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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Recon Food, a Social Media App Connecting Users Through Food, Launches Today

Social media has been under scrutiny in the past few years for its potential negative effect on mental health and overall well being. Today, a new social media app launched with the aim of being a positive space for users to connect and share their love of food. The app is called Recon Food, and it was created by Spencer Rascoff, the co-founder of Hotwire and Zillow, and his daughter Sophia Rascoff.

Instead of meeting up with loved ones at restaurants to connect over a meal during the pandemic, over this past year we connected over social media by sharing photos of trending recipes like banana bread and whipped coffee. However, there are many other tricky things to navigate through on social media like non-stop news, targeted ads, politics, and controversial topics. The father-daughter Rascoff duo was inspired to develop an app like this because of the many aspects of social media that felt unhealthy, and food was something that brought their own family together during the pandemic.

With the Recon Food app, there are two tracks: restaurants and the home kitchen. Users can post photos of food and drink ordered from restaurants and leave a review, or upload photos of dishes they have created themselves. The app has geolocation, which enables users to tag the location of the restaurant and recommend their favorite dishes. Within the app, users can view a map (powered by Apple) to see where different restaurants are located, which can be helpful for finding new restaurants. Only restaurants that have been reviewed will show up on the map, and because the app is so new, there are currently only a handful of restaurants that pop up.

For those cooking at home, (this option does not allow geolocation), users can also post photos of foods or drinks they have created. The Recon app has computer vision technology that will search a user’s camera roll for food photos, and automatically upload them to the app privately or publicly.

Tradionally, people use platforms like Google or Yelp to view photos and reviews left by other diners to decide on where to eat. This is certainly helpful in making a decision, but a downside to these review platforms is that more often than not, a negative experience is more likely to produce a review. Additionally, it is hit or miss if someone actually recommends particular dishes in their review. With Recon Foods, hopefully, there will be a balanced mixture of honest positive and negative reviews, and more users will feel compelled to recommend dishes they’ve tried at a restaurant.

There are a few other food and restaurant-centric apps available besides Recon Food. Jybe is an app that can currently be used in major U.S. cities that helps conscious consumers see where eco-friendly restaurants are located. Diners that post high-quality restaurant reviews on the SynchroLife app are rewarded with the platform’s own cryptocurrency called SynchroCoin (SYC).

The Recon Food app is currently available for free for iOS phones in the App Store or as a desktop version.

The Feast App Launches to Help Log What You Eat

With so many people taking pictures of their meals, why not put that to good use and make those pics part of a pathway to healthier living? That’s the gist behind Feast, a new iOS app that officially launched today.

Feast is basically a photo diary for everything you consume, from full breakfasts to cans of Diet Coke. Unlike other food logging apps out there, Feast is not interested in having you count calories or macronutrients or providing you with any real data about what you consume. “I think the general public are not into macronutrient breakdown,” Brad Kim, Feast Co-Founder and CEO told me by phone earlier this month, “It flusters and confuses them.”

Instead, Feast meant to be an easy way to simply snap a photo of everything you eat, so you can get a broader understanding of what you consume on a daily basis. You can also take a selfie to help illustrate your state of mind when you at. “Feast puts a mirror on yourself, so that you can self-reflect and become self-aware and self-correct,” Feast Co-Founder and CEO, Jackie Kim said during that same call.

Feast does offer weight tracking and even has it’s own homegrown AI assistant, dubbed “Sid,” that uses machine learning to help automatically identify and log food you’re taking pictures.

In a way Feast trying to be like an Instagram for eating (though one could argue Instagram is the Instagram for eating). You can edit your photos, make them public, and follow other individual feeds.

Feast isn’t the only visual food journal app out there. Both Foodvisor and Bite.ai offer food photojournaling, but both of those apps use AI to surface nutritional information about what you’re eating. And with YesHealth, users can share photos of their meals with nutritionists and get access to personlized coaching to reach weight goals.

Connecting its users with dieticians and nutritionists is on Feast’s product roadmap. The app is free to use right now, but during our call Brad Kim told me that potential ways for the company (which is bootstrapped) to make money include licensing it out to medical professionals who want to monitor what their clients eat, creating an online marketplace where Feast users could hire nutritionists, and, of course advertising.

Feast is built on an interesting premise — that when it comes to healthier eating, more data about what we consume can lead to less success. And on some level, this makes sense. Just looking back and seeing that I grabbed a handful of Wheat Thins eight times in one day is probably just as useful as knowing numerically how bad Wheat Thins are for me. Now that Feast is live on iOS (Android app to follow later this year), we’ll see if this less is more can get more people to eat less.

