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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Connected Kitchen

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?

The GRO is a modular system that can be tailored around a user’s preferences. Some of the modules in the GRO system include:

  • The Plant Gallery: A glass-enclosed showcase for fruits and vegetables.
  • Pulse and Grain Library: A transparent storage system for beans and grains.
  • Fermentation Pantry: A temperature-controlled home fermentation cabinet.
  • Nordic Smoker: a countertop kitchen smoker.
  • Steam Oven and Grill Drawer: An appliance garage.

The system will also have a touchscreen with a digital system called the ‘GRO Coach’ to provide the user with personalized eating recommendations, goal-setting, dietary and cooking guidance, and progress measurement over time. The system will also provide visualization of the user’s eating habits and how those impact the planet. The system will also possibly understand a consumer’s food inventory, making recommendations based on what is already in the fridge.

Something I might expect from another Swedish company in IKEA, the GRO system is unlike anything I’ve seen from a home appliance maker. It’s less a new appliance or even a series of appliances, but instead a fairly detailed vision of the future of the home kitchen. And not just a vision around space design, but in many ways around how consumers should live and eat in the future.

All of which is, in some ways, a real credit to Electrolux. It’s not often a company makes such a declarative values statement when introducing a new product, especially a product like an appliance or kitchen cabinetry system. It’s also, in my opinion, a vision that will probably play better in Europe than other regions, given the typical European’s (and especially northern European) higher level of awareness and concern about climate change.

At this point, Electrolux has not announced when the GRO system will be available to consumers. My guess is it may take a little time to roll out, given that it’s a brand new concept and might need to leverage home builder channels pretty extensively (it’s a complete kitchen system, after all, not just a single appliance upgrade).

No matter when it comes out, I’m interested in seeing how the industry and the consumer react to Electrolux’s future kitchen vision.

You can see a concept video of the GRO below:

After Getting Derailed by COVID, Smart Food Container Startup Silo Attempts a Come Back

Back in late March of 2020, Silo CEO Tal Lapidot had a decision to make. The dark clouds of a global pandemic had gathered overhead, threatening to derail his company’s progress on finishing a product he’d been working years to deliver.

The product, called the Silo food storage system, was a new take on a stale category where most everyone used the same plastic containers their parents had used before them. The Silo featured lots of cool bells and whistles, including a built-in scale, Alexa integration, and spoilage notifications. The big idea, though, was a vacuum seal system that promised to extend shelf-life of food by up two to three times.

It turned out that lots of people liked the idea of a better food storage system and the company was flying high when it ran a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2018 that raised over $1.4 million. I was one of them, becoming backer #2531 after I plunked down $219 for the ‘enhanced basic’ reward package that included the Silo base and four containers. The promised ship date was April 2019, but after having backed a few hardware projects before this one, I knew ship dates were less hard promises than loose guidelines.

Lapidot and his team had been regularly posting updates on the progress of the company on Kickstarter, and the backers were, for the most part, both understanding and encouraging. With COVID-19 infections spreading and a whole lot of uncertainty about the virus, Lapidot felt he had no choice but to send his workers home. He posted an update on Kickstarter letting everyone know about the situation:

We hope this update finds you well, and you and your loved ones are staying safe. Since our last update, the world has changed in terrible ways. Unfortunately, this has significant implications for all businesses, including ours.

Silo recently had to pause all operations as the whole team is under stay-at-home orders, which, unfortunately, also caused the delay in sending this update. As a hardware startup, we have tried at first working from home, but this has proven to be highly inefficient as we cannot make actual progress without our team having access to our office lab and equipment.

Mothballing the project meant bringing his team back from China, where the company had been working with a contract manufacturer preparing to build the product. They’d already invested in the tooling for the product manufacturing run, one of the most expensive parts of building a hardware product.

“The idea was, once COVID subsided a bit, we would restore the operations, ” Lapidot told me in a phone interview. “But as you know, that took longer than expected.”

A couple of years longer than expected. While a big part of it was due to an inability to work on the product both in their office in Israel and on-site in China, an even bigger issue was the company soon ran out of funding. Although they’d managed to raise an impressive amount of money with their Kickstarter, the cost of engineering a product and manufacturing systems for over 5 thousand backers would cost much more than $1.4 million. Lapidot had expected this and managed to find investors for the company, but once COVID hit, one of them got cold feet.

