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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Connected Kitchen

CloudChef Wants to Capture a Chef’s Knowledge in Software to Recreate High-Quality Cuisine Anywhere

What if you could digitally record the best chefs in the world as they make their culinary masterpieces? And what if you took that knowledge and encoded it into software that enabled everyday kitchen workers across the globe to recreate these dishes without specialized training?

That’s the idea behind CloudChef, a new company that wants to create a “Spotify for food” with a cloud software platform that aims to enable culinary teams in remote kitchens to make a meal just as a master chef would.

“We started CloudChef with this whole notion that in the same way that you can record and playback audio and video, you can now record and playback taste,” said CloudChef founder Nikhil Abraham in an interview with The Spoon. “And if you could hypothetically record and playback taste, you could eat from the best chefs and restaurants and literally anyone from the world without having any location constraints.”

So how does it work?

According to Abraham, CloudChef has outfitted its capture kitchens with technology that closely monitors a chef working through a recipe. Sensors and cameras monitor everything from the temperature of a protein to the moisture lost while reducing a sauce to the brownness of an onion and put it all into a machine-readable playback file that can be executed in a kitchen powered with CloudChef’s software.

“With our sensors, depending on what recipe it is, we can codify the intent behind the steps and also codify the intuition of the chef,” said Abraham.

Record & Playback Taste - CloudChef

On the “playback” side, how does CloudChef-enabled kitchen work?

Abraham said a CloudChef-powered kitchen is nothing but a standard kitchen, but the appliances are controlled by software. Modern appliances accessible via an API (like a newer Rational oven, for example) can connect directly and receive instructions from the CloudChef software. For appliances without the ability to interface with external software systems, CloudChef “opens it up, and we put an additional small amount of hardware in there to help us control the appliance with software.”

Abraham said that while CloudChef kitchens have the cooking guided by their software, humans still play a significant role in creating meals. The physical labor of moving food from station to station, taking stuff in and out of the freezer, and plating are all still done by workers without specialized training under the guidance of CloudChef.

“Every workstation in our kitchen is loaded with screens, and people have personal devices on them at all times,” said Abraham. “For example, they get tasks like ‘go to workstation two, and then the task would be to remove contents from this pan onto this other pan and put it inside the blast freezer.’ The physical action of moving stuff around in the kitchen, weighing things out the right way, is done by humans while all the cooking decisions are made by software.”

Abraham believes this ‘co-botic’ balance between software automation and humans is essential. For example, while he could envision a future where more cooking tasks are executed by robotics, he said the best results come when a human is involved.

“And at some point, we’ll have some amount of automation in the kitchen, but there are still a lot of different tasks in robotics that machines are particularly bad at, and humans are just instinctively good at,” said Abraham. “If you tell a human to scrape stirred rice from the bottom of a pan, it’s pretty intuitive. Most humans wouldn’t have a problem doing that. But teaching that to a robot takes time.”

Eventually, the company plans to open up the CloudChef platform to other kitchens via a licensing/SaaS model.

“The vision with that product is that if you’re a kitchen owner, you will give your kitchen spec via a web interface, and we will guide you on what all appliances you need to buy, or what all incremental things you need to put in your kitchen to make it CloudChef ready,” said Abraham. “So just like how Android has guidelines for hardware manufacturers, we will also have guidelines for kitchens that are CloudChef-powered

But for now, Abraham said the company’s current focus is on the “capture” side of things. They are working on recording as many chef recipes to the platform as possible – they currently have about 100 – which can be used in CloudChef-powered kitchens.

CloudChef currently has two company-owned kitchens, one in Mumbai and one in Palo Alto. The Mumbai location is an outsource kitchen for brands and has already served over 50 thousand CloudChef-cooked meals. According to Abraham, the brands have received higher ratings and retention rates compared with other kitchens. The Palo Alto location is operational and delivers meals via third-party delivery services like DoorDash.

While you may be partially correct if you think some chefs would resist the idea of having their cooking know-how put into a system that automates their work somewhere else, the company hasn’t had any problems getting high-profile Indian chefs like Srijith Gopinathan (Ettan), Thomas Zacharias (Bombay Canteen, Locavore), and Manjit Gill to record recipes on their platform. Part of the attraction, no doubt, is the royalty the chef receives each time one of their recipes is made. However, I imagine some may also be attracted to the idea that CloudChef technology could create a more chef-like version of their recipe, which may make them feel better about the idea of lending their name to food sent out via ghost kitchens which, if we’re being honest, don’t always have the best record of creating chef-like food.

CloudChef’s own investors include celebrity chef Tom Colicchio and Roy Yamaguchi, so they clearly also see value in the idea (though they haven’t – at least at this point – put any of their recipes on the platform).

