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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Connected Kitchen

Versaware is Building a Smart Kitchen System to Help You Stick to Healthy Eating

If you’ve ever tried to closely monitor the calories and nutrients of what you’re eating, you know it requires a lot of work. Once you’re done reading labels, estimating portion sizes (often incorrectly), weighing ingredients, and then adding things together, you may need an extra helping to replenish all the energy you’ve expended.

And sure, there are meal-logging apps like MyFitnessPal, but often you still have to use best guesses as to portion sizes and manually enter lots of data.

The creators behind Versaware want to make the whole process less messy and more precise with a smart kitchen system that can estimate the total calorie and macronutrient makeup of a meal as you make it.

How does it work? The system centers around two connected kitchen products – a bowl and a scale – and the Versaware app. As a user makes their meal, they scan the ingredient barcode (for packaged food) or query for the item (for fresh produce), then drop it in the bowl or onto the scale. The app takes the weight of the added ingredient and calculates the incremental calorie count and macronutrients (protein, carbs, fat) as you build your meal.

Company cofounders Jacob Lindberg and Creed McKinnon decided to build their smart kitchen nutrition system after finding existing solutions to monitor calorie and nutrient intake disjointed and cumbersome to use.

“We said, ‘why don’t we consolidate all of this data collection and these tools needed to understand what you’re eating and bring them into one device?'” Lindberg said on a Zoom call with The Spoon. “And we realized that if you tethered the data corresponding to an ingredient’s weight straight to the phone, and just prompted the mobile application for the query of what that ingredient was, then you would solve the entire solution around building a meal from the ground up.”

According to Lindberg, showing the calories and nutrients in a meal in real-time allows the user to easily adjust as they build a meal.

“You can alter the portions of each ingredient that goes into your meal by visually seeing the macronutrient composition of that entire meal,” said Lindberg. “You can, for example, add more flour or reduce the amount of sugar based on however many calories, grams of fat, or grams of protein you want to ingest.”

The current product prototype can scan barcodes and has access to a database with 10s of thousands of products via an open API. Lindberg says they will continue to add features over time, including computer vision capabilities that will scan a food item and estimate its nutritional makeup.

Last week the company started taking preorders on its website and had already sold over $50 thousand in presales. To help gear up for manufacturing, the company’s founders have been working closely with the Centropolis accelerator and plan to start raising seed capital in March. The company plans to start shipping to early backers by the fall of this year.

While many early smart scale products have had mixed success, Versaware hopes to set itself apart by focusing the system and app on a health and fitness use-case. We’ll be watching to see if this will help the company succeed where others haven’t.

If you’d like to pre-order a Versaware bowl and cutting board, you can do so here.

You can watch the Versaware intro video below.

Introducing VersaWare - Nutritionally Driven Meal Creation

Chris Young’s Combustion Launches Predictive Thermometer for Presale

When Chris Young first announced his new product a year ago, he made it clear he wasn’t making just another Bluetooth-connected thermometer.

“I started building the first thermometer in the world to actually measure the real cooking temperature which can profile your food so that it can estimate things like how big is the food and how fast is it cooking,” Young said.

Young made a convincing case at the time, explaining how the product, the Combustion Predictive Thermometer, would utilize eight sensors to monitor the core, surface, and ambient temperatures and give a cook an idea of the food is done. Getting that gradient temperature is important because, according to Young, only with that can you (or your thermometer) correctly calculate the true cooking temperature and how fast an item will cook.

Now, a year later, Young’s first product from his new company is finished and is available for presale on the company’s website.

Outside of making the industry’s first predictive thermometer, Young also wanted his new product to be extremely simple to use. That drive for simplicity was motivated by his experience at Chefsteps, where the team working on the Joule spent lots of time and resources troubleshooting the sous vide circulator’s networking technology (the Joule sous vide circulator requires a paired smartphone to operate).

In short, Young learned that sometimes simpler is better when it comes to cooking, and with the Predictive Thermometer, simplicity comes in the form of a paired timer that has a big display and doesn’t require an app or set up out of the box (though an app is available for those who want one). According to Young, the thermometer utilizes the built-in beacon technology to broadcast the cooking data to the timer and any other Bluetooth-connected appliance that wants to communicate with it.

Young didn’t reveal pricing last year when he announced the product, but now we have it: The thermometer and timer are regularly $199 but are available now for presale for $139. You can preorder one on the company’s website.

