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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Next-Gen Cooking

Why a Small Startup in the Middle of Valencia May Be Leading the Wireless Energy & Invisible Cooktop Trend

About a decade ago, IKEA famously released a concept video laying out its vision for the kitchen of the future. The central concept for their envisioned future kitchen was a kitchen table that not only made the experience of cooking and eating interactive with a touch interface, but also had built-in induction transmitters under the table’s surface that transmitted energy to power appliances and powered invisible-to-the-eye heating zones.

It was a compelling peek into what could be. While induction cooktop hob technology was and is a somewhat mature technology, the idea of using an induction transmitter to provide both wireless power and heating in everyday kitchen countertop surfaces fired up our imaginations in the same way Tom Cruise’s John Anderton character did about gesture interfaces more than two decades ago in Minority Report.

Since IKEA released its video, the futuristic idea of using an ordinary surface as a source of power and cooking heat has been inching slowly toward becoming a reality without ever seeming to make it to market. While there have been some efforts in standards-building by the same organization that brought us wireless phone charging standard Qi, actual product introductions of kitchen surfaces with built-in wireless power and heating have been pretty much non-existent.

But that’s changed over the twelve months thanks to a company named Cloen. Nestled on the east coast of the Iberian peninsula, this small Spanish startup has begun to pull back the curtain on the technology they’ve been developing for the better part of a decade. The company’s technology, which it calls Cloen Cordless Technology (CCT), is built around a dual induction plate system that provides heating to cook zones and wireless energy transmission to countertop appliances.

The company’s patented technology is on display in New York City at the flagship showroom of Spanish tile maker Porcelanosa. For Porcelanosa, another (and much older) company that also makes its home in the Valencian Community of Spain, Cloen built a custom-designed set of kitchen countertops and furniture with the CCT technology under the Spanish tile and furniture company’s Gamadecor brand.

You can watch a demo video of the CCT-powered Gamadecor product below:

Cloen Cordless Technology by Gadgets

In addition to building their own countertop kitchen products and those of partners (like Porcelanosa) with built-in transmission systems, Cloen is also working on a new line of countertop small appliances under the BeCordless brand, a joint venture between Cloen and cookware company Bergner. These countertop cooking appliances, which you can see in usage in the video above, include blenders, toasters, and air fryers.

The company is working with Porcelanosa on the cooking surface roadmap to build modular kitchen cooktops with up to five invisible cooking and power transmission zones. It also works with other manufacturers to build kitchen tables with dual-cooking and power transmission zones.

Above: Rendering of a 5 dual induction modular system being developed for 2025 release

The company has also worked with TV show producers in Spain and South Korea to build custom products for chef-centric cooking programs. In fact, you can see the Cloen-powered cooktop on Netflix in the reality TV show Lady Tamara, which is about Spanish aristocrat and chef Tamara Falcó.

For its product in Korea, the company is developing a table similar to the one in the IKEA concept video. However, if you expect to cook on a wood-only kitchen table, you might be slightly disappointed. According to Cloen, the table will have both power zones on the wood surface and induction heating in an in-laid glass area.

The company, which was founded by Pablo Cerra, an engineer by training, has grown to around 20 people, over half of them engineers. The focus on engineering is due to Cerra’s intention of building everything needed for the system. Cloen owns not only the core technology concepts but also develops the software and provides the SoC circuit boards to build into its partners’ systems.

“The secret is the software algorithm and the chip (microprocessor),” Cerra told The Spoon. “That’s secret to the whole technology.”

Cerra and his team decided to build a full-stack company to be an ingredient technology for their own and other brands’ wireless power kitchen technology because he felt the foundation needed to be laid for the market.

“This technology has to be for everyone,” Cerra said. “If you buy a mobile phone now, you can charge it with a normal charger or wireless charging. The thing is, wireless power and induction for the kitchen have to be the same.”

But Cloen isn’t alone. As mentioned, the Wireless Power Consortium is working on its Ki standard, and we’ve heard from multiple appliance brands that they are investigating and actively building products that will include wireless power. Other startups and tile companies are also looking at building wireless power systems.