Basket is like Waze for Local Grocery Price Comparison

In these uncertain economic times, it’s more important than ever to get the most for your money, especially when it comes to groceries. But comparison supermarket shopping isn’t exactly easy in the time of COVID. We’re supposed to be limiting our trips to the store, not adding more of them to see where we can get the best deal on eggs.

That’s where Basket comes in. It’s an app for iOS and Android currently in beta that lets users compare the prices of items across multiple grocery stores in their area before leaving the house.

So for instance, after downloading the app I enter my location and select from stores nearby (Walmart, Target, Trader Joe’s, etc.). I compile my usual grocery list, and once I’m done, Basket tells me how much my list costs at each store. That way I can know where I’m getting the best deal and go to that store.

Andy Ellwood, Co-Founder and President of Basket, told me by phone this week that Basket users save an average of 20 percent on their orders.

But Basket also figures that money isn’t the only thing that is valuable to people. In its results, Basket highlights both the cheapest and the nearest store options because you may not want to drive 10 miles out of your way to save five bucks.

The app gets its pricing information from people, called shoppers, who use the Basket app to upload pricing information on a variety of items across the store. Ellwood said that Basket has had around 50,000 of these shoppers over the life of the app, which launched a beta in 2018. On an ongoing basis, the app has a couple hundred to a couple thousand price shoppers per month.

Much like Waze, where Ellwood once worked, many of these shoppers do it just to be a part of the bargain hunting community (read: volunteers). But Basket does engage some “Commerce Moderators” who log a lot of prices, and rewards them with a variety of prize incentives to seek out and upload even more pricing information.

The Basket app is free to download and use, and the company has raised $10 million in funding so far. Basket makes its money by providing pricing data to manufacturers who want to better understand how much items cost at any given time in different areas.

One thing Basket does not have is an e-commerce tie-in. So once you’ve assembled your grocery list, you can’t buy everything at a selected store through the app. You still have to go out and into the store to actually grocery shop. Ellwood said this is type of integration with delivery or curbside pickup is on the Basket roadmap.

Given how the pandemic has created record levels of online grocery shopping, Basket may want to fast-track that type of functionality. Granted, we don’t know how much of that record-setting traffic will become the new normal, but if Basket is supposed to help make my grocery shopping more cost-effective, it should be able to make my trip to the grocery store more efficient.

The Basket app will officially launch out of beta later this summer.

Now With 600,000 Users, Chefling Turns On its Machine Learning Switch

Chefling released an update to its kitchen assistant app this week that the company says will create more personalized recommendations. The app update also includes enhanced pantry management as well as smart appliance controls.

Previously, we described Chefling’s service this way:

With the Chefling app, users can scan barcodes or take a picture of their receipt to monitor what foods they have in their fridge and pantry (and keep tabs on when that food will expire). Based on your food inventory, Chefling’s smart cookbook will then recommend recipes you can make. If you are missing any ingredients, Chefling automatically creates a shopping list for you and as you check these items off this list, the app keeps track of the new food available for newer recipe recommendations.

I spoke with Chefling Co-Founder Amar Krishna by phone and he said that prior to this week’s update, Chefling used “brute force” algorithms to make recipe recommendations because of its smaller data set. This time last year, the company had roughly 150,000 users. That number has since grown to 600,000 users, giving Chefling the hundreds of thousands of data points (recipes searched for or browsed, recipes chosen, frequency of cooking, etc.) required to do more deep learning and, as Krishna put it “unleash the algorithms.”

The result, Krishna said, is highly personalized recipe recommendations. Open the app, and it will serve up smarter, better, more accurate recipe recommendations based on the food you have. “It should know you more than you know yourself,” he said.

The app update also comes with a new food inventory feature. Through manual barcode and receipt scanning, Chefling has always kept track of what you add to your cupboards, but it didn’t know when they were removed. With this update, after you make a recipe, you can click to “Update Pantry” and it will subtract the amount of each ingredient used to make the recipe. This way the app knows how much of a particular ingredient you have left for future cooking.

Chefling is now also able to control certain Bosch smart appliances in your kitchen. From the recipe you can do things like set the oven or fridge temperature, or even turn on the coffee machine.

There are plenty of apps looking to become your kitchen assistant besides Chefling, namely Innit and SideChef. And all of them are striking deals with smart appliance manufacturers. Will this update be enough to help Chefling break through? We’ll have to see once it gets cookin’.

