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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Connected Kitchen

Cooksy Uses Cameras and Thermal Sensors Above Your Home Stove for Guided Cooking

While there is quite the range of guided cooking assistants for home cooks, Cooksy is looking to deliver guided cooking by adding a device above your home’s range. Launching a crowdfunding campaign today on Indiegogo, Cooksy is a small camera and thermal sensor that you affix above your cooktop. As Cooksy’s cameras and sensors monitor the temperatures of your pan and food, it talks with an accompanying mobile app, alerting you if your pan is too hot or too cold, when to flip foods and when to remove them.

Cooksy has a level of intelligence, so it can identify some foods the user places in a pan, like salmon, for instance. The device also comes pre-loaded with some recipes. But as Cooksy President, Jeff Knighton, explained to me by video chat this week, Cooksy is mostly about user-generated content. Yes, Cooksy can identify salmon in the pan, but if you’re not following a specific recipe from the app, it won’t provide specific guidance.

What it will do is provide data around the user’s experience cooking that food — the aforementioned salmon, for instance. That data might include how hot the pan is, when the salmon gets flipped, and when it gets removed from the heat. Cooksy saves all that information so that the user can bring it back up once they cook salmon again. Cooksy will ensure the pan is at the same temperature as before and that the user flips the salmon and removes it from the heat at the same times they did before.

Cooksy’s goal is to have users share their cooking experiences with a larger community. In addition to recording your cook, the system has basic editing tools that allow you to chop the video down to just its essentials and easily input ingredient and other recipe information. This means that if a professional chef cooks a steak and uploads their video doing so, users could replicate the same cooking process at home.

Of course, that also requires people to do the work of creating recipes and uploading them to the app. Which may or may not be a big deal, depending on how user-friendly the Cooksy app is.

Cooksy is coming to market just one week after Miso Robotics launched a similar cameras+tablet solution for professional kitchens. Miso’s artificial intelligence capabilities seem more robust, with the ability to recognize foods and automatically tell when they are done cooking (no recipe required), but Cooksy could theoretically help home cooks make sauces, stir frys, basically any dish you cook on the stove.

Cooksy, however, won’t come cheap. Early birds backing the project on Indiegogo can pledge $389 for a standard Cooksy, or $479 for the Cooksy Pro, which features greater thermal resolution and more on-board storage. If you are at all interested, you may not want to wait, because the retail price is 40 percent more ($649 for the basic and $799 for the Pro). That is not cheap. Especially if you consider you can pick up an entire six-piece set of Hestan Smart Cookware or a June Oven for $600. And you don’t have to wait. Cooksy is supposed to ship in November of this year, though as avid readers of The Spoon know, crowdfunded hardware campaigns have a tendency to miss their deadlines.

BEERMKR Launches Equity Crowdfunding Campaign, Will Appear on “Shark Tank” Tonight

If I wasn’t such a professional, impartial journalist, I might shed a small tear of joy for BEERMKR. I’ve been writing about the company since 2018 when it launched on Kickstarter, and continued to follow them through trade shows, COVID-related production delays, and finally with a full product review last fall. And now the company has launched an equity crowdfunding campaign, but will also be pitching to the investors on Shark Tank tonight. Li’l BEERMKR is all grown up.

Unlike traditional home brewing, BEERMKR doesn’t require the mess and complications of buckets and bottles and hoses. Instead, it’s a connected, all-in-one countertop beer fermenting, brewing and dispensing system. The accompanying mobile app tells you when to add your ingredients, and the BEERMKR controls all the agitation, temperature control and resting. I had never brewed beer before in my life and was able to make a delicious stout on my very first try, which prompted me to add BEERMKR to our Spoon Holiday Gift Guide.

We obviously don’t know yet if the Sharks will bite upon hearing BEERMKR’s pitch, but the company is hoping everyday investors will. BEERMKR is looking to raise roughly $1 million through equity crowdfunding on the StartEngine platform, and as of this writing has already raised more than $122,000 in its first day. BEERMKR has a good track record when it comes to crowdfunding, having raised nearly $400,000 on Kickstarter to put the BEERMKR into production. (And unlike other beer-related crowdfunded hardware, it actually made it to market.)

