• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Skip to navigation
Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Events
  • Newsletter
  • Connect
    • Custom Events
    • Slack
    • RSS
    • Send us a Tip
  • Advertise
  • Consulting
  • About
The Spoon
  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Events
  • Advertise
  • About

Next-Gen Cooking

May 28, 2024

Tovala’s Keeley Kabala: Success in Smart Kitchen Requires Listening to Your Customers

Back in 2016, an early-stage startup called Tovala appeared in just the second Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase. Company CEO David Rabie showed off the first-gen oven and discussed the vision for a combination of a hardware appliance and a food subscription service.

Fast forward eight years later, and Tovala has become one of the true success stories in the smart kitchen, amassing a large and enthusiastic user base for its oven and an extremely high lock-in rate for its meal delivery service.

I caught up recently with Tovala’s COO, Keeley Kabala, to talk about Tovala’s business in 2024 and where he sees his company and food delivery going over the next decade.

One of the key takeaways for me was that Tovala still focuses heavily on adding value for its customers through its oven, even if that means enabling users to take advantage of the multi-function cooking automation that is one of the key differentiators for the Tovala. The company sells two models of oven today – a five-in-one and a six-in-one – and as of today they have over one thousand CPG products in the database that they can run scan-to-cook where the oven will have an optimised set of cooking instructions that can bring the different forms of heat (and steam) into the cooking process.

According to Kabala, many of those CPG products are available at Costco.

“Right now we have dozens of Kirkland products that can scan to cook right from the beginning,” said Kabala. “So people many times are leaving the store with scannable items that have cook cycles already programmed in for their oven to use.”

Not only does Tovala have scan-to-cook for Costco’s Kirkland brand items, but it is also selling its oven in select Costco, which Kabala believes will give them more exposure to different customer types, which will give them new data points around which to build product around customer preferences.

It’s this listening to customers, says Kabala, the is critical for their future success.

“If we’re willing to listen to our customers, they’ll give you a chance to iterate.” said Kabala. “If you don’t listen, you might not be around forever. It’s been great to see just how vocal people are, too. They really care. So they don’t hold back on their feedback. We just have to make sure we keep listening.”

You can watch the interview below as well as read the transcript of the full conversation.

If you’d like to connect with Keeley in person, he will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit next week. You can get your tickets at the SKS website.

A Conversation with Tovala's Keeley Kabala

Michael Wolf: All right, I’m here with Keely Kabala, not Keely Tovala, because it sounds like some people get that mixed up because the name sounds so familiar.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, it’s got the same last few letters, but yes, it was named before I got here. I didn’t choose the name of the company, but it’s led to confusion and many jokes along the way.

Michael Wolf: And I imagine one of those jokers is David Rabie, the cofounder and CEO of the company I’ve spoken with. He’s been at Smart Kitchen Summit to some of it, but we’re excited to have you come out to Seattle in June to talk about what you guys are doing at Tovala. Tovala is a really interesting company because they are one of the real success stories in this idea of like bringing new technology into the kitchen. And also you have this interesting pairing with a food delivery service. You guys have really been a shining star in that space, combining a food delivery service with the hardware. We’ll talk about that in a little bit, but before we jump into like what’s going on with Tovala, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got where you are.

Keeley Kabala: Sure. My whole professional career has kind of been in the consumer appliance space. Did my very first internships at Whirlpool and Fellows, making appliances and paper shredders. I went over to Whirlpool full-time and had a variety of different interesting and challenging assignments all over the world. I got to live in Europe for a year, in China for a year, launched products and dishwashers, refrigerators. And interestingly enough, David and Brian, the other co-founder of Tovala, asked me to be their first employee in 2015. I didn’t understand the concept of Tovala and turned them down. And they asked me again a few months later and again a few months later. And finally, after they launched the Kickstarter and it became a little bit more real, I ended up joining the team as the VP of Hardware Engineering. And so, at that time, they had the Gen 1 oven, which had a lot of pros but also had a lot of cons. And my job was to work with the team to create what was our second gen oven. And it’s kind of the base for the two SKUs that we have right now. So we developed that in 2017, 2018, and it launched November 2018 and kind of has been our bread and butter on the hardware side ever since. And then on the ops side, I joined the food ops team kind of in a support role in early 2019. We were trying to figure out, we had just opened our own food facility on the South side of Chicago. And I kind of came over just a little advisement type role for our COO at the time on cost and quality and kind of just took over OPS along the way. And then, you know, we really started to explode in the back half of 2019. And it’s been a wild ride throughout the pandemic and opening food facilities along the way. But yeah, that’s been my Tovala journey. Originally, I came for the hardware side, and now I spend most of my time on the food side, but both teams report to me.

