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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Connected Kitchen

Called It: Just as We Predicted, Amazon is Building a Smart Fridge

Apparently, Amazon is building a smart fridge.

That’s at least according to a report from Business Insider (paywall), who reports that Amazon is building a fridge that would utilize machine vision and other advanced technology to monitor food in the refrigerator, notify us when it’s about to expire, and automatically order & replenish items through Amazon.

Dubbed Project Pulse, the initiative is being led by the company’s physical store unit, the same group that developed Amazon Go’s just walk out technology. Other teams, such as Lab 126 (its California-based hardware team that developed the Echo) and Amazon’s grocery unit are also contributing to the effort.

Here at The Spoon, we’re not all that surprised Amazon wants to create a fridge, mostly because we (I) predicted it nearly four years ago. When I asked “Is Amazon building a smart fridge?” in 2017, I tried to connect some of the dots I saw in Amazon’s commerce and devices businesses. And let me tell you, there were a lot of dots.

Perhaps the biggest being patents filed by the company at the time. In the fall of 2017, Amazon had filed two patents for smart fridge technology: the first described a fridge that uses machine vision to detect food spoilage, and the second described a fridge that utilized an electronic nose to detect food spoilage.

From the post:

The first patent application, filed on September 14th of this year, is called “Image-Based Spoilage Sensing Refrigerator” and centers around utilizing internal cameras to detect spoiled food. The system would use both infrared and visible spectrum cameras to detect spoilage of food and then send an alert to a mobile device.

This patent application was designed to work in concert with a scent-based sensing system defined in another patent application (also filed on September 14th) called “Scent-Based Spoilage Sensing Refrigerator” that utilizes a variety of sensors to detect gasses emitted from spoiled food and then sends an alert to a mobile device.

Of course, Amazon files lots of patent applications, many for technologies that never really go anywhere. But unlike many other companies, Amazon doesn’t just do R&D and build patent war chests for nothing. If they think they can make a product and upend a market, they usually will, so a smart fridge didn’t seem all that far-fetched.

There were other reasons I suspected something was up, including the company’s interest in kitchen commerce with products like Dash, a shoppable recipe patent, and even a partnership with Kenmore to sell fridges. And a year or so later, when the company entered the appliance business with their own branded products, an Amazon smart fridge seemed even more likely.

So now that an Amazon smart fridge is a very real possibility, I’d ask this: Will it be something worth buying? I would say yes if can help consumers better manage their food inventory than existing refrigerators. Samsung, LG, and others have made some significant advances in smart fridges, but it still feels like the category hasn’t achieved its full potential in food management and waste avoidance.

In the end, I’m both cautiously optimistic and a bit skeptical about an Amazon smart fridge. Optimistic given Amazon’s proven ability to think out of the box and completely rethink an existing product category. Skeptical because the company’s innovation in hardware has often historically been not-so-subtly motivated by a desire to serve Amazon’s broader corporate goal, which is to get people to buy more stuff. Because of this, I’m worried a technically impressive Amazon smart fridge might in the end just be a big connected shopping cart.

For this prediction at least, I hope Amazon proves me wrong.

Smart Food Waste Composters Are Here. Here’s a Look at Five of Them

Food waste sucks, but no matter how hard we try, most of us end up throwing out some food.

So if and when food does go to waste, the best thing to do is to make sure it doesn’t end up in a landfill. In some locations (like where I live), the city offers green bin programs with curbside yard and food waste pickup. But what option do those without city-run green bin programs have?

Composting! That’s right, no longer just for hardcore gardeners or your parents’ hippy friends, composting is becoming more popular as a way to avoid filling our landfills with carbon gas-emitting food waste, while also creating a rich food source for the home garden.

The problem? Composting takes time. In fact, it can take you up to a few months to fully compost food in a traditional composter (and that’s even after you buy worms!).

But now, there may be another answer…

Welcome To The Age of The Smart Food Waste Composter

The good news is we’re seeing a new wave of smart, automated compost systems that help the user turn food waste into compost. These new systems can compress composting time from months to days. They use internal compressors and grinders to break down the food and often have sensors to optimize the internal environment to foster microbe and nutrient growth.

