Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Topics

Vebu Scores Deal (and Investment) With Chipotle to Trial Avocado Processing Robot

Robotics, AI & Data

Last week, Mexican food fast-casual chain Chipotle lifted the curtain on a new avocado processing robot called the Autocado. The new prototype robot, developed in partnership with food robotics innovation studio Vebu, will slice, core, and peel avocados before human hands mash them into Chipotle’s famous avocado dip.

The robot is being trialed at the Chipotle Cultivate Center in Irvine, California. According to Chipotle, the new machine could potentially cut guacamole prep time by 50%, which they say will help restaurant staff concentrate more on customer service and hospitality.

The Autocado works by having an employee load it with a case of ripe avocados, up to 25 lbs at a time. Each avocado is then vertically oriented and moved to the processing device, where it is halved, cored, and peeled. The flesh of the fruit is gathered in a stainless-steel bowl, ready for manual mashing and seasoning.

If Chipotle decides to deploy the Autocado widely across its restaurant locations, it could save a significant amount of person-hours that the chain spends each year producing guacamole. Chipotle expects to use 4.5 million cases of avocados across its US, Canada, and Europe outlets this year, the equivalent of more than 100 million pounds of fruit. The company believes the cobotic’s precision processing could increase yield and reduce food waste, leading to significant cost savings.

For Vebu (formerly Wavemaker), the deal is a nice feather in its hat for a company best known for the Flippy burger robot. Chipotle announced they would invest in Vebu through its Cultivate Next venture fund as part of the deal. This isn’t the first robot-oriented investment for Cultivate Next, which has invested in Hyphen, a maker of automated makelines for restaurants.

You can check out the Autocado in action below.

The Chipotle Autocado Avocado Processing Robot

DiGiorno Debuts Pizza Vending Machine, and It Looks a Whole Lot Like Basil Street Pizza

Robotics, AI & Data

This week, Nestlé frozen pizza brand DiGiorno debuted its first-ever pizza vending machine, the DiGiorno To Go.

When I looked at the machine and watched the video of the DiGiorno to Go in action, I thought the machine looked familiar. That’s when it struck me: This DiGiorno To Go looks like a re-skinned Basil Street pizza machine. Take a look for yourself:

See what I mean?

My guess is this IS the same system. Readers of The Spoon may remember that Basil Street put its assets up for sale last year. While it’s never been disclosed who bought the company’s technology and associated IP, we now know whoever it was has (seemingly) is working with DiGiorno. For all we know, Nestle/DiGiorno may have purchased the assets.

In describing the project in the video below, Nestlé employee Bill Marks says that DiGiorno “did manage to partner with a hot pizza vendor to cocreate a hot pizza vending machine.” Vague, sure, but Marks’s job in the marketing video is not to go into the corporate machinations or details that brought Basil Steet’s technology to DiGiorno.

Either way, the pairing of Basil Street with a big frozen pizza brand like DiGiorno makes sense. I can see these branded machines popping up in cafeterias, public spaces like airports, or even grocery stores.

According to DiGiorno, pizzas from DiGiorno To Go will cost $9 and be ready in about three minutes. And yes, that is how long it took for a Basil Street machine to prepare a pie.

We’ve reached out to DiGiorno to see if we confirm whether this is, in fact, the Basil Street machine and will report back anything we hear. In the meantime, you can watch the Basil Street DiGiorno pizza vending machine in action below.

DiGiorno To Go Vending Machine

As Jobs Disappear, Could Restaurants Become a Battleground For Pushback Against AI & Automation?

Robotics, AI & Data

Last month, after 29 months straight of job gains, the number of total available restaurant jobs dropped. It wasn’t a huge dip – 800 jobs – but compared to the previous month’s gain of 24 thousand and monthly gains as high as 81 thousand at the beginning of the year, the dip was somewhat surprising, especially as restaurant sales have slowly but surely inched upwards throughout the year.

Could this be a temporary setback? Perhaps, but there’s also a possibility that it’s an early indicator of a long-term, potentially irreversible decline in the restaurant industry’s job market as emerging technologies come into play.

