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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Highlights From our Future of Meat Food Tech Meetup

Last night we hosted our second food tech meetup. Folks passionate about the future of meat mingled over some excellent grub from lunch subscription service MealPal. One lucky attendee even won a Joule from our sponsor, ChefSteps!

Panelists Isaac Emery (Good Food Institute), Christie Lagally (Seattle Food Tech), and Ethan Lowry (Crowd Cow) had a really thought-provoking discussion about our relationship with meat, why industrial farming is so unsustainable, and the alternatives we can turn towards. If you missed it, here are a few topics and points that stood out to us.

P.S. Our next meetup is on June 27th and will focus on food waste solutions — mark your calendars and register to get your free tickets!

Meat labeling is frustrating.

“I hate labeling,” said Lowry. Factory-farmed meat companies can use clever labeling loopholes to make their products seem more ethical or high-quality. For example, beef can be called “grass-fed” even if it’s just fed pellets of grass in a small pen, and U.S. meat doesn’t have to disclose where it was farmed on the package. Which can be frustrating when companies like Crowd Cow try to show that their beef is truly grass-fed and local.

Of course, we also had to touch on the issue of labeling with regards to lab-grown meat. This topic has been popping up in the news as of late; from provisions in the proposed farm bill to Missouri’s declaration of what is and isn’t meat. People (and Big Beef) are wondering: will clean meat actually be considered meat?

We didn’t solve that problem in our 40-minute panel, sadly. But the panelists did agree that labeling really needed to be more accurate and transparent — for meat and meat alternatives.

Education is critical — sometimes. 

People don’t always know very much about the meat they eat. In fact, they often don’t want to. “Nobody wants to see how the sausage is made — literally,” said Emery. Which is why education is such an important part of his, and Good Food Institute’s, mission. In order to promote meat alternatives, Emery and GFI work not only to inform consumers about the negative environmental effects of animal agriculture but also about new options, such as lab-grown meat.

Education is key to Crowd Cow as well. By giving their customers information about the farm where the meat was raised, they set themselves apart from the veiled sourcing of industrial meat — and justify their higher prices.

Interestingly, education — at least on the part of the consumer — is not all that important to Lagally’s mission at Seattle Food Tech. She’s marketing her plant-based chicken nuggets to institutions, such as schools and hospitals, as a healthy, easy-to-prepare option that costs the same as the meat alternative. So when kids go through the lunch line and get her plant-based nuggets instead of ones made of chicken, the point isn’t that they necessarily care that they’re eating something vegan. In fact, the point is that they don’t care — all they’ll notice is that it tastes good.

 

So, what’s the future of meat?

Lowry summed it up best when he said that the future of meat would be “complex.” If we learned anything at this meetup, it’s that there are a myriad of new ways to create and purchase meat (and meat alternatives), all of which are relatively new. (And, in the case of lab-grown meat, yet to be on the market.)

So as unsatisfying an answer as it is, the truth is that we don’t know what the future of meat will look like. But what we do know is that there will be a lot more options than there are now: more (and better, and cheaper) plant-based meat products, higher-quality meat with transparent supply chains, and, hopefully, clean meat as well.

    That’s a pretty rosy view of the future. But if we can make these alternatives convenient, affordable, and good-tasting, people will hopefully turn towards them and the amount of factory farmed meat will fall. “If we build it, they will come,” concluded Lagally. And that’s exactly what they’re working to do.

Thanks to everyone who came out for the meetup! See you on June 27th. 

Video: James Ehrlich Talks Food, Epiphanies, & the (Eco)Village of the Future

Take a second, right now, and picture the community of the future. Are there green roofs, lazily-turning windmills, and streetlights powered by solar energy? Maybe even a lawn-mowing robot or two?

James Ehrlich, CEO of ReGen Villages, has a pretty innovative vision for how neighborhoods of the future should look and function. After a career as a tech entrepreneur and television producer for The Hippy Gourmet, with a few epiphanies along the way, he came to the sobering realization that “the planet is, in fact, falling apart.”

In response, Ehrlich began sketching out plans for modern ecovillages with food “not as a sidebar or a flourish, but as the actual mechanism for how a neighborhood infrastructure is built.” ReGen Villages is currently in the midst of construction their first pilot community in Almere, Netherlands, with plans to expand.

After he wowed us with his optimistic vision for the future of homes, neighborhoods, and communities at the Smart Kitchen Summit last year, Ehrlich sat down with Allen Weiner of The Spoon chat with about epiphanies (and breakdowns), the concept behind ReGen Villages, and what’s on the horizon (hint: their ecovillages might be coming to a state near you!).

Psst—look out for videos from past Smart Kitchen Summits every Friday on The Spoon. And if you’re in Europe (or just want an excuse to EuroTrip), register for SKS Europe, coming to Dublin in June.

Chef Philip Tessier Thinks Tech Can Help Create A New Generation Of Cooks

Phil Tessier is a busy guy.

In his day job as culinary director for Hestan Smart Cooking, he’s spent the past couple years working with a team of software developers, hardware makers and culinary experts to bring a new smart cooking system in the Hestan Cue to market.

He’s also spent much of the past few years helping the US win its first silver (2015) and gold medals (2017) in the world culinary championship, Bocuse d’Or.

And if that wasn’t enough side-gigging for you, Tessier just published his first book, Chasing Bocuse: America’s Journey to the Culinary World Stage, his account of the journey to the pinnacle of competitive culinary cooking.

I caught up with the Chef to talk about his new book, hear the story of team America’s ascent to the top of competitive culinary world, and to see how an elite chef like Tessier views technology’s role in bringing a new generation of cooks into the kitchen.

But first, since Tessier had previously worked for one of America’s preeminent chefs in Thomas Keller and is currently seeing his own star rise rapidly since he helped America come home with the gold, I wanted to ask him about the emergence of chef as celebrity in America and beyond.

According to Tessier, being a chef became more desirable over a long period of time in large part due to the advancement of technology. “In the 1800s, one of the highest mortality rates in a profession was being being a chef. You’re breathing in coal smoke all day long. With the invention of modern stoves and ventilation in kitchen, that profession has been able to elevate with advancements in the kitchen.”

Tessier also believes perceptional shifts in the broader culture helped contribute to the chef as celebrity. “When you look at how that’s changed culturally, you’ve seen this change from a blue collar profession, where it was ‘I’m not smart enough to do anything else’ to where this is is a goal from a young age.”

Tessier says that the switch towards chef being a high-status job happened in places like France and Japan first, while the shift in US happened more recently as shows like Top Chef created what eventually became the celebrity chef.

After helping win team US win silver as a competitor in 2015 and gold as the head coach this year, Tessier spends lots of his time nowadays thinking about the future and how to help instill the excitement of cooking in young people. Conveniently, this is an area where his work with the Hestan Cue aligns well with his role as a coach and teacher of young chefs.

“One of the most intriguing aspects is it is the excitement that kids have,” said Tessier.

Tessier recalled a recent event in New York City where his team “had an 11 year old do the brown butter sauce we did in the competition on the Cue. We measured everything out and she did it all by herself.”

“It would be so hard to teach someone all the important steps along that way. For us, bringing people into the kitchen, getting people excited about ‘I made this’, that’s where it gets really exciting and rewarding for us.”

If you want to hear my full conversation with Philip Tessier about the journey to Bocuse, the evolution of being a chef in America and abroad, as well as how he thinks technology can help create more excitement in the kitchen, you’ll want to check out the latest episode of the the Smart Kitchen Show.

Just click play below or download the podcast on Apple Podcasts!

Josephine Looks To Change Cottage Food Laws In Effort To Expand Home Cooking Marketplace

Today’s a big day for Josephine, the startup behind the ‘cottage food’ sharing platform and marketplace that enable home cooks to sell food to their neighbors.

That’s because today is the day a bill is being considered by the Health Committee of the California state legislature called the 2017 CA Homemade Food Operations Act (edit: the bills name was changed to “AB 626—The 2017 Homemade Food Act” in the form it went before the committee). The bill, which Josephine management helped craft and introduce, would expand California’s current cottage food law to allow aspiring home-based food entrepreneurs to sell home cooked meals to neighbors.

(Ed Update: The bill passed out of assembly on April 25th. You can read our story here). 

That’s naturally of interest to Josephine, which has built a platform which can more or less be described as an “Uber for cottage food” (although it should be noted the company resists the negative connotations associated with platforms like Uber). The problem for Josephine, which is based in Oakland, is that the sale of home cooked meals to neighbors is not allowed under current California law. As a result, about a year ago home cooks using Josephine received cease and desist letters, which eventually led the company to shutting down operations in the east Bay area.

The company, which has investments of about $2 million from Kapor Capital and angel investors, believes home cooks with the proper licensing should be able to sell food to their neighbors. And why not? Just as how Uber, Airbnb and other sharing economy platforms gave entrepreneurial folks a marketplace to rent their underutilized assets – whether that be a car, apartment or a person’s own time and labor – it’s logical that there’d also be demand to do so with home cooked food. In fact, it would be hard to argue there isn’t a large potential market of people on both sides of the equation – those who can cook and need to make some extra money, and those who like to eat – to make a marketplace like Josephine successful in the long run.

I caught up with Josephine cofounder Matt Jorgensen to ask him about Josephine’s efforts to change California’s cottage food law and also get a little backstory about Josephine.
You can keep up with the status of Josephine’s efforts and the California Homemade Food Operations Act at their blog.

When was Josephine forced to halt operations?

Jorgensen: In April of 2016, several of our cooks were served Cease and Desist warnings from local health regulators, which lead us to halt operations in the East Bay. This ultimately led to our good faith collaborations with State health regulatory coalitions in CA

With the Homemade Food Operations Act (Editor Note: Bill name was changed to “The 2017 Homemade Food Act:), when is a vote expected on this bill?

First the Bill must pass through Health Committee next Tuesday April 25th, and we expect the legislature to vote at some point in the early summer.

How does California compare to other states in terms of legality around cottage food as a business?

Jorgensen: California is essentially on par with the 30+ states that have passed Cottage Food laws.

Like many states, certain California cooks with the access and means can apply for cottage food permits as hobbyists, but the law doesn’t allow for the sale of most financially viable/ culturally relevant products… instead it’s focused on certain shelf-stable foods (jams, granolas etc). So we haven’t seen CA yet push beyond others in terms of the available food types. Several states go further, with Wyoming’s “Food Freedom” law being the most open.

Do you see this bill as the first in a push towards national rolllout? (And will other states follow suit)?

Jorgensen: We’re taking a different advocacy approach in each state– while we’re supporting Garcia’s legislation in CA, we’re actually looking at various administrative paths in other states. In Portland for example, we have strong support letter from the Mayor for a proposed pilot program. In other states like Wyoming the low-risk behaviors we are proposing are already legal.

How does Josephine business work? Is it similar to other sharing economy services that take a % of the overall bill? Charge a flat service fee?

Jorgensen: There’s no cost to set up a cook account or post meals. For each meal cooks serve, they keep 90% of your total sales and 10% of your sales will go toward covering credit card fees and the cost of our services. We also partner with values aligned non-profits for no cost.

