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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Next-Gen Cooking

After Last Year’s Thanksgiving Disaster, I Bought a Combustion Thermometer. The Result Was Juicy, Just-Right Turkey

In 2021, I hit a Thanksgiving home run.

After deciding to brine a turkey for the first time, the results were much better than expected. Guests were happy, compliments were given, and when I learned we were hosting again last year, I figured it’d be easy to replicate the juicy, delicious result.

But I was wrong. Last year’s turkey was a disaster, so overcooked that the thing was pretty much an inedible piece of gristle.

What happened? After reviewing the steps and comparing them to the previous year, I realized I simply left the turkey in my old oven for too long without taking the bird’s temperature. When I did take it out to check it with my old-school thermometer, it had an internal temperature of 200 degrees and was climbing quickly. Experienced hands will know that’s WAY too hot – over 35 degrees hotter than the suggested cooking temperature – and the results were what you’d expect: a turkey was so overcooked it was all but inedible.

Needless to say, this year, I wasn’t taking any chances. I was going to invest in a smart thermometer and keep track of the bird’s temperature in real-time.

Which one? I decided I wanted to go with the Combustion because I liked the idea of keeping an accurate read on the bird’s temperature from core to surface (as well as ambient temperature) via the thermometer’s eight sensors. I also wanted to take advantage of Combustion’s predictive technology, which would give me a countdown and notify me when it would hit the target temperature.

I took the Combustion thermometer out of its bright yellow box on Thanksgiving morning. I’d downloaded the app to my phone a day prior, enabled it to connect via Bluetooth with the Combustion app, and ensured the thermometer was fully charged. I estimated the turkey would take about four hours to cook at 300 degrees (that’s with convection – if I didn’t use convection, I’d have cooked it at 325). I put in a target temperature of 160 degrees, knowing the bird’s core temperature would continue to rise after I took it out of the oven and waited.

After about 30 minutes, the Combustion gave me an estimate for when the turkey would hit my target temperature. Unsurprisingly, it was cooking slightly faster than my initial estimates, but I was prepared because I had the Combustion.

I watched the countdown clock tick downward, and when it hit 160 degrees, the app told me it was time to pull out the turkey. I double-checked the temperature with my old school thermometer and it matched the temperature reading on my Combustion thermometer. I put foil over the bird and let it sit for about 45 minutes before carving it up.

The result? A juicy, just-right turkey.

You’re probably asking why I didn’t use a smart thermometer before, and it’s a good question. The answer is I should have, but I figured at the time I could just do the math myself. As it turns out, however, older ovens can be a bit unpredictable (as can turkey cooking time estimates), and now the Combustion will be a permanent fixture come turkey cooking time.

Could I have used another thermometer? Maybe, as long as it has enough sensors to measure the core, surface, and ambient temperatures. While the original Meater had two sensors, it couldn’t measure core, ambient, and surface temperatures. However, Meater’s latest thermometer, the Meater 2 Plus, has five internal sensors and an ambient sensor, so I figured that would have worked great as well.

But after my experience, I recommend the Combustion predictive thermometer. The company tries to get you to buy the pair of the thermometer and the yellow kitchen clock, but I found the app works just find (and meant less clutter on my counter). You can buy the thermometer by itself right now for $119, or buy the thermometer and clock for $159.

Three Years After CES Debut, ColdSnap Readies Launch of Countertop Ice Cream Making Appliance

Nearly three years after it stole the show at CES 2021 with its countertop ice cream machine, ColdSnap has readied itself for a commercial rollout of its system this fall.

In a recent blog post, the company shared a glimpse of the product’s development over the past few years, detailing its pod production capacity expansion, the development of its production partner ecosystem, and the continuing refinement of the ColdSnap machine itself.

According to the company, they’ve expanded their production facility in the Boston suburb of Billerica, adding 20,000 square feet with an additional 24,000 square feet of space leased across the street. After producing their initial batches of liquid in small batches in their test kitchen, the enlarged factory that is part of the company’s headquarters will support 300-gallon batches of their liquid mix that will fill the ColdSnap aluminum cans (think energy drink-size) on-site.

