Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Alexa

SmartThinq-ing. LG Appliances to Work with Google and Alexa

In a Switzerland-like move of neutrality, LG announced today that its SmartThinq line of connected appliances will work with both Google Home Assistant and Alexa (hat tip to Digital Trends). This will allow users to control more than a hundred SmartThinq devices, including ranges, ovens and refrigerators, with their voice through Google Home or Amazon Echos.

LG had previously announced Alexa integration for its new line of Thinq smart refrigerators, and at the same time had stated its commitment to an Open Platform, Open Partnership philosophy, which included incorporating Google Assistant. Today’s announcement seems to make this openness official across all of LG’s SmartThinq devices.

This is a smart (pardon the pun) play for LG, as both Alexa and Google Home devices have been selling in the millions. By working with both Google and Alexa, LG can slide its smart home devices into whatever ecosystem people have chosen for themselves. Removing any barrier to adoption is good — especially when you are asking people to plunk down thousands of dollars for something like a smart fridge.

It’s also a contrast to Samsung, which has chosen to push its own smart assistant, Bixby, in its Family Hub fridges at the expense of working with outside voice services.

In the kitchen specifically, LG is creating a very open platform in a bid to capture early adopters. In addition to working with both Google and Alexa, LG announced at CES that it will work with both Innit and SideChef to provided guided cooking capabilities into its ovens and ranges.

Probably not so coincidentally, LG also announced its own Thinq Google Assistant Speaker today, giving LG its own entrant in the smart speaker market. And since it’s powered by Google, you can talk to it to control your other LG devices.

Food Tech News Roundup: Tooth Calorie Counters, Snoop Dogg, and Amazon’s Next Move

The time has come for our weekly roundup of food tech news stories; ones that caught our eye, but weren’t quite big enough to justify a whole post. This week’s news update focused on some of our favorite foods (and drinks): pizza, beer, and coffee. Also, did we mention that Snoop Dogg is involved? Or at least his voice is. There’s also a tiny tooth sensor that can track everything you eat and — surprise, surprise — more news on Amazon’s journey to rule the ecommerce world. Let’s get started, shall we?

Photo: Modernist Cuisine

Modernist Cuisine’s newest book is about pizza

Modernist Cuisine may have just published their 5-volume compendium Modernist Bread a few months ago, but they’ve already announced the subject of their next literary venture: pizza. The multivolume will be written by Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, along with the Modernist Cuisine team, and will cover a broad array of pizza recipes, pizza history, and pizza-making techniques, both traditional and modern.

It’ll be a year before the ‘za anthology comes out, but if you want to give Nathan Myhrvold and his team some insider advice on your favorite pizzerias and pizza-makers, they’re already crowdsourcing tips: just email pizza@modernistcuisine.com. Then treat yourself to a slice of pepperoni for doing a good deed.

Photo: Diageo

Alexa and Snoop Dogg are your new mixologists

This week Amazon Alexa partnered with Diageo to launch a “Happy Hour” skill. It offers three features, including one called ‘Mix-It-Up’ which offers drink recommendations based on users’ mood and tastes. There’s also the ‘Find a Bar’ feature which has a Yelp integration to recommend bars nearby that serve Diageo cocktails (which, since Diageo is the world’s largest spirits producer, is pretty much everywhere). All recommendations are sent to the user’s Alexa app. This is another example of Amazon pushing the boundaries with voice assistants, taking a step forward so that competitors like Google and Apple will have to rush to catch up.

My favorite part of this skill is the fact that Snoop Dogg is involved. Yes, Snoop Dogg. Users can also ask Alexa for “Snoop Dogg’s drink of choice,” and he’ll give cocktail recommendations. One can only hope they’re not all iterations of gin and juice. 

Photo: Starbucks

Starbucks hops onto the blockchain train

Starbucks announced this week that it would launch a pilot program applying traceability technology to its coffee beans to monitor their journey from “bean to cup.” They’ll partner with small coffee farmers in Costa Rica, Colombia and Rwanda, logging and sharing information about the coffee supply chain. Essentially, they’ve embraced the blockchain trend — though they don’t use that term anywhere in their release.

