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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Smart Kitchen Summit 2017 Announces First Round Of Speakers

The Smart Kitchen Summit is back for its third – and biggest – year yet. Heading back to Benaroya Hall on October 10 and 11 in Seattle, the Summit will once again bring together the who’s who of the smart kitchen world. A combination of leaders from the worlds of Big Food, tech, commerce, culinary, design, delivery and smart home, SKS speakers, sponsors and attendees represent some of the biggest names in their respective industries.

The 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit agenda will be live in the next few weeks, but the Summit crew has started to announce the first round of speakers for this year and it is filled with rockstar talent. Notable speakers this year include CTO of Barilla, Victoria Spadaro Grant who will speak to the role of technology and innovation in the world of Big Food as well as Neil Grimmer, CEO and founder of personalized meal kit delivery startup Habit.

Because the consumer kitchen and consumer food preferences are constantly being influenced, SKS will welcome Top Chef alum and owner of ink, Chef Michael Voltaggio.

The Summit will explore the how the smart appliance is changing in the face of new interface, delivery, commerce and technology models; appliance leaders Yoon Lee, senior VP of innovation at Samsung along with Ola Nilsson, CEO of Electrolux’s small appliance group will join us for those discussions.

With innovation in food tech and the connected kitchen moving so rapidly, Summit themes around business models and startups will help attendees think about their own product roadmaps and understand where the space is headed.  Evan Dash, CEO of StoreBound will be on hand to discuss how his company is helping to bring to market such products the the PancakeBot and SoBro, through a fully integrated model of a go-to-market pipeline.

The Smart Kitchen Summit has also drawn an elite group of journalists who are covering and looking at how technology is transforming the way we eat, shop for and cook our food. Maura Judkis, food and culture reporter for the Washington Post, Ashlee Clark Thompson, associate editor at CNET, Carley Knobloch from the HGTV Smart Home, Lisa McManus from America’s Test Kitchen, Keith Barry, editor-in-chief of Reviewed.com (owned by USA Today) and Amanda Rottier, Product Director of Cooking at the New York Times, will all help facilitate discussions.

Other 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit speakers include:

For the full list of speakers and 2017 sponsors and partners, visit the SKS website.

No other event brings together the decision makers and disrupters from across the food, cooking, appliance, retail and technology ecosystems like SKS. Join us on October 10 and 11 in Seattle to connect with new people, find partners, see the latest technology and startup demonstrations, hear the leaders of the space and make deals.

Early bird tickets are on sale now through July 31, 2017 and if you use code SPOON, you can get 20% off tickets through the end of this month. So, if you want to grab a front row seat as we map the future of cooking and the kitchen, register now.

PicoBrew Surpasses Anova To Become Top Food Kickstarter Campaign Of All Time

With just one day to go, PicoBrew’s latest Kickstarter campaign surpassed Anova to become the top campaign of all time in the food category. The company’s Pico C campaign reached $1.812 million to eclipse Anova’s $1.811 million campaign for the Anova’s 2014 Precision Cooker campaign.  The company announced the milestone in a livestream update on the campaign page.

While the Pico C reached its initial funding goal of $350 thousand within hours of launch, breaking the record was no sure thing. After an initial surge of backers who gobbled up the best backer rewards that offered a $279 price on the company’s latest model beer brewing appliance, momentum slowed. Earlier this week, the campaign still stood more than a $100 thousand away from the record.

But thanks to a last minute surge of backers in the waning hours of the campaign, the Pico C is now tops in the the food category on Kickstarter.

“We picked the Pico Model C as a Project We Love early on and are thrilled that, with the help of over 4,100 backers, it broke the record for Most Funded campaign in our vibrant Food category,” said  Clarissa Redwine, Kickstarter’s Design and Technology Outreach Lead for the West Coast in an announcement.

PicoBrew seemed to have its sights on the becoming the top food Kickstarter from the beginning. The company announced new backer rewards throughout the campaign, including some fairly surprising new hardware add-ons. First came the PicoStill, a device that can be used to make essential oils and even whiskey, and last week the company announced the PicoFerm, a fermentation monitor. The company also announced the Pico would be able to brew kombucha and offered free PicoPaks as additional incentives throughout the campaign.