How does Josephine find new cooks?

Jorgensen: Mostly through word of mouth and through offline communities. Many cooks are already partaking in the types of activities we support before choosing to partner with Josephine.

How does Josephine ensure people are going to be quality cooks? I assume getting a “cottage cook” license (as permitted by the bill) would be one step. But are there other things you do?

All cooks go through a vetting process from the masters of public health on our team and have access to our knowledge base before posting their first meal. We work with them to ensure a quality first experience, but all meals are also reviewed by customers (built-in accountability).

Is Josephine the only cottage cooking platform app, and if so why hasn’t this market taken off (is it legal restrictions, or something more as well).

Jorgensen: Some other companies have tried to make this business work, but we believe we are still in the early days of building the cook confidence and public trust necessary for this business to succeed.

How big is Josephine and what is your funding?

Jorgensen: We have a few hundred cooks across the country, a staff of 10 in Oakland, CA, and funding from a handful of different impact, angel, and venture capital investors. We’ve raised a little over $2m so far from angel and impact investors including Kapor Capital.

Sous Vide Startup Mellow Gets New CEO, On Track To Ship This May

The Spoon has learned that Mellow, a startup that has gained attention for development of a hybrid sous vide appliance with unique features such as a built-in refrigeration and a scale, has a new CEO. Long-time supply chain executive Gary Itenson, who served as the company’s COO for the past year, has stepped into the top spot and former CEO and company cofounder, Zé Pinto Ferreira, has left the company.

The change caught me by surprise because it’s a bit unusual for a CEO to leave on the eve of shipping its first product, but also because when I checked in with Ferreira at the end of last year, things seemed to be on track. The company has just secured a new relationship with contract manufacturer Flextronics and the Mellow appliance was expected to ship in the spring.

In an interview, Itenson has told me that the first shipments of Mellow are still expected to ship in May.

“We announced this past Monday to our pre-order customers that Mellow deliveries will start at the beginning of May,” said Itenson. “Based our production schedule and transit time all of our early backers will have a Mellow to cook with in their kitchen by mid-June.”

I also asked Itenson about the departure of Ferreira and the outlook for the company (I reached out to Ferreira for a comment but have not received a response).  You can see Itenson’s answers to my questions below.

Wolf: Ze Ferreira is no longer with the company. It’s unusual for a founder to leave before shipping product, so can you tell us the reason for the departure?

Itenson: I joined Mellow March 2016 as COO and as you know the journey for any startup, especially Hardware, is never easy and in hardware sometimes the COO can play a more pivotal role than the CEO. Both co-founders, Ze and Catarina Violante felt late last year that, as we moved closer to shipping, transforming Mellow from a product development team to a more robust operational entity was vital. At that time, I agreed to take over as CEO, with our investors’ full support.

Catarina has continued on as our VP of Product and has always driven the software and hardware side; while Ze decided on his own to leave the company but did so at a time and in a way to ensure we could keep moving forward without any disruption.

Wolf: Was this a decision made by the board members/investors?

Itenson: It was a decision made by the founders and I, but ultimately it was done with the complete support of the board.

Wolf: What is your background and how is Nex-Solutions (Itenson’s previous company) related to Mellow if at all?

Itenson: I have three decades of manufacturing, operational and business development experience within the hardware industry and I have lead teams that have scaled fast and effectively. Prior to Mellow, Nex- Solutions was a company that I founded 10+ years ago, based on the premise of helping domestic companies source and manage Asian supply networks.

Over the years I have worked with a number of companies and founders in the Bay Area, which is how the co-founders and I got involved. I am a passionate home Chef and I was really enamored with the Mellow product. It has fantastic potential for busy people and to truly bring healthy and convenient eating options to the home.

Wolf: Can you clarify the relationship with Flextronics?

Itenson: After joining the Mellow team last year, we saw that Flex was a clear choice to help us take a product from prototype to mass production. The relationship is one of a customer and supplier partner, however the senior management at Flex in China have really embraced Mellow. They love the product concept and as such, they have been more than supportive in applying resources and assets to insure we ship a great product.

Wolf: Ferreira indicated the technology was “harder to scale than originally thought” when I interviewed him in the fall. Have you overcome the difficulties around trying to do a combo sous vide/refrigeration unit?

Itenson: Yes, very much. Again hardware is hard and taking this extra time has made all the difference. Over the past several months we have had Mellow units in the field with select individuals that range from Sous vide experts to busy families and the feedback has been tremendous.

People are so enthusiastic about the refrigeration aspect and how this brings a completely different experience and convenience to sous vide cooking, with nothing like it in the market. Everything we have thought Mellow could be is now becoming a reality and we are very excited.

Wolf: What is the intended ship date and price point for retail (or ball park)?

Itenson: As mentioned the ship date starts in May and by mid-to late June customers will be able to purchase a Mellow unit from stock via our website. Pre-order pricing will be ending soon and going forward we expect $499.00 to be our target retail price.

While our price is higher than other sous vide products in the market, we feel that the Mellow, being a stand-alone appliance -with the unique ability to refrigerate and cook at a time you choose- justifies the higher price. Of course our long-term goal will be to bring down the price but we don’t see that happening for some time.

Want to meet the leaders defining the future of food, cooking and the kitchen? Get your tickets for the Smart Kitchen Summit today.

Full Transcript: Talking VR, Virtual Eating & Smart Design With Google’s Basheer Tome

Last month I talked with Basheer Tome, the lead designer for Google’s virtual reality hardware. We covered a lot of ground, from how virtual reality will change how we live in the home to virtual eating to smart design and new interfaces.

You can listen to the podcast here or read the full transcript of this very informative conversation below.

The conversation was edited slightly for readability.

Michael Wolf: I don’t think you’re the only one at Google on their virtual reality side of things – but you’re a hardware interface designer for virtual reality with Google. How are you doing, Basheer?

Basheer Tome: Good, good. I’m actually the only one by title…

Michael Wolf: You are?

Basheer Tome: [laughter] Yeah. I’m trying to make this a thing. There is a sort of unproven space between industrial design and user experience design that generally gets covered by one or the other, but there is like the people, the actual designers who care about a product looks and how it sort of has its own brand and the aesthetics, and there’s the user experience designers who are worried about like what buttons are on it and how do those work, how do those function, and how people use the product, but very often one or the other has to do both of those jobs when it comes to the actual buttons on a piece of hardware.

Usually it ends up getting skewed one way or the other or you get something beautiful that’s hard to use, or you get something easy to use that’s quite not so appealing. I try and sit in between the two and help connect them together, and I think a lot about how something like feeling in your hand, how good it clicks, and how easy it is to use and how you can remember where all the things are and how they work.

I think part of the interest on the food side for me is that for some reason all these kitchen manufacturers, the minute they put a chip on it, they forget everything they’ve ever learned and just go nuts.

Michael Wolf: [laughter] I will definitely dive into where your thoughts are around some of the products being designed for the kitchen because there are a lot of different attempts, a lot of different things going on. But let’s talk a little bit more about what you’re doing every day at Google. Google, as many people know, is investing heavily in virtual reality, but the way you think about it and based on our early conversation, you guys are trying to make it somewhat more of a platform for something other than just gaming because a lot of people are thinking of virtual reality in the context of let’s play a really immersive video game, but you guys are going to try to make it more broadly applicable to our wife in a lot of different respects.

Basheer Tome: Yeah, we really virtual reality and augmented reality, and there’s like a third variant – mixed reality which is more mediated – but we really see these spatial computing platforms as really like the next version as we know it. It may not take over 100 percent of the way you interact with computers, but we do see that as a major step and a major piece going forward. For that to be true, it has to break away from being just about gaming. I think there’s a lot of really great gaming experience you can have and experiences I personally I already had, but it really comes down to trying to take this thing that people tend to enjoy already a little bit on the gaming side and trying to open it up to the rest of everyone, and we do that through creating apps that actually are relevant to them, that helps solve needs and problems but then we also think about how to bring down the cost to make it more accessible, work with other manufacturers and partners so that there is a wide variety of platforms with different abilities that sort of market to those people, and we’re really trying to turn this into a more broad generalized platform more than just a gaming rig.

Michael Wolf: For people who aren’t into this idea of virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, very briefly explain what the differences are between those three.

Basheer Tome: Sure. virtual reality is where you’re putting a headset on your face made out of cardboard, plastic, or fabric, and really there is a screen in there, and in an ideal world we’re tracking where it is either rotationally in an ideal world in a free space and it really feels like you’re replacing your entire reality around you with a virtual one and you’re interacting with that and that can happen over digital space and you can interact with other friends. But for the most part, you’re taken to a different place.

With augmented reality, you stay in the same place and we’re actually overlaying information on top of that. What that generally means is that’s you have a transparent display rather than something opaque and ‑

Michael Wolf: Like Google Glass?

Basheer Tome: No. I think that’s one of the biggest mischaracterizations of Google Glass because Google Glass never put stuff directly between the majority of your vision and what you’re looking at. Google Glass, we call it the heads-up display, which sort of stays in the corner of your eye and it’s supposed to be like a more comfortable easier to use notification center and image capturing device rather than actually augmenting everything you see.

Mixed reality is more of a hybrid in between step, so right now with augmented reality, one of the biggest drawbacks is that you overlay light on top of what you’re seeing, and so a lot of times you can’t really replace what you see. You can only add stuff on top. Mixed or mediated reality ends up being more of you actually have opaque pixels and you can actually replace things that you see in your vision and oftentimes especially you see nowadays it means using a screen but then you’re using a camera to actually show you what’s going on outside and then you’re editing that video live rather than just having to overlay it purely on top.

Michael Wolf: When you talk about augmented reality, some of the earliest I guess instantiations of that coming into the world, I remember we’re on Android phones, you would have a smartphone and you would kind of move it around, and through the camera, you would overlay information on top. Is that basically what we’re talking about the most common form of augmented reality today when you’re using some sort of smartphone app?

Basheer Tome: Yeah, I think nowadays that’s definitely the most common variety of it. I think one of the biggest drawbacks it has right now is oftentimes it doesn’t really have a whole lot of awareness about what’s actually in your world. It knows generally what you’re looking at and that you’re rotating the phone and it can put stuff on top. I think Pokémon Go is a great example of that where you see the camera behind and the Pokémon is sort of getting there and they might try to do some clever stuff with the Pokémon laying on the ground. But for the most part, it doesn’t know if there’s a chair there or it doesn’t know if there’s a door. It’s not as smart as it could be and I think when people talk about the future of augmented reality, it’s much more in-depth and much more involved and that’s part of why we haven’t really gotten there as much yet because you actually have to start scanning the world, tracking the world, and knowing where every single object is in free space.

Michael Wolf: In Pokémon Go, correct me if I’m wrong, I think it basically takes GPS data to give it a basic understanding of the world, but it hasn’t really gone through the physical world and created like this really nuanced process database of all the spaces. Am I right on that?

