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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

CES

It’s All But Official: The June Oven is Cooked

If you’ve been paying attention to the June Oven website lately (and really, who hasn’t?), you may have noticed that it’s been a bit difficult to order a new smart oven from the company for most of the past 12 months. That’s because every single model listed (standard June, June Premium, and June Oven Plus) has been marked as “sold out.”

If June were a capital-starved startup scrimping up to start its next production run, there’s an outside chance we may see more inventory at some point. But, somewhat paradoxically, since June was acquired by grill giant Weber in January 2021 – a company that no doubt has relatively easy access to manufacturing services – that there have been no June ovens for sale doesn’t bode well since, presumably, this was a decision made by management.

And now, according to Andru Edwards, a tech influencer and writer for GearLive, the Weber team told those who asked at CES last month that the June oven is no more.

From a post made by Edwards on Reddit:

Just got the word from Weber themselves here at CES. The June Oven will continue receiving software updates, but no plans for a new model. The tech from June is now being integrated into the new Weber grills. Was hoping for June Oven Gen 4, but it’s not in the cards, unfortunately!

My own outreach to Weber has gone unanswered, so this, combined with a lack of inventory and what they were telling folks at CES, it’s probably safe to say that June is cooked.

This will no doubt come as a bummer for those hoping for a fourth-generation June. It will also raise the question of why Weber bought June in the first place. The answer is probably as simple as, at least at the time of the deal, Weber saw June’s expertise in building high-tech cooking platforms as something they could build on for their own technology roadmap.

From then-CEO of Weber, Chris Scherzinger: “June has been an invaluable partner in developing our Weber Connect platform. Adding June’s expertise and technology to our own allows us to accelerate our connected innovation programs and better address grillers’ needs with new products and services that offer simplicity and fuel grilling discovery through enhanced capabilities.” 

Since then, Scherzinger has left the company. And, while Weber went public in 2021 (after the June acquisition), it wasn’t long before the company’s stock was pulled from public trading after accepting a buyout from private equity firm BDT Capital Partners, which had been its majority shareholder at the time of the IPO. That all makes for a lot of internal turbulence, so it’s probably not all that surprising that the company pulled back a bit from its future roadmap. Add to this the fact Weber is, in essence, an outdoor grilling company, and indoor smart ovens really aren’t a core focus (maybe they should have been focused on an indoor smoker like GE Appliances?).

While June looks like it’s done shipping new ovens, those in the market for a high-tech countertop cooking appliance can still buy a Brava (now owned by cooking equipment giant Middleby), Tovala, or Suvie. And, if you’re willing to wait a little bit, you could pick up a Macrowave from Revolution Cooking (which uses infrared and microwave heating) when it ships later this year.

Fresco Deal With Panasonic Brings Device Control & AI-Powered Planning to HomeCHEF Multi-Oven Lineup

At CES 2024, Panasonic announced that it had struck a deal with smart kitchen OS startup Fresco to integrate the Fresch kitchen OS platform with the Japanese brand’s multi-oven countertop cooking appliances.

The deal covers the US market and will see Fresco’s technology bring a new set of connected features to Panasonic’s multi-oven products, the first being the HomeCHEF 4-in-1 multi-oven. According to the announcement, the Fresco AI assistant will reside within the Panasonic app, allowing users to tailor recipes according to their dietary needs, substitute ingredients based on pantry availability, and change serving sizes and cooking preferences. Users can control cooking modalities, enabling steam cooking, air frying, and more through the app and get alerts about cooking status.

The deal marks a significant win for Fresco with one of the leading microwave manufacturers in the world, one that has been relatively aggressive about adding new cooking capabilities through its HomeCHEF multi-oven line. The partnership is interesting because it’s one of the first partnerships by a major microwave company to bring device control and AI-assisted cooking to their lineup.

According to Fresco, the HomeChef 4-in-1 will first be released in the US market in late 2024.