And by new technologies, I primarily mean automation and artificial intelligence. All one has to do is scan the headlines for the past 12 months to find that the restaurant industry has caught automation fever. Big chains ranging from Chipotle to Sweetgreen to McDonald’s are experimenting with ways to automate their restaurants.

And then there’s AI. Last month Wendy’s announced a new partnership with Google in which they are piloting a new generative AI solution called Wendy’s Fresh AI in a drive-thru in Columbus, Ohio. The company said this is the first of what could potentially be many locations that use the technology. Mcdonald’s has also been trialing AI technology, which its execs believe, in some ways, is better at handling customer interactions than humans.

“Humans sometimes forget to greet people, they forget, they make mistakes, they don’t hear as well,” Lucy Brady, McDonald’s chief digital customer engagement officer, told CNN. “A machine can actually have a consistent greeting and remain calm under pressure.”

This wave of new tech goes beyond robotic arms and simulated voices taking orders at the drive-thru. There’s been a recent surge – accelerated during the pandemic – in digital kiosks, mobile ordering apps, and QR code ordering at tables. These have resulted in an increased number of digital touchpoints designed to speed up the process and, to some extent, reduce reliance on human intervention.

It’s hard to fault the operators. A significant number of restaurant employees permanently exited the industry during the pandemic, and since then, operators have struggled to fill vacant positions. Despite offering higher wages and improved benefits, many open positions remain unfilled due to a lack of interest. If employees are hard to find, why not let technology take over?

Which brings us back to how we humans will be impacted by all this new technology. Workers are increasingly tasked with working alongside all this new tech, transforming job descriptions into something that can sound like working an IT help desk. Others find that technology is increasingly eating away at opportunities at the human connection aspect of the job they enjoy.

“Those points of connection get lost in mobile ordering,” said one former Starbucks barista. “So, it’s just like, ‘Here’s your order, bye.”

Then there’s the threat of job extinction as automation and AI take hold. While no big chains have deployed robotics or AI so widely that they’ve eliminated key positions in the front or back of house, it’s only a matter of time before early pilots become the primary engine of production. Sweetgreen has essentially proclaimed its new bowl-making robot is the future, and both Wendy’s and McDonald’s have hinted at broader applications of automation and AI.

As we teeter on the precipice of an automated and AI-powered restaurant industry, are we beginning to see signals of pushback stemming from job loss fears? There are subtle signs. When Chili’s showed off their trial of the Bear Robotics server in a video on Facebook last year, some commentators pushed back. “Quit trying to erase people!” wrote one. Another commented, “Another reason why I will never set foot inside of a Chili’s. You cannot replace a human in the hospitality industry.” Others are penning editorials saying that while operators may benefit from automation, workers and customers lose.

In certain instances, workers displaced by new technology have begun to retaliate. As detailed in our interview with restaurant operator Andrew Simmons, he struggled when a former employee who resisted the deployment of automation at his San Diego area pizza restaurant started making negative comments on social media and called in complaints to the local health department.

Are these initial pushbacks a sign of a larger anti-technology movement? That remains to be seen, but ignoring these early indications of a neo-luddite movement would be ill-advised, according to one professor.

“The various signals currently circulating in public discourse are not immediately obvious, nor are they specifically anti-technology or anti-progress,” wrote Sunil Manghani, a Professor of Theory, Practice & Critique at the University of Southampton and Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute for AI. “Yet, arguably, the signals are of a nascent sense of ‘protest’. Just as Hobsbawm reminds us, the Luddites were not opposed to machines in principle, but rather to those machines that were threatening their livelihoods and communities, we will likely start to see opposition not to software in principle, but various instances of software; opposition, then, to how and who deploy new technologies in the particular.”

Today resistance may manifest in an employee fighting back here or there or the occasional social media pushback against new automation. However, these intermittent signals could become the norm, especially if job numbers continue to decrease while more restaurants deploy robots and AI. Some studies say that over 80% of restaurant jobs could be handled by robotics, and some experts see millions of jobs being replaced through AI or automation within a decade.