Basheer Tome: Yeah, that’s correct. I think in a true augmented reality world like the way people use the term, if you were looking at a Pokémon standing in the parking lot, then someone else could be looking at it in the exact same space, it in the exact same position and you’d be both looking at the same one. Whereas today with the game, you’re generally in the same location, you end up finding the same Pokémon but they might not be in the same spot.

For Pokémon Go, it’s still a great fun experience and so I think finding and intuiting the fidelity of games and applications to the fidelity of the actual experience you are able to bring I think can help still make compelling experiences. You don’t have to have like a fully augmented reality world for you to have a great time.

Michael Wolf: When you look at the capabilities of what we have today in augmented reality, in a home context, I want to talk a little bit about how possibly you can apply this type of technology within our homes to make it a more rich experience. I can certainly see how it would be valuable for people with maybe they have mobility issues. When it’s dark, they can’t see but they can maybe you use augmented reality to identify things in the surroundings. Do you see huge potential using augmented reality or even virtual reality within the home context?

Basheer Tome: Yeah, I think there is definitely a crazy amount of possibilities for that, and I think the vast majority of them are stuff we can’t even really think of until we have the technology out there. I work on the input teams specifically and we all sort of report up to this more virtual augmented reality and mediated reality. It’s a big combined department.

Michael Wolf: When you say you put the information, you’re taking in information from around the world to process?

Basheer Tome: No, it’s less on the sensing side and more on how a person interacts with this device.

Michael Wolf: Got it, okay.

Basheer Tome: Yeah, much more design-centric and people centric than technology centric, and so we interact with the techno team a lot actually, and we work with them, trying to think of different ways people can use this technology in integrating it in their daily lives. I think Tango especially has gotten me pretty excited about all of these possibilities and how fast they will be coming. I mean there’s already multiple things coming down the pipe, and we’re really looking at sort of a more broad option of the technology.

Michael Wolf: For the audience, very quickly explain the Tango concept.

Basheer Tome: Sorry. Tango is our first-party augmented reality tracking system that uses a camera and a few other extra sensors that are relatively cheap to reconstruct your world and actually figure out where you are absolutely positioned to the entire Earth, which is crazy and awesome, and so it actually can figure out like not just where are you in the world or where are you generally but it knows that you’re in this room in this exact spot and you’re looking at this door that it has seen and scanned before.

Michael Wolf: For each person’s reality in their space, their life space that they’re moving around in, it creates its own unique personalized database, it’s going to know my home, it’s scanned it before. Then from there, it can add richness to that. It can maybe add information and interactivity?

Basheer Tome: Yeah. I mean I think what’s unique about is that yeah it can keep personalized data about you and sort of you can save your own data, but I think what’s unique is that it actually has a unique recollection of say your desk, and it knows where it is and that you’ve looked at it, and so that if you had placed a box on your desk, then your friend can come over, open up their phone, start to boot up Tango and start up an app and they can also see that same box in the same place.

Basheer Tome: Yeah. It’s really starting to catalog and connect all these things in real life, in real space.

Michael Wolf: So I don’t have to actually buy my wife like a real gift. I can just create a virtual gift and leave it there for her?

Basheer Tome: [laughter] You can let her know that she has a real gift.

Michael Wolf: [laughter] I think it’s probably a good idea to keep buying stuff. That’s the general rule. Yeah, my wife will probably like my virtual reality in part because she doesn’t necessarily like ‑ I don’t think she likes the idea of virtual reality and that’s another topic entirely.

You know when you go to like Universal Studios, all the rides now are basically you’re moving around in this chair that goes around, but you’re basically looking at a screen and it’s creating the illusion of moving fast through space, but it’s almost like a 3D experience. She doesn’t like that. She doesn’t like watching 3D movies, so she’s really scared about this idea of virtual reality. Is that something that you guys are trying to work with and make it more so people aren’t just getting that weird sense of disorientation when they’re in these 3D environments?

Basheer Tome: Yeah. That’s definitely one of our biggest things we’re trying to help fix. I think in particular virtual reality these days seems pretty in opposition to a lot of women’s sensibilities, and a lot of this is because it’s this big expensive annoying thing, and I think in general women they’d much rather not deal with useless stuff.

Michael Wolf: By the way, have you seen those Samsung advertisements where they showed a person in the middle of a room with a big mask on and there’s a bunch of people around them, looking at them? Those are just terrible commercials because they just look so awkward [laughter].

Basheer Tome: We’re actually huge fans of their product. I think they got a lot of things right really early in and that’s not Google forced me to say that. I think it actually is a pretty great product.

Michael Wolf: I think this idea of a person sitting there with the headset on in the middle of a room with people looking at it, that just seems like an awkward social situation for a lot of people, and maybe even more so for a woman who is always my wife.

Basheer Tome: Yeah, I think some of the biggest drawbacks that a lot of virtual reality marketing today is it’s aimed at gamers. It’s aimed at dudes for the most part like it’s black, it’s big. It has all these big cables, and all these crazy high setup costs, and it’s just like a lot of hassle for not a lot of gain, and we are really trying to fix a lot of that and we’re really trying to open it up to a lot more people.

Michael Wolf: Let’s talk a little bit more about some of those types of applications that we can use with them. One of those is I think eating. I know that that’s a particular passion for you. Talk a little bit about and how where we are on that because it seems like to some people, this seems like maybe this weird, unfathomable. You can never kind of create a virtual eating experience. Some people are actually working heavily on this because it seems like maybe there’s a lot of applications for like weight loss, etc.

Basheer Tome: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of interesting possibilities there. I mean I just want to be clear that I mean as of today, the visual of having this big black box strapped to your face while getting chili all over your shirt as you’re trying to eat is I think pretty dystopic and comical. But I think there’s a lot of interesting possibilities for sure. I mean there’s a lot of interesting studies revolving around using audio to manipulate your sensations a bit while you’re eating and there’s a lot about color and visual information.

I think the weight loss I think could get there. I’m a little less bullish on that, but I think there’s a lot of interesting use cases and I can try and dive into a few of those, but I think one of my favorite examples for sure is Heston Blumenthal’s dish the, Sound of the Sea.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, so explain that for people.

Basheer Tome: Yeah, I think he made it around 2010 at The Fat Duck, but it’s this super ocean-y dish where you got scallops, seafoam and flowers, and it looks like this beautiful ocean wave on the beach. He was really fascinated with trying to really enhance the sea and the seafood taste that you get there. I think he ran across this one research paper that said that if you listen to the sound of waves, or eat at the beach or at the ocean that you sort of get that sensation a lot more strongly and you taste more strongly the ocean if you can hear those waves.

What he actually does is he got the dish and then next to it comes a conch, and inside the conch is an iPod playing the sounds of waves, and then it has two little earbuds that stick out and they instruct you to place them into your ears and then you eat the dish, and it sort of puts you in the right time and the right place and really opens up your senses.

Michael Wolf: For people who don’t know Heston Blumenthal, he’s basically a celebrity chef, worked at Fat Duck, actually probably one of the most famous chefs in the world. And so what you’re saying is he’s also a pioneer in a way in virtual eating?

Basheer Tome: Yeah, I guess it depends on how you define the virtual aspect of it.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, yeah, or it’s multisensory cooking or another term.

Basheer Tome: Yeah, yeah. Another term I’ve seen is cross-modal sensory where you’re trying to use sound or some other non-taste sense to augment your taste.

Michael Wolf: You talked a little bit about using sound. There’s obviously this strong olfactory sense or smelling sense. There’s also been research in natural, virtually recreating taste sensations using some weird kind of contraption that send electrical impulses to your tongue. But do you follow all this stuff that’s on the cutting-edge of maybe even manipulating your taste senses.

Basheer Tome: I’m really skeptical about where they’re at with some of that stuff. I work a lot in haptics and thinking about how you can use like vibrations and different types of stimuli to different sensations in virtual reality and there are these electrical pads that you stick to your arm or different parts of your body, and you can send electrical current actually it’s your muscle.

I’ve seen a lot of that stuff and it’s almost marketed as it feels like your arm just moved and it feels a lot more like a reflex than it does like your body intentionally moved it. It gets really stinky and tingly. I’m skeptical that if you put it on your tongue or on your throat that it really would feel just like eating a steak.

 

Michael Wolf: But this is an area that you have taken a lot of interest, so talk a little bit about how you think about it briefly more broadly. You talked about Heston Blumenthal, but it’s an area you have a personal interest in. How do you think this idea of combining either augmented or virtual reality with food in some way, what are some of the possibilities in the future?

Basheer Tome: I think some fun little examples of that are like which frequencies you hear while you’re crunching or eating especially as it relates to texture has a huge effect on that texture sense, so there’s fun huge tricks can try at home like if you put on some really noise-cancelling headphones like it’s some nice Bose ones or whatever brand you prefer and you’re trying to eat some potato chips, they don’t feel as crunchy because you don’t hear those high-frequency sounds. Similarly, you can do that if you still wear the noise-cancelling headphones, then you put your hands on a chalkboard and slide them across, it feels a lot smoother because a lot of your sensory information for those higher frequency sounds come through your ears rather than through your fingers. It’s really your fingers that more detect than the lower frequency sounds.

Michael Wolf: Is it less horrible if you’re scratching it with your fingernails with that?

Basheer Tome: Actually, yeah. It is less horrible if you wear the noise-cancelling ear – it feels a lot more smoother. There’s a guy, Charles Spence, who’s done a lot of these experiments and published them. There is a podcast I love, Gastropod from Cynthia and Nikola, and they had a whole episode where they interviewed Charles, and I think it’s called Crunch, Crackle, and Pop, and yeah, it’s fascinating. There’s a lot of really interesting work there on just the audio component.

Michael Wolf: Because we don’t think about the separation of all these senses and what you’re saying is the experience completely changes if you manipulate one part of it. Maybe it’s the hearing. You put on noise-cancelling headphones, something that could be like entirely horrible like running your fingernails down a chalkboard, you’re saying it changes the nature of that. That idea is maybe applicable to a lot of different things.

Basheer Tome: Yeah, yeah. I think the general concept of replacing your senses with some digital ones I think is a little bit more far off, but I think the concept of augmenting them is a lot closer to reality today, and I think when people talk about augmented reality or virtual reality, it’s so rarely due to they think of anything but the visual, and when they do, thy go straight to audio, and those are some of the lower-ranking fruits and a lot easier for computers to do. We still haven’t corrected the knot on creating digital aromas and even [unintelligible 0:21:58] is still quite rudimentary. It’s just different variations on a vibrating motor.

Michael Wolf: It’s funny because you talk about digital smells, I remember back in early 2000’s at CES, people were talking about that, I thought it was kind of the sign of the impending bubble that came [laughter]. But what I’ve seen at CES this year and maybe the last year or two is people are getting back into this idea of trying to crack that nut. Where are we on that in terms of like creating digital olfactory senses or digital smells? Is there some interest in working down there? Is this still a long way off?

Basheer Tome: I think it’s still crazy far off, but I think part of it is they haven’t cracked the nut on actually sensing the different smells, and I think that’s one of the first major components is being able to understand and deconstruct a smell and understand what parts of it make it that actual sense.

