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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Next-Gen Cooking

(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.

Scoop: Tovala to Roll Out New Steam + Air Fry Smart Oven This Fall

Tovala, a Chicago-based smart oven & food delivery startup, will roll out a new oven this fall called the Tovala Steam + Air Fry smart oven.

Technically, Tovala’s second-generation oven, unveiled in 2018, has convection built in (which acts essentially the same as air frying). Even so, the company hasn’t pushed the air fryer functionality in promotions or via specifically designed air fryer recipes up to this point.

Above: The email sent to select Tovala subscribers who received test units of the third-generation Tovala oven

But that looks like it will soon change. According to an email sent out to a limited number of selected beta testers, Tovala has sent out a beta test version of a new model with an enhanced emphasis on air frying. The email says that “a lot of chef brains and engineering talent went behind this latest model,” which potentially hints at some interesting new recipes and features for users of the new Tovala hardware. According to the email, the latest generation of the smart oven will begin shipping to customers this fall.

At this point, it’s unclear if the company intended for word of its third-generation smart oven to get out. After Tovala sent out the test units to backers, they then sent an email calling delivery of the units a “happy accident.” Some Tovala customers were told by the company’s customer support that the new oven is the same as the old one, only that they will be sending out “air fry baskets” for an additional fee.

Update: Tovala responded to our request and confirmed they are unlocking air frying capabilities through a software update and a new accessory in the air fry basket. According to Tovala, it will be the same model oven, but after the software update and the air fry basket is made available they will rename the model the Tovala Steam + Air Fry Smart Oven. The company also confirmed they are updating their scan-to-cook feature and plan to have 100 grocery items optimized for cooking with the basket.

Else Labs Announces Pro Kitchen Focused Oliver Fleet As It Pauses Rollout of Home Cooking Robot

Else Labs, the company behind the countertop home cooking robot called Oliver, announced today the launch of Oliver Fleet, a commercial kitchen reimagining of its original core product.

The new Fleet solution is a respin of its original standalone Oliver home cooking robot into a solution that allows multiple units to be used and managed simultaneously in professional kitchen environments to automate cooking tasks. According to company CEO Khalid Aboujassoum, while the Oliver Fleet units look the same from the outside as the original consumer unit, they’ve been built to withstand the more rugged requirements of the professional kitchen.

“It might look like the household unit from the outside, but the guts of the Oliver Fleet are different,” Aboujassoum said. “The Fleet units are designed for back-to-back cooking, for that harsh environment in the commercial kitchen compared to the household.”

With the pivot to a food service focused solution, Else is pausing the rollout of the home Oliver. According to Aboujassoum, the decision to make the change was largely driven by the supply chain disruptions and associated component shortages and price changes. While some backers of the Indiegogo campaign eager to get their home Oliver may not be happy with the switch, Aboujassoum said the company would give them the option of a full refund, or they can choose to continue to wait until the company restarts the consumer unit rollout.

While the focus on commercial automated cooking comes after a pandemic where restaurant businesses have faced increasing challenges around labor, Aboujassoum told me the company started hearing interest in developing a commercial version of the Oliver before COVID.

“It was an initial modest conversation at an exhibition late in 2019 where the Oliver got the attention of one of the food service companies,” Aboujassoum said. “The composition of the Fleet was born out of these conversations.”

The pandemic put everything on hold, but eventually, Else Labs started to hear more requests as things began to normalize. “As the dust settled, those conversations revived again,” Aboujassoum said. “We started receiving an influx of inbound requests all the way to the CES participation (earlier this year).”

The way Aboujassoum sees it, the Oliver Fleet can help food service companies move away from centralized food production in a central kitchen by pushing the ability to cook from raw ingredients on-site using automation.

“When I talk to (food service) clients, they’ve set up operations where they may have a huge central kitchen with a production plant, and they are shipping to maybe 50 locations,” Aboujassoum said. “We are talking about decentralizing the central kitchen. How much money can you save by deploying the Oliver Fleet and decentralizing the central kitchen? It’s a very transformational proposal.”

Aboujassoum says the Oliver Fleet system is available now and they will have announcements of deployment partners very soon. You can see a video of the Oliver Fleet system in action below.

The Weekly Spoon: Electrolux’s Kitchen of the Future & Taco Bell’s Reimagined Restaurant

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Electrolux Launches GRO, a Kitchen System Designed to Encourage More Sustainable Eating

Can a kitchen’s design help us eat more sustainable, plant-forward diets?