Michael Wolf: And you have that engineering mindset, obviously, build products throughout your career. And I would imagine that an engineering mindset really helps as you try to optimize the food delivery side and the operation side.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, yeah, I think we have a good team of engineers that bridge both the oven and the food side. I think that’s probably one of our competitive advantages compared to just maybe a meal kit company that doesn’t have the engineering firepower that we have, whether it’s on the hardware side, the ops engineering side or the software side. You know, some of our engineers have developed very sophisticated thermal modeling to make sure our food is safe. And also the packaging is as light as possible for customers, based on zip codes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And getting to work with them has been a good challenge. I think there’s, you know, one of our unique advantages is having the control of the food because we produce the food, ship the food, and then have the kill step and the quality control in actually the customer’s house because we’re using our, you know, chef curated cook cycles to cook the food. So it’s a good engineering systems problem to solve.

Michael Wolf: The current hardware, which like you said, is the foundation of what you helped build. One of the core ideas that I’ve always found with Tovala is it has steam, which I think obviously makes the food a lot better. You know, steam ovens haven’t really become widely deployed in consumer kitchens in the US but I think it really does make food better. So talk about, you know, the feature set within the oven and why it works so well with the food you guys deliver.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, we have a five-in-one and a six-in-one. The five in one has the bake, the broil, the air fry functionality, as well as toast and reheat. And then, on our six-in-one, we’ve added steam. So steam is just another cooking mode that allows to preserve moisture inside of some of the more delicate food items to reduce browning for other delicate food items. And actually in many ways can help accelerate the cook because you’re getting the cooking from the steam surface and the heat transfer going through the food. So, you know, we’ve gone into air frying. We were kind of, I think, a little late to getting into air frying. We were debating that for a long time on the differences between it and, you know, just bake, convection bake. But we launched the air fry model that has the two feet speed fan. It gets really great performance. And then, you know, our six-in-one has the steam functionality that does really great on some of the bread items. case ideas. It comes out really great. The salmon turns out perfect when it’s with steam and then hit with the broil at the end. I think the true advantage is the multi-step cooking where you’re able to change modes and temperatures. And that’s what most of our, you know, Tovala cycles do, whether it’s the scan to cook groceries or the Tovala meals, or some of our customers who really enjoy cooking at home, they create sophisticated cycles on their own. Some people just like to hit bake 400, 15 minutes all the time. Others get a little bit more creative. They have a ramp up with an air fry to get the high velocity airflow in the oven, hit it with bake, and then the broil at the end to get caramelization or whatever the case may be. But yeah, I think our true advantage is the multi-step cooking.

Michael Wolf: And that pairing of your food or even CPGs with the scan to cook with the ability to switch to different modes makes it fairly unique. I think most people just buy something at Costco, put it in the microwave, or put it in their air fryer, and hit go. But you have all these five to six different elements that you can combine. So each food has its own essentially recipe around the cook. Apply a certain amount of heat, you’re gonna finish with this, add some steam, and that’s optimized for each food that you deliver to the consumer.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, exactly. And it’s also from a food safety standpoint. So it’s a balancing act that our food safety team and our culinary team constantly are trading off on. It’s a unique spot for us to have that, one, that additional kill step in the home. But actually, quality control is something that we actually have. How the food turns out when you cook it, we control that in the person’s house. Most other meal delivery companies, your end result is determined based on how good of a chef you are. And we extend one layer further where our oven is cooking the cook cycles the way our chefs intend at the test kitchen here at HQ. And they’ve gone through several rounds of testing. And the important thing is pairing the protein with the side. And so you can cook chicken a bunch of different ways, but whether it’s paired with mashed potatoes or a rice pilaf or green beans, how it gets to that food safe temperature is going to be different. And so our chefs have to balance that out. And so that’s why each recipe has a unique cook site.