I think they kind of do that through pretty intense laboratory studies, but they haven’t figured out a way to have similar to what you have a microphone for audio, you don’t really have like a digital nose for smells, and I think once you get to that point, then you can start working backwards a little bit better and then start reproducing those smells. Today, there’s all this different fits that you have to create and most of the products and demos I’ve seen involve just having a large myriad of vials and sprayers and then you combine a few.

Michael Wolf: But they’re certainly I think I’ve seen some startups. There are some at CES, talking or just aspiring to be that digital nose, but the digital nose, as you’re saying is kind of this sensor that can just know what the smells are, that research is still way far off. It’s still in laboratories. It hasn’t been something that you can create in a consumer device at this point.

Basheer Tome: Yeah, and it is only the first half. You have to build a sense and then you can produce.

Michael Wolf: You said at the beginning of the show you had some ideas or you had some feedback for people who were creating new devices in the kitchen, smart kitchen devices. What are some of the biggest pitfalls you’ve seen around design around today’s current crop of smart kitchen devices?

Basheer Tome: I think a lot of it is not just thinking through the way a person would actually use the product and really trying to create a product that represents bullet points rather than an actual journey or a task that human needs to do while using the product. I think like a kitchen timer is a great example of this bifurcation where before you have a chip in it, it’s round, it’s metal. It sort of hums while it’s running and you rotate it. As you rotate it, you feel that cranking and you have a visual representation of how much time is left. It’s basically like a pie graph. It goes every time it moves and you can see from far away where it’s at and then when it finishes it dings.

Inexplicably when they jumped to digital, they decide, “Screw that! Let’s just do a grid of buttons, 1 through 9, and it’s going to beep every time you hit a button and if you need to restart it, then you have to hold down start stop.”

It’s one of those things where I understand that’s way cheaper. I understand that if you want to buy the $1 kitchen timer, then sure that’s the cheap one, but you can’t pay good money for a nice digital timer that aesthetically works and that works the way your hands work and the way you’ve been using them over time, and honestly like a rotating cutter, what you would use to make a digital kitchen timer work rotationally is not expensive. It’s like cents on a dollar, so there’s no real excuse other than just the way you approach the problem, the way you think about it.

Michael Wolf: What you’re saying is when you move from mechanical to physical world of controls towards the digital world, it pays or should you just stick to paying homage to the learned behavior that we’ve had over our lifetime not just jump into this world of work. It’s complete departure, and it’s kind of in the way like when I’m reading an eBook on an iPad even though I’m dewy with my fingers and it’s on the screen like they actually try to create the visual look and flipping of a page, so we need to have some of those hands and kind of pay homage to the world, the physical world?

Basheer Tome: Yeah, in a sense. I feel like homage is a little bit more ceremonial that I wouldn’t even go for. I would say like you’re throwing away decades of learning like we’ve already figured out a lot of really great ways and you could at least try and learn from that and utilize that. I think toaster is another great example where for some reason every time they want to add a feature, it’s another button and they just don’t really think through how a normal person would use it like I guess to not be overly critical, I think one of my favorite complaints that I really feel like gets it a lot of the time is Bravo.

I really feel like they actually think about how a normal human would work through these problems and then they design around that. As of last time I checked, they have one of the highest-selling toasters on Amazon and it’s like on order of magnitude more expensive than everyone else and people still buy it and they have all these amazing little things on their that now almost everyone just belligerently copies but they were the first ones to have a little button on the toaster that says, “A little bit more.” Honestly does 30 seconds mean anything more or less to you? Like not really. It gets the thought across and it really connects with you on a human level.

Michael Wolf: I get that. I think having those fine touches that differentiate like a little bit more, I love that, but when we talk about like generational shifts towards maybe it’s Millennials, people who have been younger than that and using new technologies. I mean clearly none of those people know how to use a rotary dial phone. None of us really think about rubbing rocks together to create fire, ultimately an extreme example, but I mean is this just like do we need these hands or these homages to like older ways of doing things as like a bridge to get to the new thing or do you think it’s just something you need to keep in perpetuity over time even into the new generation?

Basheer Tome: I think it’s less about sort of keeping a tradition and more of adapting the technology to work. You take the good parts about what works and you keep those and then you let go of the parts that don’t work. Another great example of where I see a lot of this bifurcation is in the sous vide machines. I love the Joule. The app is beautiful. The people who made it some of the nicest people in the world, but I just don’t understand why there’s no buttons on it. It really basically ‑

Michael Wolf: It was a brave choice. You have to admit it was brave, but I agree with you. I think that was ‑

Basheer Tome: It’s a bold choice.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, bold. For some people, it’s a deal breaker I think.

Basheer Tome: It’s an implicit promise saying that we will update this. We will keep the app updated. We will staff this, and we will be around because the minute we stop being around or the minute we stop staffing this up, your machine won’t really work anymore because unless you’re going to dedicate a phone and an app and never update them ever again to just being this walled off garden that only operates your sous vide machine, you will update, you get a new phone and your app won’t work anymore. I think the way in general when we build the apps, it’s kind of like building a sandcastle next to the ocean. Everything is constantly in flux. You also have the waves and if you don’t keep updating, you don’t keep repairing, it stops working.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, the great thing about the old world is like if I go on to like my grandparents’ basement and I find this old clock, if it hasn’t been water damaged or whatever, there’s a good chance that it will work still. But you were to like go into your basement 50 years from now, finding an old Joule and the last time they created the app was like in 2025, then this thing is a piece of junk. You can’t use it.

Basheer Tome: Yeah. I think. To give you a good example, that’s not just on the over extreme version of like it’s all analogue and steampunk. I think Anova does a great job of straddling the line between the two where they have a physical knob, they’ve got a few lightweight buttons on top, and you can use the entire device without ever having to know that there is a phone app, or that it even has Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

But if you want some of the more advanced controls and you really want it to time itself and you really want to have direct access to recipes and have it automatically pick and choose the times, that’s when you borrow the phone and that’s when you get some of the more complex features, and so you take the simplest most critical aspects of how you use the product and you build it into the hardware, and the more advanced features where it would really be a high cost and low gain to integrate into the hardware, you then offload it into a borrowed screen like your phone. I think that’s absolutely the right way to approach it.

Michael Wolf: Those are actually the two sous vide machines I switch back and forth in between, and obviously with the Joule, I have to use the app, right? But when I use the Anova, quite honestly a lot of times I just plug it in and I use the on-screen buttons and dial, and I don’t ever go to my phone just because it’s quicker to me. That’s one of the things I think in general I love connected devices. I mean I have been interfacing with my Sonos for the past decade using a great app. I’ve increasingly started to use my Amazon Alexa just using my voice, so I see how that transitioned from capacity touch to voices happening for me, but even with something like a sous vide cooker, if it’s on an on device button and a dial, that’s just quicker to me than getting a phone involved.

But I do see the value of the Joule-guided cooking app like this idea of visual guidance. Using that I think is valuable, so I can see you using that I think is valuable, so I can see using that. But you’re still if you don’t need that necessarily, then you don’t need necessarily, then you still have to use the phone meaning it’s one extra step.

Basheer Tome: Yeah. I like this idea of having the options because you’re not purely relying on their good faith and good will to keep updating and supporting the hardware while still allowing them to provide you with some of these more advanced features. But that said, I mean consciously not including those buttons and that interface, it does allow them to make a lot smaller, a lot sleeker, and I completely understand why they made the decisions they made and I’m not trying to  criticize them specifically and more just kind of like it’s my personal opinion.

Michael Wolf: I’ve asked you mainly about by virtual reality and augmented reality around eating, but have you given thought to using that, which you do every day, and creating these controls in cooking like how can we maybe apply virtual reality or augmented reality in some way around making food? Is that something you think about?

Basheer Tome: A bit. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of obvious potential ways to incorporate augmented reality into cooking where you’re getting tips. It might be live. It might even connect you to another chef or someone remote who might be giving you instructions step-by-step or you might say everyone has this idea but you overlay something on to a cutting board and then it tells where and how to cut things. But I think even walking back a step further from that and even something like you could use something on our current Daydream platform where we really hope and are looking to see learning as a major category of applications or experiences you have in virtual reality because I think when you have this complete virtual and fully immersive environment, there’s a lot of things you can teach someone and learn that’s a lot harder to explain without diagrams or really complex text.

Michael Wolf: Some of these devices from the Bosch, they have this thing called Mikey. It’s like basically a soulful robot that they demoed at CES. It actually projects a video onto like a surface and I love this idea of taking video, putting it on a kitchen surface, maybe it’s for instruct yourself how to cook, and I always think about this stuff when I think when I see it, I think about going on Star Wars, and I always go back to like the hologram like that’s the ultimate to me like getting to that hologram phase, that type of projection of video and maybe we get into 3D video projected into like a space without any sort of goggles on. Would you call that virtual reality?

Basheer Tome: Well, I think specifically projecting video would count more as augmented reality. It’s yeah, projected AR, as the trendy way to call it would be, but we do think about that a little bit. I think there’s a little world of ways you can implement Tango like tracking into wide variety of objects. But it still feels like to me like to me, it’s a little further off. I think part of it is my dream kitchen isn’t necessarily windowless and it has a lot of natural light and nice surfaces. That sometimes to be at odds with projection screens.

Michael Wolf: A lot of your job is just like dorks like me saying, “Hey, this is what I want. I want Star Wars. I want to live it.” Like you just kind of have to dial us all back a little bit?

Basheer Tome: No, no. sometimes I like to join along for the ride. I think one of the best parts about the job is talking to a bunch of people what they are excited some really cool ideas, so it’s not just me saying no all the time.

Michael Wolf: [laughter] Hey, Basheer, thank you for saying yes to this podcast. I appreciate you coming on. This has been a lot of fun, and I look forward to talking to you soon again.

Basheer Tome: Awesome, thank you!

Image credit: Samsung

Full Transcript: Creating A Food Data Layer With Edamam’s Victor Penev

 

I recently caught up with Victor Penev, CEO of Edemam, about his company’s effort to create a data layer for the Internet of Food. You can hear that conversation on the Smart Kitchen Show podcast here, or you can read the full transcript of the conversation below. The conversation has been edited slightly for readability.  

Michael Wolf: How are you doing, Victor?

Victor Penev: I’m doing very well. Good to be here, Michael.

Michael Wolf: Now you started your company back in 2011, and you’re one of the early companies I think really to go after this idea of trying to organize food data. Tell us about the original concept for Edamam.

Victor Penev: So the original concept actually started a little bit before 2011. I’ll give you just a little bit about my personal history. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I had a good exit at my last company. We built the largest Internet company in Bulgaria and I had taken a year off and I was looking to do something new. Eventually because I’m a passionate cook, and I cook every day in my life, I decided I’m going to do something at the cross section of food and technology.

I started looking around the space and very quickly came across one of the biggest problems I think that’s related to food is that people even looking 50, 100 years from now will still want to know what’s in their food and how it impacts their health and wellbeing. What I realized is that the information about food is not that readily available. It’s oftentimes contradictory, inaccurate, and so on and so forth. We decided we’re going to try and organize the world’s food knowledge and give it back to people, so they can make smarter food choices and live healthier and happier lives. That was kind of the original idea. Then that was probably 2010.

