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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Bosch Enlists Alexa and SideChef to Teach People How to Use Its Ovens

Ovens are getting fancier with new connectivity and automated cook programs. Someone replacing a traditional oven they’ve had for decades with a newfangled smart oven could be forgiven for not understanding or taking full advantage of all their new device’s automated bells and whistles.

To help with this, and to educate its users, European appliance giant BSH is enlisting the help of Alexa and SideChef. BSH is running a pilot program in the U.K. for Bosch Home Connect oven owners. Users there with an Amazon Echo Show (or Fire TV Stick 4K, Fire HD Tablets) can download the Alexa Home Connect Cooking Challenge skill.

Once downloaded, users can follow one of 25 guided recipes (pizza, pastries, proteins, etc.) created by SideChef. After preparing the dish, users tell Alexa to turn on the oven. The connected oven will then use an automated cook program to, presumably, cook whatever the meal is to perfection.

For food tech fanatics like many Spoon readers, this type of feature may sound a little ho-hum. Alexa already integrates with plenty of appliances. But the goal for BSH is to surface new and interesting capabilities on its devices that their customers might not know about. In addition to automated cook programs, the recipes could introduce people to a steam feature, and the dish being made illustrates how to use that feature.

This is also just the beginning for the Home Connect Cook Challenge skill. I spoke with a BSH representative by phone this week, and they outlined how shoppable recipe functionality is on the product roadmap along with expanding the library of recipes to include any recipe a user finds on Alexa, not just ones from SideChef.

I Attended a Techstars Virtual Demo Day and It Was Actually Pretty Good

One of the hardest parts for me personally about COVID-19 has been watching my son lose a big part of a senior year in high school. Daily zoom lectures are no replacement for the camaraderie and celebration of wrapping up twelve years of a primary school education, and the cancellation of graduation ceremonies is a particularly difficult pill to swallow for young adults and their families who’ve waited a lifetime to cheer the receiving of a diploma.

I imagine those participating in startup accelerators may be experiencing a similar feeling. While it may not be the same as replacing the culmination of twelve years of primary education, the 12 or so weeks spent in an accelerator are intense and life-changing for all involved and, like with my son’s high school, many of those days and the final “graduation” have been swapped out for virtual facsimiles.

Which is why I decided to attend the recent BSH Appliances/Techstars Future Home Demo Day. I’d had the chance to attend the “graduation” of the first cohort of this same accelerator in person a year ago in Munich, so I figured I’d have the proper context to see how this virtual demo day compared to the real thing.

The accelerator cohort spent the first six weeks together in Munich, but the decision was made in mid-March to send everyone home and conduct the rest of the accelerator time virtually, including this final virtual demo day. Last year, each of the 10 groups of founders packed into a Munich movie theater and, over the course of the next couple hours, gave polished pitches about their companies as friends, mentors and potential investors cheered them on.

Curie London cofounder Dan Tang describes her startup via Zoom

This year, the event was held via (you guessed it) Zoom, where an initial kick off with comments from the accelerator organizers, and from there each founder would give a quick description of their company. The fuller pitches, the ones that essentially replaced the ones given at demo day in Munich, were pre-recorded so they would, as BSH’s accelerator organizer Tibor Kramer explained, “avoid any issues with streaming.”

The inital kickoff in Zoom was pretty fun. Despite presenting from their own homes virtually, I could sense the founders and the accelerator organizers participating really were happy to see each other and they all cheered each other on and fondly called each other by their nicknames when each took over and gave a brief intro to their company.

At last year’s event, many in the audience held a glass of wine or a beer in hand as they cheered along the founders from their seats. This year, many of the founders and accelerator participants cheered each other along with a celebratory beer or glass of wine as they sat in front of their computers.

Attendees file into a Munich movie theater for the Future Home 2019 Demo Day

After the demo day kickoff, attendees were encouraged to spend the next hour watching the pre-recorded pitches and then drop into private web video chats with each founder team to ask questions and congratulate them. BSH invited me to drop into a few of these meetings and ask questions so I did.

In total, I dropped in to meet four of the founder teams individually and each one seemed excited about graduating and the future despite the obvious differences in today’s landscape. Some admitted that there were definitely some challenges with going virtual, with a couple pointing to the time zone differences as the biggest struggle for them as they tried to participate remotely during Munich business hours from places as far-flung as Bangalore.

