, so it’s hard to tell exactly what happened and why ChefSteps was forced to downsize. I can only speculate that sales of the Joule (or their related Joule Ready sauce business) wasn’t substantial enough to fund the ongoing business and that they had exhausted funding provided by early backer Gabe Newell.

Newell, a billionaire who made his money in the video game business as the founder of Valve, had given the company a low-interest loan early on. While Young had described Newell’s support as giving the company the financial flexibility to push in new directions (such as with the Joule), it looks like Newell’s generosity has its limits. It’s unclear if ChefSteps had sought funding from other outside sources (or is still seeking funding).

Less than a week after that ChefSteps shut down its premium content offerings and shuttered its relatively nascent sauce-selling business. At that time, ChefSteps CEO, Chris Young posted to Facebook:

As you’ve heard, there have been some changes at ChefSteps in the past week. Our funding situation unexpectedly changed (emphasis mine) and we’ve had to make the incredibly difficult decision to let a significant fraction of our amazing team go. This truly sucks.

Following these closings, Mike Wolf followed up with another story, writing:

While it was always assumed ChefSteps was in a good financial place because of the backing of billionaire Gabe Newell, it’s apparent now that wasn’t necessarily the case. Most interestingly, it looks like the sudden change in the health of the company’s balance sheet was not anticipated, making me wonder if either Newell called in the loan or had changed his position somehow and didn’t want to extend more credit to the company. There’s also the possibility ChefSteps had been seeking other financing and had something fall through at the last minute.

ChefSteps will be integrated into the Breville Group business and will continue to operate out of its Seattle office.

The acquisition by Breville is good news for Joule fans everywhere, but given the tight times the company was in and the fact that terms were not disclosed, it probably wasn’t the exit the company was hoping for when they started.

We will continue to follow this story as it develops.

July 15, 2019

Review: MyBar.io is a DIY Mixed Drink Robot with Decidedly Mixed Results

Happiness comes from setting proper expectations, so if you want to spend $299 for the DIY MyBar.io robot cocktail maker, you should expect that it will be (pretty) easy to build, frustratingly hard to set up, but will ultimately work as promised.

Before any review of MyBar can begin, it’s important to know that this is basically the side hustle of one guy, Juan Pablo Risso. He’s an IoT engineer by day, and does pretty much everything for the MyBar by himself: designs, assembles and ships the kits, and even answers customer service questions. In short, this is not the same experience as buying a fully-formed product constructed by a venture-backed company. You just need to know what you’re getting into.

Ordering the MyBar was easy and the kit arrived as promised. The company says it should only take 2 hours to assemble, but I think that’s for DIY enthusiasts who already know what they are doing. I am not, and did not, so it took me more like 6 hours.

In my defense, it wasn’t just my own technical shortcomings. The online guide was incomplete, skipping entire steps (like adding the LED light), or not specifying that the flathead screwdriver required was for tiny parts on circuit boards, not regular screws. Additionally — and this is another danger of buying DIY products that aren’t fully tested before they ship — the first circuit board I got was faulty. Some of the terminal screws also would not tighten so wires would pop out.

To his credit, however, Risso was very responsive to my frustrated weekend emails, responding to every one, and even replacing my circuit board.

Those issues notwithstanding, the MyBar was pretty straightforward to build. It’s the housing, wiring 9 pumps to the circuit board, and attaching a bunch of tubes. It looks a little Frankenstein-y, but overall, the hardware is solid.

While the machine itself is solid, the software side needs a lot of work. The app is Android only, and I installed and ran it on an Amazon Fire HD 7 tablet. To be fair, the HD 7 is all of $50, so it is not the snappiest of tablets, but using the MyBar app was excruciating.

Ideally, you assign each tube a liquid (tube 1 = vodka, 2 = rum, 3 = grapefruit juice, etc.) in the app. The app then knows what ingredients you have and presents you with a list of drinks you can make. Tap a drink and the corresponding pumps spit out precise amounts of booze and mixers into your cup.