Then we looked at various technologies of how to approach it and eventually ended up with semantic technology. There was a very simple hypothesis. Semantic technology is one of those things that fail quite often. People try to boil the ocean with it, but we thought that food is a fairly contained domain without too much spillover what an ontology can do, so that semantic technology can actually work in the food space. I spent some of my own time and money before launching another one formally in building a little bit of technology just to make sure that semantic would work.

Officially I think I called it October 2011, but somewhere around that date, we launched the company. We initially started as a B2C company and now after a couple of years, we switched to a B2B model.

Michael Wolf: In those early days of being a B2C company, you guys not have any success. You guys garnered hundreds of thousands of downloads through your application. Talk a little bit about those days and why you switched to be a B2B company?

Victor Penev: It’s a very simple business decision, so initially we thought we’ll organize high-quality recipes. We’ll take them for all kinds of nutrition and calories. We’re just going to provide smart suggestions for what to eat and maybe even meal plans on a weekly basis, and so on and so forth. We did have about 800,000 folks that installed our app, both on iOS and Android. What we found out after a couple of years is that as we tried to create paid product that consumers will be paying for, there were very few takers. We realized consumers just take back anything that’s related to food in terms of data to be free, so we couldn’t figure it out. A few hundred thousand users don’t have enough of people to create advertising-supported model, and I didn’t personally believe in advertising-supported model.

That was the time when we realized, “Okay, we got to do something different.”

Then just at that exact time, a few catering companies started coming to us and said, “Can you do the nutrition for our recipes?”

Then we said, “Sure! We’ll charge you $20 a recipe.”

They said, “Okay.”

Then we looked at ourselves and said, “Okay, well somebody is willing to pay for what we have,” so we re-productized everything and launched as a B2B player. That’s what happened. That was probably end of 2013, beginning of 2014, and since then we’ve been doing a B2B model. We went through API, custom implementations of the API, as well as data licensing.

Michael Wolf: I want to get into that and talk a little bit about your customers and how that’s kind of grown overtime, but talk a little bit about this idea of building an ontology of food using semantic web and association to create this database. What was the goal there and what does that mean? Was there a lot of work early on to kind of create the categories in trying to figure out where to put things?

Victor Penev: The hard work is not actually building the ontology. Like I said, the food space is relatively self-contained and fairly easy and straightforward to organize. I think a lot of the difficulty around organizing data around food is that it’s fuzzy. It’s not well structured. It’s not like physics, or chemistry, or any other hard subject that you have taxonomy and you have ways of organizing and so on and so forth.

I mean food has been around since humanity existed, so people talk about food in all kinds of different ways. They have a lot of implied meanings. There’s a lot of cultural background around it. The difficulty around structuring food data is not just the ontology itself, but actually the layering and what we build a natural language understanding on top of it. The ability to capture any data in terms of what people say about food and then transform it into something that’s quantifiable ‑ nutrition in our case.

We went with semantics because we were looking 10, 20 years down the road to be able to provide smart suggestions to people what they should be eating that necessarily imply influencing. We want to be able to know things about the person, maybe they’re allergic to something, if they’re on a diet, if they have a heart condition, but also their biochemistry. They are like sensors that take real-time blood samples, what have you, and also know what their goals are in terms of fitness and health and start inferring from all the structure that we have, what will be the best meal for them to eat. That process is endless.

I mean new data can be added constantly. I think there’s a big new field coming on board, which is the microbiome, which will be probably in the next 10 years change drastically the notion of how we should be eating. Obviously, there are sensors that are trying to constantly measure what’s in your blood and that’s a new thing that will probably hit the market again in the next 10 years.

Our goal was to organize and structure all these data in a way that can do meaningful suggestions to people what they should eat and that required inferencing, that’s why semantic technology.

Michael Wolf: And over time, you accumulated a huge database. I think you said you have a database of about 1.7 million recipes and you’re working with companies like the New York Times, Epicurious. Talk about how you provide that information and then how it’s used by these companies.

Victor Penev: that’s one of our major use cases is companies that have lots of recipes. The New York Times and Epicurious are great clients, but we do the same thing also for catering companies, for restaurants, anyone that has a lot of recipes that need nutritional analysis. We really replace the human nutritionists so to speak because that’s the alternative for most of those companies. For some of them, it’s just not affordable like if you’re Epicurious, you have 300,000 or 400,000 recipes. Even hiring an army of nutritionists, it becomes very expensive and obviously a no-go proposition.

The way we work with all those companies is very simple. It’s an API integration based on their recipe in the format they have it. We process it on our end. We do the analysis. It takes less than 400 milliseconds per recipe to get analyzed and it’s not just cooking up ingredients to nutrients. We also take into account techniques such as what happens to the food if it’s fried, or marinated, or baked in salt, and so on and so forth, and we return back the data.

The data that we return to them has up to 70 different nutrients. It’s automatically tagged for about 40 most popular diets, so all the allergens, anything that is for example low-sodium, low-sugar, paleo, vegan, and so on and so forth, I mean any diet that you can imagine that has been the popular culture, we tag the recipes for.

We just return this data to them, and then after that they decide whether to display the data to the end-consumer. Some of those companies use it to improve their searchability and also for SEO purposes because that’s metadata that is very relevant to the content they have, so that’s how we work with them.

Michael Wolf: And so, when you look at the evolution of the connected kitchen, you guys have started to look at that space. Increasingly companies who were adding connectivity also were trying to add value on top of that. How would you envision yourself possibly working with a company that is making a device for the consumer and then the consumer wants to understand what they’re reading from the nutrients and health perspective?

Victor Penev: I mean there’s a couple of major use cases here. Again we’re coming from the perspective that people want to know what’s in their food and how that will impact their health and wellbeing, there are a couple of things that people can do. One is obviously find what they should be cooking, and that’s where our database of 1.7 million recipes comes in. They’re all nutritionally tagged and analyzed. You might be sitting in front of your smart fridge and a touchscreen or you might be talking to a virtual assistant that’s part Alexa or Cortana or whatever it is, and you might be saying, “Hey, I have broccoli in my fridge.”

We can actually know that you have broccoli in your fridge if the fridge is smart enough.

“I’m diabetic, and my husband is on a paleo diet, and my kids are allergic to peanuts. What can I do?”

We can suggest very high-quality meals that you can cook, and then from that point on, there is transactional capability to create a shopping list. They might be kind of what you mentioned earlier about the ability about guided cooking, so that particular aspect has a set of video instructions that take you through the cooking process, and so on and so forth. That is one use case.

The other use case, which probably is even simpler and more prevalent, would be people would be just cooking things and then finding out what’s in their food. It’s surprising to me that in this day and age, the majority of meals that people eat are home-cooked meals and there is no way for them to figure out the nutrition of those meals. Maybe you read a box of cereal and maybe you know what’s in a cup of milk but if you do anything a little bit more complicated, you start to track actually what you’re eating. You got to have to be very, very precise, take a lot of time doing it or kind of give up. That’s where we come in.

You can just in natural language speak, “This is what’s in that recipe and this is what I did with it,” and within a second, we will return the nutrition.

We can tell you, “Okay, well the [unintelligible 0:14:03] that you did is actually 700 calories per serving and it’s got that much salt and that much fat.” Then you can decide whether next time you’re going to cook it or modify the recipe, or maybe serve less of it, and so on and so forth.

Michael Wolf: This seems like the perfect Alexa Skill [laughter] I hear you talk about that. Have you guys talked about either through your partner or kind of have been the backend for an Alexa Skill that I can ask in making this, I have these ingredients, what is the calorie count?

Victor Penev: Yeah. I mean we’ve talked to Alexa from day 1 ever since Alexa was launched. Our challenge there was that we never figured out a business model, much like with the B2C space Alexa is a platform that says build an app and that app can be used by our consumers except there is no transaction. We don’t get paid by the consumers to do that and we know the B2C companies. We couldn’t figure out the business model on Alexa, but that is top of our minds.

We’re building for our nutrition research, which is a tool we sell to dieticians and nutritionists and restaurants, which leverages natural language. We are building voice recognition capabilities into mobile devices, and eventually we want to do in the kitchen as well. I will want to do it in every room actually, but we have to figure out the business model. In addition to Alexa, I know Microsoft is working on Cortana and they are pushing very hard in that direction.

If we figure out a way for a business to use our capability or somebody to sponsor an app that is voice-powered app for the Echo device or any other device that any company is putting out there that is powered by voice recognition, we’ll very quickly build it. It is very easy because we’ve done all the natural language, understanding the work upfront, and so for us, it’s just hooking up the voice recognition to that.

Michael Wolf: Couldn’t you basically build a white label skill that you then go to appliance company X or CPG Company Y said, “This is just you plug in. Here’s your skill. You put your skin on it, Maybe you add a few kind of cast components and then they create their own Alexa Skill with all this nutritional information?

Victor Penev: That’s a wonderful idea. The only thing I would correct with the idea is that I personally want to have the appliance manufacturer or the retailer to come to us and say, “We’ll pay for that for you to build that skill,” and then we’ll build the skill.

We scrapped the startup and we try not to put resources against something that is not going to have guaranteed revenue. That is the only thing, but I can definitely see ourselves working with Whirlpool, or Samsung, or Bosch, or any of those companies and be able to power that particular skill for them.

Michael Wolf: It’s still so hard to figure out what is the nutrition of this thing I’m making every night, and then you start to throw in all this different branch predictions. I’m going to fry it, I’m going to put it in an oven, I’m going to put olive oil on it. I mean there’s just so many and if you guys have the data, I mean I think we’re going to get to the point where consumers can access that information in a fairly quick labor. We’re not there yet, so it takes companies like you in combination with the consumer-facing brands whether that’s a hardware supplier, or apps, or whatever to do that.

Victor Penev: Uh-huh.

Michael Wolf: I definitely am in line with you. I think that’s going to happen. I think most consumers will want that.

Victor Penev: Absolutely, I think so, too. To my mind, that’s not a question of if but when and whether 2017 is going to be the year or we’re going to have to wait another year. That is the big question I think.

Michael Wolf: You mentioned a little bit about sensors and being able to kind of detect. Have you been observing what’s going on in that space? I think it’s an interesting space. We had a company called Nima at our event that does gluten sensing. I saw at CS this year finally the company is making the SCIO, which is making basically an infrared food scanner, which there’s been a lot of debate whether or not you can a low-cost infrared food scanner like the kind they’re doing. It’s usually that will be an interesting area as well. Have you guys looked into that that space?

Victor Penev: We looked into that space. I think like many other space in that area, that is still very early stages and it’s evolving. The challenge for all those companies, they serve a particular use case. If you are checking for gluten, there is a 0.8 percent of probes that have celiac disease. That’s a godsend product for you. The problem with most of those solutions is that they’re not serving the general public because to serve the general public, you have to do full chemical analysis of the food. You have to be able to say not just the content of gluten or if there is like a pathogen in it, but also to tell how much fat, or how much carbs and sugar, and how much vitamin A.