And, of course, it’s not just restaurant jobs. Other lines of work, from creative to industrial, are threatened by new technology. And as more and more workers see unionization as the front line to a fight for more equitable pay, it’s also apparent – as evidenced by the Writers and Actors guild strike – the biggest fear about making a living in the future is whether or not employees will be replaced by technology.

Still, the restaurant industry, perhaps more than any other, is ripe for an automation and AI takeover, which is why I think that it could become the central battleground for the pushback in the form of an automation neo-luddite movement. Restaurant chains are the second biggest employer in the US, and two – Mcdonald’s and Yum Brands – are two of the top three employers in the country. Although Andrew Yang’s campaign warning of societal destabilization due to robotics and AI didn’t gain much traction in 2020, there’s a good chance he was ahead of his time, and we may see future politicians campaigning on an anti-automation platform with restaurants as one of the primary areas of focus.

Readers of The Spoon know we’re not anti-technology around here. In fact, we’ve covered just about every food robot out there and will continue to do so. But as we see more signals about potential pushback against the rise of automation and AI, I think it would be wise for the restaurant industry to begin to get ahead of this growing issue and think about how to balance new (and often necessary) technology with taking care of their employees.

Otherwise, they risk losing control of the narrative as more people organize to resist the impending AI and robot invasion.

Come hear experts talk about the impact of automation and AI on food jobs at The Food AI Summit on October 25th.

MIT & NVIDIA Researchers Are Building Tech That Could Enable Better Kitchen-Robot Precision

Robotics, AI & Data

This week, a group of researchers from MIT and NVIDIA are showing off a system that one day may be pivotal in helping our robot chef make dinner without making a mistake.

While robotic planning systems are good at developing high-level plans, they often fail when confronted with highly-complex environments. Because of this, the group wanted to create a task-planning system that performed well in complicated scenarios with many obstacles.

The project focused on developing a task and motion planning (TAMP) algorithm to help robotic systems solve mobile manipulation problems in difficult environments. The core of the algorithm is PIGINet, which the group describes as a transformer-based learning system that, for each proposed task plan, helps the system more quickly understand the success probability of a given motion trajectory.

Today’s robotic system task planners often fail when faced with the reality of highly complex and infinitely variable real-world scenarios, getting bogged down in processing how to navigate through the unique physical geometries of their environments. The seemingly infinite variety of small things in a kitchen – random items on a counter, the different locations of a pot on a cooktop, open doors and drawers – may be easy for a human to handle but can give a robot fits. With the PIGINet transformer, the system will be able to more quickly process through and understand the success probabilities of each course of action due to the specific start state and the given obstacles within.

According to the group, the PIGINet transformer-enabled task planner gives the robot a better chance of success by better understanding the various scenarios and each’s feasibility before they are executed. Their initial experiments showed that using PIGINet substantially improves planning efficiency, cutting down runtime by 80% on problems in relatively simple scenarios and up to 50% in more complex ones.

While the group’s initial effort focused on kitchen and food-planning tasks, it believes its system can be applied to other tasks within and outside the home.

While there have been a lot of venture capital dollars and product development hours spent on developing kitchen robotics, you can see by this project and those similar to it just how early we are in developing truly advanced kitchen automation. The kitchen is one of the most complex and variable work environments, and creating a robot that doesn’t simply automate a single repeatable process is extremely difficult. With projects like this one and EPIC Kitchens, we are laying the foundation for our robot chef future.

You can watch a video on their project and how it works below:

PIGINet: Sequence-Based Plan Feasibility Prediction for Efficient Task and Motion Planning

Researchers at Cal Poly Are Studying The Social Impact of AI & Robotics on the World of Food

Robotics, AI & Data

Last fall, a group of researchers at Cal Poly was awarded a $700 thousand grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the social and ethical impacts of AI and cooking automation.

The study will last four years and explore the benefits and risks to individuals and the impact on family and communal relationships, creativity and culture, economics and society, health and well-being, and environment and safety.