“When COVID erupted globally, I got a phone call saying ‘hey, listen, we’re not going to transfer the funds’,” Lapidot said.

From there, with a furloughed team, stalled operations in China and a lack of funds to get things going, Silo entered a period of stasis as Lapidot just tried to keep the lights and preserve the company’s assets while he searched for new funding.

“The situation sort of stagnated, and we tried to figure out how we can get back on track.”

Two years on, things are finally starting to look up. The company has found a new investor to help fund the production run for the product, and now Lapidot is working to get the company back to where they were in the spring of 2020 when the world shut down. A big part of that is trying to reassemble a team and ramp up engineering and technical talent.

“We basically just send everyone home one day, and so there was no organized process of preserving the knowledge,” Lapidot said. “So we have everything, and now we’re trying to get to where we were.”

Other challenges include a lingering lack of critical components due to COVID-related supply chain disruptions. And then there are the continuing travel restrictions to China as the country tries to tamp down a new wave of COVID infections.

“We cannot travel to China because it’s 21 quarantine days just to enter, and it’s not very simple even to get that approval,” Lapidot said. “So it’s going to be a bit more challenging because we have to work more remotely instead of being there.”

According to Lapidot, the company has enough funding for an 18-month runway for the company, and his focus is on getting the first units of the product built. He has started building an engineering team and has reestablished ongoing contact with the manufacturers.

The biggest challenge, according to Lapidot, will be securing the critical components they need to build the final prototypes. They need those to finish debugging the system to prepare for manufacturing, after which they plan to send out factory-made units later this year.

In the meantime, Lapidot knows that the early goodwill he had among backers has evaporated as his updates have gone silent since last July as he has tried to figure out how to get the company back on its feet. Like many stalled Kickstarter projects, most of the messages from backers nowadays are less words of encouragement and more of the “what happened to my money?” variety.

Lapidot told me he plans to apologize to the backers and that he will be transparent about where things are in an upcoming update.

“I know people got hurt from the situation and I feel horrible. We didn’t want this situation. I’ve been a backer on the Kickstarter community for a while. Being in the doghouse after you have seen it from the other side, it’s not an easy experience.”

Forget Smart. Samsung’s Latest Fridge Focus is Creating Giant Custom Photo Walls

Who needs fridge magnets when you can create a giant photo wall with a picture of your kids, furbaby, or dream vacation getaway instead?

That’s exactly what you can do if you own a Bespoke fridge from Samsung. According to a release sent to The Spoon, owners of Bespoke fridges can now create custom fridge panels featuring a photo or artwork. The new feature can be added to a new Bespoke fridge or swapped out with a panel on an existing unit.

To create a Bespoke custom printed panel, users go to the Mybespoke website, upload a picture or artwork, edit the layout, and submit the panel for print. Each custom printed panel will set you back $250. The new custom-designed panels feature will be available later this year.

Okay, so pictures printed on your fridge isn’t exactly high-tech, but it is definitely a sign of where Samsung’s head is nowadays when it comes to their fridge lineup. It’s not like Samsung has forgotten about its Family Hub fridge line exactly, at least not yet. After all, they did announce some fairly modest improvements at CES, and you can get a Family Hub version of the Bespoke line. But it’s clear, at this point, that their primary focus seems to be their design-forward lineup with Bespoke.

All of which speaks to the state of the smart fridge market. No one has really cracked the code on figuring out how to leverage smarts to make food management truly easy. Sure, big screens are nice, as it using Alexa and auto-replenishment of grocery staples. But none of them, in our view, is doing a great job of helping us take inventory or reduce food waste without a whole lot of work on the part of the user.

We’re still waiting for that and hope someone will come up with that game-changing innovation soon. If you’ve got a big idea about that, why don’t you let us know and show it off at SKS Invent in October.