In addition to the company’s ice cream and frozen treat mix production within its own factory, they are working with co-manufacturers to ramp up production. According to ColdSnap, initial tests of its mix showed the product was too thick to flow through the pipes at third-party manufacturers because the liquid was different from commercial ice cream mixes commonly made at manufacturing facilities. The company’s food science team reformulated the mix for production in external factories and for large-scale production in-house.

Another big step towards its commercial launch was the addition of packaging automation. It’s hard to believe, but until now, the company has hand-packaged all of the pods to support the roughly one hundred trial machines in the field. Now, as they look to scale, they’ve added automation equipment and project they will be able to manufacture 30 million pods per year.

ColdSnap also detailed improvements to the countertop machine, including adding a QR code reader that will tell the machine which type of drink it is making and what the company describes as a ‘more powerful’ refrigeration machine.

Part of what makes ColdSnap intriguing is its ability to make instant ice cream from room temperature, shelf-stable liquid. As company CEO Matthew Fonte told me last year, a product like this could be potentially transformative for markets where cold chain storage is not widely available or cost-prohibitive.

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

I agree that this type of machine could be really interesting in markets without substantial cold chain storage, my guess is clones would pop up pretty quickly in markets like China once the concept is proven out.

ColdSnap’s initial target is the office and business markets, but in the long term, Fonte says the company will enter the consumer kitchen. He said he’s open to partners for any expansion into the home market, and I’m sure he’ll be able to find him if he and ColdSnap can prove the technology works and there’s demand for it in the commercial space.

Yummly App Adds New Features, Reminding Us It’s Still Around Six Years After Whirlpool Deal

Today, recipe and guided cooking app Yummly announced a refreshed set of features, including what it describes as AI-powered recipe recommendations, an improved meal planner feature, and integration with an upgraded Yummly thermometer.

Since Whirlpool acquired Yummly, the recipe recommendation and cooking guidance app has largely flown below the radar while adding periodic incremental improvements over the years. And as far as I can tell, the announced improvements are par for the course.

This includes the new and improved “AI-powered recipe recommendations,” which sounds a lot like the things the company was promoting almost five years ago when they were touting “AI-powered personalization.” It’s not immediately clear how these AI-powered recommendations differ from previous AI-enabled recommendations, but we’ll have to take the company’s word for it.

The app’s improved meal planner function looks like it’s primarily focused on further building out a shoppable recipe function, something that has become relatively common in recent years for many recipe apps as a way to monetize through affiliate marketing commerce. The Yummly meal-planning shoppable recipe meal planning capability is a premium feature for users through a monthly subscription.

Whirlpool is hardly mentioned in the release (outside of the About Yummly boilerplate at the bottom), and the only real evidence of the company’s influence is the integration with an improved Yummly Thermometer, which is a product that Whirlpool has gone through pains to integrate with a number of their appliances. According to the announcement, the new Yummly thermometer now has three sensors, up from the two sensors in the previous generation.

While Whirlpool seems content to let Yummly operate mainly as a standalone app with its own brand, it seems a far cry from when the company acquired the app and saw it as driving the digital transformation of the appliance giant’s product lineup. Outside of a big splash at CES 2019, which the company described as a “roll-out across multiple Whirlpool brands,” the app hasn’t added all that much in terms of feature sets beyond what it had five years ago, and there’s been scant evidence of any further integration – thermometer notwithstanding – with the broader Whirlpool family.

One reason the app has become something of an afterthought in Whirlpool might be that many of the original stakeholders have moved on. Yummly founder Dave Feller left soon after the deal was done, and Brian Whitlin, who drove much of the product innovation, left in 2021. Add in the fact that the acquisition’s primary champion within Whirlpool, Brett Dibkey – who drove much of Whirlpool’s digital transformation – left in 2020, and the company’s current caretaker mode makes sense.

Is the Retro-Styled Wonder Oven The Future of Countertop Multicookers?

This week, social media-savvy cookware brand Our Place dropped something entirely unexpected: a stylish 6-1 countertop multi-function cooking appliance.