Five Predictions for Consumer Food & Kitchen Tech in 2022

Food tech prediction week at The Spoon continues, and today we’re looking at the home. And if you haven’t already, make sure you check out my predictions on restaurant tech, food robots, and plant-based meat.

Meet The Smart Food Delivery Locker

For the last few years, companies like Walmart, Amazon, and others have been trying to figure out how to deliver food when we’re not home. Ideas have run the gamut, from delivering products directly to our fridges, onto our dinner tables, depositing groceries in our garage, to even dropping deliveries into our car trunk.

All this effort would be unnecessary if homes just had temperature-controlled storage lockers, something that – at least until lately – hadn’t existed.

Until now. This month Walmart and HomeValet announced a pilot program that will deliver fresh groceries to the HomeValet smart outdoor delivery receptacle. Another company, Fresh Portal, is building a temperature-controlled home delivery box that is accessible both outside (for delivery companies) and inside the home. And then there’s Dynosafe, who appeared on Shark Tank in the spring of 2021 and got an investment from Robert Herjavec.

While companies like Yale have been making smart boxes for delivery for a little while, there hasn’t been a widely available temperature-controlled smart storage box. In 2022, I expect we’ll start seeing more deals like the Walmart/HomeValet deal, as well as some integration deals with third-party delivery providers.

Steam-Powered Cooking Gains Traction

Although steam cooking has long been a fixture in pro kitchens, it’s never taken off in the consumer kitchen. However, that could change in 2022.

Consumer steam cooking picked up, um, steam in 2020, when Anova started shipping their countertop Precision Oven. At CES this year, LG showed off a new microwave with steam cooking. And then there’s Tovala, the food delivery and steam oven startup which has started advertising it on national Sunday night football broadcasts.

While steam cooking has followed a similar path to sous vide circulators – a pro tool making its way into the home – I think it has much wider appeal. Because they know the power of steam-cooking, some chefs have pined for an affordable home combi-oven. Now that they’ve finally got their wish, 2022 might be the year consumers take notice.

Amazon Debuts a Smart Fridge

Back in 2017 when I first asked if Amazon might build on a smart fridge, all the evidence I had to go on was a couple of patent filings. Since that time, we’ve watched as the online giant launched branded kitchen appliances and worked on making Alexa a capable home cooking assistant.

And then last fall, Business Insider wrote about Project Pulse, Amazon’s top-secret smart fridge project. According to insiders, the fridge would include machine vision and other advanced technology tell us when food’s about to expire, and automatically order & replenish through Amazon. The effort is reportedly being led by the same group that developed Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology and has been in the works for a couple years.

Truth be told, the smart fridge category could use Amazon. The market has grown stale as big US appliance brands have slowed down their efforts in this space, including market leader Samsung. While the South Korean appliance giant has historically been the most aggressive among the bigs in the category, Samsung didn’t make any substantive announcements about Family Hub at CES this year other than adding it to the Bespoke Fridge line. There are also signs that the company may be shifting its focus to its new Home Hub as the center of its smart home strategy.

Bottom line, if an Amazon smart fridge becomes a reality in 2022 (and I think it will), it would catalyze some much-needed innovation from other large appliance makers.

Home Food Waste Technology Comes Into Focus

Smart composting appliances are one nascent category within home food waste innovation coalescing into a legitimate category. Kickstarter darling Lomi has finally started shipping, Vitamix, known for lits blenders, is shipping its FoodCycler FC-50, and a variety of others are on the way.

But composting is the last stop on the food waste mitigation express, and everyone would be better off preventing food from heading to the compost bin. To do that, we need better food storage, something a startup called Uvera is working with its food storage system that uses UVC light to kill bacteria and extend shelf life. There’s also Blakbear, who is working on a food storage system that would measure gasses emitted from food to help measure shelf life. And though they’re long overdue, startup Silo has told me they should be shipping in 2022.

For their part, most appliance brands still don’t seem to have a cohesive strategy for helping consumers reduce food waste, but that didn’t stop them from talking up sustainability at CES year. I hope all the talk translates to more action in 2022.

