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Exclusive: The Spoon Talks With ChefSteps CEO Young About Breville Acquisition

Big news today in the world of the connected kitchen. As Chris Albrecht previously reported, Breville has acquired ChefSteps, maker of the Joule sous vide appliance.

I caught up with ChefSteps CEO Chris Young to ask him about the deal. Below is a transcript of our conversation.

Congratulations on the news. Can you tell us a little about how this came together? 

Young: When the bad news broke, Breville quickly reached out. They had been longtime admirers of what we have done. As we met with Breville team in Sydney, as I got to know their CEO Jim Clayton and talked about what we were doing with software, community and content, and we talked about what we accomplished with Joule, they saw a real opportunity to accelerate what Breville was trying to do by putting us together.

How do they plan to integrate the company?

They are keeping the Seattle offices. They are going to be investing more in our software team and capabilities. I can’t talk about future roadmap plans, but I think there will be a lot of opportunity with what we’ve done with Joule and how it might work together with Breville products in the future, and I think you are going to see a lot of investment in content and community from the Chefsteps side. In a lot of ways, this is a great outcome. Everything we want to keep doing is going to continue to happen and our community has a great steward in Breville so there’s continuity of our business and work.

Are you are going to stay on?

Young: Right now [I’m] involved in Breville, having conversations about how my role will evolve. We’re working it out. Grant [Crilly] is staying on, most of the team is staying on, and I expect be involved in Breville in some way going forward.

Can you tell us the acquisition price?

Young: No. Those terms are confidential. But I will say everyone who is involved, though it’s been a very challenging few months, feels very good about the outcome.

Why Breville?

Young: I’ve known Breville for a very long time. I had worked with them back when I was with the Fat Duck.

April was a very tough time. Had to let go a lot of my colleagues, stabilize the business, take time to figure things out. But when I made list of who I think was the right company to go forward with, Breville was at the top of my list. So when they reached out, I was really happy. It made it really easy. We have a shared DNA, how we think about products, how we think about innovation, that we’re fundamentally there to serve our community of cooks. We’re never just about doing a product at a particular price point and a set of features, that’s never how we approached things. I also think it’s real validation [that] what we built, what we shipped, was really one of a kind.

You had been working on a number of other products. Can you tell us what will happen to the ChefSteps product roadmap under Breville?

Young: This is one of the changes for me. Breville has to make a lot of decisions. We’ll absolutely see Joule go forward. There is a lot of eagerness to see our roadmap go forward. Will everything go forward? I have no idea, but I know there are several things we are very close I think we will be able to ship to our community later this year and I am quite excited about that.

You’ll be paired with precision cooking pioneer Polyscience under Breville. Thoughts about that?  

Young: We worked with Polyscience early on. They were a pioneer in the commercial space. With Joule, Breville was not only wanting to have a commercial offering, but also wanted to have the best offering in the consumer space with Joule.

The consumer sous vide market has been really competitive and some companies have struggled. Any thoughts on how it looks going forward?

The sous vide market is growing tremendously. The market is growing very fast, over 40% per year. Prime Day was fantastic for us. [I] think there has been a challenge in the industry. Some of it is a timing question. Some of the obvious strategic buyers that would give startups an exit, they’re maybe not ready yet to transform themselves with technology and they’re struggling out to figure out how they would benefit.

That is sort of the problem: there are not a lot of buyers that yet have the vision they need for the technologies that companies like ChefSteps pioneered. Breville gets it. They were already committing to a connected future and we just provided a great opportunity to accelerate it. I think until you get more companies recognizing they absolutely need this technology as part of their future, you’re going to see these companies struggle. But fundamentally, I think we’ve proven this technology is absolutely worthwhile and the relationships with their customers are invaluable.

Is the Joule Ready sauce business dead?

Young: I don’t think any final decisions have been made. We’re not putting back into production immediately. These are assets that Breville has acquired. There was a lot of things we were developing behind the scenes our customers absolutely loved. To be candid, I wish that business had a little bit more time to mature because their growth numbers were tremendous. I don’t know if I would say its dead, it might just be a question of priorities before anyone can turn back to it.