The Airhood is a Portable Exhaust Hood That Sucks up Smoke, Grease, and Steam

Kitchen exhaust hoods help trap airborne grease, steam, and anything else that rises up when you’re cooking on a stove or cooktop. But many smaller places like apartments, dorms, or camper trailers don’t have them, which often means splattered grease, smoke-filled rooms, and even tripped smoke alarms.

It’s these types of situations where the Airhood would be a perfect fit. The Airhood, designed by French designer Maxime Augay, is a portable exhaust hood that can be set on a countertop next to a cooktop and suck up smoke, grease and steam out of the air.

The Airhood features two filters. The charcoal filter filters smoke and fumes out of the air, while the oil filter captures grease from out of the air and helps avoid buildup of sticky film and grease odors from embedding itself into walls, curtains, or other cooking adjacent areas. I can also see the Airhood helpful for non-cooking applications where people want to eliminate airborne smoke (I’m looking at you cannabis enthusiasts).

Augay conceived of the Airhood while in college after finding the extractor hood in his home difficult to clean. He submitted it to and won the “Pure Talent Contest – Living Kitchen Selection” at imm Cologne, one of Europe’s largest furniture trade shows.

Below is a picture showing the evolution of the Airhood from early prototype to final product design.

Augay teamed up with Smart Product Concepts Ltd, a kitchen appliance design services and manufacturing company based in Hong Kong, to help bring the product to market. The product launched on Kickstarter on May 2nd and reached its target in just 99 minutes and, as of this writing, has raised over $76 thousand. The Airhood team has completed the final tooling and plans to start manufacturing in September and ship by October.

The unit is available in two forms: a wired version for $79 and a cordless version for $99. As always, buyers should be beware of any Kickstarter campaign. That said, with the campaign’s fast start and the tooling already completed, the chances of the final product making it to backers look pretty good.

You can see the Airhood in action in the video below:

AirHood® | The World's First Portable Kitchen Air Cleaner

As Political Fight to Ban Natural Gas Rages On, Microsoft and Others are Pressing Ahead With All-Electric Kitchens

If you’ve paid attention to natural gas regulation over the past few years, you’re probably aware a growing number of municipalities and state governments have pushed to ban the use of the gas hookups in new home and office builds as they look for ways to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.

It started with Berkeley in 2019, and since that time, a number of cities in California and New York have followed suit with efforts to restrict or outright ban the use of natural gas. Predictably, GOP-controlled legislatures around the country have fought back by passing “preemption laws” that prohibit cities from banning natural gas. According to CNN, twenty states with GOP-controlled legislatures have preemption laws prohibiting cities from banning natural gas.

But while the political battle between old-world gas adherents and those looking to reduce our reliance on gas rages on, big companies like Microsoft are reading the tea leaves and building electric kitchens. According to a story in Fast Company, the software giant is building an all-electric kitchen in one of its newest buildings in Redmond, Washington.

From Fast Company:

It’s a 13,000-square-foot LEED Platinum-rated green building, with 400 pieces of electric kitchen equipment capable of preparing about 1,000 meals a day across 9 dining concepts featuring different cuisines. The space is being used to test out products, processes, and menu items before spreading to more than 77,000 square feet of food preparation and kitchen space for upward of 10,000 meals a day when the full campus expansion begins opening in 2023.

Microsoft is just the latest company to start transitioning its office space – and its kitchens – to all-electric as they see the writing on the wall when it comes to local mandates. In 2020, Adobe broke ground on an 18-story all-electric building for its new headquarters. Alloy Development started development in 2020 on a five building all-electric project.

The reason for these moves is clear. According to the Building Decarbonization Coalition, gas combustion in buildings accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions (12%) than all in-state power plants (9%), so by moving towards all-electric buildings, companies can make a significant dent in meeting sustainability targets.

As for Microsoft, the effort includes designing new types of cooking equipment that can meet the needs of feeding their workforce. The company wanted to continue creating a variety of different kinds of menus, including ones that traditionally utilize fire-intensive cooking styles such as woks, so they worked with an outside designer to develop an induction wok cooking system.

Fast Company: To figure out a solution, Microsoft partnered with the commercial kitchen equipment manufacturer Jade Range. Over the course of two years they co-developed a new kind of wok-cooktop combination that allows both the motion a chef needs and the constant contact induction cooking requires. The novel wok system, with a pan that fits inside a bowl-shaped cooking surface, has stood up to side-by-side taste tests among Microsoft workers, comparing gas and induction wok dishes. 