The study is led by Patrick Lin, a philosophy professor and director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at Cal Poly.

“Robot or AI kitchens would automate a special place and communal activity in the home, so that immediately warrants critical attention,” Lin said in the announcement. “Outside of the home, restaurants are one of the most essential and oldest businesses, given the primacy of food. They are the bedrock for an economy, the soul of a community, and the ambassador for a culture. But the pandemic is causing a seismic shift in the restaurant industry, and robot kitchens could be a tipping point that forces many restaurants to evolve or die in the coming years.”

According to Lin, the primary work output will be a public “ethics impact report” that evaluates the societal impacts of robots and AI on this “last mile” of food automation. This will include examining everything from robots flipping burgers or making restaurant pizzas to using AI and robotics in the home to produce and create complete meals.

It’s an interesting project that came onto my radar because Lin personally invited me to participate in a workshop hosted at Cal Poly to discuss the impact of robotics and AI on the last mile. While I usually don’t participate in these types of research projects, I decided to take him up on it since this is an area that I’m pretty fixated on of late.

One potential area I am particularly interested in is how human workers will react to the addition of automation to their workplace. While I expect some workers will embrace the opportunity to use technology to make their work-life easier, others will bristle or outright resent some of their previous tasks being taken over by automation.

One operator who experienced this firsthand is Andrew Simmons. He recently saw former employees undertake a social media campaign to disparage his restaurant for using robotics in the kitchen, including reporting the restaurant to the local health department. What’s interesting about Simmons is, unlike many of the headline-grabbing robot installations at national chains like Sweetgreen, he’s a small one-restaurant operator who is reinventing his entire restaurant workflow through an automation-heavy tech stack. I imagine other smaller operators will attempt to follow the template he’s created (he says he could automate future restaurants for $70k), particularly if he shows he can be successful.

As restaurant robots become lower-cost and more accessible, there’s no doubt society at large will need to think through what the impact will be. I’m excited to participate in Lin’s workshop to help think some of these through, and I hope to share some of the insights from the workshop. I will be limited in what I can share – Lin explained that the workshop would follow the Chatham House Rule, which forbids the identification of other participants without their expressed consent – but I do plan to write about some of the key insights discussed at the workshop in the future, so stay tuned.

For those who didn’t get an invite to this workshop and want to discuss this exciting topic, I suggest coming to The Spoon’s Food AI Summit, which is taking place in the Bay area this October!

Ansā’s New Roaster Uses Radio Waves To Roast Coffee on The Countertop

Foodtech

While we know fresh-roasted coffee tastes better, by the time store-bought beans make it into our coffee machines, chances are they were roasted months ago. But what if we could roast the beans right before they enter the brewer?

If a new company called Ansā has its way, coffee roasting will come to our office breakroom with its new e23 microroaster. The e23 takes green beans sent from the company and roasts them on the countertop without any smoke or ambient heat associated with traditional gas-fired roasting systems.

So how does the company’s roaster work? According to Ansā, the company uses dielectric heating, which usually refers to microwave heating-based systems. According to the company, the system’s computer vision (provided via a built-in camera) coordinates roasting with precision application of the radio waves to transmit the energy to individual beans, creating a highly precise and homogeneously applied roast.

When asked if the system uses an older magnetron-based heating (the heating system for the traditional microwave oven) or newer solid-state heating systems, Ansā wouldn’t specify, instead telling The Spoon, “We’ve designed a purpose-built EM system that allows us to digitally control the intensity and location of the energy concentration within the roasting chamber, in real-time.” My guess is since the system can direct energy with high precision, the system uses a solid-state amplifier to transmit the energy via radio waves.

The company also wouldn’t disclose pricing, saying, “Price is set by the distributors, and at their discretion.” I would estimate the machine would cost anywhere from $5 to $10 thousand, but will be offered at a much lower initial price, subsidized via a built-in coffee supply contract in which Ansā supplies the unroasted green beans for a fixed term.

