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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Next-Gen Cooking

Kickstarter: BeanBon Lets You Roast Coffee Beans on Your Countertop

If the first pandemic-spurred lockdown drove us all to bake bread, perhaps quarantine 2.0 will inspire people to roast their own coffee beans. If so, devices like the BeanBon could become all the rage.

Launching on Kickstarter today, the BeanBon is a countertop home coffee roasting appliance system that can roast up to 120 grams of raw coffee beans at a time. Users can choose from three modes:

  • SmartMode: Select from one of eight pre-set profiles to roast coffee with the push of a button. Adjustments can be made in the accompanying app.
  • Creator Mode: Lets users manually control different roasting parameters such as heat, exhaust levels, roast time, etc. Settings can be saved and shared with the BeanBon community.
  • Guru Mode: Allows users to experiment with the roast profiles created by professional coffee roasters.

Any raw coffee bean can be used, and BeanBon offers a curated selection on its site for purchase. There is even a special “BeanBon X Champs” variety that includes a QR code to use special Guru Mode roasting instructions.

The Kickstarter for the BeanBon launched today, and you can pick one up for $699. Company materials say the device will start shipping in September of this year.

The BeanBon is the creation of a Taiwanese company called avigo, and we reached out to them because there were some details left out of their English-language press materials. Namely, they also didn’t include any information about the availability/cost/shipping of coffee beans to the U.S.

The BeanBon device and raw bean market is very similar to the Kelvin home roaster, which costs just $249 for for pre-orders (though the Kelvin doesn’t have a connected mobile app). The Kelvin is supposed to ship to backers next month, that’s almost a two year delay from the original ship date.

That’s good to know if you are interested in the BeanBon. Backing hardware projects on Kickstarter is definitely buyer beware because there are many risks associated with moving a prototype to production.

But given that this pandemic tragically doesn’t show any signs of slowing, there’s a good chance you’ll still be stuck at home (in the U.S.) whenever the BeanBon ships.

Aspara’s High-Tech At-Home Farm Launches in the U.S.

Hong Kong-based Aspara, which makes high-tech, tabletop-sized farming units for homes, is now shipping devices across the U.S. through retailers like Home Depot, Wayfair, and via its own website.

The Spoon flagged Aspara back in January as a company to watch in the up-and-coming at-home farming space because of the device’s small size, lowish price point, and approach to hydroponics. At the time, the company was selling its system, which can fit easily on a countertop, to customers in Hong Kong and in very, very limited quantities via Amazon to other parts of the world.

This official U.S. launch makes the device available to all U.S. consumers. Speaking on the phone today, Rob Alexander, the Owner of Conducted Sales, the sales agent for Aspara in North American markets, said that Aspara has another eight retailers in the works, though he couldn’t at this point use specific names. 

High-tech, hydroponic farms have historically been the territory of industrial-scale indoor farming companies — the AeroFarms and Plentys of the world. But following this past January’s CES show, both major appliance makers like LG and Miele along with smaller startups began to heavily publicize a new kind of indoor farm, one created for the at-home consumer. These devices are typically quite small and meant to feed a single household, rather than supply a grocery retailer. 

Alexander said Aspara’s homegrown system differs from others on the market in the way it tackles the hydroponic element of the farming. It uses what he calls an “ebb and flow” design, where water for the plant roots is constantly replenished from the side unit (see image above), making the water supply easier to refill than many at-home farms. Aspara’s also has sensors that determine nutrient levels in the water, the current level of humidity in the air, and whether a plant is getting too much light. An accompanying app notifies the user when any of these elements need attention.

“It’s trying to give you feedback to create the optimum growing environment,” Alexander said.

Another differentiation: the device is repairable. While that might first sound like a weird selling point (no one wants to buy tech that might break), it actually speaks to how seriously Aspara is pursuing the idea of making its high-tech grow system the kind of kitchen appliance that’s on par with a dishwasher or refrigerator. You don’t throw out a dishwater the second something goes wrong. In the same way, Aspara users can replace parts like sensors and light canopies, rather than having to go out and buy a whole new farm.

The company’s approach recently won them the Green Product Audience Award. 

Price-wise, Aspara is on the lower end of the at-home farming spectrum. The device goes for $349 right now at Home Depot online.