Anova was unseated after holding the #1 spot in the food category for almost three years. Of course, both campaigns are a long way from the top when looking at top Kickstarter campaigns of all time, with Pebble (now owned by Fitbit) claiming two of the top three spots and the troubled Coolest Cooler claiming the #2 spot.

Happy 50th Birthday, Microwave. Here’s Why You Won’t Make It To 100

Happy 50th birthday, microwave oven.

This year, the ubiquitous cooking box born out of an accidental discovery by a Ratheon military researcher has reached the half century mark, and as the last new cooking appliance category to become indispensable in nearly every American home, it’s certainly a milestone worth celebrating.

However, there are signs that the fast-cook workhorse will soon be on the decline as newer, better technologies make their way to market. On this 50 year celebration of the microwave, let’s consider how pervasive they’ve become and the many reasons the microwave oven will not be around for its hundredth birthday.

Surpassing Oven and Ranges

Ever since Amana introduced the first countertop unit back in 1967, consumers have embraced the convenience of the microwave. They helped usher in an era of fast-cook food like microwave popcorn and pizza, and as the microwave became cheap and plentiful in the 70s, they were soon everywhere.

Eventually the microwave rivaled traditional ovens and ranges in adoption, and today there are more microwaves sold quarterly than gas ranges.

Microwave Unit Shipments 2005-2017. Source: Statista

Still, for all its success, the microwave’s future is in doubt.  Perhaps the biggest reason is that while the microwave is fast and efficient, it’s actually pretty poor at its job. Not only do microwaves cook and reheat food unevenly, they are not good at cooking multiple items simultaneously.

And it’s these shortcomings that have opened the door for newer technologies such as…

Here Comes RF Cooking

RF cooking, which utilizes solid state (semiconductor) technology in place of the microwave’s old school technology, cooks with a much higher degree of precision.

Here’s what you can do with an RF cooking enabled oven:

  • Cook multiple foods at once within the same cooking chamber at different temperatures
  • Can sense when a food is done
  • Cook evenly across and through an entire piece of food rather than the uneven cooking results you get with a microwave

There are multiple companies with RF cooking technology products in development. One is Goji Food Solutions, which originally developed its RF cooking technology for medical applications as a way to heat tissue evenly. The company claims to have 147 issued patents in the area of RF solid state heating and another 76 pending. Other companies, such as NXP, have chip solutions that early system builders are bringing to market. Lastly, there is an industry consortium called the RF Energy Alliance that includes Whirlpool as a founding member that is working on standards for solid state RF technology.

Let’s Get Steamed

Tovala Oven

For many years, the combi oven has become the darling of chefs for its ability to combine multiple cooking modes (convection, steam, combination) into one and its ability to produce delicious food. However, despite its many advantages, the combi oven has been relegated mostly to the pro kitchen despite efforts by high end manufacturers such as Miele and Jenn-Air to bring to the home.

But that may change soon, as companies such as Anova and Tovala to bring low-cost counter top combi ovens to market for under $500.  The Tovala oven first sold to backers through a crowdfunding campaign and will be available for under $400 this year, while the Anova oven, which is expected to ship in mid-2018, will sell for under $500 when available.

The Instant Pot Generation: Slower Cooking Takes Hold

Lastly, while we may never see an end to prepackaged convenience food, it’s safe to say the heyday of the Hot Pocket is well past us. More and more Millennials are embracing slow cooking by using revamped old-school products with modern tech flourishes like the Instant Pot. This multifunction pressure cooker has become a phenomenon, garnering over 18 thousand reviews on Amazon to become the #1 overall product in the kitchen and dining category.

The Instant Pot

By adding multiple cooking types beyond just pressure cooking such as rice and yogurt mode as well as processor-driven programmable cook modes and automation, the Instant Pot has tapped into a generation of young cooks and wannabe cooks who love Swiss Army knife devices that can save space by combining multiple functions while also producing high quality results.  There are best-selling cookbooks, as well as dozens of websites and large and active Facebook and Reddit communities where enthusiastic Instant Pot users share recipes and cooking tips.