At first glance, I found myself having difficulty processing what I was seeing. The Wonder Oven looked like what the cooking appliance of the future might look as imagined by someone in the distant past. The dissonance I experienced looking at the oven came in part, I think, from the advanced feature of an appliance that looked almost toy-like, or, as a Refinery29 editor described it, “an easy bake oven for adults.”

The Wonder, which can air fry, broil, roast, toast, and steam foods, comes in four different decidedly soft colors: char, steam, blue salt, and spice. The $195 price includes the oven, a baking pan, an air fry basket, a wire rack, and a crumb tray. The Wonder has a reasonably sized footprint at 11.6 in. (h)x 11.5 in. (w) x 10.6 in (depth) and a decent-sized cooking cavity capacity at 7.6 in (h) x 10 in. (w) x 10.3 in. (depth).

The Wonder is the latest in a wave of multi-function countertop cooking appliances that have come onto the market in recent years, like the Ninja Foodi and the Cosori Toaster oven. Some have steam capabilities, but usually at a higher price than the Wonder. The steam-enabled Tovala, which can be purchased for as low as $49, requires a commitment to the Tovala food service.

But the biggest differentiator for the Wonder is the stylish design readymade for viral Instagram posts. Nearly every multicooker on the market looks the same variation of the toaster oven, a big shiny steel rectangle box. With its big round dials and muted colors, the Wonder sets itself apart – much like companies like Smeg have done with their stand mixer – and from the looks of the breathless comments on their intro post on Instagram, Our Place may already have a hit on its hands.

In some sense, the approach by Our Place for its first cooking gadget reminds me of Dash from Storebound, which was acquired by Group SEB in 2020. Evan Dash, Storebound CEO, told me that his product lineup, full of kitschy-looking uni-taskers (waffle maker, sous vide egg bite maker, etc.), is designed to pop on social media, and he often took inspiration from his kids when designing the products.

However, unlike DASH gadgets, the Wonder has enough built-in utility to become a nightly go-to for young, design-conscious home cooks. And this combo of utility and attractive design might just be the future of the countertop multicooker.

Thin Margins & Competitive Moats: Analyzing Instant Brands Journey to Bankruptcy

Instant Brands, the parent company behind the Instant Pot, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today, as first reported by Bloomberg. The company, which also owns the Pyrex glassware brand, announced they’d reached a deal for a new $132.5 million financing line of credit to support the company as it navigates the bankruptcy process and figures out a new path forward.

Signs of trouble first surfaced for Instant Brands earlier this year when the Wall Street Journal reported the company had hired advisors to help it restructure. At the time, the company had a $400 million line of credit trading at a severe discount due to rising interest rates. According to Bloomberg, the combination of high-interest rates, waning access to new lines of credit, and a dwindling cash position forced the company to finally file for Chapter 11.

So what happened? How did Instant Brands, the company behind what was once the fastest-growing countertop appliance in the US, go from high flyer to Chapter 11 in just a few short years?

Below are some of the reasons I believe led to the company’s current predicament:

The Pressure Cooker Category Reached Saturation Very Quickly

Part of the reason for the success of the Instant Pot was the fantastic value for the consumer. In one multifunction appliance, the consumer had a rice cooker, steamer, bean maker, yogurt machine, sauté pan – you name it – all for $100 or less. It was hard to beat, which is why Instant went from zero brand recognition a decade ago to becoming eponymous with the category it created (or, in a sense, reinvented) in just a few short years.

The problem with exponential growth is you can get to market saturation very quickly. The product (and its clones) was affordable to almost anyone, and before long, anyone who wanted one had one. But unlike high-margin tech products like the iPhone, the Instant Pot isn’t something most consumers want to replace every few years.

Clones, Ninjas, and Narrow Competitive Moats

While the Instant Pot’s reinvention of the pressure cooker was an innovative take on an older category, it was easy to knock off. Because of this, it wasn’t long before a slew of low-cost copycats flooded Amazon and other online retailers.

At the same time, fast-moving brands like SharkNinja kept on innovating. They jumped on new cooking appliance categories (like air fryers) more quickly than Instant Brands, which has admitted to being late to the category. Instant’s CEO has stated the company is continuing to look for its next hit, even as it enters into financial reorganization.