Right now, this has been done in chemical analysis labs and the largest one in Wisconsin is 1 million square foot, so it’s a lot of equipment that you have to fit essentially into a small device. Is that going to happen? I think so. It’s just going to take time to kind of get this million-square foot fitted into devices ‑

Michael Wolf: In your pocket?

Victor Penev: In your pocket, yeah, in your hand, or something like that [laughter]. I think that will happen. The other thing that’s interesting about sensors and I think that’s actually more evolved is it probably requires a lot more regulation and idea of program whatnot is those kinds of implantable sensors in the human body and/or stickers that constantly take blood samples in real-time, and so they track your biochemistry. To an extent, it’s not even that important what you eat; it’s important how what you eat impacts your body and your own blood chemistry.

It’s important to know how it impacts what’s in your food, so that you can make informed decisions whether you’re going to eat that or not eat it, but once you’ve eaten it, it’s interesting to understand how that impacts your blood chemistry and what corrective action you want to take if you need to take that corrective action. There are many people that monitor particular nutrients like that people with diabetes or kidney disease that is absolutely necessary. But for folks that are just checking calories or fat or sodium, that can be very useful, and so that’s a whole different set of sensors other than the ones that are analyzing food.

Michael Wolf: Speaking of sensors, in a way I think what Apple is doing with HealthKit is an interesting health layer. I think it would be interesting once you start to fuse the type of data you have with what for example they’re doing with HealthKit. Have you guys looked at integrating?

Victor Penev: Yeah. We’ve looked at obviously HealthKit. We looked at Fitbit. We’ve looked at every single platform out there that does health record management and personalized record management, and we’re very careful not to get into the space where we have to manage electronic health records. We need to be HIPAA compliant and whatnot. But obviously, food intake is an important thing.

I think for a lot of those companies, it’s an important thing. I think for a lot of those companies, they’re still trying to figure out who’s going to win the race on the device wearable, and the wearables for better or worse, are just too focused on sensors measuring energy output, how many steps, if I jump, if I’ve done 100 crunches and so on and so forth. The energy input, which is essentially food, is lagging behind, and part of the reason why it’s lagging behind is because it’s hard to do the energy input. Unless you find a way to do it automatically, which will be measuring the bloodstream of somebody, it will be ‑ people are not disciplined enough.

We made a conscious choice to hold off until we see enough of a use case of people being willing to input data through their mobile devices. The interface is still not there, and I think we probably have the most advanced interface with voice recognition with the accuracy. There’s a lot of people that do voice recognition but we have a very, very high accuracy in management and situational analysis. Even that is still more of a case where people that are health nuts or they have particular disease than the general public.

I think there’s going to be a watershed moment when Apple probably or one of the other companies in this space that’s really big. Apple and Fitbit look like are going to be the winners, but they go and say food is important to us now, so let’s build tools around food. I think when they start pushing it into their devices, that’s going to be the moment we’re going to jump on the bandwagon.

Again, we’re very careful. There’s a lot of trends we can put our resources against, so many different things, and we decided that this is not something that’s going to happen in 2017.

Michael Wolf: But I like that, the way you phrase that. They’re all geared today toward measuring energy output. Food really is the energy input, and I wasn’t necessarily suggesting – I guess I was a bit suggesting going into healthcare and competing with them but like a fusion of the capability and the data that you have with HealthKit data maybe in the consumer-facing app, maybe it’s on an iOS device, that would just be very powerful. It sounds like you’re thinking the same thing: you’re just kind of waiting for the right time.

Victor Penev: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: Maybe it’s one of your partners. Maybe it’s Apple using your data to do that.

Victor Penev: Yeah. I mean that’s exactly our play. We hope that eventually we’re going to plug into HealthKit. We’re going to plug into every single platform. We also integrate with Validic. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this company. But essentially, we’ll have data output that will go into personal profiles when people eat something and we’re starting to do that. But right now, we’re focused on providing these tools to dieticians, to restaurants, professionals that are paying for this service because they need it to run their business. That same thing is a B2C product very easily, which has dropped the price I think. We removed some of the feature that food service professionals or dieticians may need then. It becomes a B2C experience that can be plugged into HealthKit or anything else and just become an app that does that.

We do have something very similar with Samsung. We did maybe 2 or 3 years ago, a partnership with them for S-Health, which is essentially the equivalent of HealthKit. We were the first food app there and our recipes search based on nutrition with ability to log in the recipe account directly into S-Health, so with all the nutrition.

We’ve done that sometime ago and that was part of the experience of why we think the market is not ready yet. But we’re closely monitoring that market.

Michael Wolf: Take a step back and just kind of if you look 5 years from now, what does the kitchen look like with regards to nutrition information, all this kind of devices and data layers like yours? I mean will it have arrived at that point?

Victor Penev: Well, I don’t know if it’s going to be 5 years, but I’ll tell you what I think ultimately the situation is going to be, and I think the kitchen is moving maybe 2 years behind the smart car in terms of there was a lot of investment in the space and eventually started to become a reality and now it’s a question of somebody just putting the right regulation in place and the smart cars can become reality.

I think the smart kitchen is probably a couple of years behind, so maybe in 5 years it will happen because there was a lot of investment from big name companies into the space. I think that every single device in the kitchen will be connected. It’s the IoT dream that the devices in the kitchen don’t need to be connected to that many other things. They need to communicate with each other, and so the fridge and the stove, and the sous vide and your food processor only to have kind of have the same platform and be able to communicate with each other. If the fridge has onions, what can you be doing with those onions and have some kind of a communication to the oven where maybe you’ll be I don’t know putting them in the oven or whatnot and that will form a particular recipe, or a particular way or cooking, or they might be chopped in a food processor.

There’s got to be connection there, but I think every single device will have an interface. A device probably will have a touchscreen, will probably have voice recognition interface, or both. It will have probably some kind of a display to display to you important information. It might be a video that teaches you how to cook something that’s on top of your stove, but it might be like a shopping list that is displayed or recipe suggestion, which I hope we will be powering a new fridge, or even just a timer on your kitchen appliance, or in-built weight measurement that tells you how much of whatever you’re cooking with.

Those are the things, and I think that in addition to those interfaces, there’s going to be an overall software that runs them and the kitchen operating system and there’s going to be a data layer because this kitchen operating system an interface with a human will have with all devices will necessitate data, and it’s data about specialized nutrition but it can be data about cooking, about the provenance of the food, anything that might be related to your experience in the kitchen becoming much more seamless.

I’m going away from technology, but in kind of winning the kitchen back for the human. We used to enjoy being in the kitchen and sharing food and whatnot and we kind of went away with that with microwaves and TV dinners and whatnot. I think actually technology can bring us back to the kitchen and the joy of cooking because it’s going to make it a lot easier, food is going to be delicious every time you make it, and everybody will love it.

That’s kind of the vision I see and I hope us to be part of that solution specifically on the data layer with regard to foods and recipes and nutrition, so that we can help people make those smart food choices and eat better.

Michael Wolf: It sounds good. We’d love to have you out in Seattle, the Smart Kitchen Summit, to talk a little bit about it, so thanks for spending some time with me today.

Victor Penev: Thank you, and yes, we’re planning to be in Seattle.

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Full Transcript: Our Interview With Dave Arnold

Late last year, I checked in with Dave Arnold to talk about his new product idea, the Spinzall (which he has since started to move into production), as well as talk about his book and how to make great ice.

Needless to say, Dave has a lot of interesting things to say, so we thought we would present the full transcript of the conversation for your reading pleasure. The transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Michael Wolf: For the listeners who don’t know, we jumped right into it, but I’m going to step back and introduce you. You’re Dave Arnold. You are host of the Cooking Issues podcast. You are also a creator of products. The first one was Searzall, which is an after-sous vide burner or finisher, if you will, you can probably explain it better, and now you have the Spinzall, which is your centrifuge for culinary explorers, consumers, whatever. Did I do a good job? I missed a few things, I would imagine.

Dave Arnold: Yeah. We have another product that we never even did but it exists because I wanted it to kind of exist. It’s called the Cocktail Cube, and it’s to get the texture that a professional would get using big ice when you’re shaking by using regular garbage ice. It’s basically just a texturizer. But again, it’s never going to put a dent in anything, so we built it just so it exists and I thought they’re on Amazon but we never do any publicity around it, yeah.

Michael Wolf: Some would ask why go through all the trouble of making all these pieces of hardware, trying to create prodcuts. I mean I kind of call you like a culinary mad scientist in a way because you are doing all these things. You write books on how to do kind of really cool cocktails, but why go through the trouble of making your hardware?

Dave Arnold: Well, when you’re working in this field, you notice gaps or things that you wish you could do or things that you wish other people could do, and then it’s in my nature to try to fix that. I have always wanted to do it. That’s one of the reasons I kind of started the company, struck out a way from my old job as the director of culinary technology at the French Culinary was I wanted to actually build and make some of these products when I see a gap.

I noticed that people can’t really generate the heat required to do finishing of low temperature products, meats, sous vide, so I built the Searzall basically like a high-powered handheld broiler but very small, so it’s very focused, so you’re never going to do like 1,000 steaks with it, but you can do one and in fact I use it 90 percent of the time for non-intended purposes just because it’s handy to have like a broiler like a handheld broiler sitting around with you at all times.

Michael Wolf: Is 100 percent of that food purposes or other purposes outside [laughter]?

Dave Arnold: No. I use it only for food, but it’s like because you always had it there, so I kind of use it as a jail-free like hit the top of an egg a little harder or I just use it all the time – melt cheese on a burger as it’s always next to wherever I’m cooking, so I end up using it all the time. My wife uses it when the delivery pizza is a little too coagulated on top, she just like hits it when it’s top of her plate, so it sits on the table. We end up using it a lot for not the intended purpose but it’s good. It’s certainly has more purposes than you think.

The one with the Cocktail Cube that I was constantly going to events and not having decent ice to shake with and you need really big ice cubes to get a perfect like the bar quality texture on a drink that we would get. I just got sick of going to events and providing something that I thought was not a top-notch product, the shake and drink, so I was never happy with them.

I did some tests and it turned out that it was not the fact that you were shaking with big ice. It was just the dimension of that cube was what was important. And so, I basically built something with that dimension that has the same density as ice that won’t break in a shaker, that won’t flake off, it’s food-safe. It has low thermal mass so it won’t affect the chilling and so yeah. I was like I wish I had this product, therefore I made it.

Michael Wolf: People are very specific about their ice.

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: The texture, the shape of it. FirstBuild built their own ice machine because they wanted a certain type of restaurant-style ice.

Dave Arnold: Who did?

Michael Wolf: FirstBuild, the GE ‑

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: Hacker space, whatever. They made an ice machine that allows you. I like McDonald’s ice because it is a very specific type of ice, even though McDonald’s is a terrible place to eat.