Breville Acquires ChefSteps, Maker of the Joule Sous Vide

Kitchen appliance giant Breville announced today that it has acquired ChefSteps, maker of the Joule connected sous vide wand. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

From the press release:

Breville’s acquisition of ChefSteps will enhance the long-term R&D capacity that brought the Joule product to market, allowing for continued and sustained focus on innovation, while increasing global commercial scale to further maximize the value of the ChefSteps content platform and portfolio of fast-growing connected Joule products. It also forms a natural consumer-focused extension to Breville’s existing commercial sous vide range of products following its acquisition of the PolyScience Culinary division in 2014.

The privately funded ChefSteps started out as an online culinary community and recipe site and went on to become an early pioneer in the sous vide space through the company’s well regarded (and well designed) Joule.

In April, ChefSteps laid off a significant number of its staff. At that time Spoon Founder Mike Wolf wrote:

There are still not many details beyond what’s been reported, so it’s hard to tell exactly what happened and why ChefSteps was forced to downsize. I can only speculate that sales of the Joule (or their related Joule Ready sauce business) wasn’t substantial enough to fund the ongoing business and that they had exhausted funding provided by early backer Gabe Newell.

Newell, a billionaire who made his money in the video game business as the founder of Valve, had given the company a low-interest loan early on. While Young had described Newell’s support as giving the company the financial flexibility to push in new directions (such as with the Joule), it looks like Newell’s generosity has its limits. It’s unclear if ChefSteps had sought funding from other outside sources (or is still seeking funding).

Less than a week after that ChefSteps shut down its premium content offerings and shuttered its relatively nascent sauce-selling business. At that time, ChefSteps CEO, Chris Young posted to Facebook:

As you’ve heard, there have been some changes at ChefSteps in the past week. Our funding situation unexpectedly changed (emphasis mine) and we’ve had to make the incredibly difficult decision to let a significant fraction of our amazing team go. This truly sucks.

Following these closings, Mike Wolf followed up with another story, writing:

While it was always assumed ChefSteps was in a good financial place because of the backing of billionaire Gabe Newell, it’s apparent now that wasn’t necessarily the case. Most interestingly, it looks like the sudden change in the health of the company’s balance sheet was not anticipated, making me wonder if either Newell called in the loan or had changed his position somehow and didn’t want to extend more credit to the company. There’s also the possibility ChefSteps had been seeking other financing and had something fall through at the last minute.

ChefSteps will be integrated into the Breville Group business and will continue to operate out of its Seattle office.

The acquisition by Breville is good news for Joule fans everywhere, but given the tight times the company was in and the fact that terms were not disclosed, it probably wasn’t the exit the company was hoping for when they started.

We will continue to follow this story as it develops.

Video: World Pizza Champion Tony Gemignani Uses Breville Pizzaiolo Countertop Pizza Oven

Like Ahab and his whale, I’ve been on the hunt to replicate the same kind of pizza I ate in Italy at my home. And failing miserably. Pizza stone in the oven, gas outdoor pizza oven, on the grill — none of them replicate the char and pillowy crust of a real Italian style pizza.

This was why I was so excited to taste pizza from the Breville Pizzaiolo Smart Oven at our FoodTech Live event in Las Vegas night. The Pizzaiolo ratchets up to 750 degrees and can cook a pizza in just three minutes. The result is a nicely charred, airy crust that really felt rustically Italian.

Of course, it helped that said pizzas were made by World Pizza Cup Champion Tony Gemignani. Here’s a quick video of he and I talking about the Pizzaiolo to give you a (delicious) taste of what the device is capable of.

Food Tech Live: Tony Gemignani Uses the Breville Pizzaiolo Countertop Pizza Oven

You don’t have to get fancy either, the Pizzaiolo can also just cook a regular ole frozen pizza or one made using store bought crust. At $800 the Pizzaiolo ain’t cheap, and I’ll probably have a hard time convincing my wife (and my waistline) that our family needs one — but now at least I know that authentic Italian style pizza is possible to make in my kitchen.

Smart Kitchen Appliances: What If “Smart” Means Superior Instead Of Connected?

One of the core discussions around the smart kitchen at SKS over the past three years has been the function and usability of smart devices in the kitchen. What devices will actually help us cook better food more easily and what are just silly attempts at connectivity for connectivity’s sake?

Breville has a different take on what makes an appliance smart, and it goes well beyond the ability to connect to its devices via a smart app. The new Breville Smart Oven Air has unique technology that allows for incredibly precise temperature control and can actually change how the heat is distributed. In other words, depending on the requirements of the specific dish you’re cooking, you can make the oven hotter at the front, top, bottom, or back of the chamber.