AR Takes Guided Cooking to the Next Level

Ever since Thermomix pioneered the category of guided cooking with the launch of the TM5 (and more recently the TM6), there’s been an array of companies building tech to assist consumers as they cook. In the last few years, that’s meant voice assistants from TinyChef and Amazon, software and connected cooking hardware from Hestan and others, and we’ve even seen futuristic concepts like this one at SKS 2020 that monitors eye glances as a way to help a consumer manage meal-making.

But the biggest leap forward in cooking assistance might come in the form of augmented reality. Last fall we saw Snap release their food scanning app that utilizes their augmented reality bar to help provide contextual information for items scanned by the phone, and last month we wrote about a cool demo of how a pair of AR glasses could significantly level up the home cook’s capabilities in the kitchen. And while Lauren Cason’s demo was just that – a demo – I expect some appliance makers may have taken notice of how powerful the combo of cooking and augmented reality could be.

We have a couple more prediction posts to come, so make sure to tune in next week!

What The Heck Happened to Drinkworks?

One of the stories I missed while I was out of the country in December was the shuttering of Drinkworks.

What makes the announcement so unexpected was, overall, things seemed to be generally going well: the company was expanding nationally, sales seemed on the uptick, and they’d even just announced the newest generation drink appliance in October of 2021.

Then, less than two months later, the joint venture between Anheuser-Busch and Keurig Dr. Pepper announced it was ceasing operations.

I don’t have to tell you how unusual it is for a company to announce a new product and then shut down just months later. And, now, almost a month after the news, we really don’t have a good answer for what happened, which is why it’s still worth asking: what the heck happened?

Generally, what that type of quick about-face tells me is that the higher-ups – and by that I mean the two companies involved in the joint venture funding – decided the project wasn’t working and pulled the plug.

So what does ‘not working’ mean? It could be any number of things: Appliance or beverage pod sales weren’t meeting forecasts. Customer satisfaction was low. The project was sucking up too many resources. Maybe the two companies didn’t like working together or their strategies diverged. As I said, it could be anything and we may never know (unless, of course, a former insider wants to tell us. Please reach out if you’d like to do so privately).

The end of Drinkworks also begs the question: is this the end for home cocktail appliances? Bartesian – and now Black and Decker – would argue no. As for me, I’m not sure I want a pod-making machine, but I would take a voice-enabled cocktail marking robot.

Watch my video look at the demise of Drinkworks below.

What The Heck Happened to Drinkworks?

The Auum Dishwasher Takes Aim at Single-Use Waste By Cleaning & Disinfecting a Glass Cup in 10 Seconds

Every year, the average office worker uses 500 single-use paper coffee cups, most of which end up in landfills. Plastic cup and bottle waste is even worse.

One obvious answer to reducing or eliminating all this waste is to replace single-use beverage containers with washable, reusable cups or glasses. The problem with this is many offices don’t have a kitchen, and even in those that do, most workers are either too busy (read lazy) to load or unload a dishwasher.

Enter the auum-S, a small countertop dishwasher that washes and dries a single glass cup in 10 seconds. The machine, which uses less than one ounce of water per wash, also disinfects the glass cups using high-temperature dry steam heated to 140°c (284 °F).

You can watch how the system works in the video below:

Unlike other small form-factor countertop dishwashers, the auum-S is targeted at offices, and because the system is for the professional market, the company uses an as-a-service pricing model. The standard setup price is €150 per month for the machine and one hundred 8 ounce glasses. The glasses, designed by Swiss company Bodum, are double-walled and can be customized for the customer with logos or names printed on the glass.

According to company spokesperson Léo Calvet, auum started selling the auum-S four months ago in its home market of France and has already shipped 1500 machines. Many customers are based in Paris and include such names as L’Oréal and Yves Saint Laurent. The company, which has raised one round of funding and is looking to raise more funds this year, plans to sell the auum-S into additional European markets this year and is eyeing a US market entry in 2023.

The Auum Dishwasher Aims to Eliminate Single Use Cups at Work

CES 2022: Samsung & Others Launch Home Connectivity Alliance to Foster Appliance ‘Cloud to Cloud’ Interoperability

This week at CES, Samsung, Haier (and its subsidiary GE Appliances), Electrolux, and others announced the formation of the Home Connectivity Alliance, a group focused on fostering cloud-to-cloud interoperability across different home appliances.