Check Out NXP’s Presence-Sensing Cooktop Demo Powered by On-Chip AI

We’re still sifting through some of the cool product demos from CES last month, and one that caught my eye was the demo by NXP of a presence-sensing cooktop powered by an embedded MCU. According to the company, the system used a Neural Processing Unit that runs the machine learning and facial-recognition algorithms within the system rather than relying on a cloud-based compute. The demo featured a device control interface from Diehl Controls.

As can be seen in the video below (taken by TIRIAS Research Principal Analyst Francis Sideco), NXP spokesperson Thomas Herbert shows that you can turn on the burner with either touch or motion sensing (including motion sensing with cooking mitts on). From there, the system is using facial recognition to detect if a person is within local proximity of the cooktop. According to Herbert, presence detection comes into play in a scenario where there is a critical state, such as the pan getting too hot and there is water boiling over. If the system detects a critical state and no one is standing around the stove, it will shut off the heat and can send an alert to the person via a Matter (an open-source smart home connectivity standard) enabled device to alert the cook that the system has intervened on their behalf.

CES 2024 - INVITE ONLY- Part 3 of 3 NXP Autonomous Home Showcase Based on Matter

The demo is interesting to me in a couple of contexts. One is that, as we’ve written about here on the Spoon, the number one reason for fires in the home is due to cooking mishaps, and enabling your stovetop or other cooking appliances to recognize both anomalies as well as the presence of someone could be a real gamechanger, akin to the dip in automobile accidents in recent years due to the widespread prevalence of blindspot detection systems in modern cars.

The second context that’s interesting is that it could become a significant technology in assisting aging-in-place scenarios, particularly for seniors who become a little more forgetful as they age. One of the key determinants of whether folks can continue to live independently is their ability to feed themselves, and by providing “blind spot” detection like this, my guess is this could extend many seniors’ ability to live independently for years.

January AI’s New App Uses Generative AI to Predict How Food Will Impact Your Blood Sugar

If you’ve been diagnosed with a metabolic health issue, you might have used a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) at some point to track the impact of your food intake on your blood sugar. However, as of March 2023, only 2.4 million people used a CGM in the U.S., and because of the relatively small adoption rate of this technology, the vast majority of folks with diabetes or who are in danger of metabolic health issues may not have access to real-time insights into what the impact different foods may have on their glucose levels.

January AI aims to change this with its latest innovation: a free app that performs predictive analysis on the impact of various foods on blood sugar. The company, which unveiled its newest tool at CES last week, has developed an AI-powered app that analyzes meal photos and offers users immediate feedback on glucose impacts, macros, and healthier meal alternatives.

January says its app uses generative AI to automatically generate accurate food titles and estimates of ingredients and ingredient quantities within complex meals.

“It uses three kinds of generative AI to tell you your blood sugar response,” said Noosheen Hashemi, CEO of January, speaking at The Spoon’s CES Food Tech Conference last week. “It uses our own generative AI for glucose, and then it uses a vision generative AI to pick what’s in the food, and then it uses that language model to give it a title.”

According to the company, its AI-driven predictions are based on millions of data points, including wearable data, demographic information, and user reports. The company says this approach enables the app to provide personalized glucose level estimates and insights, making metabolic health management more accessible and actionable.

“It’s as simple as scanning a food,” said Hashemi. “You can also scan a barcode. You can also do a search. And we can tell you all the macro, its total calories, how much fiber, protein, fat, and carbs it has. And we can also show your blood sugar.”

According to Hashemi, the company’s platform can be customized and trained for specific users by taking data from a wearable such as a smartwatch, a person’s glucose monitor, or even food logs. With that data, the app can create highly customized predictions around a person’s biomarkers and dietary preferences.

“One out of three people in America has pre-diabetes, and 90% of them don’t know it,” said Hashemi. “And one out of nine people has diabetes, and 20% of those people don’t know it. So blood sugar is something we should all be managing, but we just don’t know that we should.”

Given the increasing popularity of GLP-1 medications, my guess is that more Americans will start to consider how their diet affects their blood sugar in the coming years. And, even if they don’t use a glucose monitor or get a prescription for a medication like Ozempic, increased awareness will push many to use apps like this one to help them better understand how a given food will impact their blood sugar and overall health.