So, while it’s time to step back and wish the one of the most unlikely success stories of the modern kitchen a happy 50th birthday, it’s also a time to recognize that the microwave’s best days might be behind it. Newer and better technology technology, combined with changing consumer behavior, could mean we might be celebrating a new type of cooking appliance 50 years from now.

Make sure to subscribe to the Spoon newsletter to get it in your inbox. And don’t forget to check out Smart Kitchen Summit, the only event about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen.  

PicoBrew Adds PicoFerm In Effort To Become #1 Food Kickstarter

Today PicoBrew announced a new stretch goal in an effort to become the #1 food Kickstarter campaign of all time.  The new goal features the PicoFerm, a web-connected fermentation monitor that lets brewers monitor the status of their fermenting beer.

The reigning food champ is Anova, which has held the top spot ever since its highly successful Kickstarter campaign for the Anova Precision Cooker three years ago which went on to hit $1.811 million.

The target amount PicoBrew set for its next stretch goal? $1.812 million.

With the Pico campaign currently sitting at just under $1.5 million, Anova’s record looks very much in reach. Typically, successful campaigns follow a pattern: a surge of early backers, a mid-campaign lull, and a surge at the end as those sitting on the fence rush in. By adding extra stretch goals like the PicoFerm, campaigns hope to nudge the undecided into pulling out their credit cards.

So what is the PicoFerm? While the details are a little fuzzy, it looks like an small keg monitor that gives users of the PicoBrew Pico C (and the original Pico) the ability to monitor the progress of fermenting beer. According to PicoBrew, the PicoFerm will send “a precise forecast on when your beer will be ready to drink. It will also send tips on how to improve or speed up the process.”

Lastly, why would PicoBrew care about surpassing Anova? The answer is simple: bragging rights and free marketing. By becoming the #1 food Kickstarter campaign, PicoBrew will raise their profile further and generate a series of “new Kickstarter food champ” articles that will give them momentum as they make the Pico C available for presale after the campaign.

With Investment In Nomiku, Samsung Expands Presence In The “Connected Kitchen”

Today Nomiku, maker of sous vide immersion circulators, announced their latest generation connected cooking appliance and the launch of a subscription meal service that will deliver frozen, pre-cooked meals that owners of the new Nomiku can cook in 30 minutes or less. As part of the announcement, Nomiku also announced that Samsung Ventures had invested in the company.

Food delivery marks an ambitious new direction for Nomiku, one of the original sous vide startups that has been shipping immersion circulators since 2013. By moving into subscription food delivery, Nomiku has its first business line with recurring revenue. The move also makes Nomiku one of the first companies to create a connected hardware device tied to a subscription meal service. While other companies such as Whirlpool and Barilla have been selling RFID powered cooking systems with specially designed packaged food for a couple years, and startup Tovala announced a meal subscription service tied to their cooking appliance last year, Nomiku appears to be the first to launch a meal subscription plan with intelligent auto-reordering built into the connected cooking appliance.

By offering fast-prep meals, Nomiku is also hoping to expose sous vide cooking to a wider audience. Sous vide is often seen as the domain of foodies, the types that are willing to wait longer for a cook to finish in exchange for a better tasting meal. By accelerating the cooking process, the company hopes to change the perception of sous vide circulators from a device synonymous with slow cooking to one that offers both convenience and better tasting food than other fast-cook methods such as microwave ovens.

Nomiku Pork Shoulder pre-cooked meal. Photography by Albert Law

The company plans to start small, shipping to 100 customers in May and expanding to a broader audience in the early summer time frame. The subscription food packages will be modular in nature, consisting of both “mains” and “sides” that can be mixed and matched. The average price of a meal is $15 and, after 20 or so meals, the company says it will credit the price of the Nomiku circulator ($149) towards meals.

The circulator is equipped with an RFID reader, which allows the user to scan an RFID tag on the meals and send the Nomiku circulator specific time and temperature settings for each dish. The device will also be synced with the customer’s existing food inventory and, according to Nomiku, will automatically reorder food when the meals left available are down to four.