With this program Starbucks is hoping to connect its coffee drinkers to coffee farmers, though it’s not exactly clear how. While the traceability may indeed give their farmers an “individual identity” — one that will no doubt be capitalized upon as a marketing angle — the system is only really applicable to the players downstream.

I can only see this used as a marketing scheme. With this program, Starbucks can trace beans from one particular farm through the roasting and packaging process, and can then market that product as a “single origin coffee” (not doubt for a higher price). This is something that previously only smaller coffee roasters and distributors could do. But thanks to blockchain tech, Starbucks can hop on the bandwagon. We’ll have to wait and see if they actually deliver on their promises of transparency, but suffice it to say I’m healthily skeptical.

Amazon expands Whole Foods stores to support delivery

Amazon is looking for bigger Whole Foods stores in urban centers to serve as both grocery stores and delivery jumping off points for some of their most popular items, like books and electronics. If Whole Foods serves as a city-based delivery hub, it would reduce Amazon’s need to maintain warehouses for non-grocery items. That way, they can deliver goods to urban consumers more quickly.

This move comes a little over a month after Amazon started rolling out 2-hour Whole Foods delivery. It’s another step in the ecommerce giant’s strategy to use brick-and-mortar Whole Foods locations to bolster their online sales.

Photo: Nomiku

Nomiku expands delivery to 6 more states

Nomiku, one of the first companies to launch a home sous vide circulator, just expanded  the map for their Sous Chef meals. The company started experimenting last year with food delivery and, after a year of working the kinks out within their home state of California, has started shipping their sous vide ready meals to to six additional states: Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. Their meals, which offer a large range of vegetarian and meat options, are precooked meals are heated to serving temperature in 30 minutes with the Nomiku sous vide appliance. Nomiku is part of a growing number of startups such as Tovala, ChefSteps, and FirstChop that are pairing cooking appliances with subscription food services to create additional convenience for the consumer.

Image: Fio Omenetto, Ph.D., Tufts University

A new tooth tracker can track everything you eat

Think of it as a calorie counter you can’t cheat, a fitbit for your eating habits. Researchers at Tuft’s University have developed a 2mm x 2mm sensor that you can stick on your tooth to monitor what you eat. It syncs up with your mobile device to wirelessly transmit data on your glucose, salt, and alcohol content. While this could be a helpful tool for some people who want to keep a super accurate account of their calorie intake, it could have some scary implications. It could exacerbate unhealthy food obsessions, or create a way for people to monitor individuals who are supposed to be limiting their sugar, salt, or alcohol intakes.

In the future, scientists want to create abilities for the sensor to track nutrients, chemicals, and psychological states. And if that brings Black Mirror to mind, I’d say you’re not too far off base.

Orderscape Wants to be the Voice Layer for Ordering Food Through Alexa

There is a recurring bit in Star Trek: The Next Generation where Capt. Picard orders “Tea. Early Grey. Hot.” and the ship’s computer magically makes one appear. Though the all-knowing, all-doing computer of the Enterprise served as the inspiration for Amazon’s Alexa, right now, her food producing skills are still a bit slim.

Orderscape, a young B2B startup, is looking to change that by creating a voice ordering software layer that uses smart speakers like Alexa to let people order from restaurants just by speaking.

The goal, according to Orderscape CEO Michael Atkinson, is to connect with enough restaurants so that people at home could say “Alexa, I’m hungry for a cheeseburger.” Alexa would reply with nearby burger joints, and then allow you to pick the restaurant, customize your order (no pickles!) and complete the transaction, all just by speaking. (Orderscape only facilitates the voice order, so you’ll still need to set up an account/payment information with the appropriate vendor.)

To achieve this, Orderscape is working with platforms such as Olo, Onosys and Monkey Media — companies that already power online and mobile ordering systems for thousands of restaurants.

As Atkinson describes it, Orderscape is a plug-in that connects these ordering platforms with smart speakers like the Amazon Echo or Google Home. “We built our technology stack and integrate it into Alexa using our own natural language processing engine,” said Atkinson.

That natural-language processing takes in thousands of menu items and is able to understand what a “cheeseburger” is, as well as understand the exact types of cheeses available for burgers at that restaurant. So when you talk to Alexa to order your cheeseburger, Orderscape translates your instructions for the ordering platform, who passes it through to the restaurant.