You can hear Hashemi discussing the app and showing a demo in the video below.

January AI CEO Talks About New Generative AI App at CES

Revolution’s New Smart Toaster Will Have Wi-Fi and Tell You The Weather

Last week at CES, Revolution Cooking, a company that’s made a name for itself by creating the world’s most high-end, tech-enabled toaster, gave us a sneak peek at its latest-generation bread crisper.

The new Revolution toaster, which the company says will ship on May 1st, not only has the same recognizable touchscreen and proprietary and patented InstaGLO heating technology that powers the first generation toaster (and the new Macrowave oven), but it will be the company’s first Internet-connected edition.

So, why add Wi-Fi to a toaster? According to Sean Robbins, Revolution’s head of marketing, one obvious reason is to enable over-the-air feature rollouts and improvements to the product’s heating technology. However, perhaps the most significant reason relates to the role a toaster plays in a toast-lover’s daily routine.

“People who love to toast, it’s kind of a daily ritual for them,” said Robbins. “So we talked to our best customers and asked them what would you love to have on the home screen. We heard things related to what their daily routine is. ‘I want to start my day and make my toast, and I wonder what the weather is that day.'”

According to Robbins, the Revolution connected toaster is also the first to get the green light from UL. The product safety standard company, well-recognized for its certification stamp of approval, had previously frowned upon Internet-connected toasters. This is because adding connectivity to a product with an open heating element was considered a significant safety concern. Because of this, Robbins says that owners of their new toaster still won’t be able to remotely control the heating element, but they will have the comfort (and perhaps more importantly, retailers will have the comfort) that UL says this thing is safe.

While the Internet-connected toaster has become something of an Internet meme, often used to ridicule over-engineered products and an Internet of Things gone awry, there have been relatively few attempts to add connectivity to toasters. While some have taken a swing (and the tech press commentators have reacted predictably), the reality is since Revolution essentially kickstarted the whole high-end touchscreen toaster craze (there are a bunch of copycats on Amazon now) and has built a loyal customer base for its tech-enabled toaster, my guess is that they’ll likely find a receptive audience for those who also want their toaster to tell them whether they should bundle up for the day.

You can watch my interview with Robbins below.

Revolution Talks About Its Latest Smart Toaster at CES 2024

The Kara Pod is a Coffee Machine That Refills Itself by Pulling Water from Thin Air

This year at CES, Kara Water debuted the Kara Pod, a combo coffee brewer and air-to-water countertop machine. The Kara Pod takes company core technology, which turns humidity from the air into drinking water, and combines it with a coffee machine that can produce up to almost a gallon of water (3.2 liters) per day, which can be used as drinking water or for brewing coffee.

Kara Water was founded in 2017 by Cody Sooden and Michael Di Giovanna. The two wanted to create a machine that could produce clean drinking water free of contaminants. Sooden’s interest in the technology started after he began experimenting with capturing water from air while studying architecture. He eventually wrote a research paper on harvesting moisture from the air, which ultimately became the genesis of the company’s technology.

Kara Water isn’t the first company to show off water-from-air technology at CES. We’ve seen Watergen debut a working model in 2020, and Zero Mass Water, which uses solar power to capture moisture and turn it into drinking water, showed off its machine at CES 2019. But this is the first countertop appliance model we’ve seen and the first time we’ve seen air-to-water combined with a coffee machine.

According to Sooden, the Kara Pod will start shipping in March for $299. You can watch our interview with Sooden below.

The Kara Pod Coffee Maker Gets Water Refilled From Out of Thin Air

The CES 2024 Food Tech Exhibit Walk-Around Guide

Welcome to the CES 2024 Food Tech Walk-Around Guide!

If you’re at CES (or even if you’re not) and want to check out all the cool new food tech products on display this week, this is your go-to guide.