The Samsung Connection

One of the most interesting aspects of today’s announcement is the Samsung connection. Samsung’s investment arm invested an undisclosed sum in the company, an amount that Fetterman calls “the most money any single investor has put into Nomiku”. The move marks the second investment in a precision cooking/sous vide startup by a large appliance maker in a short time period, coming just a couple months after the acquisition of Anova by Electrolux.

According to Fetterman, Samsung “is a logical partner for us because they do the connected home.” The investment in Nomiku is, according to Fetterman, a move by Samsung “to dominate the connected kitchen.”

Fetterman said Samsung plans integrate the Nomiku with their smart home platform, SmartThings. Samsung acquired SmartThings almost three years ago, and since that time has had somewhat mixed success in establishing the platform as one which other companies will commit to building around. However, the consumer electronics giant has been fairly successful in their effort to integrate SmartThings with their various product lines in the home such as appliances and TVs. While Samsung had prevously announced an integration of SmartThings with their own Wi-Fi ovens, Nomiku appears to be the first small precision cooking appliance integrated with the SmartThings smart home platform.

Fetterman also told The Spoon that Samsung plans to launch a Nomiku app for the Family Hub refrigerator. The app will come preloaded with the Family Hub and will control the Nomiku device directly from the fridge. Fetterman also believes existing Family Hub models will see in-field software updates that will install the Nomiku app on the connected fridge.

It will be interesting to see where Samsung takes this investment/partnership. I am sure they will be watching Nomiku’s efforts to enter food delivery closely since that business represents a new potential revenue stream for the company. The South Korean consumer electronics conglomerate displayed an early and aggressive embrace of the smart TV market and the associated revenue streams tied to apps included on these new devices. With their investment in Nomiku and the growth of the connected kitchen, one has to wonder if they possibly see food delivery as an enticing new service model in an era of ever-declining hardware margins.

To see Lisa Fetterman and other leaders talk about the future of the connected kitchen, come to the Smart Kitchen Summit. Get your tickets today.

Anova Rolls Out Alexa and Google Home Integrations With ‘Guided Cook’ Capabilities

If you’re a member of the rapidly growing sous vide community, there’s a good chance you are one of tens of thousands that go online to share recipes and suggestions for taking the craft – and that evening’s meal – to the next level.

And if you’re an enterprising user of Anova’s sous vide circulator who just so happened to hack a custom Alexa skill to cook with your machine, you might just share your idea and get the attention of both the community and Anova itself.

That’s exactly what happened when David Zielezna shared his new Alexa skill on Reddit. After creating a stir in the /sousvide reddit, an Anova community manager reached out to David to put him in touch with the Anova software team. Before long, the sous vide enthusiast from Australia was offered the opportunity to create the official Anova Alexa integration.

And so today Anova is rolling out their new Alexa skill based on David’s work, as well as a new Google Home action that is available to Android customers.

The Alexa skill and Google Home Actions will have what Anova is calling ‘Guided Cook’ capabilities, which allow the user to access the guide information from the Anova app and work through a series of options to optimize and work through a cook. In the same way a person would navigate a branching tree of selections in the app to optimize cooking a meal, the new Alexa Skill and Google Home Action allow users to input the protein type, doneness and thickness via voice in a series of commands.

Here’s an example of how this will be done using Google Home Invocations (commands) within the Google Home Action.

User: Hey Google, tell Anova to help me cook a steak.
GH: Steak has the following choices: A) Porterhouse, B) Ribeye, C) Strip, and D) Tenderloin. Which would you like?
User: Ribeye
GH: How thick is your ribeye in inches?
User: One point five inches
GH: The ribeye steak recipe has the following choices for how you can cook one point five inch thick ribeye: A) Very rare to rare, B) Medium rare, C) Medium, D) Medium well, and E) Well done. Which would you like?
User: Medium rare
GH: The precision cooker settings for Ribeye Steak using one point five inch ribeye cooked medium rare are 129 degrees for one hour. should I start your cooker with these settings?
User: Yes
GH: I told Anova to start a cook for your Ribeye Steak at 129 degrees for one hour. Please refer to this recipe in the anova app for an ingredient list and full preparation steps.

The Guided Cook capabilities are available today with the Alexa Skill, and will be available via an update to the Google Home Action on April 4th.