But the software is rigid and buggy. It works best if you can just use the pre-defined bottles already in the app: tequila, rum, grapefruit juice. There’s a UPC scanner in the app to ideally add any bottle of booze, but it didn’t work for any bottle I tried. Plus when you add a bottle, you have to fill out every line in the app’s form before it will be accepted. That means you have to add a UPC code (which I just wound up making up) as well as an image of the product. It’s very clunky.

Once built, setting up the MyBar to make drinks just takes. a. long. time. Too much time. And even when I successfully added ingredients, it only presented one cocktail recipe, so I had to manually create more. I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole here, but adding those recipes was the second biggest frustration with the product because the workflow is not well designed, takes too much time and was just very amateurish.

I say “second” biggest, because my biggest frustration with the product was the wireless bluetooth connection to actually talk with the MyBar itself. Perhaps it was because I chose a cheap tablet, but unless it was literally right next to the MyBar, it lost its connection. This would then freeze and crash the app, forcing me to re-start. Multiple times.

We threw a party over the weekend, and I spent a good hour prior just trying to get the MyBar to work. In my mind, I had already started writing a scathing review of the product. Yeah, it was relatively easy to build, but it was far too onerous to set up. It didn’t work as promised. The app sucked. The wireless connection sucked. Everything sucked and I was ready to chuck it all in the trash when something happened.

It worked (You can see the video of it in action below).

Not only that, it kept working and worked throughout my entire party and what I thought would just be a novelty for people to point at and then ignore actually became a fun way for partygoers to get their own drinks. They liked MyBar and enjoyed (and marveled at, if I’m honest) the experience of tapping a button on a tablet and that drink magically appearing out of the machine.

And these party people weren’t rubes, many of them worked in tech and were still surprised and fascinated by the MyBar. To be fair, no one asked how they could get one, but that didn’t stop them from coming back throughout the night. I had to re-think my review because though it was a pain in the @$$ to set up, it ultimately did what it was supposed to do, and it delighted people while doing it.

My experience may have been less-than-stellar, but the end users loved it. I had to re-write my mental review.

I can’t say you should run out and purchase the MyBar, especially if you are not a DIY person and are frustrated easily. But I also can’t say you shouldn’t buy one, especially if you have some patience, a little technical know-how, and want an easy way to serve cocktails at your parties.

The advantage of the MyBar is that it’s a third of the price of the high-end, fully automated Barsys, and the cocktail recipes come straight from your bottles, not flavor pods like the similarly priced Bartesian (so you can do more customizing).

If you go into MyBar with these expectations, the happiness of your guests might just make you happy.

MyBar.io in Action

July 1, 2019

Manage Cooking Multiple Meats to Different Temperatures with the New MEATER Block

Just in time for summer grilling season, Apption Labs, the company behind the connected MEATER thermometer, announced the launch of the new MEATER Block today. The new Block of thermometers allows users to monitor the cooking of multiple pieces of meat at once and extends the wireless range of the device.

The new MEATER system still acts much the same way as the single probe. It’s a connected thermometer roughly the size of a heavy-duty nail that you slide into your meat (beef, chicken, fish, pork, etc.). It wirelessly talks with the accompanying mobile app to let you know how the meat is doing, and even gives you tips on when to pull it out and how long to rest it.

While MEATER had sold multiple thermometers bundled together before, the new MEATER Block set of probes is different in that they work together so you can monitor different meats simultaneously. So you can be grilling different pieces of beef to different doneness at the same time, or even monitor simultaneous cooking of different types of meat.

Additonally, the new MEATER Block acts as a WiFi bridge, boosting the wireless communication range of the device so you can presumably be anywhere in your house and still check in on those chops. Other versions of the MEATER only go 33 ft. or 165 ft., depending on the model. The MEATER Block also sports a touchscreen and has a standalone mode so you don’t even need to use a phone.

I tested the single MEATER last year and thought it worked well. I’m pretty nervous when it comes to cooking proteins thoroughly, so monitoring my meat without needing to open up a hot oven (and let all the heat out) to insert a thermometer is a nice touch. The company has sent me the new block to test out, but it hasn’t arrived yet. If it works as advertised, it will be a great tool for summer cook-outs, especially with its new ability to continuously cook and keep track of different foods on the same grill.