“One big change was time zone management,” said Saakshi Jain, cofounder of Zelish a kitchen and meal planning app startup. “We are in a very different time zone that everyone else and it was very late for us.”

Another big difference was the loss of some of the exchanges that are only possible in-person.

“When you’re there with the other founders you really build this strength with the cohort that is hard to replicate in a virtual setting,” said Mihai Hogea, cofounder of Pepper, a voice-powered nutrition & diet management startup. Hogea gave an example of how the accelerator organizers took his cofounder (and brother) Andrei to some Munich brewhouses to celebrate his 30th birthday.

Overall, however, I found my first accelerator virtual demo day enjoyable and pretty informative. I was able to spend more time with each founder I wanted to chat with and felt I found out more about their companies than I would have in an in-person setting, in part because I was able to ask them questions and take some notes on my computer which, it goes without saying, would have been somewhat awkward in-person at a Munich movie theater.

For the founders, I think they also found it enjoyable, but I still think they would have preferred to be drinking beer in Munich. All of them told me the first six weeks spent in person really allowed them to bond and helped make the final half of the accelerator more productive and enjoyable, despite being virtual.

For future accelerators, I imagine the same success will depend somewhat on how much in-person time the cohort gets. And, hopefully next year, the third cohort of this accelerator will be able to get together in Munich and pitch their companies in a dark Munich movie theater.

BSH Unveils the Second Cohort for its Future Home Accelerator

Today BSH Appliances announced the 2020 class for its ‘Future Home’ accelerator, a program co-produced between the Munich based appliance conglomerate and accelerator specialist Techstars. The new cohort is the second one in the accelerator, which the company launched in 2018 and plans to run through 2021.

This year, BSH and Techstars continued to broaden the focus of the accelerator across the entire home (the original focus when the program was launched in 2018 was the kitchen) as it welcomed a founder class that spanned ten nationalities with startups based across seven countries.

According to the announcement, the program this year had an expanded focus on the “future of home living and included B2B business models” and had startups focused on themes such as “future of co-living, sleep management, cooking, personalized skincare, and artificial intelligence as a service.”

As with every accelerator managed by Techstars, each startup that participates in the program will each receive an investment of $20,000 in exchange for 6 percent of their equity and will have access to a $100,000 convertible note.

The companies include:

Ask Winston (UK): A Whatsapp-based messaging channel for requesting home services.

Curie London (UK): A home appliance for personalized skin care.

Lullaai (Spain): an app focused on tracking a baby’s sleep and helping the baby sleep better.

Magicho (Israel): an app-based smart home gesture controller for smartwatches and smartphones.

Nise Tech (Canada): a cooking automation startup starting with an app-controlled sous vide circulator.

Pepper (USA): a nutrition-focused, Alexa-powered smart kitchen scale for tracking and planning meals.

Quant-Co (Turkey): an AI-as-a-service platform.

Serendipia Life (USA): A startup that manages co-living & co-working spaces.

The Porch Pod (USA): a smart package container for securing home package deliveries.

Zelish – a kitchen assistant app that features personalized food recommendations, grocery shopping and guided cooking.

I asked Tibor Kramer, who leads the accelerator for BSH, about how this year’s accelerator differs from their inaugural class and what themes they focused on for the 2020 cohort. You can see his answers below:

What lessons did you learn from the first cohort that impacted your thinking in selecting this next group of startups?

One key takeaway from our first program was that companies get the most out of this future home accelerator if they have at least an MVP ready. So we selected companies accordingly this year.

Our second learning can be summarized by the common saying “Hardware is hard” – especially for a startup; software is easier not only in terms of progress during the accelerator but also for PoCs with BSH.

Last but not least, as the smart kitchen consumer space is quite narrow, we decided to open up the scope towards “the future of living at home.” We also accepted two B2B startups and are proud to have a startup from one of the biggest emerging economies, India.

What themes did you focus on and/or problems for the consumer were you trying to solve when building your cohort?

We kept last year’s focus on the smart kitchen and personalized digital services around it. We extended it this year to the problem of rising housing costs, leading to smaller apartments and shared flats. With living constraints increasing, the space we live in has to become smarter.

In the consumers smart cooking journey, last mile delivery often causes problems, that can be solved. How about going a step further and ask your voice assistant to have your fridge filled by a service provider?

