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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Survey: People Don’t Grocery Shop Online (for now)

Do you buy your groceries online, or do you prefer roaming the aisles at your local supermarket in real life? According to a recent poll from Reuters/Ipsos, most people still shun online grocery shopping and head for the store.

From the Reuters article on the survey results:

Seventy-five percent of online shoppers said they rarely or never buy groceries online, according to the survey of nearly 8,600 adults from Aug. 12 to Sept. 1. Even among frequent online shoppers who make internet purchases at least weekly, almost 60 percent said they never buy groceries online or do so just a few times a year, according to the poll.

This actually makes sense given how so much of how we pick our food depends on the quality of the product — sorting through bunches of bananas to find the right bunch, getting the best cut of meat, etc.. Additionally, online groceries run into the same lack of spontaneity problem that prepared meal kits do. You don’t always know what you want until you roam the aisles, see all the options at once, and pick what you are in the mood for then.

The Reuters article uses this data as a backdrop to question Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods. But we think this actually reaffirms why Amazon paid $13.7 billion for the high-end grocer.

Amazon has been trying to get into the grocery business forever. Buying online works for staples that you eat all the time, such as restocking your favorite yogurt and bread each week, and other pantry items. But when it comes to more perishable and fresh items, the company realized it needed an option for people to pick up in person.

Buying Whole Foods gave the company an instant country-wide, supply chain and delivery network built specifically for food that was already in the neighborhood. The bonus of buying a higher-end chain like Whole Foods is that people are more inclined to believe in the higher quality of its product.

Through a combination of what it knows about you already, connected devices like Alexa, machine learning and unparalleled expertise in delivering items to your home quickly, Amazon will get people to (slowly) migrate people to buying more groceries online.

Even Reuters points out that while people may not be buying their groceries online right now, that doesn’t mean they won’t in the future. Nielsen predicts online groceries will grow to a $100 billion business by 2025. A survey in that year will most likely have drastically different numbers.

Walmart & Amazon Want To Send People Inside Our Homes. Will We Let Them?

A couple weeks ago, Walmart announced an agreement with August Home and Deliv to create a direct-to-fridge delivery service. The idea is to use August’s smart access technology to grant temporary access to a delivery person to place the groceries inside a customer’s fridge.

And last week, word leaked that Amazon was also working on its own direct-to-fridge delivery effort by developing a smart doorbell (one would assume the doorbell would also connect an electronic access control product like a smart lock). Both efforts are intended to add extra convenience for consumers and address the problems of unattended delivery.

This got me to thinking: as the epic battle for the future of grocery delivery extends from our doorstep and into our icebox, how many of us will let total strangers into our homes for a little extra convenience?

According to a survey conducted by NextMarket Insights on behalf of Comcast/August Home in early 2016, about 30% of online consumers said they would give temporary access to a service professional such as a house cleaner or delivery person. While that’s well below a majority, it’s probably enough to encourage Amazon and Walmart that there’s a market for this.

And there should be. The problems of “unattended delivery” are real; food left on your porch can get stolen or spoil, particularly if you spend long stretches of time at work or outside the home.  There are many consumers who would gladly adopt technology such as a smart doorbell/smart lock if it meant their groceries were safe and cold when they got home.

Still, I’m not completely sure if we’ll ever see a majority of Americans trusting enough to let complete strangers into our homes.  My wife and I have had home cleaners come twice a month for about a decade, but I didn’t feel comfortable with them being alone in our homes until after a year or so had passed and I got to to know them personally. How many of us ever get to know our grocery delivery guy?

Historically as consumers, our comfort levels rise as we get more accustomed to new situations enabled by technology. Take Uber or Airbnb. Ten years ago most of us would have scoffed at the idea at getting into a strangers car or sleeping in a person’s home. Now it’s considered perfectly normal.

But will we ever have that same level of comfort with unattended access? It’s our home, after all, not someone else’s.  My guess is that slightly more consumers will get comfortable with the idea of letting strangers into their homes, but not a whole lot more.

And that’s probably fine with Walmart and Amazon, both of which are working on other alternatives such as grocery pickup, drones and locker access. And who knows, maybe Amazon is working on refrigerated version of a storage locker us less trusting types could install our our doorstep.

Sonos gets Alexa (and soon Google and Siri)

If you’re like me, Amazon’s Echo plays a central role in your kitchen. Player of music, answerer of questions, setter of timers, forecaster of weather. The Echo is super convenient, but the sound quality is definitely lacking.

