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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Next-Gen Cooking

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.”

Is Home Fermentation The Next Big Kitchen Tech Opportunity?

There’s been a fermentation boom in restaurants over the past decade. Chefs everywhere are using the age-old technique to make everything from kimchi to katsuobushi, and nowadays, it’s not out of the ordinary for high-end restaurants to have a head of fermentation on staff.

And now, thanks in part to the pandemic and the rise of experimentation in food making, more people than ever are doing fermentation at home. Anyone who’s tried to create a sourdough starter, brew kombucha or make sauerkraut has dabbled in fermentation whether they know it or not.

Still, fermenting is still viewed as something of a black art. Part of it is the weird and slightly creepy terminology (mother, anyone?). Mostly, though, it’s also because the act of farming bacteria to create tasty and healthy new foods is a far cry from the usual activity of assembling and cooking our meals in our kitchen.

The New Sous Vide?

But what if it wasn’t? What if, like other pro cooking techniques that have entered the consumer kitchen, fermentation got an assist from technology to help would-be home fermenters with their craft? Could some innovation and little cool hardware help make fermentation more mainstream, like the sous vide wave that started nearly a decade ago?

That is the hope of a couple of entrepreneurs I caught up with recently at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Fred Benenson’s Breadwinner helps home bread bakers know when their sourdough starter is ready. Tommy Leung’s company Hakko Bako is making a fermenting appliance for the home.

Both see a big future for home fermenters, a future that starts with making the process a little less mysterious.

“I remember I was talking with a close friend of mine when I was starting work on Breadwinner,” said Benenson. “I could tell he was like a little sketched out by the idea that there was this jar of goo.”

Benenson knew that his friend wasn’t alone. There are millions of people around the world who see these jars as mysterious and a little scary. If he could just provide a little more clarity, they wouldn’t be as scared of fermentation. They’d also end up making better bread.

That’s where Breadwinner comes in. Originally conceived as a “social network for yeast” where home cooks could share their stories of loave-making, Benenson also started working on a hardware device that monitors starters. The idea behind both was to give more information.

“Humans have had kind of an innate relationship to fermentation for a long time,” said Benenson. “In terms of making it more approachable, you think of any situation that’s got a lot of uncertainty and confusion, and you’re trying to learn it for the first time, the more you can reduce that uncertainty, the better you feel about engaging with it.”

Leung also wants to make fermentation more approachable. To do that, he is creating both a home and professional kitchen appliance to bring precision to the process.

“Our goal is just to make fermentation easy,” said Leung. “So it means to provide temperature control and then use the technology to make the process easier.”

That precision and control is necessary, in part, because fermentation is so different from the usual act of cooking in the kitchen.

“Most of the things you’re doing in the kitchen, then you’d like to be prepping in the morning and then like serving and cooking it,” said Leung. “Fermentation happens over hours, days, weeks and months.”

Both Benenson and Leung are bullish about fermentation as being potentially the next big professional kitchen technique that could be mainstreamed through innovation.

“The top chefs are already fermenting,” said Leung. “They’re already creating these like amazing flavor experiences. I think like with food usually starts in the Michelin restaurants and then it moves to more like casual dining, and then to the home. So I definitely think it’s going to be a huge part of the future.”

“I’m bullish there,” said Benenson. “I think it will be a while before we have all of our ducks in a row to make the case but it’s what I’m hoping for. I think fermentation is gonna start to sound a lot less scary.”

So is home fermentation the next big kitchen tech opportunity? You can decide for yourself after watching my full conversation with Benenson and Leung below.

The Spoon & CES Bring Food Tech To The World’s Biggest Tech Show For First Time Ever

Each January for the past couple of decades, I’ve packed up my suitcase and headed to the Nevada desert to take part in the world’s biggest tech show, CES.

I’m not alone. CES is the singular tech show that pretty much every major industry attends along with those who watch and follow those industries.

This includes the food world. Many remember the debut of the Impossible 2.0 burger in 2019, a watershed moment for both the company and the plant-based meat industry. There’s also been food robots, ice cream makers and much more that have made a big splash at the big show.

However, up until this year, any food professionals coming to CES were attending despite the lack of a dedicated food technology and innovation area in the exhibition space or in the conference tracks. Because CES is *the* great convener in the tech world, we felt food tech needed representation. This led The Spoon to rent out the ballroom of Treasure Island for a couple of years running to produce Food Tech Live. We wanted to give the food industry a central place to connect and check out the latest and greatest in food innovation.