Besides these topics a lot is happening in the startup scene in the area of healthy living, with health-data-driven apps allowing consumers to become the CEOs of their own body. We addressed this last year with personalized nutrition coaching and extended it this year to the area of sleep improvement.

The BSH Future Home accelerator is part of a multi-pronged effort from one of Europe’s biggest appliance brands to incubate potential new partners that could help them prepare for a more digital and tech-powered future in the home. The other effort is BSH Startup Kitchen, a group that works with startups the company believes could help power new services from its appliance product group.

Both efforts are a part of the BSH digital business unit, which is overseen by BSH’s Chief Digital Office Mario Pieper (you can see an interview I conducted with Pieper at Smart Kitchen Summit last October here).

Mars Announces Startups for Inaugural Seeds of Change Food Accelerator

This morning, CPG giant Mars unveiled the six startups participating in the company’s first-ever cohort for its Seeds of Change accelerator program, which helps early-stage companies with health- and sustainability-focused offerings hit their next phase of growth.

As a consumer-focused brand, Seeds of Change has been in operation since 1989, initially selling organic seeds to farmers and gardeners before launching a food line in the late 1990s.

The new accelerator program, which was announced in March of this year, is an extension of the brand’s focus on health and sustainability.

Participants were selected this past weekend, when 10 finalists from the application pool headed to Chicago and presented their companies and ideas to a panel of judges. Each will receive a grant of $50,000 and participate in a four-month-long program that includes curriculum and mentorship sessions designed to help startups scale up their operations.

For this first cohort, the program looks to be focused mainly on ingredient innovation:

Fora produces non-dairy butter and is on track to release other yet-to-be-named plant-based dairy alternatives.
Prommus makes a protein-enhanced hummus, and also runs a program that provides meals to school children in food-insecure parts of the world
Brooklyn Delhi makes India-inspired condiments and sauces.
Tru Made Foods turns condiments like BBQ sauce and Sriracha into superfoods by replacing sugar with vegetables
NoBull Burger makes plant-based burgers.
Oxtale sells starter packs that let consumers cook traditional Asian meals in under 30 minutes.

The six companies chosen over the weekend were selected for Seeds of Change’s U.S.-based program. The company also runs an Australia-based version of the accelerator, for which applications just closed.

Mars, at this point, is better known for candy and pet foods than it is for sustainable eating. But like a growing number of major CPGs out there, the company is looking to double-down on food innovation by partnering with younger, leaner companies, and also align more with the growing consumer demand for things like health, transparency, and sustainability. Dairy Farmers of America, who works with some of the world’s largest food producers, has a new(ish) accelerator program that’s been getting attention as of late, and numerous other CPGs, from Kraft-Heinz to Nestle to BSH run programs.

BSH Home Appliances Invests in Chefling to Bolster the AI-Powered Pantry

BSH Home Appliances (or BSH Hausgeräte GmbH) announced today that it has made a strategic investment in Chefling, maker of an AI-powered assistant for the kitchen that helps a user manage food inventory, create shopping lists and zap digital recipes to their connected appliances. The Munich-based appliance giant will acquire one third of the shares of the Silicon Valley startup as part of the deal, the terms of which were not disclosed. This deal comes a year after Chefling raised $1 million as part of a pre-series A funding round and less than two years after the startup pitched as part of the SKS Startup Showcase.

The deal was driven by BSH’s Digital Business Unit, the group responsible for the Home Connect platform as well as BSH’s Future Home accelerator initiative. BSH sees Home Connect, their Wi-Fi based connectivity platform for their Siemens, Bosch and Gaggenau home appliance brands, as a foundation to offer digital services. The company acquired a controlling interest in Kitchen Stories in 2017 to add guided cooking capabilities to their services toolkit, and with this deal the two companies will look to build out a personalized pantry management digital services layer for HomeConnect.

“With our Hardware+ strategy, we want to offer meaningful support to our consumers in the everyday usage of their appliances,” said Mario Pieper, BSH’s Chief Digital Officer. “Chefling offers digital services that link the entire cooking journey, from inspiration to inventory management, shopping, and cooking. With Chefling’s Artificial Intelligence technology platform, both companies are in a strong position to raise the bar on personalized services and assistance in the kitchen.”