Not only have we scoured the CES exhibitor guide, company websites, and all the press releases that have hit our inbox, but we’re also walking the show floor here in Vegas to bring you all the food tech news coming out of Vegas this week.

You can use the handy table below to read a description of what each is showing off at CES, as well as find a link that shows a map with the location of each company’s booth. The embedded airtable guide is also sortable, and you can pop out each company to get more information about them.

We’ll be keeping this list updated. If you don’t see your company on here (and you have a product to show), drop us a line.

CES 2024: Sevvy Smart Cooker Cooks Food By Sending Electric Currents Through Food

I don’t know about you, but when I bake anything, we’re talking about 25-30 minutes in an oven. But if you’re using a new technology debuting at CES from a startup called Sevvy, that time drops to just four minutes.

How does it work? According to the company, their technology utilizes “integral heating” through electrical currents. This means a combination of Pulsed Electric Field-based and Ohmic heating technology to enable quick food preparation at low temperatures. These currents pass through the food, simultaneously delivering the same amount of heat throughout the entire dish, which, according to Sevvy, drastically reduces cooking and baking times.

I personally verified that the company’s blueberry muffins, which company CEO Kamiel de Leur says took just four minutes to make, were just as tasty and as those made using traditional oven heating. But de Leur says it’s not just faster cooking times that sets their technology apart. Because Sevvy reduces the need for cooking and baking fats by up to 50% and decreases salt and sugar usage, de Leur says their technology is also healthier.

The company has six issued patents for the electric current-based cooking technology, which de Leur hopes to license to strategic partners, including home appliance manufacturers and makers of professional cooking equipment.

You can watch my full interview with de Leur below:

Sevvy Shows Off Pulsed Electric Field-based and Ohmic Heating in Sevvy Smart Cooker at CES 2024

Watch The ColdSnap Countertop Ice Cream Appliance In Action at CES 2024

It goes without saying that everyone likes ice cream, and that was never more apparent than at last night’s CES Unveiled press event.

The first thing I saw when I walked into the crowded room was a huge crowd of journalists lining up to get a serving of ice cream (another truism is journalists like free food). The ColdSnap machines were cranking away as ColdSnap workers – including ColdSnap CEO Matthew Fonte – handed over cups to attendees.

Last fall, ColdSnap expanded its production facility in the Boston suburb of Billerica, adding 20,000 square feet with an additional 24,000 square feet of space leased across the street. Now, as they look to scale, they’ve added automation equipment and project they will be able to manufacture 30 million pods per year.

Part of what makes ColdSnap intriguing is its ability to make instant ice cream from room temperature, shelf-stable liquid. As Fonte told me last year, a product like this could be potentially transformative for markets where cold chain storage is not widely available or cost-prohibitive.

“China’s ice cream market is as large as the United States, but they have 25% the amount of refrigeration per capita that we do here in the States,” Fonte said. “If you could circumvent the cold supply chain and give them shelf-stable pods, they can freeze their ice cream on demand, they can reach the masses there and grow that market four times.”

You can a peek of the ColdSnap in action below.

ChefPaw to Show Off Home Pet Food Maker at CES 2024

While most kitchen tech gadgets at CES this week are for preparing sustenance for two-legged creatures, ChefPaw is explicitly designed to create homemade food for our furry friends.

ChefPaw, which is a creation from the founders of pet health products company Innovet, is essentially something akin to a Thermomix for dog food. The product, for which the company has filed a provisional patent, features a large mixing bowl and a mixing blade, allows pet owners to mix raw ingredients like vegetables and meat. Users follow their own chosen recipes (or recipes provided by ChefPaw), and the device will cook up to six pounds of homemade dog food in about 40 minutes.

You can see the ChefPaw in action below:

If you want to buy a ChefPaw, you will have to be committed to the idea of homemade pet food because it isn’t cheap. The ChefPaw will set you back $639 plus tax and shipping, which isn’t exactly as spendy as a Thermomix, but it’s more than twice as much as a low-end Thermomix clone and 4-5 times that of an Instant Pot, another popular home appliance for making pet food.

