Ever wonder how the PicoBrew makes beer? Carlos Rodela stopped by the beer brewing appliance company’s booth at the Smart Kitchen Summit got a walk-through of the product from the company’s head of marketing, Donald Brewer.
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Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman Talks About The Future of Cooking
As the personal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, it’s Wilson Rothman’s job to write about the technology that impacts consumers in their everyday life. Whether e-readers, Macbooks, or new mobile phones, if it’s a popular consumer platform, chances are Rothman has covered it.
But there’s one type of technology that is particularly near and dear to his heart: cooking. That’s because the former NBC News tech and science editor is a dedicated home cook, a hobby that can be traced all the way back to his childhood when his grandmother would whip together amazing meals for large family gatherings despite a busy schedule as a performer.
“I was born thinking about food and how to make food,” said Rothman in an interview at the Smart Kitchen Summit. “I attribute that to my Sicilian grandmother, who was an opera singer but managed to come home and cook elaborate meals for like a hundred people.”
One of the reasons Rothman loves cooking is it taps into his creative side.
“I liken it (cooking) to music. When you think about music and putting together songs and playing with people, you have to get everything right, but you have to know what you’re getting into even before you start. With cooking, that same creative gene kicks in with me where I know where it’s going to look like at the end, I know where I’m at to begin with, but what happens in the middle is anyone’s guess.”
For someone as dedicated to both the craft of cooking and technology as Rothman, one concern is how much these new advances could potentially automate the act of cooking. After all, can one stay true to the craft of cooking if the robots are doing it all?
Rothman says that one can embrace progress by trying to understand the science behind cooking as a way to become a better cook.
“What a lot of the technology products are doing are applying that knowledge (of science), because while I may be able to pore over a book by Harold McGee, but other people don’t want to do that and it’s not fair they are denied their steak because they didn’t read a 900 page book.”
“The science, what happens when bread is baking, what happens when the steak hits the pan, once you know that, you can achieve quite a bit with some very rudimentary equipment.”
To find out more about how Wilson Rothman sees the impact of technology on cooking and the kitchen, watch the video above!
Let’s Talk About Flavor for a Second (VIDEO)
Lately when I talk to chefs and home cooks about the type of food they want to make, I keep hearing the words “like my grandma used to make.” It’s become shorthand for all-natural, healthy food with honest flavor, created using painstakingly slow processes.
I’m totally on board, except for that last part, about the analog attitude. There’s so much technology that can vastly improve the taste and flavor of your food, so that it’s like what your grandma used to make, but even better.
Take a device like the pressure cooker. “A pressure cooker can produce exceptionally tender results while maximizing the flavor extracted from the ingredients,” writes molecular gastronomy guru Heston Blumenthal in the foreword to the Fast Slow Pro brand manual. Sure, you could spend more than 12 hours making chicken stock — or you could get even richer flavors in 1 hour with a pressure cooker, especially one with a screen that gives you instructions and tells you when everything is finished cooking. I recently started using one and have been astounded at the flavor of the foods I make in it: creamy roasted potatoes, intense stock, tender octopus, you name it. Grandma may not have cooked this way, but her recipes would have been even better if she had.
There’s another reason the analog logic doesn’t quite make sense: Grandma (or maybe great-grandma) used to grow her own tomatoes or buy them from a farmstand down the street. Now we go to a megagrocery store to get those tomatoes. “Our food system is not designed for taste and flavor. It’s designed for travel,” said Jennifer Broutin Farah, the CEO of SproutsIO, at the recent Smart Home Summit (watch the video below). That means the food we eat tastes more like cardboard than carrots, cucumbers, or kale. No wonder no one wants to eat their vegetables.
SproutsIO’s connected system makes it easy for everyone (black thumbs included) to grow their own produce at home: The device helps you grow vegetables and fruit from seeds in its modular system, and its smartphone app gives you real-time data about how it’s going. Plus it learns from you to help you grow better. The idea is that if those vegetables and fruits were easy to grow and tasted better, everyone would want to eat them, improving their overall health.
And it’s only one of many kitchen gadgets and products designed to improve your experiences with food, whether that’s growing, cooking, or eating it, to change our diabetes- and obesity-laden country into a healthier one. After all, as Farah said, “small-scale solutions that have high leverage can create great impact.”