Dave Arnold: Right. It depends also like if there is no one perfect kind of ice for what you want to do, but like for shaking cocktails, you want this kind of like large-dimension ice. You can freeze it so you can buy like a 2-inch change mold that doesn’t need to look good this ice and freeze it, but then you’re throwing them away and then you have to bring them to events. And so, the people that I know that have them are mostly actually people who have access to that ice who keep the cube in their kit in case they’re in a situation where they have to shake their cocktail and they don’t have the good ice. But again, I haven’t publicized it so it hasn’t spread that far.

Michael Wolf: All right, so talk about the Spinzall. Why do we need a lower-cost centrifuge and aren’t there already kind of cheap centrifuges out there? What was different with yours?

Dave Arnold: Yeah, so the cheap centrifuges that are out there are functionally worthless for doing anything. They’re good just for proof of concept of being able to play around with them. That’s what I always said is I told people years and years ago, I bought one of the inexpensive $150 brand they put out there for people to buy was a Champion E-33, and I think it’s somewhere like $150 but it spins these little tubes and if you ever as I have been in the basement of a hotel in Bogota, trying to spin out banana Justinos with an E-33.

Michael Wolf: I’ve done that in that hotel [laughter].

Dave Arnold: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s terrible, right? I mean so like you’re sitting there, but the worst part of it isn’t even the tiny yield, although that is horrible. The worst part of that is actually those tubs are impossible to clean out. It’s just a nightmare to clean all those tubes, so you have to rack all these tubes and you’re spinning constantly to get anything. It’s just they’re a horrible nightmare. The big ones are nice, but you can’t take them with you. No one can afford the space really even if you have the money. Even if you have $8,000 to $10,000 or you’re willing to buy used, very few people can afford the space and so these techniques, both in the bar and culinary are techniques that I have always thought deserved a much wider audience.

People are like, why do I need a centrifuge? When they focus on it, they’re focusing mainly on like the things that you see in Modernist Cuisine like pea butter and things like this but really the bread and butter of a centrifuge for someone who’s into cocktails is juice and liquors like Justinos. But then even if you stand from a non-culinary standpoint like the day-in day-out that they that they use it… I know someone was running it over there, is herbal oils. He made these fantastic herbal oils. It makes very fast, very low mess butter, and so the quantities that you make in these because it holds 500 ml in the bucket at a time, which is vastly more than a Champion E-33, less by a factor of 4, say what a full-sized benchtop 3-liter centrifuge actually holds. It doesn’t actually hold 3 L. You never actually put 3 L into it when you’re running it, so you end up putting about 2, so we have a quarter of that capacity. By the way, you could buy one of these and still be weigh, weigh, weigh less than one of those and a lot easier to store and easier to run. But I digress.

All these things that people don’t know that they want it for, that it’s just awesome to have. I want more people to be able to use a centrifuge and get this kind of results. I especially we started because I was kind of always been a little miffed that the techniques that I’m really interested in the bar tend not to spread. I think it’s because of the difficulty of them spreading.

Michael Wolf: Right, right. It’s not democratized from a tool standpoint.

Dave Arnold: Right, right. And so even though this is expensive for a human being, if you’re buying it for a business, once you – one of the reasons I thought it’s like, look if you’re trying to have a centrifuge at the bar, very few bars that I know of can afford the space and the money. But then even if you do make that leap, you don’t want to pin your whole program on having an ingredient where any second maybe it breaks and then you’re done, you know what I mean? It needs to be small enough and kind of inexpensive enough that if something hit the fan, you could just replace it or get it fixed and it wouldn’t end your program, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah, yeah. I still see the centrifuge as something that needs someone. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s like I think you were on a road tour. You showed it to Chris Young at ChefSteps. I think you may have sent one out to Kenji, I’m not sure.

Dave Arnold: I stopped by.

 

Michael Wolf: But you need a guy like him or you or Chris to write the book on it or maybe it’s someone we don’t know who just backed it on your site, who’s going to take it, blog about it because I think people don’t know what to do with it yet. Is that right?

Dave Arnold: Right, and so I think what’s going to happen is that see what I’m banking on is there’s a certain number of people that bought Modernist Cuisine when it came out and there’s a certain number of people that bought my book, Liquid Intelligence, when it came out, and they see that I have a chapter where I’m like basically everything that I actually do at the bar, I do in a centrifuge. Then here are ways to get around the fact that you don’t own a centrifuge. Then if they didn’t have to get around that, if they could just own an centrifuge, why wouldn’t that be better. And so, what I’m hoping is that we get some early adopters who can see how non-intimidating and useful a centrifuge is just by virtue of using it more, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Are you hoping, Liquid Intelligence, that chapter is kind of the ground zero, kind of like Modernist Cuisine was for a lot of what happened afterwards, or do you think you’re going to see some other folks writing books, and then do you also need something like on the culinary side to write a book about how you do this for culinary purposes?

Dave Arnold: Yeah, I mean as far as I’m concerned right now, I’m going to write the manual for this. It’s going to have some recipes in it, but yeah, I want more and more people to want – the only thing is when people write books, they don’t write books for stuff that you can’t have, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah.

Dave Arnold: They just don’t do that.

Michael Wolf: They won’t sell very well [laughter].

Dave Arnold: Yeah, right. So I think it’s probably more something is going to get pushed in kind of in the Internet in the blogosphere at least initially because it’s just I’m imagining going – I actually went to my publisher. I was like, “I want to write a book on cocktails.”

They’re like, “Cocktail books don’t sell that well.”

I was like, “Yeah, but this one is going to be incredibly complicated and talk about equipment that nobody can own.”

They’re like, “Oh, yeah. Sell it to me.” Do you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah [laughter].

Dave Arnold: It’s like ‑

Michael Wolf: The publishers are already trying to like they know their business is dying. You come there with this idea.

Dave Arnold: yeah, but the thing was they let me write it and I think the good news was that I told people how to do things if they didn’t have it, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah.

Dave Arnold: My assumption was that people wanted to be treated like I cared about them and what that means to me is I’m going to tell them how I actually do things. Then I’ll also give them ways how to do it without those things, but I wouldn’t want to buy a book where someone had to pull a bunch of punches, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah. one of the cool things about the sous vide machines now you’re seeing with Chris, you’re seeing to a certain degree with Anova is the app connected to it. I don’t like to dismiss apps and let’s say, “Okay, you could turn it off, get notifications, great.” But I do think like there’s just this concept of guided cooking I’ve been writing about, just the idea like having some sort of whether or not it’s a recipe to kind of be fused with the hardware. Do you see an opportunity with your centrifuge to maybe have some sort of connectedness, maybe not this generation where you can actually fuse it with software, do interesting things? Or is it like getting too far out there?

Dave Arnold: I don’t know. I mean it’s a pretty simple boneheaded machine. In fact, the ‑

Michael Wolf: So I’m making things way too complicated by saying let’s put an app on there [laughter] ‑

Dave Arnold: No. I mean you got to remember I’m old too, right?

Michael Wolf: Yeah, so am I.

Dave Arnold: I don’t understand like I just like to cook, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah.

Dave Arnold: I’m not I was at Kenji’s place and as a demonstration was like Alexa turned on my jewel to some temperature. I was like, “You, man.” I push buttons, I turn knobs, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah.

Dave Arnold: The engineers in China were actually not happy with me because I was like, “I want two knobs. I want knobs, three knobs now. I want knobs and switches.”

They’re like, “No, we’re going to put a membrane thing here.”

I was like, “here’s what I want. I want knobs and switches.” [laughter] you know what I mean? My theory is ‑

Michael Wolf: This is for a year, this went back and forth?

Dave Arnold: Yeah, even though I’m old and maybe wrong about this, my gut tells me that when you’re trying to get someone to use a new piece of technology, you want to make it as friendly as possible. If there’s anything their way, right, it’s going to piss some people off more than it’s going to exciting to the people that get the extra bells and whistles, but I could be wrong.

Michael Wolf: You initially offered this at $699?

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: I think that’s right, and where do you see going forward? Is this something that you ultimately see 5 years from now as a $299 price point? Do you want to be in Target or is it something ‑

Dave Arnold: I have to sell a lot of them exactly like after the presale, the price is going to go up because like to make, I mean the cost that we pay now is high like our tooling costs is high, our per unit cost is high because I don’t anticipate making that many of them. If someone said to me, “Hey, Dave, we’re pretty confident that you’re going to sell 15,000 of this a year,” then I could drop the price substantially, you know what I mean, but I just can’t, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Who knows? I think Anova is doing hundreds of thousands of circulators. I’m not saying like sous vide is an analogue, but maybe at some point you get a bunch of cocktails ‑

Dave Arnold: Well, it is. Remember back in the day, a circulator costs $2,000?

Michael Wolf: Right. Maybe you’re kind of like looking at those volumes down the road, who knows? I mean you’re a blog post person?

Dave Arnold: I mean yeah, look at it this way, right? All the circulators prior to 2005 or 2006, I forget when the exact date was, were $2,000. Philip Preston dropped the price of circulators to under $1,000 and they started taking off in the chef community, along with the fact that I got them to give one to Wylie. Wylie put it on Iron Chef against Mario, plus with the Spanish invasion coming over of chefs, circulators started to pick up, so there was a reasonable number of people buying circulators at $1,000 apiece.

I know a number of other people, but I started teaching courses on how to do low-temperature sous vide work and so people started to train up on it. More and more people are buying them. There’s also always a steady supply of people buying them used on eBay, right? Then eventually people started making their own. You have this price point of $800, which is almost reachable for people, then all of a sudden, a guy at [unintelligible 0:23:08] Nomiku and [unintelligible 0:23:09], they broke the $500 mark and quickly got it down to $300, and then I think the floodgates opened. Now you’re down under $200, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: Yeah.

Dave Arnold: So, it could happen. It’s just you need to do volume to be able to manufacture stuff at those prices.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, I think that Gourmia Sous Vide Pod maybe around $99 from $129 or something, so they actually have those down at that price point now.

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: It’s crazy. You have a lot of other things you’ve beyond this centrifuge. You’re the guy behind MOFAD, the Museum of Food and Drink, and I think you’re actually talking to me from there right now.

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: So tell people what that is all about?

Dave Arnold: It’s just the first idea I had. I knew I wanted to be in food but I actually didn’t think I wanted to be involved with the actual restaurant world, so I could have a fine arts degree, and I was like there’s no museum in New York. There was at the time actually Copia, but there was no museum devoted to what I thought was like the most important subject, food and drink, so like there needs to be kind of a large-scale museum. This is an idea I had of opening back in ’04, and then it’s just been for the first 8, 9 years, I didn’t have the ability or any real team to start it with.

It just never really happened, and then I teamed up with Peter Kim, who was our pro bono lawyer, who have just been slowly building it up now. Now we have a brick and mortar lab space. It’s kind of a museum incubator, which is where I am now. We did an exhibition on flavor, on the kind of the birth of the flavor industry, the advent of organic chemistry and the birth of the flavor industry.

Michael Wolf: It’s a really cool topic, by the way.