Some come in economically sized countertop systems, while a couple of others look like a kitchen garbage bin or sit under your sink and connect to your plumbing system.

Most of these systems are either still in development or are just beginning to ship. And while I haven’t tested any of them yet and can’t vouch for their effectiveness, I do think – if they work as promised – these systems could potentially make composting a much more viable option for millions of households.

Here’s a look at five early entrants into the smart food waste composter category.

The Lomi

The first look at Lomi

The Lomi is a countertop system that compresses and grinds food waste into compostable material. The user drops food waste into the system and pushes a button, and the Lomi will turn the waste into compostable material in less than a day. The system has an Eco and Express mode; Eco takes about 20 hours and will produce a densely rich nutrient compost, while the Express mode takes 6 hours and produces a “neutral natural fertilizer”.

One of the cool features of the Lomi is it will compost compostable plastics. Throw in those compostable plastic containers or cutlery and the system will churn it into fertilizer. The Lomi uses a replaceable carbon filter system to reduce odor, and filters need to be replaced every 3-6 months.

The Lomi is from Pela, a company that made a name for itself with compostable material phone cases. When it launched on Indiegogo this year, the Lomi easily broke the record for the most-backed product in the food waste category with nearly 19 thousand backers and $6.9 million in raised funds.

Those interested can still buy the Lomi for $399 on Indiegogo and the company says it will ship in January 2022.

The Vitamix FoodCycler FC-50

Introducing the Vitamix® FoodCycler® FC-50!

While many of the new smart compost systems are from startups who launch their products on crowdfunding platforms, the new Vitamix FoodCycler FC-50 is from a name well known for its home blenders.

Here’s how Vitamix described the FoodCycler when they announced it last year: The FoodCycler FC-50 is lightweight, easy-to-use, odorless and compact. It comes with a small food-waste collecting bucket that can be moved around the kitchen – from countertop to sink – when preparing meals. The bucket is dishwasher-safe and comes with a lid, making it easy to keep the cast-iron bucket on your kitchen counter and the FoodCycler unit in a garage, laundry room or pantry..

The FC-50 can process a bucket of food in 4-8 hours. In addition to vegetable and fruit scraps, the unit will process meat, dairy products, and even bones from bones from fish or chicken.

The Vitamix FC-50 is available today for $379 on Amazon.

KALEA

KALEA automatic kitchen composter creates more out of your food scraps – start your home composting

Unlike the Lomi or the Vitamix FC-50, the KALEA home composter sits on the floor and looks like a small garbage can. The KALEA has two main components; Food is dumped into the upper chamber, where it is shredded, and its moisture is removed (there’s also a carbon filter to remove odors). Once shredded and dried, waste then drops into the second chamber where the machine creates the optimal temperature, oxygen levels and humidity conditions to turn the waste into compost. The processed compost is ready in 48 hours and dropped into a collection tray at the bottom of the machine.

The KALEA launched on Kickstarter, and while it didn’t raise the eye-popping amount of the Lomi, the creators were able to raise a respectable €485 thousand. The first backer units were supposed to go out in December of this year, and if the updates on Kickstarter are any indication, it seems like things are mostly on track. However, if you weren’t one of the early backers and wanted to order a KALEA, you’ll have to wait until July of next year, and it will set you back €729 ($850).

Tero

Tero - The revolutionary alternative to composting

The Tero is a countertop home compost machine that turns food waste into compostable powder in 3-8 hours. Like some of the other countertop machines, the Tero compresses and grinds the food, and the company claims it reduces the total volume of the material by 90%.

The product comes in two versions, the Tero and the Tero Plus. The Tero Plus does the same amount of food as the base unit, but also comes with Wi-Fi connectivity and an app that lets you track how much food waste you have processed and order filters.

The Tero was funded via a successful Kickstarter campaign and units are shipping now to early backers. You can preorder a Tero on the company’s website.

Sepura

The Sepura is unique in that it is a system that replaces your under sink food disposal system and automatically separates food waste into a collection bin. The home owner or a plumber installs the Sepura system by connecting the separator unit to the sink. A separate collection bin connects to the processing unit, which takes about 8 seconds or so to grind the food and separate solids from liquids. When the collection bin is full, the user detaches it and puts the processed food into a compost pile or into a green bin.