Of course these days you can’t have a conversation about at-home food production without brining COVID-19 up. Since Apsara wasn’t available to North Americans at the height of shelter-in-place mandates, the company wasn’t measuring demand for its product in that region. However, Alexander told me they did see a spike in Hong Kong, where the device has been available for some time. 

My guess is that with the product available Stateside, that demand will surface quickly. Other at-home farming systems have seen huge jumps in demand recently as the pandemic, panic-buying sprees, and other factors have made many consumers question their total reliance on the traditional food supply chain.

Next up, Aspara wants to do a widespread launch in Canada, and also broaden the types of plants its system can grow to include other types of plants, including fruits and vegetables. 

Whirlpool’s W Labs Countertop Smart Oven is Now Selling for Half The Original Price

Did you know Whirlpool has a countertop smart oven?

Don’t worry, most people didn’t, in part because Whirlpool never talked much about it after it launched in early 2019.

But now that you do know about it, you might also be interested to know they’re selling it for just $399. That’s half the original sticker price for the smart oven from W Labs, Whirlpool’s innovation hub. From the looks of it, the price reduction looks permanent.

So why is W Labs selling its June clone which debuted in January 2019 so cheap? It might be because the group is looking to clear out the remaining inventory of a product which was, from the beginning, positioned as an experiment. They only made 2000 of them and they only sold the product online and not through traditional Whirlpool appliance showroom sales channels.

Still, the wind down makes me wonder if the big appliance manufacturer is making way for a more permanent replacement. Whirlpool tends to do big refreshes to its product lineup every two years, which means 2021 is a refresh year after a relatively quiet 2020 and a big 2019. As part of a larger refresh, I can see a countertop smart oven as a logical candidate for the lineup.

It also appears Whirlpool is closing out its scan-to-cook smart microwaves and is out of stock on many of its smart ovens or ranges. While some of this could be due to COVID-related supply chain disruptions, this could be another indication that the company might be starting to wind down its current lineup more broadly as it prepares for a new line of smart ovens for 2021.

Thermomix Users Can Now Order Ingredients With Launch of Shoppable Recipes on Cookidoo

Thermomix announced today they have launched ingredient shopping on the Cookidoo, the Thermomix multicooker’s digital recipe and meal planning platform.

The new capability allows Thermomix users to add a recipe’s ingredients to a digital shopping list and order them through the Cookidoo app. Fulfillment of the order (delivery or pickup) is done through a third-party grocery retail partner of the shopper’s choosing.

The new shoppable recipe feature will be available to users of any Cookidoo-compatible Thermomix model (TM5, TM6 and TM31) in the U.S., Germany and the United Kingdom.

You can watch how it works on the video below:

Those using the TM6 can add ingredients from any of the 50,000 or so recipes available through the Cookidoo interface by simply clicking on the “Add to Shopping List” option directly on the appliance’s touchscreen. From there, they head over to the Cookidoo mobile app or website to review the list, remove items they may already have, and add additional items to the list. They can then select a grocery retailer or online grocery service provider like Instacart to fulfill the order.

According to Thermomix’s head of consumer experience, Ramona Wehlig, bringing ingredient shopping and delivery to the users of the Thermomix completes the meal journey for their users.

“We had the weekly planner and curated shopping lists,” Wehlig said by phone, “but we never closed the gap in the meal journey until the ingredients were delivered.”

Wehlig said the company has been developing shoppable recipe functionality for the past year and a half. The company started trialing an early version capability through pilots in Germany. These initial pilots, which used technology developed by Thermomix, helped the company to understand the digital grocery shopping process and to fine-tune the ability to do things such as ingredient matching.

However, as the company pushed to accelerate its shoppable recipes efforts, it started looking for a partner to help them scale. This brought them to Whisk, a shoppable recipe and digital food platform startup acquired by Samsung Next last year. Whisk powers a number of grocery commerce capabilities in the connected kitchen, including (not surprisingly) on the Samsung Family Hub fridges.

“The core aim [of working with Whisk] was to scale faster,” said Wehlig. “This allows us to connect our users with more grocery stores in a shorter time frame.”