In October of last year, Orderscape announced a partnership with LevelUp. Though nothing has been fully realized from that deal yet, Atkinson says that his software is currently ingesting 22,000 menus from LevelUp, and announcements around implementations are forthcoming.

Orderscape is also working with Fazoli’s pizza chain to offer voice ordering on Alexa, you can see it in action in this video:

Orderscape is “founder funded” right now, and Atkinson says that they’ll make money by getting a small percentage of the transaction when people use voice to place an order. Additionally, by acting as the middleman in the transaction, Orderscape will amass a lot of customer data that it can use to better understand and presumably monetize.

Partnering with aggregators like LevelUp is a smart play for the startup, as it puts Orderscape in front of more potential customers quickly and becomes a value add for the ordering platform.

I’m not convinced, however, that straight voice is the best mechanism for ordering food, especially when ordering multiple, complex items. Voice would be more powerful when paired with a visual element like the touchscreen on the Echo Show, so I could scroll through all the options available, see what I’m ordering and exactly how much I’m paying.

Since Alexa is built into devices like the FireTV that plug into screens, it’s not hard to imagine ordering your meal while watching an episode of Star Trek is that far away.

Guided Cooking Trend Continues Momentum In 2018

Two years ago at the Housewares Show in Chicago, I saw the emergence of a new trend called guided cooking. At the show, companies like Cuciniale, Oliso and Hestan Cue showed off early efforts to combine sensors, software, precision heating and content in an orchestrated experience that guides home cooks through the creation of a meal.

As I said of my effort to make salmon with the Hestan Cue, using a guided cooking system for the first time was something of a revelation:

“…this combination of the pan, burner and app and the guidance system they had built that really led me to see the possibilities around this new category. I am not a great cook by any stretch of the imagination, but I cooked one of the tastiest pieces of salmon I’ve ever had in about 20 minutes. The experience was enabled through technology, but the technology didn’t take me out of the experience of cooking. Further, I can see as I gain more confidence using a system like this, I can choose to “dial down” the guidance needed from the system to the point I am largely doing most of the cooking by myself (though I don’t know if I’d ever get rid of the automated temperature control, mostly because I’m lazy and it gives me instant “chef intuition).”

Fast forward a couple of years and the guided cooking trend continues to gain momentum. A number of companies talked up new guided cooking platforms at CES in January, from big appliance makers like Whirlpool and LG to big tech platform providers like Google and Amazon.

And at the Housewares show in Chicago this week, guided cooking was everywhere. Hestan Cue, now shipping, was on display this week in the Smart Home pavilion. iCuisine, a startup that utilizes a modular sensor to connect to everyday kitchen tools to a guided cooking app, had its own take on step-by-step cooking instruction. Vorwerk’s Thermomix showed off their all-in-one multicooker with built-in guidance and talked about the company’s online recipe platform, the Cookidoo.

Over at the Gourmia booth, the prolific maker of low-cost connected cooking devices showed off a variety of connected devices, including a Thermomix-like multicooker with built-in cooking guidance. The company’s head of product told me the Gourmia multicooker will eventually act as a smart kitchen hub that enables cross-device cooking orchestration with other Gourmia appliances. As I left the booth, celebrity chef Cat Cora was performing a cooking demo in the booth and talking about the concept of smart recipes.

Gourmia’s Thermomix clone (currently only available in Europe)

Chefman, another maker of low-cost connected cooking appliances, showed off its sous vide cooking app with newly integrated guided cooking capabilities at the show, and a company spokesperson told me the company plans to add guided cooking to all of their connected cooking appliances this year.

Meanwhile at SXSW (which annoyingly was at the same time as the Housewares Show this year), Innit announced the release of Google Assistant functionality within the Innit app they first demoed at CES. With Google Assistant, a home cook can navigate the Innit app’s guided cooking features via voice. According to company COO Josh Sigel, the release marks the first third party app which is completely controllable via Google Assistant.

Of course, like any new trend, there will be hits and misses as products roll out. Early reviews of the Tasty One Top have been somewhat subpar, while my experiences with some of the early Amazon video cooking skills have been hobbled by lack of YouTube integration and the early stage of cooking capabilities in their Alexa skill API.