Samsung Wants You to Put Generative Art on Your Refrigerator

Today Samsung launched a new line of custom refrigerator art produced by generative AI. According to Samsung, the new collection was created by Matt Jacobson, an artist who “uses computer code as his paintbrush.” Jacobson used computer algorithms to create 100 generative art prints designed for Bespoke refrigerators.

Generative art – art created using an algorithm or, more recently, with artificial intelligence – has generated lots of buzz lately as new tools like OpenAI’s DALL-E have people creating visually stunning artwork with a few lines of text. While we’ve seen many artists and companies jumping on the AI-powered art bandwagon, Samsung is definitely the first appliance brand to tap into the generative art zeitgeist.

For Samsung, the move is an interesting – if on-brand – way to tap into the latest technology trends. The Bespoke line allows customers to create custom refrigerator designs using mix-and-match panels, whether with off-the-shelf designs or personalized designs with a customer’s artwork or photos. The Bespoke line has been getting lots of promotional love from Samsung over the past year-plus, while the company has let its tech-forward Family Hub line recede into the background. The release of the new generative art collection seems to be another tacit admission by the company that while cutting-edge technology may be a fine way to enhance its design-forward lineup, making it the central focus of a refrigerator’s feature set wasn’t a winning proposition.

The collection is available for a limited time and free to download from today until February 13, 2023.

You can hear Jacobsen describe the project in the video below:

Samsung Bespoke - Generative Art by Matt Jacobson

Brava Debuts the Brava Glass at CES 2023

Brava, a maker of smart oven technology, unveiled the Brava Glass smart oven this week at CES. The new model is the first update since the company debuted its eponymous in 2018.

The Brava Glass fixes what, for many, is the biggest shortcoming of the original Brava: not being able to see inside the cooking cavity. Ok, technically you could peek inside, but only by using the camera that resides inside the cooking chamber of the original Brava. But with the new Brava Glass, no cameras are needed (thought it does have one) as you look inside the Brava through a pane on the front door.

According to Brava spokesperson Steven Barush, the company had always intended to put a see-through glass on the door of the Brava, but didn’t want to rush it. That makes sense, especially considering that Brava’s cooking technology uses high-intensity light. To make looking inside the Brava with the naked eye without getting sun-blinded possible, the Brava Glass has a 97% tint says Barush.

As you can see below, even with a significant tint, the internal cooking light brights things up enough to get a good view of the inside of the oven.

A Look at the Brava Glass at CES 2023

The new Brava Glass with retail for $1,995 (compared with $1,295 for the original Brava) and comes with accessories like a cast iron dish, a muffin tin, a bread pan and more. The company expects the Brava Glass to shipping in early April.

Fridge Cam Maker Smarter Launches New Models at CES, Announces Acquisition of Chefling

Smarter is off to a busy 2023. At CES in Las Vegas today, the fridge cam and kitchen tech startup announced a new lineup of fridge cams. And, if that wasn’t enough, the company also announced they have acquired smart kitchen software maker Chefling.

The new lineup of fridge cams includes an update to the company’s original model. The FridgeCam2 has an extended 3-month battery life, an upgraded processor, and easier one-click set-up via the device’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. In addition to new FridgeCam, the company also introduced the FoodCam Mini, a small form-factor model that can be placed in the fridge or the pantry.

Smarter is also debuting the FridgeCam Pro this week, a model targeted at appliance manufacturers who want to retrofit a fridge cam into their refrigerator models without significant redesign. According to Smarter, the Pro model, which is powered by a USB-C connection, can be added to a fridge without having to make expensive modifications to an OEM’s pre-existing hardware.

Above: Smarter Image Recognition Technology

In addition to new hardware, the company announced it had acquired Chefling, a startup whose software helps home cooks manage food inventory, create shopping lists and plan meals. Smarter plans to pair Chefling’s food inventory database with its food image recognition capabilities to create what it says is the most advanced food inventory management system available.

Chefling, which got early traction through a partnership and investment from Bosch, has been pretty quiet for the last year and a half. By putting its software into the hands of Smarter, it gives its technology new life through the newly combined companies’ fuller suite of software targeted at the difficult task of consumer inventory management.

“The software offered by Chefling is the missing piece of the puzzle in terms of providing a full end to end service,” Chrisian Lane, CEO of Smarter, said in a release sent to The Spoon. “Taking the hard work out of stock keeping, meal planning and deciding what you need to buy next. We have automated the entire planning and cooking experience, making it the ideal assistant for the kitchen”.