For Whisk, the addition of Thermomix helps cement an already strong position as one of the primary shoppable recipe platforms. While I haven’t seen updated numbers for a while, back in 2018 Whisk told me its platform touched 20 million users each month. With the addition of Thermomix — first in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S., later globally — the company will get millions more.

For Thermomix, the integration of shopping capabilities from the Cookidoo digital recipe platforms opens up potential new revenue streams through various forms of partnerships with CPG brands and any commissions passed on from the third party grocery platforms. For users, it adds another nice feature and could entrench the Cookidoo recipe platform as their primary digital shopping list manager.

BonBowl Looks Like a Pretty Great Personal Induction Cooker

It’s been a long time since I was single and living alone, but I remember a particular hassle from that time was cooking for myself. Aside from not being a very good cook, recipes often made too much food for one person, took too long to create, and the clean up was a pain.

Too bad the BonBowl didn’t exist back then. The BonBowl is a new personal induction cooking system that promises to help people whip up fresh-cooked meals without a lot of complications.

The BonBowl has two parts, the induction cooktop base and a specially designed bowl that fits on top of it that cooks and is also the serving dish. BonBowl is compact enough to stay on a kitchen counter, and the bowl is big enough to serve a generous-sized meal for one. Because it uses induction, there isn’t a hot surface to be wary of, and it plugs into a standard outlet. The bowl is also dishwasher safe, making cleanup easy.

Because consumers in the U.S. might not be familiar with induction cooking, the BonBowl website (there isn’t a mobile app yet) also features a number of recipes for guidance. All of the recipes feature five ingredients or less that you can find at most stores and take less than 15 minutes to cook.

BonBowl’s launch is coming at a time when the global pandemic has re-shaped our eating habits and more people have been forced to eat at home. While restaurants are re-opening, people are still wary about dining there. Restaurant delivery is an option, but it has ethical complications (it’s also expensive!). Having a personal cooker like a BonBowl could come in handy, especially if there’s a second wave of coronavirus on its way.

There has been some renewed interest in innovative at-home cooking appliances. Earlier this week, Tovala announced that it raised $20 million for its connected oven and meal service. The oven itself has a scan-to-cook feature that allows for easy meal preparation.

BonBowl is bootstrapped and was founded by Mike Kobida, a veteran product designer whose previous company, Spectrom3D was acquired by MakerBot in 2015. Kobida currently has three patents pending on the BonBowl.

Single people, or anyone interested in compact cooking appliances, can pre-order the BonBowl right now for $129, and it will ship throughout the U.S. on July 21.

CKBK, the Spotify of Recipes, Launches Guided Cooking with NEFF Partnership

Recipe subscription service ckbk announced this week that its guided cooking features are now integrated with the NEFF Home Connect platform, allowing users to control the NEFF N 90 oven directly from select recipes.

The partnership between ckbk and BSH, NEFF’s parent company, was announced last September. In an press release sent to The Spoon, ckbk said its subscribers can now choose from one of 2,000 Home Connect recipes and send the correct temperature, time and cooking method directly to the NEFF oven directly from the app.

The integration also works in reverse, so users can select a mode from their N 90 oven and be presented with a list of recipes specifically for that mode.

As part of the launch, NEFF is throwing in a three-month trial of ckbk for customers who buy a WiFi-enabled N 90 NEFF oven. That free trial extends up to six months if the oven is synced with the Home Connect app.

While the ckbk/NEFF partnership has been in place for months, the guided cooking space has seen some renewed interest lately in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic. People sheltering in place were cooking more and companies like Hestan made its Hestan Cue Cooking School available for free back in March. And earlier this week, Drop announced $13.3 million in funding for its “kitchen OS” software.

Will interest in home cooking continue as quarantines let up? Studies show that despite re-openings, consumers are still reluctant to go back into restaurants, so we won’t be abandoning our kitchens quite yet. And there are a lot of people out there who would probably still welcome some high-tech guidance with their cooking.

Kickstarter: The Otto Wilde G32 is a Connected and Modular Grill

A connected grill is nothing new. But a connected modular grill that expands and customizes as you like? Well, now you’re cookin’ with gas. Literally.