Equity crowdfunding is becoming quite a trend in the food tech world. Companies like Piestro, Future Acres, Blendid and GoSun have all conducted equity crowdfunding campaigns. Raising capital from traditional VCs comes with the pressure to scale and deliver a return on the VC’s investment in a relatively timely manner. Startups that choose that equity crowdfunding route mitigate that scaling and time pressure. However, using equity crowdfunding also means companies don’t necessarily get access to the institutional knowledge and connections that could help them run their businesses more efficiently.

I reached out to BEERMKR CEO Aaron Walls this morning to ask him why they opted for equity crowdfunding, and this is what he emailed back:

We’ve done traditional financings and we’ve done kickstarters, but this is our first equity crowdfund. As we began investigating, it became evident that our company was uniquely positioned to execute an equity crowdfunding campaign. First, we have a large install base of happy customers, many of whom have reached out prior to this campaign and asked if they could invest in our company. Second, with as many kickstarters as we’ve done, we have the internal processes in place to work through the crowdfunding dynamics. Lastly, our category of alcoholic beverages does very well with crowdfunding. It’s a category that you don’t need an advanced degree to fully understand the full potential. From our standpoint we felt it was worth the effort to see how well it performs. The worst case scenario? We can always go back to raising capital the old fashioned way, but given the first day success, it looks like we won’t have to!

Walls also said that BEERMKR is only raising $1 million because that is a limit set by the SEC based on the makeup of the company.

I didn’t ask him whether Mark Cuban is now an investor, but I’ll be watching Shark Tank tonight and maybe there there will be one little happy tear for Walls and his team.

BSH Partners with Plum to Make Next-Gen Kitchen Appliances

BSH Appliances North America has partnered up with a wine-appliance maker Plum to create “next generation kitchen appliances,” according to an announcement made by the two companies this week.

From the announcement:

 BSH Home Appliances Corporation, the manufacturer of home appliances known across North America for high quality and superior innovation, and Plum, the creator of the first fully-automated appliance transforming wine by the glass, announce they have entered into a strategic partnership to explore potential smart appliances for the kitchen.

The headline of the announcement makes it sound like this could be something big. After all, the term “next-generation kitchen appliances” sounds important. My guess, however, is that the two companies are basically working on a wine dispenser for the Thermador brand, which is part of the North American division of BSH Appliances Group.

Why? First off, Plum makes wine chillers and dispensers. That’s it. Up to this point, it hasn’t appeared to actually have any bigger appliance aspirations.

Second, this looks like it’s a strictly North American effort, not part of the broader smart appliances efforts driven out of the BSH’s global headquarters in Germany. The global holding company, BSH Home Appliances Group, has its own smart home platform in Home Connect, an investment in Chefling (a smart kitchen software platform), and partnerships with the likes of SideChef. None of those, from the looks of it, are involved in this effort.

Not that a wine appliance for Thermador isn’t interesting. While there are a few appliance brands like Samsung and LG that have built wine refrigerators for the home, no big brand has yet to make a smart wine dispenser.

And the Thermador brand makes sense since it’s both a purely North American-centric brand and also a high-end appliance for people who, most likely, drink some wine.

As for Plum, the deal is interesting in that it looks like the first partnership for the company with a larger appliance brand, and when you look at the company’s leadership, BSH North America makes sense. Company CEO, Michael Traub, joined Plum last year after heading up mattress company Serta. Before that? He was president and CEO of . . . BSH Home Appliances North America.

Traeger Launches Apple Watch App to Monitor and Control Your Grilling

Traeger Grills announced this week the launch of its first Apple Watch app, which allows users to both monitor and control the cooking on its WiFire compatible connected grills.

In the press announcement, Traeger said its Apple Watch app is the first of its kind in the industry. That may or may not be true, but regardless of its place in history, it’s easy to see the utility this type of app could bring to the grilling experience. Smoking a brisket or ribs takes long hours, and the freedom of controlling the grill from your wrist anywhere you are (even when you’re out, away from your home) would definitely come in handy.

Features of the new Traeger Apple Watch app include:

  • Real-time grill temperature monitoring and control even if you’re away from your house
  • Probe temperature setting and monitoring
  • A timer to notify cooks when to sauce, check or pull the food
  • Pellet-level monitoring, to know when to re-load the hopper
  • “Super Smoke Mode,” which lets users blast their food with 100 percent hardwood smoke between 165 and 225 degrees

The WiFire grills were already pretty convenient for rookie grillers like myself. With the connected phone app, I was able to make pretty great ribs and briskets without ever having done so before. This is totally a first-world problem, but moving that monitoring from the iPhone to the Apple Watch means that I don’t need to carry my phone around to check on my grilling.