The organization, which was incorporated in September 2021, is focused on solving a big problem for the smart home: incompatibility across different brands’ smart appliance products. Anyone with smart home appliances from different brands knows why this is a problem. Connected appliance product lines typically have their own proprietary app that only works with that brand. The end result is multiple apps and products that don’t talk to each other.

Here’s how the group’s website describes the benefits of interoperability: A consumer may purchase a connected washer and dryer from Brand A and benefit from features like notifications that alert the user when their wash or dry cycle is complete. Unfortunately, these notifications can only be enabled via Brand A’s platform. Interoperability enables consumers to purchase a washer from Brand A and a dryer from Brand B (or vice versa) and still receive the convenient wash or dry cycle completion notification either from Brand A’s platform or Brand B’s platform.

To achieve that type of cross-brand interoperability, the HCA’s focus is on making sure member companies’ data and service clouds connect. This focus on cloud-to-cloud interop makes sense in 2022, a time well into the smart home revolution where interoperability in the lower parts of the network stack – like physical layer communications (i.e. Wi-Fi, Zigbee, etc) – has largely been solved.

Since the HCA was founded only three months ago, it’s not surprising there are no technical details on how it will work (and by no details, I mean no details: The technical info page simply says “more info to come!”). One of the big unknowns will be how the group will work with other efforts to create cross-compatibility in the smart home, including the much-discussed Matter standard founded by Amazon, Apple and, yes, Samsung’s SmartThings Group.

In Samsung’s announcement about the group, they make no mention of Matter or other smart home interoperability standards (though they mention their own platform SmartThings), instead talking up the importance of interoperability across appliance brands.

“It is the support of global manufacturers like Samsung that makes HCA uniquely qualified to establish interoperability guidelines for long-life appliances and systems in the home, ultimately delivering safe, simple and elegant consumer experiences,” said Yoon Ho Choi, President of Home Connectivity Alliance (and Samsung employee).

While the group has an impressive initial roster of members, a few notable absences include BSH Appliances, Whirlpool, and LG Electronics. BSH is particularly interesting because the group has its own smart home interoperability standard it has been pushing for some time called Home Connect.

In many ways, it’s this absence of other big names that is the HCA’s (and really any interoperability effort’s) biggest challenge; any semblance of full cross-brand compatibility is, by definition, out of reach unless all of the industry’s biggest stakeholders buy in. Whether or not that happens for HCA is yet to be determined, but it’s still early days and the group is off to a good start. Let’s hope they can make it happen so we smart appliance owners can finally have products that reach their full potential.

With Ember’s New Raise, The Company Eyes Expansion Into Smart Baby Bottles & Cold Storage

Up until this point in its history, Ember’s been known for one thing: smart mugs.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the company’s flagship precision heated mug is a pretty cool device that not only keeps your coffee at the perfect temperature, but can reveal insights like that 10:51 AM is peak coffee drinking time across America.

But for anyone who’s talked to the company CEO Clay Alexander, an inventor with over a hundred patents to his name, you get the sense that he and Ember have lots of cool new ideas up their sleeves they’d like to bring to market if they only had the time and money. While I’m not sure about how much time Alexander has on his busy hands nowadays, he and Ember look to have taken care of the money part with their just-announced $23.5 million funding round.

In the press release announcing the new funding, Ember mentions both its cold chain technology and precision heated baby bottles as areas they plan to invest in. From the release: This expansion includes Ember’s Cold Chain Technology, which seeks to disrupt the current pharmaceutical cold chain with the world’s first self-refrigerated, cloud-based shipping box.  The company also has plans to grow its consumer vertical with revolutionary technology to improve infant feeding and further releases in innovative drinkware solutions.

The company’s cold shipping box technology will keep vaccines and other temperature-sensitive medical supplies at a constant temperature as they make their way to their destination. Alexander first teased the idea back in 2018 in a podcast with The Spoon, when he told me the company had already built a prototype that uses the company’s semiconductor-powered refrigeration technology to keep up to forty vials refrigerated at a constant temperature.

“You could strap that thing on the back of a moped and send it into a village in Haiti and save lives,” said Alexander.

During that same conversation, Alexander also talked about how heating water for his infant daughter made him realize baby bottles could be an excellent potential application for precision heating technology. “You pull it out of the fridge, and there’s a little base you couple to the bottle,” Alexander said. “When you couple it, it heats the milk and formula to 98.5 degrees, which is body temperature.”

