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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

CES

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.

Yo-Kai to Debut Boba Making Robot at CES 2024

In less than two weeks, Yo-Kai Express, a company that’s become synonymous with hot ramen-making robots, will show it has a sweet side with the debut of a boba-making robot at CES in Las Vegas.

Yo-Kai CEO Andy Lin told The Spoon that the company’s new robotic boba maker will be the first boba-bot that incorporates a cooking pot inside the appliance, enabling it to cook boba tapioca pearls as well as other toppings. According to Lin, the machine’s built-in cooking capability will allow it to be more than just a boba-maker, enabling it to create a variety of different hot and cold beverages and meals ranging from instant oatmeal to protein shakes to soups and coffees.

The first machine will be shipped to Netflix’s headquarters in Los Gatos, California. After that, Lin says that distribution will be a phased release with around ten boba-bots shipped to other corporate headquarters in the Bay Area. Another shipment in March will put the Yo-Kai boba machine at college campuses and other locations, and starting in June, the Yo-Kai boba-bot will be widely available to individual operators who want to operate a Yo-Kai.

And it’s with this wider availability that Yo-Kai will begin a new expansion approach that will extend beyond its current operating model. Lin says that in 2024, the company plans to phase its expansion model into one utilizing a partner model where individual operators will pay an initial startup fee to Yo-Kai, and from there, they will be able to take ownership of the boba and begin operating it. Lin says that the model, which is “franchise-like”, will offer new operators a choice of up to 1,500 different locations that Yo-Kai has helped find through a new strategic partnership with a large real estate management company.

“Usually, if a partner wants to open a boba store, they need to find a location by themselves,” said Lin. “But we don’t need them to find a location; we can actually provide a location to them. So it will be a one-stop-shop: Go to the website, select the region you want to have the machine, and we will work together with them.”

While the Yo-Kai boba-bot certainly isn’t the first automated boba-making machine, no other company has had much success in expanding beyond initial pilots and trials. Bobacino, which debuted in 2020, saw its CEO depart last month, and it’s not clear if the company is still operational. Cloutea, which debuted its boba robot at CES 2023, opened a store in Las Vegas this past April but has not expanded beyond a single location.

The new Yo-Kai boba robot will debut at CES, which starts on January 9th and runs through January 12th. The new boba bot will be featured in the food tech area on the show floor in the Venetian Expo Hall at CES.

Stay tuned to The Spoon for more food tech coverage at CES over the next two weeks.

Three Years After CES Debut, ColdSnap Readies Launch of Countertop Ice Cream Making Appliance

Nearly three years after it stole the show at CES 2021 with its countertop ice cream machine, ColdSnap has readied itself for a commercial rollout of its system this fall.

In a recent blog post, the company shared a glimpse of the product’s development over the past few years, detailing its pod production capacity expansion, the development of its production partner ecosystem, and the continuing refinement of the ColdSnap machine itself.

According to the company, they’ve expanded their 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. After producing their initial batches of liquid in small batches in their test kitchen, the enlarged factory that is part of the company’s headquarters will support 300-gallon batches of their liquid mix that will fill the ColdSnap aluminum cans (think energy drink-size) on-site.

In addition to the company’s ice cream and frozen treat mix production within its own factory, they are working with co-manufacturers to ramp up production. According to ColdSnap, initial tests of its mix showed the product was too thick to flow through the pipes at third-party manufacturers because the liquid was different from commercial ice cream mixes commonly made at manufacturing facilities. The company’s food science team reformulated the mix for production in external factories and for large-scale production in-house.

Another big step towards its commercial launch was the addition of packaging automation. It’s hard to believe, but until now, the company has hand-packaged all of the pods to support the roughly one hundred trial machines in the field. Now, as they look to scale, they’ve added automation equipment and project they will be able to manufacture 30 million pods per year.

ColdSnap also detailed improvements to the countertop machine, including adding a QR code reader that will tell the machine which type of drink it is making and what the company describes as a ‘more powerful’ refrigeration machine.

Part of what makes ColdSnap intriguing is its ability to make instant ice cream from room temperature, shelf-stable liquid. As company CEO Matthew 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.”

I agree that this type of machine could be really interesting in markets without substantial cold chain storage, my guess is clones would pop up pretty quickly in markets like China once the concept is proven out.

ColdSnap’s initial target is the office and business markets, but in the long term, Fonte says the company will enter the consumer kitchen. He said he’s open to partners for any expansion into the home market, and I’m sure he’ll be able to find him if he and ColdSnap can prove the technology works and there’s demand for it in the commercial space.

Four Years After CES, Breadbot’s Robotic Breadmaker is Dishing Out Loaves at Grocery Stores

For robot startups seeking to make a splash at CES, there are a few options: holding a large press conference, making it weird and creepy, or serving cocktails. However, one method stands out above the rest for drawing in crowds: wafting the aroma of freshly baked bread (aka ‘the Subway method‘).