Since it was announced last year, I’ve eagerly anticipated the marriage of Alexa’s voice control with the room-filling sound of Sonos Play speakers. Today, Sonos announced that Alexa integration is finally here, along with a new Sonos One speaker with Alexa built in — as well as forthcoming Google Assistant and Siri support.

For existing Sonos and Alexa owners, the Amazon connected assistant is available via a Sonos app beta update available today. With it, you’ll be able to control your Sonos speakers with your voice via the Echo and Echo Dot.

With the Sonos One (available October 24), Sonos is vying to become Switzerland of connected home assistants. The $199 speaker sports Alex integration out of the box, with support for Google Assistant and Siri (via iOS) coming in 2018.

This is probably the best position for Sonos to take as it feels the squeeze between cumbersome traditional high-end audio and the more convenient but lower fidelity smart home devices like the Echo. The timing is good too, given that today Google unveiled its beefy Google Home Max smart speaker and the upcoming Apple Homepod bills itself as having superior audio. Being agnostic to your assistant ecosystem of choice could give Sonos an edge and a chance to regain some lustre.

We had three Sonos speakers in our house, and almost immediately stopped using all of them once we got an Amazon Echo. Despite having worse sound, the device was in the kitchen, so it was more convenient to where our family mostly congregates. It’s such a high-class problem, but after experiencing Alexa’s voice control, running to get my phone to control my speaker felt like so much… work.

But was we played more music in the kitchen — whether to cook to, do homework by, or just throw an impromptu dance party — sound quality became more important. My pre-Sonos One solution was to plug an Echo Dot into a Sonos Play:5, but that takes up a lot of counter space, has dangling cords and can make it harder for Alexa to hear my voice. With its smaller footprint and newer technology, the Sonos One becomes an interesting proposition.

Bosch’s Friendly Kitchen Robot Shows Off Sous Chef Skills At IFA 2017

When Bosch showed off their kitchen assistant Mykie at last year’s IFA and a few months later at CES, the social robot did little more than project a looped video suggesting how he might help out in the kitchen.

But at this year’s IFA, the little guy seemed all grown up as he showed off a voice-powered interactive demo of guided cooking. In the video captured below, you can see the user giving voice commands to navigate Mykie from step to step, watch recipe preparation instructions, search the web and watch videos of pro cooks preparing the food.

It’s an interesting evolution of Mykie in what is fast becoming a more competitive market for AI powered sous chefs. This year we’ve seen everyone from Buzzfeed Tasty to Whirlpool join others like the Hestan Cue and Cuciniale with guided cooking platforms, while Amazon and Samsung are creating what are voice-powered kitchen computers as extensions of their existing AI and app platforms.

By giving Mykie a name and cute little robot face, Bosch is betting consumers will embrace AI assistants with a little personality. Compared with the faceless Alexa, Mykie certainly seems warmer and one that might even become something of a “friend” in the kitchen. Of course, whether we as consumers will befriend the likes of Mykie is part of a longer-term question around just how realistic home robots and AI assistants become.

Bosch representatives at IFA were still vague on when we might see Mykie make it to market. With CES in just a few months, you have to wonder if the German appliance giant will reveal details in Las Vegas about when consumers might have their own kitchen assistant with a friendly face to help them make dinner.

Amazon Looks At Food Tech To Make Packaged Food Better

Amazon continues to explore ways to dominate the $700 billion grocery market, and this time the commerce giant is turning to military-grade food tech to gain an edge on competitors. Reuters is reporting on Amazon’s interest in a partnership with 915 Labs, a startup based in Denver that’s commercializing a technology known as MATS – or microwave assisted thermal sterilization. MATS is a process that takes prepared food and using a specific heating technique, eliminates food pathogens and microorganisms that cause spoilage.

According to Reuters, the process involves taking “sealed packages of food in pressurized water and heating them with microwaves for several minutes.” A sort of sous vide on steroids, the technique was developed at the University of Washington and received FDA approval in 2012 as a safe way to preserve fresh foods.

MATS replaces traditional preservation techniques which often entail heating foods at high temperatures for up to an hour, significantly damaging the quality and taste of the food. 915 Labs, the startup that’s trademarked MATS, says to solve the problem of damaged foods, companies add things like “salt, flavor, texture and color enhancers, and other unnatural ingredients” to make the foods edible again.

MATS-Made Foods and Beverages

Packaged food has to have a long shelf life in order for dry goods companies to make money – but the game changing element is taste. With MATS, companies could potentially make packaged food appealing again, in an era where the heavy consumer focus is on healthier, fresher options. Which brings us to Amazon.