“The Hookup” Matches You with Your Ideal Coffee Bean Mate

Finding a soulmate can be hard — but what about finding your coffee soulmate? A new app from Trade Coffee Co. wants to help java lovers of all stripes discover the coffee of their dreams.

Dubbed “The Hookup” (cringe), the service starts by asking users answer 6 basic questions about their coffee experience level, preferred brew method, desired roast level, and coffee order (black, cream, sugar, etc.). As a snobby ex-barista, I was surprised to see the option for ground coffee (grind it yourself, guys!), but hey — I guess can’t blame Trade for trying to capture a wider audience.

After submitting their answers, users get a custom coffee recommendation from one of 50 different roasters. They can either purchase the coffee through Trade, or sign up for a subscription service which will deliver tailored coffee options ever 7, 14, or 21 days. All coffees cost between $12 and $20 — pretty average for specialty brews — and shipping is free. After tasting the coffee, users can submit feedback to the Hookup, which will then adjust their profile and inform future coffee shipments.

Photo: Trade Coffee Co.

Based on my answers, I was recommended an Ethiopian coffee from San Francisco-based roaster Sightglass as “The One.” The beans are $19, which is on the high side but not unusual for specialty coffee. After entering in my payment information Trade Coffee Co. offered me the option to let something called “Probot” manage my next order and give me recommendations and shipping updates over text.

In addition to coffee beans, Trade Coffee Co. also sells coffee brewing equipment and offers how-to tutorials for a variety of brew methods, from French Press to Pourover. Interestingly, in researching this article I discovered that the site is owned by JAB Holding, the coffee-hungry corporation which also lays claim to Peet’s, Intelligensia (which is prominently featured on the Trade site, hm…), Keurig and Panera, among others. Trade offers a new channel for JAB to reach haute coffee consumers, and also draws in more customers with its promise of curation and personalization.

In that way, The Hookup puts me in mind of wine discovery and recommendation apps, such as Wine-Searcher and Vivino. Like wine, specialty coffee can be intimidating — not everyone knows exactly which roast they like, or what country produces their favorite single origin. The Hookup is an easy, fun way to discover some new coffee beans in a super low-touch way.

While its services might be a bit scattershot and “mainstream” for true coffee connoisseurs — and a bit pricey for those who just drink it for the caffeine — I’d say The Hookup is actually a pretty helpful service for the majority of java drinkers (silly name aside). It would be a great service for people who want to up their coffee game but aren’t sure how to start, or those who already like specialty coffee but don’t want to spend the time or energy seeking it out.

If you’re curious about how technology is changing the way we grow, source, discover, and drink coffee, don’t miss Nate Gilliland of Bellwether Coffee’s solo talk at the Smart Kitchen Summit this October, entitled “From Soil to Sip: Disruptions in the Coffee Value Chain.” Get your tickets here!

Suggestic Experiments with Augmented Reality to Help You Stick to Your Diet Plan

What if you could wave your phone over a restaurant menu and see “through” the descriptions, instantly assessing which dishes are best (and worst) for you to eat?

That’s exactly what Bay Area startup Suggestic is working on. When users first open the free app, they set up their goals (lose weight, have more energy) and dietary preferences or restrictions (vegetarian, no dairy, allergic to peanuts). The app then recommends a series of dietary plans to match those preferences and goals, such as Anti-Inflammation or Low-Carb Mediterranean.

After selecting your plan, the app will create weekly meal plans with 3 to 4 recipes per day. “All recipes are found via machine learning,” Suggestic’s co-founder Shai Rozen told me over the phone. In fact, after they started the company four years ago, they spent the first year and a half applying for patents (which are currently pending) around their recipe-curating analytics. For a $100 annual fee, Premium members get access to food recommendations and recipes from selected health influencers. Users can turn their weekly meal plan into a dynamic grocery list, and Rozen said they’re working on making it shoppable.

Suggestic also provides videos and tasks to keep you on-track with your selected health program, a chatbot to guide you through meal and restaurant selection, plus a place for users to log their sleep quality and water intake. Its restaurant feature uses algorithms to analyze menu items at over 500,000 restaurants in the U.S., and will give each dish a score 1-10, depending on how well it’ll fit into your chosen diet. They’re also working on integrating genetic insight with DNA sequencing service Helix.