German grill maker Otto Wilde is in the final days of its Kickstarter campaign for the G32, the company’s smart, modular grill. The campaign itself has blown past its goal of $33,862 to raise more than $4.3 million on the crowdfunding platform.

The grill features a ton of high-end features and finishes like multi-zone gas grilling, four commercial grade burners that can reach a temperature of 810 degrees Fahrenheit, an and extra-long rotisserie burner. It also features an accompanying mobile app that works via WiFi and Bluetooth for remote control of the grill and guided recipe cooking.

But as I mentioned, these types of connected features aren’t new. The Traeger WiFire grills offers much the same remote control, and the Weber Smart Hub powered by the June OS brings connectivity to “dumb” grills.

But what Otto Wilde does offer is the ability to add a range of modular components to your backyard bbq set up. The system allows you to easily add more burners, sear stations, storage and more.

There are two versions of the G32 available to backers right now. The G32 Connected is €1,299 (~$1,500 USD) plus shipping for delivery in November of this year; and the G32 Smart, which features the ability control the grill remotely, guided cooking and burner grouping is €1,799 (~$2,000) plus shipping for delivery in March of 2021. That’s not cheap, but it’s also not beyond the pale if the grills deliver on their promise. And this being a Kickstarter project, delivering on that promise is always a risk (just ask Spinn backers).

We’re actually seeing a lot of technology and innovation coming to the outdoor grill. In addition to the smarts of Otto, Traeger and Weber, companies like Spark are combining high design with patented Briqs to reinvent cooking with coals.

Ironically, all this innovation comes at a time with the neighborhood barbeque won’t be the same given our socially distant summer. But that just gives people time to practice with their own families before dazzling friends next year.

Spark Grill Wants to Improve Charcoal Grilling. Will Grillers Go For Its Proprietary Charcoal System?

Memorial Day often marks the start of grilling season, and, like most Americans, I’m ready to fire up the barbie after being stuck inside for most of the past two months.

I’m currently using a standard gas grill but lately have been thinking about adding charcoal to my backyard cooking arsenal, which is why I was intrigued when I heard about the Spark Grill. The Spark, which just opened up for preorders this week, looks to essentially add the precision heating capability and ease-of-use of gas to a charcoal grill.

Here’s what Chris wrote about the Spark after the Boulder-based company announced its eponymously-named first product:

The stylish grill ditches the lumps of briquets for a single, flat charcoal “Briq,” and uses a series of stoking and cooling fans for precision temperature control.

The Spark is capable of getting temperatures between a low 200 degrees all the way up to a ripping hot 900 degrees. The grill also has an accompanying mobile app that lets you monitor the temperatures of your cooking cavity and the food you’re cooking.

Anyone who’s tasted food grilled over charcoal would agree the flavor is generally better, but I’ve stayed away mostly because charcoal is more work and I’m pretty lazy when it comes to my backyard cooking.

But from the looks of it, the Spark makes charcoal grilling as easy as gas. This ease-of-use is made possible by the grill’s unique charcoal “Briqs”, which are single-use sheets of charcoal made for the Spark. A standard Briq lasts for about an hour, though the company has indicated they will also have “Quick Briqs”, which go for 30 minutes for the mid-week quick grill, and are working on “slow and low” Briqs, which will go for a couple hours at smoking temperatures.

In short, the Spark presents a tradeoff: gas-like ease and precision with charcoal, but you have to use what is a proprietary charcoal system. I’ve become mostly resistant to hardware that is captive to a single-source for its consumables, but I think I’d be ok with the Spark and its Briq system for a couple of reasons.

First, the company’s FAQ says, technically, one can use regular charcoal with the Spark. This gives me some comfort that my grill wouldn’t be (ahem) “bricked” if the Spark stopped making Briqs for some reason.

The second reason is the company seems well-positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for home grills in a market slightly underserved with innovative new products. As we’ve learned recently with PicoBrew, startups tend to go out business, but it appears there’s strong early demand for the Spark, which helps alleviate (at least for the time being) concerns I would have about going all-in with a startup selling a proprietary consumable.

So while some traditional charcoal devotees might bristle at the idea of a proprietary system, I think there will be enough folks like myself interested in what looks to be an easier way to grill with charcoal to take at least take a look at the Spark.