With Amazon Pantry, Dash replenishment services, the purchase of Whole Foods and the use of machine learning and AI to run next-gen stores, Amazon is all in on the grocery game. And while the company is still working on ways to compete in the fresh foods game, Amazon is taking prime real estate in the middle of the grocery store with dry goods.

And besides boxed snack foods and household items, what lives in the middle of the grocery store? Prepared and packaged foods. From frozen dinners to soups, pasta mixes and “just add water” foods, the center aisles are generally filled with sodium-laden offerings that can be bought and sit in pantries for months.

As Amazon looks at building its own meal kit delivery service(see Mike’s Amazon meal kit review), there’s a clear interest in developing its own line of foods that take advantage of Amazon’s massive e-commerce infrastructure but also don’t require the large investment that fresh food transportation and storage often do, particularly in the form of refrigeration.

And without additives and sodium, MATS produced packaged foods could still stay on the shelf just as long but taste much better and be comparatively healthier than their traditionally preserved counterparts.

The research that led to the development of MATS was funded by several large food companies, including Nestle, General Mills, Delmonte and Pepsi, all of whom also play a big role in dry goods and groceries. But now 915 Labs owns the exclusive rights to MATS and its sister process, MAPS or microwave assisted pasteurization sterilization which is a faster way to pasteurize foods like dairy and baby food.

Reuters reports that consumers are unlikely to see MATS-created packaged foods from Amazon until 2018 – and maybe even later depending on how the company decides to integrate the technology with its current offerings. It’s clear that the omnichannel retailer has big plans for food domination in the future.

The Kenmore-Amazon Deal Examined

Last week, Sears and Amazon announced a partnership that will bring the Kenmore brand of appliances to Amazon.com. The deal, which also brings Amazon’s smart home voice assistant Alexa to the Kenmore lineup of smart appliances, marks the first time in Kenmore’s hundred plus years the iconic appliance brand will sold through a non-Sears channel.

The reaction to this deal was mixed. Wall Street loved the idea of Kenmore tapping into Amazon’s retail savvy and Alexa platform, while others saw the deal as something of a white flag for Sears.

The reality is this deal has many net positives – and a few downsides – for both. Let’s break it down for each side:

Sears/Kenmore

Sears’ struggles over the past few years are no secret, and with more stores closing every year, it’s no surprise that Kenmore’s market share has also been shrinking. By virtue of its up-to-now exclusivity with Sears, the appliance brand has simply been in less storefronts every year, which has meant less opportunity to capture the consumer dollar..

Sears stores 2010-2016. Source: Business Insider

The Kenmore brand has also lost some luster over the past decade, as Gen-Xers and Millennials have looked at new entrants into the appliance market such as Samsung and LG. The brand is, in many ways,  mom and dad’s (or grandma and grandpa’s) appliance brand, so the addition of Alexa smarts could give the brand a well-needed upgrade.

The deal also allows Sears to keep its most popular remaining brand. Last year, the company sold the Craftsman brand to Black & Decker, which gave the company a liquidity lifeline, but also meant it was beginning to cut into bone as it struggled to turn itself around.

Long term, however, the deal still doesn’t seem to change the long-term trajectory for Sears. The company’s existing retail format is expensive and outdated and this does nothing to change that. If anything, it could mean less sales of Kenmore appliances in Sears storefronts as more are sold online through Amazon, which could accelerate store closures long term.

Amazon

The deal for Amazon is almost (but not entirely) net-positive. Not only do they get a semi-exclusive distribution deal as the Kenmore brand’s only non-Sears sales channel, but it also likely locks the Alexa platform in as Kenmore’s primary voice interface.

Long term, it also makes Amazon a bigger player in white goods and appliances. While it’s unclear if Amazon would launch their own brand of appliances – my gut tells me they probably wouldn’t – you can never rule anything out with Amazon.

The biggest downside for Amazon? How this deal could benefit other voice assistant and smart home platforms.

Think about it: For other Amazon appliance partners, the deal probably is a bit of an annoyance. After making much of their CES this year about Alexa integration, Whirlpool probably can’t help but be a little annoyed with this deal. This deal will reinforce the reality that while an Amazon Alexa integration is necessary, it would be wise to not put all your eggs in the Alexa basket.

The deal could also have an upside for Google and Apple. While many appliance companies have already done Nest integrations and have been working on Google Assistant integration, this deal will likely push them to push down on the gas pedal. For Apple, who has been moving fairly slowly with HomeKit and Siri integration, this could serve as an opportunity to evangelize their platforms in the face of growing dominance of Alexa’s voice assistant in the smart home.