But the coolest part isn’t what they already offer — it’s what they’re working on. Suggestic is currently beta testing an augmented reality (AR) feature that allows users to point their phone camera at a menu and see color-coded indications of which dishes are best for their diet. “Then you can interact with the menu as if you were RoboCop or Terminator,” said Rozen. As of now, this service is available in 10% of the restaurants Suggestic covers.

It’s a little further out, but Suggestic is also developing tech to integrate AR into their grocery shopping service. So if you pick up a bag of gluten-free crackers and want to see how well it fits into your diet, all you’d have to do is bring out your smartphone and Terminator it.

The startup currently has a staff of around 20. Rozen told me that they have raised “around $3 million” over two funding rounds. The app launched about two months ago and has roughly 20,000 downloads.

AR is starting to pop up in more and more places throughout the food system. Huxley is combining AR, AI and machine learning to help increase indoor agricultural outputs. Big Food companies like Campbell’s are also exploring AR as a way to engage consumers from the grocery store to guided cooking, as is Williams Sonoma. Chinese startup Coohobo is using AR to make the grocery shopping experience easier and more social. App Waygo translates menus around the world into English, complete with pictures. And down the road, virtual reality (VR) in nutrition, cooking, and grocery shopping will be pretty common, too.

At the end of the day, Suggestic might be trying to do too much — they’ve got the buzzwords down (algorithms, AI, etc.), but combining them into a useful tool that can actually enable longterm healthy lifestyle changes will be a big lift.

That said, dining out can be a minefield for people with specialized diets or food restrictions; if Suggestic can nail the augmented reality aspect of their app and expand it to more restaurants, that could have huge benefits for those trying to watch what they eat.

 

Filtru is a One-Stop App for Coffee Obsessives (Or Aspiring Obsessives)

I am a self-admitted coffee snob, but I’m fully aware that most people don’t want to put the time and effort into the minute measuring, timing, and coordination that it takes to make a top-notch cup of joe.

However, if you are one of those people — or want to become one — Filtru was made for you. The Manchester, U.K.-based startup has a mobile app which walks users step-by-step through the coffee brewing process.

Founder (and sole employee) Bobby Bobak came up with the idea for Filtru shortly after he got an Apple Watch. A developer by day, he was also a serious coffee nerd, and wanted to create a step by step timer which would tap you on your wrist to indicate when to stir and pour in the brewing process. He launched the app in early 2016.

When you open the Filtru app you’re greeted with nine coffee brewing methods, from AeroPress to Chemex to French Press. Each choice leads you to a page with a quick brew guide, including grind size, the weight of coffee needed for a single serving, and water temperature and volume. There’s also a “how to” section so new brewers can figure out how to use that Moka Pot or Kalita Wave.

Once your ingredients are prepped, press the ‘Play’ button to start the timer. The app will walk you through each step of the brewing process, buzzing to indicate when to move onto the next task. “Sort of like being guided by a barista,” Bobak explained to me over the phone.

If you want to take it up a notch, Filtru also syncs with three bluetooth-enabled scales (with a fourth option in the works) to guide your brew with even more detail — telling when you’re pouring too fast, too slow, or at just the right rate. Which seems like a small detail, but my barista training taught me that water flow rate can actually make a noticeable difference to your end cup.

You may be thinking: “Whoa, this is way more detail than I ever want to think about when making coffee.” And if that’s the case, let’s be clear: Filtru is probably not for you. I should also say that it really doesn’t make sense to use Filtru if you don’t have a kitchen scale, since all the steps are indicated in weight. (Side note: you should get a kitchen scale — they’re inexpensive and make baking such a breeze.)

But if you are looking to up your coffee game, Filtru is a nice option that provides a lot of hand-holding — and clean, attractive graphics — along the way. Novice brewers can stick to the brew “recipes” already on the app, and experienced coffee nerds can take matters into their own hands and record their specialized brew methods, then share them on the app or social media. Eventually, Bobak wants Filtru to have a community library of brew recipes for anyone to peruse and try for themselves.

Bobak is also exploring ways to add augmented reality (AR) elements to Filtru to help users assemble their new coffee makers, and leverage machine learning to automatically record new brew recipes through scale data. 

At the moment, Filtru is free to use, and Bobak told me that he’s looking at the possibility of monetizing the app by integrating a shop aspect. Users would have the option buy the various coffee makers, filter papers, and even coffee beans through a single tap, and Filtru would get a cut of every product sold through the app. 