All that said, I think we can expect lots more in the guided cooking space as 2018 unfolds. I saw a slew of products in Chicago under embargo that are slated for later this year that offer new approaches to guided cooking, and there will no doubt more guided cooking products being developed in stealth that should see the light of day at IFA and Smart Kitchen Summit.

Bottom line: what started as a trend a couple years ago is fast becoming a central theme for appliance makers big and small, making 2018 a big big year for guided cooking.

Podcast: The Future of (Food) Media Is Conversational & AI Driven

If you’re looking for someone who can build a media company with the future in mind, you could do a lot worse that Shelby Bonnie.

Bonnie first showed his ability to build forward leaning media properties with CNET, a company he cofounded that helped set the template for tech media for much of the past couple decades. For his next act, Bonnie cofounded Whiskey Media, a company that tapped into the power of passionate communities with brands like Tested, Screened and Giant Bomb just as social media platforms like Facebook were beginning to change the media landscape.

And Bonnie’s latest bet? A company called Pylon, which is leveraging AI-powered voice assistants and chatbots to create media properties that power content delivery in vertical interest areas such as food and cooking.

I caught up with Shelby to talk about those early days, how he sees media evolving over the next decade and how he thinks Pylon can help shape that new future.

If you are an appliance maker, food brand or any company that touches the consumer, you’ll want to listen to this podcast to get an understanding of the future of consumer media.

You can listen to the podcast below, download it here or subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Battle For The Kitchen Screen Got A Lot More Interesting At CES 2018

When I wrote about the battle for the kitchen TV last June, the launch of the Echo Show was one of the signals that told me companies were beginning to pay attention to the space. Half a year later, my own usage of the Show has helped me better understand why.

That’s because ever since Amazon’s video-enabled Alexa assistant entered our home, it’s the first thing my eyes are drawn to as I enter the kitchen. The continuous scroll of news and weather, integration with popular apps like Pandora and Allrecipes, and access to videos all have quietly made the small screen indispensable for my entire family.

And now, with a slew of standalone smart displays and kitchen-centric video screens at CES last week, I’m more convinced than ever as we enter 2018 the kitchen TV market will be a fascinating one to watch.

Here are some of the kitchen screen entrants from this year’s big consumer show:

Echo Show And The Competitors

In some ways, the Echo Show and its small screen competitors are the early favorites. Whether or not to purchase a $200 or below (today the Show is on sale for $179) countertop video-enabled voice assistant is a much easier decision to make than that of a $3 thousand fridge. And now, with Google pouring money into the space, you can expect many more choices and over time.

CES 2018 featured some new smart displays on, um, display, many of them designed to be used with Google Assistant. I suspect at some point Google will likely come out with a first-party device (like the Echo Show), but for now we have displays from the likes of Lenovo, Philips and JBL and the initial reviews are pretty positive.

Fridge TV

Hard to believe, but Samsung’s already on version three of its Family Hub fridge, a product that is fast becoming the central focus of the CE giant’s broader smart home strategy. I stopped by the Samsung CES showroom at the Aria to check out the Family Hub 3, and I have to say the new screen looks good.

And as is often the case, LG has followed Samsung’s lead with the ThinQ Instaview Fridge but took things one step further by making their smart screen translucent so you can also see what’s in your fridge. You can see a demo of the LG ThinQ Instaview Fridge here:

While the idea of fridge TVs continue to gain steam, some argue that there’s a mismatch between the life cycle of cutting-edge tech and that of installed appliances. An appliance is an investment, something most consumers expect to last up to a decade. Technology, on the other hand, can be outdated after a few years. This argument resonated after talking to someone at the Samsung booth, who told me the Family Hub gen-1 likely wouldn’t be updated to the third generation software that is coming out with the Family Hub 3, (though the Family Hub Ones in the field were recently updated to Family Hub 2 software).

Despite this, I think the centrality of the fridge in most kitchens and the early relative success of the Family Hub will fuel interest in making the fridge the star of the kitchen TV market.