Stepping back, the arrival of wireless power and invisible cooking zones is also part of a broader trend towards technology and functionality in the kitchen receding into the background. Sure, it’s part of the invisible kitchen design trend, but it’s also bigger than that, part of the megatrend that has technology disappearing before our eyes, fueled by AI, voice and gesture interface platforms, technology miniaturization, and the influence of companies like Apple and, well, IKEA over the past decade.

Ralph Newhouse Tells The Story of Chefman and Chef iQ (and Drops Some News About Upcoming Products)

Around 2009, Ralph Newhouse’s company hunted down excess inventory of small electrics and would re-sell them into the secondary market. However, it wasn’t long before Newhouse realized he wanted to make his own appliances, and that’s when the Chefman we know today was born.

That was just the beginning of Newhouse’s journey into creating his own products. As he and Chefman started to see how new connected products made their way into the market over the past decade, he knew he could take his learnings from Chefman and create a new brand delivering more tech-forward connected products. That thinking led to the creation of Chef iQ, a startup within a startup focused on the smart kitchen.

According to Newhouse, he saw an opportunity to take the company’s know-how for making affordable cooking appliances and create products for consumers with tech-forward features that didn’t break the bank.

“We looked at the smart hardware and the ecosystem that was developing, we felt a lot of brands were kind of missing the mark,” Newhouse told The Spoon. “There were brands out there that were creating very expensive hardware, and it was difficult to make the value case to the consumer on why they needed something with the smarts at these elevated price points. We knew that if we took our expertise at the supply chain and married it with our infrastructure and the team we had over here, perhaps we could build something that had technology underpinning the experience but that the consumer wouldn’t have to pay for.”

Newhouse also tells the story about visiting China years ago and running into some employees from smart oven maker June. After they told him excitedly about the forthcoming launch of a new June Oven, he started to think about how expensive to build these complex connected products. Soon, he started to think maybe he and his company could bring some of these same features at a more affordable price point.

Those early thoughts led to the development of a new product the company will introduce at the Housewares Show (aka the Inspired Home Show) in March: the company’s first smart oven. According to Newhouse, the new Chef iQ smart countertop oven will feature air fry capability, soft door close, a newly developed DC brushless motor, and a touch display. The new oven, which will be connected through the Chef iQ app, will sell for an MSRP of $299.

Looking forward, Newhouse sees many other new products on the horizon, including the rollout of a built-in oven from Chef iQ in 2026.

“It’s something, by the way, I’m super stoked about,” said Newhouse. “It completes the ultimate vision. We look at that industry as ripe for disruption. We think a lot of brands are kind of scared to compete in that space because it’s just really never really been done before.”

You can hear the entire conversation from Newhouse by clicking play below, over on Libsyn, or through Apple Podcasts or the usual podcast spaces.

It’s All But Official: The June Oven is Cooked

If you’ve been paying attention to the June Oven website lately (and really, who hasn’t?), you may have noticed that it’s been a bit difficult to order a new smart oven from the company for most of the past 12 months. That’s because every single model listed (standard June, June Premium, and June Oven Plus) has been marked as “sold out.”

If June were a capital-starved startup scrimping up to start its next production run, there’s an outside chance we may see more inventory at some point. But, somewhat paradoxically, since June was acquired by grill giant Weber in January 2021 – a company that no doubt has relatively easy access to manufacturing services – that there have been no June ovens for sale doesn’t bode well since, presumably, this was a decision made by management.

And now, according to Andru Edwards, a tech influencer and writer for GearLive, the Weber team told those who asked at CES last month that the June oven is no more.

From a post made by Edwards on Reddit:

Just got the word from Weber themselves here at CES. The June Oven will continue receiving software updates, but no plans for a new model. The tech from June is now being integrated into the new Weber grills. Was hoping for June Oven Gen 4, but it’s not in the cards, unfortunately!

My own outreach to Weber has gone unanswered, so this, combined with a lack of inventory and what they were telling folks at CES, it’s probably safe to say that June is cooked.