While the U.S. has long trailed Europe in its use of induction cooking, the push for building electrification has given increased momentum and has started to force the hand of many hold-outs who have long preferred gas cooking equipment.

Instant Brands and Vorwerk Invest $20 Million in Smart Kitchen Specialist Fresco

Smart kitchen startup Fresco announced today that it had raised $20 million in Series B funding from kitchen appliance mainstays Instant Brands and Vorwerk, the company behind Thermomix. According to the release, a third company has also participated in the funding round and will be identified later this year.

Fresco, which up until earlier this month was known as Drop, plans to use the funding to bring on additional talent and invest in product development. The company, which currently has a workforce of 50 employees, plans to double its headcount over the next two years.

In both Instant Brands and Vorwerk, Fresco is bringing on investors that are also customers. Fresco started working with Instant Brands, the company behind the popular Instant Pot pressure cooker, in 2019, and last year Fresco developed the Instant Brands Connect app to work with the company’s new premium pressure cooker, the Instant Pot Pro Plus. Vorwerk and Fresco first announced their partnership in 2019 at the Smart Kitchen Summit, a deal in which Fresco was to power device connectivity and online shopping for the Thermomix TM6.

Fresco is among a group of technology platform players building software to power appliance inter-connectivity, cooking assistance, and meal planning for the kitchen. However, while many of the company’s peers have increasingly focused on powering online grocery shopping experiences (including Whisk, which ultimately helped Thermomix with its on-device shopping), Fresco has doubled down on guided cooking, meal planning and device interconnectivity.

I asked Fresco CEO Ben Harris why they decided to focus more on the cooking portion of the meal journey and not emphasize grocery commerce like its peers. According to Harris, it was a matter of focus.

“We absolutely see the value in plugging into grocery,” said Harris in an interview with The Spoon. “It’s a strategic decision to make sure that we build the best guided cooking experience.”

Fresco’s latest funding follows a $13.3 million Series A funding round led by Alpha Edison and Morpheus Ventures in 2020. At the time of their Series A, the company emphasized its intent to build the ‘kitchen operating system,’ a positioning that was not all that surprising given Alpha partner Steve Horowitz’s role as the lead developer for the Android operating system. With its latest investment, the company’s messaging is still essentially the same (with maybe a slightly less tech-forward framing) as it brings on popular consumer brands behind Instant Pot and Thermomix as investors.

“Instant Brands and Fresco are working together to develop innovative breakthroughs in the kitchen, and beyond,” said Ben Gadbois, CEO and President of Instant Brands, in the release. “This investment deepens our partnership further and supercharges these initiatives.”

As for those wondering who the third investor might be, while Fresco is keeping that quiet for now, Harris did offer a clue: Unlike Vorwerk and Instant Brands, Harris said the other investor is not a countertop appliance brand, but is instead a manufacturer of large appliances. The Fresco CEO said he expects more partners to invest in the future.

“We expect to announce more partners in the future investing in the platform and this is just really the first cohort.”

Smart Kitchen Platform Company Drop Changes Name to Fresco

Drop dropped Drop.

The startup that started with a connected scale eight years ago announced it has a new brand identity. The company is now called Fresco, a name which “(reflects) the company’s priority to connect dots in the kitchen between appliances, home cooks and recipes to make cooking effortless,” said the announcement.

Fresco CEO Ben Harris said that the company needed a new brand given its evolution beyond its hardware roots.

“Drop was a great name for a physical product, but we pivoted to become a smart kitchen platform, providing end-to-end solutions to make appliances connected, from firmware development to IoT expertise and an app that pulls all the appliances together,” Harris said. “As a result, we needed a brand that better represented this.”

Drop is part of a cohort of smart kitchen startups that offer software and connectivity solutions to power kitchen appliances and help consumers cook and plan meals. While some of its peers have increasingly focused on shoppable recipes and looked to help power online grocery integrations, Drop has doubled down on expanding its solutions and increasing its partner roster in the connected kitchen and guided cooking space.