With over half of Amazon Echos and likely a similar percentage of Google Home products ending up in the kitchen, Anova’s embrace of voice control makes sense. The kitchen has been a fertile area for skill creation over the past year or more, and now with Google Home doing what it can to ratchet up its third party voice interactions, we’ll see even more.

Bottom line, you can expect a lot more people talking to their cooking devices in the coming years.

You can watch David Zielezna’s Alexa skill in action in the video below:

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Want to meet the leaders defining the future of food, cooking and the kitchen? Get your tickets for the Smart Kitchen Summit today.

Is The Anova Deal The Nest-Google of the Smart Kitchen?

Back in January 2014, I had just caught a ride to the Las Vegas Convention Center for the Consumer Electronics Show when I struck up a conversation with the two men in the back seat of the shuttle. They were executives from Nest, makers of the learning thermostat that had been the talk of the smart home industry for the past year, so I was naturally interested to hear what the company was up to at the big consumer trade show.

While we had a nice conversation, nothing stood out to me when I recalled the encounter a week later other than the two seemed to be in a pretty good mood. The reason I was even thinking about the chance meeting was I had just heard about Google’s acquisition of Nest for $3 billion, a huge sum of money and certainly enough to make any Nest executive happy.

I had similar thoughts a week ago when I first heard about Electrolux’s acquisition of Anova. I had just co-hosted a party with Anova at CES, and while everyone at the mixer had a good time talking smart kitchen with industry colleagues, the only indication from the Anova team that something may be in the works was everyone seemed to be in a good mood.

Last week’s news also got me thinking about other similarities between the two deals.  Much like Nest at the time, Anova was the leading independent startup in a nascent but fast-emerging connected home market, and so their acquisition by a deep-pocketed and established player helps to validate their market just as Google’s acquisition of Nest validated the smart home.

Which naturally leads one to ask, “Does that make Anova deal the Google-Nest of the smart kitchen?”

The answer to that question is yes…and no. In other words, it’s a bit complicated.

In the way of similarities, both Anova and Nest were experiencing fast growth. Anova saw its sales double year over year in 2016 and is on the verge of a million customers in the first half of 2017, while Nest hit the million customer market just around the time of acquisition.

Both deals also came at a time when awareness of their specific markets – smart home and smart kitchen – was starting to seep into the broader consciousness of the early mass market.

And of course, both made connected products with really high levels of consumer satisfaction.

But there are some big differences, perhaps the biggest of which being the types of companies who acquired them.

Yes, both were deep-pocketed suitors, but Google and Electrolux are very different types of businesses with different motivations. For Google, their core business is data and information. Sure, they have dreams of a growing hardware business, but these efforts, including their more recent Google Home product, is often motivated by a desire to further their ability to gather and distribute information to consumers in new and interesting ways.

As the world’s second-largest home appliance maker, Electrolux’s business – and motivations – are much more transparent: With the acquisition of Anova, they now have a new precision cooking hardware line they can sell. Anova and other early precision cooking companies proved this is a legitimate segment and Electrolux now has the opportunity to enter this market in a big way.

But perhaps the biggest difference between the two acquirers is their platform motivations.  Google clearly had platform aspirations with the acquisition of Nest, who’s technology they saw as the foundation for not only more of their own products, but as a platform around which they could offer to the broader industry to build third party products. Sure, the long and complicated story of Nest post-acquisition and the rise of newer approaches such as Amazon’s Alexa have changed the calculus a bit for Google and everyone else, but there’s no question that was the original vision.

For Electrolux, it’s clear they envision Anova’s product line as the foundation for more precision cooking and smart cooking products. And as is often the case when an established company buys a fast-growing startup, I could also see them trying to instill Anova’s innovation-centric startup culture and even let their newly acquired team take the lead on some of those efforts. But Anova’s precision cooking products are not a platform in the same way Nest products are a platform, nor were they intended to be, which is fine because Electrolux is not a platform company in the same way Google is a platform company.

There are other important differences. Valuations are much different today than in 2014. Hardware startups are not getting the same multiples we saw in early 2014.  And while Steve Svajian and Anova’s team are hugely capable, Google paid a premium to get an exec team led by industry legend Tony Fadell, recognized as the father of the iPod, the previous decade’s defining consumer hardware product. And while Anova has certainly filed for patents for innovation related to its immersion circulators, Nest’s IP portfolio was fairly broad in the area of the smart home.