Smarter also announced a new inventory management software tool it calls KitchenSync. The tool, paired with Smarter’s computer vision, can determine whether food is in stock or not. The software can factor in other sensor data (such as a weight sensor) and determine whether an item needs to be replenished. The software can also integrate with a customer’s online grocery service and can match food inventory to purchases.

If you want to check out Smarter’s new FridgeCam lineup, they’ll be at Showstoppers at CES.

Smarter Managing Director Isabella Lane will be on stage tomorrow at the CES Food Tech Conference on the future of cooking session.

GE Appliances Debuts Voice-Controlled Smart Mixer That Detects Texture and Viscosity

GE Appliances just dropped an interesting new appliance: a smart stand mixer with built-in scale, app control for guided recipes, and voice control through Alexa and Google Home.

The Profile Smart Mixer is, as far as I can tell, the first Wi-Fi controlled smart mixer on the market, which is quite a feat in itself, given the sheer number of connected appliances that have debuted over the past decade.

The mixer has many interesting features, including a scale and voice control, but its the device’s ‘auto-sense’ technology that intrigues me the most. The auto-sense feature monitors changes in texture and viscosity through motor torque feedback optimizes performance, and will automatically shut off the mixer when it determines the mixing is complete.

GE Profile Smart Mixer with Auto Sense

The mixer has an app and utilizes guided recipes, enabling users to follow the instructions around ingredients and send mix commands from the app itself. For someone who often cooks using YouTube videos or new recipes discovered online, I’d appreciate the ability to send commands to my mixer from a phone. Unfortunately, I often find a device’s app recipe libraries lacking, so hopefully the new mixer will eventually enable the import of recipes found online (something companies like Fresco, a GE Appliances partner, enable through their platform).

The new appliance has built-in Wi-Fi, using the company’s Profile Connect+ software platform to enable connectivity to the cloud and field-deliverable software updates. GE Appliances has been perhaps the most active in promoting its field upgrades. I expect they’ll do the same with their new smart mixer by delivering new features or seasonal capabilities.

GE Appliances’ new mixer is an interesting addition to the mixer market, one that KitchenAid and Cuisinart currently dominate. However, while GE Appliances has had products in the market, they’ve been priced much lower than the new smart mixer (which retails for thousand bucks), often below $200. It will be interesting to see if Whirlpool/KitchenAid respond to GE Appliance’s new entrant by bringing their own smart mixer to market.

Suvie Introduces Third Generation ‘Cool to Cook’ Countertop Appliance

Today Suvie, a Boston-based kitchen appliance and food delivery startup, announced its third-generation cooking appliance.

The Suvie 3, which comes just a year and a half after its second generation cooking robot, features four major upgrades according to company CEO Robin Liss:

Smaller footprint. The Suvie 3 is 10% smaller than the previous generation. With its shorter stature, Liss says the Suvie 3 can now fit under most any kitchen cabinet.

Improved aesthetic design. The Suvie 3 features a lot of stainless steel and, compared to previous generations, looks more like a traditional countertop cooking appliance.

Increased cooking capacity. Even with a smaller exterior, Suvie squeezed in more cooking capacity. According to Liss, the new appliance has 36% more cooking volume than the previous generation.

“This means you can comfortably feed four plus adults with one meal cooked in the Suvie,” Liss said.

Cool to Cook is now available on all cooking modes. With previous generations, Suvie users could only schedule cooks with lower-temperature cook modes (sous vide, steam, etc). With the gen 2, the user needed to push a cook button on the appliance itself to initiate a higher temperature cooking mode (bake, broil, etc.). With the third-generation Suvie, users can remotely initiate cooking across all cooking modes.

Liss admits announcing a new generation cooking appliance less than a year and a half after they started shipping the current generation is a short turnaround. According to Liss, one reason is that hardware development cycles take a long time, and they felt they needed to start building the ‘what’s-next’ as soon as the new model ships.

“We knew people wanted a smaller device, and we knew customers wanted cool to cook in all modes, but we knew it was gonna take us some time to get those features designed and optimized.”

Liss and the Suvie team felt enabling cool to cook across all cooking modes would take some time to get the approval of industry safety watchers, so the company spent much of the past year and a half involved working closely with UL to make sure all-mode cool to cook got greenlighted.

And so now, the first batch of Suvie 3s will leave the factory in China next week. According to Suvie, those who order immediately should get their units within 5-8 weeks.

To start, the company will sell a bundled package that includes both the Suvie 3 main unit and the accompanying starch cooker for $799 (there was no re-design on the starch cooker). The company plans to eventually sell the Suvie 3 on its own for $399 with a subscription to Suvie’s meal delivery service. The company will also offer discounts on the latest model for past Suvie customers.