That’s what the folks behind the Wilkinson Baking Company did back in 2019, and the end result was their robot, the Breadbot, became a sensation that year at the world’s largest tech event. The smell of fresh bread pulled in journalists, tech nerds, and passersby like a tractor beam, garnering the type of press that big budget brands like Samsung would envy.

The small Eastern Washington-based company, co-founded by brothers Randall and Ron Wilkinson, has been working diligently to bring their product to market since then. Their goal was to transition from a working prototype to a production-ready machine suitable for grocery stores.

As part of the transition, the company also looked to find a new CEO. The Wilkinson brothers, both in their late sixties, wanted a CEO that could take the early-stage startup from a small LLC with a big idea to one that was mature enough to raise funding and bring the first product to market. Paul Rhynard, a former strategy consultant for McKinsey who also had experience raising capital as Chief Strategy Officer for Russell Investments, stepped in for Randall in April of last year and has since helped raise a seed round of $3 million last summer to fund the build-out of the company’s first production run of robots.

According to Rhynard, the new robot was built after testing the early prototype in a small grocery store in Eastern Washington.

“The machine that was at CES has been dramatically updated,” Rhynard told The Spoon. “One of the key differences is we rebuilt the brain of it. We have fully custom chipboards and a custom tech stack that run the machine. It was a huge update from a control and software standpoint of actually operating the machine.”

The company also made significant upgrades to the mechanical system, including adding four hoppers instead of one, which allows the Breadbot to make four varieties of bread throughout the day. The new Breadbot has significant updates to how it bakes and measures bread quality which, according to Rhynard, allows the machine to achieve more consistent results.

“So now we have a machine that we can scale up and start to place in grocers around the country,” said Rhynard.

And that’s what they’re starting to do. The company built 20 robots and so far has placed seven of them in different grocery chains which include Super One Foods, which is operating a Breadbot in a store in Northern Idaho and two more in Montana, and last month the company installed a Breadbot at Akins Fresh Market in eastern Washington. Three more Breadbots are set to be installed in a high-end Milwaukee, Wisconsin grocery retailer this month.

Rhynard says the company’s business model is a lease-plus-fee model, where grocers pay a monthly fee and a small amount per loaf baked. In return, Breadbot provides a turnkey solution, which includes providing bread mix, yeast, bread bags, and ongoing maintenance.

In return, grocers get what is essentially a bakery in a box that sits in full view of the customers on the store floor. The machine, which can produce up to 200 loaves a day, can produce bread throughout the day, with each loaf taking about 96 minutes from start to finish to make a loaf. In the stores it is currently operating, the Breadbot is making three varieties of bread: Nine grain, homestyle, and honey oat.

According to Rhynard, early on stores aligned the baking of the bread with the hours of the baking staff, which meant the Breadbot baked all the bread in the morning. Now, he says, some stores are going to start experimenting with baking bread during peak shopping hours, from four to seven at night, which will allow shoppers to buy hot, freshly made bread (and take in that fresh-baked bread smell).

Rhynard says that while grocery stores are their key target customer, they are also having talks with other potential types of customers, including cafeterias and the military. The company is also talking to potential customers in places where fresh-baked bread is difficult to come by, including Hawaii, which imports the vast majority of its bread from the US west coast.

To fund further growth, Rhynard said the company is now starting to look to raise a Series A. He knows it will be challenging given the current state of the market, but he’s optimistic the company’s current traction will attract new backers.

For now, though,the company is busy finding new customers looking to pull in shoppers with the smell of freshly baked robot bread.

Meet the Breadbot 2.0

The CES 2023 Food Tech Review

Despite all that hard work, we still made time to check out many of the food tech startups making their way to Las Vegas in January and, now, we have included all of that research in the CES Food Tech 2023 Review.

Before you read this report, here is a quick note on how we structured this review:

Category: We included a number of different categories for the food tech review. We categorized each company into the primary category they represented themself as for CES 2023. These categories included everything from agtech to kitchen tech to food robotics.

One sentence description and company HQ location: We also included a short one-sentence description of each company’s product and where they are headquartered.

Company description: For each company, we included a description of the company and what they were showing at the show. These were sourced from the company’s announcements, The Spoon’s own articles, as well as, if possible, from checking them out on the show floor during CES.

Mike’s Take: For most companies, we included a quick take about their product or technology to provide some context around their showing at CES and how we see them fitting into the broader food tech market.

Video: Since we know that showing is often the best way for someone to get a quick understanding of a product, we tried to include a video about each company. Some of the videos were shot by The Spoon at CES, others were captured by the company or another publication. For additional context, for each video, we included who produced the video and, if possible, a general time frame for when it was created.

Mapping Them Out

Our Japan partners at SIGMAXYZ created a nice graphic mapping out the different food tech startups they found at CES. The categories, by and large, correspond with how we saw them, with only a few difference. You can click on an enlarged version of the map here.