In some ways, the ease with which low-cost copycats and brand-savvy bigger companies like SharkNinja were able to create similar products that were instantly competitive with Instant Brand’s showed just how small, in retrospect, Instant’s competitive moat was. In other words, there was no significant technology, manufacturing or brand differentiators that companies entering the market had to overcome.

Non-Premium Pricing and Low Customer Loyalty

While Instant became synonymous with the smart multicooker category, the brand didn’t necessarily build significant brand loyalty. Customers, who often bought their Instant Pot or clone for end cap fire sale pricing, didn’t necessarily view the Instant Pot brand as something unique or irreplaceable. Other categories like built-in ovens, refrigerators, or coffee makers usually have bigger price tags and connotations of premium user experiences. At the same time, the Instant Pot often seemed cheap in price and quality. Much of the damage around the brand’s low-rent image was self-inflicted.

Buy High, Sell Low

When Corelle and Instant Pot announced the merger of the two companies, the combined value of the new entity was estimated at around $2 billion. Much of that market value was attributable to the white-hot Instant Pot, which meant Corelle would pay out the nose to bring the company and its fast-growing product lineup into the fold.

While I don’t have the projections that Corelle put together to rationalize the debt load they would take on to finance the acquisition, it’s probably not too big a leap to say they didn’t forecast sales of Instant Pot cooling off as fast as they did. And, as detailed in the Journal in March, the company hasn’t come close to finding a successor hit to help the company get on the right path again. At the same time, the lean operating model of the Instant Pot’s early days (which had four employees in 2013) is long gone, making way for the layered corporate bureaucracy of Corelle (the combined company had 1,900 employees earlier this year).

The bottom line is Instant Brands became highly leveraged right as the product started to reach market saturation. In the following years, Instant has moved slower than its competitors like SharkNinja and Dash, who have come out with often better-looking products in new categories at equal or lower prices. The result is this week’s announcement.

It’s really too soon to tell how the company will far going forward. Post-bankruptcy, Instant will have a clean balance sheet but a much smaller innovation team, and without the company founder Robert Wang (who left the company’s operation in late 2021), it’s not clear where the next big company-changing idea will come from.

Cookware Darling Great Jones Gets Scooped Up by Meyer. Is the DTC Home Goods Wave Over?

This week, Fast Company broke the story that Great Jones, a popular DTC cookware maker for the millennial set, had been acquired by cookware giant Meyer. In Meyer, Great Jones joins a portfolio of brands that includes Farberware, Anolon, Hestan (including the tech-powered products under Hestan Cue), Circulon, and Rachael Ray. According to Fast Company, Great Jones’s six employees will join Meyer, and cofounder and CEO Sierra Tishgart will become Meyer’s executive creative director.

Meyer is an interesting destination for Great Jones, a startup that experienced rocketship growth early on through viral social marketing through Instagram for products such as its “The Dutchess” Dutch oven. From there, the company rode a bit of a roller coaster through the pandemic, some internal strife, and ultimately ran into an icy fundraising environment as investors cooled on DTC startups in recent years.

The DTC cool-off struck across all consumer goods categories as it became clear, particularly after pandemic restrictions lifted, that growth would ultimately be limited unless brands established some brick-and-mortar channel strategy. DTC OG Warby Parker realized this fairly early, opening its first retail storefronts over a decade ago, which management has admitted have been so successful they have plans to open 900 of them.

But glasses aren’t cookware – you don’t need to try a pan on to see how it looks, after all – so why would the company need to show up on retail storefronts? Part of the reason is rising digital marketing costs, which have increased by 20% since 2021, and growing costs of direct shipping goods to consumers.

But perhaps the biggest reason is customer conversion in-store is often much higher than online, particularly as more and more brands have popped up across the cookware category in recent years. While Great Jones had already entered retail in places like Nordstrom, Meyer’s access to a vast array of brick-and-mortar retailers will no doubt accelerate the brand’s growth as it gets significantly more exposure to customers who primarily buy things through retail.