Even though it may not feel like it for most of the country, spring is around the corner, which means that grilling season is not that far off. And backyard barbecues are definitely getting high-tech upgrades. Smart oven maker, June was recently acquired by Weber and its connected cooking OS has been integrated into a new line of Weber gas grills.

Even though our BBQ parties will probably still need to be socially distant this summer, with connected tech, being away from your grill won’t be a problem.



Chris Young Wants to Bring Cheat Codes for Good Cooking to the Masses With His New Startup, Combustion Inc.

When Chris Young started working on Modernist Cuisine with Nathan Myhrvold almost 15 years ago, their original idea was to simply write a book about sous vide cooking.

“I still have emails where we thought it’d be a few hundred pages, we could get it done in a year,” Young told me in a phone interview.

As most know, Modernist Cuisine would grow far bigger than a hundred pages, and take much longer than a year to write. And while much of the multivolume work is dedicated to sous vide cooking, what Young and other early sous vide enthusiasts knew was that this cooking technique with a fancy name was just a means to a more important end: mastery of time of temperature in cooking.

“If you look at Modernist Cuisine, about half of the book is dedicated towards explaining the physics of heat transfer in the kitchen,” said Young. “Because [the application of heat] often makes the difference between a meal being spectacular and a meal not [being] so great.”

So when Young went on to found ChefSteps and eventually build a sous vide appliance with the Joule, the ultimate goal was always to give the cook mastery over the two elements that are so important in creating good food.

“Time and temperature are just sort of these cheat codes to better cooking,” said Young.

Chris Young

If helping aspiring cooks master these cheat codes was the bigger picture and sous vide was just one means to this end, Young realized at some point he had to go beyond sous vide cooking. That meant launching a new company called Combustion Inc. and making a thermometer.

But not just any thermometer. This one would come packed with eight different temperature sensors.

Why so many?

According to Young, when cooking a roast or a chicken, it’s important to not only get the temperature inside the meat, but to get the gradient temperature throughout it, including its surface and ambient temperatures. Only then, according to Young, can you properly calculate the true cooking temperature, how fast an item will cook, and when you should take it out.

Like any self-respecting chef-slash-cooking-technology entrepreneur, Young had hacked together a solution for his BBQ that allowed him to closely monitor internal and surface temperatures, but knew the solution with all of its wires and multiple thermometers wasn’t something wasn’t exactly approachable for the average consumer.

“I have a fairly kludged together a bunch of electronics,” said Young. “It’s not what I would call productized.”

Here is where he saw an opportunity to create a thermometer that would give him the type of data to help achieve the results he wanted. While there is certainly no shortage of smart thermometers on the market, Young felt none of them were able to give him the information he wanted to cook they way he wanted.

The Combustion thermometer, kitchen timer and app

“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 wanted to build a thermometer that could be fairly sophisticated when it came to telling temperature and predicting when meat should be done. He also wanted the device to communicate this information with not only a paired kitchen timer (the other initial product from Combustion), but also with apps. He also knew, however, after having built the Joule, connected products can be also have their problems.

“I lived that,” said Young. “I know this probably as well as anyone at this point, because like we were all in on IoT, and we got it working pretty well, and I can tell you how painful it was. When it inevitably breaks, who’s responsible? And so the experience for the consumer is all this IoT shit that is just dumb.”

It was that experience with the Joule and the polarizing responses to connected devices that made Young rethink how to create a connected product. While he wanted to make a thermometer that is connected, with all the benefits that could bring, he also wanted one that worked out of the box without a complicated pairing and set up.

The answer was to make the temperature data freely available by broadcasting it using a built-in Bluetooth capability. That meant instead of going through a complicated pairing experience with its own app, the thermometer can utilize the beacon capabilities built into the Bluetooth spec to broadcast the time and temperature data of the chicken, roast or whatever is being cooked.

“We actually said, ‘Look, there’s nothing super secret about your temperature data,'” said Young, adding that the thermometer “advertises its data every 200 milliseconds” and all that data is just part of a beacon.

