SideChef’s Kevin Yu on the Future of the Kitchen in a Time of Unprecedented Change

In 2015, I was at smart-home networking event at South by Southwest when I bumped into a young technology executive by the name of Kevin Yu.

We got to talking and I told him I was thinking of having a conference about the future of food and cooking. As it turns out, how people cook was something Yu thought quite a bit about.

He ran a company called SideChef, which made a recipe app, while it was early days for connected appliances and step-by-step guided cooking, Yu was already looking for opportunities to take his recipe app and use it as a central command system for appliances.

It was just six months later Yu was on stage at the first Smart Kitchen Summit talking about how this future we discussed in Austin.

Since that time, much of what we talked about in those early days in Austin has materialized: appliance manufacturers have added connectivity and SideChef has struck deals with many of them to integrate its content and technology. They’ve created their recipe format that atomizes the cooking process and allows for them to launch things like their shoppable recipe integrations.

So in a year with so much change, I thought it would be good to once again catch up with Kevin and his US manager director Carolyn Eschbach to get a read from the front lines of the connected kitchen. We talk about the company’s Facebook Portal integration and the launch of their Premium offering, as well as the rapid changes in consumer behavior. We also talk about how the current state of the connected kitchen.

Subscribers of Spoon Plus can see the full interview below. To learn more about Spoon Plus, click here.