Michael Wolf: And you do work with stuff that people can buy at the grocery store because you have scan to cook. That to me is really helpful. And I think that would be something that consumers more broadly would like if, hey, I could buy something at the store and my cooking device can be optimized around what the optimal cook mode is for that. Maybe that’s a combination of like the food brand working with the appliance maker, but that isn’t really available today beyond like what you guys are doing. Is this something you think maybe more widely available in a 10 year time frame. Maybe that’s with a Tovala or another appliance where essentially the cook and the different elements of the cook can be applied in a more precise manner based on what consumers are putting into their cooking box.

Keeley Kabala: I think for certain customers, that’s definitely the case and definitely a benefit, like not having to check, not having to preheat. I think that’s the other thing that’s like one of our main advantages is anything we’ve scanned to cook in a Tovala, whether it’s a Tovala meal or a CPG type item where you scan the UPC, you set and forget it, you cook it from ambient heat. And so we’ve calculated the preheat and how the oven warms up into the cook cycle. And so I do think that’s another thing. It brings the convenience factor. If you had to always preheat your oven, then remember to come back 10 minutes later, put it in. It’s just one more step that I don’t think customers need or want to do. It’s really a non-value step to them. So we try to eliminate those. And then not every item is going to work. Not every oven item is ovenable. It can’t be cooked with the heaters. Some companies have very delicate packaging. And we don’t want them to melt, so that’s why we don’t pick everything that can be from CPG or from the frozen aisle. But there’s a lot. There’s over 1,000 items at this point in our database. We continue to add to them based on customer’s demand. There’s definitely times of days where this functionality is used quite often. And certain items, whether it’s snacks or breakfasts, are very prevalent use cases for these.

Michael Wolf: So looking forward, I imagine you think a bit about what the Tovala cooking side could look like in a long-term time horizon. Do you guys think you’ll continue to evolve the cooking appliance? Maybe in 10 years, will it be whether it be more automation or different modes of heating? Or do you think consumers just want a basic what you have today and just a little bit of change over time?

Keeley Kabala: I think, I mean, the biggest thing for us right now is, you know, for the history of our company, we’ve always been direct to consumer. And so people are coming to us more with a food need first. And very recently we started in retail. We’re in Costco now with our oven. And so I think we’re getting feedback from our customers on different things they want. So I think it’s like, based on where the starting point of the customer comes in, they’re going to want different functionalities, different capabilities, similar to when we went from the gen one to the gen two oven. You know, the gen one oven didn’t have a bake button on the front of it. We thought everyone wanted the super smart appliance, only app usage, and we very quickly got feedback that we needed to make some tweaks. And so we brought the functionality still in the app, but also to the front of the oven. You know, the gen one had a larger footprint. We needed to change the footprint size. The kitchen counters are so valuable in everyone’s home. We needed to make sure we were optimizing every square inch. And so going into retail now, we’re getting feedback. We’re very early into it. Only been a few months with Costco, but we’re seeing that there’s different functionalities, different features, different use cases. And so I think there will definitely be some tweaks in the hardware and the overall experience in general.

Michael Wolf: That Costco relationship is really interesting to me because when I think of Costco, they obviously sell appliances, but I go there mainly for food. I usually get the same things. You guys combine the oven with a kind of consumable. Once people buy the oven through a Costco, can they then pick up the Tovala food at Costco or would only be delivered to you guys, to them?

Keeley Kabala: So right now we haven’t started any food in retail. That’s on a roadmap of things to consider. Right now we have dozens of Kirkland products that can scan to cook right from the beginning. So people many times are leaving the store with scannable items that have cook cycles already programmed in for their oven to use. But right now we only sell ovens at Costco. But I think once again, this is our advantage we have is we have the opportunity to go into the other side of the store and start getting some of our products there for quicker trials for customers who aren’t familiar yet as much with Tovala as a food product and only are learning about us first time more on the appliance side.

Michael Wolf: And that’s interesting that you guys have worked with Costco. So some of the food items available at Costco, you can scan to cook. So they’re probably excited about that.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, they’re super excited about that. I mean, not only are they getting to move our ovens through their store, but it’ll help them move some of their other products as well. And it just kind of brings some from newness and kind of a tech advantage that Costco didn’t have previously on the food side.