If you want to hear the head of Kenmore innovation, Chris McGugan, talk about this deal, make sure to not to miss the Smart Kitchen Summit. Just use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets. 

I Made Dinner With An Amazon Meal Kit. Here’s My Review

Amazon can be kinda cruel.

Think about it: Blue Apron, arguably the biggest name in meal kit delivery, works for years to create a new way for consumers to make dinner, eventually becoming the most successful meal kit company in a crowded field and, just after they have an initial public offering to pay back investors and employees for all their hard work, Amazon waltzes in with a meal kit service of their own the same exact month to send Blue Apron’s stock tumbling downward.

Brutal. But hey, this is Jeff Bezos we’re talking about.

Bezos Prime

Does that dude look like he means business? Yes. Yes he does.

But Blue Apron’s bad fortune is my luck since I live in the Seattle market, where Amazon tends to roll out new food initiatives first. When I read yesterday the company was already shipping its meal kits, I decided to order one.

So here is my review. Before I start, it’s worth noting I will be comparing my experience with Amazon’s meal kit to that of Blue Apron. Why? It’s what I know. I subscribed to Blue Apron for about seven months last year and, as a result, Blue Apron is my main point of reference when it comes to meal kits.

The Order Experience

When I learned that Amazon is already shipping their meal kits in the Seattle market, I went to the site and checked out the meals available. And while I didn’t expect to eat an Amazon meal kit for dinner last night, when I saw the company offered same day delivery on their meal kits, my dinner plans suddenly changed.

A few observations about the order experience. First, I counted a total of sixteen available meal kits. I liked having the choice of that many meals, something I didn’t get with Blue Apron in a specific week, which gave me the choice of four meals to choose from every week, two of which they would ship to my house.

Second, same day delivery is a big deal. With Blue Apron, I needed to pick my meals roughly a week in advance to give the company enough time buy, prepare and ship the meal to me by early the next week. With Amazon’s meal kits, I ordered that morning before 10 AM, and it was on my porch before 5 PM.

For those of us who often don’t plan that far in advance, this is a nice feature. It also gives me more flexibility since I can order one meal or five meals in a given week. Blue Apron subscriptions offered only two options: a two-person meal plan with three meals per week and the family plan, which is two meals a week.

One advantage of Blue Apron is they offer family meal kits (a serving of four). All of Amazon’s meal kits, at least currently, are portioned to serve two people. While this could be a problem if I want to cook for my family of four, I figure it’d also be easy enough to order two Amazon meal kits for one meal. But more packaging means more mess, so I suspect Amazon will offer more portion options in the future.

Pricing is similar to Blue Apron on a per-meal basis. Blue Apron advertises meals priced at less than ten bucks per person, and that in line with all of the Amazon meal kits, which came in at $8-9 per person.

The Unboxing

This is where things got exciting.

The meal kit arrived at my home in an Amazon Fresh bag, inside of which there was a package wrapped in an insulated bag.

The Amazon Fresh bag with insulated meal kit inside

When I opened the insulated bag, I saw a single box with multiple ice packs.

Inside the Amazon Meal Kit delivery bag

When I pulled the box out of the insulation bag, I was surprised at how small the package was. Granted, it was a serving for two, rather than the family meal four-person servings I would get from Blue Apron, but I was surprised nonetheless at the small size of food box.

Below is a video of my “unboxing” of the meal kit.

Let me emphasize that the packaging and presentation of the Amazon meal kit was probably the most impressive part of the whole experience. I liked that all the food was packed tightly in a well-designed box. Contrast this with Blue Apron, where ingredients are, for the most part, packed loose in the big insulation bags.

Another small observation, but possibly an important one. The chill packs in the insulated bag were fully recyclable. The plastic exterior of the chill packs had a giant recycle symbol. Verbiage below that said the contents inside is plain old water and that I could empty and recycle the bags. I like that idea because other meal kit services (not just Blue Apron) often have some chemical concoction inside that is not recyclable.

Amazon meal kit chill packs are filled with water and are recyclable

The Ingredients

Next, I assessed the ingredients. Much like Blue Apron, the number of ingredients I had to work with always surprises me. I guess this is in part because if left to my own devices, I often cook simple meals and when I do cook with recipes and a bigger meal plan, I find it it’s a lot of work to assemble everything I need. With a meal kit – whether it’s Amazon or Blue Apron – the hard work of shopping and assembling ingredients in the right portions is already done.