But now that’s all about to change as food tech hits the big time this coming January. CES announced in June that food tech is going to be a featured theme for the first time ever at the big show. We couldn’t be more excited, in part because we will get to see even more cool food tech innovation, but also because CES has chosen The Spoon as the dedicated CES partner for the food tech exhibition and conference portions of the show!

We’re busy helping to develop a half-day conference and talking to lots of companies about coming to show their products at the four day CES food tech exhibition and we can’t wait to show what we’ve helped CES build.

But we need your input too! If you are interested in showing off your latest and great food and kitchen-related product or solutions, make sure to let us know. Just head over to this form on the SKS website and drop us a line. We’ll get right back to you and let you know how you can be a part of food tech at CES.

You can read more about the program below with our official announcement, or just drop us a line to see how to get involved.

We’ll see you in Vegas!

Food tech has arrived at CES®. Leaders in kitchen, food and cooking are coming together in Las Vegas from January 5th to January 8th at CES  2022 to examine how technology is changing the global food chain. CES has teamed up with The Spoon, the leading food tech media and events partner to showcase, demo and discuss the way technology has transformed the world of food. 

While we’re sure the excitement and buzz around food tech will be everywhere, we are working with CES on two key initiatives at the show, including: 

  • The Food Tech Exhibit, an exhibit space showcasing the latest innovations and demonstrating new products from across the kitchen and food tech spectrum. This will be live on the CES show floor in the Venetian Expo. 
  • The CES Food Tech Conference, presented by The Spoon, will bring together visionary thinkers, chef entrepreneurs, appliance vendors, delivery and food retail disruptors at CES 2022. Each session will highlight the innovation and disruption happening across the food industry as a result of tech advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, mobile accessibility and more. 

CES is fast approaching — and there are many ways to get involved before, during and after the show. The CES Food Tech presented by The Spoon area will focus solely on companies building the future of food and cooking. Booth spaces are diverse in terms of size and ability to customize – get in touch and we’ll work with the CES exhibitor team and our team to ensure you put together a space that serves you. 

If you aren’t able to secure a demo or company/showcase spot but still want your brand to be part of the inaugural year of food tech at CES, you can sponsor the CES Food Tech Conference on Day 2 of CES in the Venetian. Conference tickets for CES programming will be on sale soon. 

Early Research Shows Promise for Cooking with Lasers

Ever since I first saw secretly evil superhero Homelander cut through anything and everyone with laser beam eyes, I’ve thought it’d sure be handy to have a pair of laser peepers to clean up weeds around the house or cook a quick meal.

While I (unfortunately ) won’t be able to shoot lasers from my eyes anytime soon, things are looking up in the laser cooking department thanks to a recent research project by a group of students a Columbia University. In a recent article for npj Science of Food program for Nature, the group describes the project in which they print and cook raw 3D printed chicken using lasers.

The group started by pureeing a chicken breast and then extruded the chicken paste into squares using a 3D printer. From there, they used different lasers to conduct various trials that varied parameters with three different lasers: A 5–10 W blue diode laser (445 nm) as primary heating source, and comparative tests done with an Near Infrared (NIR) laser (980 nm), NIR laser (10.6 μm).

From the explainer video:

“By tuning parameters such as circle diameter, circle density, path length, randomness, and laser speed, you can optimize the distribution of energy that hits the surface of the food, but at higher resolution than conventional heating methods.”

The group also experimented cooking in highly-precise cooking patterns (including a checkerboard pattern) to see how it compared with traditional cooking. The takeaway? Laser cooking might make better food than traditional cooking methods like broiling.

“Compared to oven broiling, we found that laser cooked foods are more moist and shrink less after heating,” concluded the group.

Interestingly, the group also found that lasers can cook food wrapped in plastic. The idea of being to cook through packaging opens up potential new avenues for offering consumers no-contact food in foodservice scenarios, something that’s no doubt of interest in these pandemic-stricken times.

While some like SavorEat are building print-and-cook systems, this is the first time I’ve seen a cooking system which uses lasers. The high-fidelity control of laser cooking is reminiscent of the solid-state cooking systems slowly making their way to market, only instead of using radio waves they shoot highly directed beams of light.

You can read the full research paper here and watch the explainer video below:

Robots that Cook: precision cooking with multiwavelength lasers

SpiceHero’s Creator Wants to Modernize a Stone Age Tool To Help Make Tastier Spices

If you’re a chef or a spice aficionado, there’s a good chance you use a mortar and pestle to crush your spices. But for the rest of us who are happy to buy our spices in the form of pre-ground powders from the grocery store, we’re missing out.

That’s at least according to Thomas Weigele, who is currently running a campaign on Kickstarter to get his invention – an automated mortar and pestle called the SpiceHero – funded. So why would someone want to create a modern version of a tool that has been in use since the Stone Age?