This deal didn’t happen overnight according to Chefling cofounder Amar Krishna. The two companies first announced a partnership during SKS 2018 last October, and over time realized it made sense to explore a deeper relationship. Under the deal, Amar explained that Chefling will look to leverage BSH’s reach to expand connections with grocery and CPG brands, while also building on the startup’s UltraConnect platform which they debuted at CES.

So what does UltraConnect do? According to Krishna, it can take any digital recipe and convert it it into a machine readable format to be used by a connected appliance.  It also enables ‘pantry management’ by taking ingredients on hand – not just the what of what you have, but the weight as well – to automatically generate a “smart recipe”.

The machine learning capabilities at the core of UltraConnect have taken time to build and have gotten stronger as Chefling’s user base has grown into the hundreds of thousands, said Amar. As he told Chris last January, reaching over 600 thousand users meant “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.””  

Of course, as with any deal like this, I have to wonder what it means for a startup’s other relationships.  Chefling announced an UltraConnect partnership with GE at CES this January, and so it remains to be seen if GE will remain open to using Chefling’s technology as the startup enters a strategic relationship with BSH. GE also works with Innit and SideChef, and could expand those relationships further. But, since Chefling-BSH wasn’t a full acquisition, it may be the Louiseville-based appliance brand could be fine with the new arrangement.

BSH Reveals First Cohort as it Kicks Off Techstars-Powered Future Home Accelerator

While the food world has no shortage of accelerators as big CPG companies race to reinvent themselves in the face of a rapidly changing market, home appliance brands have largely stayed out of the accelerator space.

This changed last summer when BSH Home Appliances (BSH Hausgeräte GmbH) announced it had teamed up with Techstars to create the BSH Future Home Accelerator. The new accelerator was a declaration by Europe’s biggest appliance maker that it was getting serious about fostering innovation within appliances by looking outside for new ideas.

The accelerator’s first class of ten startups offer a mix of products ranging from recipes apps, hardware to add intelligence to kitchen appliances, kitchen commerce platforms and smart home tech. The companies, which are in Munich today to kick off the 13 week accelerator program, will each receive an investment of $20 thousand in exchange for 6% of their equity (standard for all Techstars program participants). In addition to the $20k investment, a $100 thousand convertible note is made available to program participants (also standard for Techstars programs).

The companies include:

MealiQ (UK): An AI-powered app that searches public available recipes that match a user’s taste preferences, health criteria, etc.

ckbk (UK): Essentially a Spotify for cookbooks, ckbk offers subscribers access to a database of 100,00 recipes across a huge number of cookbooks. Users can search for recipes, create “playlists” and get personalized recommendations. (You can read the Spoon article on ckbk here).

YouAte (USA): A food logging app that allows users to track what they eat by asking a series of personalized questions. The app’s goal is to help users better understand their eating habits and the “emotions associated with them”.

Rocky Robots (UK): A conversational voice bot that is focused on helping users with motivation, tracking routines and reinforcing good habits. The company is developing physical social robots prototypes that, from the looks of it, will at some point go into a person’s home or kitchen.

Pantri (UK): Pantri is a kitchen-centric, API-powered, CPG replenishment platform for appliance makers and grocery retailers. Pantri was a finalist in our SKS Europe startup showcase.

WIFIPLUG (UK): Voice-interface enabled Wi-FI smart plugs focused on monitoring activity of consumption of consumables by appliance. The WIFIPLUG utilizes an API to monitor and deliver data to appliance OEMs, enabling it to add consumable replenishment capabilities to traditional appliances. The WIFIPLUG is compatible with Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft & IFTTT.

Inirv (USA): Inirv makes a retrofit smart knob for existing stoves and cooktops. Originally focused on fire prevention, Inirv has expanded into also being a broader smart stove platform to also enable remote cooking monitoring and management, reminders, etc. Inirv is a 2016 SKS Startup Showcase alum.

aimee (DE/USA): A retrofit system to make existing fridges smart. The system includes both a camera and a smart home/kitchen interface for the front of the fridge. The Aimee system enables auto-reordering and allows you to control other smart home devices via the front-of-fridge control interface.

Sensorscall (USA): A privacy-sensitive eldercare monitoring system that uses AI to analyze for irregularities in patterns from the system’s sensors and alerts family members and loved ones.