You can see below what my unpacked box looked like:

My meal kit ingredients

The main difference I noticed with my Amazon meal kit and a Blue Apron meal kit is Amazon has done more of the work by chopping the vegetables. Blue Apron kits come with whole vegetables, and you chop them according to the recipe instructions. Some meals had me chopping five or six vegetables to prepare a meal. For this meal, which included sweet potato fries, a bacon jam with onions and a cole slaw, all the vegetables with the exception of the pickle were already chopped.

Whether this is good or bad comes down to personal preference. If you prefer whole, fresh food or like doing more of the prep work for your meal, Blue Apron makes sense. If you want to save a little time or find chopping veggies tedious, then I would suggest Amazon’s meal kit service is better in this regard.

Time To Cook

With my ingredients ready to go, it was time to cook.

Much like Blue Apron, Amazon includes a good looking instructions and ingredient card with their kit. The card, with ingredients on one side and cooking instructions on the other, was smaller than the Blue Apron cards.

Here’s the Amazon instruction card for my Wagyu beef burger meal:

The Amazon meal kit recipe card

At first blush, the meal I chose looked really simple. After all, how hard can making a burger be?

And while it was straightforward, I found the extra flourishes Amazon put into the recipe to make this, as they put it, a “burger for a true gourmand,” enjoyable. They had me make a bacon jam with onions and maple balsamic, finish the burger in the oven, and toss the sweet potato fries in a delicious seasoning blend. In general, it wasn’t too much work, but enough to make me feel like I could say I cooked something.

Making bacon jam

And just like Blue Apron, I found the 30 minutes of promised cook time was action packed. Once I finished one thing, I was onto the next and, all along the way, I was using timers (Alexa, naturally) as I orchestrated the cook.

In 30 minutes or so, I had the meal ready to plate.

The Meal

Here’s the plated meal:

The finished meal

I was feeding my son, who isn’t a fan of onions or cole slaw, so his was more basic. Mine was, more or less, as pictured on the instruction card.

It was good. Wagyu is high-quality beef and, add in the artisanal bun, the bacon jam, and the premixed burger sauce, and it was one tasty burger.

It was also a very big burger. The meal kit included a full pound of ground beef for a two person meal. I normally don’t make half-pound burger patties, but I decided to go for it, and it resulted in a very fat burger that was hard to get my mouth around (that’s a good thing).

While I think one meal is too small a sample size to generalize about Amazon’s meal kit portion sizes, if my meal is any indication, Amazon is not scrimping. Blue Apron four-person portions sometimes felt a bit light when it came to the main course, but satisfying.  One thing I will be watching for as I sample other meal kits is if generous portions as part of Amazon’s overall strategy.

Despite the size of the meal, I will say it was good enough to finish the plate in its entirety.

Summary

Bottom line, I was happy with my Amazon meal kit and will be trying other meal combinations and recipes.

Last night’s experience tells me Amazon has put in a lot of time to fine-tune this product. The purchase experience, delivery time, packaging and presentation, cooking experience and quality of meal were all high-caliber.

Combine that with company’s strength in online commerce, customer loyalty, delivery infrastructure and – as of last month- their move into brick and mortar grocery delivery, and Amazon’s move into meal kits should be worrisome for Blue Apron and any other company in the meal kit space.

Join The Spoon editors and folks creating the future of the kitchen at the Smart Kitchen Summit. 

Doritos By Drone? It Could Take A While

Across the skies in the U.S., delivery drones are a concept that holds great promise. This vision remains as an elusive scheme held hostage by regulators and uncertain implementations. Companies such as Amazon, Google, and even 7-Eleven are in the pilot and trial phases of drone delivery, as they test range, durability and payload of these flying, robotic carriers. A sign of domestic market uncertainty is that many of these early experiments are taking place on foreign soil.

Israeli-based startup FlyTrex is taking a different approach to the drone delivery opportunity. The company certainly has its eye on the food delivery down the road. While that space sorts out, FlyTrex is offering an out-of-the-box solution, complete with an API program, with potential appeal to markets beyond the culinary world with a focus on non-U.S. customers. Sensing the commercial use of drones for food and/or groceries is, at best, murky, the company has a deal in place with the Ukrainian postal authorities to soon test the delivery of small parcels via these unmanned, low-flying aircraft. FlyTrex hopes this is a first of many such trials.