Despite these advancements, MEATER seems to still have the same issue I had with the previous generation: its size. The MEATER itself is big, and because you keep it in the meat throughout the cooking process, a sizeable hole forms. The other thing we’ll lament here at The Spoon is that the MEATER doesn’t have a plant-based meat option for, say, grilling Beyond Burgers.

But if those aren’t dealbreakers, you may want to check out the new MEATER Block, which is available now for $269.

June 27, 2019

June Raising Price of its Smart Oven $100 Because Tariffs

I am an unabashed fan of Kai Ryssdal, host of the public radio show Marketplace. If you’re a listener or follow him on Twitter, you know he’s been saying the trade war President Trump is engaged in with China is actually going to be paid for by American consumers. And this week, we got evidence of that when we learned the tariffs will soon impact the prices of connected kitchen appliances.

Today, June announced that starting July 1, it is raising the price of its smart oven to $699, a $100 increase. In a statement emailed to The Spoon, June CEO, Matt VanHorn said:

As you may have heard, the US recently increased tariffs on imported products manufactured in China. Unfortunately this affects us and we have had to raise our prices by $100, to $699 for the June Oven and $899 for the Gourmet Package. This will take effect on July 1, 2019. We absorbed the first tariff increase last year to minimize customer impact, but for this second increase, we have had to pass along some of this cost to customers.

June’s price increase comes just days after Corelle Brands said that tariffs would force it to raise the price of the wildly popular Instant Pot multi-cooker, from $38 to $187.44. (Though to be fair, I’m not sure there’s a person left in the U.S. who doesn’t have one.)

We had heard off-the-record talk of price increases from food tech execs last year. Now, with no end in site for the tariff tantrum, it looks like those high prices are now a reality.

In addition to established companies, one has to wonder how this could impact the fulfillment of Kickstarter projects, many of whom manufacture their goods in China. Crowdfunded hardware projects have a hard enough time getting to market, and this could be yet another hurdle for those that didn’t budget appropriately.

We’ll be on the lookout for more fallout from the trade war with food tech companies (when we aren’t listening to Marketplace). Drop us a line if you notice tariff-induced price increases, and if you were interested in a June oven, you, uhh, may want to get that order in this weekend.

June 25, 2019

Will KitchenAid’s SmartOven+ with Steam and Grill Cooking Win with Consumers at $3,199?

When is an oven like a stand mixer? When it’s KitchenAid’s SmartOven+. Much like the company’s iconic mixer, KitchenAid’s new connected built-in oven, which the announced the availability of yesterday, will feature a number of attachments that enable different types of cooking. The question now is whether people will pay a premium ($3,199) for that flexibility.

As of now, the SmartOven+ has three attachments, all of which are powered via a plug inside the oven. The SmartOven+ comes with a powered grilling attachment, which the company says offers “true grilling year-round, minimizing smoke and eliminating flares common in outdoor grills.” There is also an integrated baking stone attachment and a steam cooking attachment. Oddly, neither the steam nor the stone attachments ship with the SmartOven+, but must be requested after purchase and are shipped out to the customer at no additional cost.

In addition to different types of cooking, the SmartOven+ also has connected features such as remote control via KitchenAid’s mobile app, as well as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa integration for voice control. Through a Nest integration, you can also be alerted if you accidentally leave the oven on.

All of this versatility in the SmartOven+ ain’t cheap. The 30-inch single configuration will set you back $3,199 and the 30-inch double is $4,799. (You can get a “regular” KitchenAid single oven for $1,700 and a double for $2,700.)

When the SmartOven+ was announced at CES earlier this year, we were intrigued by the device’s modular cooking capabilities. The steam function was of particular interest to Spoon Founder, Mike Wolf, who wrote, “While I’m not sure I’m ready for a baking stone, after trying out a countertop steam oven, I’m sold on that method as a superior way to prepare many types of food. With this new KitchenAid oven, I can add it in.”

The KitchenAid stand mixers became a countertop (and wedding registry) staple because of its versatility. It’s safe to bet that KitchenAid won’t stop at these three attachments and like its mixer, more functionality will be on the way. Depending on how many attachments the company makes, $3,199 might wind up being a bargain.