Still, even as one of the early success stories for DTC home goods gets scooped by a legacy home goods brand like Meyer, other DTC cookware startups like Caraway and Misen continue on. But word that Misen had a significant layoff last year shows that the high-flying DTC cookware brands of the past decade may continue to struggle unless they combine forces with a big, established retail-oriented brand or invest in building their own retail channels.

With the acquisition of Great Jones, Meyer – an admittedly staid brand outside of its venture into connected cooking with Hestan Cue – hopes to inject the DNA of an online native brand across the company, signaled by making Great Jones’ Tishgart the company’s new executive creative director. Smart move because, in the future, the companies that succeed will likely be those that have strength at retail and can also navigate social media and online channels.

Fresco Introduces Complete Refresh of KitchenOS Platform, With Aim of Delivering True Multi-Brand Device Contol

Today, Fresco announced the launch of its KitchenOS platform, a ground-up refresh of its smart kitchen software suite. As part of the announcement, the company revealed that Instant Brands, the maker of the popular Instant Pot smart pressure cooker, would be the first brand to launch the new KitchenOS with the Instant Pot Pro Plus.

The new KitchenOS, which includes new firmware, apps, and smart recipes, is the result of a two-year effort by the Dublin-based company designed to enable multi-appliance control and a new personalized user experience.

In an interview with The Spoon, Fresco CEO Ben Harris said the company realized in 2021 that in order to achieve a scalable approach to the smart kitchen, they would need to rebuild the platform from the ground up. They began to work on the new platform, accelerating their pace last year after a $20 million Series B investment.

“When we launched the Drop scale nine years ago, we received a lot of inbound interest from appliance manufacturers who saw the need for a neutral platform for the kitchen and the inevitability of one interface for the entire kitchen and their expectation that there would be one screen for orchestration,” said Harris. “They all want the back-end infrastructure, they all want the apps, they want the IoT branded for themselves, but customized with similar components under the hood.”

This led to numerous partnerships and many custom-built apps for appliance brands, but the problem, according to Harris, was that as the inbound requests started to multiply for custom-built customer-facing apps, it really began to slow the company’s ability to build products.

“We would tweak something on the platform over here, and it would cause problems over there,” said Harris.

According to Harris, the company faced three major problems around this time. First, they had to build new firmware for every single appliance, which meant it took nine months to launch a new product. Second, the company had to build a new UI for every appliance. And finally, they had to create new recipes for an appliance to work with the appliance firmware and app.

Limited cross-brand connectivity was another issue. Because each brand had a custom app and entirely unique firmware, a brand’s appliances could only communicate with another brand’s appliances through the Fresco app. Harris and the Fresco team knew that to achieve the promise of the smart kitchen, this would need to change.

It was around the same time they realized this approach was not scalable that Harris and the rest of the team started discussing the evolution of the Fresco platform with one of the company’s advisors, Steve Horowitz. Horowitz, who was added to the board when his firm invested in Fresco (then Drop), was with Google during the early days of Android and helped lead the engineering team that developed what would become one of the world’s dominant mobile operating systems.

In 2021, the company went back to the drawing board and started to rethink how they could build a more scalable platform that didn’t require building entirely new custom apps and delivered on the promise of true appliance-to-appliance interconnectivity. To achieve this, the company began working on what Harris described as a universal firmware and universal appliance UI that would work with all appliances connected to the Fresco platform.

Shots from the new Fresco/Instant Brands App

According to Harris, getting there required a step back to examine the commonality across appliances and a reimagining by the company of how they view the universe of appliances in the kitchen.

“We used to build appliances by their category, like stand mixer, oven, blender,” said Harris. “But we actually realized that we needed a sort of universal communication layer between recipes and between appliances.”

Harris says this step-back enabled them to realize that there were 77 common cooking capabilities in the kitchen – such as bake, broil, steam, etc – and across these cooking capabilities, there were 8 ways to describe them such as time, temperature, and cooking speed.  

“Suddenly, we now had, architecturally, from a back end point of view and then from a customer UI point of view, this set of universal concepts that we can have to join recipes and appliances, and to have appliance control,” said Harris. “We rebuilt the consumer experience with this multi-brand appliance control that sits inside our appliance partner apps, to reflect this top-to-bottom experience that ultimately allows us to deliver on the vision of this universal appliance control that can orchestrate all of your appliances.”