According to Liss, an “overwhelming majority” of Suvie users subscribe to the company’s meal delivery service. She says the company has sold over 15 thousand second-generation Suvies and the typical customer profile is a dual-income family with kids who are too busy to cook. While Liss wouldn’t disclose exact revenue splits, she told me that the company’s revenue is “roughly” half and half between its hardware and food business.

“We think that it’s good to have a balanced business with a strong appliance business and a strong meal business,” Liss said. “We do that because we think that to deliver some cutting edge technology, we need to have the customer interest to do these advanced features.”

Suvie’s focus on the continuous development of new hardware contrasts with Tovala, another cooking appliance/food delivery startup. While Tovala has done some minor modifications its current generation cooking appliance, the Chicago-based startup is essentially still selling the same oven it introduced four years ago. In about the same time span, Suvie has introduced three different models.

According to Liss, Suvie’s fast pace of hardware development is an essential part of its mission as a company.

“That’s the company we’ve built, which is different than a lot of hardware startups,” Liss said. “A lot of hardware startups at their core are really taking an existing product and maybe changing the design and adding some software to it. We decided that we wanted to change the way dinner was made. So we invented countertop, ‘cool to cook’ multizone appliances.”

It remains to be seen how existing Suvie customers will react to the announcement of a new generation appliance so soon after they received their gen 2 models, many of them over the past few months. Liss says the company will give discounts to existing customers who want to upgrade to the new Suvie model.

Else Labs Announces Pro Kitchen Focused Oliver Fleet As It Pauses Rollout of Home Cooking Robot

Else Labs, the company behind the countertop home cooking robot called Oliver, announced today the launch of Oliver Fleet, a commercial kitchen reimagining of its original core product.

The new Fleet solution is a respin of its original standalone Oliver home cooking robot into a solution that allows multiple units to be used and managed simultaneously in professional kitchen environments to automate cooking tasks. According to company CEO Khalid Aboujassoum, while the Oliver Fleet units look the same from the outside as the original consumer unit, they’ve been built to withstand the more rugged requirements of the professional kitchen.

“It might look like the household unit from the outside, but the guts of the Oliver Fleet are different,” Aboujassoum said. “The Fleet units are designed for back-to-back cooking, for that harsh environment in the commercial kitchen compared to the household.”

With the pivot to a food service focused solution, Else is pausing the rollout of the home Oliver. According to Aboujassoum, the decision to make the change was largely driven by the supply chain disruptions and associated component shortages and price changes. While some backers of the Indiegogo campaign eager to get their home Oliver may not be happy with the switch, Aboujassoum said the company would give them the option of a full refund, or they can choose to continue to wait until the company restarts the consumer unit rollout.

While the focus on commercial automated cooking comes after a pandemic where restaurant businesses have faced increasing challenges around labor, Aboujassoum told me the company started hearing interest in developing a commercial version of the Oliver before COVID.

“It was an initial modest conversation at an exhibition late in 2019 where the Oliver got the attention of one of the food service companies,” Aboujassoum said. “The composition of the Fleet was born out of these conversations.”

The pandemic put everything on hold, but eventually, Else Labs started to hear more requests as things began to normalize. “As the dust settled, those conversations revived again,” Aboujassoum said. “We started receiving an influx of inbound requests all the way to the CES participation (earlier this year).”

The way Aboujassoum sees it, the Oliver Fleet can help food service companies move away from centralized food production in a central kitchen by pushing the ability to cook from raw ingredients on-site using automation.

“When I talk to (food service) clients, they’ve set up operations where they may have a huge central kitchen with a production plant, and they are shipping to maybe 50 locations,” Aboujassoum said. “We are talking about decentralizing the central kitchen. How much money can you save by deploying the Oliver Fleet and decentralizing the central kitchen? It’s a very transformational proposal.”

Aboujassoum says the Oliver Fleet system is available now and they will have announcements of deployment partners very soon. You can see a video of the Oliver Fleet system in action below.

Is Roku About To Bring Us Shoppable TV Content Featuring Martha Stewart & Other Culinary Giants?

Last week, Walmart and Roku announced a deal that would allow TV viewers watching streaming via a Roku device to purchase items – including food items – using their remote.

According to the announcement, the new experience will allow customers to click on and purchase items advertised within the “moments of entertainment” (translation: during an actual show and not an explicit commercial), as well as during commercial breaks during ad-supported programming.

The new integration will allow viewers to click on a shoppable ad and proceed to checkout. The customer’s payment information will be pre-populated from Roku Pay, Roku’s payments platform, and then the customer taps “OK” on the Walmart checkout page to place the order. A Walmart purchase confirmation is emailed to the customer.