Dave Arnold: It’s cool and people love, people don’t understand it. In fact, very few people understand it and it’s tied up with a very particular mentality and point in time and understanding of things like real versus artificial that are just fraught words, and then now we have an exhibition up on Chinese-American cuisine, kind of how it came to be because it’s kind of if you look at a Chinese-American restaurant, its existence has a different trajectory from any other that I can think of ethnic cuisine in America. It’s also loved, intensely loved and also sometimes maligned as being inauthentic when in fact it is authentic for what it is, Chinese-American food. We have an exhibition up on the roughly 150-something year history of that.

Michael Wolf: I love that. I love the idea of like flavor trends and food trends, analyzing those because I would imagine there’s a pattern to what happened to Chinese. I don’t know with the other ethnic foods take that same pattern, Japanese food for example, but like is anyone doing that from the museum perspective besides you?

Dave Arnold: People do individual exhibits on food because it’s such a popular way to kind of get people in but in general they don’t have the same focus that we have. Our main thing, we were looking at culture of food, culture, history, commerce, society, science through the lens of food and most like a lot of these impact very heavily on all of those domains. It’s a good topic through which to look at almost anything and we all eat. Most of us enjoy it.

Michael Wolf: [laughter] Pretty much everyone eats.

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: Last question in terms of where people can buy the Spinzall now. Where they can get one?

Dave Arnold: Sure, sure. So preorder the Spinzall now, please, because we’re doing preorders at Modernist Pantry, so it’s modernistpantry.com/spinzall, and you preorder now. We have a special preorder price. We were trying to sell 1,000 of them preorder so that we are guaranteed to have the money to be able to get the tooling and the first run built and then we will deliver them in July, it’s what we’re shooting at. The money is fully refundable up until ‑we’re not going to charge the cards until we get to the point where we know that we have the funds to complete the run. Then it’s fully refundable until the moment we ship. However, if you do back out, you lose the deal. You lose the deal. You don’t get back in line, but yeah, preorder it now. Be the first kid in your block to have a centrifuge that is the size of a food processor but still make enough product to serve a whole bar.

Michael Wolf: And people could find you at Cooking Issues on Twitter. I think the Cooking Issues podcast, they could search iTunes for that.

Dave Arnold: Yeah. Cooking Issues and I’m on Twitter and Instagram, yeah, and then call into the podcast on Tuesday.

Michael Wolf: You do a live calling show.

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: You’re a much braver than I am.

Dave Arnold: most of the people actually end up emailing me questions, so I think I lot of the people can’t listen during the day anyway, but I do get live calls. you know what, here’s the thing: you shouldn’t worry about being stumped because if you don’t know, you just say I don’t know. That’s always a valid answer. You don’t have to know everything, you know what I mean?

Michael Wolf: I like it. We all do it.

Dave Arnold: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: All right, Dave, thanks for spending time with me, man.

Dave Arnold: All right, thank you.

Podcast: Creating A Food Data Layer With Edamam’s Victor Penev

Victor Penev set out five years ago to create a semantic data layer for the world of food. Now his company, Edamam, has one of the world’s biggest databases and provide food and nutrition data to companies like the New York Times and Epicurious. Now Penev wants to bring his data to the world of connected cooking appliances.

You can subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show on iTunes or via RSS.

You can find out more about Edamam here.

A Conversation Dražen Drnas, CEO of Robotic Chef Startup GammaChef

Late last year, one of Croatia’s biggest packaged food conglomerates, Podravka, invested in a robotic home chef startup called GammaChef.

It’s an interesting move for such a storied company. Podravka, which was founded in 1934, started as a fruit factory before eventually becaming nationalized as part of Yugoslavia in 1947. With the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, Croatia gained independence and soon the company was privatized. Now, nearly 80 years after its founding, the company has invested in its first startup, a robotic home cooking company.

The investment made me want to learn more about GammaChef and hopefully figure out why one of Croatia’s longest-running food companies was interested in consumer cooking robots. I recently caught up with GammaChef’s CEO, Dražen Drnas. Below is my interview edited slightly for readability.

Can you tell me more about the investment by Podravka?

Drnas: Podravka is one of the leading food companies in the SouthEast, Central and Eastern Europe. Unfortunately I can not disclose the financial details but it was in terms of standard seed rounds. This seed round with Podravka is for us more than just a financial investment; it is also a strategic partnership. Podravka is going to actively support GammaChef project with its R&D and know-how. They are also involved in design of disposable food cartridges and ingredients needed for preparing meals in Gammachef.

Is the product mainly for Croatia, or do you have plans to distribute/sell in rest of Europe or USA?

Drnas: The product is planned for a global market. Since Croatia is part of EU, we will probably target EU first. The US market is also in our plans.

Tell me more about the product.

Drnas: GammaChef is robotic chef capable of preparing any one pot meal. At its core is a digital recipe. Based on that recipe, GammaChef will prepare you fresh, homemade and tasty meal at any desired time. It is capable of preparing risottos, pasta, gnocchi, stews, soups, any meal prepared in one pot.

Basically, it follows the steps of a real human chef, adding right amount of ingredients at the right time. It also controlls other parameters of cooking, like stirring and setting temperatures.

It is not a closed machine, you can digitalize your own recipe simply by switching the robot to TeachMe mode, cook your favorite dish on GammaChef and save it. Later you can share it with your friends and they can have your authentic meal prepared your way on their GammaChef.

The Robotic chef will come with some digital recipes, but also you can download new recipes or whole cookbooks from our store, it will be some kind of ‘Kindle for cookbooks’.  It is fully connected via WiFi, so it can be controlled by your smartphone or even Amazon Echo. It has some handy features like personalised taste (more or less salt or spices) or calculation of calories intake.

What about pricing and availability?

Drnas: We still don’t have the final price, but our calculations and plans are setting a price within the price range of a better kitchen appliances, it will not cost more than some good quality oven. We are planning to start with first pilot series next year and later go into serial production.

Robotic cookers haven’t taken off. We haven’t really seen one that really works well. How will the Gammachef differ?

Drnas: Yes, robotic cookers are a new category of devices, not many companies even tried, so far none have really delivered. Unlike some other robotic cookers, we chose somewhat different and more pragmatic approach. GammaChef is designed more like a household appliance, and not like a humanoid robot. That makes it less costly, easier to put in your kitchen, and sometimes less scary.

Also, functioning of GammaChef does not depend on food delivery of prepared ingredients. Yes, we are planning to have food cartridges with our partner, but also you can refill the containers with your own food and cook your favorite recipe. That means we are not constrained and limited with logistic problems of profitable food delivery worldwide in the first phase.

And the final and most important thing, GammaChef is cooks tasty meals. We ran a test where we invited to a cooking contest between the robot and good human chef, after the blind test of meals, shrimp risotto made by robot won human made risotto by 12:6 in votes.

We believe it is time to bring 21st century into our kitchens, but our approach is not to dehumanize kitchen by filling it with automatization like some car factory. We need a pragmatic approach that is going to help us eat healthier. We believe our solution will enable working families to eat homemade meals together. That will unload part of the burden from our working moms like the washing machine did.  But also a device that will unleash our creativity, there is no reason why you couldn’t have your favorite grandma’s stew prepared just in time when you come home from work.

What is your background? Do you have someone (maybe you) who is the robotics lead/expert helping to design?

Drnas: Me and my cofounder Đulijano Nola are both electronics engineers. We’ve been playing with electronics and robots since late 80’s. Later we switched more to software development. We have entrepreneurial experience in setting up and running digital companies. We built some successful products like Gohome.eu, a real estate search engine and CrnoJaje.hr, the no.1 daily deal site in Croatia. For the GoHome project, we raised VC investment for expansion into EU market.

We are both amateur chefs and since we are passionate about technology almost as we are passionate about food. We started building a robotic chef almost for fun as a side project in our free time. When we managed to build the first prototype and discovered how well GammaChef cooked, we decided to go full speed in that direction. When we see how well people are reacting to the food and to the robot, we’re convinced we are on the right track.

To achieve our vision, we’ve continued to build out our team. We’ve added a small agile team of software developers, mechanical engineers, designers and chefs helping the design.

 

Dispatches From The Smart Kitchen: Brewing Beer With the Pico

This series explores how new technology is used in real-life people’s home kitchens. It’s one thing to watch a demo on a company website or at the store, but it’s quite another to use them in your own house. These are stories of people who use technology to make delicious food (or beer) for themselves, their families, and their friends.

Name: Luke Murphy

Preferred Technology: Pico and Zymatic from PicoBrew

Other Kitchen Technology: None!

What It Is: The Zymatic is the first fully automatic all-grain beer brewing appliance. You can make your own recipe or brew one from the library. The just-released Pico (from the same company) is the Keurig of home brewing systems: It uses ready-to-brew PicoPak ingredient kits, and it can brew five liters of craft beer in about two hours.

picobrew2Why: Luke started home-brewing about six years ago, but when his roommate moved out and his girlfriend (now wife) moved in, he stopped his beer-making ways. Needless to say, he missed the process. He bought the Zymatic and got brewin’, and when the Pico came up on Kickstarter, he helped fund it immediately. “I’m an engineer by trade, focused on process and design, so I really appreciated the blend of creativity, science, and process control,” he said. “Not only could I control my process consistently when honing in a recipe but it gave me the time to brew where I wouldn’t otherwise have it.” Beyond that, he liked the idea that the device “allows a smaller brewery an opportunity to broaden their distribution network and get exposure to where they wouldn’t otherwise be able to” (aka your kitchen counter).picobrew3

How He Discovered It: He met Pico co-founder Avi Geiger through a mutual friend while hanging out at a store dedicated to craft brewing. When he heard what Avi was up to with both devices, he was immediately interested. “The science of understanding contributing variations in the process of brewing and trying to minimize them for consistency is awesome,” he explained. He even convinced his neighbor (who was not a home brewer) to buy a Pico and says it’s fun to watch someone become interested in the science behind beer.

“Not only could I control my process consistently when honing in a recipe but it gave me the time to brew where I wouldn’t otherwise have it.”

Which Is Better: “I liken them to a PC vs. an iPad,” he said. “I can tweak and customize a lot more on a PC/Zymatic, but the iPad/Pico are just simple and easy.  Not to mention the Pico shortened the brewing process in half, which is nice.

“Something that was always tricky for me with a traditional homebrew was fermentation. PicoBrew simplifies this greatly by a really clever modification that allows you to ferment under pressure, like a lot of professional brewers. This helps take temperature variation out of the equation when fermenting, making the beer a lot more consistent.” In other words, he can now brew PicoBrew’s adaptation of Deschutes’ Fresh Squeezed IPA and Great Divide’s Yeti Stout with the push of a button. He says he would buy both devices again “without a doubt.”

picobrewbuffalobar

Favorite Beer to Make: A session IPA that he says he can drink all day while playing cornhole. He’s made it around five times using the Zymatic, all while hanging out in his garage bar, which he’s named the Buffalo in honor of the video of “Guy on a Buffalo” (see above for actual photo and below for infinite amusement, preferably while drinking a beer brewed with the Pico).

Guy On A Buffalo - Episode 1 (Bears, Indians & Such)