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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Week in Restaurants: Kitopi Brings Ghost Kitchens Stateside, The Amazon-Deliveroo Deal Is on the Rocks

If you’re currently hiding from your in-laws, stuck at the airport on your way home, or just need a mental break from the holidays, now would be a good time to catch up on all things restaurant tech.

Behold, our the last restaurant tech roundup of 2019, complete with news on ghost kitchens, facial-recognition software, and Amazon’s latest antitrust woes:

Kitopi Kicks Off U.S. Operations With NYC Ghost Kitchen

Dubai-based ghost kitchen provider Kitopi has expanded operations to NYC. The startup, which already operates kitchens in London, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and other cities around the globe, provides kitchen infrastructure to restaurants wanting to use ghost kitchens to fulfill off-premies orders. The company signed a 10-year lease on a space in Brooklyn and has plans for 10 to 15 kitchens to be housed in the facility. Kitopi also plans to open another location, in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood, in February 2020, and expand further across the U.S. (no specific locations have been named) later in the year.

The Next Phase of the Amazon-Deliveroo Investigation Begins

Amazon’s investment in UK food delivery startup Deliveroo is now in serious jeopardy after the two companies failed to address the concerns from UK antitrust watchdog the Competition and Markets Authority around how the deal would affect competition. Earlier in December, the CMA cited concerns around how the deal could hurt emerging competition in the food delivery market as well as raise prices and lower quality for consumers. The investigation now enters a second phase that will further delay, if not derail, Amazon’s investment and in the process give competitors like Just Eat and Uber Eats a leg up in the meantime.

PopID Is Launching Its Facial-recognition Platform In Dairi-O Kiosks

North Carolina QSR chain Dairi-O, may be older than McDonald’s and far less known, but it’s on the cutting edge as far as implementing restaurant tech is concerned. The chain has teamed up with PopID to launch the latter’s facial-recognition software inside self-service kiosks at Dairi-O restaurants. PopID is owned by Cali Group and already has its technology in place at CaliBurger, Deli Time, and other small-to medium-sized restaurant chains. With the facial-recognition technology, users can access saved favorite meals, re-order, and pay for their food without a phone or credit card. Dairi-O said it plans to install the tech in all of its locations in the first half of 2020, and has expansion plans for the brand itself in the near future.

Amazon Has 5 Days to Save Its Controversial Investment in UK Food Delivery Service Deliveroo

Amazon’s investment in Deliveroo — and its stake in UK restaurant food delivery — remains in doubt after British regulators said this week that the deal could mean higher prices and lower quality services for customers. Amazon and Deliveroo have five days to submit proposals that counter these concerns, which were raised by UK competition watchdog the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Failure to do so would mean a an in-depth investigation of the deal that could take six months, according to an article published in The Guardian.

Amazon first announced the investment in Deliveroo in May 2019, when it was meant to be part part of a larger $575 million funding round. Though the investment would form a minority stake, about 16 percent, the CMA flagged it in July, saying it presented “reasonable grounds” to suspect that Amazon and Deliveroo would “cease to be distinct.” Deliveroo was then prohibited from any activity that would lead to Amazon’s integration with the restaurant food delivery service, including changes to senior management or big contracts. 

In a statement released Wednesday, the CMA said the investment could “damage competition in online restaurant food delivery by discouraging Amazon from re-entering the market in the UK.” Amazon previously ran its own restaurant delivery service in the UK but shuttered that business after just two years. As regulators have stressed, the Deliveroo investment would give Amazon a path back into the market and immediate access to Deliveroo’s existing customer base. That in turn would undercut competition from other food delivery services in the UK such as Uber Eats and Just Eat.

“There are relatively few players in these markets, so we’re concerned that Amazon having this kind of influence over Deliveroo could dampen the emerging competition between the two businesses.” Andrea Gomes da Silva, executive director of the CMA, said in the statement.

There is also the concern that the deal would damage competition in the UK grocery delivery sector. Amazon and Deliveroo are both two of the strongest players in this area right now. A major investment like this could reduce the competition.

According to The Guardian article, Amazon could be forced to sell its stake in Deliveroo, as previous companies have had to do in similar cases over the years. 

Amazon: Instant Pots, Avocados and, of course, Amazon Devices are Big Sellers This Year

In what is becoming its own holiday tradition, Amazon sent out a press release this week explaining how Amazon and Amazon devices in particular crushed it this past Cyber Monday.