By taking shoppable commerce to the TV screen, Walmart is going beyond the shoppable integrations the company has previously done through partnerships with SideChef and Tasty. While the rise of video-centric social media platforms is blurring the lines, TV watching (including streaming) typically is a much different experience than time spent in front of our computers doing activities like online shopping.

For Roku, the move builds on an impressive ad business which saw the company garner the bulk of its $734 million in Q1 non-hardware revenue via advertising sales. The core of the company’s ad business is done via its Oneview Platform, which does ad-targeting of consumers based on their viewing behavior and allows Roku to deliver ads interspersed into shows on its own channel and via streaming partners that do have ad-supported content (like, say, Hulu) that open up ad inventory to Roku.

This deal is interesting on its own, but it becomes much more intriguing considering Roku’s recent big bet on original cooking content featuring names like Martha Stewart, Emeril Lagasse, and Christopher Kimball. That news was unveiled in May at Roku’s 2022 NewFronts when the streaming company announced co-production deals with Marquee Brands and Milk Street Studios to produce seven new streaming shows exclusively for the Roku Channel.

Why are the two deals, when considered together, much more interesting than on their own? Because while Roku can theoretically insert commerce-conversion opportunities for Walmart or other partners in ads on other streaming channels, the streaming company can go much deeper with commerce integrations on its channel where it has the full rights to the content and owns all the ad inventory.

Some of those deeper integrations might include in-show shopping moments. For example, imagine watching “Martha Cooks” or “Milk Street’s My Family Recipe” (two of the new shows on Roku TV) and seeing Martha or Christopher Kimball showing off a new holiday recipe. The Roku platform would allow a call to action overlay within the show itself where viewers could click via their remote to view the food items in the recipe, add them to a cart, and a transaction to be completed there on the spot.

While the Walmart and the new show slate are technically different deals, I would be shocked if Roku wasn’t pushing the possibilities around in-show commerce when negotiating with Martha, Emeril and Kimball. Conversely, the timing of the Walmart shoppable ad partnership is giving Roku a premium grocery partner just as the streaming company is beefing up its food and cooking content.

Longer-term, I would imagine other streaming partners like Hulu or even Netflix (which is considering ad content) would be open to enabling in-show commerce on shows on their channel via Roku’s platform. Roku has over 60 million viewers using its platform, giving it one of the largest addressable audiences in the world of streaming. If they can tie all the pieces together and bring more streamer partners on board, the company could position itself as a true TV commerce power player.

Fellow, Maker of Specialty Coffee Gear, Raises $30 Million Series B

Fellow, a maker of specialty coffee gear, announced today they had raised $30 million via a Series B funding round led by Nextworld Evergreen.

The San Francisco-based company, which has made a name for itself with its somewhat pricey design-forward coffee-making gear, was started by founder and CEO Jake Miller in his dorm room at Stanford where he began work on a coffee steeper that raised close to $200 thousand on Kickstarter.

Since those early days, Miller and his team have launched a family of coffee and tea gear, ranging from French presses to kettles to insulated coffee mugs. The company, which has gained a following among baristas and celebrities for its sleekly designed Stagg EKG kettles (and also influenced a dozen or more knockoffs), also sells coffee beans via its website and has opened a flagship retail store in San Francisco.

Fellow CEO Jake Miller

I first connected with Miller in 2017 when he showed off the Stagg Kettle and pitched his company at the Smart Kitchen Summit. I sat down with him yesterday to talk about his company and plans moving forward.

The home coffee gear market has a rough space for some startups, yet Fellow has been able to grow. Why do you think you’ve had success while others have struggled or gone out of business?

I do think a big part of our success was our “failure” to raise venture capital back in 2013. With limited cash, we had to be incredibly thoughtful about our product roadmap. Not only did we have to understand the appeal and market size of our products, but we had to be very honest with ourselves about the likelihood of us actually delivering a product that customers would love.

For example, although a tiny market, we had high confidence in our ability to launch the best pour-over kettle in the world with a small team and limited resources. In 2013, if someone would have handed us $5 million I think there is a good chance we would have bit off too much and wouldn’t have been able to deliver. It’s exciting to sit here today with the experience of the past 9 years and now the confidence/ability to deliver on the big stuff moving forward. 

What do you plan on using the funding for?

With the capital from the fund raise, we are going to build the team out further so we can run even faster in product development, coffee, and major distribution expansion, including international and our Fellow-owned retail stores. Our second store in Venice, CA opens in August.

The consumer hardware space has changed pretty dramatically since you launched almost 10 years ago, and crowdfunding is one of the aspects that has gotten harder (due to lots of high-profile failures). Would you crowdfund today if you were starting a company or take a different path?