According to Wiegele, the idea came back when he was on the APAC consumer insights team for B/S/H Appliances, where his team would conduct ethnographic studies on markets in Asia. During one study about cooking behaviors across all socioeconomic groups in India, Weigele says one insight came up over and over: “Preparing spices with a mixer-grinder is good, but taste was much better when my mom or grandma prepared it with a Mortar and Pestle.”

He and a colleague soon realized it wasn’t just nostalgia. When they ran tests, it became clear this ancient tool for smashing and grinding spices brought out flavors in ways other methods did not. Electric spice grinder/mixers slice the spices into a uniform dust, while a mortar and pestle would result in a pleasing “mix of coarse and fine particles for dry spices and pastes have more texture and can extract the oil from the seeds, herbs and vegetables.”

Those insights resulted in B/S/H approving a project led by Wiegele to make a prototype for a semi-automated mortar and pestle machine. Unfortunately, the device, which ground the spices by rotating the stone inside the bowl, did not provide the same results as a traditional mortar and pestle. Weigele and others proposed a fully automated (with pounding motion and all) version, but B/S/H management did not give the green light.

When Wiegele left B/S/H and decided to head to school to get his masters degree in 2019, he couldn’t shake the idea of an automated mortar and pestle, so he soon hired a freelance engineer and started working on a prototype. Two iterations later, he was ready to launch his device on Kickstarter.

The SpiceHero looks a bit like a small stand mixer, only instead of beaters or mixing blades, the machine featured a pestle that pounds the contents of the bowl (mortar) at the rate of once a second. Wiegele hopes the machine, which starts at €140 as one of the reward tiers, will be ready to ship to backers in about a year.

First, though, the campaign needs to get funded. Wiegele has capped the amount for industrial design in the campaign at €20 thousand ($23.4 thousand), and after that, the rest will be used for tooling and inventory. With about three weeks to go, the campaign for the Spice Hero stands at about 50% funded around about €10 thousand.

If you’d like to back a project that could up your spice game with this modernized take on an ancient tool, you can check out the SpiceHero Kickstarter page here.

Podcast: Creating New Categories in Kitchen Tech With Scott Heimendinger

Scott Heimendinger was ready to talk about his plan.

I’d just spent a half hour talking to the longtime culinary innovator who’d spent much of the past decade bringing some of the first consumer sous vide and steam oven products to market, and after telling me about his journey through starting a company, working for Modernist Cuisine and later Anova, Heimendinger was ready to raise the curtain on what he wanted to do next.

Well, almost.

Heimendinger was ready to talk about the type of product he wanted to build (a category creator) and how he wanted to do it (by doing lots of prototyping and researching). However, what he wasn’t ready to spill the beans on is what he is actually building.

I can’t blame him. The kitchen hardware market is notoriously competitive, a space where something goes from novel to commoditized in a matter of a few years. Heimendinger had that experience with his own company (Sansaire), where he’d helped create one of the first consumer sous vide appliances.

“It’s only a matter of time until you could walk into a RiteAid and buy a sous vide machine on the same aisle that sells the Oster toasters for $25,” he told me.

One way to prevent that fast move towards commoditization – or at least make money before it happens – is to lock up the intellectual property first by filing patents (something Heimendinger has already done) and keep quiet about what you’re building until it’s ready (something he’s doing now).

So while Heimendinger wasn’t ready to give me all the details about the new product he hopes will be a category creator, I was happy to hear about his motivation for starting a new kitchen tech company.

“I’ve realized over my past experiences with MC (Modernist Cuisine),with Sansaire, with Anova and doing my own thing, even with my time at Microsoft, is that I really love zero to one,” he said. “I really love the part that I’m in right now, which is that I’m making something new.”

In other words, Heimendinger likes inventing things. Navigating the unknown.

But while he loves the ‘zero to one’ part, what he doesn’t like is taking a product beyond that. For that, Heimendinger knows he needs a team.

“When I get through prototype and spin up some flashy PowerPoints, bug all of the friends in my network to test this thing and give me feedback and listen to my stupid pitch over and over and over again, then I would like to go to companies that might be able to commercialize it,” he said. “And do what they’re really good at, which is make sure that it can get successfully manufactured and priced right, and marketed right, and distributed right. All that stuff.”

And then what?

“Hopefully, go back to the next zero.”

I caught up with Heimendinger for the latest episode of the Spoon Podcast. If you’d like to hear our full conversation, just click play below or find it at Apples Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you’d like to see Heimendinger at Smart Kitchen Summit 2021 virtual in November talking about how to build category creators, get your ticket here.