The GE Kitchen Hub 

One of the more interesting concepts in kitchen TV I saw at CES was the GE Kitchen Hub, a screen/smart home controller designed to sit above your oven.  The Kitchen Hub, which was originally conceived in GE Appliances innovation hub FirstBuild, not only has voice and gesture control capability built in but works with Zigbee and Z-Wave to connect to your smart devices.

You can see Digital Trends video walkthrough with the Kitchen Hub below:

GE Kitchen Hub - Hands On at CES 2018

The concept of the Kitchen Hub sits somewhere between the Amazon and Samsung approach, a device that’s separate from a large appliance (and their long life cycles), but one that is also a built-in. The product is priced in that middle territory as well, coming in at $600.

I like the idea of the Kitchen Hub. A separate built-in screen, one that is more affordably priced than a hybrid appliance/TV product and that can also act as a smart home control center is a potential winner. Of course, a lot will rely on execution, but overall this is an intriguing product to watch.

One thing’s that clear: the battle for the kitchen TV became a lot more interesting at CES 2018. Check back at the Spoon and subscribe to our newsletter to monitor our coverage of this market over the next 12 months.

Podcast: The CES 2018 Smart Kitchen & Foodtech Wrapup Show

CES 2018 is in the books. It was a hectic week packed with smart kitchen news and showcases. Mike was on the floor in Las Vegas and reveals the big trends (voice activation everywhere!), the cool news stuff (guided cooking!), and the countertop dishwasher he calls “sexy.”

Take a listen for all the in-depth analysis you need. You can also subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show in Apple Podcasts or download it here.

Whirlpool Smart Kitchen Announcements Include Cooking Automation And Yummly 2.0

Whirlpool is kicking off CES with a slew of smart kitchen announcements, including an update to the Yummly personalized recipe app, voice integration with Google Assistant and scan-to-cook guided cooking technology.

Whirlpool made a huge effort at CES 2017 to move further into the smart kitchen space, showing off a suite of connected appliances. Then, in May of last year, the company acquired recipe app startup Yummly and gained an entire community of users and a host of food content.

Whirlpool spent the rest of 2017 working on taking full advantage of the Yummly acquisition and is introducing the results of its work today at CES 2018. Among the brand’s many kitchen-related announcements, Whirlpool is launching Yummly 2.0, a new version of the recipe and cooking resources app that includes image recognition, meal scheduling features and an enhanced guided cooking experience when using Whirlpool connected appliances to cook.

Ingredient Recognition 

The next-gen Yummly app will include built-in image recognition software powered by machine learning to recognize multiple foods in one picture and dole out recipe recommendations based on what foods are shown. With a large database of food images, Yummly will continue to get better at identifying the food that users have on hand, using machine learning to evolve and grow its knowledge base.

In the Whirlpool mobile app, the company is launching the new Scan-to-Cook technology, a feature that allows users to scan a UPC barcode on frozen food packages and an existing set of instructions including temperature and cooking time for that particular food will be sent to the appliance. Scan-to-Cook setting can be customized to individual preferences if a food is preferred more or less cooked than the standard settings.

Guided Cooking Gets Better

For home chefs that have Whirlpool’s connected range or microwave, Yummly is now able to identify recipes that will work with those appliances and send cooking instructions to the device while following an interactive step-by-step tutorial in the app with images and video. While the user is instructed on what to chop, wash and prepare, the participating oven can be heating up and preparing a timer so it’s ready to go when they are. 

Starting in the spring of 2018, users will also be able to control their connected appliances straight through the Yummly app – a good sign that the brand plans to continue to invest in the platform as the center of their smart kitchen strategy in 2018.

Same Day Grocery Ordering 

Many smart appliances offer grocery list integrations, but Whirlpool takes it a step further in the Yummly app. The ingredients are categorized automatically in an attempt to make shopping easier (better than my Amazon Alexa grocery list which is just one giant list of things I may or may not have already bought) but even better – a new integration with Instacart means you can get the ingredients you need, delivered in about an hour.

Scheduling, Voice, Remote Start

The Yummly app lets users schedule their meals out for the week and let them know when it’s time to start cooking based on the scheduled desired eating time. And, like almost every other company at CES, Whirlpool is announcing integration with Google Assistant to be able to control connected appliances through voice command. Details on the integration weren’t provided but with Google pushing back at Amazon’s domination in voice assistants, it’s not surprising that they’re pursuing the kitchen as a space to gain mindshare. Additional features in the app lets families remotely start their appliances from outside the house to warm up the oven and get the kitchen ready for dinner.