Qi Aerista (Hong Kong): a smart tea brewer with a patented multi-infusion system that brews hot, cold and strong-brew. The brewer also has nine preset brewing brewing programs. The tea brewer is connected to a tea marketplace where users can order teas through single purchase and monthly subscriptions.

I had a chance to interview Tibor Kramer, who heads up the accelerator effort for BSH. You can read our interview below:

Will this accelerator pick a new class annually?

Yes. The BSH Future Home Accelerator Powered by Techstars will run annually for three years. Each year will include a new class of 10 companies, identified through a rigorous selection process, to participate in the 13-week program.

How did you discover the various startups to participate?

After defining the search fields, Techstars sought out to its network and to the future home vertical in order to find the most innovative companies in that space. Through this work, Techstars was able to connect with founders working on a wide range of different products and speak with hundreds of entrepreneurs from around the world. Ultimately, we narrowed it down to the top 10 startups that BSH and Techstars felt to be the best fit for the program. These 10 companies are all creating meaningful innovations in the future home space, and are reflective of the type of companies we and Techstars were looking to engage for the BSH Future Home Accelerator Powered by Techstars inaugural program.

There is a mix of startups from the smart home, kitchen and food spaces. Was there a predesignated balance of types you were looking for, or did these 10 just rise to the top? Was there a regional focus (Europe only vs Global)?

We had a clear focus on both smart appliances and digital services for end consumers for this program. Within this focus there was no weighting – the best teams made it to the top 10 and were selected to participate in program. Our method involved evaluating applicants by looking first at the team, then market traction, fit to BSH, and business model. It was crucial to make selected teams were well-rounded and will be responsive to mentorship, including critical feedback.

How would you characterize the split in both management and financial ownership of this between Techstars and BSH?

Techstars and BSH are committed to helping the entrepreneurs succeed. Techstars has operated more than 165 accelerators since its inception in 2006 and has a proven approach. We (BSH) are bringing the industry expertise, connecting entrepreneurs with >30 mentors within BSH, who bring specific knowledge relevant to the business models and support the companies actively, also with opening further doors. BSH and Techstars are in a partnership. Each has it’s respective areas of expertise and resources which we brought in. It’s a partnership with a primary goal to support our companies throughout the life of their businesses. BSH and Techstars are invested in the companies, details of the financial ownership are not disclosed.

What is the relationship with this group and BSH Startup Kitchen? Are they both a part of a broader effort by BSH to connect with the future kitchen startup ecosystem?

Both the BSH Startup Kitchen and the BSH Future Home Accelerator powered by Techstars aim at connecting to startups on a broader base. Both are managed by the Strategic Ventures Team in BSH’s Digital Business Unit.

The Accelerator targets startups that focus on customer-facing innovations (products and digital services). These startups typically tend to be rather seed / early-stage. In contrast, BSH Startup Kitchen targets startups that develop cutting-edge enabling technologies for our next-gen home appliances—or for our operational systems (e.g. Industry 4.0). BSH aims to become one of the first clients / partners of top-notch startups. Eventually, BSH Startup Kitchen offers a program to initiate long-term B2B business relationships between top-notch startups and BSH. These startups typically tend to be more mature / later-stage.

BSH Appliances Patents Camera-Enabled Microwave Oven

While microwave ovens still can’t be turned into cameras, it turns out cameras may be making their way inside of microwave ovens.

That’s because BSH Appliances recently was issued a patent for just that: a microwave oven with a camera for observing food inside the cooking chamber.

The patent, issued last week, describes a cooking system that puts a camera behind a glass panel (for shielding from food splatter) and a metal shielding plate perforated with small holes.

A camera captures images through a perforated shielding plate

The camera, which is attached to the mesh metal shielding plate, is able to capture images through a hole or group of holes while still staying safe from microwave radiation.

The patent also describes how the system could connect the camera to an LCD or LED screen on the front of the cooking appliance for viewing what is inside or to a wireless network for remote viewing on a mobile device.

While some may ask whether a camera-powered microwave is even necessary (who wants to watch a Hot Pocket get hot after all?), the reality is the camera acts as a sensor which could enable AI-powered cooking applications such as real-time precision heat adjustment.  Companies like Markov are building next-generation microwave ovens with RF steering capabilities that leverage an infrared camera, and Brava has built an oven with a camera to dynamically adjust a cooking session.

And who knows, with Amazon now heating up the microwave market, what’s to keep the tech giant from adding a bit of its machine vision magic to generation two?