June 24, 2019

Podcast: Digitizing The Kitchen

Four years ago at the first Smart Kitchen Summit, Kevin Brown and Eugenio Minvielle got on stage to unveil their new company, Innit. The idea was essentially this: they wanted to create a platform to digitize the kitchen.

It made sense. After all, as digital subscription services abounded for things like entertainment and home security, but the kitchen was in stuck in stasis. Since that time, the company has done their part to push the kitchen digitization cause forward by partnering up with plenty of appliance makers, acquiring another startup to shore up their grocery shopping game and even powering customized meal kits.

For this week’s episode of the Food Tech Show, I decided to catch up with Brown to hear how this journey to digitize food and cooking is going. You can hear our conversation just clicking play below, finding it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or play/download direct to your device here.

June 17, 2019

Genie Launches its All-in-One Cooking Appliance and Meal System in the U.S.

When she was a child, Ayelet Carasso-Sternberg would watch episodes of Star Trek with her father and marvel at the show’s technology-filled future. Fast forward several decades later and during one particularly hungry day at the office, Carasso was lamenting the fact that there was still no food replicator like they had on the Enterprise.

It was that love of sci-fi and an empty stomach that set Carasso-Sternberg in motion to co-found and become CEO of Genie, which makes a countertop appliance that will cook you a meal with the push of a button.

There are two parts to the Genie system: the hardware, which is a small, squat device resembling a vintage refrigerator, and the cups-in-a-meal, which are filled with freeze-dried ingredients. (Carasso is quick to stress that these aren’t frozen pre-made meals; rather, they’re individual ingredients assembled into one vessel). There are 30 Genie meals that run the gamut of breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert.

To make something such as penne bolognese or a rice and lentil bowl, you scan the meal cup with the machine, insert it into the cooking cavity, puncture the lid with the water/steam attachment and push a button. The Genie device does the rest, heating and mixing all the ingredients together and giving you a hot meal in three minutes.

Genie Demo

The Genie uses three types of heat: precision microwave targeting, the company’s patented steam technology, and conduction heating via the cradle that holds the meal container. After scanning the meal, the Genie’s algorithms know how much water to add, and how much of the three heating types to use and when to properly cook each element within the container.

The only thing that enters the pod is the steam or water supply, which heats, reconstitutes and and acts as a directional mixer for the ingredients.

Hungry people reading this who are interested in the Genie will have to get a job to find one as it’s strictly a B2B play right now. There’s no consumer version available yet. The hardware itself is free with a subscription to the meals, and while Genie won’t reveal specific pricing, Carasso told me in an interview that the cost for the end user would typically be between $4 and $7 per meal.

Genie raised $10 million in 2018, and the product is already available in Israel. With today’s announcement, the company is expanding into the U.S. It will face some competition in the North American office space from startups like Markov, which sells a hardware/prepped meal combo with the Level 1 (and also has special microwave technology), and Kitchenmate, which has its own cooker + meal solution.

Going after the corporate market is a good starting place for Genie. Companies are looking for a meal solution for their employees that is somewhere between offering nothing and the massive expense of providing free catered meals. Meal-in-a-box solutions like Genie’s help fit that bill. Now we’ll just have to see if American businesses will beam these food pods up.

June 17, 2019

Early Kitchen Commerce Pioneer IKAN Holdings Acquires Freshub, Obtains $8 Million in New Funding

Freshub, an Israel based kitchen commerce startup that powers in-home grocery shopping through IoT technology, has been acquired in an all-stock transaction by New York City-based IKAN Holdings, an early pioneer in tech-powered shopping in the kitchen.

In a related move, IKAN has also raised $8 million in fresh financing to, according to the announcement, “fund the further development of the merged company’s smart kitchen commerce solution, while enforcing its IP rights based on representation by Kramer Levin in the United States.”

The investor was not disclosed as part of the announcement.

While details on IKAN are hard to come by, way back in 2007 the company debuted a product called the IKAN Grocery Scanner, a barcode reader that allowed users to create a online shopping list and order groceries through website Ikan.net (which is now non-functional) and have it delivered through Peapod or other third party partners.