While the announcement indicated the company would expand into new consumer drinkware products, I was a bit bummed there was no mention of one of Alexander’s neater ideas: precision-heated dinnerware. It’s a product the company already had working prototypes for in 2018: “It just looks like a dinner plate, but it’s magically keeping your hot food hot and your cold food cold,” said Alexander at the time. The plate would have heating zones, that would allow cold potato salad to stay cold and heat food like steak and, if you move your steak, the heat will track under the plate.

Whatever they have in store, I’m intrigued to see the company add new products beyond their original smart coffee mug.

Amazon Alexa Expands Food Personalization Features With Launch of ‘What to Eat’

Last week, Amazon launched a new personalized meal recommendation feature for Alexa called ‘What to Eat?’. The new capability, which was part of a slate of new features for Alexa first teased at the end of September, gives users recommendations for restaurants, recipes, prepared items, and more based on their preferences.

What to Eat is an expansion of the personalized food recommendation capabilities of Alexa that the company began rolling out earlier this year with the ‘What’s for Dinner’ feature. Where What’s for Dinner offers personalized recipe ideas based on past purchase behavior, What to Eat goes a step further by recommending options based on a user’s dietary preferences and restrictions shared with Alexa.

Once a user asks, “Alexa, what should I eat?” the voice assistant will share recommendations for restaurants, recipes, prepared food, and meal kits. Users can share their preferences and restrictions by telling Alexa to “open my food preferences.” From there, they can choose a primary diet profile from many choices that include vegetarian, paleo, keto, kosher and more. They can also add various dietary preferences such as low-salt, gluten-free, low-carb, egg-free, and more.

I tried out What to Eat on my Echo Show. After asking Alexa, a screen popped up with a Blue Apron meal recommendation at the top and then buttons for restaurants, recipes, and prepared food recommendations.

Once I clicked a level down from each topline option, I got more choices from Alexa. For example, under recipes, I chose a shoppable recipe from Amazon partner SideChef. Once there, I had my choice of step-by-step instructions for the recipe, adding ingredients to a shopping list or directly to my Amazon Fresh cart.

When choosing restaurants, a ‘nearby restaurants’ screen popped up with three options less than a mile from my home. From there, I could filter by delivery, pickup, reservations, or open now.

When I clicked on prepared foods, a screen popped up with Whole Foods chicken tortilla soup as the featured item, as well as the option to filter by Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, or food type (salad, soup, vegan, etc.).

This evolution of Alexa’s meal personalization capabilities gives Amazon monetization opportunities through a user filling up their e-commerce basket with ingredients via a shoppable recipe, selling prepared foods from Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods, or by gathering a spiff for a restaurant recommendation. While not all of these opportunities are created equal – Amazon obviously gets a bigger share of the spend when customers add a recipe to their Amazon Fresh basket as compared to when a user eats out at a local restaurant – What to Eat entrenches Amazon deeper into the decision-making process of the consumer.

It also shows the uneven playing field for Amazon’s kitchen commerce efforts compared to other voice assistant players. After helping to create the category in 2015, Amazon continues to be the runaway leader in the US smart speaker market share, logging 69% of all installed speakers as of mid-2021. A good chunk of those smart assistants resides in the kitchen where users often will ask for recommendations, add things to a shopping list, and more. All that activity enables Amazon to profile us and, now, make money at every step in the meal journey.

The head of Alexa’s kitchen team, Mara Segal, talks about the new feature and how it allows Amazon to touch the meal journey from end to end in her interview for Amazon Devices’ blog:

“Customers consume roughly 20 meals for the week,” Segal said. “Finding a recipe, getting groceries, picking restaurants, and cooking a meal—it all takes time. We think customers will be excited to break out of their routines and get quick, personalized assistance. With What to Eat and our suite of Alexa Kitchen features, we can make the food journey easier end-to-end—getting that great idea, saving favorites from different food and recipe providers in one place, adding ingredients to the Alexa shopping list or cart, and cooking meal kits or recipes hands-free with Alexa’s assistance.”

GE Appliances Sends a Turkey-Cooking Sous Chef to Half a Million Wi-Fi Connected Ovens

GE Appliances announced this week it had released an over-the-air software update that will assist half a million owners of GE Appliances’ Wi-Fi connected ovens cook their holiday turkey.