This will no doubt come as a bummer for those hoping for a fourth-generation June. It will also raise the question of why Weber bought June in the first place. The answer is probably as simple as, at least at the time of the deal, Weber saw June’s expertise in building high-tech cooking platforms as something they could build on for their own technology roadmap.

From then-CEO of Weber, Chris Scherzinger: “June has been an invaluable partner in developing our Weber Connect platform. Adding June’s expertise and technology to our own allows us to accelerate our connected innovation programs and better address grillers’ needs with new products and services that offer simplicity and fuel grilling discovery through enhanced capabilities.” 

Since then, Scherzinger has left the company. And, while Weber went public in 2021 (after the June acquisition), it wasn’t long before the company’s stock was pulled from public trading after accepting a buyout from private equity firm BDT Capital Partners, which had been its majority shareholder at the time of the IPO. That all makes for a lot of internal turbulence, so it’s probably not all that surprising that the company pulled back a bit from its future roadmap. Add to this the fact Weber is, in essence, an outdoor grilling company, and indoor smart ovens really aren’t a core focus (maybe they should have been focused on an indoor smoker like GE Appliances?).

While June looks like it’s done shipping new ovens, those in the market for a high-tech countertop cooking appliance can still buy a Brava (now owned by cooking equipment giant Middleby), Tovala, or Suvie. And, if you’re willing to wait a little bit, you could pick up a Macrowave from Revolution Cooking (which uses infrared and microwave heating) when it ships later this year.

Check Out NXP’s Presence-Sensing Cooktop Demo Powered by On-Chip AI

We’re still sifting through some of the cool product demos from CES last month, and one that caught my eye was the demo by NXP of a presence-sensing cooktop powered by an embedded MCU. According to the company, the system used a Neural Processing Unit that runs the machine learning and facial-recognition algorithms within the system rather than relying on a cloud-based compute. The demo featured a device control interface from Diehl Controls.

As can be seen in the video below (taken by TIRIAS Research Principal Analyst Francis Sideco), NXP spokesperson Thomas Herbert shows that you can turn on the burner with either touch or motion sensing (including motion sensing with cooking mitts on). From there, the system is using facial recognition to detect if a person is within local proximity of the cooktop. According to Herbert, presence detection comes into play in a scenario where there is a critical state, such as the pan getting too hot and there is water boiling over. If the system detects a critical state and no one is standing around the stove, it will shut off the heat and can send an alert to the person via a Matter (an open-source smart home connectivity standard) enabled device to alert the cook that the system has intervened on their behalf.

CES 2024 - INVITE ONLY- Part 3 of 3 NXP Autonomous Home Showcase Based on Matter

The demo is interesting to me in a couple of contexts. One is that, as we’ve written about here on the Spoon, the number one reason for fires in the home is due to cooking mishaps, and enabling your stovetop or other cooking appliances to recognize both anomalies as well as the presence of someone could be a real gamechanger, akin to the dip in automobile accidents in recent years due to the widespread prevalence of blindspot detection systems in modern cars.

The second context that’s interesting is that it could become a significant technology in assisting aging-in-place scenarios, particularly for seniors who become a little more forgetful as they age. One of the key determinants of whether folks can continue to live independently is their ability to feed themselves, and by providing “blind spot” detection like this, my guess is this could extend many seniors’ ability to live independently for years.

Chef Robotics Raises $14.75M To Automate Food Assembly in Commercial Kitchens

We’ve been tracking Chef Robotics before it was even called that when the company’s CEO and founder, Rajat Bhageria, spoke at The Spoon’s food robotics conference ArticulATE in 2019.

At the time, Bhageria was still in stealth on what would become his restaurant robot company, but he had hinted that he was up to something when we talked to him and convinced him to come and speak at the conference as an investor for his investment shingle, Prototype Capital. Since that time, Chef Robotics has exited stealth and the company is actually selling its robot (Bhageria says that company revenue has doubled between 2022 and 2023) and, as first reported by Techcrunch, the company has raised a new $14.75 million combo debt/equity round of funding.