From the New York Times article by David Pogue who tested out the product in 2008:

Each time you’re about to throw away an empty container — for ketchup, cereal, pickles, milk, macaroni, paper towels, dog food or whatever — you just pass its bar code under the scanner. With amazing speed and accuracy, the Ikan beeps, consults its online database of one million products, and displays the full name and description.

Not only could you scan packaged item barcodes, but it also included what could roughly be described as voice shopping. From the article:

“…if you want something that has no bar code, like fresh fruit, you can press a Voice Reminder button and simply speak it: “Six green bananas.” A D’Agostino representative on the other end will manually add the requested item to your order.”

The Ikan Grocery Scanner (2007)

If 2008 sounds early for what is essentially a functional connected grocery scanner with integrated voice shopping, that’s because it is. While obviously not as seamless as today’s modern voice shopping platforms such as Alexa or Google Assistant, IKAN’s early product still allowed consumers to add items to a grocery order with their voice.

All of which makes the announcement’s mention of IP rights enforcement make sense. I’m sure the newly combined company will pursue licensing deals from those building connected and voice-powered home grocery replenishment products, including possibly even Amazon and Google themselves.

So what is IKAN getting in Freshub? For one, the Israel-based startup has been at it a long time (Freshub received their first seed funding in 2013), so they bring their IP to add to the combined entity’s arsenal. Freshub also has established relationships with grocery stores such as Woodmans and had worked early on with in-store retail commerce giant NCR.  They also have been working with consumer hardware manufacturers such as XtremeMac and Gourmia to build products, though it’s not clear if any are currently shipping.

June 11, 2019

Tetra, the Tiny Countertop Dishwasher Everyone Fell in Love with, Now Won’t Ship Until 2020

Exactly no one predicted that a dishwasher would steal the show at CES, but that’s what happened in Vegas in January of 2018.

Originally expected to be available for purchase at the end of 2018, the Tetra dishwasher from Heatworks had attendees saying “take our money” with its promise of a ten minute wash cycle, miserly water usage and a futuristic design that made many of us (including me) weirdly ok with the idea of putting a dishwasher on our already crowded countertops.

Now, however, those of us ready to plop down $299 for the Tetra can hold onto our money for another year: the countertop dishwasher now isn’t expected to ship until some time in 2020.

Why the slipping ship dates? According to company spokesperson Melissa Verzwyvelt, the issue had to do more with straightening out contract manufacturing issues with the company’s latest generation water heater, the Model 3, which took focus and resources away from the company’s newest product line.

“With Tetra, we have had to push our dates back twice now because we have had a few production issues with our MODEL 3 Water Heater that have been out of our control,” Verzwyvelt told me via email. “So instead of finalizing Tetra’s specifications and distribution channels as we had anticipated, our team’s focus and resources have gone to resolving MODEL 3 contract manufacturer problems.”

That’s a bummer for those of us eager to buy the Tetra, but an even bigger one for Heatworks. After all, the company had lots of buzz coming out of CES two years in a row for its new product line. You have to think some folks will possibly move on by the time it finally ships, or even consider another entrant (say hi, Bob).

On the other hand, the company’s core business has been water heaters (it’s where the patented water heating technology in the Tetra comes from), so it makes sense to get that ironed out first.

Some of you may be wondering about the status of the DUO, the new portable water heating carafe the company debuted at CES this year. According to Verzwyvelt, with the Model 3 manufacturing issues behind them, the company is also busy working on getting the DUO to market as well, which means hopefully they’ll meet the 2020 ship date I predicted in January of this year.

You can get a look at the Tetra in the video below.

June 5, 2019

Is Walmart’s Store No. 8 Building A Consumer Hardware Platform With Project Franklin?

Over a year and a half ago, a startup by the name of Wim was gobbled up by Walmart’s  Store No.8.  At the time it seemed like an unusual pick-up for the retail giant’s innovation arm for a few reasons:

  1. Wim made a home frozen yogurt machine.  I suspected then and suspect now that Walmart has no intentions of getting into the fro-yo business.
  2. Wim had just told the world about their machine and had lots of early buzz.
  3. Store No. 8’s portfolio of stealthy projects is largely focused on the reinvention of retail. The Wim team was decidedly consumer hardware and food product focused.