 

If you’d like to read the full report, you can subscribe to Spoon Plus, our premium research service, here. 

Podcast: The Bloomberg Alt-Meat Hullabaloo With Rachel Konrad

In this week’s episode, we catch up with Rachel Konrad, a former journalist who spent the last decade-plus working for Tesla, Impossible Foods, and now the Production Board.

Rachel joins Mike and Carlos Rodela to talk about her background, the recent controversy surrounding Bloomberg’s article declaring plant-based meat a fad, and how she helped Impossible bring food tech to CES in 2019 with the launch of the Impossible 2.0 burger.

GreenSwapp Wants to Make Figuring Out the Climate Impact of a Bag of Chips as Easy as Snapping a Pic

While the climate impact of our food has finally made the main stage as a topic at the world’s most high-profile summit, the average joe has no idea how good or bad that bag of chips or can of soda is for the environment.

A Dutch startup called GreenSwapp wants to change that by making information about the climate impact of practically any CPG product instantly available to anyone using its technology.

The Amsterdam-based company started as an online grocery app for climate-friendly products, but more recently has focused on building a climate impact data platform for both consumers and companies. To that end, the company debuted a new scanning tool at CES which gives instant scoring (low, medium, or high impact) of practically any packaged food product when the product’s barcode is scanned with a smartphone.

Here’s how it works: Curious about the climate impact of a tub of yogurt? Head to the GreenSwapp website (www.greenswapp.com) with a mobile browser, and at the top of the page, click on the bar code scan symbol. Your phone will ask you if scan.greenswapp.com can use your camera. Click yes and scan away.

Once a product is scanned, GreenSwapp will show a score and an estimate of how much of your daily carbon footprint a serving of the product eats up. Below that, you’ll see a breakdown in a “climate deep dive” that shows where that carbon was emitted.

Above: Scan of Brown Cow Maple Yogurt with Greenswapp.com Scanning Tool

So how does GreenSwapp figure all of this out? According to company CEO Ajay Varadharajan, they factor in estimates of carbon output for each food for every part of the product’s journey to our plates.

We “go through the entire journey of every food product, the impact of processing, the impact of transportation, the impact of packaging, and then we display it as a single number on a single color for the consumer to be able to understand if it’s good or bad,” he said.

While the web tool is something I’m sure some climate-conscious consumers would save as a browser favorite, I’d be more likely to make GreenSwapp a part of my daily routine if it was a discrete app or integrated as a feature on one of my online grocery apps. While GreenSwapp’s current app is only available for grocery shopping in the Netherlands, the company has an open API that any online grocery or delivery company can use to integrate Greenswapp’s data into its offering.

But will they? While most grocers don’t offer climate change impact data, my guess is it’s only a matter of time. There is already a discussion of having climate impact data on food labels (and some brands have already tried it), and my guess is at some point, progressive states like California and Washington State will force the hand of CPG companies and retailers, much as they did around nutrition and calorie labeling for food service.

If and when that happens, GreenSwapp could be well-positioned to fulfill Varadharajan’s vision of making his technology the ‘Fitbit of sustainability.’

You can watch a demo of the GreenSwapp web tool below.

Demo of GreenSwapp carbon-tracking platform for food products.

BlenderCap Wants You to Make Margaritas on the Go With Its Half Horsepower Portable Blender

Want to make margaritas on the go? Then you might want to check out the new small form factor blender unveiled last week at CES by a company called Cruz.

The Cruz BlenderCap is a new portable blender that has it all in the name: It’s a bottle cap with a blender built in. The product was developed by two former Apple employees, Dakota Adams and Matthew Moore, on the side while they set up a battery factory in China for Apple. The two eventually left their day jobs and went full-time on BlenderCap a year ago.

The BlenderCap’s strength is – perhaps not surprisingly, given the former day jobs of its creators – its battery technology. The blender uses what the company describes as a ‘next-generation electric vehicle Cell-to-Pack battery architecture’, which provides a half horsepower of power.

“You can blend an entire Costco bag of ice and fill an entire Home Depot bucket with margaritas on a single charge,” Adams told The Spoon at CES. According to Adams, the BlenderCap will work with almost any vacuum-plated bottle like a Hydroflask or Thermoflask.

The BlenderCap will start shipping next month from Shanghai, where the two founders leased manufacturing space and are making 6 thousand BlenderCaps in its first production run.

“We’re leasing factory space at a really high-end manufacturer in Shanghai, and we own all the equipment and the robots building this,” Adams told Techcrunch. “So we actually have on our assembly line — we designed the entire assembly line — and we’ve got more robots than people putting this together. It’s crazy. There are glue dispensing robots, automatic screw dispensers. It’s beautiful.”

The BlenderCap is available for preorder for $129 from the company’s website.

A high-powered PORTABLE BLENDER at CES #shorts