Michael Wolf: What are you most excited about when you think about the Consumer Kitchen five years down the road, 10 years down the road? What excites you about that space?

Keeley Kabala: I mean, I think in general, a way to reduce waste. So whether it’s personalization and understanding what people want to eat so they make sure they don’t buy or order the wrong stuff that ends up being wasted or better understanding of inventory management. But I think in general, both food and energy waste are still major opportunities in the kitchen space. And so whether it’s how people get their food, how much food they get, when they get their food, what food they get, I think are all still major opportunities across our business and other businesses. And then, you know, I have a large oven in my home. I worked for a company that made very nice large ovens. I only use the large oven now on Thanksgiving. Like there’s a lot less energy usage by having the right appliance for the right job. And I think for what I need normally, you know, Tovala answers that. I think there’s a lot of other really smart, compact kitchen appliances. And so I think adoption is, I think, been interesting to see, not just us, but other companies as well, you know, gain adoption. And the one thing I’ve always shocked by is how willing people are to try new things in the kitchen and are willing to take on early stage innovation because they are really trying to optimize the food that they eat, their time, and their space in their kitchen. And so that’s why companies like us and many others have existed and continue to get a chance to iterate. If we’re willing to listen to our customers, they’ll give you a chance to iterate. If you don’t listen, you might not be around forever, but it’s been great to see just how vocal people are, too. They really care. So they don’t hold back on their feedback. We just got to make sure we keep listening.

Michael Wolf: Great closing words, Keely Kabala with Tovala. Thank you so much for spending time with me today.

Keeley Kabala: Yeah, have a great day.

March 18, 2024

Is The US Power Grid Prepared For The Transition To Induction Cooking?

In case you haven’t heard, electricity demand is shooting through the roof.

After more than two decades of flattened usage due to more efficient lightbulbs, appliances, and factories, the growing adoption of EVs and the explosion in new data centers for compute-intensive applications such as AI over the last few years has resulted in skyrocketing demand for electricity, according to a new report in the New York Times. In fact, forecasters estimate that peak demand in the summer will grow by 38,000 megawatts nationwide in the next five years, which is akin to adding another California to an already overburdened grid.

Above: Electricity Demand Over Time and Forecasted Demand. Source: New York Times

The Times report does a good job highlighting how EVs and higher usage air conditioning in homes are two of the biggest culprits for reversing the trend, but largely omits any discussion of another potential big driver of electricity usage in the future: induction cooking.

And from the looks of it, induction could significantly impact the overall electricity usage of a family home. While it’s more energy efficient in general, a household switching from gas to electric induction cooking will use more electricity. How much? According to some sources, an hour of induction cooking will use between 1.4 kW and 2 kW per day. That compares with about 2.5 kW per day in charging for the typical EV.

So, not quite as much as EV, but still enough to translate to a significant draw on the grid once we’re talking tens of millions of induction stoves. All of which begs the question, will the grid be ready?

It’s something that’s definitely on the mind of some in the appliance world. One appliance executive recently told me that grid readiness is one of the microenvironment variables they are factoring in when evaluating their own induction cooktop strategy. Add to that various local restrictions around gas cooking (and pushback against said restrictions), and the calculation as to how much they push electric appliances gets somewhat nuanced depending on a given market’s grid readiness and regulatory environment.

My own guess is that while we’re finally seeing induction making inroads in the US, the adoption isn’t moving at such a rate that it will make matters significantly worse than other factors, such as EV and data center growth. In fact, it’s because those other reasons have grabbed the attention of those responsible for forecasting and building out our electricity infrastructure that the industry will more than likely be ready for when we hit tens and even hundreds of millions of induction cooktops in homes.

March 12, 2024

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.

March 1, 2024

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.

February 12, 2024

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.

February 7, 2024

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.

January 26, 2024

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

January 22, 2024

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.

January 17, 2024

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

January 16, 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

January 8, 2024

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

November 27, 2023

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.

Previous
Next

Primary Sidebar

Footer

  • About
  • Sponsor the Spoon
  • The Spoon Events
  • Spoon Plus

© 2016–2025 The Spoon. All rights reserved.

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
 

Loading Comments...