The beacon technology built into Bluetooth is what allows products like the Tile tracker other other devices to broadcast messages to your smartphone to give it updates. With the Combustion thermometer, the built-in Bluetooth beacon technology will send cooking data to the Combustion kitchen timer, (the other new product announced today) or its app (Yes, there is an app for those who want one, but Young makes it clear it’s not necessary). The device will also be able to send information to other Bluetooth-enabled appliances, like GE or BSH ovens, that want to communicate with it.

Young spent plenty of time at his last company making sure his device worked with other appliances, but it was painful. There were lots of meetings negotiating complicated technology and business arrangements for the Joule to integrate with other devices. These types of months-long negotiations were exactly what the onetime ChefSteps CEO wanted to avoid at his new company.

“This is sort of a version 2.0 business model,” said Young. “Because inevitably the old way involves a huge tussle between the appliance manufacturer’s desire to have a platform and app and the startup’s desires. I’m simply saying I make my money when I sell thermometers and I make my money when we sell other things.”

Young told me Combustion Inc. will sell the thermometer and the kitchen timer as a pair, but will also sell each separately. He wouldn’t give me pricing, saying only that they won’t be super cheap but also won’t be astronomically expensive. He said they plan to make them available by this summer via their website and not (as of yet) in retail.

In a way, Young’s efforts feel more like he’s making a tool for cooks rather than trying to monetize a venture-funded startup. It’s not unlike Dave Arnold and his Searzall and Spinzall products. That’s not to say Young isn’t looking to make money or doesn’t have big plans; he says the thermometer is only the beginning.

But, after a less-than-satisfying final chapter to the ChefSteps story, I can see why he’d want to get back a bit to the roots of what he started all those years ago with Myrhvold, which is to provide cooks with tools to better use the cheat codes to make good food.

Suvie Debuts Second Generation Countertop ‘Cooking Robot’

Suvie, a maker of smart automated cooking appliances for the home, has debuted its second generation appliance, the eponymous Suvie 2.0.

So what’s different about the first and second generation Suvie? A whole bunch.

First things first: Suvie 2 is a heck of a lot smaller. That’s mainly because the second generation appliance has reduced the Suvie from being a four-chamber cooking appliance to a two-chamber machine. This change is made possible because each cooking chamber is now multifunctional, which means instead of having chamber specifically for sauce, protein or veggies, each of the two chambers can broil, steam, sous vide, slow cook as well as roast and bake (these last two cooking modes are new to the Suvie 2).

And just like the first machine, the Suvie 2 has a built in compressor-based refrigerator that chills the food until is is ready to cook. This was one of the draws of the original Suvie — being able to store your food safely in the machine while you were out all day, until it was time to cook it.

While the Suvie 2 has a smaller countertop footprint, the cooking capacity per chamber has actually gone up. According to Suvie CEO Robin Liss, cooking pans are 21% larger than in the previous generation.

To help slim down the new appliance, Suvie also removed the “starch’ chamber and created a separate, optional Starch Cooker. The new add-on, which Liss affectionately called “starchie” (but insisted is not the official name), features the same “patented” autodrain capability and can cook rice, pasta, beans and other starchy foods.

The new Suvie will be available for a pre-order price of $399 for the main unit, and $300 for the starch cooking add-on. MSRP for the core unit will be $800. According to Suvie, the company will also offer a significant discount to customers of the first gen Suvie who want to upgrade.

Just as with the first gen appliance, the user will be able to cook Suvie-originated meals or their own food, but with the addition of quartz broiler heating elements (the same type of heating elements used by the popular Breville toaster ovens), which enables more consistent heating and allows for the user to bake and broil food.

To fund the rollout of the new Suvie, company Liss told The Spoon the company has raised a $11 million in seed funding (they previously has raised $725 thousand on Kickstarter). That funding will also help the company continue to expand its associated meal service.

The new funding and the debut of a second generation Suvie is a bright spot in a kitchen tech market that has seen some consolidation over the past few years. Since Electrolux’s acquisition of Anova for a quarter of a billion in 2017, the few exits for venture-funded kitchen tech startups have relatively quiet (like ChefSteps, Brava and June), while others – like Nomiku and Sansaire – have shut their doors.