In Amazon’s typical vague fashion, the company didn’t release any hard numbers, saying only that “Customers purchased millions more Amazon Devices compared to the same period last year in Amazon’s Stores globally and the best-selling items were Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote.”

It’s no real surprise that the biggest e-commerce site in the world could pull levers and buttons on its biggest shopping day of the year to generate millions of sales of its own products. But if we look back, during last year’s Cyber Monday holiday weekend, Echo Dot was also a big seller, with millions of Echo devices sold. And in 2017, Amazon said that over that entire holiday shopping season that it had sold tens of millions of Alexa devices.

In short, dominance perpetuates itself, and with Amazon owning 70 percent of the smart speaker market, its dominance doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. For the smart kitchen, this means appliance makers will continue to bake Alexa capabilities into their devices, which will beget more sales of Alexa-enabled devices, and the cycle continues.

Quick sidenote: It’s interesting to see Amazon’s wording evolve over the past three years. In 2017 it was “Alexa” enabled devices. In 2018 they were “Echo” devices and this year they are “Amazon” devices. This evolution is a reflection of how Amazon has broadened its first-party offerings with items like the Fire TV devices and Ring connected doorbells and lights.

But it wasn’t all Amazon, Amazon, Amazon this holiday season. The company also announced its “Best of Prime 2019” this week and among the winners were Instant Pot and… avocados.

The Instant Pot (which merged with the maker of Pyrex earlier this year) is indefatigable. Amazon said it has been a top seller for the past three years, and the Instant Pot DUO60 was among the most gifted items by Prime members this year as well.

And while it really didn’t provide any other context or numbers, Avocados were also a big seller throughout 2019 for Amazon Prime members as well.

OK. Sure.

This is just the first round of Amazon’s “Aren’t We Great?” press releases. Expect another after Christmas as well, telling (in vague terms only) how many millions of devices it sold throughout this holiday season.

How Could Amazon Licensing its Go Technology Impact Other Cashierless Startups?

Bloomberg has a story out today saying that Amazon’s cashierless checkout ambitions are much bigger in both size and scope than its current bodega-sized Go stores. A source told Bloomberg that Amazon is looking to outfit its own larger-sized grocery stores with its checkout tech and also license it out to other retailers.

Bloomberg’s story complements an earlier CNBC report saying that Amazon was looking to license out its cashierless checkout technology, though the licensees listed then were airports and movie theaters. But if we know that Amazon is opening its own larger format grocery stores, developing new Go-like systems that work in larger format stores and is now actively seeking to license out its cashierless technology, what does that mean for all the other startups now in the cashierless checkout space?

As a quick refresher, Amazon Go stores are grab-and-go retail experiences. Shoppers scan their phone as they walk into the store where banks of cameras and sensors keep track of what people grab and what they keep, and charge them automatically upon exiting.

Amazon isn’t the only company working on this cashierless checkout technology, and we cover a number of the other players in the space. Trigo, Grabango, Standard Cognition, Caper, Zippin are all startups looking to retrofit existing grocery stores with cashierless checkout tech.

Many of these startups have even already announced retailer relationships: Trigo is being used by Shufersal in Israel and Tesco in the U.K., Grabango has Giant Eagle, Caper has Sobeys in Canada and Zippin has Lojas Americanos in Brazil.

There are a lot of grocery retailers in the world, so there’s plenty of opportunity to go around, but one has to wonder how Amazon’s 800 lb. gorilla will alter the current playing field.

To be sure, I don’t imagine large, nationwide retailers like Albertsons or Kroger, who are already scared of Amazon’s grocery growth and working overtime to fight them off, would want to then turn around and license Amazon technology. And Amazon’s largest rival, Walmart, has already built out its own Intelligent Retail Lab, which currently uses cameras and sensors to monitor inventory, but seems primed for expansion into cashierless checkout at some point.

However, smaller, regional chains might be interested in adding Go-like capabilities to their stores. And they might be more willing to license Amazon tech, which comes with a brand recognition, world-class technology and a sense of permanence (i.e. they won’t run out of money and shut down).

Amazon would surely be keen to license its Go tech to smaller chains, perhaps even at a discounted rate because it would give the company something just as valuable as money: all that shopping data. By licensing out the means for purchasing, Amazon would still get all that data about what is bought and when, without having to build out stores everywhere in the U.S. This data could then be used to feed the algorithms to make the stores they do build out physical spaces more efficient.

