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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

CES

Samsung Continues to Push the Smart Fridge Envelope at CES 2017

Samsung continues to push forward with its vision of the smart refrigerator as the center of the smart kitchen with the announcement of its Smart Hub 2.0 model (dubbed Family Hub 2.) at 2017 CES. Family Hub 2.0 represents an update to the company’s flagship 1.0 version announced at the 2016 CES. Family Hub 2.0 will be expanded into 10 new models as opposed to four which featured the initial version.

Improving upon such features as its voice controller, Samsung announced new application partners such as  GrubHub, Nomiku, Glympse, Ring, Spotify, and iHeartRadio. In Europe, Samsung is working with local home grocery services to add greater consumer convenience, and with music/audio services, the new Family Hub can offer the latest tunes, news headlines and weather reports from a central family gathering place.

Family Hub 2.0 has increased its usability by offering an internal camera to keep track of what food needs to be replenished and then connecting to a MasterCard grocer-ordering app. Integration with AllRecipes allows cooks to connect to recipes that can be read in large text via a 21.5-inch LED screen. As a smart hub, individual family members can set up their own profiles and use the built-in screen to create shopping lists, calendars, and memos.

The new Family Hub 2.0 smart refrigerators start at $5,799, not exactly priced for mass consumption. Samsung continues to have faith in the smart fridge category, firmly believing that the refrigerator is a logical hub for other IoT appliances in the smart kitchen including its new line of ovens. Beyond the kitchen, if Samsung were able to tie together its various point-solution hubs from around the home (using its IoT platform ARTIK) it could become a dominant player in the world of IoT.

LG also announced a new smart refrigerator at CES 2017, the InstaView model with its standout feature being integration with Amazon’s Echo to provide voice-control. Echo’s Alexa voice assistant can be used to order groceries from the Seattle-based retailer with Amazon software built into the appliance. A 2-megapixel camera with a wide-angle lens will allow consumers to see what food needs to be reordered via the 29-inch LED screen built into the front of the appliance.

Running on the same WebOS as LG smart TVs, pricing and availability of the InstaView was not announced.

Whirlpool, who won a CES 2017 innovation award for its Zera food recycler, announced new technology for its line of refrigerators including a door within a door, but has yet to come out with a smart fridge.

Whirlpool Adds Alexa Voice Functionality To Fridges, Ovens & More

Alexa was the star of last year’s CES. It looks like we might have a repeat performance this year.

Today Whirlpool and Amazon announced a partnership that will bring Alexa functionality to a range of Whirlpool Wi-Fi enabled appliances including ovens, refrigerators, and washing machines. Today’s announcement builds upon the momentum gained by Amazon over the past year, which saw the company’s voice assistant adopted by everyone from GE to ChefSteps in the kitchen. With Whirpool, the company adds the world’s largest appliance manufacturer to their Alexa partner list.

This is not the first time Amazon and Whirlpool joined together to make CES news. Last year the appliance maker announced Amazon Dash integration with their dishwasher and washing machines.  The announcement was part of a broad set of connected home announcements that featured connectivity. However, this year’s partnership with Alexa could resonate more significantly than past years by tapping into the excitement around voice control and Amazon’s own connected virtual assistants. Amazon sold out of their voice assistant powered Echos over the holidays, a sign of growing interest around the products.

This news, alongside other announcements such as GE’s partnership with Nest Protect, shows how the smart home industry is evolving beyond one focused primarily on basic automation and security to ones becoming part of the fabric of the home and the home’s systems. In appliance makers, Amazon finds ready partners who want to add incremental value to their connected products while also finding ways to convince consumers to upgrade faster than the traditional 7-10 years.

Looking forward, it could be interesting to see how Whirlpool combines its effort with Amazon with other third party platform provider partners such as Innit. This summer the company announced that Innit would power a number of new products, starting with its high-end Jenn-Air brand. One can envision how more powerful sensor-powered ovens and fridges using Innit’s platform could become integrated with Alexa skills in the future.

PicoBrew Will Now Let You Customize Your Brew With FreeStyle PicoPaks

While PicoBrew’s second generation home brew appliance, the Pico, made significant leaps forward in approachability when compared to the company’s first home-brew machine in the Zymatic, it also sacrificed one really cool feature: the ability to customize your home brew.

That’s because the Pico uses a pod-system called PicoPaks that come preconfigured with the grains and hops rather than requiring the home brewer to mess with all that him or herself. It makes brewing much easier, but it also means less creativity since you are brewing a pre-configured and pre-measured brew from the PicoPak.

But at CES this week, the company announced the arrival of the FreeStyle PicoPak BrewCrafter, their new online PicoPak configuration tool that allows home brewers to drag and drop ingredients in a virtual PicoPak to create custom homebrews.