In summary, while these deals have some similarities, in the end, the acquiring companies had very different visions and motivations. Google’s platform-centric vision of the world meant Nest’s technology would soon be positioned as a de facto standard around which the industry choose to coalesce, while Anova’s technology will serve as a platform for a company of one – Electrolux – to launch themselves into the smart, precision cooking market.

Electrolux Acquires Sous Vide Market Leader Anova for $250 Million

While New England celebrated another championship today (and most everyone else cried in their beer), the folks at Anova had their own reason to celebrate this Super Bowl Sunday: Today the company announced that Swedish appliance giant Electrolux would acquire the fast-growing maker of precision cooking hardware.

The specifics of the deal are as follows: Electrolux offered $250 million in cash for the San Francisco startup, of which $135 million is contingent on performance. As part of the deal, Anova will become a standalone subsidiary within Electrolux and the company will retain the Anova brand.  The Anova staff will continue to operate out of San Francisco and Steve Svajian, Anova CEO, will remain CEO of the new subsidiary.

The deal is a significant one for the nascent smart kitchen market, marking the entry of the world’s second biggest appliance company into the precision cooking market. For Anova, the deal comes at a time of fast growth; they sold 400 thousand circulators in 2016, about double what it did the year previously, and they expect to hit one million in spring of 2017. At the same time, they are seeing increased competition from likes of ChefSteps and Gourmia.

The acquisition comes after eight months of negotiation between the two companies. Talks started after Ola Nilsson, who is CEO of Electrolux’s home care and small appliances group, reached out after buying an Anova precision cooker. After an initial phone call in summer of 2016 between Nillson and Svajian, negotiations continued to heat up and culminated in early January around the time of the Consumer Electronics Show.

The deal marks a nice exit for Anova, which was cofounded by Svajian, Jeff Wu and Dr. Frank Wu and Natalie Vaughn in 2013. The company shipped their product that year, the market’s first sub-$200 sous vide circulator. A year later, the company shipped their first connected product, a Bluetooth-connected precision cooker. They’ve since released a dual Bluetooth/Wi-Fi model and, late last year, announced a precision countertop oven at the Smart Kitchen Summit which is expected to ship in the fall of 2017.

According to Electrolux’s Nillson, while they plan to keep the Anova brand front and center as they enter the precision cooking market, eventually they see extending the Electrolux brand  as well.

“I think (Anova) can contribute a lot to the Electrolux group and how we go to market, and eventually how we can bring precision cookers to the consumers under our brands.”

We’ll have more analysis on the deal and what it means for the smart kitchen market in coming days, so stay tuned.

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Cinder Grill Now Shipping As Precision Cooking Market Heats Up

The long-anticipated Cinder grill is finally making its way to customers.

Earlier this month the company announced on Facebook that production units will be shipping to those who pre-purchased the Cinder. The grill, which uses two aluminum cooking plates with embedded temperature sensing in an enclosed (but not airtight) cooking chamber, has been available for preorder for the past year at a price of $399, $100 below the MSRP of $499. The company expects to have all US preorders delivered by the end of February and Canadian preorders shipped by the end of March.

Shipping product marks the end of a long journey for CEO Eric Norman and Cinder, which have been working on the grill for five years. The company filed patents in 2012 and 2013 for precision cooking techniques, and has been working to bring the product to production ever since.

As the company neared production at the end of last year, they experienced slight production delays due to the complicated nature of the grill, which Norman explained in a recent blog post:

“…we analyzed the build rate using data from a sophisticated measurement system and discovered the rate of production was far below our goal. Factory estimates were off because Cinder is an order of magnitude more complicated than any electric grill ever produced. The accuracy and testing requirements of Cinder are high, requiring different part suppliers to coordinate in unfamiliar ways. This was the cost of going for super high-quality while shooting for a reasonable cost. Sometimes logistics or communication were not smooth, requiring more time and effort than expected.”

