The happiest of weekends to you all! We’re just about recovered from the whirlwind of the Smart Kitchen Summit, which returned to Seattle for its fourth year this week. Look out for a wrapup post soon!
Until then, we’ve pulled together some of the buzziest food tech news stories from around the web for your reading pleasure:
Facebook’s software turns food photos into recipes
The team at Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) group developed AI software which can translate food photos into recipes (h/t Forbes). The software can examine a photo of, say, a tofu curry and then spit out a list of ingredients, as well as the process to make it. As of now, neither Facebook nor Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) have any plans to roll out the software to users.
Photo: Chris Albrecht.
Culinary on-demand startup Kitchen United raises $10 million
This week Kitchen United, a startup which manages kitchen spaces to help food concepts expand into new markets, raised $10 million dollars. The round was led by Alphabet’s venture capital arm GV. Kitchen United launched its first commercial cooking space in May of this year with 15 different food companies. The company plans to build 20 to 30 locations around the country by next year.
Photo: Breville.
Breville’s oven cooks pizza in 2 minutes flat
Calling all impatient cooks who loves homemade pizza. Breville has a new countertop smart oven which can heat up to 750°F and cook a pizza in two minutes (h/t The Manual). The Smart Oven Piazzolo uses radiant, conductive, and convective heat to give pizzas the traditional “char” of wood-fired Neopolitan pizzas.
Duplex to make restaurant reservations starting next month
In May of this year Google demo-ed Duplex, a Google Assistant feature which uses AI to hold eerily convincing phone conversations. This week the company announced that they would launch Duplex on Pixel phones in four regions — New York, Atlanta, Phoenix, and the Bay Area — starting next month (h/t Techcrunch). At first, Duplex will be used to make restaurant reservations. Google said that the Assistant will announce itself on all phone calls made using Duplex.
Belgian startup Mealhero officially launches
Yesterday Mealhero, the meal delivery service with a smart countertop steamer, officially launched to customers in Belgium and Netherlands. According to an article in made in Oost-Vlaanderen (translated with Google Translate), the company opened the doors of their office in Erpe-Mere, Belgium and gave 250 of their crowdfunding backers their steamers. Mealhero raised €900,000 (~1.04 million) last month.
Did we miss anything? Tweet at us @TheSpoonTech.
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