The e23 is the first we’ve seen using RF radiation to roast the beans on the market. Coffee is traditionally roasted in big drums over gas-powered flames, an energy-intensive roasting process that produces lots of CO2, while newer electric small-footprint roasters like the Bellwether uses convection and conduction heating. According to sources I spoke to this week at the International Microwave Power Institute’s annual conference, microwave-powered coffee roasting is a topic the coffee industry is intrigued by, but it has yet to be commercialized (at least until this week).

According to Ansā, the company is working with a network of distributors across the US focused on the office/workplace segment. These Office Coffee Service (OCS) companies will sell the solution as a bundled service of ansā’s specialty green coffee beans and the e23 micro roaster.

SEERGRILLS Unveils the Perfecta, an ‘AI-Powered’ Grill That Cooks the ‘Perfect Steak’ in Two Minutes

Connected Kitchen

AI is seemingly everywhere nowadays, so it was only a matter of time before it would show up at the backyard BBQ to help us cook the perfect steak.

That’s the vision of a UK startup named SEERGRILLS, which debuted the Perfecta this week, which the company describes as the world’s first AI-powered grill. The grill combines high-temperature infrared cooking with its AI system called NeuralFire, which automates the cooking process.

According to SEERGRILLS CEO Suraj Sudera, the AI works through a combination of sensor data, cook preferences inputted by the user, and intelligence built into the software around different food types.

“The device will capture the starting temperature of, say, chicken breast and adjust the cooking in line with the preferences you’ve inputted in the device,” said Sudera. “Whether it’s a three-inch or five-inch chicken breast, it doesn’t matter. It will be whatever adjustments it needs, just like your cruise control on your car will adjust to keep you at the preferred speed.”

When a cook is done, users can rate the quality of the cook, which informs and optimizes the NeuralFire algorithm for the next cook. Suraj says that SEERGRILLS is also constantly updating its food database, so if, say, a new type of steak from Japan becomes popular, the AI engine will be updated to optimize the cook for that meat type. The company says its AI will also optimize to reach each type of meat’s sear and doneness, as well as help to perfect the Maillard reaction.

The hardware itself is somewhat unique compared to other infrared grills on the market in that it cooks meat vertically. The user puts the meat in a holder, which will sense the temperature and thickness of the meat. Once inserted, both sides are cooked simultaneously using infrared heat, powered by propane, which SEERGRILLS says can reach 1652ºF. According to the company, the grill can cook three ribeyes in one minute and fifty seconds, six burgers in a minute and thirty seconds, and four chicken breasts in two minutes and thirty seconds.

In addition to the grill itself, the company is also building accessories such as a rotisserie module, a pizza module, and a grill station. The company will start taking preorders in July and plans to begin shipping the Perfecta by the end of this year. Pricing for the grill and its accessories has not yet been disclosed.

🚀 Introducing Perfecta™ - The World’s First AI Powered Grill. 🚀

Karakuri Joins The Growing List of Food Robot Startups That Have Shut Down

Robotics, AI & Data

More bad news on the food robot front.

Karakuri, a startup that made a robotic food kiosk that assembles various cold and hot ingredients into prepared meals, is shutting down, according to founder Barney Wragg.

In a post on Linkedin, Wragg cited the pandemic and the challenging fundraising environment as the reason for the news and included a link to a Google Sheet with Karakuri employees who Wragg said it was “incumbent” on him to assist in finding new roles.

From the post:

It’s with a very heavy heart that I have to report that our journey at Karakuri is coming to an end.

For the past five years, we’ve developed and deployed robotics for the QSR industry. We’ve survived many challenges, including the pandemic and our bank going bust us, but sadly we’ve been unable to find the funding we need to move to the next level.

Most of all I’d like to thank the incredible team we’ve built. They’ve stayed dedicated to the challenge and built incredible technologies in the face of abject uncertainty.

It’s incumbent on me to help these great people find new roles, spread their wings, and share their talents with others.

Attached is a list of the folks who are available and their preferred contact details.

Please feel free to reach out to anybody you think you need or could help find new roles.

I’m also on hand to help in any way I can.