This new approach would need buy-in from their partners. That’s because it would require each appliance to have a new firmware and a new app that included access to a common Fresco account alongside the appliance brand’s account. From a customer perspective, it’s this single Fresco account identification, that sits within the different brand apps, that would enable the cross-brand connectivity.

“When you set up an account and our partner apps, you agree to basically set up the dual account both with Instant Brands and Fresco at the same time,” said Harris. “And you agree to both the Instant Brands and the Fresco terms and conditions. And then that allows both the individual tenants for Instant Brands and each one of our partners, and then also the sort of interconnectedness that’s brought by Fresco.”

One obvious concern appliance brands may have with having a single Fresco account embedded within different apps to connect across brands is that customer data privacy is protected both for the customer and the individual brands. According to Harris, that privacy was their top priority in architecting their new platform.

“That’s a real, clear, hard-line,” said Harris. Harris said each brand would get its own “data warehouse for lack of a better term”, and they ensured that each set of data would adhere to all data privacy rules. Harris said that if a customer opts in, their data would be part of aggregate, anonymous data around usage to help appliance brands build better products. But, in the end, “nobody sees anyone else’s user data, and they only have their own appliances and their own users that they are interacting with.”

Beyond the new architecture to enable cross-device interactivity, Fresco also focused on redesigning the customer experience, implementing design tenets from the likes of Apple Watch and other Apple Carplay to help guide users during the cook. Unlike early guided cooking platforms, however, Fresco focused on making sure the user would have as much or as little assistance as they needed and made sure to clearly communicate information to customers in a way that ensure they were informed and had control.

In rethinking the customer experience, Harris gave a shout-out to Wired writer Joe Ray, whose review of the Drop/Fresco platform gave them clarity on what they needed to focus on. 

“Joe Ray did an amazing job of calling out the issues with the experience we’ve built. And that was obviously a catalyst in the process, in really assessing the underlying data, and for to ask ourselves if we are delivering on our promises.”

According to Harris, the complete rebuild of the code base was a long and difficult process, but it was a necessary one given the direction of the smart home and smart kitchen. He pointed to Matter (he says Fresco will integrate as devices become Matter-compliant), and how all the big smart home brands were aligning around the standard. However, kitchen products, he pointed out, were fundamentally different and needed a platform like Fresco.

“This is where the future is, this is what Matter is building,” said Harris. “All of these appliances starting to be able to work together in any location. We’re just accelerating that we’re delivering it today, instead of waiting years before that Matter becomes a reality.”

Tovala Debuts 5-in-1 Air Fryer, Its First Non-Steam Countertop Appliance

This week Tovala debuted a new countertop cooking appliance, the multifunction Tovala Smart Oven Air Fryer. The new appliance is the first new hardware from the company since it unveiled the second-generation smart steam oven in 2018.

Some readers may be thinking, ‘wait, didn’t Tovala release an air fryer last fall?’ Well, they did introduce air frying, but it was as a retrofit upgrade to the gen 2. Because the gen 2 Tovala had convection (a built-in fan for air circulation), they could add air frying through a software upgrade and an air fry basket.

With the new Smart Oven Air Fryer, they’ve built an entirely new appliance designed around its air fry capability.

“Our engineering team redesigned the oven’s airflow system by introducing a 2-speed motor, and a larger fan blade and vent in order to accomplish max air frying power in this oven,” said Maggie Condon, Tovala head of communications, in an email with The Spoon. “These adjustments allow for more air to circulate throughout the oven and around your food faster, creating a stronger, crispier air fry experience. With these changes, we introduced a designated Air Fry setting on the oven and in the Tovala App.”

With the release of the new air fryer, the Tovala gen 2 appliance – with its steam capability and retrofitted air fry function – has been renamed the Tovala Pro.

Interestingly, the new Tovala appliance is the first without steam capability, which has long been one of the most popular features of Tovala ovens. Judging by a recent conversation on a Tovala user group page on Facebook, some are confused about whether the just-announced Tovala has steam built in and how it compares to the now-renamed Pro version.