While the idea of smart ovens with cameras inside are not new, a consumer microwave oven with a camera has not, to our knowledge, made its way to market.  With BSH Appliances figuring out a way to shield a built-in camera from radiation, you have to wonder if we’ll see a camera-enabled Bosch microwave soon.

Weekly Spoon: Kitchen Projection Interfaces, Amazon Drone Patent & Innit Nabs Arçelik

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If you go to lots of trade shows like me, you know it takes time for innovation to make its way from the show floor into our living rooms.

We’ve all seen this with technologies like virtual reality and 3D food printing; only after years of development and iteration cycles do we get to the point where a product is ready for prime time.

And then there are technologies like projection interfaces that – up until now at least – seem like they’re stuck in development stasis. The idea of a projectable, anywhere surface interface has been discussed for close to a decade in the research and academic community and started showing up on trade show floors about five years ago. Despite this, the concept never seemed to go beyond an occasional product demo.

So last year I started to wonder why exactly the technology hadn’t reached consumers yet. After all, with the likes of Whirlpool, IKEA, and Bosch showing off jaw-dropping demos, it only made sense this technology would find its way to market at some point.

While there’s no clear answer, I narrowed it down to a couple of factors. First, the reality is the technology still needed some refinement to make it both consumer-ready and affordable. Second, appliance vendors often wait for big-tech to take the first leap, and from what I could tell none of the big-tech 5 (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon) seemed particularly active with projection interfaces.

But now, it looks like one big company is committing to bringing a projection interface to market. BSH Appliances showed off a new product concept called PAI at IFA in Berlin this past week. PAI is a movable projector interface that is designed to go on a countertop in a kitchen.

I’m excited that BSH looks to be serious about bringing PAI to market. While some see voice as the dominant user interface of the future, abysmal usage rates of Alexa skills for commerce have shown us that voice in itself isn’t enough.  Consumers are visual, and most things we do in the kitchen are multimodal. Because of this, I believe the dynamic projection interface could a vibrant area in UI development over the next decade.

BSH Appliances wasn’t the only one to make news at IFA last week. Sharp showed up in Berlin with a fridge that featured a built-in vacuum sealer, prompting Chris Albrecht to wonder what exactly types of features he would want in his next fridge.

Smart kitchen platform startup Innit had a strong showing at IFA, popping up in a number appliance OEM booths, including that of a new partner in Arçelik.  The Turkish appliance conglomerate behind the Beko and Grundig brands showed off an Innit integration to power guided cooking as part of its HomeWhiz smart home platform.

It wasn’t all IFA this week. This week the Spoon scooped yet another Amazon patent in which the Seattle tech giant shows an innovative new method for delivery drones to generate power while in transit by harnessing both wind and kinetic energy.
After the news of a $30 million funding round for Farmer’s Fridge, I’m looking forward to a panel at Smart Kitchen Summit on the future of lunch. We’ll be discussing how new technologies, business models and delivery formats are all colliding to change what we eat every day, including at work.  You can read Chris’s piece on Farmer’s Fridge, a startup we’ve been covering for the past year.

Speaking of Smart Kitchen Summit, we’re less than five weeks away from our flagship show exploring the future of food and cooking. We have an amazing program planned, and not only will we have executives from big appliance brands like Whirlpool, GE and more, but we’ll also have startups from the smart kitchen, food robotics, restaurant tech, retail and more to discuss and showcase how each of these industries are changing to disrupt the consumer meal journey.  Make sure to get your tickets now and use the discount code NEWSLETTER (You can also use this link which has the code already applied).

That’s it for now. Have a great rest of the week.

Mike

P.S. Make sure to tune into this weekend’s episode of the Smart Kitchen Show podcast, where I have a great conversation with the CEO of the startup behind what is arguably the most successful consumer food robot ever made. You won’t want to miss it!

In the 09/06/2018 edition:

Ordermark Raises $9.5 Million for its Online Order Management Tools

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 06, 2018 10:23 am
Ordermark, a startup that helps restaurants unify and organize online orders, today announced that it has closed a $9.5 million Series A led by Nosara Capital. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $12.6 million.

Nima Peanut Sensor Now Available, Gluten Sensor Selling at Select CVS Stores

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 06, 2018 06:00 am
It’s back-to-school time, which means my son is once again eating lunches in a cafeteria. I doubt his school is unique, but it actually has separate tables for kids who bring in peanut butter sandwiches.