The product isn’t cheap with a $949 sticker price, but if you hurry you can get in on the third drop (the first two sold out) and snap one up for $799.

Attention Nana and Pop-Pop: Facebook Portal Adds Recipe App SideChef

Over the past few years, the Amazon Echo Show has become extremely popular as a smart assistant for the kitchen, allowing consumers to quickly access recipes, watch videos, and connect to smart devices.

The Facebook Portal, on the other hand, has largely languished since its release in late 2018 as consumers resisted adding a video-enabled device to their homes from a company that has proven an unreliable steward of their privacy.

However, with the arrival of COVID-19, it seems like the Portal may finally be getting a little traction from its most reliable demographic (seniors) as many of the homebound silver-haired set looks for ways to connect with family during quarantine-times. And now, they can get in on some of that cooking action, too, as Portal added the SideChef smart recipe app to its store last week.

From the SideChef announcement:

SideChef’s signature “smart recipe” format ensures a seamless cooking experience for home cooks of all skill levels with its easy-to-follow guided video recipes, which has been adapted to also fit the screen size for Portal devices.

While the cooking guidance on a kitchen screen is a nice feature to have, I suspect it may be the integration with AmazonFresh that might be a bigger selling point for seniors. My own 70-something mom started using online grocery for the first time during the pandemic, and I’m sure she’d love to add items to her shopping list and order while working in the kitchen.

While the Portal does have Alexa built-in, I’m not sure if the Portal’s Alexa integration connects to Amazon’s delivery service via SideChef (SideChef does work with Alexa on native Amazon devices). If that is the case, it might just the recipe to sell my own Alexa-loving mom on putting a Portal in the kitchen.

For SideChef, Facebook is yet another partner in a long list of integrations for the guided cooking and smart kitchen app over the past few years including Samsung’s Bixby, Amazon Fresh (as mentioned), and GE/Haier to name a few.

According to SideChef, the app is available now for the Portal Mini, Portal, and Portal+.

Join Us and Seattle Food Geek for a Free Virtual Workshop on Building Next-Gen Kitchen Tech

Back when I learned Scott Heimendinger (aka the Seattle Food Geek) was leaving Modernist Cuisine, I immediately wondered what he was going to build next. After all, Scott is the guy who basically invented the consumer sous vide circulator, arguably the biggest kitchen cooking creation the last decade outside of the Instant Pot.

While Scott plans to keep much of what he’s building under wraps for the time being, that won’t stop me from trying to pry as much info as I can from him next week when he welcomes us into his home workshop to show off how he thinks about and prototypes next-generation kitchen technology.

We’ll also be joined by Larry Jordan, a long-time chef and kitchen tech maker who is known for bringing crazy cool ideas like a connected salumi maker to life.

If you’d like to join us for an interactive conversation and get a peek at both Scott and Larry’s workshops as well as into how they innovate and prototype and innovate new kitchen tech, you’ll want to join us next Tuesday April 21st for our live interactive event, Building The Future Kitchen: Rapid Prototyping Your Way to A Next-Generation Kitchen Product.

Come armed with questions and ideas for Scott and Larry to react to because we’re going to set aside plenty of time to take them. And who knows, maybe you can tease a secret or two out of Scott or Larry about their next big idea.

Sign up today!

With Consumers in Quarantine, Connected Cooking Companies Spring Into Action With Tailored Content

With a good chunk of the world’s population currently in quarantine, most of us are cooking at home a lot more nowadays.

Along with all this home cooking has come a massive spike in demand for information for culinary how-to, ranging from recipe suggestions to tutorials on how to do everything from making rice to baking bread. While many are simply searching Google for recipes, others are settling in to learn cooking skills to help them learn to get food on the table.

This sudden hunger for cooking-related guidance has led some tech-forward cooking startups to ramp up the content as they look to both satiate newfound interest in cooking skills while also giving quarantine bound consumers something to do with their time.

Here are a few ways in which kitchen tech startups have ramped up their efforts to serve homebound consumers:

Hestan Cue

While the Hestan Cue already walks users through recipes with step by step instructions, the guided cooking startup has launched Hestan Cue Cooking School, a series of virtual classes to help users of the connected cooking platform build up on their cooking skills during quarantine.