Called Turkey Mode, the new software update gives users step-by-step cooking instructions for their big holiday bird. The update also utilizes a software algorithm to estimate the cooking time needed to reach an optimal 170 degrees internal temperature for any size bird. Temperature measurement is done via a probe that comes standard with all GE Appliance’s connected oven models. Turkey Mode update works with most GE Appliances Wi-Fi connected oven models, 64 model families and 336 SKUs in all.

To see Turkey Mode in action, I jumped on a video call with GE Appliances’ food scientist Sabrinah Hannah and GE Appliances’ director of digital transformation, Taylor Dawson. Hannah told me that the company has been baking turkeys as a product development tool for decades, and they knew that turkeys are one of the biggest challenges home cooks face all year.

One of the lessons learned in the company’s testing was where to place the probe. The slowest heating part of the bird is deep in the breast, so part of the update on LCD-enabled models is a visual of where to place the probe. According to Hannah, if users follow Turkey Mode steps, they won’t need to baste the turkey or cover it with foil.

According to Dawson, the update went out to both LCD-equipped Wi-Fi ovens as well as Wi-Fi models without LCD screens. Users with LCD-equipped ovens can follow the step-by-step instructions on their ovens or the GE Appliances SmartHQ app, while users without LCDs can follow along on the app. For those who get the update on their LCD-enabled ovens, a button that says “Turkey Mode” will appear in the choice of cook mode on the screen. In addition to seeing the new cook mode, the user also gets a season-themed holiday background and a turkey “gobble” sound that plays when the turkey is finished cooking.

Turkey Mode is the second big update GE Appliances has sent over-the-air to their installed base of connected ovens this year. Earlier this year, the company sent an update that added an ‘air fryer’ cook mode to Wi-Fi-connected ovens in the field. While countertop smart ovens like the June have offered upgrades via over-the-air updates for a few years, the ability to send new cook modes and other updates to installed ovens is just beginning to take off as the installed base of connected built-ins reaches a critical mass. The ability to add new cooking features represents a potential business and customer support model opportunity for an industry where customers previously had a fixed set of product features that never changed once they walked out of the store.

At Long Last, Mitte Begins to Ship Countertop Mineral Water Machine

Mitte, a maker of countertop mineral water machines, announced this week that they would begin shipping their first product, the Mitte Home, this month. The Berlin-based company will ship first to new customers and Kickstarter backers in Germany and plans to begin selling the water-mineralizer in the US in the spring of 2022.

The Mitte Home, which sells for €350, filters and mineralizes the water using a two-step process. The water is filtered using activated charcoal. After filtration, the water seeps through calcite and magnesite rocks to add calcium and magnesium. After mineralizing, the system adds CO₂ and dispenses. The system uses a cartridge system for filtration and mineralization, with each cartridge good for 250 liters. The machine also uses replaceable CO₂ cylinders to add the fizz.

The Mitte Home can be controlled by an app, which allows users to track consumption. The app also allows users order new cartridges and CO₂ cylinders.

The original Mitte product offered via the company’s Kickstarter campaign included water distillation, but this version only provides filtration. According to the company’s update on Kickstarter, a premium model called the Mitte Home Plus will include distillation and will ship in 2-3 years. The company is offering backers the option get a Mitte Home, wait for the Mitte Home Plus, or get a full refund.

While the Mitte comes to market over three years late, backers of the Kickstarter can take comfort in the product actually shipping. Hardware-based crowdfunding campaigns are notoriously high-risk, many products never ship, and those that do are usually late. The company’s ability to persist was no doubt in part due to a $10.6 million funding round in 2018. That round, led by DanonevManifesto Ventures, the New York-based venture arm of Danone, was significantly more than the $317 thousand raised as part of its crowdfunding campaign.

If you live in Germany and would like to order a Mitte, you can do so today at mitte.co, while those who live outside of Germany can add themselves to the waitlist.

Instant Brands Launches Instant Pot Pro Plus and Drop-Powered Connected App

Instant Brands, the company behind the popular Instant Pot line of multicookers, announced today it has launched a new connected multicooker, the Instant Pot Pro Plus, and an all-new Instant Brands Connect app.

The new app was developed in partnership with smart kitchen software company Drop. The two companies began working together with the launch of a guided recipes app in 2019, but that first app was strictly a recipe app with no control features. The new app allows the user to select recipes and initiate cooks, customize recipes, monitor cooking progress, get notifications, delay cooking start, and change steam venting methods. Users of the new Connect app will have access to 1500 recipes to start.