Swedish appliance manufacturer Electrolux thinks the answer is yes and, to that end, has launched an ambitious new kitchen system concept to help us get there.

Called GRO, the new system is comprised of a collection of interconnected modules that utilize sensors and AI to provide personalized eating and nutrition recommendations. According to the company, the system was designed around insights derived from behavioral science research and is intended to help encourage more sustainable eating behavior based on recommendations from the EAT-Lancet report for planetary health. The company will debut the new system at this week’s EuroCucina conference.

“How can a thoughtful kitchen slowly nudge you to more sustainable choices,” asks Tove Chevally, the head of Electrolux Innovation Hub, in an intro video to the GRO system. “To make the most of what you have, to buy smarter, and eat more diverse?

To see a video of the new GRO and to read the full story, head here.

Do you have the next big idea for the future of food & cooking? Apply to tell your story at SKS INVENT!

Taco Bell’s Vision of the Future Includes High-Tech Dumbwaiters & Lots of Drive-Thru Lanes

I’ve always been fascinated with dumbwaiters. An elevator built specifically to deliver food between floors of a building, the dumbwaiter is an idea that is both ridiculous and fascinating.

And while I can’t be sure that someone like Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos doesn’t have dumbwaiters built into their homes (though Bezos would probably prefer robots and Trump manservants he could yell at), what I am sure of is the dumbwaiter has, for the most part, largely gone extinct as part of modern life.

Until now. That’s because Taco Bell sees them as a potentially integral part of their restaurant of the future. Called Taco Bell Defy, the taco chain’s new restaurant concept includes an elevated restaurant with multiple drive-thru lanes, food lifts, and a lot of digital integrations.

While I wouldn’t, unlike others, claim this new concept possibly “the most ambitious” prototype in restaurant history, I would say it makes a whole lot of sense for a restaurant chain that does most of its business through a drive-thru. While many chains have developed drive-thrus that have multiple order lines, the choke point always comes later when cars zip-up into a single line to get their food. By spreading out the hand-off of food to four lines, the choke point of a single window for food handover is eliminated.

You can read the full post here. 

Smart Kitchen

Meet Celcy, a Countertop Oven With a Built-In Freezer That Will Cook Meals For You

Say you’re leaving for work and want to come home to a fully cooked meal? Or better yet, you want to line up a work week’s worth of meals and just want them prepared when you get home?

You might be a good candidate for the Celcy, an autonomous cooking appliance that combines a countertop oven with a freezer that stores the meals until ready for cooking.

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.

You can read the full post here. 

Food Retail Tech

Circle K Planning To Deploy Seven Thousand AI-Powered Self-Checkout Machines

Mashgin, a maker of computer-vision-based self-checkout machines, announced today it has signed a deal with Circle K parent company Couche-Tard to deploy seven thousand self-checkout machines at the convenience store chain over the next three years.

The move follows the initial deployment of Mashgin systems at nearly 500 Circle K stores across the United States and Sweden since 2020. The move by the second-largest convenience store chain in North America with almost seven thousand stores will represent one of the largest ever deployments of self-checkout systems to date.

For Mashgin, the deal represents its biggest customer win yet and is yet another sign of why the company was able to recently raise a $62.5M Series B round at an impressive $1.5 billion valuation. The move represents a 700% total increase in deployments over its current installed base.

The Mashgin self-checkout system is installed at the checkout counter and enables customer checkouts without scanning barcodes. As seen in the video interview from CES in January, customers can essentially toss their items onto the small checkout pad, and the system will automatically recognize and tabulate the products.

To read the full story, head here.

Future Food

Cocuus Raises €2.5M to Scale Industrial 3D Food Printing for Plant & Cell-Based Meat Analogs

According to a release sent to The Spoon, 3D food printing startup Cocuus has raised €2.5 Million in a Pre-Series A funding round to scale up its proprietary 3D printing technology platform for plant-based and cell-cultured meat analogs. The round was led by Big Idea Ventures, with participation by Cargill Ventures, Eatable Adventures, and Tech Transfer UPV.

Founded in 2017, the Spanish startup has developed a toolbox of different 3D printing technologies under its Mimethica platform to enable the printing of different types of foods. These include Softmimic, a technology targeted at hospitals and eldercare facilities that transforms purees into dishes that look like real food (think of a vegetable or meat puree shaped into a “steak”), LEVELUP, an inkjet printing technology that prints images on drinks like coffee or beer (like Ripples), and LASERGLOW, a laser printer platform that engraves imagery onto food.

Read the full post at here.