From Techcrunch: Rajat Bhageria tells TechCrunch that Chef distinguishes itself from the likes of Miso by focusing on food assembly, rather than cooking specifically. The company is also touting ChefOS, the underlying software driving its robot arm’s decisions. “[F]ood is very highly dimensional: depending on how you prep the ingredients (e.g., julienned onions vs chopped), cook the ingredients (e.g., sauteed, baked, broiled), store the ingredients (e.g., cooked, room temp, frozen), the material properties radically differ,” the company notes. “And these properties change daily based on who is prepping and cooking. To deal with this, Chef uses various sensors – like cameras – to collect training data and then trains models that help Chef learn how to manipulate a large corpus of ingredients.”

When he spoke at ArticulATE in 2019, Bhageria discussed the importance of better and cheaper computer vision and the growing power of AI to help power useful robots in food service and beyond.

“In my head, computer vision is absurdly important here,” said Bhageria. Now you have better sensors with cameras, better computation with GPUs, cloud computing, and deep neural networks, and better actuation.”

You can watch the food robotics panel with Bhageria and other food tech investors below.

Articulate 2019: Investment Opportunities in Food Robotics

Dodo Pizza Trials ChatGPT-Powered Flavor Generator in App

Dodo Pizza, a thousand-store pizza chain that’s built a name for itself by experimenting with different types of technology, announced last week that it was trialing a new “In-App Flavor Generator” powered by ChatGPT. The new generator, which is only available for now in the Dubai market, allows customers to create personalized pizza flavors from 35 different ingredients.

Here’s how it works: The app’s flavor generator, which uses generative AI technology, presents users with a choice of ingredients, all of which can be combined in different ways, which Dodo says can result in up to 30 million potential flavor combinations. This feature is designed to cater to individual preferences and moods, enabling customers to experiment with unique pizza creations.

For the launch, Dodo Pizza expanded its ingredient list with 17 new items, including some pretty weird flavors like popcorn, duck, guacamole, melon, fruit loops, falafel, and pumpkin seeds. The app’s interface queries the user’s mood and preferences, with options like “movie night,” and from there, users can customize their pizzas by specifying dietary restrictions or ingredient exclusions, such as vegetarian-only options or the omission of onions, pineapple, or spices.

The company, which was founded in Russia and originally grew to become Russia’s biggest pizza chain (but now is headquartered in Dubai), recently brought on a new CEO in Alena Tikhova, while company founder Fyodor Ovchinnikov has moved into the executive chairman role. Under Ovchinnikov, the company gained a reputation for embracing technology early on (Dodo was the first pizza chain to experiment with drone delivery), and this latest move continues that trend.

According to Dodo, early trials have piqued customer curiosity. The company says the AI “pizza card” generates about three times the clicks of other menu positions. Dodo says they plan to roll out the AI pizza generator in other regions this year, including Southeast Asia and Africa.

Revolution’s New Smart Toaster Will Have Wi-Fi and Tell You The Weather

Last week at CES, Revolution Cooking, a company that’s made a name for itself by creating the world’s most high-end, tech-enabled toaster, gave us a sneak peek at its latest-generation bread crisper.

The new Revolution toaster, which the company says will ship on May 1st, not only has the same recognizable touchscreen and proprietary and patented InstaGLO heating technology that powers the first generation toaster (and the new Macrowave oven), but it will be the company’s first Internet-connected edition.

So, why add Wi-Fi to a toaster? According to Sean Robbins, Revolution’s head of marketing, one obvious reason is to enable over-the-air feature rollouts and improvements to the product’s heating technology. However, perhaps the most significant reason relates to the role a toaster plays in a toast-lover’s daily routine.

“People who love to toast, it’s kind of a daily ritual for them,” said Robbins. “So we talked to our best customers and asked them what would you love to have on the home screen. We heard things related to what their daily routine is. ‘I want to start my day and make my toast, and I wonder what the weather is that day.'”

According to Robbins, the Revolution connected toaster is also the first to get the green light from UL. The product safety standard company, well-recognized for its certification stamp of approval, had previously frowned upon Internet-connected toasters. This is because adding connectivity to a product with an open heating element was considered a significant safety concern. Because of this, Robbins says that owners of their new toaster still won’t be able to remotely control the heating element, but they will have the comfort (and perhaps more importantly, retailers will have the comfort) that UL says this thing is safe.