All this is to say that 2019 was a transitional year for cashierless checkout startups with lots of partnerships announced publicly. But with Amazon looking like it’s getting into the game, those startups will need to scale up and lock down even more retailer agreements before it’s too late.

Amazon Issued Patent For System That Coordinates Microwave Oven With Wi-Fi Network Traffic

Back when the government first set aside radio spectrum real estate for home and industrial use in 1947, one of the very first applications they had in mind was the microwave oven. Only the then nascent cooking technology, which operates within the 2.4 GHz radio band, wouldn’t be using the newly reserved spectrum to send communication signals over the air, but would instead be creating electromagnetic radiation to heat food.

Three quarters of a century later microwave ovens are still heating our food, only nowadays their widespread use congests the same ISM bands (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) that are now widely used for digital communication networks such as those based on Wi-Fi. Most of the time it’s not a problem, at least until someone gets hungry and zaps a snack in the microwave. When that happens, the device’s electromagnetic radiation can disrupt the quality of a Wi-Fi network operating in the 2.4 GHz frequency band.*

In other words, heating up Hot Pockets usually results in dropped data packets.

Most of us tolerate the problem because we don’t really think about it. Not Amazon. This week the company was issued US patent number 10,477,585 for a system that coordinates the heating element of the microwave (the magnetron) with the home’s Wi-Fi network.

How does it work? Basically by employing a system where the microwave oven and Wi-Fi network coordinate network traffic around the magnetron’s on-off cycle.

From the patent:  the “wireless communication device (e.g., the microwave oven itself, a speech interface device in the environment of the microwave oven, etc.) may determine if the magnetron of the microwave oven is operating, and, if the magnetron is operating, a coordination mechanism can be implemented to send data wirelessly in the environment during the magnetron’s off period, and to cease sending the data in the environment during the magnetron’s on period.”

So why would Amazon care about coordinating our microwave ovens with local digital communication traffic? Maybe in part to make sure the company’s tens of millions of Wi-Fi devices in our homes in the form of Alexa-powered Echos and Ring doorbells work well together. The company also has its own microwave oven product (as well as a new multifunction smart oven), so it’s not too much of a stretch to see the company implementing this technology in its own products as a potential differentiator.

In the end, it’s hard to say whether Amazon will ever even put this patent to use. The company is a prolific researcher and patent filer, and while the bulk of its patents have to do with things like cloud computing, drones and artificial intelligence, every now and then one of their patents is of a more domestic nature. But, like with the Seattle giant’s other patents like the electronic nose in a refrigerator or a smart garden, it sure is fun to speculate.

*Sure, network nerds will note that many Wi-Fi networks nowadays operate in a higher, less-cluttered frequency in the 5GHz radio band, but most Wi-Fi gear is dual-mode and still operate periodically in the 2.4 GHz band. 

Amazon Confirms Grocery Store, but Questions Remain

After months of speculation, CNET confirmed this morning that Amazon is indeed getting into the grocery store game. Despite this confirmation, however, many questions remain.

Here’s what CNET discovered so far:

  • The first Amazon grocery store will be in Woodland Hills, CA near Los Angeles
  • It is opening in 2020
  • This store is different from Whole Foods
  • The store won’t use Amazon Go’s cashierless checkout tech, so you’ll have to wait in lines

We don’t know what name the store will have, or what the selection and pricing will be, or if there are more stores on the way. Earlier reports have suggested that this Amazon store could carry the types of items that Whole Foods doesn’t (e.g. a can of Coke or a box of Twinkies).

Amazon’s bid to build its own grocery stores comes at a time when it is aggressively battling the likes of Walmart, Target and Kroger for a larger piece of the $800 billion dollar US grocery market. According to earlier research, Amazon already leads its competitors in online grocery shopping, but most of that is through Amazon proper, not its Amazon Fresh grocery brand, and those shoppers tend to spend less than shoppers spend at Walmart.com.

Last month, Amazon made delivery of online grocery orders free for all of its Prime Members, and the addition of its own line of groceries stores would give the company more options for customers like curbside pickup.

But right now, online grocery shopping remains a small percentage of overall grocery spending, as people still like to look and touch produce and proteins before they purchase. Having a real world retail store would give Amazon tons of data and insights about who shops and when, how they move through a store, what they buy, what they don’t buy etc. All of this can be leveraged by its already massive retail platform to get you to ultimately buy more, buy more groceries online, and buy more groceries from Amazon.

