CES

January 7, 2019

Impossible Foods Unveils New Gluten-Free Burger Recipe at CES

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is known as a time when companies debut cutting-edge technology like drones, robots, and… burgers?

Tonight plant-based meat company Impossible Foods unveiled new recipe for their popular “bleeding” vegan burgers. According to the release from Impossible, the new iteration will be gluten-free, have zero cholesterol, and contain as much iron and protein as conventional beef from cows. This marks the first time the Redwood City, CA-based startup has revamped their burger recipe since the patties debuted in 2016.

The new-and-improved burgers will launch tomorrow (January 8th) in an array of high-end restaurants, and Impossible stated over email that they will “likely” be available in grocery stores in 2019 (as long as Impossible gets FDA approval to sell its burgers in retail). So far, there’s no word when the new recipe will roll out to the over 5,000-odd locations — including all White Castles — which currently have Impossible burgers on their menu.

Impossible’s patties already contained no cholesterol and have comparable protein to ground beef — so essentially, the main difference is that the new patty is gluten-free. Which is actually kind of a big deal. “Wheat protein” is the first ingredient listed on the Impossible Foods website, followed by coconut oil, potato protein, and heme (which is what makes the burgers “bleed”). That means that the original Impossible patty was strictly off-limits for anyone with a gluten allergy, or who was just trying to cut down on gluten for health/dietary reasons.

Nixing the wheat protein certainly opens up potential new consumers for Impossible, but only if they can still deliver on taste without their primary ingredient. Which leads me to wonder: what exactly is the new burger made of? Impossible didn’t reveal the ingredients in their new burger, so we don’t know what they’re using to replace wheat. My guess is pea protein, the go-to protein choice of most alternative-meats including Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods’ biggest plant-based competitor. (Beyond Meat’s products are already gluten-free.) That could make it especially tricky for Impossible to differentiate itself when it heads onto retail shelves to compete directly with Beyond in 2019.

[Ed note: At the opening Impossible Foods revealed that the main ingredients in their new burgers are soy and potato protein, not pea protein as I’d guessed.]

Taking a step back, it’s interesting that Impossible Foods decided to make this announcement at CES, amid a sea of more “traditional” technologies like touchscreens and VR helmets. But when you think about it, plant-based meat is indeed a technology: one that’s changing the way we eat protein. In fact, it’s a technology that has the potential to improve our planet a lot quicker than something like self-driving cars. I for one hope we see more innovative food companies repping at events like CES in the future.

For now, CES attendees can try free samples of Impossible’s new burgers from a food truck outside the Las Vegas Convention Center from January 8-11. Stop by and let us know what you think!

January 7, 2019

GoSun Debuts The ‘Solar Kitchen’ So You Can Cook (and Chill) Around The Clock

If you think solar powered cooking is something you can only do when the sun is out, think again.

That’s because GoSun, the company which got its start five years ago when it debuted its first solar oven on Kickstarter, has evolved its product line to what is essentially a fully self-contained “solar kitchen” that can cook (or chill) at any time of the day or night.

At the center of the company’s solar kitchen concept is the GoSun Fusion, a hybrid oven that can cook using solar power or electricity. With the Fusion, a user can cook a meal with solar power in about an hour. At night, the Fusion can cook a meal in the same amount of time by drawing power from the new lithium ion power bank product the company is debuting at CES. The power bank will receive its energy from an accompanying foldable solar panel, also being rolled out at CES.

While all this cooking is great, you and I both know a kitchen is not complete without something to keep your food (or beer) cold. GoSun now has that covered too. The company also unveiled the GoSun Chill, which the company calls a cooler but, according to GoSun CEO Patrick Sherwin, it’s actually a fully operable mini-fridge.

“It’s crazy how efficient this technology has gotten,” said Sherwin. The Chill (read fridge) has a “brushless DC compressor motor inside allows you to keep a couple cases of beer cold for entire day with this power bank.”

According to Sherwin, the Fusion will be shipping in a little over a month and the new power bank, solar panel and Chill cooler will be for sale in March via Indiegogo and will ship in the summer.

You can watch my full interview with Sherwin from CES Unveiled below:

GoSun Debuts The 'Solar Kitchen', Including a Solar Powered Mini-Fridge

Watch this video on YouTube

January 7, 2019

Chop and Awe: Whirlpool Debuts A Bunch of Smart Kitchen Products at CES 2019

Big companies will sometimes debut one intriguing product at CES and call it a day. But this year, Whirlpool decided to drop about a half dozen.

In what amounted to essentially a shock and awe campaign of smart-kitchen product debuts, the company announced a whole bunch of products that piqued my interest. We’ll be stopping by the Whirlpool booth when the show floor opens tomorrow to capture some of these items on video. For now, here’s an overview of what the company is unveiling in Las Vegas:

Connected Hub Wall Oven With Augmented Reality

This oven kind of blew my mind when Whirlpool told me about it, primarily because of the transparent front display: besides allowing a user to see inside the oven, it also acts as a video screen for displaying pretty much everything from video-cooking instructions to shopping lists to family calendars.