For more #smartkitchen news at CES, follow @TheSpoonTech, @SmartKitchenCon and @michaelwolf for updates.

Survey: Homeowners Say Smart Kitchen Tech “Nice” (not Need) to Have

While smart kitchen vendors rush to print off thousands of flyers for next week’s CES, a new survey from Scripps Network Interactive finds that respondents considered technology in the kitchen a “nice-to-have,” because “pain points aren’t strong enough to drive major purchases or changes in behavior.”

Before anyone goes and cancels their room reservation at the Bellagio, let’s take this survey with a big grain of salt. It was part of a broader survey about smart homes and we don’t know the makeup of the audience other than it’s comprised of 600 U.S. homeowners of “all ages.” Additionally we don’t know how the questions were presented. There’s a big difference between asking someone if they want an internet connected oven and asking them if they would like on-demand guided cooking instructions.

But those unknowns and even the scraps of data offered by this survey can be instructive for those in the smart kitchen space. It’s good to note that in the Scripps survey, 40 percent of respondents said they “aren’t interested in connected appliances and expressed skepticism of the utility of kitchen-related tech beyond the ‘gee-whiz’ factor.”

In other words, for a broad audience, a connected oven might not sell itself, and may need value messaging to convert skeptics. Lead with the benefit (guided cooking, real-time nutritional information) rather than the technology (Bluetooth/WiFi enabled).

Smaller kitchen gadgets fared a bit better in the survey with “small kitchen appliances” leading the respondents’ wish lists, followed by automatic cleaning devices and voice controlled devices.

Obviously smaller kitchen gadgets are less of an investment than big connected appliances, and don’t require a large amount of space. Additionally, cycles of phone upgrades have taught us that technology can get outdated quickly. Replacing a five year old “smart” coffee maker is a lot different than swapping out a five year old smart fridge. Plus, people have a legitimate concern about losing control of their appliances and having a company brick their fridge.

The desire for voice control among survey respondents could show us the entry point appliance manufacturers need to sell bigger ticket items, and Alexa is shaping up to be the tip of that spear. Amazon sold tens of millions of Alexa devices over this past holiday, and the company just announced built-in cooking controls for cooking appliances like microwaves. Once users are comfortable with an Alexa microwave, getting them to buy an Amazon smart fridge isn’t as big a leap.

Who knows? Buying an Echo today could lead to a kitchen remodel next year.

This survey shouldn’t rattle anyone packing for CES this weekend, but this small data point is a nice reminder of what to consider when pitching your products.

Amazon Brings Cooking Capabilities To Alexa Smart Home Skill API

While over 50% of Echos end up in the kitchen, a lack of cooking-specific commands and categories within the popular voice assistant’s smart home API has meant few people actually prepare food with Alexa today.

But that could soon change.

That’s because today Amazon introduced built-in cooking controls for cooking appliances into the Alexa smart home API. Initially rolling out in microwaves from Whirlpool and others, the new cooking capabilities will let users define time and temperature parameters and will eventually use the Alexa voice interface to walk through cooking a meal.

From the Alexa developer blog:

Customers are increasingly using voice user interfaces (VUIs) as a hands-free way to manage their lives, and hands-free control is especially valuable when cooking. With the built-in cooking device controls in the Smart Home Skill API, you will make it easier for your customers to control your cloud-connected microwave. Instead of pressing multiple buttons to enable advanced microwave features, your customers can now use their voices. For example, a customer can say “Alexa, defrost three pounds of chicken” or “Alexa, microwave for 50 seconds on high.”

Initially, there are four new capability interfaces in the Smart Home Skill API – Alexa.Cooking, Alexa.Cooking.TimeController, Alexa.TimeHoldController, and Alexa.CookingPresetController. You can leverage these interfaces today for microwaves and for appliances that support preset cooking. The interfaces are designed for future extensibility as support for more cooking devices becomes available.