So why release a new appliance without steam? My guess is the company did it due to the popularity of air frying; even with the upgrade to the second-generation appliance, many customers still probably didn’t realize it had its new function since air frying was not on the function dial. With the new Tovala Smart Oven Air Fryer, the steam option goes away, and air fry has been added.

Sourdough Savior: A New Machine Keeps Your Starter Fresh and Alive

One of the byproducts of the COVID-19 pandemic was the rise (no pun intended) of sourdough baking. Quicker than you can say, “cabin fever,” a nation of wanna-be bakers turned their homes into warm and crusty boulangeries. Key to the process is what’s known as a sourdough starter, a mixture of flour and water that has been fermented by naturally occurring yeast and lactic acid bacteria.

While hearty in nature, starters need a bit of TLC to do their thing optimally. Enter Sourhouse co-founders Erik Fabian and Jennifer Yoko Olson, two bakers who brought their skills as marketers and industrial design, respectively, to create Goldie, an appliance built to keep sourdough starters at an ideal temperature. The proper temperature for a sourdough starter is between 75-85°F (24-30°C), and this range provides the warm environment needed for the yeast and bacteria in the starter to thrive. Too hot and the starter may over-ferment, while too cold can slow or halt the fermentation process.

Fabian and Olson’s entry into the world of sourdough baking is called Goldie, as in Goldilocks of The Three Bears fame. Goldie is built to provide just enough warmth to keep a sourdough starter consistently in the “Goldilocks Zone” (as in not too hot, not too cold).

In a recent interview with The Spoon, Fabian explained that the idea for Goldie preceded the pandemic and was born out of his sourdough starter issues. “You know, New York apartment, it was getting down below 60, and it was just too cold for my starter,” he said. “I didn’t really understand the way temperature interacted with my starter at that point. So, I found a warm spot, which became a DIY trick. As I continued to bake, I found that my starter was kind of like always searching for a warm spot.”

Once COVID came along, with the assistance of Olson, an experienced product designer, discovery met opportunity.” We didn’t want to make something like smart technology. We wanted to be like dumb technology for marketing because there’s enough complexity to baking with sourdough, so we wanted to create something simple. My basic idea early on was like a warming base with a transparent dome,” Fabian said.

The next step was Kickstarter, where Goldie was introduced in April 2022. Ending in October, Sourhouse’s offering drew 1,007 backers who pledged $103,948, almost triple the $39,000 original ask. Along with the Goldie apparatus, the Kickstarter kit came with a cooling puck that a baker can keep in the freezer if the starter overheats and needs quick cooling.

With fermentation a thing now, what are the thoughts about the extensibility of Goldie? Would it work for other types of fermented foods? While Fabian wouldn’t be specific about such next steps, it’s clear he and Olson are on to something, given proper fermentation for everything from sauerkraut to kombucha works best with controlled temperatures.

“Our focus on bread is really because, from my point of view is like I think it’s one of the most accessible points to entry into fermentation,” Fabian commented, “probably along with sauerkraut. And you know, I think it’s just easier to launch a brand and a business around a more targeted kind of idea.”

Spoken like a true marketer.

Haura Unveils a Modular Food Factory for the Kitchen at CES 2023

Nestled in the basement of the Venetian Expo center last week at CES, a startup from Italy showed off a machine that its inventor hopes will empower home cooks to do pretty much anything their heart desires: making home-made pasta noodles, roasting coffee beans, making cheese, brewing beer and lots more. In short, the machine, called the Haura, is intended to be a modular food factory in a box.

The Haura comes with three major features that unlock all of that flexibility: a motor to power different add-on modules (lasagna-maker, blender, cocktail shaker, sauce and frosting shippers, etc.), an induction heating surface for cooking, and a built-in extruder to enable home cooks to make food that usually requires pro-style equipment.

“The extruder means that you can automate a lot of processes that you only industrial food-making machines,” Haura spokesperson Matteo Pressacco told the Spoon. “For example, if you need to make pasta, candies, snack bars, are confectionery packed, baby’s food, everything can be automated.”