However, while the deal seemed something of an outlier, that didn’t mean the combination of the two wouldn’t lead to something really interesting.

But what exactly?

At the time of the acquisition, there were very few clues other than a statement in the Walmart press release about the deal that said Wim had “created some of the most thoughtfully-designed home devices on the market and we’re excited to bring that experience and fresh perspective to Store No 8.” Since that time, the company has remained mum about what exactly Project Franklin is about, but there have been some small signals emanating from the group’s hiring activity that could point to what their up to.

Here are a few:

Project Franklin Will Produce Lots of Consumer Data: From what I can tell, Project Franklin’s product will be be a consumer product that spits out lots of consumer data. This signal comes from a job posting for a data scientist from earlier this year for Project Franklin that told applicants that the chosen candidate would “join our founding team as the first Data Scientist who will play a crucial role in helping us build a consumer product rooted in data analysis.”

Project Franklin Will Have Its Own Brand: Another clue suggests the product will also have its own new consumer-facing brand. This posting for a Growth Marketing Lead says Project Franklin’s product will be “a brand-new brand (get it!) and you will be responsible for working collaboratively with our operations, design and product team to think about the role that branding and marketing will play in launch and, eventually, the super growth of the brand.”

Project Franklin’s Product Will Be a Service. Or, at the very least, be a consumer product with a significant service component. A posting tells prospective candidates for a Director of Operations position that they will “drive the operations playbook on how to deliver a consumer-focused, technology-backed service to millions of customers across the country.”

Project Franklin Will Be E-Commerce-Centric. A posting for a Senior Software Engineer says they will need to “Iterate rapidly to build a next-generation e-commerce product.”

Project Franklin Is Tied To Specific Markets. This clue comes from a position for a Director of Operations (City Launcher) that says the new hire will “play a central role in the launch of our first market.” After this first market, however, Project Franklin will move quickly to other markets. From the posting: “This launch will bring new, cutting edge technology to market before we quickly scale to more of Walmart’s expansive stores network.”

This last clue is particularly interesting since Franklin is e-commerce focused. This tells me that whatever the product ultimately is, it likely will facilitate or enhance local deliveries from different Walmart stores or warehouses.

Beyond that, do these clues tell us what Project Franklin will be? Not really.  In fact, I have to commend whoever’s job it is at Store No. 8 to write cryptic job postings, because they are very good at what they do.

Still, we have enough information to suggest a few potential scenarios:

First, I think the product could be something of an answer to Amazon Alexa, in particular the home commerce and data-gathering aspects of Alexa. What form this might take is hard to predict, but the collective hints within the job listings suggest Franklin could be a consumer oriented product that has high-consumer engagement that also results in the consumer ordering lots of stuff from Walmart.

In other words, something like Alexa.

I should say here that by suggesting Franklin could be an Alexa-ish platform for home commerce, I am not suggesting it will be a voice assistant or interface. In fact, while it could be, I don’t expect it has to to be.

Instead, I suspect it will be more like Alexa in a meta-sense, in that it will provide customers value through a product that makes their life easier (“hey, I can use my voice to get information, control my smart home or order things!”), but the larger benefit of Alexa for Amazon (and its brand partners) is all the data gathered and the ability for consumers to order products completely friction-free. This is something Walmart currently doesn’t have while Amazon (and Google) does.

I also think there’s a good chance this service product could be manifested in a form of consumer hardware. I have no other clue to base this one other than the Wim team was creating a hardware product.

Also, whatever Franklin becomes, it could have a heavy food focus. That could simply involve food delivery, or it could be something more. This suspicion is fed by the hiring of Jeff de Picciotto late last year, someone who was originally with Wim but left and came back. De Picciotto led CPG product development for the Momofuku restaurant chain of David Chang fame.

Granted, all of this is a whole lot of speculation about a project that could take a bunch of different forms. But, for all the reasons I’ve named above – that Walmart has big plans for Project Franklin, that they plan to launch a potentially important new brand, that it looks like a platform that could touch millions of consumers – it looks like something worth speculating about.