These Design Trends Will Help You Create a Winning Product (VIDEO)
So you’ve finally finished creating your connected kombucha maker! But there’s only one model, it feels pretty cheap, and the app interface is built into the side of the device. Hmmm. According to Carley Knobloch of HGTV Smart Home, consumers may not be so excited about your product.
At the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit (watch the video below), Knobloch detailed the latest trends that can make a product stand out from the crowd.
“It should really be a sensory experience that tells our body in every way that we are home,” she said.
Personalization
First off, that means it should be unique to each person’s home. Consumers are looking for custom looks and features “so that everything looks as unique as the person,” Knobloch said. “The more you can accommodate different features and the ability to change features depending on every person’s or family’s needs, the better,” making the customer a partner in the design experience and that much more invested in your product.
This flexibility for the oh-so-precious millennials, who want an authentic space, as well as boomers, who are all about individualism. Two age groups, one stone.
Sensory Experience
Don’t stop at the visuals. Consider the sounds your product makes to create a happy Pavlovian response. Pay attention to touch, “the weight of it, does it feel substantial or does it feel flimsy; what’s the quality of the finishes, do they look polished do they look casual; is it fun to touch the touchscreen?” Knobloch asked.
She said that natural products are very en vogue at the moment: bamboo, plant life, woven baskets, pottery, macramé. Just as valuable: touchless faucets, induction burners, disappearing devices that can hide behind cabinets.
The Right Kind of Smart
Most of all, consider what kind of connectivity your consumers want. “They don’t want smart that isn’t future-proof,” she said, and “they don’t want smart that doesn’t respect their privacy.” On the other hand, they want smart that connects them with their food (think grocery shopping, meal prepping, and knowing what’s in their fridge) and smart that connects them to their family and the world.
Follow these guidelines and your connected kombucha maker might just become a hit.
Kitchen Tech Must Balance Longevity With Extensibility According To Appliance Execs (VIDEO)
One of the biggest challenges in bringing new kitchen technology to market is ensuring that appliances like smart ovens last a really long time.
How long? Up to 20 years, according to Paul Bristow, Sr. Product Manager at GE Appliances, who along with other appliance execs spoke recently at the Smart Kitchen Summit on a panel entitled ‘The Self Driving Oven’.
The reason for such longevity is simple: Because that’s the expected lifespan of an appliance like a wall oven in a traditional home. That’s a tall order for appliance makers, particularly as they start to transition product development cycles to more closely resemble those dictated by the technology industry, where it’s not unheard of for a product like a smartphone to become obsolete in just a couple of years.
But according to Steve Brown, head of Whirlpool’s Jenn-Air business unit, adding new technology features such as Wi-Fi may allow appliance makers to future-proof their products through remote software upgrades.
“The exciting thing about having the oven connected is it will stay more relevant over time,” said Brown. “When we launched our connected oven last December, it didn’t have any integration with Nest and now it does. We will be adding voice recognition very shortly.”
But ensuring longevity goes beyond simply adding connectivity like Wi-Fi. According to June CTO Nikhil Bhogal, it also means making sure the hardware can grow over time as new features come to market, which means taking a more forward-looking approach than many of today’s consumer electronics.
“If you look at today’s consumer electronics, they’re built to today’s OS (operating system) stack,” said Bhogal. “Within 2 years when the OS starts adding additional functionality, the OS starts adding new functionality, it slows down and it becomes obsolete in 3 years.”
According to Bhogal, this often means over-building the hardware capability to ensure that it can take on new features over time.
“Part of the approach should be building with headroom to grow,” said Bhogal, who went on to detail how June has utilized powerful components such as the Nvidia K1, a processor that powers some of today’s high-end mobile gaming devices, when building the June Oven.
David Kender, the VP of Editorial for USA Today’s Reviewed.com, asked the panel if appliance makers are starting to shift their product planning approach to factor in newer, more cutting edge technologies.
The answer is yes, according to Jenn-Air’s Brown. “There’s been a change in the sense of urgency in the last 15 months.”
When Kender asked why things have shifted in the last 15 months, Brown pointed to the reduction in cost of components and the realization among appliance makers that the kitchen has fell behind other parts of the home.