A Look at the Haura Food Factory at CES 2023

The company is working on a number of different modules, ranging from a lasagna maker to a beer brewer, that can be plugged into the appliance’s motor or extruder. This modularity gives the box its flexibility and sets it apart from other all-in-one cooking appliances.

The machine will have its own 10″ touch screen that shows the progress of any food-making project, including information such as temperature and humidity. The Haura will have what the company calls the F-OS, short for Food Operating System, that will enable the operation of the appliance. Different cooking instruction sets, called F-Apps, will come with pre-set processes for operating the machine and allow the user to cook a variety of foods through repeatable, step-by-step processes.

The inventor of the Haura is Angelo Pressacco, a mechanical and electrical engineer, who worked with chef Dario Zuliani on the conceptualization of the Haura.

The patented machine is still in the design phase, and it’s not clear at this point when it will be shipped to consumers. Let’s hope they can pull it off, because if Pressacco and his team can bring their idea to market, they may just create an entirely new category of home food-making appliance.

(Updated): It Looks Like Spark Grills, Maker of an Innovative Charcoal Grilling System, Has Shut Down

(Editor’s note: Spark Grills has filed to liquidate its assets in a procedure akin to filing for bankruptcy called a “Assignment for the benefit of the creditors (ABC)”. You can read the full document below.)

It looks like Spark Grills has shut down.

While the company, which makes a proprietary charcoal-based grilling system, has not made any official announcement, outward signs indicate the company has all but closed up shop. Their website has stopped selling charcoal bricks and has no inventory left of its grilling systems for sale. And, according to some of the company’s customers on Reddit, Spark’s support lines have gone dark.

From one Reddit user:

When I bought my Spark in the Summer their support was top notch. However after the unit leaked grease and stained my patio (my fault for not using a grill pad, their fault for advertising no need for a grease bucket) I’ve been trying to return my unit for two months and support has gone dark. No email response, phone, or text back during biz hours.

In addition to signs that the company is no longer selling any products, its executive team looks like it has started to move on. The company CEO, Ben West, has also indicated on his Linkedin that he is “figuring out what’s next.”

It’s a bummer because the company’s technology stood out in a sea of nearly identical grilling systems with its precision charcoal heating system. Here’s how we described The Spark Grill when we first wrote about it:

The stylish grill ditches the lumps of briquets for a single, flat charcoal “Briq,” and uses a series of stoking and cooling fans for precision temperature control. The Spark is capable of getting temperatures between a low 200 degrees all the way up to a ripping hot 900 degrees. The grill also has an accompanying mobile app that lets you monitor the temperatures of your cooking cavity and the food you’re cooking.

Spark shutting down would also be extra tough for owners of the grill because the system uses a proprietary charcoal system only available from the company. However, in what could be interpreted as a sign the company may be trying to help its customers keep grilling once it closes its doors, last week it posted a video on Youtube showing how to use the Spark grill with ordinary briquette charcoal.

We’ve reached out to Spark and will update the story when we get a response.

Update: The document about Sparks liquidation is below:

Celcy Opens Beta Testing Program For Its Combo Freezer & Oven Countertop Appliance

While new countertop cooking hardware concepts are few and far between nowadays, every now and then one emerges out of left field that does something new and different. And the Celcy, which combines freezing and automated cooking in a single-self-contained appliance, definitely qualifies as new and different.

Here’s how I described the Celcy when I first wrote about it in June:

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

Celcy - The Automated Nespresso of Food

And now there’s good news for adventurous types who want to get their hands on an early Celcy unit: The company is taking reservations to reserve an early beta unit.

The company is asking for a $150 down payment to apply for an early unit. That will get you access to an early unit and 15 meals (the company is operating a Tovala-ish model of hardware and meal subscriptions). The beta trial, which the company expects to start next spring, will last for three months, after which the user can pay the rest of the price ($150 will be applied) to the cost of the Celcy. While the company doesn’t mention the price of the finished unit (when I first wrote about Celcy in June, founder Max Wieder said the target price would be $549), the price for beta-testers will be 50% of the retail price.

If you want to get in line, you can head over to Celcy and reserve your spot.