Thanks, Barney

While it’s a bummer Karakuri couldn’t survive, it’s not surprising. Food robotic startups suffer from several disadvantages, including incredibly long development cycles and being capital-intensive.

Ex-Picnic CEO Clayton Wood summed it up well in a Linkedin post where he explained that a food automation startup’s “existential risk is being successful enough at the seed stage and building momentum (and costs) toward your scaling stage, only to find no Series A/B/C investors. Without planning and execution, you will be unable to survive. Progress means spending–and cutting spending to stay alive eliminates progress.”

Clayton says he believes newer startups will benefit from an earlier recognition that they need be frugal from the outset, unlike many of the first-generation food robot startups who launched in what was a more friendly fundraising era.

I also expect more food robot startups will start to look to commercialize a product or a subsystem more quickly in order to get to positive revenue faster. As I wrote a few months ago after our food robotics mini-summit, investors like Buck Jordan see a path to revenue through offering a portion of a founder’s big idea to the market instead of waiting years until the full vision is realized.

“I suspect that some robotics companies who are a little more responsible, or a little more revenue-oriented, are going to start paring down their objectives,” said Jordan.

Jordan pointed to Creator, a maker of fully roboticized restaurants, as an example of a company he believes has valuable technology that could be ‘parted out’ to the market and be successful.

Make that had valuable technology. Creator didn’t ever sell a portion of its systems and instead tried to make a full robotic restaurant. The company shut down in March.

Podcast: How One Operator is Reinventing His Restaurant With Technology

Robotics, AI & Data

When Andrew Simmons decided to buy a restaurant in January 2020, little did the long-time entrepreneur know that in just a few months, he would be forced to close his doors due to COVID. 

But instead of giving up, he knew he had to get creative to survive. Survive he did, and when he reopened his doors, he kept tinkering, trying to figure out how new technology could make his restaurant more efficient. 

Andrew’s been an open book during the process, open-sourcing his learning as he navigates his journey via posts on Linkedin and a blog. He shares what works and what doesn’t, providing a potential blueprint for other operators thinking about how technology could change their business. 

During this podcast, Andrew and Mike talk about:

  • How the installation of a pizza robot from Picnic completely changed how he does business
  • How one piece of game-changing technology, like a pizza robot, forces other changes and adoption of new technology throughout the restaurant’s workflow
  • The impact of new technology on his unit price for pizzas 
  • How analytics software helped him realize his dine-in business was not profitable and how it changed his thinking about how he ran his restaurant
  • How he was forced to rethink how he used employees through the use of technology and how the employees (and former employees) have reacted
  • His pizza subscription concept and how he believes it can help him pay for opening new restaurants
  • Andrew’s plans to launch a 100-unit restaurant chain built using off-the-shelf restaurant technology

If you are considering using technology such as robotics for your restaurant, this episode is a must-listen! You can listen to the conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or click play below.

Is the Retro-Styled Wonder Oven The Future of Countertop Multicookers?

Next-Gen Cooking

This week, social media-savvy cookware brand Our Place dropped something entirely unexpected: a stylish 6-1 countertop multi-function cooking appliance.

At first glance, I found myself having difficulty processing what I was seeing. The Wonder Oven looked like what the cooking appliance of the future might look as imagined by someone in the distant past. The dissonance I experienced looking at the oven came in part, I think, from the advanced feature of an appliance that looked almost toy-like, or, as a Refinery29 editor described it, “an easy bake oven for adults.”

The Wonder, which can air fry, broil, roast, toast, and steam foods, comes in four different decidedly soft colors: char, steam, blue salt, and spice. The $195 price includes the oven, a baking pan, an air fry basket, a wire rack, and a crumb tray. The Wonder has a reasonably sized footprint at 11.6 in. (h)x 11.5 in. (w) x 10.6 in (depth) and a decent-sized cooking cavity capacity at 7.6 in (h) x 10 in. (w) x 10.3 in. (depth).