While local governments in the US are moving quickly to pave the way for slow-moving (and safe) sidewalk delivery robots, delivery drones on the other hand are stuck in a frustrating loop of regulations that prevent the space from moving forward which, in turn, limits the technological progress of this mode of robotic delivery. As with many current legislative battles, regulating drones has become a fight between state and federal government.

“This could be a brave new world — and a cool way to get your stuff,” Minnesota’s U.S. Rep. Jason Lewis told Governmental Technology. Lewis is a Republican recently introduced bipartisan legislation to give the state, local and tribal governments’ jurisdiction over drones flying at 200 feet or lower. Lewis believes such a measure protects privacy and property rights while giving a boost to new technology.

The FAA is not keen on turning over drone regulation to local authorities. “If one or two municipalities enacted ordinances regulating [drones] in the navigable airspace and a significant number of municipalities followed suit, fractionalized control of the navigable airspace could result,” the agency wrote in 2015.

Despite obvious roadblocks, Amazon is undaunted in its pursuit of drone delivery. Given the amount of money the company has invested in the opportunity, as well as its pending purchase of Whole Foods, the supergiant retailer must explore every channel for efficiently getting goods from business to business and from business to consumer. Recently, Amazon has set up a research center in Paris to develop an air-traffic control system for drones as well as seeking a patent for cylindrical delivery hubs that work for drones and delivery trucks.

While there are plenty of sample videos detailing tests in various regions of the U.S., or tantalizing futurists with drones delivering beer, it may be years before we reach the viable intersection of food delivery and octocopters. In the meantime, the current zeitgeist for drone delivery is one that requires patience, a strong vision, and the resources to wait out multi pronged inertia.

Allrecipes And Others Leveraging Amazon For Guided Cooking Efforts

Allrecipes, one of the web’s original food and recipe pioneers, is making yet another move into the smart kitchen.

And not surprisingly, the nearly twenty-year-old company has once again partnered up with crosstown online commerce giant and newly minted grocery store chain operator Amazon to do so.

This week Allrecipes announced it is one of the first companies to launch a video skill for cooking. The company’s new Alexa video skill fuses video and photos with step-by-step instructions to make their recipes fully immersive cooking guides.

Meredith (owner of Allrecipes) President Stan Pavlovsky highlights how the addition of voice and video transitions a simple recipe into an interactive experience: “Voice-led experiences are playing a rapidly growing role in helping home cooks discover and prepare recipes with ease. Adding visual guidance to that experience is the next step. With this skill, Allrecipes turns the cooking show of the past into an interactive and fully customizable experience that has more than 60,000 paths to choose.”

As recipes become more interactive and increasingly connected to cooking hardware through software, a new battleground is opening up to become the guided cooking software platform for the kitchen. While the new Alexa video skill no doubt creates new partnership opportunities for Allrecipes to work with cookware and appliance manufacturers, it also puts them more directly in competition with other players creating cooking guidance systems centered around recipe information.

Just this past month, cooking app maker SideChef launched its first app from a new publishing platform designed to create personality-centric guided cooking apps. The Budget Bytes app, created in cooperation with well-known food blogger Beth Moncel (the author behind the popular Budget Byes blog), combines photos, Alexa voice guidance with step-by-step instructions for the user.

This move follows efforts by companies like Drop and Innit to create guided cooking software platforms that connect directly with third party appliances and cookware through IoT technology.  Others, like ChefSteps and Hestan Cue, have created fully integrated systems that fuse recipe driven visual instruction apps with sensor-enabled cooking devices.

At the center of much of this activity is Amazon, acting as an IoT and AI “arms dealer” with Alexa and its hardware platforms to help power companies in the kitchen space to create new products and accelerate transitions to new business models. The new SideChef app integrates with Alexa, as does ChefSteps for its Joule connected cooking appliance. And while we have yet to see any significant move by these companies to utilize Amazon’s image recognition APIs, it’s just a matter of time before one of these companies incorporates the company’s computer vision technology as part of a guided cooking system.

Of course, Amazon partners always have to wonder which parts of the business the Seattle giant will ultimately decide to enter themselves. As we saw with Nucleus, Amazon often will partner with companies and then create specific products that look similar to those products. And, as Geekwire points out, with Whole Foods Amazon now has access to a large cache of recipe information. Chances are they will eventually look to that data more closely with the Alexa and Dash platforms to power their own devices and create opportunities for direct commerce.

But for now, Allrecipes and others are happy to work with Amazon to help transition the recipe from a simple list of ingredients to interactive guidance platform.