Built with the virtual class platform Teachable, the initial classes cover techniques for cooking beef, eggs and vegetables. The cool thing is that while the classes suggest you use your Cue for certain steps, you can use the classes even if you don’t have the Hestan device.

According to Hestan Smart Cooking managing director John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen, about one third of the Hestan Cue users have signed up for courses.

Anova

Sous vide specialist Anova has always been active in creating cooking content for their user community, and over the past month they’ve gone quarantine cooking focused by creating content to help consumers with everything from making pantry staples to batch cooking. And for the parents with bored kids, Anova suggests enlisting them to help with the brisket.

Thermomix

Thermomix is known for its in-person sales model for the high-end multicooker, but in the age of COVID-19 they’ve gone virtual with a “quarantine kitchen” series of cooking demos and are also allowing potential customers to book online cooking demos with the TM6 sales team.

You can see one of their latest episodes of their quarantine kitchen series below:

SideChef

SideChef is also ramping up its quarantine specific content. In early March they created a quarantine cooking recipe collection. A month later, and with virtual happy hours firmly planted in the stay-at-home zeitgeist, they’ve created a guide for virtual dinner parties.

Instant Pot

The massively popular pressure cooker is famous for leaning on its Facebook community to create content for them. Still, the company seems to have recognized our new shared reality and is letting people know that Instant Pots can help you cook bread while you’re cooped up during quarantine.

Food Network Kitchen

While the Food Network Kitchen app doesn’t seem to have created any tailored content for quarantine bound consumers, they have seen a big jump in usage and consumers look for more ways to cook. Company spokesperson Irika Slavin told me via email that Foodnetwork.com has seen “double digit increases” in page views and the Food Network App, the guided cooking premium offering launched in October, has seen what Slavin describes as a “triple digit increase” in visitors.

ckbk

ckbk is a ‘Spotify for cookbooks’ app that puts pretty much any cookbook or recipe just a click away.

Since ckbk only offers access to existing cookbooks, the company isn’t creating any quarantine specific content, but they do have a good idea of what people are cooking. Company founder Matthew Cockerill told me he’s noticed most of his subscribers, and the world in general, seem to be moving in sync over the past month through what he calls the ‘seven stages of cooking grief.’

“So first of all it was about the prepping – stockpiling durable good – beans and pasta,” said Cockerill. “Then came the “staff of life” basics bread and baking. And after that, I think, there’s a need for some comfort, yes, but also some relief from the monotony. Which is where I think chocolate and dessert cravings are kicking in. It’s either that or alcohol. And in many cases both!”

“Lastly,” he continued, “we’ve also seen a trend of interest in ways to use the new found time which people see stretching out ahead of them, with longer-term projects” like baking bread.

Cockerill told me that new subscriptions are up 250% over pre-COVID times. If you want to cook your way through grief, the company is giving away 30 days free access to their app to help you cook through your pantry items.

Spark Grill Launches Pre-Order Waitlist, Promises Gas Style Precision with Charcoal

I’m not a huge barbecuer, at least not enough to weigh in on any debate between gas and charcoal fired grills. But you know that gas gives you precise temperature control, charcoal gives you that added depth of flavor.

Well the Spark promises to marry the best of both of those worlds with its new eponymous grill, which was made available for pre-order last week. The stylish grill ditches the lumps of briquets for a single, flat charcoal “Briq,” and uses a series of stoking and cooling fans for precision temperature control.

The Spark is capable of getting temperatures between a low 200 degrees all the way up to a ripping hot 900 degrees. The grill also has an accompanying mobile app that lets you monitor the temperatures of your cooking cavity and the food you’re cooking.

But you can’t get your hands on one just yet. According to its website, you can only get on the waitlist to be notified when it does go on pre-sale (before the general public) some time in May of this year. The Spark will “start” at $799, though we don’t know exactly what that does and doesn’t include.

If it works as promised (and that’s a big if), that price point isn’t too bad. The (excellent) Traeger WiFire connected wood pellet smoker grill is $799, and the connected Weber Smokefire wood pellet grill (powered by the June OS) starts at $999.

BBQ season is just around the corner, and there are more connected grilling options than ever. The only question remaining is whether people will be able to connect in person for cookouts, or have to remain socially distant.