In many ways, Filtru is similar to other brew recipe-recording apps, most notably Acaia Coffee, which also syncs to bluetooth-enabled scales. But Acaia only works with its own coffee scales, and is meant to act as a platform for coffee obsessives to record and share their recipes. Filtru, on the other hand, has a wider audience appeal. According to Bobak, roughly half of its users opt to use the pre-set coffee brew recipes, which he takes to indicate that they’re new(er) to the high-tech homebrew game.

Filtru has over 3,000 monthly active users and has been downloaded about 27,000 times since it launched. Currently, it’s only available for iPhone’s OS, but Bobak said there was an Android version in the works.

When Bobak developed Filtru, he wanted to explore one thing: “How can tech improve the end user experience of coffee?” This is a question a lot of companies we’ve covered on the Spoon — an IoT-enabled coffee brewer, a countertop coffee bean roaster, and an electric vacuum brewing system,  among others — are trying to answer.

Filtru may have a niche audience, but it’s free, user-friendly, and versatile; plus it doesn’t take up any counter space. I for one tried it and ended up with a pretty great cup of coffee. While I don’t think I’ll use it every single morning, it was super accessible and easy to figure out. Next time I’m brewing coffee with an unfamiliar tool — I see you, moka pot — I’ll definitely use Filtru as my guide.

This coffee brought to you by Filtru!

 

Karma Turns Surplus Food from Restaurants and Grocery Stores Into Cheap Meals

We know, we know — food waste is an astronomical problem. The good news is, lately it has been getting quite a bit of press, and there have been a smattering of apps, agtech tools, improved food freshness labels, and other innovations (edible food sensors, anyone?) aimed at reducing the gobsmackingly high amount of perfectly edible food that goes in a landfill.

One of these is Karma, a Stockholm, Sweden-based app that helps retailers sell excess food directly to consumers at dramatically reduced prices. Karma launched in Sweden in November of 2016 and expanded into the U.K. in February of this year. So far, they have a grand total of 1,500 partners — including restaurants, cafes, hotels, bakeries, and grocery stores (300 of which are in the U.K.) — with roughly 350K end users across both markets.

Once they get set up with Karma, food suppliers can use the service to upload any surplus food that they would otherwise have to throw away. “We leave it up to them to allow the decision for what that means,” Alex Spain, VP of International Development for Karma, told The Spoon over the phone. The only requirement is that the food can’t be past its legal sell-by date.

Next, partners set the discounted price the food will sell for. The exact number is flexible, but Spain said that it has to be a minimum of 50% off. “We want it to make economic sense of something that would otherwise go to waste,” he said. “Otherwise, if it’s just 10-20% off, it’s in danger of just becoming a deals site.” Once the customer buys the food, they’re responsible for picking it up within a time window set by the supplier.

Joining Karma is free for both customers and retailers, and there are no binding terms for either party. The company collects a 25% transaction fee from the food provider on each purchase made through the app.

Spain told us that Karma is best suited to pre-prepared or packaged items such as sushi, salads, or sandwiches, but he added that it can also work for made-to-order food. He gave the example of lobster spaghetti; maybe a restaurant has a whole leftover lobster at the end of the day that they can’t use the next day, but they don’t want to sell a straight-up lobster in a bag. Instead, the chef will whip up a lobster spaghetti or other prepared dish to order when someone buys the crustacean.

The Karma app at work. (Photo: Karma.)

Karma isn’t the only app out there aiming to reduce waste by helping food establishments resell their surplus. In fact, they’re not even the only one in the U.K. Winnow tackles food waste from kitchen ordering and preparation, and Olio facilitates free food surplus sharing among neighbors and businesses. In the restaurant and retail sector, their most notable competitor is Too Good to Go. 

Karma also targets higher-end restaurants, including ones with Michelin stars. They want to curate a high-quality offering for their customers. “There’s a risk that when you talk about surplus or waste, people worry it’s low quality,” said Spain. “We want to make it seem like they’re not just picking up leftovers; we’re just trying to optimize supply and demand.”

They also put heavy emphasis on transparency. With Too Good To Go, users don’t know exactly what they’re going to get; they just show up to the restaurant and get a portion of whatever they have left. Karma, on the other hand, makes it clear exactly what products the customer will receive.

Olio, however, takes a more C2C approach. It’s chiefly aimed at neighbors who can use the app to share extra food, surplus vegetables from their garden, or excess bread amongst themselves. For restaurants, Spain views Olio as complementary to his company’s service; cafes or grocery stores can use Karma first to resell as much food as they can, then turn to Olio to get rid of the remainder for free.