Early Research Shows Promise for Cooking with Lasers

Ever since I first saw secretly evil superhero Homelander cut through anything and everyone with laser beam eyes, I’ve thought it’d sure be handy to have a pair of laser peepers to clean up weeds around the house or cook a quick meal.

While I (unfortunately ) won’t be able to shoot lasers from my eyes anytime soon, things are looking up in the laser cooking department thanks to a recent research project by a group of students a Columbia University. In a recent article for npj Science of Food program for Nature, the group describes the project in which they print and cook raw 3D printed chicken using lasers.

The group started by pureeing a chicken breast and then extruded the chicken paste into squares using a 3D printer. From there, they used different lasers to conduct various trials that varied parameters with three different lasers: A 5–10 W blue diode laser (445 nm) as primary heating source, and comparative tests done with an Near Infrared (NIR) laser (980 nm), NIR laser (10.6 μm).

From the explainer video:

“By tuning parameters such as circle diameter, circle density, path length, randomness, and laser speed, you can optimize the distribution of energy that hits the surface of the food, but at higher resolution than conventional heating methods.”

The group also experimented cooking in highly-precise cooking patterns (including a checkerboard pattern) to see how it compared with traditional cooking. The takeaway? Laser cooking might make better food than traditional cooking methods like broiling.

“Compared to oven broiling, we found that laser cooked foods are more moist and shrink less after heating,” concluded the group.

Interestingly, the group also found that lasers can cook food wrapped in plastic. The idea of being to cook through packaging opens up potential new avenues for offering consumers no-contact food in foodservice scenarios, something that’s no doubt of interest in these pandemic-stricken times.

While some like SavorEat are building print-and-cook systems, this is the first time I’ve seen a cooking system which uses lasers. The high-fidelity control of laser cooking is reminiscent of the solid-state cooking systems slowly making their way to market, only instead of using radio waves they shoot highly directed beams of light.

You can read the full research paper here and watch the explainer video below:

Robots that Cook: precision cooking with multiwavelength lasers

SpiceHero’s Creator Wants to Modernize a Stone Age Tool To Help Make Tastier Spices

If you’re a chef or a spice aficionado, there’s a good chance you use a mortar and pestle to crush your spices. But for the rest of us who are happy to buy our spices in the form of pre-ground powders from the grocery store, we’re missing out.

That’s at least according to Thomas Weigele, who is currently running a campaign on Kickstarter to get his invention – an automated mortar and pestle called the SpiceHero – funded. So why would someone want to create a modern version of a tool that has been in use since the Stone Age?

According to Wiegele, the idea came back when he was on the APAC consumer insights team for B/S/H Appliances, where his team would conduct ethnographic studies on markets in Asia. During one study about cooking behaviors across all socioeconomic groups in India, Weigele says one insight came up over and over: “Preparing spices with a mixer-grinder is good, but taste was much better when my mom or grandma prepared it with a Mortar and Pestle.”

He and a colleague soon realized it wasn’t just nostalgia. When they ran tests, it became clear this ancient tool for smashing and grinding spices brought out flavors in ways other methods did not. Electric spice grinder/mixers slice the spices into a uniform dust, while a mortar and pestle would result in a pleasing “mix of coarse and fine particles for dry spices and pastes have more texture and can extract the oil from the seeds, herbs and vegetables.”

Those insights resulted in B/S/H approving a project led by Wiegele to make a prototype for a semi-automated mortar and pestle machine. Unfortunately, the device, which ground the spices by rotating the stone inside the bowl, did not provide the same results as a traditional mortar and pestle. Weigele and others proposed a fully automated (with pounding motion and all) version, but B/S/H management did not give the green light.

When Wiegele left B/S/H and decided to head to school to get his masters degree in 2019, he couldn’t shake the idea of an automated mortar and pestle, so he soon hired a freelance engineer and started working on a prototype. Two iterations later, he was ready to launch his device on Kickstarter.