The new Alexa cooking capability understands food categories (for example, Alexa will take a food term from the Echo user – such as “sockeye salmon” – to categorize food in the “Fish” category) and cooking modes.  Appliance makers are able define their different cooking modes that are discoverable within the Alexa app, which means users will be able to access modes such as “defrost” in products such as Whirlpool’s line of connected microwaves. The new cooking capability from Amazon also allows appliance makers to make their presets libraries available through Alexa.

While Whirlpool’s expected to be the first to launch the new Alexa cooking capability for its connected microwaves (no exact date has been given), Amazon also announced Samsung, GE, Kenmore and LG are all working to bring the new Alexa cooking capability to market.

And finally, one last piece of news embedded in the announcement: The company has invested in June, high profile maker of the June connected oven, via the Alexa fund. This means, of course, you can expect the June oven to work with Alexa’s cooking capabilities sometime in 2018.

Enjoy the podcast and make sure to subscribe in Apple podcasts if you haven’t already.

Ten Trends That Will Shape The Future of Cooking In 2018

With 2017 in the rearview mirror, it’s time to look forward and make some predictions about the next year in food and cooking. While I often wait until after CES to look into the crystal ball since there are always lots of announcements at the annual consumer tech mega-show, I think it’s safe to point to a few big trends we can expect over the next 12 months.

With that in mind, here are ten trends I think you’ll see the shape the future of the kitchen over the next twelve months (Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date on our coverage of all of these trends over the next year):

Digital Recipe At The Center Of Action

With apologies to Tyler Florence, the recipe is not dead. In fact, if anything the recipe is becoming increasingly important in the digital kitchen. It’s becoming our automated shopping list, the instruction set for our appliances, and the content is becoming dynamic, atomized and personalized depending on our personal preferences and the context of our current day, meal plan, and food inventory.

I expect all of this to continue in 2018 and even accelerate as recipes become shoppable, connected to cooking guidance systems and fuse with new interfaces such as voice assistants and chatbots to help with the cooking process.

New Cooking Boxes

While “cooking box” isn’t exactly a standard industry term, it’s an apt way to describe the wide variety of exciting products coming to market that allow consumers new ways to prepare food.

Last year we started to see new takes on steam ovens like the Tovala, the first consumer market RF cooking appliance announced in Miele’s Dialog, and even combo devices that combine fast-cooking with flash-freezing like the Frigondas. In 2018, I expect to see lots more innovation with built-in and counter top products as old-school appliance manufacturers and housewares brands realize there’s opportunity in deviating from the same-old cooking appliances and offering consumers new options when it comes to preparing food.

Smart Grow Systems Move Towards Mass Market

While home grow systems have been around for years, adoption has remained fairly narrow. That will start to change in 2018 as the idea of using technology to grow and create our food at home enters the mainstream consciousness. Driving this trend will be the ever-increasing consumer desire to source food more locally. After all, what’s more local than our own homes?

The great thing about this space is there’s already a wide gamut of interesting options available for consumers today. Whether it’s low-cost offerings like seed quilts, to the growing number of soil-less home grow systems like those from Aerogarden or Ava, to crazy backyard farm robots like those from Farmbot, I think we’ll see more innovative products – and greater consumer adoption – in 2018.

Home Fermentation

There’s no doubt one of the most interesting trends we’ve seen in consumer food over the past couple years is the embrace of interesting fermented products like kombucha, and I think this interest will start to generate more interest in consumers fermenting their food at home.

We’ve already seen companies like Panasonic show off fermented food cookers, and beer appliance startup PicoBrew is starting to offer Kombucha as an offering. With interest in fermented products likely to increase, I expect more innovators will look to make creating these products at home easier.

Desserts Meet Tech

Like most, I love myself a good dessert, and I expect we will see an increasing number of interesting ways to fuse technology with sweets in the coming year. Some of these innovations will focus on convenience (like the CHiP cookie maker), but some will enable consumers to create hard-to-make sweets like chocolate, ice cream and other types of desserts that are normally time and knowledge intensive.  Expect to see some interesting announcements in this space in the next 12 months.