With its own Grocery Delivery Service, Walmart Grabs More Data

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 05, 2018 04:00 pm
Walmart is leaving no stone unturned when it comes to getting you your groceries. As of today, that includes testing out its own delivery service (h/t Food Dive). The retailing giant announced a pilot program for its new last-mile delivery service, dubbed Spark Delivery, which will deliver groceries directly to customers’ front door.

For Goodr’s Jasmine Crowe, Blockchain Is a Key Piece to the Food Waste Puzzle

By Catherine Lamb on Sep 05, 2018 02:00 pm
Food waste is generating quite a lot of interest as of late; but one buzzword that might give “food waste” a run for its money is blockchain.

Innit Adds Arçelik To Growing List of Appliance Partners

By Michael Wolf on Sep 05, 2018 12:00 pm
The smart kitchen was everywhere this year at IFA, Europe’s big appliance and tech expo, and one company that seemed to be on everyone’s dance card was Innit.

Farmer’s Fridge Stocks up with $30M

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 05, 2018 10:54 am
Farmer’s Fridge, the company which makes vending machines that dispense healthy meals such as salads and protein bowls, today announced that it has raised a new $30 million round of funding led by Innovation Endeavors. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $40 million.

Seltzer? Sous Vide? Smart Apps? What Cool Things do you Want in a Fridge?

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 05, 2018 07:33 am
For those old enough to remember, there is an episode from season two of The Simpsons where Homer designs a car for the average American. The result, as you can imagine was a hodge-podge monstrosity that featured bubble domes, three horns, shag carpeting and cost $82,000.

Bear Flag Robotics Raises $3.5 Million for Autonomous Tractor Tech

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 04, 2018 10:00 am
The common refrain from robotics companies is that they help with manual, repetitive tasks. And when you run a farm, there are plenty of manual, repetitive tasks, and Bear Flag Robotics raised $3.5 million seed funding right before the holiday weekend to help agricultural workers out with them.

Amazon Patent Points to In-Flight Recharging For Delivery Drones

By Michael Wolf on Sep 04, 2018 06:54 am
Ever since Jeff Bezos teased the idea of drone deliveries on 60 Minutes in 2013, the tech world has been abuzz with the idea. At the time Bezos said that the reality of drone deliveries wasn’t there yet, but he thought it just might be in 4-5 years.

FoodPlus Sells Surplus Food (in Slovenia) so it Doesn’t go to Waste

By Catherine Lamb on Sep 04, 2018 06:00 am
Based in Slovenia, FoodPlus began in 2015 when co-founder Dalibor Matijevic began searching for a way to cut down on food waste by redistributing surplus food. He developed a B2B platform for companies to buy and sell extra food at a super low cost — creating a new revenue stream and keeping food out of landfills.

Will BSH’s PAI Usher In The Era of the Kitchen Projection Interface?

The idea of using your countertop as a touchscreen interface has been something big tech and kitchen appliance makers have been playing around with for much of the past decade.

First there was Whirlpool’s attempt in 2014:

IKEA served up the idea for its Kitchen 2025 concept a year later:

IKEA Concept Kitchen 2025

And Bosch has been showing off things like this coffee robot with a projection interface for a few years:

Spotted at #ces2017: coffee robot at the @Bosch booth.

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And this year it looks like the large German appliance conglomerate, BSH Appliances (the company behind the Bosch, Thermador and Gaggenau appliance brands, to name a few), is showing off what looks to be a more evolved version of the projection interface in PAI at IFA in Berlin.

PAI, which stands for ‘Projection and Interaction’, is a system that projects an image onto a flat surface to create a virtual interactive interface for the kitchen.  While the projector incorporates a camera, a speaker, a microphone, two USB ports, WiFi and Bluetooth antennas, the key technology here is a 3D sensor that detects minute movements of fingers on the surface.

According to project manager Markus Helminger, the PAI 3D sensor powers a projection interface that can “be perfectly operated even with dirty fingers and occupies no space on the work surface, so that consumers have enough space for cooking or baking.”