And, hopefully, we should know soon. Whatever Project Franklin will be, it looks like its unveiling is imminent if the group’s increased hiring activity of go-to-market types is any indication.

May 31, 2019

Chef Meal Kits Brings the Virtual Kitchen Concept and Restaurant-Branded Meal Kits Together

Despite the amount of text we dedicate to documenting its struggles, there’s still opportunity to be had in the meal kit sector. Grocery stores are selling kits in their aisles, others are integrating them with shoppable recipes, and, in a trend that picked up steam last year thanks to Chick-fil-A, restaurants are starting to sell their own branded kits via mail order.

As far as Chef Meal Kits founder Meg Ginimay is concerned, the restaurant meal kit category is a hugely promising one, especially when you combine it with the concept of a virtual kitchen and offer it to restaurants at a low cost.

Chef Meal Kits operates as a marketplace for restaurants wanting to sell meal kit versions of their popular in-house dishes to customers. Currently the service operates in eight U.S. states: California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho.

The website currently offers 220 kits for purchase. Customers can filter by things like protein type, diet requirement, or a specific city. You can also, of course, filter by the restaurant itself so long as it’s participating. Most dishes are portioned for between two and four servings. Price varies based on the restaurant, plus shipping costs. Depending on the kit you choose, the price is typically higher than, say, something from HelloFresh. But as Ginimav points out, the goal is to connect customers with “a premium service that [offers] better quality ingredients” and is in some way an extension of the restaurant experience itself.

Unlike many traditional meal kit companies, Chef Meal Kits doesn’t require a subscription to use. Once ordered, Chefs Meal Kit portions out and packs up the ingredients and sends them out, and they arrive at the customer’s door one to two days later. Ginimav says the company is also considering FedEx Air once it has the volume to justify that.

For restaurants, participating in Chef Meal Kits could potentially make extra money and grow a brand without incurring unmanageably high costs in terms of both time and money.

Right now, Chef Meal Kit works with independent restaurants and/or food entrepreneurs. The company connects each restaurant with a consulting chef who helps them choose recipes from their menu (between four and eight), typically, and convert them into a meal kit recipe. From there, Chef Meal Kit takes photos of each dish, creates a restaurant-branded “storefront” on its website, and manages the portioning, packing, and shipping of orders each week. According to Ginimav, the company currently has 300 restaurants signed up to participate on the platform. Around 30 of those are active on the Chef Meal Kit marketplace; the company is in the process of onboarding the others as we speak. And as for larger chain restaurants, Ginimav says they will look into including Cheesecake Factory-level brands “down the line.”

Down the line also includes goals ramping up the virtual kitchen aspect of the operation. Right now, Chef Meal Kit handles all the work in terms of preparing the ingredients for shipment, which it does from its virtual kitchen in San Diego. In future, Ginimav wants to be able to offer restaurants the option to manage this process themselves (and save money doing so) by bringing their own staff to a Chef Meal Kit virtual kitchen. This “self-fulfillment” concept would also work for food entrepreneurs just starting out who perhaps want to test a brand without incurring the risks and costs of doing business with brick and mortar.

“No longer are the days where you have to spend $200,000 to $300,000 minimum to set up a restaurant,” he said, adding that virtual kitchens can be a “very low-cost launchpad for your brand.” He also points out that this future scenario will still be meal kit focused, and that the virtual kitchen spaces will exist for picking and portioning ingredients, not doing any of the actual cooking. The meal kit, Ginimav explains, is its own important arm of the restaurant experience: “Now you have a third option, which is you can cook at home with our meal kit. We’re just trying to be that third option. We’re not trying to replace the others.”

May 29, 2019

Hop On: There’s a Sudsy New Wave of Homebrew Appliances Looking To Automate Beer Brewing

How many people will make beer at home if you give them an machine to help in the process?

The next few years should provide an answer to that question as a new wave of beer-brewing appliances hit the market.

Home beer brewing machines aren’t new. PicoBrew started shipping the Zymatic a few years back and followed that product with the consumer-focused Pico. Brewie started shipping its second generation, the Brewie+, last year. Australian extract-beer giant Coopers got into the game in 2017 with BrewArt (though technically some wouldn’t call extract-derived beer “brewing”), and we’re not even counting those like HOPii that have already come and gone.