SCiFi Foods Raises $22M With Andreessen Horowitz’s First Investment in Cultivated Meat

SCiFi Foods, a Bay Area-based food tech startup, announced that it has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), making it a16z’s first investment in the growing cultivated meat market. The company, formerly known as Artemys Foods, also announced that it will be adding a new board member, Myra Pasek, the General Counsel of IronOx, who will be utilizing her expertise from Tesla and Impossible Foods to help SCiFi Foods bring its novel plant-based and cultivated meat hybrid through regulatory approval to the market. 

The new funding raises SCiFi Foods’ total funding to $29 million and will primarily be used to scale R&D efforts, build out the leadership team, and market the company. 

The Spoon sat down with CEO and co-founder, Joshua March, to learn more about SCiFi Foods’ new name, a hybrid meat product, and what it looks like to raise funding from one of the most famous venture capital firms during a recession.

Read the full interview with Joshua March here.

Food Robots

Xook Raises $1.3 Million to Roll Out Robotic ‘Food Courts in a Box’ in The US

If you’ve ever visited a cafeteria at a tech giant like Google or Facebook, you probably found that the food is just as tasty (or tastier) and often better for you than what you might order at a corner restaurant or make in your own kitchen.

But according to Xook CEO Raja Natarajan, this kind of access to an abundance of tasty, healthy, and free food is more the exception than the rule for US office workers. This is very different from countries like India, said Natarajan, where most corporate employers provide access to cafeterias stocked with food options for employees. This is why, after trialing a prototype for what he and cofounder Ratul Roy describe as a “food court in a box” in Bangalore, they are eyeing the US for the rollout of their robotic kiosk.

“In countries with high labor costs and high food costs, it is very hard to offer this kind of experience unless it comes with automation,” Natarajan told The Spoon in a recent interview.

To read the full story, click here!

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

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

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

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

From Fast Company:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holy Smokes: FirstBuild’s Arden Indoor Smoker Hits Crowdfunding Target in Two Minutes

FirstBuild, GE Appliances’ innovation arm, has launched its latest crowdfunding campaign, and this one looks like a potential home run.

The same group that brought you the Opal ice machine and the Paragon induction cooktop are now bringing an indoor pellet smoker called Arden to market via a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. The Arden can smoke up to two racks of ribs at a time or a small brisket, all inside your home without setting your fire alarms off.

The Arden uses a smoke-elimination technology that requires no additional filters to clean or replace. According to FirstBuild, the technology was first developed for GE’s smart hearth oven and has now been incorporated into the Arden.

The unit uses the same pellets used with other smokers. Once the smoke is pulled out of the chamber and into the smoke eliminator, it eliminates all smoke and just CO2 and water are exhausted into the kitchen. This allows users to sit the Arden on a countertop and smoke a slab of meat without any special venting.

You can take a look at the Arden and hear some of the answers about the technology in the video below.

Arden Indoor Smoker: Your Questions Answered

The Arden is just the latest product concept to emerge out of FirstBuild, GE Appliance’s incubation hub and micromanufacturing facility located in Louisville, Kentucky. While some FirstBuild products have been home runs (like the Opal ice machine), others have been small hits (like the Mella mushroom fruiting chamber) or didn’t make it out of the infield at all.

With the Arden, it looks like FirstBuild may have another extra-base hit on its hands. The machine hit its crowdfunding target within two minutes of launching today on Indiegogo and hit $300 thousand within 30 minutes. The Arden is at over $433 thousand from 653 backers as of this writing.

Those interested in picking up the Arden indoor smoker can buy it for $649 on Indiegogo, a 40% discount from the unit’s expected retail price of $1,099.

Five Predictions for Consumer Food & Kitchen Tech in 2022

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

Meet The Smart Food Delivery Locker

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

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

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

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

Steam-Powered Cooking Gains Traction

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

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

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

Amazon Debuts a Smart Fridge

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

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

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

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

Home Food Waste Technology Comes Into Focus

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

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

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

AR Takes Guided Cooking to the Next Level

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

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

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

CES 2022: Meet the Graphene Kitchen Styler, a Cooking Appliance Made With the World’s Thinnest & Strongest Material

For most of us, graphite is the black smudgy drawing material at the center of an everyday wooden pencil. For material scientists, it’s the foundation for perhaps the most interesting nanomaterial ever discovered.

That nanomaterial is called graphene, which is an extremely thin layer of carbon arranged in a honeycomb-shaped (hexagonal) lattice.