I’m incredibly thankful to the thousands of backers who have supported Fellow through multiple products. The connections we’ve made with our early supporters is priceless. So yes, I think if done right, with the right intentions and expectations, I would absolutely use crowdfunding for a new company today. And, who knows, maybe Fellow goes back to crowdfunding for one of our future products! Even though we don’t need the cash for development today, the insights and feedback we get from our backers is essential to our success.

When you started designing your first product while still at Stanford, did you think you’d be building a consumer products brand long-term?

From day one, my goal was to launch a brand that had real permanence. I often talk internally about my dream of building a 100-year company. So, the desire was there. However, when I think back to 2013 at Stanford sitting in the Launchpad class at the d.School, my big dream was to have 10 employees who were passionate about product design. Now, all of the Kardashians have a Fellow Stagg EKG and it’s also being used by world champion brewers. Fellow today is far more than I ever imagined, but what is exciting is that I truly believe we are just getting started. 

Do you see Fellow expanding beyond coffee/tea hardware in the future?

At some point, yes. But, not today. There is still so much more our customers are asking us to do within coffee. However, at some point in time our customers will ask us to move into other categories in the kitchen. We build beautifully functional tools for the home barista today, and we’re excited to build beautifully functional tools for other passions in the kitchen in the future.

You were a Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase finalist in 2017.  Do you have any memories from that experience you can share?

Yes! I remember pitching on stage alongside so many other great entrepreneurs. That was a real treat for me. Additionally, I remember seeing the other brands and products at the event and feeling inspired. Talking to other founders at SKS helped me to internalize the value that technology can create in the kitchen. 

The Shrooly Lets Aspiring Mushroom Farmers Grow Fungi On Their Kitchen Countertop

While I’m not a mushroom eater – they’re slimy and weird-looking pieces of mold – I’m all for growing them at home because, well, mushrooms are slimy weird-looking pieces of mold.

And, from the looks of it, I (and the mycophiles among us) may soon have another option to become a small-scale mushroom farmer with a home mushroom fruiting chamber called the Shrooly. The new gadget is currently being offered up through a new Indiegogo campaign and is scheduled to start shipping to backers in December of this year.

The appliance, which is available starting at $299 on Indiegogo, is a countertop home growing chamber with light and humidity control. The appliance has on-device control knob and a small display screen that gives updates on the mushroom’s growth, temperature data, and how long until the mushroom is ready for harvest. The Shrooly will also have an app that allows the user to control humidity and monitor the growth of the mushroom.

The Shrooly Mushroom Growing Appliance

Shrooly users will grow mushrooms from pods that feature a variety of different types of shrooms, ranging from Maitake to Shiitake to Cordyceps. Once a user puts a pod into the chamber, the mushroom takes about five or so days to grow big enough to be harvested. Each mushroom pod will cost $12. Shrooly owners will also be able to use third-party growing blocks.

Spoon readers may remember a similar concept from GE’s innovation arm and microfactory FirstBuild, the Mella. The two chambers are similar, but the Shrooly has a bit slicker-looking design and what looks like smaller countertop footprint. The two appliances are similarly priced, with the Mella going for $419 compared with the Shrooly’s standard price of $440.

While we haven’t quite seen the same level of proliferation of mushroom home grow chambers as we saw with countertop leafy-green grow systems a few years ago, two in the span of less than a year might be the start of a trend. For those who actually want to generate food for consumption with a small footprint countertop appliance, I actually think mushroom chambers make more sense. Mushrooms can be quite large and they have fairly quick grow cycles, which similar-sized countertop veggie-grow machines really only produce herbs or leafy greens like lettuce.

As always, we have to caution that crowdfunded appliances have a history of delays and sometimes never showing up at all. But, the mushroom heads out there, the Shrooly might be worth taking a shot on.

The Weekly Spoon: Electrolux’s Kitchen of the Future & Taco Bell’s Reimagined Restaurant

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Electrolux Launches GRO, a Kitchen System Designed to Encourage More Sustainable Eating

Can a kitchen’s design help us eat more sustainable, plant-forward diets?

Swedish appliance manufacturer Electrolux thinks the answer is yes and, to that end, has launched an ambitious new kitchen system concept to help us get there.

Called GRO, the new system is comprised of a collection of interconnected modules that utilize sensors and AI to provide personalized eating and nutrition recommendations. According to the company, the system was designed around insights derived from behavioral science research and is intended to help encourage more sustainable eating behavior based on recommendations from the EAT-Lancet report for planetary health. The company will debut the new system at this week’s EuroCucina conference.