Amazon Opening Big Robotics Center in Massachusetts

Amazon announced today that it’s going to build a new robotics hub in Westborough, MA outside of Boston. The company is spending $40 million on the 350,000 square foot facility that will open in 2021 and be in addition to the company’s current robotics center in North Reading, MA.

When you think about Amazon automation, it’s often in relation to its warehouse robots that autonomously carry around racks of items to be boxed and shipped. But the company has been branching out into other robots such as the Scout delivery robot currently running around in tests in Washington state and California. Amazon also has a patent for a robot that would live in your garage and go out to fetch items for you.

Amazon didn’t mention any specific projects that will be worked on at the new facility, but given our focus on food here at The Spoon, our minds immediately went to how Amazon could continue to apply new robots to groceries. Amazon is reportedly looking to open up its own line of supermarkets apart from Whole Foods, and it’s not hard to imagine the company taking its logistical know-how and applying it to some kind of robot-driven grocery fulfillment center.

Automated grocery fulfillment centers are gaining some traction with grocery retailers. Takeoff Technologies is building out micro-fulfillment centers in the back of existing grocery stores for Albertsons, Ahold Delhaize and Sedano’s. Fabric (formerly Common Sense Robotics) recently raised $110 million and moved its headquarters to New York City and has plans to build 14 fulfillment centers across the U.S. Meanwhile, Kroger is building out standalone robot-powered smart warehouses for grocery delivery in various locations across the eastern half of the U.S.

If Amazon builds out its own supermarket chain from the ground up, it’s conceivable that it will incorporate automation and robots to make fulfilling online orders more speedy. Plus, having all that robotics talent and research could help the company figure out new technologies to better handle fragile and perishable items like fruits and vegetables.

The company just started offering its Prime members free delivery for groceries, and making that process more efficient as online grocery shopping grows only makes sense.

Why Amazon Made Grocery Delivery Free for Prime Members

The war to win your online grocery shopping dollars escalated this morning as Amazon announced it was now offering unlimited free grocery delivery for its Prime members. The move waives the previous $14.99 delivery fee and offers options for one- and two-hour delivery through Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market.

Why did Amazon make this move now? I mean, obviously it’s using all of the levers at its disposal to get more of your dollars (and shopping data!) as it fends off grocery rivals like Walmart, Kroger and Target. With an estimated 105 million Prime members in the U.S., Amazon has a sizeable audience that it can sway, and it needed to move the needle when it comes to online grocery shopping.

Though online grocery is a small sliver of the overall grocery shopping now, it’s growing, and Amazon needs to change the nature of how people shop for groceries on its site. Research from Coresight earlier this year showed that Amazon was already leading in online grocery shopping, but with a pretty big caveat. As we wrote in May:

When consumers are buying groceries online, Amazon.com is the top place to do it. Coresight says 62.5 percent of who bought groceries online did so through Amazon, which commands a double digit lead over competitors like Walmart and Target (see below). It should be noted, however, that most of this shopping is through Amazon proper, not Amazon Fresh or Prime Now, and that Amazon shoppers generally spend less on groceries there than at Walmart.com, Target.com or Kroger.com, making Amazon shoppers “occasional or small-basket online shoppers.”

By making grocery delivery free for Prime members, Amazon is looking to convert casual shoppers into more dedicated big basket ones.

This new Prime perk also comes just a month after Amazon rival Walmart announced it was rolling out its Delivery Unlimited service nationwide. As the name states, Delivery Unlimited gives Walmart shoppers unlimited grocery delivery for $98/year or $12.95/month. Amazon Prime is $119/year or $12.99/month and includes faster shipping on items ordered through Amazon, as well as video and music streaming services.

We would be remiss if we didn’t note that waiving the grocery delivery fee also comes as Amazon is reportedly prepping its own chain of supermarkets separate from its Whole Foods subsidiary. We don’t have any details on this new chain yet, but it’s not hard to imagine that online grocery shopping and Prime member benefits will be baked into its infrastructure from, well, Day 1.

In its announcement blog post, Amazon said that Prime members currently using the grocery delivery can continue to use the service. Other Prime members who live in one of the 2,000+ locations where grocery is available can request an invitation to shop Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods delivery at amazon.com/grocery, and will be notified when they are able to do so.

Report: The Food You’re Buying Off Amazon’s Marketplace Could Be Expired

Amazon is known as the “everything store,” but perhaps we should be a little more cautious about buying everything from there, especially stuff you eat. According to a report published by CNBC yesterday, customers are finding that food they order from Amazon is arriving spoiled or past its expiration date.