As Spoon readers know, I’ve felt for a long time now that the kitchen screen is a big opportunity, one that only a handful of companies (cough Amazon, cough Samsung) have tried to seize. With this new oven, Whirlpool is staking territory for this largely unclaimed terrain with an integrated screen that can power all sorts of video-centric applications in the kitchen.

KitchenAid Smart Oven+

This one was intriguing to me because not only does it offer smart-oven capabilities such as voice control and an LCD screen for recipe selection, it’s also modular and allows the user to add steam, grill or baking stone attachments. While I’m not sure I’m ready for a baking stone, after trying out a countertop steam oven, I’m sold on that method as a superior way to prepare many types of food. With this new KitchenAid oven, I can add it in.

The Smart Countertop Oven from WLabs

This oven is basically Whirlpool’s answer to the June smart oven. The countertop device has food identification capability, which means it can recognize a variety of food types and set cooking temperature and time accordingly. It also has a scan-to-cook feature and voice-control integration with Alexa. The smart countertop oven is from Whirpool’s incubation unit, W Labs, which essentially means it’s a limited availability product that is not – as of yet at least – part of the permanent Whirlpool lineup. The product will be available soon for preorders for $799 at the WLabs website.

KitchenAid Combination Cook Processor

While not as tech-forward as the other products, the KitchenAid Cook Processor may just be the most useful product debuted by Whirlpool/KitchenAid at CES this year. This multifunction cooking appliance can cut, stir, steam, and, just like a Thermomix, has an internal scale that enables step-by-step recipe guidance. The device has Wi-Fi on board, allowing it to connect to the Internet to download recipes and software updates.

I’ve long been waiting for one of the big appliance makers to offer up a Thermomix-like offering for the U.S. market, and it looks like KitchenAid finally has done just that.

KitchenAid Smart Display

I mentioned above my belief that kitchen screen is going to be a big deal, and so it makes sense that KitchenAid would offer up their own smart display with Google Assistant. Google’s been on a tear lately, hoovering up integration partners, and with KitchenAid, they’ve gotten a blue-chip partner into which they can plug their voice assistant and smart home platform. The KitchenAid Smart Display will work with Yummly, including a new Pro version of Whirlpool’s cooking guidance app that features celebrity chefs like Richard Blais.

Believe it or not, this isn’t even all of the announcements Whirlpool/KitchenAid will be making this week. We’ll be sure to post updates once we’ve visited the Whirlpool booth here at CES.

January 7, 2019

The BreadBot Is A Bread Factory for the Corner Grocery Store

Back in college, whenever I rode my bike through the Gasworks Park neighborhood in Seattle, I’d get hit with the smell of bread baking as I passed the local bread factory.

As you can imagine, it was wonderful.

And now, Wilkinson Baking Company hopes to bring the best smell in the world to your local grocery store with its new bread making robot, the Breadbot.

The BreadBot, which made its debut last night at CES Unveiled, is a standalone bread robot that can make up to ten loaves of fresh bread per hour from scratch. The machine is fully automated, so after the store employee adds in bread mix to the mix hopper, the BreadBot mixes, forms, proofs, bakes and cools the loaves of bread.

The bread robot was designed to make bread pretty much anytime during the day (or night), and could be scheduled to start the process up to three hours before a store opens. So when the early rising morning shift worker unlocks a store with a Breadbot inside, not only will the smell of fresh bread waft out, but over a dozen loaves will be waiting to be sold.

“It’s the first time bread can be made in a fully automated fashion, start to finish,” said Dr. Randall Wilkinson, the CEO of Wilkinson Baking Company.

Wilkinson envision the BreadBot going into grocery stores, where the machine can sit in the bread aisle and make bread in front of customers. The company’s been trialing the breadbot in local grocery stores in eastern Washington and the results are basically what you’d expect.

“You see the crowds here at CES, that’s what happens in the store,” said Wilkinson. “The consumer comes in, says ‘what’s this?’, and if you’re a retailer you say, ‘that’s what I want.'”

The BreadBot is part of a larger trend of automation and robotics enabling more localized creation of food types that are normally made in a big factory somewhere. Much like the Bellwether coffee roasting machine can push coffee roasting out to the local neighborhood coffee shop, the Breadbot allows the local grocery to offer fresh made bread made in-store.

“Imagine taking a $150 million bread factory, slicing it up into small pieces, move that out into the grocery store, and make it fresh there rather than in the factory,” said Wilkinson.

You can see my full interview with Dr. Wilkinson and see shots of the BreadBot in action in the video below (bread smell not included):

BreadBot, a bread making robot, debuts at CES

Watch this video on YouTube

January 4, 2019

Newsletter: The Road to CES and Plant-Based Meat Mania

Happy Friday,

It’s all hands on deck here at the Spoon as we prepare for CES. Our comfortable walking shoes are packed, our schedules are taking shape, and our Criss Angel Mindfreak tickets are booked (just kidding on that last one (maybe)).