“How can a thoughtful kitchen slowly nudge you to more sustainable choices,” asks Tove Chevally, the head of Electrolux Innovation Hub, in an intro video to the GRO system. “To make the most of what you have, to buy smarter, and eat more diverse?

To see a video of the new GRO and to read the full story, head here.

Do you have the next big idea for the future of food & cooking? Apply to tell your story at SKS INVENT!

Taco Bell’s Vision of the Future Includes High-Tech Dumbwaiters & Lots of Drive-Thru Lanes

I’ve always been fascinated with dumbwaiters. An elevator built specifically to deliver food between floors of a building, the dumbwaiter is an idea that is both ridiculous and fascinating.

And while I can’t be sure that someone like Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos doesn’t have dumbwaiters built into their homes (though Bezos would probably prefer robots and Trump manservants he could yell at), what I am sure of is the dumbwaiter has, for the most part, largely gone extinct as part of modern life.

Until now. That’s because Taco Bell sees them as a potentially integral part of their restaurant of the future. Called Taco Bell Defy, the taco chain’s new restaurant concept includes an elevated restaurant with multiple drive-thru lanes, food lifts, and a lot of digital integrations.

While I wouldn’t, unlike others, claim this new concept possibly “the most ambitious” prototype in restaurant history, I would say it makes a whole lot of sense for a restaurant chain that does most of its business through a drive-thru. While many chains have developed drive-thrus that have multiple order lines, the choke point always comes later when cars zip-up into a single line to get their food. By spreading out the hand-off of food to four lines, the choke point of a single window for food handover is eliminated.

You can read the full post here. 

Smart Kitchen

Meet Celcy, a Countertop Oven With a Built-In Freezer That Will Cook Meals For You

Say you’re leaving for work and want to come home to a fully cooked meal? Or better yet, you want to line up a work week’s worth of meals and just want them prepared when you get home?

You might be a good candidate for the Celcy, an autonomous cooking appliance that combines a countertop oven with a freezer that stores the meals until ready for cooking.

The Celcy, which is currently in development, will store up to four meals in a freezer. Cooking can be rescheduled via an app or on-demand via request. When it’s time to cook, the meal is shuttled from the freezer compartment on the left side into the cooking compartment side on the right. A built-in elevator lifts and deposits the frozen meal in the top upper right cooking chamber where it is cooked for consumption.

You can read the full post here. 

Food Retail Tech

Circle K Planning To Deploy Seven Thousand AI-Powered Self-Checkout Machines

Mashgin, a maker of computer-vision-based self-checkout machines, announced today it has signed a deal with Circle K parent company Couche-Tard to deploy seven thousand self-checkout machines at the convenience store chain over the next three years.

The move follows the initial deployment of Mashgin systems at nearly 500 Circle K stores across the United States and Sweden since 2020. The move by the second-largest convenience store chain in North America with almost seven thousand stores will represent one of the largest ever deployments of self-checkout systems to date.

For Mashgin, the deal represents its biggest customer win yet and is yet another sign of why the company was able to recently raise a $62.5M Series B round at an impressive $1.5 billion valuation. The move represents a 700% total increase in deployments over its current installed base.

The Mashgin self-checkout system is installed at the checkout counter and enables customer checkouts without scanning barcodes. As seen in the video interview from CES in January, customers can essentially toss their items onto the small checkout pad, and the system will automatically recognize and tabulate the products.

To read the full story, head here.

Future Food

Cocuus Raises €2.5M to Scale Industrial 3D Food Printing for Plant & Cell-Based Meat Analogs

According to a release sent to The Spoon, 3D food printing startup Cocuus has raised €2.5 Million in a Pre-Series A funding round to scale up its proprietary 3D printing technology platform for plant-based and cell-cultured meat analogs. The round was led by Big Idea Ventures, with participation by Cargill Ventures, Eatable Adventures, and Tech Transfer UPV.

Founded in 2017, the Spanish startup has developed a toolbox of different 3D printing technologies under its Mimethica platform to enable the printing of different types of foods. These include Softmimic, a technology targeted at hospitals and eldercare facilities that transforms purees into dishes that look like real food (think of a vegetable or meat puree shaped into a “steak”), LEVELUP, an inkjet printing technology that prints images on drinks like coffee or beer (like Ripples), and LASERGLOW, a laser printer platform that engraves imagery onto food.

Read the full post at here.