Cinder now joins a growing group of companies bringing precision cooking products to the consumer market. At this year’s big tech show in Vegas, leading sous vide circulator company Anova announced a refreshed lineup and showed off a demo model of its precision oven, FirstBuild announced a new version of the Paragon with guided cooking capabilities, while upstart Gourmia continued their aggressive rollout of products.

With all of this action, there’s no doubt precision cooking will have an interesting 2017.

Podcast: The CES Smart Kitchen Wrapup Show

It’s the CES 2017 smart kitchen wrapup! Mike and Ashley talk about what they saw at this year’s big consumer tech confab in Vegas.

Some of the topics they cover:

  • Smart fridges
  • Smart appliances
  • Whirlpool assisted cooking
  • Bosch’s kitchen robot Mykie
  • Panasonic’s smart kitchen
  • Anova’s new lineup of sous vide circulators
  • AppKettle
  • Alexa

Plus a couple non-CES news items such as Daimler’s investment in Starship and the
AB Inbev and Keurig Partnership.

This episode can be downloaded by clicking here.

Enjoy!

Mellow’s Zé Pinto Ferreira On Flex Partnership, Smart Kitchen & Sous Vide

Last week, Mellow, the maker of an innovative sous vide system that includes features such as built-in refrigeration and a scale, announced a partnership with contract manufacturer Flextronics to help push the product into production.  That’s good news for Mellow’s early backers, since the $400 (presale price) product was expected to ship in early 2015.

But the announcement hinted at more than just a typical contract manufacturing relationship.  The two companies execs not only talked about bringing Mellow’s machine to market, but also said they would collaborate on future products. Adding to the intrigue is Flex, which had moved into the smart home when it acquired the business of distressed smart home company Wink from Quirky last year, sees the smart kitchen fitting nicely into the broader connected home.

From Flex’s president of Global Operations, Mechanical Technology Solutions, Gerhard Zebe: “We believe Mellow’s connected appliance could be an integral part of the smart home kitchen, and something consumers will want and enjoy.”

The Mellow smart sous vide machine

With news of this partnership for a company we’ve been tracking for the last two years, we decided to catch up via email with Mellow’s founder and CEO, Zé Pinto Ferreira, to ask him a few questions.

Below is our email interview. Answers have been edited slightly for brevity.

What is the nature of the partnership with Flextronics?

Ferreira: Flextronics has invested in Mellow in non-traditional ways (no equity or capital have been exchanged) that really come down to a much closer and more trusting working relationship than any customer I’ve ever seen have with a manufacturer. The best I can tell you is that Flex’s upper management is heavily involved in Mellow, and they’ve put a disproportionate amount of care in shipping the best possible product.

Mellow originally was intended to ship in early 2015. What was the reason for the delay in shipment?

Ferreira: The technology was harder to scale than we thought. That’s the hard part of building such a unique product, you never know what problems will show up when you scale from prototypes to mass production, especially when you have the standard for that quality we have. We’re on the cusp of shipping now, and we’re so proud of the product people will get.

The product is unique with its refrigeration and sous vide in one unit. Was trying to do both in one device a challenge?

Ferreira: It was insanely hard, but it was the only way to build the product we wanted to ship: a fully automated sous-chef that cooks while you’re away from home. Back when we started, lot of clever people thought what we were trying to do was impossible. We knew it wasn’t, and we’re about to prove it at scale.

Given how close Mellow is to production, how will things change with the partnership?  

Ferreira: The most exciting thing about a software-driven product like Mellow is that you’re not finished with it by the time it goes into a box. We’re shipping a simple proposition: An app and a device that make a great product together. But we’re extending that product to more platforms and integrations soon.

How do you see a sous vide maker benefitting from a partnership with a company that owns a smart home platform player like Wink?

Ferreira: We don’t see Mellow as a sous-vide device. Bear with me: It cooks food sous-vide, but it’s so different from everything else out there. Most sous-vide devices end up only being used for special occasions, and there’s a limited amount of work connectivity can do for you when you’re cooking a whole hog for 20 people. Mellow is made to be left at home cooking while you’re at work, so working together with the rest of the home to anticipate your needs/changes in your day makes a lot of sense to us.

Will your role change at all now with this partnership?