Despite all this activity, it seems the homebrew market has only just started to pick up speed. With that in mind, here’s a quick look at the new entrants to home brewing appliances coming to the U.S. in the next year:

BEERMKR

Set to ship this summer, BEERMKR’s open platform and proven ability to deliver products make this startup one of the more promising new entrants to the home brew appliance space.

Here’s what I wrote in March after I saw the BEERMKR in action at the Housewares show:

The system, which comes with a brewing appliance and a beer dispenser, sells for a post-Kickstarter price of $399 for the complete system. MKR KITs, the optional ingredient packs for those that want to “brew-by-number”, will each cost $12 and deliver a gallon or so of beer.

At $399, BEERMKR is one of the most affordable new entrants to the market. The company will sell MKR KITS that include all the ingredients for a batch of beer for $12, though you can also use your own grains and hops.

You can watch founder Aaron Walls walk me through the product below:

A look at the Beermkr beer brewing appliance

LG HomeBrew

We were as surprised as anyone when LG announced their intent to enter the home-brewing appliance space in advance of this year’s CES. The new appliance, aptly called LG HomeBrew, sees the South Korean appliance giant taking a Keurig-style approach to home brewing with an all-in-one capsule-based system that automates the entire process, including dispensing.

If anything, a big consumer electronics brand like LG entering the home-brew-appliance space helps legitimize it, even if LG runs into challenges finding a market for their product. Of course, much of the product’s ultimate success will depend on pricing and on how well it actually works, but I worry that by creating a fully-capsule based system the company might be going against the trend towards more open brewing systems. After all, consumers who go through the trouble of making beer at home have shown they want some room for creativity, one of big the reasons PicoBrew finally opened their platform to enable ‘bring-your-own-ingredients’.

MiniBrew

MiniBrew, the brain child of two Dutch advertising executives, is different from all the other appliances on this list for one reason: it’s already shipping.

The product, for which the company raised €2.6M in funding in December, started shipping throughout Europe in the fall of last year and the company is targeting a 2020 entry into the U.S. market.

Cofounder Olivier van Oord gave me a walk-through of the MiniBrew when I was in Europe last month, and I have to say I liked what I saw. The system is both open enough to allow the brewer to craft their own recipes while also also applying enough automation to make the brewing process (and serving) much easier and approachable.

One aspect I liked was an app that allows the user to craft recipes easily around their own beer preferences. From there, they can order ingredients based on their own recipe or choose an ingredient pack based on a beer from one of MiniBrew’s partners. Once the wort is created, the user tosses the yeast into the brew keg and tells it to start the fermentation process with the app.

Keeping the the wort and what becomes the fully fermented beer contained in one keg that also serves as the (fully refrigerated) dispensing keg is something van Oord saw as critical, in part because it eliminates room for error:

“Where beer goes wrong is in the transport of wort,” he said. “Working clean is the most important part of beer brewing.”

The MiniBrew isn’t cheap, selling for €1,200 (which is roughly $1,350 USD), but for those that was a powerful but open system — and one that is already shipping — the MiniBrew is a strong contender.

You can see my walk through of the MiniBrew below:

MiniBrew Beer Brewing (and Dispensing!) Appliance

DrinkWorks

While not technically a home-brewing machine, DrinkWorks at least deserves mention for one reason: the home adult beverage machine is a product of a joint venture between Keurig and the world’s largest beer company, AB InBev.

The DrinkWorks machine, which is now available in beta in the Budweiser’s hometown of St Louis, MO, to consumers statewide in Missouri and Florida, uses pods to make cocktails and, surprisingly, beer. While it’s unclear exactly how the beer is made from a pod, it’s not through traditional brewing and fermentation methods. But for those that like the idea of making cockails and beer at the press of a button with a Keurig-like pod system, you have to at least be intrigued by DrinkWorks.

While DrinkWorks has been fairly vague on details, we expect the product to be more widely rolled out later this year. For now the DrinkWorks machine will set you back $399, though pricing could change in future.

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