Graphene was first isolated in 2004 when a couple of scientists stuck everyday household tape to graphite to separate the fragments. They repeated touching the tape to the thin dusting of graphite particles until they had a layer one atom thick. They were eventually able to take this method to create the world’s first sheet of what is called graphene. It was this discovery – as well as a better understanding of the amazing resulting properties of the material – for which the two scientists from the University of Manchester eventually won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010.

Ever since, it’s those same properties that have made graphene the focus of material researchers around the world. Not only is graphene the world’s thinnest material (again, one atom thick), it’s also the strongest. In addition, graphene is also transparent and is an excellent conductor of both heat and electricity. As a result, some of the applications being explored as part of the “graphene gold rush” include everything from conductors to touch screens to concrete strengthener.

And now, a home kitchen cooking appliance.

That’s right, at CES last week, a company called Graphene Square showed off a new cooking appliance concept that uses graphene to heat and cook food. The product, called the Graphene Kitchen Styler, looks something like a transparent space-age George Foreman grill. To make, say, toast, you insert a slice of bread between two transparent clamshell sides, close it, and watch through the transparent graphene material as the bread gets toasty and brown.

According to a company spokesperson, the graphene can go up to 200 degrees Celsius within 90 seconds. And while the video below shows the appliance browning toast, Graphene Square says they’ve also used the Graphene Styler to cook steak, chicken, and even boil water.

CES 2022: A look at the graphene-based cooking appliance from Graphene Square

While graphene itself is a pretty exciting material technology, it remains to be seen as to whether consumers would want this specific appliance built with it. And while the Graphene Square says this product could be to market by 2023, it may just be that the company – which is more of a B2B materials science manufacturer than consumer products company – is trying to entice a Samsung or LG to consider graphene for one of their future kitchens appliances.

Whirlpool Delivers Air Fry Upgrade To Line of Smart Appliances

Today Whirlpool announced today they are adding an air fry feature to a number of their connected appliances via an over-the-air software upgrade.

The new feature, delivered as an upgrade to five of their most up-to-date built-in appliances, will be added to the following products:

  • Whirlpool Smart Slide-in Gas Range with EZ-2-Lift Hinged Cast-Iron Grates (Models WEG750H0H and WEGA25H0H)
  • Whirlpool Smart Slide-in Electric Range with Scan-to-Cook Technology (Models WEE750H0H and WEEA25H0H)
  • Whirlpool Smart Single Wall Oven with True Convection Cooking (Models WOS72EC7H and WOS72EC0H)
  • Whirlpool Smart Double Wall Oven with True Convection Cooking (Models WOD77EC7H and WOD77EC0H)
  • Whirlpool Smart Combination Wall Oven with Touchscreen (Models WOC75EC0H and WOC75EC7H)

Whirlpool isn’t the only appliance brand delivering air fry over the air. GE Appliances started sending the software upgrade out in April of 2021 to 200 thousand or so connected oven customers.

What’s the reason for the air fry upgrade air assault? For one, it’s an easy upgrade from a hardware perspective for a connected convection oven, since air frying is really just using convection baking. Because of this, no additional hardware is needed (unless, of course, you want to buy an ‘air fry basket’), making the upgrade mostly a software upgrade that adds air fry-specific cooking logic and new user commands to the UI.

For Whirlpool, which isn’t officially exhibiting at CES this year, the news represents a fairly low-key set of new feature upgrades for the third year in a row. The company, which announced a big lineup of new products three years ago at CES 2019, hasn’t had a major overhaul of its smart appliance lineup since that time.

Maybe later this year or at CES 2023 Whirlpool will add some bigger upgrades. May I suggest a combi oven?

CES 2022: As LG and Others Embrace Steam, Could 2022 Be The Year of Steam Cooking?

When asked at Smart Kitchen Summit in 2017 what appliance he was waiting for to make its way to the consumer kitchen, award-winning chef Philip Tessier said, “the combi oven.”

As it turns out, Tessier wasn’t the only chef that day who thought a steam-powered consumer kitchen was a good idea. When asked the same question a couple of minutes later, Serious Eats’ Kenji López-Alt agreed.

“I was going to say combi ovens too,” said López-Alt.

The combi oven, also known as combi steamer, combines traditional convection (dry) heating and moist heat using steam to enable the cook to do all sorts of things they can’t do with traditional ovens: Sous vide cooking, steaming vegetables, and baking moist delicious bread to name a few.

While steam cooking has been a long-time fixture in pro kitchens, it has never taken off in a big way in the consumer kitchen. But that might be changing. In 2020, Anova finally started shipping their countertop Precision Oven, and the critics embraced it. Since that time, the company has had trouble keeping the $599 appliance in stock.