The SpiceHero looks a bit like a small stand mixer, only instead of beaters or mixing blades, the machine featured a pestle that pounds the contents of the bowl (mortar) at the rate of once a second. Wiegele hopes the machine, which starts at €140 as one of the reward tiers, will be ready to ship to backers in about a year.

First, though, the campaign needs to get funded. Wiegele has capped the amount for industrial design in the campaign at €20 thousand ($23.4 thousand), and after that, the rest will be used for tooling and inventory. With about three weeks to go, the campaign for the Spice Hero stands at about 50% funded around about €10 thousand.

If you’d like to back a project that could up your spice game with this modernized take on an ancient tool, you can check out the SpiceHero Kickstarter page here.

Bruvi Raises $7 Million as it Sets to Ship Its Pod-Coffee Brewer in 2022

Bruvi, a maker of a single-serve pod-based brewing system, has raised a $7 million pre-Series A round as it prepares to launch its brewer and direct-to-consumer pod marketplace in 2022.

According to an announcement sent to The Spoon, the company plans to use the funding to “pay for manufacturing, software development, brewer inventory, and digital advertising expenses, as it prepares for pre-orders in November 2021 and national launch in Q1 2022.”

While many of the new coffee systems coming to market nowadays seem to be grind and brew systems that do away with the pod altogether, Bruvi is bucking the trend by rethinking the pod-brewer. The Bruvi brewer, which is Wi-Fi connected and app-controlled, adjusts heating parameters and brew-strength depending on the pod, which the system scans when inserted. The app will set brew schedules, monitor usage, and allow you to reorder.

The company claims the Bruvi system is differentiated by being the only pod-brewing system that brews coffee in the pod itself. This is debatable, especially considering Nespresso’s Vertuo pod system, which uses centrifugal force to extrude a crema espresso from the pod.

The company says its pod is more eco-friendly because it is made of treated polypropylene, which it claims will biodegrade up to 63% in about 600 days, compared with just 2% biodegradation of a normal pod. While that’s better, a more biodegradable pod is still a pod, something that adds to the waste stream. But for those coffee lovers that insist on using a pod-brewer, Bruvi’s system could be a way to reduce the mountain of plastic their coffee habit leaves behind.

Bruvi’s founders include longtime coffee industry executives Sung Oh and Mel Elias. Oh is the technical cofounder, having spent five years inventing a single-pod system for his company Touch Coffee and Beverages. Elias brings the coffee industry connections from his prior stint as the former CEO of The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.

Customers can pre-order the Bruvi bundle, which features a brewer, 24 B-Pods and water filter, for $198 starting in November. The company says it will begin shipping the brewer in the first quarter of 2022.

Beer Made With a Beer Brewing Robot Wins Gold Medal

In July, a homebrewer using a BEERMKR home beer brewing appliance won gold at the National HomeBrew Competition.

According to a release from BEERMKR, a beer brewed by Christian Chandler of Phoenix, AZ, won the gold medal in the Porters & Stouts category, beating out 164 entries in the contest put on by the American HomeBrewers Association.

The win was an important milestone in that it’s the first time that a homebrewer used an automated beer brewing countertop appliance to help develop an award-winning recipe at the HomeBrew Competition.

So how did Chandler use the BEERMKR to develop his beer? From the release:

Chandler says that BEERMKR’s small batches and ease of use let him make multiple iterations of a recipe and “really tweak things on the fly.” Chandler was able to fine-tune his recipe into a national gold medal winner.  The repeatability of BEERMKRs process also helped him make consistently good beer as he advanced from the first to second rounds of the competition.

Chandler used the BEERMKR to do quick batches, which he later scaled up using a higher capacity brewing system called the Grainfather to increase batch size. While The Grainfather automates some parts of the brewing process, it still requires the user to monitor readings manually and transfer the wort to a separate container for fermentation after the brew. The BEERMKR, on the other hand, automates much more of the process of beer brewing. The brewer chooses the ingredients and builds a recipe, but from there the sensors and software of the BEERMKR monitor much of the process, from brewing through fermentation to carbonation.

In short, Chandler, an experienced brewer, integrated the BEERMKR as part of his recipe development process. He iterated recipes and brewed quick small batches with smaller portions of ingredients on the BEERMKR, and used his bigger machine to brew larger quantities once the recipe was dialed in.