Customers have complained about curdled coffee creamer, hot sauce and granola bars and even baby formula and baby food that arrived past its sell-by date. The problem, according to CNBC, is with Amazon’s third-party seller marketplace, where gaps in Amazon’s technology and systems have allowed these expired items to proliferate. CNBC used a data analytics firm to examine Amazon’s 100 best-selling food products and discovered that “at least 40% of sellers had more than five customer complaints about expired goods.” CNBC’s findings come just a couple of months after The Wall Street Journal found Amazon’s marketplace was selling “thousands of banned, unsafe or mislabeled products.”

For its part, Amazon seems to be brushing aside any deep concern, telling CNBC that any products sold on its marketplace must comply with Amazon policies, including providing expiration dates for consumables.

Amazon’s apparent lax approach to oversight could present a pretty big problem for the company when it comes to food. These issues around expired food are surfacing at a time when Amazon wants to get more into grocery. In addition to Whole Foods, which the company owns, Amazon is also reportedly looking to open up its own chain of grocery stores. While we don’t know much about this new chain, it will undoubtedly have an e-commerce component, and the last thing Amazon wants is having its brand associated with widespread bad or expired food as it launches this endeavor

For now, however, the best course of action for consumers is to be aware of the problem, and be ready to skip buying certain things from the everything store.

How Sevenrooms Is Making Voice Tech the Centerpiece of Restaurant Operations

If you are a restaurant in 2019, one of your most valuable assets is your customer data: what they order, how much they spend, whether or not they hate parsley. There are numerous tech platforms nowadays to help restaurants access this mountain of information, but historically that’s meant handling a tablet or mobile device along with all the other items restaurant staff juggle.

Guest-management platform Sevenrooms wants to change that by making it possible to access vital customer information using your voice.

The NYC-based company’s software platform already lets restaurants track customer data points in real time and access that information quickly to provide guests with more personalized service. Now the company is doubling-down on voice tech, which it believes will be the key tool for collecting and inputing customer data into restaurant systems of the future.

The company, who has raised $21.5 million to date, received an investment for an undisclosed sum from the Amazon Alexa Fund in late 2018 and has been working on an Alexa skill ever since to help restaurants access customer data faster and more seamlessly, and without having to use their hands.

“That’s a thing that would have originally required a GM to be looking down at a tablet or some form of screen,” Allison Page, Sevenrooms’ cofounder and Chief Product Officer, says over the phone of getting customer data. “And Alexa’s going to make it so much easier to get [that information] hands free in the middle of service so they don’t have to interrupt that hospitality they’re providing.”

So long as a guest’s information is stored in the restaurant’s system (via, for example, a loyalty program), Alexa can access that information with a simple voice command. For example, a GM could ask Alexa who is sitting at Table 5 and be told it’s a local customer who’s spent a total of $5,000 at the restaurant over the course of time and is celebrating an anniversary that night. The GM could then send over a giftcard, dessert or some other token of appreciation for the guest that would both personalize their experience that night and, hopefully, keep them coming back.

In certain settings, it might seem superfluous to add a voice layer to a system. But restaurants are inherently chaotic settings where multitasking reigns supreme and staff quite literally have their hands full most of the time with trays of food that could easily be spilled and damage a touchscreen device. Going hands-free with voice-enabled technology is potentially a far more seamless way of integrating guest management into a restaurant’s system. Page says the skill can also tell a user things like how much revenue a restaurant has booked that night and how that number compares to previous nights, if a guest has dietary restrictions, and even if they wrote any recent reviews of the restaurant.

The system also works the other way around. If a server or GM learns, for example, that a guest just moved to the neighborhood, they can tell Alexa to input that data into the guest’s profile to store as information for future visits.

All of this can be done without the user ever having to log into the Sevenrooms system, and that’s at the heart of Sevenrooms’ Alexa integration: bringing tech into the restaurant without letting it take over a la tablet hell.

Page demonstrated this at the 2019 NRN show by donning a pair of Alexa-enabled glasses and showing the audience how she could ask the skill questions about a restaurant guest and have the information appear right on the lens.

Whether its glasses, watches, or some other wearable device that’s the future of voice tech is yet to be determined. While voice tech in the restaurant has gotten a lot of press lately thanks to McDonald’s acquisition of Apprente, it’s still early days for the technology’s place in restaurants, and there are still challenges to work through. For example, Page says one of the current hurdles for Sevenrooms is getting Alexa to properly understand voice commands and questions in the middle of a noisy dining room. The company is currently working with Amazon on solving this issue.