While other efforts at projection interfaces at trade shows have largely been to show off the concept with no concrete plans for commercialization, this time things look different with PAI. According to a German language post about PAI by on the BSH Kitchen Stories blog, they plan on rolling out PAI in February 2019 in China. While there’s no indication as to when we might see the technology in Europe or the US, my guess is we could see the technology in product rolled out in Europe as early as next year.

You can see a demo of the PAI interface (in German) below courtesy of Computer Bild TV:

Bosch PAI: Projektor für die Küche vorgestellt!

The story behind PAI is an interesting one. The technology spun out of development work Bosch was doing in ventilation. According a company spokesperson, researchers were looking to improve the user experience for cooks and “the developers wanted to create an assistance function for an extractor hood that would make it possible to project images from the hood and display recipes on the work surface. In an extensive UX study carried out by Bosch, this idea went down so well that the project was actually carried out.”

According to the company, consumer testers almost universally said they use tablet or smartphone when cooking or baking, but they didn’t like giving up the counter space to these devices required and, perhaps more importantly, they worried touching these devices with dirty hands. As the company worked on the concept more, they eventually decided to not incorporate it into a vent hood but to make the PAI a standalone projection system that allowed the consumer to place it where they desired on the counter.

The company has also integrated the PAI with its Kitchen Stories guided cooking system and its Home Connect platform, which opens up some intriguing possibilities. It’s not hard to envision a Kitchen Stories guided cook experience that shows step-by-step instructions projected onto the kitchen counter. With Home Connect, PAI could also project virtual start buttons, timers and other ways for the consumer to interact with their appliances.

With BSH Appliances – one of the world’s biggest appliance companies – taking projection interfaces seriously, my guess is we’ll likely see other big appliance brands push forward with their own projection interface commercialization efforts in the coming year and we’ll most likely see some of these teased at CES in Las Vegas next January.

BSH Acquires Controlling Interest in Kitchen Stories As Part Of ‘Connected Cooking’ Strategy

Late last month, BSH Home Appliances, the largest appliance manufacturer in Europe, announced it had acquired a controlling interest in Kitchen Stories, maker of video-rich cooking apps with step-by-step instructions and recipes.

The deal is yet another sign of how large appliance makers are moving quickly to transform themselves into content companies and connect their appliances to digital content platforms.

In the announcement, the two companies said they had plans to integrate Kitchen Stories content into BSH’s smart home connectivity app and platform, Home Connect. While initial integration will start with basic tasks like temperature setting for Bosch and Siemens appliances, more capabilities like guided cooking will be built into the app over time.

Kitchen Stories cofounder Verena Hubertz outlined the vision around integration with the Home Connect platforms:

“This investment will enable us to tap the connected kitchen market, and to help design the cooking of the future. We’ll develop solutions to help users in all aspects of the cooking process – from inspirations for recipes to added-value services. And we’ll be combining our own findings with those of BSH about what consumers want. That will enable us to reflect users’ expectations better, and to make Kitchen Stories even more attractive. Kitchen Stories will also soon be integrated into the Home Connect ecosystem, and will gradually be expanded with new applications.”

This deal is the latest in a string of moves by appliance companies to more deeply integrate their cooking hardware with cooking content as the kitchen becomes increasingly digital. Earlier this year Whirlpool acquired Yummly as the kitchen entered what Whirlpool exec Brett Dibkey described as a ‘transformation.’ A new crop of startups like Hestan Cue, ChefSteps, SideChef, and Innit have been busily creating a variety of products that create immersive guided cooking offerings that connect with cookware and appliances, and this summer the media startup Buzzfeed moved into guided cooking with the launch of its Tasty One Top.

The deal caps what has been a few years of fast growth for Kitchen Stories, an early entrant into the video-guided cooking app space alongside others like SideChef. According to the company, the Kitchen Stories app now has millions of users and has been released in 150 countries worldwide.

Another interesting aspect of the deal is it marks a successful exit for a women-led company.  Like many other tech segments, women have been under-represented in the smart kitchen, so hopefully the move is a sign of increasing momentum and encouragement for women-led startups in the space.

Lastly, the deal comes just over a month before CES, where big tech companies like Bosch often show off their latest products. I would expect to see the company at least showcasing Kitchen Stories early integration in Las Vegas.

You can see an interview with the two Kitchen Stories cofounders Verena Hubertz and Mengting Gao and BSH Chairman Karsten Ottenberg below:

Ten Questions for BSH and Kitchen Stories