According to Spain, retailers who switch to Karma from other food resell apps see a spike in demand. At the same time, Too Good To Go has the upper hand in terms of availability; it’s currently active across 8 European countries, while Karma is only available in the U.K. and Sweden — at least for now. 

Karma currently has a staff of 35, five of which are dedicated to the U.K. Last year, Karma raised a seed round of 4 million lead by Berlin-based company e.ventures. Spain didn’t yet know which market the company would launch next. But if the number of food waste reduction apps keeps increasing, hopefully Karma (and company) will continue to expand and, eventually, make a dent in the sobering global food waste problem.  

IoT-Enabled Cora Coffee Brewer is for Java Nerds Who are Tight on Space

Aaron Freyer got the idea for the Cora Coffee Brewer three years ago when he was packing up for a visit home to Portland, OR. “I got my suitcase out and pulled out my Chemex and my grinder and my scale — and realized it wasn’t going to fit,” he told me over the phone. “But at the same time, I was just getting into specialty coffee and I didn’t want to sacrifice quality.”

So he decided to develop a product that brewed excellent coffee but took up much less space: the Cora Coffee Brewer. At 4.7 inches in diameter and 9 inches tall, it is indeed petite, and can brew up to 13.4 oz (equivalent to one large cup of coffee). The Cora Brewer launched its first IndieGoGo campaign yesterday with a goal of $10,000.

Sure, if space is an issue you can always use an Aeropress or Kalita or even just a good old plastic drip cone. And all of those options are cheaper than the Cora, which Freyer says will retail for $199. That buys you the porcelain brewing carafe and the smart scale. But Freyer’s coffee brewer has two things going for it: 1) It’s IoT-enabled, and 2) It looks really nice.

The Cora brewer magnetically latches to a wood scale with bluetooth — but no interface. In order to see the scale’s reading, you have to open up a connected app, which will tell you the real-time weight readout of the Cora brewer in ounces or grams. It also has a built-in timer.

Though it attaches to the brewer, the scale can also be used independently to make tea, weigh packages, or bake. It has a rechargeable battery which lasts up to a month. When it needs juice, you can plug in the scale with a USB C charger.

As of now, that’s all the scale does. But Freyer said that the plan is to integrate that hardware with a more advanced app into the future. “It could almost gamify the process; it could say ’Hey, you’re pouring too slow,’ or recommend certain coffees to you,” he elaborated. Freyer has already developed the Cora app for iPhones and is working on one for Androids, as well as a way to sync the scale up to Apple watches.

Cora Coffee Brewer: Smart Pour-Over Coffee Brewer

 

Freyer is currently a senior in college at San Jose State and has a keen interest in industrial design. Which is why he wanted to make the Cora not only compact and connected, but also beautiful and well-made. And since its primary use case is in a smaller apartment, where every kitchen gadget and appliance is on display, aesthetics are important.

“I put a big focus on the quality of materials used,” he said. From vegetable-dyed leather to food safe porcelain to cherry hardwood, every aspect of the Cora screams “curated.” All parts are also manufactured and assembled in the U.S.

If he reaches his fundraising goal, Freyer says their first priority will be on jumpstarting the manufacturing process. “Everything is quoted and ready to be made,” he said. Which is why he’s confident that Cora can indeed reach its projected September ship date and avoid crowdfunding manufacturing delays.

Early backers can grab a limited number of Cora Coffee Brewers for $149 (once those run out, the price jumps to $169). Which is still a chunk of change. We’ll see if java-loving aesthetes are willing to pay for a device that looks as nice as the coffee it brews will taste.

Mucho Makes Shoppable Meal Planning More Dynamic & Efficient

“You do the cooking. We do the rest.” That’s the tagline of Mucho, a London-based startup which aims to create personalized, convenient meal plans that can be customized a whole slew of ways. And they really do take you pretty much ALLLLL the way through the meal journey.

Customers can use the Mucho app to select recipes based on dietary preferences (low sugar, vegetarian, etc.), budget, and how people they want to feed. The app then builds a customized shopping basket around the recipe(s), which users can either transfer into a printable shopping list or, if they’re in the U.K., they can also have their shopping list delivered through grocery delivery service Ocado. Users can also add on bits and pieces like cleaning products or snacks to their delivery list.

As of now, Mucho has over 1000 recipes in their database, culled from 40 online influencers and 20 brands — most of whom focus on healthy recipes. 

When I first heard of Mucho, I thought “Isn’t this just emeals, but British?” Both services offer personalized recipe selections, both create shopping lists, and both are linked up with grocery delivery companies so users can have their meals’ ingredients delivered straight to their door.

According to their cofounder Shanshan Xu, however, Mucho differs from emeals — and existing shoppable recipe services in general — quite a bit.

First of all, it’s more flexible. “We’ve found that people’s mood changes all the time,” said Xu. While emeals requires a subscription that locks users into a set number of dishes from the get-go, home cooks can use Mucho as much — or as little — as they’d like. They update their dietary profile and the number of people they’ll be cooking for every time they open up the app.

Emeals does allow their users switch between plans, but you can’t customize day-by-by. Which can be a hassle if you’re someone that, say, wants to eat vegan one week and flexitarian the next, or isn’t consistently dining with a partner or family. 

Mucho can also be cheaper — depending on how much you use it. Jenn Marsten reported for The Spoon that prices for emeals vary based on how long you choose to commit, but it costs $29.99 for three months or $59.99 for a full year, not including the cost of ingredients and grocery delivery. Mucho’s app is free to use, and if customers choose to have groceries delivered through the app they add a 5% fee to the final bill.

Do a little high school math, and we can determine that if you’re buying less than $1,200 in groceries per year, Mucho costs less than emeals. While $1,200 isn’t much at all to spend on groceries, especially for families, emeals also requires users to sign up for grocery delivery services (such as Amazon Prime or Instacart) separately, whereas Mucho builds Ocado delivery into the service. Xu told me that they’re hoping to soon shift the price burden away from the consumer and onto the grocery retailer.

To me, Mucho is a good option for people who want a more dynamic meal-planning service than emeals, but who need more hand-holding than is offered by shoppable recipes.

I’m betting the app will be popular with young, single folk (read: millennials) who want to cook more (and more adventurously), but also value the convenience of grocery delivery — and are willing to pay for it. Plus, Mucho’s bright, poppy graphics seem like they were made with this audience in mind.

Speaking of millennials, I tried the app myself; it was fun and easy to use, and while I couldn’t use the delivery capabilities (because I’m in the U.S.), I could definitely see myself incorporating Mucho into my grocery routine, especially when, as Xu reassured me, the delivery option comes over the pond.

The app has over 10,000 downloads so far. The Mucho cofounders put together money themselves to create the beta version of their app, and their roughly 10-person team is working to perfect their product before raising their seed round.

Coffunity Makes Anyone a Coffee Expert (Yes, Even You)

Unless you’re a barista by trade, you might not know all that much about what type of coffees you like. Ethiopian? Light roast? Notes of milk chocolate or stone fruit?

That’s where Coffunity comes in handy. The company, which is based in El Salvador, developed an app which lets users rate and review coffees, discover new brands and varietals, and determine their overall coffee preferences. Founded by Andrea B. Pacas, a 6th generation coffee producer, and Federico Bolanos, a professional roaster, cupper, and barista, the Beta version launched in March 2018.

The app made quite a splash at the Specialty Coffee Expo in Seattle last weekend when it won the Best New Product Award for Technology and the overall Best of Show.

Here’s how it works: Users take a picture of a coffee label and Coffunity will use a Google Vision scan and identify the label’s text. If that label is in their database, the app will give users a rundown on the beans’ taste attributes, origin, processing methods, and quality. It can get pretty granular, down to the exact varietal of the beans, the altitude on which they were grown, and even the name of the farmer(s) who grew them.

Coffunity users can rate coffees after they drink them and leave public reviews. So before you invest in a bag of beans, you can check and see if it matches your coffee preferences and find out what others wrote about it (i.e. tastes best with milk). If the app doesn’t recognize the coffee label, you can enter in its information and add it to the database.

Users can also search Coffunity’s library to determine the best coffees for them to purchase. For example, if you know you like fruity coffees, you can enter that in and see which brands and roasts might be a good bet for you. You can also search for coffees based on parameters like price, origin, retailer, or overall rating.

The company is even working on integrating geolocation services into their app so that users can discover nearby highly-rated coffee spots. So if you’re in a new city and want to source some nice beans for your Airbnb, you won’t have to wander aimlessly or settle for Starbucks.

And if you don’t know what you like, Coffunity will keep track of all your coffee rankings and create a profile of your taste preferences. The more coffees you rate, the more data it has to generate your profile, the more you can discover which coffees you like — and which you don’t.

There’s also a social aspect to Coffunity: you can follow friends on the app (or local baristas) to see which brands and varietals they’re drinking and liking. Sort of like Spotify, but for coffee. And if you just want to follow the crowd, the app keeps a list of the top-ranked coffees each day according to their global user base.

Coffunity hopes that their app will create the world’s largest coffee community. But they also want to encourage people to drink better coffee, be more aware of the variables and minutiae that goes into producing the beverage, and get more familiar with coffee producers, who are often isolated from the people drinking their product.

It might be surprising to some that at an event rife with barista robots and connected roasting machines, something as un-flashy as a coffee community app stood out as Best in Show. Their win indicates a movement in the craft coffee market towards democratization and accessibility.  You no longer have to be an SCA-trained expert to know a thing or two about high-quality coffee beans.

They’re not the only app geared towards educating people about and connecting them with good coffee. Apps like Cupper and Beanhunter help people find good coffee shops near them, while Acacia and Intelligentsia help you find the optimal home brew method. As specialty coffee becomes more and more accessible, I bet we’ll see more apps geared towards education and democratization of everyone’s favorite morning beverage.

The app is free and iOS compatible, though a version for Android is in the works. So far Coffunity has 950 downloads and over 150K coffees in their database. Coffunity currently has a staff of 12 and has been downloaded in more than 54 countries, though with this recent SCA Expo win under their belt, I bet they’ll soon be expanding.

Chef Dazzer Wants to Bring Professional Chefs Into Your Kitchen

In the past, if you wanted to book a decent caterer, you either had to find one through word of mouth, do a lot of googling, or just settle for a pre-made crudité plate with Ranch from the supermarket.

Chef Dazzer, a Boston-based startup which just launched in March 2018, hopes to change that. Its platform connects culinary professionals, personally vetted by their staff, with people for private event catering.

Chef Dazzer works in two ways: Customers can either get in touch through the company’s website, where they can chat with a staff member who acts as a personal “concierge” to match them to a chef. They can also download the app. On the app, chefs can create profiles, showcasing different menus and cuisines that they offer. Customers can flat-out book a particular menu from a chef, or they can chat via a built-in messaging platform in the app to customize which dishes they would like at their event. 

The two different platform entry points put me in mind of dating services: you can either go into an app and see what’s available, or you can go through an intermediary — like a matchmaker — to help with the selection process. In general, the website is for customers who want a little more hand-holding and want a person to talk to about their event — which, according to their CEO Mike Cormier, is one of the most popular aspects of the platform. 

After their catering event, customers have the opportunity to rate the chefs on a five-star system. When the clients pay the chefs, Chef Dazzer takes a 15 percent cut.

Chef Dazzer is not the first company trying to connect professional chefs to private clients. But it might have come along at the right time. One of the first companies to try this model was Kitchensurfing, which closed in 2016 after raising $20 million in capital. According to Cormier and Avery Gordon, who runs the chef operations side of Chef Dazzer, it’s at least in part because they launched before the Boston market was ready for this kind of model.

“Back when Kitchensurfing came out, having someone come to your house and cook for you was still a very new idea. Now with things like care.com, people are much more comfortable with the idea of having someone you don’t personally know come over,” said Cormier. 

Chef Dazzer also hopes to distinguish themselves by curating a high-quality experience, both for the chefs and the clients. They want to showcase culinary talent by choosing chefs that they know are high-quality, so you won’t book a local high schooler posing as a Michelin-star to cater your 400 person black-tie event. 

To pick which chefs will join their platform, Gordon dips into her years of experience in the Boston culinary community. The approach seems to be working for them now, since they’re new and small, but it will be interesting to see if they can keep up this vetting strategy as they grow and expand to new cities. 

Another potential issue for the company is lead time: most of ChefDazzer’s clients book chefs two weeks to one month out, though they can also contact a chef a few days before the event. At a time where people are used to ordering a slew of pizzas for a party and having them delivered in 45 minutes, it’s a risk to bet on customers being willing to plan that far ahead.

So far, Chef Dazzer has seen a good bit of demand — mostly on the chef side. They have a queue of 55-60 chefs who are interested in joining the platform, but only 10 or so are currently live on the website and app. They hope to scale up as they build their community of both chefs and clients.

Chef Dazzer is bootstrapped and hopes to create a solid user base before building their seed round. Until then, Bostonites can browse chefs to cater their next event, as long as they’re ready to plan a bit ahead.