Allen Weiner of The Spoon sat down with Scott Brady, General Manager of Global Marketing at Breville at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit to talk about how Breville’s smart oven makes life easier in the kitchen. According to Brady, “this precise heat distribution lets you complete a lot of simple cooking tasks a lot better.”

For example, if you’re baking a cake, you’ll want the heat focused on the bottom of the oven to prevent it from cracking; whereas, for a pizza, you’ll want the heat evenly distributed throughout. Both are possibilities with the Breville oven, so that you can get the perfect finish no matter what you’re cooking. And the guesswork of how to heat and at what temperature isn’t left up to the user – the oven will course correct and heat to perfection no matter what the dish.

Another trend in kitchen appliances seems to be more all-in-one functionality. The future kitchen will likely not have a slow cooker, an oven, a toaster, a microwave and a sous vide machine but rather one or two devices that does most of that with ease. Breville is trying to pull that off with the Smart Oven Air. For one, it’s bringing in air-frying, which is a much healthier way to prepare your favorite fried foods. Instead of using hot oil, the oven uses fast-moving convection heat to mimic the effect of a traditional deep-fryer. Precise temperature control and regulated air movement mean that this oven can also dehydrate fruit, as well as act as a slow-cooker.

The question is: The Breville oven may be smart, but where does the company stand on connectivity?

For Breville, Brady says, “We don’t want to be connected for connected’s sake.” Instead, their goal is to create products that offer unique, new technology that’s truly helpful—not cumbersome. The future of smart kitchen devices is creative technology that actually makes culinary tasks easier for the user when combined with the convenience of an app, a built-in recipe database and intelligence baked into the device itself.

Brady says Breville is working on products that meet this promise, and you can expect them in 2018.

The Spoon Video Top 3: Yogurt Tech, Breville’s Coffee Robot & The Cordless Kitchen

It’s our weekly video recap of the top three trending stories from over the past week on The Spoon. Our recap includes these stories:

Make sure to follow us on Facebook to get our weekly video wrapup of the top trending stories first.

Breville’s New Espresso Machine Is Almost Like A Home Robot Barista

It’s no secret that robots are changing the way the food and beverage industry is creating food, serving its customers, designing products and automating tasks that used to belong to people. Startups like Cafe X are actually staffed with fully robotic baristas who will make you a delightful (and fast) cup of coffee with no real human involvement.

But it’s not just Silicon Valley startups getting in the mix – companies like Breville are thinking about how to automate tasks and deliver appliances that give consumers quality without leaving the house. Enter Breville’s newest invention, the Oracle Touch, which is the closest you can probably get to hiring a barista to come to your house and make you the perfect espresso-based beverage. The Oracle Touch has – you guessed it – a touchscreen and a bunch of advanced technology inside that gives it the ability to create a drink from scratch without much human input at all.

The Oracle will grind the beans, tamp down the ground espresso, infuse and pour a shot and steam your milk of choice to the exact desired standards (without anyone having to hold the wand or container.) In a market where fancy espresso machines usually require some know-how and Keurig-type machines make brewing coffee with a button-push super simple, it makes sense for Breville to try and create the best of both worlds.

The machine, of course, isn’t cheap and not meant to be a hugely mainstream device. But Wired reviewer and food writer Joe Ray has a lot of great things to say about the Oracle, including:

“The Oracle cleverly straddles a line, offering an impressive amount of customization and hands-on time, while automating enough that you’d have to try hard to make a bad drink…for those who are able to plunk down $2,500 on an espresso maker, Breville has created an outstanding machine.”

I took first balked at the price, but when considering my $4.50 a day soy latte habit, I spend about half the cost of a Breville automated espresso machine in a year on barista-created beverages. And I have to leave my house to get them.

Does this type of technology mean we’ll see the downfall of the traditional coffeehouse? Not likely. Robotics and automation are certainly disrupting many areas of the food service industry, but coffee shops still offer a product and an atmosphere that many people can’t or don’t want to replicate at home. While the price points of home automated espresso machines might come down over time, the more likely impact will be to baristas themselves as automation and advancements in robotics are coming close to replacing the job of grinding, measuring, stamping, steaming and combining ingredients to create the perfect caffeinated beverage.