The company emphasized the word neutral when describing itself in a new intro video: “What started with a shared love of food and technology has evolved to become the neutral, cross-brand platform that seamlessly brings appliances, home cooks, and recipes together.” That emphasis on neutrality may be a reference to other smart kitchen software platforms that have sold large stakes to appliance brands (Chefling) or others that have been acquired outright (Whisk/Samsung, Yummly/Whirlpool).

The move to change a brand identity nearly a decade into a company’s existence isn’t without risk. Many in the kitchen and consumer cooking technology space are familiar with the Drop name and its products. Now it’s up to Fresco to educate the market about its new identity. However, because Fresco is a B2B brand, the lift won’t be nearly as heavy a lift for the company since it doesn’t have to educate consumers.

The Golden Age of Tiny Dishwashers? Bob and Tetra Begin Making Their Way to a Countertop Near You

Ever since we first stumbled upon the diminutive dishwasher named Bob in the basement of the Sands convention center at CES 2019, we’ve been wondering when the little guy would arrive stateside.

The answer is this year. Daan Technology, the French startup behind the Bob, started shipping the small footprint dishwasher in Europe in 2020 and had originally slated the Bob to arrive in the US the same year. While that model Bob stayed in Europe, an updated global version is finally set to start shipping this year.

The company started a Kickstarter campaign this month and has bundles featuring Bob starting at $379 with an expected ship date of September 2022. For those who don’t want to buy through Kickstarter, my guess is the company will begin up selling Bob on its own website later this year.

Order options include a hose to connect the dishwasher to a faucet (Bob also has a one-gallon water reservoir that can be filled manually) and a range of colorful faceplates. The Bob Premium also includes an interesting UV-C ultraviolet option that allows the user to disinfect items (like phones) that can’t get wet.

While Bob’s Kickstarter backers get a starter pack of the company’s proprietary detergent cartridges (called cassettes), they’ll also want to order extras. Like the Tetra dishwasher, Bob’s small size necessitates special detergent cartridges to get the dosing right.

Speaking of Tetra, when we caught up with the dishwasher’s manufacturer Heatworks late last summer, they had just opened up preorder with a target ship date of May 22nd of this year. The company made the rounds at CES in January (see my interview with Heatworks founder Jerry Callahan here) and is still on track to ship this year.

While countertop dishwashers have been around for years, this new generation that includes the Bob and Tetra features smaller footprint sizes (both in terms of countertop size and resources) and puts a greater emphasis on aesthetics, with design touches like Bob’s colored faceplates or Tetra’s Frog studio driven design.

So if you’re in a small apartment, RV, or a cabin in the woods and would like to ditch the sponge, you’re time has arrived as we seem to be entering a new golden age for tiny dishwashers.

Haier Patents a Fridge That Cooks Eggs

If you’re like me, you think the refrigerator can use a rethink. Outside of adding a few smart features like Wi-Fi, internal cameras, and touchscreens, the biggest and most expensive appliance in our kitchen hasn’t changed a whole lot in recent decades.

Which is why I was intrigued to see this patent by Haier for a fridge with an internal egg boiler.

The patent, which was issued earlier this month to GE Appliance’s parent company, describes an appliance with an internal system for boiling eggs.

Image: Rendering of Egg Boiler from Haier Patent

It works like this: The egg boiler is built into the refrigerator door. Once the system controller determines the boiler has eggs loaded into it, it orders hot water into the boiler to cook the eggs. After the eggs are cooked, the cooking chamber is flushed with cooler water to cool the eggs off. An alert is then sent to the user which would open the egg boiler and remove their finished eggs.

Ok, so maybe building an egg boiler into a fridge seems like a lot of effort, especially when you can buy a Dash egg boiler for about $20. But, if you’re the type who likes to eat hard or soft-boiled eggs regularly and don’t want another kitchen gadget cluttering your countertop, this could be a cool feature.

That’s of course, if Haier ever makes it. Haier is a big company that files patents for everything ranging from a fridge with a cold brew coffee maker to one that dispenses pills, so there’s a good chance fridge with an egg maker inside never sees the light of day.