Interestingly, the two startups still making a go of it in this space both eyed the pairing of cooking appliances with meal delivery, a business model that has the potential of long-term recurring revenue for companies also competing in what is a highly cost-competitive hardware market. For its part, Tovala announced a new $30 million funding round this month, less than a year after its previous round.

If you’d like to buy the new Suvie, you can pick it up now and, according to Liss, the product will begin shipping in twelve to fourteen weeks.

You can see the Suvie in action below.

Natufia Labs Raises $3.5M for its Indoor Garden Appliance, Relocates to Saudi Arabia

Natufia Labs, the Estonia-based automated kitchen garden startup, announced today that it is relocating to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). KAUST is also leading a $3.5 million investment round in Natufia, awarding $2 million through the KAUST Innovation Fund. This brings the total amount of money raised by Natufia to $4.7 million.

Natufia makes an automated home gardening appliance about the size of refrigerator that automatically controls elements such as lighting, as well as water and nutrient dispensing. The $13,000 Natufia cabinet uses seedpods that are placed in a special unit to germinate before being transferred to pots to grow and be harvested. Right now, Natufia’s appliance can grow leafy greens, herbs and flowers.

In a press announcement sent to The Spoon, Natufia Labs CEO and Founder Gregory Lu said, “From Estonian icy-snow winters to the arid climate of Saudi Arabia, sustainable access to food supply is a global issue, so it is more than natural that this technology is thriving from Saudi Arabia.”

Problems with our existing food supply chain were revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic last year, causing a surge of interest in consumer indoor agriculture products. A new wave of high-tech appliances automate all the “hard” parts about growing food, allowing people to more easily grow and control their own food supply. Other players in the space including Gardyn, AeroGrow and Click & Grow have all seen demand increase during the pandemic.

With its new funding, Natufia said it will accelerate the development of its next models, hopefully bringing the price down to something more affordable for even more people.


Weber Announces New Smart Gas Grills Using the June OS

Weber announced it is adding new smart grills to its Genesis and Spirit lines of gas grills. The new smart grills feature the Weber Connect technology, which is powered by the June OS, and will provide precision and guided cooking to backyard barbecuers.

The new line of Weber smart grills feature WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, temperature probes and a built-in LED display. Using either the accompanying mobile app or the LED display, grillers can monitor the temperature of the grill as well as the doneness of what’s being grilled. The app will also alert grillers when it’s time to flip and serve their food.

What the grill won’t do, however, is automate your grilling. So, unlike a June oven, which automatically changes the type of heat (bake, broil, etc.) and temperature to cook your food, the Weber smart grill requires manual temperature controls. This is a bit of a bummer, but probably understandable given that the grill would have to regulate the flow of gas rather than electric current to adjust temperatures.

Today’s announcement comes a little less than a month after Weber acquired smart oven maker, June. June’s technology was used in the SmokeFire wood pellet grill back in 2019, and and two developed the Connect Hub, a small device that added smart cooking features to conventional grills.

Innovation in the outdoor grill space has certainly, errr, heated up over the past few years. Traeger has its own line of connected smart pellet smokers, German brand, Otto has a line of connected and modular grill components, and Spark launched its line of precision charcoal grills.

The new smart grills from Weber are all listed as “Coming Soon” on the company’s website. Prices range anywhere from $799 to $1,299.

Smart Oven and Meal Delivery Startup Tovala Raises Additional $30 Million

Tovala, a smart oven and meal delivery startup based in Chicago, announced today they have raised a $30 million series C funding round led by consumer-tech VC Left Lane Capital.

The funding round follows a $20 million series B Tovala raised last June.

So why did the company raise another huge round six months after the last one? The biggest reason, according to Tovala CEO David Rabie, was the company’s continued growth.

“The business has grown 10X over the past 18 months,” Rabie told me via Zoom this week. “A big chunk of that came pre-COVID, a big chunk came post COVID. COVID accelerated some things, but the business was already on pace to grow quickly.”

According to Rabie, the fit with Left Land Capital was another reason. Tovala felt their new lead investor, which focuses on consumer-focused Internet companies (some of the firm’s previous investments include Freshly, Farmer’s Dog and DeliveryHero), had the right expertise to help them scale.