Other upstarts such as Tovala and Suvie are also bringing different spins on steam-powered cooking to consumers. And LG, which introduced steam cooking into their convection ovens in 2018, is now adding Steam Cook functionality to the microwave.

In some ways, steam cooking is following the same early path pioneered by sous vide circulators. Like sous vide, steam cooking is a technique long-embraced in the pro kitchen, and it is also finally reaching consumer price points and showing up in friendlier form factors.

However, while sales of sous vide circulators eventually hit a wall because most consumers didn’t have the patience to cook meat in water baths for hours on end, my guess is steam cooking has a much wider appeal. A big reason is that unlike sous vide, steam cooking arrives in the kitchen via traditional-looking appliances (not to mention steam ovens like Anova’s allow you cook sous vide without the water bath or the plastic bag).

If 2021 was the year air-fry was everywhere, I suspect in 2022 we might begin to see the year the chefs get their wish and steam cooking begins to enter the mainstream.

Introducing Manna Cooking, the Recipe App That’s All About Community

The idea for Manna Cooking came, in a way, from CTO and co-founder Guy Greenstein’s mom — a private chef who cooks all-vegan, all-kosher food. It dawned on Greenstein one day that his mom’s workstation was totally unmanageable, a chaos of notebooks and binders overflowing with heavily annotated recipe clips. He searched for an app that would help her to streamline things but came up empty-handed.

So Greenstein teamed up with his childhood friends and co-founders Josh and Rachel Abady to create a platform that would allow users like his mom to organize, customize, and share recipes. The app, Manna Cooking, is making its official debut today on the Apple App Store. I got on Zoom last week with Josh and Rachel (the company’s CEO and CMO, respectively) to learn more about the launch.

The name of the app was inspired by the three co-founders’ early years at a Jewish day school. “Manna is what supposedly fell from the sky to nourish the Israelites — to give them everything they needed,” said Rachel, who came up with the name. “Our app is supposed to be your buddy in the kitchen that gives you everything you need to cook.”

Rachel and Josh led me on a tour of the app over Zoom. The digital environment is bright and easy to navigate, made friendlier by Chef Mic, the app’s cartoon personality. The app draws on popular social media features to help users discover new recipes: You can flick through recipes dating app-style in swipe mode, or scroll through other users’ posts in the discover feed. Users can also create and import recipes themselves.

Manna follows through on its promise of creating a single, centralized space for users to manage their recipes. In the cookbook environment, the app allows you to edit any recipe you’ve liked and save a new version. (The app also automatically flags recipe ingredients that might be incompatible with your diet.) When you want to start cooking a dish, the app guides you through the recipe one step at a time in much the same way Google’s Maps app takes you step-by-step toward your destination, saving the need to scroll back and forth between an ingredients list and instructions.

There are currently about 10,000 recipes on the app. Some are from a collection of pre-approved websites from which users can instantly import recipes; some were created by the app’s beta testers; and some were curated by Manna’s in-house recipe creator.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced Greenstein and the Abady siblings to take an unconventional approach to fundraising. They had secured some funding pre-COVID (including from David Greenstein, Guy’s father and a co-founder of the brand incubator Wonder Brands) but the pandemic scorched opportunities to proposition restaurateurs and other funders. “But we realized, even more than it’s about food, our app is about community. So if we’re a community, why not use the community to be the source of our funding as well?” Josh said.

The team used Wefunder to raise about $150,000, which helped them to create a beta version of the Manna Cooking app. That crowdfunding approach also helped the team to create a pool of dedicated beta testers: “Our first wave of testers really had skin in the game, because they had given us funds anywhere from $100 upwards,” Rachel said. “So we already had built-in super testers.”

Manna has partnered with restaurateur and chef David Burke, giving users access to simplified recipes for restaurant dishes. They’ve also identified brand-aligned social media influencers, who are creating recipes, providing feedback, and helping to promote the app.

This spring, Manna will work on raising a more conventional seed funding round. In the next couple of months, the team plans to lock in a partnership with a grocery retailer, which will allow them to launch an automatic ordering feature.

But the team’s number one priority is user acquisition, and their success there may hinge on how well the platform fosters in-app community building. At the end of the day, the promise of the app is to provide a simplified, social cooking experience, especially for users with specific dietary needs — people who want to cook gluten-free food, or vegan food, and get inspired by others who cook and eat like them.

As Josh put it: “There’s millions of people who fit each of these descriptions, and each of them should feel like they have a community that they can engage with in one, centralized place.”