So will it soon become commonplace for homebrewers to use brewbots like the BEERMKR to develop recipes for brewing competitions? I imagine so, in part because the machines essentially act as a tool for serious homebrewers to develop recipes faster. While purists might resent any use of technology when it comes to brewing up a batch, technology like the BEERMKR helps them get better at their craft by automating the boring parts like temperature control and leaving the creative parts up to them.

You can watch a video of Chandler below talking about developing his award winning recipe with the BEERMKR.

BEERMKR beer wins gold at National Homebrew Competition

Podcast: A Conversation With Kevin Brown About Innit’s Google Cloud Partnership

This week I caught up with Innit CEO Kevin Brown to talk about his deal with Google Cloud.

Like a lot of Innit’s deals as of late, the partnership is focused on the grocery space. Late last year, Innit inked a deal with Carrefour to power a personalized nutritional score for 40 thousand products sold online by the European grocery giant. Before that, they’d announced a deal with SPINS to add personalized data to grocery retailer’s websites.

And after this week’s news, Innit is likely to be plugged into more grocery retail partnerships as the food and cooking digitization platform partner for Google Cloud’s retail team.

You can listen to my conversation with Kevin below or any of the usual podcast places.

Innit Teams Up With Google Cloud To Power Personalized Shopping

Smart kitchen and personalized shopping software startup Innit announced today they have partnered with Google Cloud. The new strategic partnership will help “grocery retailers to deliver personalized services across the entire meal journey, spanning online, in-store, and at home.”

This isn’t the first time the two companies have worked together. Innit was part of Google’s CES Demo in 2018, complete with a Tyler Florence cooking demo , and in 2019 the two announced a partnership with contract manufacturer Flex. Today’s news is an expansion of their collaboration into digitizing the grocery shopping experience.

Google “has been working with us to put together a solution targeting grocery retail,” said Innit CEO Kevin Brown via a Zoom interview this week. “Innit is a vertical market expert in food and recipes and nutrition and how it all comes together. AWe essentially combined the Innit capabilities with the Google capabilities to power grocery stores to have a much better digital experience with our consumers.”

At an execution level, Google Cloud will leverage Innit’s food and shopper data to help grocery stores to deliver more personalized experiences such as custom shopping lists built around recipes or dietary preferences. This could mean personalized recommendations for a shopper or building a custom meal kit around a recipe.

The partnership is part of a multiyear move by Innit into grocery shopping digitization which began with the company’s acquisition of Shopwell. Shopwell helped to round out Innit’s platform, which was initially focused on guided cooking and the in-kitchen consumer experience, and put them into conversation with grocers. The move paid off for Innit and help them snag a deal with Carrefour last year to power the large European grocery retailer’s personalized nutrition score initiative.

It also was one of the first moves by a smart kitchen software player to create digital grocery platforms.

I asked Brown why many of the smart kitchen players have focused on grocery in recent years.

“We’re excited about the future of that (connected kitchen), but it happens that sort of hardware speed,” said Brown.

“We see that as one of the anchor pieces over time, but right now, there’s a huge focus on the front end of that. Of how do I deal with all the wellness and health issues? How do I find the right products? How do I shop? And so that’s where we basically put all of the building blocks together of the past several years to finally be able to embed that into the shopping experience itself and carry people all the way through.”

It’s the second move by the Google Cloud team into the consumer cooking and meal journey experience over the past couple of weeks. On August 19th, the company had announced a partnership with GE Appliances to build next-gen smart home appliances. One has to wonder if the flurry of digital food and kitchen deals is part of a broader effort by the cloud giant to grow its market share in the consumer food and lifestyle vertical in the coming years by focusing on next-gen digital and AI powered solutions.

Forget Watching TV. Sony Wants Your TV To Watch You (and Monitor Your Eating)

The couch in front of our TV is a sacred no-judgment zone, the place where we wear sweats, eat pizza, and binge-watch Cobra Kai on Netflix.

But what if the TV watched and, well, judged us? That’s the dystopian future Sony is thinking about, at least if US patent number 11,081,227 is any indication.