Ferreira: Not at all. Flex has been great at leaving us to do what we do best – designing a killer product for busy home cooks. Their interest is in taking our designs and making them at a level of quality where it can proudly be in any kitchen from day 1. Usually, when a hardware startup plays Apple, there’s a lot of compromise down the line. We haven’t had to compromise at all working with Flex, they understand our obsession with quality.

It’s been a few years since Mellow was announced. How has the market for consumer sous vide changed in this time?

Ferreira: We’ve seen a few new products come out since we announced, but nothing that really excites me. I have a Joule, Anova and Nomiku at home, and I get a lot of mileage out of them on special occasions, but I still haven’t’ seen anything that really screams mainstream. All (especially Chefsteps) are doing a great job with education and it shows in the category’s growth, but we’re still very far away from sous-vide being in every kitchen. In my opinion, that’s because circulators aren’t the tool for the job. But I’m pretty biased on that 😉

2017 Is Going To Be A Year Of Crazy Innovation For The Oven

When you ask people what device in the home is ripe for a technology refresh, the oven usually isn’t at the top of the list.  That’s because most of us use our ovens almost every day, without complaint, for years and decades at a time.

Why change something that works so well?

Except that it doesn’t, and the only reason so many of us think things are fine is, unlike with phones or cars, we don’t know any better since we aren’t regularly exposed to any noticeable innovation in those boring cooking boxes sitting in our kitchen.

But things are changing. Just as Nest showed us a few years ago it’s possible to rethink those white boxes in our homes like thermostats, a slew of companies are now forcing us to reconsider the oven.

June was the perhaps the first, announcing their June Intelligent last year. Today they announced their oven will ship next month, which could mark the beginning of a new wave of innovation in the oven market over the next decade.  Below are some of the technologies which will change the way we think about the lowly oven in coming years:

Precision Cooking: One of the early success stories in the smart kitchen has been sous vide cookers, mostly because of the ability to apply precision cooking techniques to get chef-like results. The thing is, you can do that in an oven too, and that’s exactly what Anova plans to do with its new precision oven.  Others like June and Jenn-Air are thinking the same thing, which should address one of the biggest problems with modern day ovens: wide variability in heating from brand to brand and model to model.  Precision also means optimized cooking depending on the food itself. The reality is 350 degrees in one oven means a very different thing in another oven, and using the same parameters to cook in your Jenn-Air could give you very different results than cooking something in your Samsung. With more precise cooking and temperature control, both appliance makers and food brands can create very tailored instructions for the food type, quantity and for the cooking device itself.

Guided Cooking: One of the most interesting trends in the smart kitchen this year was the explosion of interest in guided cooking. While companies like Hestan and Cuciniale created countertop guided cooking systems that use a pan and induction heating surface, others like Innit want to apply a similar fusion of app-guidance, sensors, and precision cooking to create guided cooking experiences with bigger built-in appliances.  What could make things even more interesting is Innit could extend the guided cooking experience further back towards prep and storage, since their platform also will be used in refrigerators and pantry systems.

AI/Machine Learning: One of the most fertile fields in machine image recognition has been food. Google and a bevy of startups have invested in research to enable a better understanding of food through image recognition, while June and Innit are working specifically to apply AI within the cooking experience itself. In addition to image recognition, the ability of devices to learn and optimize their behavior based on past cooking behavior, user preferences and contextual understanding of the consumer’s needs will lead to significant advances in intelligent cooking systems in the coming years.

New Heating Technologies: One of the biggest changes coming to ovens over the next few years will be the way in which they heat food.  Traditional ovens use electric or gas heating, and in the last few decades, convection heating has become a standard feature on most consumer ovens. But soon we will see a variety of new and interesting heating methods, ranging from the new RF cooking technology from NXP to the steam cooking included in ovens from Anova and Tovala.

Interfaces: One of the biggest changes in ovens will simply be the way in which we interact with them. The old way of programming a cook through a number of often confusing buttons was ripe for a refresh, and most of the new entrants in this space are creating compelling new industrial designs and interfaces. Whether it’s the physical dial on the June or Amazon’s Alexa, we can soon expect that we will be interacting – and talking – to our ovens in vastly different ways in the future.