SCiFi Foods Raises $22M With Andreessen Horowitz’s First Investment in Cultivated Meat

SCiFi Foods, a Bay Area-based food tech startup, announced that it has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), making it a16z’s first investment in the growing cultivated meat market. The company, formerly known as Artemys Foods, also announced that it will be adding a new board member, Myra Pasek, the General Counsel of IronOx, who will be utilizing her expertise from Tesla and Impossible Foods to help SCiFi Foods bring its novel plant-based and cultivated meat hybrid through regulatory approval to the market. 

The new funding raises SCiFi Foods’ total funding to $29 million and will primarily be used to scale R&D efforts, build out the leadership team, and market the company. 

The Spoon sat down with CEO and co-founder, Joshua March, to learn more about SCiFi Foods’ new name, a hybrid meat product, and what it looks like to raise funding from one of the most famous venture capital firms during a recession.

Read the full interview with Joshua March here.

Food Robots

Xook Raises $1.3 Million to Roll Out Robotic ‘Food Courts in a Box’ in The US

If you’ve ever visited a cafeteria at a tech giant like Google or Facebook, you probably found that the food is just as tasty (or tastier) and often better for you than what you might order at a corner restaurant or make in your own kitchen.

But according to Xook CEO Raja Natarajan, this kind of access to an abundance of tasty, healthy, and free food is more the exception than the rule for US office workers. This is very different from countries like India, said Natarajan, where most corporate employers provide access to cafeterias stocked with food options for employees. This is why, after trialing a prototype for what he and cofounder Ratul Roy describe as a “food court in a box” in Bangalore, they are eyeing the US for the rollout of their robotic kiosk.

“In countries with high labor costs and high food costs, it is very hard to offer this kind of experience unless it comes with automation,” Natarajan told The Spoon in a recent interview.

To read the full story, click here!

Meet Celcy, a Countertop Oven With a Built-In Freezer That Will Cook Meals For You

Say you’re leaving for work and want to come home to a fully cooked meal? Or better yet, you want to line up a work week’s worth of meals and just want them prepared when you get home?

You might be a good candidate for the Celcy, an autonomous cooking appliance that combines a countertop oven with a freezer that stores the meals until ready for cooking.

The Celcy, which is currently in development, will store up to four meals in a freezer. Cooking can be rescheduled via an app or on-demand via request. When it’s time to cook, the meal is shuttled from the freezer compartment on the left side into the cooking compartment side on the right. A built-in elevator lifts and deposits the frozen meal in the top upper right cooking chamber where it is cooked for consumption.

You can see a proof of concept video of the Celcy below:

Celcy - The Automated Nespresso of Food

According to company CEO Max Wieder, one of the other differentiators for the Celcy – aside from being a combo freezer and oven – is its ability to accommodate a variety of cooking styles, allowing it to either cook from scratch or simply warm up and crisp pre-cooked meals.

“It’s basically a set of shutters and fans that, when move-in combination, create the different styles of cooking, Wieder told me via a Zoom interview. “So it allows everything to cook uncovered without burning it.”

The Celcy is the brainchild of Wieder and a couple of friends from Johns Hopkins University. According to Weider, Celcy CTO Eddie Holzinger, another friend, and he started discussing ovens on a Google chat. When their friend told Weider and Holzinger he was shopping for a smart oven, they started talking about all the kinds of features – like a freezer – that could potentially put into a smart oven. By the end of the day, the future cofounders realized they had stumbled onto something.

“We started doing due diligence. We found that nothing existed on the market,” Weider said. “We did some patent searches, got together that weekend and whiteboard of the entire design of how it would work. And within three months, we founded the company. Four months after that, we filed our provisional patent.” The founders were issued a patent for its cooking system in the last month.

The company is now working on its alpha units and allowing interested customers to “reserve” a unit by signing up for a waitlist on its website. The target price for the Celcy is $549, and the company hopes to ship in the fall of 2023. Like Tovala or Suvie, Celcy plans to offer prepared meals via subscription and is already working with a copacker to develop recipes and meals. The company has raised a small pre-seed round but is raising additional funds to fund development and manufacturing.

Celcy joins a small cohort of smart kitchen hardware makers working to build unattended cooking appliances. While some like Mellow have essentially shuttered, others like Suvie have been shipping for a couple of years. Others, like Oliver, Nymble, and GammaChef, can perform unattended cooking but don’t have any ability to refrigerate or freeze ingredients.

And it’s this combo of freezer storage and cook-upon-request (or schedule) that sets the Celcy apart. Although there are other smart countertop cookers like the Suvie that have refrigeration and enable time-delayed cooking, the Celcy is the only one I’ve seen with a built-in freezer and the ability to store multiple meals in the freezer chamber.

Of course, that’s if and when the company ships the product. It’s still early, and the company still has many steps to go, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for the Celcy and its combo freezer/oven automated cooking appliance sometime next year.