While the Internet-connected toaster has become something of an Internet meme, often used to ridicule over-engineered products and an Internet of Things gone awry, there have been relatively few attempts to add connectivity to toasters. While some have taken a swing (and the tech press commentators have reacted predictably), the reality is since Revolution essentially kickstarted the whole high-end touchscreen toaster craze (there are a bunch of copycats on Amazon now) and has built a loyal customer base for its tech-enabled toaster, my guess is that they’ll likely find a receptive audience for those who also want their toaster to tell them whether they should bundle up for the day.

You can watch my interview with Robbins below.

Revolution Talks About Its Latest Smart Toaster at CES 2024

Combustion Releases Physics-Based Prediction Engine for Connected Thermometer

Today, Combustion announced that they have made a new physics-based prediction engine available for the Combustion smart thermometer.

According to the company, the prediction algorithm in this new over-the-air software upgrade, which they are calling the “new physics engine phase 1,” differs from the previous prediction algorithms in that it incorporates the ability to build a full simulation of the food in software. While the past model looked at the change in temperature and pacing of that change to predict when the food will be done, the new system will begin to factor in data around water migration, evaporation of moisture, and other factors interpreted from the eight sensors in the probe. From there, Combustion says they will be able to factor in temperature stagnation in large cuts of meat during BBQ (known as “stall”) and carry over.

The company’s announcements said that during phase 1 of the rollout, the new physics predictive model will run during the first 30% of the cook and then “switch over to the original predictive engine.” This is because Combustion expects “the new engine to make some mistakes and that early predictions may not always be stable.”

The announcement about the new update, free to existing Combustion thermometer owners, claims it “isn’t just a tweak to the existing algorithm, it’s the first step toward a new kind of cooking math.” I used the Combustion this past Thanksgiving and look forward to trying out the new features.

When Combustion launched its multisensor probe last year, it was a wake-up call for the existing smart thermometer market, which had developed mainly around single-sensor connected solutions. Since then, Meater has come out with the Meater 2 Plus, which has five internal sensors and an ambient temperature sensor, and other companies are likely developing multisensor versions of their thermometers. Combustion’s push to upgrade its software to create new capabilities is part of the company’s effort to stay ahead of the market as others look to adapt their hardware.

Chris Young, the CEO of Combustion, dropped into Dave Arnold’s Cooking Issues to talk about the new update and the broader vision for the thermometer, which includes making it open for other developers. Young says that the product has an open API, and they “have a lot of people creating cool stuff with” the thermometer.” You can listen to the interview portion where Young talks to Arnold about the thermometer updates in the embed below.

Cooking Issues Episode 124 | Chris Young Returns

CES 2024: Sevvy Smart Cooker Cooks Food By Sending Electric Currents Through Food

I don’t know about you, but when I bake anything, we’re talking about 25-30 minutes in an oven. But if you’re using a new technology debuting at CES from a startup called Sevvy, that time drops to just four minutes.

How does it work? According to the company, their technology utilizes “integral heating” through electrical currents. This means a combination of Pulsed Electric Field-based and Ohmic heating technology to enable quick food preparation at low temperatures. These currents pass through the food, simultaneously delivering the same amount of heat throughout the entire dish, which, according to Sevvy, drastically reduces cooking and baking times.

I personally verified that the company’s blueberry muffins, which company CEO Kamiel de Leur says took just four minutes to make, were just as tasty and as those made using traditional oven heating. But de Leur says it’s not just faster cooking times that sets their technology apart. Because Sevvy reduces the need for cooking and baking fats by up to 50% and decreases salt and sugar usage, de Leur says their technology is also healthier.

The company has six issued patents for the electric current-based cooking technology, which de Leur hopes to license to strategic partners, including home appliance manufacturers and makers of professional cooking equipment.

You can watch my full interview with de Leur below:

Sevvy Shows Off Pulsed Electric Field-based and Ohmic Heating in Sevvy Smart Cooker at CES 2024

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.