“The kitchen is one of the least connected parts of the home today, oddly enough, because its one of the most important parts,” said Brown. “When people ask ‘why would you connect them’, I would flip around and ask them ‘do you really think these expensive electronics will be the only things in our whole house that are not connected?'”
Connectivity Should Add Value, and Other Lessons We Can Learn From Juicero’s Business Model (VIDEO)
When Doug Evans decided to start a new company a few years ago, he asked himself one question. “What could I do that would have the biggest effect on human health?” he wondered. “The answer was juice.”
That might sound like hyperbole when talking about Juicero, the first connected-kitchen countertop cold-press juicer. We are talking about liquid kale, after all. But because of the company’s goals, functionality, and business model, which Evans discussed at the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle (watch the video below), it’s so much more. Here are three ways Juicero exemplifies a progressive mindset.
Make Something Useful
Unlike the big, bulky juicer that I have in my closet and never use, the Juicero is designed for people to use one to two times per day. It requires one touch to work and doesn’t need to be cleaned. Juicero provides ready-to-go packs of vegetables and fruit, delivered straight to your door.
“Is [a product] adding value to me as a consumer, or is it a liability because it means you have to maintain those services and consumers have to rely on those services?”
The company has set up an ecosystem that others can now use to maximize consumer health. “We have a cold supply chain, farm direct produce, IoT channel, appliances — You can use your imagination to think what else you can put through there that would make it easier for people to have other items that are made with fresh, ripe, raw, organic produce,” Evans said.
Connectivity Should Add Value
“Is [a product] adding value to me as a consumer, or is it a liability because it means you have to maintain those services and consumers have to rely on those services?” Richard Gunther of Universal Mind asked. These are essential questions in this wild west of connected-kitchen gadgets. In Juicero’s case, its app does everything from ordering automatically for enterprise accounts to telling home users that a pack in their refrigerator is about to expire. A scanner inside the juicer syncs with your app to tell you what you’re drinking, and if the pack is expired, the Juicero will not juice it. Talk about fresh.
Think Outside the Home
Evans is wisely following Keurig’s business model, focusing on restaurants, businesses, and other food service opportunities before moving to the end user market. The system only needs 10 square feet of space to work and doesn’t require someone to wash, peel, and juice produce as well as get rid of waste, making it an easy addition for restaurants and more.
Right now Juicero is only available in California and is available for purchase online. Watch the video to find out more!
The Recipe For Kitchen Tech Starts & Ends With The Consumer In Mind (VIDEO)
Jane Freiman spends much of her time in the Campbell’s Soup Test Kitchen diving into the minds of consumers in their own kitchens. “We go shopping with them, we go into their home, we watch them cook, we eat with them, we talk to them about food,” she explained to an audience at the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit.
The head of the test kitchen, Freiman explains their mantra – one that they had written on the kitchen walls that speak to this deep commitment to staying true to what their customers want and need.
“It starts and ends with the consumer in mind.”
After all, Freiman asks, “Who wants to develop a product that no one wants?”
The team at the Campbell’s Soup Test Kitchen look across generations to find commonalities and trends, even as technology and the sharing economy change old behaviors and patterns. And they’ve found interesting generational patterns; millennials and empty nesters, for example, have a lot in common in terms of what they’re looking for in the kitchen.
They’re both likely cooking for one or two people and struggling with how to do that easily. The empty nester is thinking – I only know how to cook these bigger meals for my family, how can I reduce waste and cook the right amount whereas younger cooks are unsure about how to get started and how to meal plan. Both generations include cooks that have passion for food, but the Millenials are the ones fueling the sharing economy. Where sharing recipes used to be between family and friends, it is now done through apps and online. It’s now possible to share recipes between strangers, across cultures and continents.
By studying trends in cooking and eating, companies can better understand not only if their product is serving the right need for the right audience, also find out if it’s the right time. Freiman emphasizes the importance of this in her work.
“As a test kitchen of a major brand – we have to look, watch and know – when is the right time for us to act? When is the right time for us to use that new technology?”
And Freiman is quick to point out that just because a consumer is tech savvy doesn’t just mean they’re necessarily younger. The explosion of Wi-Fi/Bluetooth enabled cooking instruments and the use of your smartphone to get recipes wherever you are is transforming consumer behavior across demographics.