Called “Monitoring and reporting the health condition of a television user,” the patent describes a television with embedded cameras and sensors that monitor everything a person while slouched on the couch, including tracking the food they eat. The patent was awarded to Sony on August 3rd of this year.

So why is Sony looking to invade the safe space on our couch? According to the patent, the thinking is a TV like this could monitor the health of the TV viewer by recording activities such and eating habits and look for any signs of a potential impending health problem.

Illustration of Remote with Biometric Sensors from Sony Patent #11,081,227

From the patent:

People spend a significant number of hours sitting in front of a television (TV). They may have a hidden health problem or a diminishing health condition. The system monitors one or more health vitals of the user such as heart rate, etc. While sitting in front of the TV, they may behave in an unhealthy manner. For example, they may eat too much while watching a TV program. The system may also monitor the types of food a person eats while watching TV.

The patent describes a system that would use a camera embedded in the TV to log a person’s food consumption and monitor eating patterns such as chewing speed, posture, and how fast they eat. The system would also identify the type of food, estimate portion size, and take a guess at how many calories are consumed. All that info could be synced with biometric monitoring (the patent suggests a heartbeat sensor in the remote) to paint a profile of a person’s health and how their TV watching habits impact it.

So who needs a TV to monitor their food intake? I guess if one consumes lots of empty calories while sitting in front of the tube, this might prod them to change their habits. But on the other hand, do we really need a TV to tell us we’re eating poorly?

And then there’s the problem of consumer privacy. Some of you may remember the controversy a few years back about a few lines in the terms of service or a Samsung smart TV that suggested the company might capture conversations and sell them to third parties. I can only imagine what people might think about cameras on their TV watching their every move.

In Sony’s defense, this isn’t close to being an actual product. Patents are oftentimes just corporate thought experiments, where R&D managers with budgets to burn ask what if? The likelihood of Sony actually building their big brother TV is probably pretty low.

Probably. But maybe someday they will, and if they do, it’ll be interesting to see if consumers are ok with the idea of a TV watching them, trying to make them better people. But hey, if you’re really watching Cobra Kai and downing whole quarts of ice cream every Friday night, maybe you could use the help of your Sony 70″ 4K OLED TV to help perform a little self-care.

TinyChef Buys Zelish, Adds App and Shoppable Recipe Capability To Voice Cooking Platform

Last month, voice cooking platform startup TinyChef (formerly known as KloveChef) acquired Zelish, a meal-planning app that was part of the BSH/Techstars Future Home Accelerator.

The deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, gives TinyChef an app and shoppable recipes to go with their voice-based cooking platform. TinyChef also said they are in the process of raising a $750,000 Series A round.

I asked TinyChef CEO Bahubali Shete to tell us more about the reasoning behind the deal and give us an update on the combined business. You can see our interview below:

Can you tell us why you felt like acquiring a shoppable recipe startup made sense for you?

Zelish isn’t just a shoppable recipe platform. Yes, this is one of their offerings, but their primary offering is to help people plan, shop and cook. Shop Recipes is a mere subset of the core offering that was essential as people were locked up at home and wanted to replicate exotic chef-made dishes, which also helped them bring in spreading awareness & getting a good chunk of revenue.

We conducted thorough research studies in North America of both smart speaker users and non-users. It was evident that people would continue to use their smartphones as personal device and smart speakers would be more like a family devices.

We recognized that some parts of the kitchen journey like discovery, planning and shopping, were easier to do on a handheld smart device.

In summary, while consumers like handsfree cooking with voice assistants, they still want to use smartphones; hence having a companion app that gives the freedom of choosing the device at different parts of the journey is critical to winning the consumers. Zelish had built the entire journey and it made a lot of sense to get on onboard a product that has been tried, tested and much loved by both users and tech editors. Secondly, a shoppable recipe platform with a web plugin is a perfect way to tie up with food influencers with recipe websites/Youtube channels.

How do you see incorporating Zelish’s shoppable recipe and other technology into the TinyChef voice-guided cooking platform/consumer experience?

We feel that Zelish’s offerings can be integrated with ours pretty seamlessly. We are enhancing Zelish’s app experience by empowering users to pick a dish they want to cook on the app and send it to their smart speakers for a hands-free cook-along experience.