The Battle For The ‘Kitchen Screen’ Has Just Begun. Here’s The Leading Contenders

Back in the year 2000, the world’s first Internet-connected refrigerator was introduced. Made by LG, the Digital DIOS came with a webcam, an Ethernet port and perhaps most importantly, an LCD touchscreen.

The fridge was one of the first examples of an appliance with a digital screen created specifically for the consumer kitchen, but with a $20 thousand price tag, consumers stayed away.  Today, nearly two decades after the introduction of the world’s first smart fridge, some of the world’s biggest consumer electronics companies are rushing to put screens back into the kitchen again.

Why now? There are a few reasons, but most come back to one simple truth: today’s kitchen is becoming the home’s central gathering place, where people not only come to make meals but also to hang out with friends, pay bills or do homework. In other words, the kitchen has become the modern home’s ‘everything room’, and unlike the family room where a TV or family computer often resides, there’s no defined product today in the kitchen that’s accepted as the go-to screen for family members to share information, manage home systems, keep tabs on things and communicate with one another.

Not that some companies aren’t trying. Here’s a look at the leading contenders:

Refrigerators

With ample flat surface space and usually centered in the middle of the kitchen, you can see why appliance makers see the fridge as the logical place to put a big digital screen. And unlike past efforts where companies would sometimes slap a screen on a fridge with limited functionality, today’s smart fridges have big, high-definition LED touch screens. The Samsung Family Hub’s screen is 21.5″, while LG’s Smart Instaview refrigerator has a huge 29″ screen.

Pros: The main advantage of having the refrigerator act as a family’s community screen is the simple fact the fridge has long served as the home’s de facto analog bulletin board, where families stick shopping lists, family pictures, and calendars. Given what seems a natural progression for the fridge to become the home’s digital command center, it’s no surprise companies have been pursuing the idea of the smart fridge for two decades.

Cons: The biggest challenge fridges face in becoming the main ‘family screen’ is simple: these are devices that are meant to stay in a house for ten years or more. This long lifespan is much different from traditional computing devices, such as mobile phones or tablets, which typically have much faster replacement cycles.  Consumers plopping down $2,500 for the latest fridge are going to want their new device to last for at least a decade, no matter how smart they are when they purchase them.

Smart Assistants

Though the Amazon Echo is only a couple years old, its success has create a whole new category of devices alternatively called ‘smart speakers’ or ‘virtual assistants’ (for our purposes I’ll call them ‘smart assistants’, since not all are speakers and the hardware part beyond the voice assistant is hardly virtual).

And now, the company’s new Echo Show represents an entirely new and exciting direction, with a 7″ touch screen and a new visual skill API that allows third party developers to create skills that leverage visual information such as live stream video from a networked camera or cooking videos from Twitch.

And let’s not forget HelloEgg, a smart assistant with an embedded visual display designed specifically for the kitchen created by a company called RND64 that is expected to ship this year.

Pros: Unlike a heavy appliance like a fridge, smart assistant products can be purchased and installed anywhere on a countertop.  In a way, they’re like a highly optimized tablet, but instead of being a personal computing device they’re created to act as a shared screen. In many ways, the Echo Show is Amazon’s concept of a kitchen computer.

Cons: The touchscreen enabled smart assistant category is just simply too new to know how well it will do with consumers. While the Amazon Echo and other smart assistant products are no doubt becoming popular, it’s just a little soon to see how popular smart assistants with touchscreen will be.

Kitchen Counters And Flat Surfaces

The concept of using the kitchen counter as a Minority Report like interactive touch screen has been bouncing around in future-forward design studios for much of the past decade and, in the past couple years, big kitchen electronics makers like Whirlpool have even toyed with the idea of the countertop touch screen.

IKEA Concept Kitchen 2025

Pros: First and foremost, the idea of your surface as interactive computing screen is just cool. It also offers an extremely flexible and dynamic format to display information and adjust to specific design needs of a kitchen.

Cons: While the idea has been floating around and touted by such big brands like Whirlpool and IKEA, a projected surface touchscreen has yet to roll out in any significant way in a mass market consumer product.

Kitchen-Centric PCs

For a hot moment back in 2008-9, some in the computer industry decided that since people spend lots of time in the kitchen, they should create a line of Kitchen PCs. The idea wasn’t altogether bad since, in some ways, was a predecessor concept to the Echo Show since these products centered around the early touchscreen Windows PCs. But not surprisingly, the late aughts “kitchen PC” movement fizzled out as quickly as it started.

Pros: The idea of a kitchen computer with a touchscreen is not a bad idea, and lots of people actually have their PCs in the kitchen.