Sensing Kitchen

When the Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman got on stage at the Smart Kitchen Summit with startups creators of digital food sensing tech and demoed live in front of a huge audience, you could hear the audience murmur as Wilson and crew smelled cheese with a digital nose or tried out the Scio infrared spectrometer. This technology that has long been gestating for commercial and supply chain applications is finally making its way into the home, and I expect that to continue in 2018, particularly as some find new ways to apply AI to better prediction and understanding around flavors and food characteristics.

Meal Services And Connected Hardware

One of the trends we’ve been watching for a while is the pairing of meal kits with connected hardware.  That trend accelerated in 2017 as Tovala shipped product, Nomiku created their sous vide ready meals and Innit hinted at new products powered by Chef’d as we ended the year.

It makes sense. Recurring revenue has long been the mantra of venture capitalists (just ask Tovala, which just got a $9.2 million series A), and in the connected cooking space, the way to get recurring revenue is offer food.  I also expect meal kit companies to also increasingly look for ways to partner with kitchen tech innovators (much like Chef’d has with Innit) as they look for ways to raise adoption and retention for consumers.

Speaking of food delivery…

Automated, Smart Grocery Delivery

With the acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, Amazon stopped dabbling around the edges with lab experiments like Amazon Go, Amazon Dash and Amazon Fresh made its intentions clear: it wants to take a big bite out of the $700 billion grocery business in the US.  And while the company has had mixed success with efforts like its Fresh delivery business, these long-gestating experiments have given them a potentially huge advantage as they start to set up central hubs and physical points of presence for the grocery business post-Whole Foods.

And now, Amazon and others see the opportunity to fuse home delivery with smart home access control and automatically deliver groceries all the way to the fridge. Combine that with the ability of fridges to actually tell us when food needs a refresh, and you can unlock some interesting scenarios.

New Interfaces

While this past year saw the continued march forward towards of popular voice interfaces like Alexa, I think we’re only at the beginning of a large-scale change in the control layer for how we buy, prepare and cook our food.  Sure, we’ll see more and more Alexa skills for cooking gadgets in 2018, but also expect more manufacturers embrace chatbots and projection interfaces as ways to interact with our cooking equipment this year.

Cooking Robots

We cover cooking robots here at The Spoon a bunch, and while many are fun and likely never to see wide adoption over the next decade, there are a variety of interesting cooking bots we’ve seen that might have real applications for specific use cases.  Some are simple food automation devices. Others are more social robots. And, in some cases, companies are working on human-like robots that could be intriguing additions to the kitchen of the future.

Needless to say with CES less than a week away, we’ll likely see many of these trends reinforced with news.  I’ll be at CES catching up on many of these announcements myself, so if you hear of any or want me to know about your product, DM me on Twitter.

Delta Faucet Will Soon Let You Pour Water With Your Voice (Exclusive)

Want to pour yourself a glass of water with your voice? It looks like you soon can with a Delta Faucet.

The Spoon recently discovered a new Alexa skill from Delta Faucet company that will allow you to do such things are pour a glass of water or fill your coffee machine simply by asking Alexa. The skill looks like it will work with forthcoming voice-enabled Delta Faucet product or products enabled by what the faucet maker is calling its “voice module” and the Delta voice web app.

The only problem is if you want to buy the Delta voice module or register for your Delta voice account with the web app, neither of those exist today. In fact, the only clue to Delta’s voice-enabled faucet – at least as of now – is the Alexa skill called Delta. My guess is the company is preparing to launch a new voice-enabled line of faucets in a few weeks at CES or the upcoming Kitchen and Bath Show.

There’s also a good chance these faucets will connect to Wi-Fi. As far as I can tell, Delta doesn’t seem to have any Wi-Fi enabled faucets on the market today (but they do have a Wi-Fi leak detector), so it’s quite possible the mysterious ‘voice module’ is also a ‘Wi-Fi module’.

So far the Delta Alexa skill has one review, which again is strange because Delta hasn’t yet released its voice module or voice web app. Chances are the review, which calls the Delta skill “Easy Peasy”, was written by a Delta employee familiar with the initiative.

I don’t know about you, but I think using my voice to pour water is one of the cooler and more practical uses for Alexa in the home. I could imagine scenarios where my hands are full or simply messy, and using my voice to turn the water on or off with my voice just makes sense. I guess I’ll just have to wait until Delta actually releases the product that works with the skill before I get my hands on one.