The Wonder is the latest in a wave of multi-function countertop cooking appliances that have come onto the market in recent years, like the Ninja Foodi and the Cosori Toaster oven. Some have steam capabilities, but usually at a higher price than the Wonder. The steam-enabled Tovala, which can be purchased for as low as $49, requires a commitment to the Tovala food service.

But the biggest differentiator for the Wonder is the stylish design readymade for viral Instagram posts. Nearly every multicooker on the market looks the same variation of the toaster oven, a big shiny steel rectangle box. With its big round dials and muted colors, the Wonder sets itself apart – much like companies like Smeg have done with their stand mixer – and from the looks of the breathless comments on their intro post on Instagram, Our Place may already have a hit on its hands.

In some sense, the approach by Our Place for its first cooking gadget reminds me of Dash from Storebound, which was acquired by Group SEB in 2020. Evan Dash, Storebound CEO, told me that his product lineup, full of kitschy-looking uni-taskers (waffle maker, sous vide egg bite maker, etc.), is designed to pop on social media, and he often took inspiration from his kids when designing the products.

However, unlike DASH gadgets, the Wonder has enough built-in utility to become a nightly go-to for young, design-conscious home cooks. And this combo of utility and attractive design might just be the future of the countertop multicooker.

Thin Margins & Competitive Moats: Analyzing Instant Brands Journey to Bankruptcy

Connected Kitchen, Next-Gen Cooking

Instant Brands, the parent company behind the Instant Pot, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today, as first reported by Bloomberg. The company, which also owns the Pyrex glassware brand, announced they’d reached a deal for a new $132.5 million financing line of credit to support the company as it navigates the bankruptcy process and figures out a new path forward.

Signs of trouble first surfaced for Instant Brands earlier this year when the Wall Street Journal reported the company had hired advisors to help it restructure. At the time, the company had a $400 million line of credit trading at a severe discount due to rising interest rates. According to Bloomberg, the combination of high-interest rates, waning access to new lines of credit, and a dwindling cash position forced the company to finally file for Chapter 11.

So what happened? How did Instant Brands, the company behind what was once the fastest-growing countertop appliance in the US, go from high flyer to Chapter 11 in just a few short years?

Below are some of the reasons I believe led to the company’s current predicament:

The Pressure Cooker Category Reached Saturation Very Quickly

Part of the reason for the success of the Instant Pot was the fantastic value for the consumer. In one multifunction appliance, the consumer had a rice cooker, steamer, bean maker, yogurt machine, sauté pan – you name it – all for $100 or less. It was hard to beat, which is why Instant went from zero brand recognition a decade ago to becoming eponymous with the category it created (or, in a sense, reinvented) in just a few short years.

The problem with exponential growth is you can get to market saturation very quickly. The product (and its clones) was affordable to almost anyone, and before long, anyone who wanted one had one. But unlike high-margin tech products like the iPhone, the Instant Pot isn’t something most consumers want to replace every few years.

Clones, Ninjas, and Narrow Competitive Moats

While the Instant Pot’s reinvention of the pressure cooker was an innovative take on an older category, it was easy to knock off. Because of this, it wasn’t long before a slew of low-cost copycats flooded Amazon and other online retailers.

At the same time, fast-moving brands like SharkNinja kept on innovating. They jumped on new cooking appliance categories (like air fryers) more quickly than Instant Brands, which has admitted to being late to the category. Instant’s CEO has stated the company is continuing to look for its next hit, even as it enters into financial reorganization.

In some ways, the ease with which low-cost copycats and brand-savvy bigger companies like SharkNinja were able to create similar products that were instantly competitive with Instant Brand’s showed just how small, in retrospect, Instant’s competitive moat was. In other words, there was no significant technology, manufacturing or brand differentiators that companies entering the market had to overcome.

Non-Premium Pricing and Low Customer Loyalty

While Instant became synonymous with the smart multicooker category, the brand didn’t necessarily build significant brand loyalty. Customers, who often bought their Instant Pot or clone for end cap fire sale pricing, didn’t necessarily view the Instant Pot brand as something unique or irreplaceable. Other categories like built-in ovens, refrigerators, or coffee makers usually have bigger price tags and connotations of premium user experiences. At the same time, the Instant Pot often seemed cheap in price and quality. Much of the damage around the brand’s low-rent image was self-inflicted.