The other offering by Zelish is shoppable recipes. Tinychef has a complimentary feature that allowed users to add ingredients to the shopping list. This is a precursor of the shoppable recipes feature. We are now working to integrate Zelish’s shoppable recipes feature into the voice platform. 

Can you give an update on current users and other metrics for TinyChef?

TinyChef has 1.4 million unique users on the platform and 120 thousand monthly active users. There are roughly 70,000 meals cooked per month using our cook-along experience. Traffic is currently heavily weighted from India, with approximately 80% coming from India and 20% from North America. The size of our recipe repository is 200,000 with 20,000 of those being actively used by our our users.

How has TinyChef grown in terms of usage? How has the company grown in the past year in terms of employees?

Tinychef’s user base has doubled in the last 8 months. Our users are using hands-free cooking mode way more than ever witnessed before. We have done some pilots with Amazon for voice shopping in India with great success.  

We have increased from 9 members to 15 employees over the past year.

Do you have any stats on Zelish?

Zelish has had approximately 130,000 overall downloads. 40% of the downloads are monthly active users.

How did you fund the acquisition? Can you give deal amount?

While we won’t be able to disclose the finer details of the acquisition, we are in the process of raising some additional funds.

We have been able to expedite a couple of our tech offerings by joining hands with Zelish. This acquisition expedited our development plans by almost a year so now we are doubling down to constantly adding more features to both our app & the skill. We now are looking to add more features & fueling our user growth plans. The same would also be supported by user growth plans both in North America and India. The funds would be our fuel to this hockey stick growth in both continents.

How many employees are coming over to TinyChef?

6 employees of Zelish will be joining the TinyChef team.

You Can Now (Finally) Preorder The Tetra Countertop Dishwasher

Tetra, the small countertop dishwasher that made a big splash when it debuted almost four years ago at CES 2018, is finally ready to ship take preorders.

Heatworks, the maker of Tetra, said that dishwasher will be available for a pre-order price of $399 ($499 MSRP) and will ship the product on May 18th, 2022, which apparently is No Dirty Dishes Day.

So what took a dishwasher originally expected to ship in mid-2019 an extra three years to get to market?

According to CEO Jerry Callahan, it had to do with a couple things, both related to getting the detergent just right for the small dishwasher.

The first was dosing.

“What we find out early on was that the dosing of its detergent was really critical,” Callahan told me in a phone interview this week. “We use a little bit of water, so if you overdosed it, the cleaning process wasn’t as good. If you underdosed the cleaning process wasn’t as good.”

Add in that each type of detergent brand has its own potency and efficacy, Callahan soon realized things would get out of hand if they tried to tell the consumer how much of each soap to use when running a load.

“I woke up in the middle night thinking about this matrix that we’d have to give everybody so that they put the right amount of detergent in. I said ‘guys that we can’t do that to people.'”

Another reason the Tetra took a while was the company wanted to make sure the cleaning detergent chemistry was just right. Typical dishwashing detergents have a mix of building agents, enzymes and surfactants, and while the varying composition and age of these different components may be fine in traditional dishwashing detergent, the cleaning cocktail needed to be pretty precise for a small machine that makes economic use of water like the Tetra.

This effort to get the dosing and chemistry right led them to a partnership with BASF. In a partnership announcement made last year, the two companies announced they would work on developing a detergent cartridge system for the Tetra. According to the announcement, each cartridge will be good for about 20 washes. Callahan told me that each wash would be an equivalent cost to a good detergent at a grocery store, or “about 35 cents a wash.” That puts cartridge pricing at around $7 per unit (pricing for cartridges were not announced in the release), but Callahan said each Tetra comes with a cartridge and preorders get an extra one thrown in.

Looking at the Tetra, I couldn’t help but notice that while the close-to-final product looks pretty close to the original design, there were a few differences.

Tetra in 2018
Tetra in 2021

One is the Tetra just looks like it has a bigger footprint. This is not surprising since the while original’s tiny design looked cool, the super small prototype didn’t seem all that practical with room for only two place settings (that’s if you didn’t have a silverware basket). The bigger Tetra of 2021 changes that with room for up to three place settings.