But hey, until we see the long-rumored Amazon smart fridge, one can hope, right?

The Kitchen 2030: How Food & Cooking Will Change in the Future (Video)

If you’ve been following The Spoon since the early days of 2015, you might remember that our flagship event that started it all was the Smart Kitchen Summit. Dedicated to the quiet revolution that was happening in the consumer kitchen, SKS became the event to examine the tech disruption upending business models and changing the way we source, cook and eat our food forever.

So it was fitting that our opening panel at the first CES Food Tech Conference was “The Kitchen 2030: How Food & Cooking Will Change in the Future,” featuring some of the leading companies in the kitchen and appliance industries. The panel discussion was hosted by Michael Wolf, CEO and founder of The Spoon and included Khalid Aboujassoum, Founder & CEO of Else Labs, Dochul Choi, Senior Vice President at Samsung, Robin Liss, CEO at Suvie and Kai Schaeffner, executive at Vorwerk (Thermomix).

The panel talked about where and how cooking, storing and even shopping for foods has shifted in the last several years; with more transparency and information about the foods we eat, the digitization of the recipe, guided cooking features and a whole new wave of kitchen appliances that may change the entire layout and function of the consumer kitchen.

“The Kitchen 2030” panel can be viewed in its entirety below — leave a comment with your predictions for the next decade of innovation in the connected kitchen.

Are Food Delivery Lockers the Next Must-Have Home Amenity?

Everywhere you look there are delivery lockers. Grocery stores, apartment buildings, office lobbies.

So why not at our home?

If you’re Jeremy High, the idea makes lots of sense. As a luxury home builder in the central California market of Monterey, High works closely with clients spec’ing out features customized around their lifestyles. A recurring ask he hears from his customers is they want a way to ensure that food delivered to their home is safe and kept at the right temperature.

The more he heard this, the more High wondered if a solution existed to help his customers. When he realized there wasn’t, he decided to build it himself.

High’s product, eventually called the Fresh Portal, is a food and package delivery locker built into the side of a home. It has temperature control zones for either hot or cold food and would be accessible both from the outside and inside. It would be managed by an app and integrated with third-party delivery service providers like UberEats or Amazon Fresh so they can access the outside of the locker and insert a delivery.

For High, who first thought of the idea in 2014 and filed for a patent a year later, the product needed to be installable both in new builds and retrofits. To make that possible, he designed the Fresh Portal to use an install concept similar to that of a retrofit window, where the installation process pierced the building envelope, and then the installed product is integrated with the home’s existing waterproofing.

“The design allows us to install this rapidly,” said High. “We can install this and not do any patchwork. No paint comes out. Nothing like that.”

High, who is raising money for his company, plans to have a shippable product by sometime in 2023. He estimates the pricing for the system will be $3,450 installed.

If this all sounds a little first-world problem-ish to you, it is. None of that should be surprising since High’s typical customer has enough wealth to buy a new multimillion-dollar home.

But the luxury home builder turned tech entrepreneur does have a plan to make his food delivery lockers more accessible through subsidization. One such scenario could include a Fresh Portal included as part of a food delivery subscription service. Another is one in which the Fresh Portal earns revenues from third-party delivery service providers.

“DoorDash can deliver to a First Portal versus your porch or knocking on the door and waiting,” said High. “Efficiency and the first time delivery success metric goes up because they’re delivering to a product.”

In exchange, High believes that the delivery companies would pay his company 1% of the sale if it’s delivered to a Fresh Portal. This is all in the idea stage at this point, as High has yet to strike any deals with third-party delivery companies, and I have to wonder if they’d willingly part ways with even a thin slice of their margin.

I think High has time to figure out his subsidization models later, mostly because I see the Fresh Portal as primarily a solution for new homes or remodels for the next few years. I can see the home delivery locker becoming a trendy new homebuilder amenity, where the product’s price is rolled into the monthly mortgage payment.

Longer-term – think a ten-year time horizon – I can see a future where home delivery lockers become commonplace. Like the milk box of a bygone era, only these boxes will be refrigerated, connected to the cloud, and – if you own a Fresh Portal – built into the side of your home.