Buy High, Sell Low

When Corelle and Instant Pot announced the merger of the two companies, the combined value of the new entity was estimated at around $2 billion. Much of that market value was attributable to the white-hot Instant Pot, which meant Corelle would pay out the nose to bring the company and its fast-growing product lineup into the fold.

While I don’t have the projections that Corelle put together to rationalize the debt load they would take on to finance the acquisition, it’s probably not too big a leap to say they didn’t forecast sales of Instant Pot cooling off as fast as they did. And, as detailed in the Journal in March, the company hasn’t come close to finding a successor hit to help the company get on the right path again. At the same time, the lean operating model of the Instant Pot’s early days (which had four employees in 2013) is long gone, making way for the layered corporate bureaucracy of Corelle (the combined company had 1,900 employees earlier this year).

The bottom line is Instant Brands became highly leveraged right as the product started to reach market saturation. In the following years, Instant has moved slower than its competitors like SharkNinja and Dash, who have come out with often better-looking products in new categories at equal or lower prices. The result is this week’s announcement.

It’s really too soon to tell how the company will far going forward. Post-bankruptcy, Instant will have a clean balance sheet but a much smaller innovation team, and without the company founder Robert Wang (who left the company’s operation in late 2021), it’s not clear where the next big company-changing idea will come from.

Cookware Darling Great Jones Gets Scooped Up by Meyer. Is the DTC Home Goods Wave Over?

Business of Food, Next-Gen Cooking

This week, Fast Company broke the story that Great Jones, a popular DTC cookware maker for the millennial set, had been acquired by cookware giant Meyer. In Meyer, Great Jones joins a portfolio of brands that includes Farberware, Anolon, Hestan (including the tech-powered products under Hestan Cue), Circulon, and Rachael Ray. According to Fast Company, Great Jones’s six employees will join Meyer, and cofounder and CEO Sierra Tishgart will become Meyer’s executive creative director.

Meyer is an interesting destination for Great Jones, a startup that experienced rocketship growth early on through viral social marketing through Instagram for products such as its “The Dutchess” Dutch oven. From there, the company rode a bit of a roller coaster through the pandemic, some internal strife, and ultimately ran into an icy fundraising environment as investors cooled on DTC startups in recent years.

The DTC cool-off struck across all consumer goods categories as it became clear, particularly after pandemic restrictions lifted, that growth would ultimately be limited unless brands established some brick-and-mortar channel strategy. DTC OG Warby Parker realized this fairly early, opening its first retail storefronts over a decade ago, which management has admitted have been so successful they have plans to open 900 of them.

But glasses aren’t cookware – you don’t need to try a pan on to see how it looks, after all – so why would the company need to show up on retail storefronts? Part of the reason is rising digital marketing costs, which have increased by 20% since 2021, and growing costs of direct shipping goods to consumers.

But perhaps the biggest reason is customer conversion in-store is often much higher than online, particularly as more and more brands have popped up across the cookware category in recent years. While Great Jones had already entered retail in places like Nordstrom, Meyer’s access to a vast array of brick-and-mortar retailers will no doubt accelerate the brand’s growth as it gets significantly more exposure to customers who primarily buy things through retail.

Still, even as one of the early success stories for DTC home goods gets scooped by a legacy home goods brand like Meyer, other DTC cookware startups like Caraway and Misen continue on. But word that Misen had a significant layoff last year shows that the high-flying DTC cookware brands of the past decade may continue to struggle unless they combine forces with a big, established retail-oriented brand or invest in building their own retail channels.

With the acquisition of Great Jones, Meyer – an admittedly staid brand outside of its venture into connected cooking with Hestan Cue – hopes to inject the DNA of an online native brand across the company, signaled by making Great Jones’ Tishgart the company’s new executive creative director. Smart move because, in the future, the companies that succeed will likely be those that have strength at retail and can also navigate social media and online channels.