The current Tetra also is taller, which makes sense since, at some point, the self-contained washing system needed to make room for the dishwashing machinery as well as have a clear water chamber, a grey water tank and the cartridge system.

While big brands like Midea have been building countertop dishwashers for years, the Tetra – and those that followed like the Bob and the Capsule – are more self-contained and put a greater emphasis on sexy design. The Tetra still stands out compared to both the Bob (which is currently shipping) and the Capsule (expected to ship next year), in large part due to the all-glass top.

And it’s because of this unique design I think there will be some pent up demand for the Tetra, even three years after its debut. Callahan thinks so too, in part because of the 25 thousand or so who have signed up to be notified when the product is ready to ship.

Hopefully we should know by next year. In the meantime, you can check out what the Tetra 2021 looks like in action below.

The Tetra Dishwasher 2021

Keurig Debuts BrewID Smart Brewing Platform, Launches First WiFi Connected Brewer

Today Keurig, the maker of the omnipresent coffee pod brewing systems, debuted a new smart brewing platform called BrewID.

So what is BrewID? According to the announcement, BrewID is “an all new technology platform designed to support a number of  features, such as the ability to identify a specific K-Cup pod brand from more than 900 pod varieties, including the specific roast, and automatically adjust the brewer’s temperature and strength settings to the specifications to the recommendations of the coffee roasting expert who created it.”

In other words, the new platform will allow Keurig coffee partners to create customized brew settings optimized for each specific roast.

“Every coffee needs a different technique to brew it to its optimized cup size or preference,” Roger Johnson, Keurig’s SVP, Appliance Global product Organization, told me over a zoom call. “And so this technology allows you to center so you understand what the roaster intended and then it’s up to whatever you’d like.”

Johnson said one of the goals of the new brewer with the BrewID platform was to achieve something closer to what you might get from a barista with, say, a pour-over coffee. To achieve that, the new brewer pairs the BrewID with Keurig’s Multistream brewing technology, which in the case of the new brewer, means five streams of water vs just one.

BrewID will make its debut in the company’s first Wi-Fi connected brewer, the K-Supreme Plus Smart Brewer.

I know what some of you are thinking: Coffee pods usually mean a quick, serviceable cup of coffee, but don’t equate to a barista crafted cuppa joe. While you are right, I do think that having a brew tailored for a specific coffee roast makes lots of sense. Dark coffee should be brewed differently than lighter coffee. Arabica beans should get treated differently than Robusta.

And that’s the goal of BrewID. By being connected, the device can access specific brew profiles from Keurig’s network of 75 or so third party roasting partners for specific brew instructions for the 900 or so different types of pods.

The new connected brewer also will have the usual list of benefits of being connected, including app-based programming and control and auto-replenishment. According to Johnson, while Keurig has offered auto-replenishment of pods with some of its earlier models, those models used a time-based system that would order pods at a pre-set interval. With the new Wi-Fi based brewer, pod auto-delivery will be based on usage of pods.

I have to admit, when I first heard the name BrewID, images of Keurig’s ill-fated brew “DRM” technology came to mind. Johnson assured me that Keurig learned their lesson from the Keurig 2.0 system rollout.

“You can brew any pod that you would like,” Johnson told me. “There’s no lockout feature. We celebrate a democratized system.”

Of course, one thing BrewID doesn’t change is the fact Keurig is still, well, a pod system. While Keurig has made big strides in making their pods recyclable – in fact, technically all K-cup pods are now recyclable – whether pods are actually recycled is dependent on consumers actually doing the work. This involves separating the lid, throwing the coffee into the compost and making sure the plastic cup is then put into the right bin. My guess is a lot of consumers still throw the spent pods into the garbage whole, putting plastic into the waste stream.

And while some new grind-and-brew systems like the Spinn do away with the pod altogether and may pose a threat in the future, those systems are still dwarfed by pods, which in 2020 account for a $25 billion market.

So for now, pods are still massive (and growing) business. And, with its new BrewID platform, Keurig is hoping to bring even more coffee drinkers to the pod.

The K-Supreme Plus Smart with BrewID will sell for $199 and will be available this fall.