The Story of ColdSnap, the Make Anything Ice Cream and Frozen Beverage Appliance

If there was a gadget that won the hearts of the tech press at CES 2021, it was the ColdSnap.

The countertop appliance, which makes ice cream, margaritas, cold coffee drinks, and more in less than two minutes, had many declaring it the best of show. CNN featured it, Seth Myers talked about it, and CES awarded the ColdSnap with an innovation award. It was a cold treat-making miracle!

Over a year after ColdSnap’s time in the national spotlight, I caught up with company founder and CEO Matthew Fonte to hear the story behind his appliance and to get an update on how things are tracking.

According to Fonte, the idea for the ColdSnap came from his daughter. Every night while reading to his kids before bedtime, he’d ask them to come up with an idea for a new invention. One night in 2018, his daughter suggested a machine that made single-serve ice cream at the push of a button, and Fonte told her he didn’t think such a machine existed and explained why.

“I said, Well, it’s kind of a pain,” Fonte said. “Sometimes, you have to put the bucket in the freezer for a few hours. You can only make one flavor. That consistency is never repeatable. You have to wait about 40 or 50 minutes for it to freeze. There’s always cleanup associated with the process. It’s a big ordeal.”

As he explained why someone hadn’t yet made an instant ice cream machine, Fonte realized this could be both a lesson and an opportunity.

“I said what else can we do about it? And talking with them, this idea emerged, well, could we use a pod where we put in a machine and flash one ice cream at a time?”

The next day at work, Fonte set about finding out. He asked some coworkers if they thought it would be possible to freeze six ounces of ice cream in a couple of minutes, and they were skeptical. But Fonte knew that there were machines that could freeze a quart and a half in about 40 minutes and thought if the volume of liquid was reduced, it could freeze much quicker.

Fonte put the question to a friend who does computational fluid modeling. After running the numbers, his friend told him he thought it was possible.

“Armed with that knowledge, I said, ‘Okay, let’s give it a try.’ I wasn’t sure how we were going to be able to do it, but I knew it was possible.”

An engineer by training, Fonte got to work 3D printing parts in his garage and building prototypes. He soon realized one of the biggest challenges would be the pod; if he could find a container that enabled quick freezing and was also low-cost, Fonte knew he could make it work.

After trying out all sorts of vessels ranging from soup to soda cans, he eventually settled on the energy drink can.

“What we settled in on was Red Bull aluminum beverage can,” said Fonte. “It’s called a slim can and has a lot of surface area per volume, which enables us to freeze quickly.”

They’re also widely available, which meant they would be affordable, and they’re recyclable.

As Fonte worked on the system, he realized his machine was more than an ice cream-making appliance. He began testing alcohol and coffee drinks, frozen yogurt, smoothies, and more.

He also realized that because the system used a pod with a long shelf life, his product could be potentially transformative for markets where cold chain storage is not widely available or cost-prohibitive.

“China’s ice cream market is as large as the United States, but they have 25% the amount of refrigeration per capita that we do here in the States. If you could circumvent the cold supply chain and give them shelf-stable pods they can freeze their ice cream on demand, they can reach the masses there and grow that market four times.”

Over the next couple of years, Fonte continued to work on the system and started to build a team. The company raised money via a friends and family funding round and filed for patents. When the pandemic hit, a manufacturing plant in the Boston area shut down, and Fonte and his team swooped in.

“Opportunistically, we went and purchased the building,” said Fonte. “And now we have just over 40 employees. We are canning or putting the dairy in our cans, or sterilizing the cans to make them shelf stable. We’re painting the cans, we’re building machines. We do all the old food science here on site.”

Nearly four years after the initial inspiration, Fonte and his team are looking at rolling out about 100 machines to businesses around the Boston area this year and are eyeing a wider rollout in 2023. He’s also started talking with large CPG brands who could possibly license his technology to enable a new way to offer their products to their customers. And while he does see the commercial market (office spaces, restaurants) as his first market, he intends to create a product for the home.

As for his daughter who came up with the idea, I asked Fonte if she would get free ice cream for life or even stock in the new company.

“I think both,” said Fonte.

You can listen to my full conversation with Fonte by clicking play below or by listening to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.