But who knows? My guess is there is probably a market for dedicated pet enthusiasts who will spare no expense for their pet on a dedicated pet food maker. If you’re at CES and want to check out the ChefPaw, you can find it in Eureka Park at the Venetian Expo starting January 9th.

GreenSwapp Shows Off Tech to Display Carbon Impact Data on Retail Shelf Price Labels at CES 2024

Imagine walking down a shopping aisle, where alongside the price of each product is a score indicating its carbon impact. That’s the world that Dutch startup GreenSwapp hopes to usher in beginning next week at CES, where it will show how its AI-powered product carbon tracker works with electronic shelf labels and Point Of Sale (POS) systems.

The demo will be showcased at a mini supermarket installation within the company’s CES booth. There, attendees will witness the future of sustainable retail—a future where price tags display cost and climate ratings. The company hopes that the score will guide consumers in making eco-friendlier choices and serve as a nudge towards a more sustainable lifestyle. At the checkout counter, the receipt shows the purchase’s collective carbon impact (using an A-F grade scale) compared to the average shopper.

The company has already integrated its GreenSwapp AI carbon tracker with the leading online grocer in the Netherlands. They have completed a pilot for the technology with Ahold, the Netherlands’ largest retail group. The company is hoping to enter the US retail market in 2024.

The push for climate impact data for retail purchases has started to gain more traction in Europe, it may take a while before US retailers jump on board. That said, progressive states like California, which just pushed new climate emission reporting requirements into place last fall, could move in this direction much quicker.

In some ways, the push for more data on climate impact on consumer purchases is reminiscent of the move to add nutritional information to restaurant menus over the past decade. However, just as more nutrition data hasn’t necessarily changed consumer eating behavior, it remains to be seen just how motivated consumers are to change their behavior, particularly if they don’t perceive it as having an immediate impact on their lives (which, unfortunately, is how many US consumers view the somewhat more esoteric nature of climate impact data).

If you’d like to check out the GreenSwapp future store concept at CES, you can find them in Eureka Park in the Venetian Expo area at booth 61440.

CES 2024: Revolution Unveils the Macrowave, a Smart Oven That Combines Infrared & Microwave Heating

Revolution Cooking, a startup best known for its high-end touchscreen toaster, is showing it’s not a one-trick pony next week at CES with the reveal of its newest appliance, the Macrowave.

According to Revolution, the Macrowave is a smart oven that combines the same patented InstaGLO infrared heating technology it’s become known for with its toaster lineup with microwave heating. Add in convection/air frying capabilities and some interesting, innovative oven features, and the Macrowave looks like a compelling new entry to the countertop kitchen tech space.

The way it works is the electromagnetic radiation from the appliance’s built-in microwave heats the inside of the food, while the InstaGLO infrared heating crisps and heats the outside of the food. From the sound of it, that combination could provide a better answer for microwaved frozen foods like pizza or frozen burritos, which are often served molten-hot in the middle and soggy or even cold on the outside.

The video below shows how the Macrowave will result in faster and more even cooking for frozen food like pizza, proteins like chicken wings, and veggies.

Say Hello to The Macrowave

While the Macrowave isn’t the first product to combine air frying with microwave technology, it’s one of the few that use infrared heating combined with microwave and air frying. Other manufacturers like LG have combined infrared with microwave technology, but these products lacked the smart cooking algorithms and precision heating detection.

And it’s these smart cooking programs that differentiate the Macrowave from previous entries. The programs, which allow the user to choose a food item like pizza, fries or hot pockets, optimize the right combination of infrared, microwave, and convention air for each item.

The oven also allows you to combine cooking steps manually using the Micro+Bake and Micro+Air Fry modes. Add in an internal temperature probe for precision heating, and the Macrowave looks like it does present a fairly unique set of capabilities compared to anything we’ve seen on the market.

No word yet on pricing for the Macrowave, but we’ll keep you updated when we find out.

The Macrowave will make its first appearance at CES’s Unveiled event, the press event two days before the show opens.