“They have more depth of expertise in the consumer subscription space than almost anyone we’ve talked to, especially especially direct to consumer,” Rabie said. “They were really interested. At some point we were going to go raise another round, and we had gotten to know them pretty well over the course of last year, and felt like it was a great fit.”

So what is Tovala going do with its new growth capital? According to Rabie, the company plans to continue to invest in the product, by which he means everything on both the food and technology side.

“All of it, from you know the app to the packaging to the oven to the food within our walls, those are all products, and each of them are kind of an important part of the customer journey. And you know what we’ve built we think is really good, but we think it can get a lot better.”

A big chunk of the new investment will go to a new food production and packaging facility to serve the western half of the US. Currently Tovala services the entire US out of two facilities in Illinois, and so they plan to lease a new space and build out a new production, packaging and delivery facility “west of the Rockies” to serve the west and parts of the south.

What the funding won’t necessarily be used for is building a new oven, in part because the current model is working pretty well for them.

“We’re still in the exploratory phase where we’re really trying to figure out if we are going to go pursue a gen three,” said Rabie. ” What does it need to do, because the gen two works quite well. Reviews are really strong customers love it. There are not people banging on our door saying ‘if only the gen two did x, we would buy more of them current price.'”

Regardless of how it plans to spend its new cash infusion, that there is strong investor interest sets the company apart from some of its peers in the consumer hardware space. While others like Zimmplistic and Chefsteps failed to find additional financing, investors have continued to knock on Tovala’s door.

I asked Rabie why they’ve succeeded where others have struggled.

“I think it’s a complex answer,” said Rabie. “Part of it was the problem we went about solving is kind of different from all the other players. For this to work, you have to be good at building physical product, you have to be good at managing food and a food supply chain, you have to be good at marketing, you have to be good at customer service. A lot of things have to go right for it to work.”

The only other countertop smart cooking appliance seeing similar traction is Anova, which continues to sell out of their new precision steam oven. I asked Rabie if this is a sign that steam ovens might be the next breakout category.

“To be totally frank, Anova will have more to do with that than us, because we have different customers,” said Rabie. “My guess is the customer that’s buying the Anova oven is interested in cooking hacks and cooking gadgets. Our customer is like, ‘I’m really busy. I want a high quality meal on a Tuesday night, and I don’t want to keep spending $60 on Doordash.'”

I’ll be interviewing David Rabie about their latest funding round on Clubhouse today at 10 AM PT. Join us to listen and ask questions.

Hestan Cue Adds New Multi-Cooker Chef’s Pot to its Lineup

Hestan Cue, which makes connected pans and cooktops for guided cooking, announced this week the addition of a 5.5 quart Smart Chef’s Pot to its lineup. According to a press announcement sent to The Spoon, the new Chef’s Pot can act as a multi-cooker, performing a number of different function in the kitchen.

The new Chef’s Pot is similar to Hestan’s other smart pans in that it features embedded temperature sensors and Bluetooth connectivity. Hestan Cue’s pots and pans, induction burner and recipe app work in conjunction with one another to precisely control the temperature while cooking. The system automatically adjusts the temperature to avoid over and under cooking items.

With its deeper basin, Hestan Cue is positioning the new Chef’s Pot as a multi-function device in the kitchen. According to the press announcement, the new Chef’s Pot can perform more than eight different cooking functions, including deep frying, slow cooking, and candy making.

Dubbing its smart Chef’s Pot a “multi-cooker” seems to be more of a marketing gambit on the part of Hestan to ride the coattails of wildly popular devices like the Instant Pot. It’s not wrong, per se. Smart, precise temperature controls does give the Hestan Cue system flexibility to tackle a number of different cooking functions. So if you buy into the Hestan Cue ecosystem, there is greater flexibility to be had. Plus, the connected recipe apps will walk you through what you are cooking.

This type of functionality isn’t cheap, however. The 5.5 quart Chef’s Pot and Induction Cooktop will set you back $499. If you already have the Hestan Cue Induction Cooktop, the 5.5 quart Chef’s Pot on its own costs $299.

UK Researchers Kickstart a New Project to Study and Fight At-Home Food Waste Behaviors

The United Kingdom has set up a national research project to study the impact of Covid-19 lockdowns on food waste and develop methods for helping consumers better manage that food waste. Researchers from the University of Leeds have teamed up with two environmental organizations — Zero Waste Scotland and the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) — for the 18-month-long research project.