“Our survey of consumers 18-65 showed that everything from the high-tech (connected devices) – to low-tech (spiralizers, microwave friendly pasta cooker) are considered kitchen tech. They don’t differentiate.”
The test kitchen survey also found the key things consumers are looking for in a tech product for the kitchen, including:
- The equipment should assist them with accuracy in their cooking; i.e. tell me when the food is done, tell me how I can cook perfectly every time and make it quicker so I can spend more time elsewhere.
- The devices should enable them to find ways to cook healthier; whether through methods, ingredients or recipe discovery, tech should focus on helping consumers source healthier meals.
- The gadget should be sturdy and easy to clean – and of course, easy to use.
Freiman cautioned the crowd not to deliver connectivity for its own sake, or to be too gimmicky with innovation. She stressed the importance for food tech and smart kitchen companies to be grounded in consumer insights and focus on what type of person they’re looking to assist in the kitchen.
“Know what tools they use, what they read, where they shop and where do they find recipes…” and make sure your product finds a path to making one or more of those easier and better.
Raised In Era Of Frozen Meals, Millennials Go Online To Learn How To Cook (VIDEO)
Back when Esmée Williams started working at Allrecipes in the late nineties, search inquiries on the massively popular recipe discovery site were, to say the least, a little basic.
“The top search term (in 1999) was ‘recipes’,” said Williams at the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle.
Nowadays things are a little different.
“Today the search terms are so much more granular,” said Williams, now VP of consumer and brand strategy at the site which brought in 46 million seekers last November. “It’s like pork chops, gluten free, paleo, ready in 15 minutes, no garlic. The cooks have become so much more sophisticated.”
Williams joined other panelists to discuss how social media and digital platforms are changing the way consumers discover recipes and teach themselves to cook. Alongside Williams was Tiffany Lo, producer for Buzzfeed’s Tasty, Kevin Yu, CEO of SideChef, and the session was moderated by CNET journalist Ashlee Clark-Thompson.
One big focus of the 30-minute conversation (which you can watch below) was how Millennials are changing food and cooking discovery.
Kevin Yu pointed out that food and social media are tightly intertwined for Millennials.
“There’s two most shared photos on the Internet,” said Yu. “The first is the selfie. The second is food. It really starts with food discovery, food passion. Millennials are incredibly passionate about food.”
Williams pointed to the upbringing of many Millennials to explain their hunger for cooking information online.
One hurdle for Millennials wanting to cook is “not having that right skill set,” said Williams.
“A lot of folks have grown up in homes where both parents worked, in the eighties and nineties there were a lot of frozen meals that hit the mainstream. Maybe they didn’t get the skills they might need. Certainly, video plays a huge role in helping them obtaining those skills.”
This hunger to learn no doubt helped fuel the rise of Buzzfeed’s Tasty, which has used its quick-play first-person perspective recipe videos to fuel its growth on the way to becoming biggest video publisher worldwide in early 2016. According to Lo, the idea started as something fairly simple.
“When we started out, we were focusing on YouTube before Tasty,” said Lo. “Then our editorial team started uploading single recipe videoes with their iPhone. A little over a year later, decided to make a team and page dedicated to food videos.” The results surprised even her.
“No one on the team expected it to grow as fast as it did,” she said.
When Clark-Thompson asked about the importance of community, Allrecipes’ Williams said she is continually amazed at how communal the act of cooking can be.
“It has amazed me at how willing people are to share their food experiences. On some recipes, we have ten thousand reviews. It always surprises me, what does that ten-thousandth person feel like they had to say that was so different than all the people before? They just want to say ‘hey, I made this too!'”
Yu said the combination of new hardware and software in the kitchen will create entirely new experiences in coming years, not unlike how it’s recreating the automobile industry today.
“When you have Tesla and you have made an incremental technological jump like adding an electric engine, that’s great for cars, but when you add the software piece, you have a driverless car,” said Yu.
“What is this new driverless car of the smart kitchen space?” he asked.
While the panelists didn’t have the answer for what the driverless car of the smart kitchen would be, Buzzfeed’s Lo did offer some guidance for product makers: follow the Tasty video model.
“Make it approachable and simple,” she said.
Watch video below:
