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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Appliances

Millo’s New Motorless Blender Features ‘Magnetic Air Drive’

Millo is back.

Founded in 2015, Millo is a food tech appliance company that jumped into the market with an innovative small blender that produced smoothies and other blended concoctions with a quiet motor. As company Adam Trakselis, CEO, told The Spoon that the idea for the initial product came from the fact that the machine he used for his post-exercise blended beverages was so loud it woke his family. “So I would have to wait until everyone wakes up to use the blender.”

The noise issue led Trakselis to look for solutions to an appliance that hasn’t seen much innovation for decades. The first iteration of Millo sold around 1,000 units, but supply-chain issues with semiconductors forced the Lithuanian company to look for a new path. That new path is the Millo Air, the company’s next generation of the product which they just launched on Kickstarter.

Millo Air operates using a magnetic air drive (aka MAD). This axial flux stator generates magnetic fields, which turn a magnetic disc inside the blending lid without any physical connection. Without any turning parts inside the base, it is extremely quiet. In addition, the new model is smaller than the first generation making it even more portable. The drive, however, is more powerful than the original, with a top speed of 15,000 RPM.

According to the company, the first blender version received product innovation awards from IFA Berlin 2019 – the largest consumer electronics show in Europe, and was the SKS Startup Showcase winner in 2019. Moreover, in 2021 Millo received an award from Amazon as one of the top 20 most innovative products launching on its platform.

Trakselis has a vision for using a magnetic air drive far beyond his new blender. As he stated, “Our goal is to innovate the kitchen industry and to reduce electronics waste at its core by producing ten times fewer appliances. We are on a mission to establish magnetic air drive as a new sustainable kitchen standard – a home kitchen needs only one magnetic drive to power all the rotation needed devices.”

For example, a major appliance company can use the Lithuanian invention in a kitchen range. The stove can have a mix of induction burners and a magnetic air drive that can be used to power small appliances. Because of Millo’s successful use of MAD in its new product, other major manufacturers in the kitchen space have been in contact to explore use cases and partnerships. “You have one single cooktop that can have an induction for heating, and we have magnetic coupling fabrication. And if you combine them, you have one solution for all your needs in the kitchen, which is seamless,” he said.

Turning to the new Kickstarter, the company hopes to use some of the lessons learned from its initial campaign in targeting influencers and being more thoughtful about its channels. Five years of experience, the CEO says, has provided the company with some valuable marketing lessons. The campaign to raise £8,817 ($10,038) will last 30 days with the minimum pledge of £152 ($175) to land a Millo Air along with a smart blending lid, an on-the-go cup, drinking lid, charger, and magnetic hook. The Millo Air is expected to retail for $299 after the Kickstarter drive is over.

CES 2021: Samsung’s SmartThings App Adding Shoppable Recipe and Guided Cooking

Samsung announced today that it will be adding shoppable recipes, guided cooking and more such functionality to its SmartThings Cooking mobile app.

The added functionality is powered by Whisk’s Food AI (Samsung NEXT acquired Whisk in March of 2019), some of which has been available as part of the Family Hub software found in Samsung appliances.

With today’s news, smartphone users with the SmartThings Cooking app will be able to:

  • Get personalized recipe recommendations based on taste, preferences as well as what is immediately available.
  • Shop for ingredients and other food through the Whisk network of retailers including Walmart, Kroger, Instacart and Amazon Fresh.
  • Guided cooking instructions along with automatic temperature controls sent out to synced Samsung cooking appliances.

This could be the year where shoppable recipes and appliance integration take off. We are coming off a record year of online grocery shopping, thanks to the pandemic, so more people than ever are accustomed to buying groceries, including perishables, online. So the logical next step is tying together all of the threads in the meal journey: discovery, selection, access and instruction.

Samsung’s integrating functionality does all that and extends it now to the mobile phone. Of course, taking advantage of all of these new features means that you have to buy into the Samsung ecosystem and get all your appliances from the same maker.

As CES is kicking off this week, there will be a slew of kitchen appliance related announcements. Given how much online grocery shopping took off last year, and its projected growth over the coming years, I wonder how much more shopping integration we’ll see.

Food & Drink Pods Were Everywhere at CES, but Do Consumers Want Them?

If you were seeking out food tech at CES last week (and believe me, we were), you might have noticed an awful lot of one thing: pods. I was surprised by how many companies I saw demo-ing pod-based food or beverage system. Here are just a few:

Fresco’s olive oil press

Fresco
Tucked into the Italy pavilion at Eureka Park I stumbled across Fresco, the maker of a “Keurig of Olive Oil.” Insert frozen pods of olive oil into the EVA device (which is about the size of a French Press), press a button, and in five minutes you can collect your cold-pressed olive oil. You can select different varietals of olive oil and even choose infused flavors, like chili or basil.

When I saw this I instantly flashed back to the Juicero debacle — do you really need a device to thaw pods of frozen olive oil? According to the reps at the booth, though, you kind of do. The EVA heats olive oil to its ideal temperature, between 20 to 25 °C (77 °F), where you can taste all of its flavors.

The machine costs €79 ($87) and each frozen pod is around €1 ($1.11). For now only Italians can order Fresco, but the company is trying to move into the U.S. While Italian cucinares (cooks) might shell out extra euros to get optimally extracted olive oil, I’m not sure American home cooks will have the same level of devotion. Especially when they could just buy fancy olive oil from their local co-op or farmers market.

CES 2020: N2FALLS' portable nitro coffee

N2FALLS
You’ve probably heard of (or tasted) coffee pods, but nitro cold brew is a new entrant to the pod-based caffeine space. Korean company N2FALLS makes small cylindrical pods which, when inserted into the partner drink lid over a glass of water, expels compressed nitrogen-infused coffee concentrate. Voila — a nitro cold brew. Or if you do it over milk, a nitro latté! The company also makes pods for tea, juice and even booze-free wine.

Coffee prices vary by quantity but average to about $3 per capsule. For now N2FALLS is only available in Korea, but the company is in the midst of planning a U.S. expansion. Initially they’ll sell their pods in brick & mortar shops (the rep I spoke to named Amazon Go as a target) before selling online.

Tigoût
Argentinian startup Tigoût is a pod-based machine that bakes up wee single-serve desserts (think: Belgian chocolate cake or a white chocolate blondie). Insert a pre-prepped frozen pod (or two) into the machine, press start, and in a couple of minutes you’ll have a piping-hot sweet treat. Tigoût has a connected app so you can monitor your bake remotely and reorder capsules as needed.

The device itself costs $400 and each pod is $1.50. Right now there are 12 options, including six savory offerings. Tigoût’s founder and CEO Rodrigo Córdoba, who showed me the machine on the CES show floor, plans to launch the company officially in December of this year.

CES 2020: A Demo of Drinkworks, the Pod-based Cocktail Robot

Drinkworks + Bartesian
Adventurous CES goers could sample the hard stuff thanks to a few pod-based machines. Drinkworks and Bartesian are both cocktail-mixing robots which rely on flavor capsules to make classic drinks.

Drinkworks, which is the result of a joint venture between Keurig Dr. Pepper and Anheuser-Busch, is a countertop appliance which turns pods into cocktails, ciders, and even beers. Just pop a capsule — which already contains alcohol — into the machine, press a button, and out comes your drink of choice. You can see it make me a Moscow Mule at CES in the video above (which, yes, I drank at 10am cause Vegas). Drinkworks is available in select states for $299 and the pods cost around $3.99 each, depending on the drink.

Like Drinkworks, Bartesian is also a pod-based cocktail robot. It uses capsules filled with juice, bitters and other mixers. However, unlike Drinkworks, however, Bartesian users have to provide the spirits themselves — which allows for more customization but also adds an extra step (and expense) to the process. Bartesian devices are currently available at retailers around the country (and online) for $349.99.

Pod people?
Clearly food & bev companies have seen the success of Keurig and Nespresso and decided that pods = the future. And there’s some validity to that. Pods offer near-instant gratification (assuming you remember to reorder them) and a high level of consistency. They also give consumers the option to switch things up according to their mood — if you want a hazelnut espresso one day and a vanilla one the next, no problemo — and provide hardware makers recurring revenues.

But while pods do allow some level of wiggle room, their very nature means that they still end up trapping consumers. You may be able to choose the flavor of your cold brew/dessert/cocktail pod, but you’re reliant on the pod itself to get the finished product — and that means you’re beholden to a specific appliance manufacturer. Consumers can chafe against being locked into food ecosystems. Pods also don’t give you wiggle room to tweak a recipe — for example, if you like a slightly less boozy cocktail or a sweeter cold brew.

There’s also the negative environmental aspect to consider. While some pods are technically recyclable, most end up in landfills. That could become a bigger issue as consumers begin to prioritize sustainability more and more.

Despite their obvious convenience, will the cost of pods — both literal and environmental — keep consumers away? Clearly a bunch of companies at CES don’t think so. But I’m not so sure that the pod-volution of food and drink will take off — especially for more niche products, like olive oil.

Instead, I think we’ll see a growth of smart devices like the Picobrew, which can work with the company’s Picopacks or let consumers add their own ingredients. Even Keurig is getting on-board. You can buy the company’s proprietary pods, but many machines also let you buy reusable pods and add your own coffee for more of a customizable and waste-free twist. The DIY aspect still keeps consumers within the hardware device’s ecosystem, but allows them more flexibility (and sustainability). That’s the type of tech I’d like to see more of at CES 2021.

Which Smart Appliances Will Survive the Kitchen Countertopacolypse?

You could see the growth of our Smart Kitchen Summit this year just by looking at the sponsor section. Back in 2015, the sponsor area was a few tabletops scattered around the back of the room. Four years later, we had an entire promenade featuring three demo kitchens with full appliances and a host of smaller startups.

Among those showing off their wares were: June, Brava, Markov and the Rotimatic. These are all sizeable countertop cooking devices that are too big and bulky to store in a pantry or shelf, so they have to be semi-permanent fixtures on your kitchen counter. Which got me thinking, how many appliances can one kitchen fit?

Because it’s not just those companies vying for your counter space. There’s also: Tovala, Suvie, Amazon’s Microwave, Bartesian, Picobrew U, and Breville’s new Pizzaiolo, not to mention whatever coffee maker you have, a stand mixer, and maybe a food processor or blender.

Phew!

That doesn’t even include the amount of counter space you need just to prepare food. A quick search shows that the average kitchen only has 26 to 30 square feet of workable countertop space. My June alone takes up 2.6 square feet, almost a tenth of the square footage for an average American countertop.

At least the June does multiple things (oven, toaster, heaven-sent re-heater of pizza). As much as I’d love a Rotimatic, I can’t quite justify the counter space (or the $1,000) for something that only makes flatbread. Same goes for the Pizzaiolo.

The Brava and the Markov are interesting because of the new technologies they bring to traditional devices (light and AI, respectively), so they at least have the potential to change how we cook and replace existing devices.

But will these new appliances attract sizeable enough audiences? Will they achieve such a level of permanence in our cooking life that we will change the way kitchens are architected?

I rarely use my traditional oven, but I can’t imagine a kitchen without one. Perhaps that’s just my age showing, but it seems like we’ll always have the big, bulky, cooktop + oven combo (if not two ovens) and a fridge, and work out from there. Then again, maybe countertop induction burners can replace a traditional cooktop as well, allowing you to cook anywhere in the kitchen (and freeing up counter space!).

But who knows, the kitchen as we know it may be dying. Perhaps between more on-demand delivery of groceries and restaurant food, and the potential rise of prepared meal kits in supermarkets, we just won’t need the traditional appliances that we grew up with. Maybe the space once reserved for our oven(s) can now be freed up for something else, something more unitasking like a Rotimatic or a dedicated pizza device.

The point of all this is, is that there are a lot of devices coming to market, and none of them are cheap. In the case of the kitchen, it is a zero sum game. The addition of one device means less room for another, so when the kitchen counteropocalypse comes, there will be winners and losers.

Report: Amazon to Release an Alexa Microwave?

According to a CNBC report, Amazon plans on releasing at least eight new Alexa powered devices by the end of year, including a microwave oven.

If true, it would mark a turn in Amazon’s strategy and move the company further up the stack and into creating a more end-to-end hardware solution. In addition to embedding Alexa into everyone else’s appliance, it would start making its own.

CNBC writes that this would be Amazon’s first move into home appliances. While it would be the first one to actually hit the market if true, we know that Amazon has at least been thinking about its own smart refrigerator. So the company making its own microwave isn’t that much of a stretch.

Amazon has made similar vertically-stacked hardware plays over the past year with the acquisition of Blink’s connected cameras and Ring, which makes a smart doorbell.

Without any more information, it’s hard to tell whether an Alexa powered microwave would be a good thing for consumers. GE recently came out with an Alexa-enabled microwave that lets you control it with your voice. But microwaves are pretty surgical appliances. You set the time to cook, usually for short bursts numbering in seconds and minutes, and the device shuts itself off afterwards. I don’t see a lot of need to bark orders at it.

What an Alexa-powered microwave would do, however, is start to shut Google and its voice assistant out of your smart home equation. If Amazon can sell you a cheap enough microwave through its massive retail platform, it gains a foothold into your kitchen that Google can’t get to. And if the Alexa microwave has the same scan-to-cook technology as the GE microwave, Amazon would know what you’re cooking and when, and oh hey! Why don’t we have Whole Foods deliver that frozen meal to you as well. It’s not a big leap in logic to think if an Alexa microwave sold well, it could expand into more Alexa appliances that all talk to each other (and you) but not to Google — denying the search giant all that juicy user data.

In addition to the microwave, Amazon is supposedly working on an amplifier, a receiver, a subwoofer and an “in-car gadget.”

Second-Gen June Oven Sells out (for Now)

He (or she) who hesitates is lost, especially if you were hoping to score the second-gen June Oven before school starts. According to the company’s website: “Batch 1” of the newest June is “SOLD OUT” and batch 2 won’t ship until late October.

The new version of the eponymous connected smart oven was attention-grabbing for the $599 price point ($499 during a launch special), which was far less than the $1,500 price tag for the first-gen oven. The June has a built-in HD camera to automatically identify and cook food you place in it, as well as a vast array of presets (64 just for bacon!) to make cooking hands-off, often with no pre-heating required.

What’s notable about the first batch selling out is that June just announced and started shipping their new oven a week ago, on August 7th. We first came across the sold out sign over the weekend, so the company hit that milestone in less than six days UPDATE: A June rep said the company sold out in two and a half days.

Now there are a few things to keep in mind here, of course. We don’t know how many units were in the first batch; it could be 20,000, or it could be 20. (It’s probably not 20.) But the drastic price reduction could have been just the thing wary consumers were waiting for before pulling the trigger.

The number of June Ovens sold could actually have a bigger overall impact than just better sales numbers for the company. If June can establish a large enough beachhead on consumer countertops now, that will leave less room (literally) for other countertop cooking appliances that haven’t hit the market yet.

If you have a June sitting on your counter, how likely are you to buy a Suvie or a Brava? I realize it’s a big market, and each of these appliance makers would probably tell you that competition is good — and they each have a unique technology/solution, and they are paired with their own food delivery service.

But in a world of finite countertop space, it kind of is a zero sum game. I ordered a June (thankfully before they sold out), and assuming it works as promised, I can’t see myself getting a second countertop oven.

We reached out to June to see if we could get any more details and will update this post as we hear more.

Should Appliance Makers Use ‘DRM’ In The Kitchen To Lock In Consumers?

One of the biggest insider debates in the world of digital entertainment over the last couple of decades has been whether or not big content conglomerates should use what is called “Digital Rights Management,” or DRM, to protect their content.

The idea behind DRM is that it ensures anyone who uses a digital product, such as a movie or an album, has purchased the right to said product. In a way, it makes sense. After all, companies that invest billions of dollars in content rightly don’t want to see their content stolen and distributed on the Internet.

But DRM had a dark side. Not only did organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America go overboard and make consumers’ lives more painful by pushing to have DRM slapped on everything, but DRM also became a way to effectively hold consumers captive, reduce choice and hurt the overall consumer experience. Anyone who tried to make a copy of an HD movie DVD circa 2008 can attest to this.

Which brings us to the kitchen. With the modern kitchen becoming ever more digital, are appliance and food makers in danger of falling into the same trap?

Some already have. The first big digital kitchen “DRM” attempt was by Keurig in 2014 when they announced the Keurig 2.0 would require that consumers only use Keurig approved pods. This was an affront to anyone who values consumer choice.  Not only did hackers create a workaround, but consumers responded and eventually forced Keurig to reverse their position.

Others like Juicero followed suit (and we know what happened to them, though they had bigger problems than their juice-pod DRM). The big lesson I think we’ve learned is that consumers resist being held captive in one product ecosystem.

Which brings us to this tweet from Jeremy Stretch (hat tip to my friend Stacey Higginbotham for bringing this tweet to my attention):

Jeremy recently purchased a GE fridge and quickly noticed his $2k appliance had an RFID reader to verify whether or not he was using a GE-branded water filter. Because of this, he opted to return the fridge.

I understand the business case for requiring consumers to use a particular brand of filter. And, to be honest, I am much more likely to be accepting of a first-party water filter vs. being held captive to a premium food consumable. But, that doesn’t mean as a consumer I wouldn’t jump at the chance to use a third-party water filter.

Stepping back, however, it’s worth examining if appliance brands should use this technology to restrict consumer choice to a brand’s own products.  In a way, RFID-enforced “DRM” can certainly help to accelerate a recurring revenue business like water filters or drink pods. On the other hand, consumers bristle when it comes to less choice.

And, perhaps even more importantly, these restrictive systems can also be shortsighted. Keurig owes some of its massive success to the availability of cheaper coffee pods; in early markets, the more choice, the better.

This is a lesson early connected kitchen startups like PicoBrew already recognize. While users of the Pico beer brewing appliance currently have to use a new PicoPak purchased from PicoBrew every time they make a batch of beer, the company is working on a beta for fill-your-own disposable pods and also has a reusable polycarbonate ingredient holder on its product development roadmap.

Others like Tovala (and the soon to ship Suvie), which offer food subscription services for their hardware, have wisely chosen not to restrict consumers to only using only their food “pods.”

As for GE, I have no doubt the company will continue to use RFID to enforce the use of their own water filters. And, because a water filter is something consumers only buy every 6-12 months, I don’t really think this will create the same type of anger that a food-consumable DRM would (i.e. Keurig 2.0).

That said, I would still encourage appliance makers to use DRM judiciously.  While most consumers have been trained to use hardware DRM by the likes of home printers, they certainly don’t like it, which of course means they’ll eventually they’ll find away around it.  If there is an option for a non-captive alternative for a consumable, many consumers will opt for that.

And if it’s a food consumable? Forget it. Not only have we seen the kind of anger something like Keurig’s DRM created, but brands should realize that they don’t need DRM to get consumers to buy first-party products. There is a significant percentage who will choose Keurig pods even if they are more expensive. In other words, there are always those consumers pay for convenience and are loyal to brands, at least if you treat them right. If you don’t, these consumers will stay away, and the overall market suffers.

Bottom line? Appliance makers would be wise to learn the lessons of past mistakes around using DRM and understand that by giving consumers more choice, there’s a much better chance of being rewarded in the marketplace.

BSH Appliances Teams With Techstars To Create Connected Kitchen Accelerator

BSH Home Appliances (BSH Hausgeräte GmbH) announced this week it is teaming up with Techstars to create the “BSH Future Home Accelerator Powered by Techstars”, an accelerator targeted at “early stage companies with innovative digital business models that want to accelerate their ideas around the connected kitchen of the future home.”

The program, which will kick off in February 2019 with an initial cohort of 10 companies, will have a total of three cohort classes over the course of three years (2019-2021) and mentor a total of thirty startups.

While – as the name of the accelerator indicates – much of the focus will be on the kitchen, the company took pains to emphasize that the scope could be much broader than that.

“We didn’t want to be too closed on topic,” Tibor Kramer, the program’s manager, told me in a phone interview. He explained this was in part because they didn’t want to shut out interesting ideas that could help make a consumer’s life better.

But Kramer also made it clear that the main focus will be on the digital kitchen. The kitchen is the “heart of the home,” he said. “We at BSH, as a home appliance manufacturer, are quite focused on the kitchen and on kitchen appliances and cooking is the most creative process.”

The move by BSH into creating its own accelerator is part of a larger trend of established companies in the food, home and retail spaces trying to tap into new ideas and energy through the creation of an accelerator and incubator programs. BSH joins the likes of IKEA, Land O’Lakes and Chobani who have gone down this path, and will likely spur other appliance and houseware products to consider doing the same.

For BSH, the creation of their own accelerator could give them a leg up as appliance companies scramble to find new products and platforms to accelerate digital transformation. These companies are transitioning from a business largely centered around the one-time sale of non-connected, stand-alone products towards a future in which software-powered kitchens open up new opportunities for radically different business models.

“As a company focused on improving our customer’s quality of life, BSH is forging a path to be the leader in digital services for the connected kitchen,” said BSH Appliances CEO Karsten Ottenberg in the announcement.  “To be successful in this rapidly evolving space, it is important to continually expand our digital capabilities and align ourselves with the most innovative startups and technology – which we will achieve together with Techstars through this accelerator program.”

According to Kramer, while Techstars will mentor the cohort companies on how to build and scale a young company, the role of BSH – which owns a number of appliances brands such as Bosch, Siemens, Thermador, Gaggenau – will be as experts in the home appliance business.

“We will handpick our mentors from the Digital Business Unit (the new business unit where the accelerator will reside), as well as executives from BSH corporation that we think will give added value to the startups,” said Kramer. “We want to give them a good mentoring and connect them with the (BSH) network.”

The program will begin taking applications online on July 23rd and will notify those accepted in November.

BSH Appliances CEO Karsten Ottenberg will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit in October. If you’d like to hear him talk about transforming BSH towards the digital future, make sure to get early bird tickets today. 

Sears Cuts Ties With Whirlpool In Another Effort To Survive

For almost a century, Sears carried staple appliance brands from Whirlpool including Maytag, JennAir and KitchenAid. But amidst the retailer’s struggles to remain profitable in a tough environment, Sears has announced it is cutting ties to Whirlpool and will no longer carry the brand’s appliances.

It appears that the retailer’s decision stemmed from Whirlpool’s attempt to raise margins in an increasingly competitive appliance market environment. In a statement, Sears commented, “Whirlpool has sought to use its dominant position in the marketplace to make demands that would have prohibited us from offering Whirlpool products to our members at a reasonable price.”

The decision is effective immediately and Sears reported that it would sell off the rest of its Whirlpool inventory while immediately pulling subsidiary brands including Maytag and KitchenAid from store floors. Sears will continue to sell its Kenmore brand and other popular appliance brands including GE, Bosch, Samsung and Electrolux.

These recent changes may not be enough to keep Sears from going under and the announcement comes in the last quarter of a rocky year for Sears; the company has been in the process of closing less profitable stores, including all those in Canada and has attempted to reinvigorate its e-commerce efforts through a partnership with Amazon. In a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” mentality, Sears signed a deal with the Seattle based e-commerce giant to sell Kenmore appliances on Amazon.

Sears business dealings with Whirlpool aren’t entirely over though, the company still manufactures the Sears Kenmore line of appliances and will continue to do so according to Sears. Kenmore is attempting to remain competitive in the connected appliance space, launching a new suite of smart kitchen appliances with Amazon Alexa compatibility at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit.

Whirlpool, on the other hand, has spent the past several years dipping their toes into the smart kitchen space, first partnering with food platform startup Innit, then announcing voice connectivity inside their devices and after dissolving the Innit partnership, buying Yummly, one of the internet’s biggest food & recipe sites.

Samsung’s Latest Smart Fridge Is Here

Samsung’s been working on connected appliances for years and the company’s flagship smart fridge feels like a personification of the vision they have for the connected kitchen. Today Samsung is unveiling their next generation Family Hub with stronger app integration and a series of new partners to enhance features like family communication and grocery to fridge food shopping.

“The Family Hub is a huge step forward in the modern kitchen. It empowers you to do things you never thought possible – like take the fridge with you to the grocery store, digitally display a photo of your kids’ winning goal, and enjoy your favorite entertainment right from your digital screen,” commented John Herrington, Samsung’s SVP and General Manager of the Home Appliance Division.

The appliance giant is revealing the smart fridge’s advancements tonight at an event in partnership with the Smart Kitchen Summit; the event will bring together experts in kitchen trends, product innovation and cultural anthropology for a panel discussion today at Samsung’s experiential retail center in NYC.

The event, “More Than Just a Fridge: The Future of Food, Family & Fun in the Kitchen,” features Samsung execs including Herrington and Yoon Lee, Michael Wolf, curator of the Smart Kitchen Summit and publisher of The Spoon, Lisa Fetterman, CEO and founder of sous vide startup Nomiku, Christian Madsbjerg, Cultural Anthropologist and Amy Bentley, Food + Culture Professor at NYU. Programming at the event will tackle why the kitchen has become the hub of the home, how the kitchen is evolving to serve the changing needs of multi-generational families and how technology is created convenience and connection in the kitchen.

The Family Hub fridges will add new features including personal memos and photos on the digital touchscreen, partnerships with TuneIn and Spotify for music streaming and integration with Samsung TVs to push programming to the fridge’s front door screen.

This latest edition of Samsung’s smart fridge will also feature the Connect app, the company’s smart home control app introduced earlier this year on the Galaxy S8. By putting the Connect app on the Family Hub fridge, the appliance can now act as a smart home command center if they have a SmartThings hub or the Samsung new Connect Home Smart Wi-Fi system with an integrated SmartThings hub.

The new Family Hub also has integration with a number of cooking applications and services such as Allrecipes and GrubHub. The device will also work with Nomiku’s immersion circulator, which is an integration by-product of Samsung’s investment in Nomiku.

(Disclosure: The Smart Kitchen Summit and Samsung partnered to produce the event mentioned in this post.)

Smart Kitchen | Food Tech Wrap-Up From CES 2017

Is it fair to say we’re all collectively exhausted from CES news? The first few weeks of the year are just a deluge of tech press releases about all the things manufacturers plan to do, make, ship, partner with and promulgate during the rest of the year. And even though CES has yet to carve out a specific floor area for food and kitchen related tech items, we definitely saw an uptick in announcements in this emerging space.

We saw smart kitchen products and integrations from larger companies and startups alike across the connected home, appliances and wearables – here’s the rundown.

Alexa, has the smart kitchen arrived? (And have you seen Google?)

It seems no one is sick of Amazon Echo quite yet and we saw even more manufacturers outside of the traditional smart home adding Alexa integration to their product lines. The biggest announcement came from Whirlpool, who made a splash last year with Amazon Dash integration at the show and this year adds voice functionality to its Wi-Fi connected ovens, fridges and washing machines. Alexa, is my laundry done?

And now, if you own a Ford with the Sync 3 platform, you can ask Alexa to preheat the oven from your car.

LG announced a competitor to the Samsung Family Hub with its own smart fridge (more on that later) – with a gigantic touch screen that looks like you might need a step stool to reach the top of, the appliance also integrates with Amazon Echo. Alexa, can you reach that icon for me?

Speaking of Samsung – the upped the ante this year with Family Hub 2.0, adding a bunch of new service integrations (GrubHub and Spotify, to name a few) but not much else. And LG jumped in the smart fridge game with giant touchscreen game with new Smart InstaView Model, boasting much of the same features as the Family Hub, including voice integration, cameras to see what’s inside your fridge when you’re away (or too lazy to open the door) and software to help run your house. LG’s model also has grocery ordering but theirs is Amazon-powered.

Google Home, the Echo’s main competitor, was announced in a few integrations. Conversation Actions, their equivalent to Alexa’s Skills, hasn’t shown us much that is kitchen or food related (with the exception of a Dominos pizza ordering action) as of yet, so Alexa is still your main sous chef for the kitchen. For now.

For their part, Whirlpool had a host of announcements around their “Smart Kitchen Suite”, including their first step into guided cooking. Their assisted cooking will guide users through three step recipes that will send instructions to the oven and program it for the cook. They also introduced “scan-to-cook” which will allow the user to scan barcodes to “send the right directions, temperature and cooking time settings straight to the appliance.”

The smart bar gets customized….and sees more competition

PicoBrew showed off its now-shipping Pico unit at CES and announced that it will offer customized PicoPaks, the pods used to make different types of beer with the device. Previously, PicoPaks were premade by the company’s professional brewers, making it more of a do-it-for-me experience. Now, you can create your own beer selecting flavors and ingredients on the platform with some guidance from the pros.

The area of smart beverages is one we’ve kept our eye on for a while, with device makers and beverage companies all vying for a piece of the pie. But The Spoon’s Allen Weiner found an interesting story NOT at CES, writing, “while companies such as Picobrew and Whirlpool’s Vessi were showcasing their high-tech methods for brewing beer at CES, two giants of the beverage industry confirmed a partnership.” Turns out that AB InBev, the world’s largest beer brewer and the makers of Keurig are teaming up to create a home-brewing system designed to deliver homemade beer and cocktails. Will it do for cocktails what the Keurig did for coffee? We’ll see.

Food waste prevention goes mainstream

The prevention of food waste has been an area I’ve been fascinated with for a while – especially as it relates to technology’s potential to really change our bad habits and help us stop bludgeoning our environment with trash. But so far, most of the solutions are niche or designed for commercial use. But -CES saw the introduction of some smart solutions that might actually change things.

First, there’s the Zera Food Recyler from Whirlpool – which is basically a fancy name for a tech-savvy composter that can live in your kitchen and turn food scraps into fertilizer with very little involvement from you. Composting is a cool idea, and the earth-friendly concept of it appeals to this generation of more health-conscious, organic-buying consumers, but is generally not pursued by the vast majority of us. Whirlpool smartly saw this as a way to use technology and create a one-button solution to this. Zera is on Indiegogo now for a little under $1k (fully funded and still taking backers as of this posting) and expected in stores later this year.

Also pretty cool – the GeniCan, a smart device you place on your trash can that scans items as you toss them in the bin and creates a grocery list from which you can reorder. You can also set it up to connect to Amazon Echo and have it automatically reorder items for you (from Amazon, of course). This might not prevent food waste in the traditional way, but it could stop you from ordering too much food and help you be more accurate with the stuff you need. If you scan everything you throw away first.

The robots are here, and they’re going to teach you how to cook

Robots at CES are not a new thing. For years, companies have been using them – sometimes in the form of product announcements, sometimes just as booth eye candy to lure traffic in – to make a splash. This year, the name of the robot game was giving arms and legs to Alexa – and making her dance, apparently.

But one appliance maker decided to create its own smart robotic assistant for the kitchen, bypassing the popular “put Alexa behind everything” trend. Bosch launched its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-connected appliances last year and this year introduced Mykie (my kitchen elf, shortened) which is basically an Amazon Echo voice device with a small touchscreen that helps you out in the kitchen. Need a recipe? Want to know what’s in the fridge? Want to listen to some music? Mykie’s got you covered. It seems odd that Bosch would want to compete with Amazon in this category, but Mykie does do some cool stuff that the Echo doesn’t, including project images onto a wall via the tiny projector in its rear, allowing you to blow up a recipe video you’re following. Mykie also offers virtual social cooking classes so you can learn to cook with an actual human instructor and the AI assistant. Is it enough to compete with the Echo? Time will tell.

Cooking tech heats up

Drop adds a second appliance manufacturer to its roster – announcing its recipe platform can now control GE Wi-Fi appliances (it announced Bosch integration in September last year.)

Panasonic showed off an entire smart kitchen with technology like a smart wine fridge with different temps for each shelf and a cool display, inductive heating built into countertops and tables to discretely heat and keep food warm and a machine learning / camera combo that lets appliances react to and adjust cooking based on the recipe you’re trying to follow.

The Smart Kitchen Show hits the CES floor

The Spoon’s Mike Wolf hit the CES floor in search of interesting conversations on food tech and smart kitchen – check out The Smart Kitchen Show’s newest podcasts.

Hear from the CEO of nutrition and food delivery startup Habit about their offerings and how they’re building the next generation of personalized nutrition.

Mike caught up with AppKettle’s founder Robert Hill to talk US shipping dates and what’s behind the company’s initial delay to bring the product to market.

Mike and I catch up on all that we saw at CES in our CES smart kitchen wrap-up.

Over the next few weeks we’ll continue to analyze what we saw in smart kitchen and future of food at CES. Stay tuned! If you want to get all our analysis in your inbox, make sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Jenn-Air Wi-Fi Ovens Add Support For Nest

Often times in the smart home space, companies announce integrations or new functionality that seem…less than useful. Part of this is a result of the race to make the case to consumers that connected devices are going to make their lives better. But sometimes we hear about device integrations that not only seem like a good idea – but also just good common sense.

One example of this is an announcement this week from appliance manufacturer Jenn-Air that it has integrated Nest thermostat functionality into the Jenn-Air Wi-Fi connected ovens. The integration will allow the oven and the thermostat to talk to one another to communicate important information. If the Nest senses that there is no one home but the oven has been left on, it will send a quick notification via the Jenn-Air app to the user to let them know and give them the option to shut off the appliance.

The other integration is even more useful, allowing users to create rules that will change the Nest’s temp settings when the oven is set at a certain temperature. This is an aim to solve a fairly common problem – the kitchen and dining room areas getting too hot, especially in the warmer months, when the oven is on for long periods of time. The custom rules will allow Nest and Jenn-Air owners to be proactive and ensure the rooms remain comfortable during the cooking process. Perhaps the only thing missing from this announcement is an integration between the oven and Nest’s connected smoke detector. The oven is the culprit of many false (and maybe some real) smoke alarms, so an integration between a smoke detector and the oven to determine whether it’s appropriate to switch off the oven in the event of a real fire seems useful.

Jenn-Air has been an early appliance leader in the smart kitchen space, announcing earlier this year a strategic partnership with food data platform startup Innit to bring a new level of intelligence to cooking using their appliances. The new Nest integration will work through the Jenn-Air app and current Jenn-Air connected oven users will receive notification to update the app to the newest version, which includes the added Nest functionality.

Read more about the Jenn-Air news here.