The plan is for the Instant Brands Connect app to allow cooks to eventually connect multiple Instant Brands products. Today customers can download it and will be able to pair the new Instant Pot Pro Plus. Instant has indicated it has a number of other smart products planned in the pipeline, which means we’ll see more Instant Pots, air fryers, and maybe even a coffee maker or two connected to the app. And while the app currently does not have a shoppable recipe feature, I can imagine that functionality in potential future versions.

For Drop, the new app is a strong validation for the Dublin-based startup’s smart kitchen OS. Instant Brands had previously built an app for its Instant Pot Smart Wifi pressure cooker, but with this launch, the multicooker giant is standardizing its connected device strategy around Drop’s smart kitchen platform. Instant Brands sits alongside other big kitchen brands such as Bosch, Electrolux and Thermomix on Drop’s smart kitchen OS partner roster.

The new Instant Pro Plus is available today for $169.99 and the app can be downloaded today in the app store.

The Spoon & CES Bring Food Tech To The World’s Biggest Tech Show For First Time Ever

Each January for the past couple of decades, I’ve packed up my suitcase and headed to the Nevada desert to take part in the world’s biggest tech show, CES.

I’m not alone. CES is the singular tech show that pretty much every major industry attends along with those who watch and follow those industries.

This includes the food world. Many remember the debut of the Impossible 2.0 burger in 2019, a watershed moment for both the company and the plant-based meat industry. There’s also been food robots, ice cream makers and much more that have made a big splash at the big show.

However, up until this year, any food professionals coming to CES were attending despite the lack of a dedicated food technology and innovation area in the exhibition space or in the conference tracks. Because CES is *the* great convener in the tech world, we felt food tech needed representation. This led The Spoon to rent out the ballroom of Treasure Island for a couple of years running to produce Food Tech Live. We wanted to give the food industry a central place to connect and check out the latest and greatest in food innovation.

But now that’s all about to change as food tech hits the big time this coming January. CES announced in June that food tech is going to be a featured theme for the first time ever at the big show. We couldn’t be more excited, in part because we will get to see even more cool food tech innovation, but also because CES has chosen The Spoon as the dedicated CES partner for the food tech exhibition and conference portions of the show!

We’re busy helping to develop a half-day conference and talking to lots of companies about coming to show their products at the four day CES food tech exhibition and we can’t wait to show what we’ve helped CES build.

But we need your input too! If you are interested in showing off your latest and great food and kitchen-related product or solutions, make sure to let us know. Just head over to this form on the SKS website and drop us a line. We’ll get right back to you and let you know how you can be a part of food tech at CES.

You can read more about the program below with our official announcement, or just drop us a line to see how to get involved.

We’ll see you in Vegas!

Food tech has arrived at CES®. Leaders in kitchen, food and cooking are coming together in Las Vegas from January 5th to January 8th at CES  2022 to examine how technology is changing the global food chain. CES has teamed up with The Spoon, the leading food tech media and events partner to showcase, demo and discuss the way technology has transformed the world of food. 

While we’re sure the excitement and buzz around food tech will be everywhere, we are working with CES on two key initiatives at the show, including: 

  • The Food Tech Exhibit, an exhibit space showcasing the latest innovations and demonstrating new products from across the kitchen and food tech spectrum. This will be live on the CES show floor in the Venetian Expo. 
  • The CES Food Tech Conference, presented by The Spoon, will bring together visionary thinkers, chef entrepreneurs, appliance vendors, delivery and food retail disruptors at CES 2022. Each session will highlight the innovation and disruption happening across the food industry as a result of tech advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, mobile accessibility and more. 

CES is fast approaching — and there are many ways to get involved before, during and after the show. The CES Food Tech presented by The Spoon area will focus solely on companies building the future of food and cooking. Booth spaces are diverse in terms of size and ability to customize – get in touch and we’ll work with the CES exhibitor team and our team to ensure you put together a space that serves you. 

If you aren’t able to secure a demo or company/showcase spot but still want your brand to be part of the inaugural year of food tech at CES, you can sponsor the CES Food Tech Conference on Day 2 of CES in the Venetian. Conference tickets for CES programming will be on sale soon.