According to a press release, researchers will examine consumer behavior around food waste both during and after lockdown periods in the UK, and use those findings to develop new ways to help consumers fight food waste and change their behaviors in the home. The project has received £328,000 (~$448,000 USD) in funding, a sum that includes a £268,000 (~$366,000 USD) from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The project is “part of the UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response to Covid-19.”

Part of the project’s inspiration comes from earlier research by WRAP showing that self-reported levels of food waste in the UK fell by 34 percent during the country’s first Covid-19 lockdown. “While we understand some of this behaviour, we want to broaden our knowledge of why the changes came about, and how we can build on this to help people prevent more food going to waste in future,” Dr Gulbanu Kaptan, one of the individuals leading the new research project, said in a statement.

As is the case in the U.S., the bulk of food waste in Britain happens inside consumers’ own homes. Curbing it will come from a range of different approaches and solutions. Right now, some approaches include smarter storage systems a la Mimica, meal-planning tools like Kitche and Meal Hero, and fridge appliances that can track food inventory more precisely.

All of these methods have varying success rates. University of Leeds’ new project appears to be focused more on the consumer behavior aspect of food waste than on individual tech tools, however. 

For the new project, around 1,500 people across the UK will take part in a survey by relating details of how they choose, store, manage, and cook food. Roughly 30 people will take part in more detailed interviews and will also keep “diaries” of their household food waste.

What Does Weber Acquiring June Say About the Smart Oven Market?

When Weber announced this week that it was acquiring smart oven maker, June, my first thought was — phew.

There was relief in knowing that June, the company, wasn’t going under any time soon, so my family will continue to enjoy June, the oven, for the foreseeable future. Instead of being a scrappy startup and dealing with issues like funding, scaling and exits, June now enjoys the deep pockets and vast sales network of grilling giant, Weber. In other words, June lives on and my smart oven won’t get bricked.

At least I hope not.

Acquisitions can get weird and who knows what Weber has in store for June, or how those plans will change. An old saw in business acquisitions is that companies don’t fully realize what they’ve bought until six months after the deal is closed.

Anyway, after the initial wave of relief, my thoughts turned to the countertop smart oven market in general, a category that still quite young. After all, June launched its first gen oven in December of 2016, which isn’t that long ago. But Weber buying June is the second major acquisition in the space since then. Brava, which started shipping its oven that cooks with light in November of 2018, was acquired by Middleby in November of 2019. Even Anova, which only launched its first smart oven last year, is owned by Electrolux.

That pretty much just leaves Tovala and Suvie as the remaining independents in the countertop smart oven space. But how long with they last?

Suvie positions itself more as a kitchen robot, in part because it doesn’t just re-heat food, it also keeps it cold and times the cooking to fit your schedule. Tovala raised $20 million and saw its business accelerate last year, thanks in part to the pandemic keeping people at home. It also doesn’t hurt that the company has has a low price point ($300) for its oven.

Anova is certainly pushing its steam-sous vide cooking as a differentiator rather than any “smart” capabilities as it enters the market. At $599 it’s not cheap per se, but Anova is promising more professional grade cooking than it is high-tech, connected bells and whistles.

A couple of years back, I wondered which companies would survive the kitchen countertopocalypse. There were so many multi-purpose (June) and single-purpose (Rotimatic) smart countertop devices coming to market that the average kitchen just doesn’t have the space to support them all. The field would winnow down, especially because some of these countertop ovens are big and take up a lot of space.

At the same time the countertop oven space is consolidating, we’re starting to see key smart features being added to traditional built-in ovens from the big players. At CES 2019, Whirlpool showed off its KitchenAid Smart Oven+, which featured automated cook programs. LG debuted an oven at CES this year that featured an Air Sous Vide setting.

The countertop smart oven space won’t disappear completely. The smaller size and cooking cavity can make preparing meals easier than firing up the gigantic built-in oven. And because they are cheaper than built-ins and don’t require installation, countertop ovens can be fertile territory for innovation. So the field is ripe for a new wave of startups to create and launch new cooking technology on a smaller scale. If that tech catches on with consumers, a bigger appliance company will acquire that startup and the cycle continues. And the industry as a whole can find relief in that.