Drag and drop beer making is really cool, but unlocking custom beer brewing with the Pico required much more than simply creating a web-based configuration tool. The vast majority of the work was on the back-end manufacturing and assembly of the new custom PicoPaks, where the company has created the ability for a PicoPak to move down the assembly line and get a one-off custom mix of grains tailored by the home brewer through the BrewCrafter tool. This is a significant departure from traditional assembly line production where there’s an emphasis on high degrees of repeatability. PicoBrew CEO Bill Mitchell told me they’ve had some observers who work with automated food production visit their production plant in Seattle and have said they’ve never seen anything like it.

As a Pico owner, I’m pretty excited about FreeStyle PicoPaks. However, I am slightly worried I’ll go overboard with certain ingredients like when I would frequent those Mongolian-style BBQ restaurants where you tell the cook all the ingredients you want on your food, but soon realize three handfuls of hot peppers might not have been such a good idea. It looks like Pico will try to steer amateur brewers like me away from overloading certain flavors as the BrewCrafter will gently nudge you back towards sanity with mix-balances to “ensure creation of a delicious beer recipe.”

For the Pico user, FreeStyle PicoPaks are available now. The BrewCrafter guide holds your hand along the way by provided “know-good” baseline beer recipes for you to tweak with a personal flourish by adjusting grains and hops to change the flavor, alcohol content and more. Admittedly, creating a custom brew in a browser might not satisfy those hard-core home brew types that want to measure grains and hops the old fashioned way to achieve their beer masterwork, but it’s likely those folks probably wouldn’t have bought a Pico in the first place.

And anyway, if you do own a Pico and want greater control over your home brew, you can always buy a Zymatic.

Drop’s Recipe App Platform Now Will Control GE Wi-Fi Ovens

Drop isn’t wasting time transforming itself into a recipe platform for connected appliances.

In the space of three months, the company has announced its second major appliance manufacturer win with GE, who the company announced would adopt its recipe platform with GE’s Wi-Fi enabled ovens. This news follows their September announcement of a partnership with Bosch to power a similar control of settings like temperature from within their recipe app.

For GE, who is taking a fairly open approach with their Wi-Fi product lineup, it’s another of a growing list of partners. They’ve also integrated with IFTTT as well ad added an Alexa skill by the name of Geneva that connects with 70 GE Wi-Fi connected appliances. Since the company’s acquisition (in June Chinese company Haier acquired the appliance division from General Electric), they have been extremely aggressive in adding new capabilities.

Drop continues to make a smooth transition from a company that makes consumer hardware (their first product was the Drop smart scale) to a platform company. The “kitchen guidance” platform space is looking to heat up in 2017, with Innit, Drop, SideChef and others continuing to partner and grow capabilities.

Smart Kitchen Chat: What Happened In Smart Kitchen At CES 2016

We’ve got more smart kitchen stories coming soon, but in the mean time we wanted to share a chat about what Mike and friend Brian Frank saw at CES 2016 in the connected kitchen.

For 2016, we plan to have more storytelling podcast episodes as well as throw in some conversation episodes as well as interviews with innovators in the smart kitchen space. Stay tuned!

Go to www.smartkitchensummit.com/show to hear this and all the other episodes.

Samsung Begins To Ship The Family Hub Refrigerator

The Gist: Samsung had the most high profile of the smart kitchen product debuts at CES this year with the Family Hub refrigerator, an Internet-connected fridge with a massive 21-inch screen and a hefty six thousand dollar price tag.  This week Samsung announced commercial availability of the product.

Our Take: Of all the categories in the connected kitchen, the connected refrigerator is most likely to receive a healthy dose of skepticism. That’s because companies like Samsung, LG and Whirlpool have been trying to fuse the Internet with the fridge since the early 2000s, and the result has been a string of fairly clunky products with little staying power and even less tangible consumer benefits. However, in recent years the arrival of low-cost cameras and internal sensors have intrigued consumers and, as a result, Samsung and others have decided to give the connected fridge another go.

While we felt the LG smart fridge was perhaps the most interesting of this year’s CES crop due to intriguing features like the ability to see what’s inside by knocking on the front of the fridge, the Samsung Family Hub also was interesting for different reasons. For one, the massive Tizen-powered touch screen on the front offers a lot of screen real estate for tailored apps. The inventory manager app also appears interesting, giving consumers some new ways to do fairly easy (but not perfect) inventory tracking using photo-tagging (as demoed here in the initial CNET review).

Bottom line, the challenge for Samsung will be adding enough value to make the fridge’s big price tag seem worth it, while also managing to keep the device relevant and up to date from a technology perspective in a category where consumers expect 10 or 15-year life spans from their fridges.