Cons: These devices were just Windows PCs with touchscreens that were very much a product of 2009.

The Microwave Oven

The fridge isn’t the only device where a screen could reside. In fact, a decade ago appliance giant Whirlpool toyed around with the concept of putting a TV screen on a microwave oven. While they never rolled the product out to market, others have since toyed around with the idea.

Games Console Microwave

Pros: Some appliances, like the microwave, are nearly as prevalent as refrigerators. Chances are a touchscreen enabled microwave would likely be much less expensive than a smart fridge.

Cons: At this point, I know of no product company that is considering a smart microwave, perhaps because of the complications of sticking a flat screen computing device on the front of a microwave. Not to say someone couldn’t surprise me, but this one seems to be the domain of tinkerers and video-bloggers at this point.

Bottom line, we’re likely to see many more screens in the kitchen in coming years. Unlike the personal computing devices most of us carry in our pockets or backpacks, these “kitchen screen” will be tailored for shared use and act as a modern equivalent of family bulletin board/digital command center for the modern home.

The only open question is exactly which device will it be.

The Smart Kitchen Summit is around the corner. Get your ticket today before early bird ticket pricing before it expires to make sure you are the the one and only event focused on the future of food, cooking and the kitchen. 

Podcast: Amazon Buys Whole Foods

Every now and then a deal of such magnitude happens, it makes you almost speechless when you first hear about it.

Amazon buying Whole Foods is one of those deals.

On this quick-take podcast, Mike gets together with Nomiku CEO Lisa Fetterman to discuss this mind-blowing deal, what it could mean for Amazon, what a future Amazon-ized Whole Foods could look like and the implications for the broader grocery industry.

Make sure to subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show here on iTunes.

You can also check out Mike’s initial take on the deal over at the Spoon.

Make sure to check out the Smart Kitchen Summit, the only event about the future of food, cooking, and the kitchen. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets. Also, make sure to subscribe to get The Spoon in your inbox. 

Analysis: Here’s Why Amazon & Whole Foods Make Perfect Sense

Blockbuster news this morning: Amazon is acquiring Whole Foods for $13.7 billion.

Needless to say, this is a huge deal. My immediate thoughts are this:

This deal signifies Amazon’s entry into physical brick and mortar in a big way. The company, which has been toying around with future store concepts like its own bookstore and the Amazon Go grocery concept store in Seattle, is betting big on physical store formats in the future.

The company can no longer simply be called an online retailer. They are now truly omnichannel.

This gives Amazon a flagship store network for food (and other products) for pickup and delivery in markets around the country. The company, which has been building out its distributed pickup locker network in places like 7-11 around the country, as well as slowly expanding the reach of Amazon Fresh, now has its own nationwide network of storefronts that they can leverage in the rollout of both.

The combined company also provides an opportunity to experiment with loyalty program benefits for the company’s Amazon Prime members. Imagine Whole Foods promotions for Amazon Prime members and even having special shopping hours for members of its subscription-loyalty club. Amazon can make finally take its loyalty program and extend physical retail benefits, not unlike members of Costco or other membership stores have been doing for years.

Perhaps most importantly, the integration of Whole Foods provides the perfect format for Amazon’s future-forward shopping concepts that they’ve been experimenting with in their Amazon Go concept store in Seattle. While I don’t see Whole Foods going cashier-less anytime soon, I do think IoT-powered shopping could ease buyer friction in the purchasing process. Expect Whole Foods to become sensor-packed stores that analyze and understand their clients better than anyone. I also expect Amazon to integrate its own technologies such as Alexa into the shopping experience and even find ways to promote its own Amazon replenishment platform Dash in-store.

Of course, it goes without saying the Whole Foods customer is not the everyman, mass-market customer. The company, which pioneered the organic grocery movement in the early 1980s, attracts a high-income crowd that is willing to pay a premium for products. It’s not the Safeway or Target customer. That said, this is exactly the type of customer that already probably spends lots of money on Amazon.

It’s a good fit.

Last point: I think this deal is an admission by Amazon that continued high-growth is dependent on further expansion into physical brick and mortar. While online commerce will no doubt continue to grow, after spending a decade experimenting with Amazon Fresh, the company has learned that getting greater wallet share in areas like fresh produce and grocery requires physical store fronts, no matter how much Amazon spends on things like drone delivery.

Want to explore the future of grocery? Make sure to check out the Smart Kitchen Summit, the only event about the future of food, cooking, and the kitchen. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets. Also, make sure to subscribe to get The Spoon in your inbox.