There’s also the question of whether restaurants will sign up for yet-another piece of tech, and one they can’t even put their hands on. Page doesn’t seem terribly concerned about this, however. As she sees it, the benefits of “not having to take your eyes off the dining room and not having to take your eyes off the guest” will prove valuable enough to the customer to justify making voice tech a central part of a restaurant’s guest management system.

Amazon Echo Buds Will Tell You Where to Find Tomatoes in Whole Foods

It had been rumored that Amazon was going to announce a set of earbuds at its big media event today yesterday. But I don’t think anyone guessed that those earbuds would tell you where to find tomatoes at your local Whole Foods.

The Amazon Echo Buds let you wirelessly listen to music and take calls, and also feature noise reduction and hand-free access to Alexa (they also work with Siri and Google Assistant). The Echo Buds are available for pre-order today for $129 and will be available at the end of next month.

Normally we wouldn’t write about earbuds, but during the demo on-stage yesterday, Amazon showed the Echo Buds doing two food techy things: First they were used to find out if a local Whole Foods had canned tomatoes in stock, and then they showed us how Alexa can tell you where those tomatoes are inside the store (e.g. “aisle 6”).

Aside from being neat — and useful — it also points to how Amazon is folding Whole Foods more directly into its other products, and how Alexa is getting more contextual. The device is no longer just handing out information but providing real-world guidance on a granular level. You can imagine Alexa not just guiding you to one item, but if you tell it that you are making lasagne, the Echo Buds could guide you through a store, giving you the fastest route to pick up all the necessary ingredients.

Of course, this guidance only applies to Whole Foods at the moment, so you’re out of luck if you shop at Kroger or Albertsons. And even then, the in-store location within Whole Foods is limited because for now, you have to select a Whole Foods location that Alexa then taps into. So you can’t wander into any Whole Foods to get guidance, you have to be in the one you picked.

Still, we know that Amazon has been experimenting with Amazon Go store-like cashierless checkout technology at bigger stores. That system involves lots of cameras and computer vision, so it’s aware of inventory levels and product placement in-stores. If Amazon rolls that system out to all of its Whole Foods, Alexa will be able to “see” into those stores to provide more precise location information (“halfway down aisle 6, top shelf”).

That’s still a ways away but listen up, with the Echo Buds, Alexa is coming with you, wherever you are.

Amazon Announces its Own Alexa Enabled Smart Oven

Amidst the many, many (manymanymanymany) announcements Amazon threw out at its special event here in Seattle today was its brand new Alexa enabled smart oven.

The Amazon Smart Oven is actually a four-in-one device that is a microwave, convection oven, air fryer and food warmer. The Smart Oven features voice control, so you can tell it to “cook one chicken breast,” as well as a scan-to-cook feature to automatically cook packaged foods. The Amazon Smart Oven is available for pre-order (bundled with an Echo Dot) for $249 with delivery starting in November.

The new smart oven is similar to the Alexa powered microwave Amazon announced at its event last year in that they are both what the company calls “reference models.” This is shorthand for saying that even though they are for sale, Amazon made these devices more to demonstrate what an Alexa powered device is capable of and how easy it is to build Alexa into hardware.

But there are a few drawbacks with Amazon’s Smart Oven. The voice control and scan-to-cook capabilities, while neat, also show off some of the shortcomings of the appliance. Just like the Amazon microwave, the smart oven must be paired with an Alexa device in order to make voice control work, so you can’t just use it out of the box on its own (hence the bundled Dot). And the oven does not have a built-in camera, so you have to use your phone or some other camera-equipped Echo device to read the barcode for scan-to-cook.

The most obvious comparison for the Amazon Smart Oven is the June oven. Both are multiple cooking devices in one, both feature cloud-based automated cook programs specific to different types of food, and both have temperature probes that plug into the device itself to monitor the internal cooking temperature of your food. Oh, and by the way, Amazon’s Alexa fund invested in June.

But the June costs $700, more than twice the amount of the Amazon smart oven. Sure, the June has more cook types (dehydrator, roast, etc.) and computer vision to automatically identify your food, but how much of that will consumers think they actually need when compared to the Amazon Smart Oven? Especially since Amazon’s device is not only a convection oven, but also sports a microwave, which the June does not. And more importantly, what happens when Amazon features its own oven on the front page of its massive retail site?

With the holidays approaching, we’ll soon find out.