We’ll be exploring the cavernous show floors all week long, sniffing out stories about new food tech products and smart kitchen appliances — and taking videos along the way. Make sure to check in on the site and on social to see our latest finds. If you’ll be there with a company of your own, feel free to pitch us!

But before we jet off to Vegas, here are a few of the biggest stories we wrote about this week:

Nestlé is tossing its hat into the meat alternatives ring with an offering called the Incredible Burger. (If you think that sounds a lot like the Impossible Burger, you are right!) In the piece I wrote that I was optimistic that Nestlé’s new burger will be successful, mostly because there’s such demand for plant-based meat that it isn’t a zero-sum game: there are room for all sorts of colorfully-named meatless burgers, chicken nuggets, sausages, etc.

After we published the post, however, we began to see some pushback on social media from readers who were skeptical about Nestlé’s choice, and thought that the Big Food company had much baggage to ethically make plant-based meats. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong (look out for a more in-depth post on this debate on Sunday), but regardless it brings up an interesting point about the implications of Big Food cashing in on new eating trends, e.g. plant-based foods.

Photo: Beyond Meat.

Speaking of plant-based foods, is anyone trying out Veganuary? This year record amounts of consumers are going veg for the month (and beyond), and the U.K. is cashing in big time with a myriad of plant-based offerings in major grocery chains and fast-food joints. Even Pizza Hut has a vegan, BBQ jackfruit-topped pie.

Here in the U.S. we may be a little bit behind the eight ball when it comes to plant-based options, especially in the fast food realm, but a few players, namely Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, are working hard to catch us up. Beyond Meat just launched on the menu at Carl’s Jr. and Impossible Foods, which is already at White Castle, has hinted that it’ll be dropping some news on January 7th at CES — check back here, we’ll be bringing you the business.

In other news this week, Chris got the scoop on AirSpace Link, a startup which came out of stealth this week and launched a registry that allows people to opt in or out of drone delivery. (Drone delivery may still be a ways away — but autonomous vehicle delivery isn’t!) Mike shared his 2019 smart kitchen predictions, from food-driven revenue models to the emergence sentient kitchen. Finally, Jenn wrote about a research group at Princeton University working to provide an open-source model for vertical farming.

If you’re looking for something to listen to this weekend, check out the latest episode of the Smart Kitchen Show. It’s another editor roundtable where the Spoon writers talk about their predictions for 2019 and what they’re looking forward to at CES. You can also get it on Apple podcasts, Stitcher and Soundcloud!

And finally, we have a job board! We’ve added a whole bunch of listings over the past week, some of which you can check them out below, or you can get the full list on the site. And if you have a job opening at your company, feel free to post it (it is free, after all).

That’s it from me! See you in Vegas (with a glass of wine in hand).
Catherine

Gourmia to Roll Out Smart Multicooker, Coffee Brewer, and Dehydrator at CES
Brooklyn-based smart kitchen company Gourmia will be unveiling three new IoT-connected devices at CES: an air fryer, a multicooker, and a coffee roaster/brewer.

Lifesum Unveils a Google Assistant Version of Its Health-Tracking App
Swedish company Lifesum has unveiled a Google Assistant version of its nutrition app, which allows users to track meals, weight, and water intake using their voice instead of a phone or computer.

Editor Roundtable Podcast: 2019 Predictions And CES Preview
Take a listen to our latest editorial roundtable podcast, in which we discuss our 2019 predictions and what we’re most looking forward to for CES.

Pepsi and Segway Enter the Increasingly Crowded Delivery Robot Space
Both Pepsi and Ninebot, Segway’s parent company, have announced separate delivery robot initiatives.

MyWah to Debut Connected Wine Dispenser for Businesses at CES
MyWah, a connected wine dispenser which uses RFID-tagged bags to track wine temperature and portioning, is debuting at CES.

DoorDash Is Testing Self-Driving Cars in San Francisco
Third-party delivery service DoorDash just announced it has partnered with General Motors’ Cruise Automation to test autonomous vehicles in San Francisco.

As the Food Industry Wakes Up to Blockchain, Online Training Options are Now Available
It’s no secret that the food industry is rapidly awaking to the great promise of blockchain technology, and headlines abound about how it promises to make traditional paper ledger-based transactions obsolete, replaced by digital ledgers. A number of online blockchain resources are springing up to help educate companies on how to use this new technology.

Soylent Adds Snack Replacement Beverage to its Lineup
Rosa Foods, the company behind meal-replacement-in-a-bottle, Soylent, launched Soylent Bridge, a new, lighter liquid designed to replace your snacking on solids. The 11 oz. Soylent Bridge clocks in at 180 calories with 15 grams of plant-based protein and comes in chocolate flavor. The shelf-stable Bridge will last a year

Why Vertical Farming Won’t Grow Without More Data
Vertical farming may be getting lots of funding, but we don’t actually know how well it works. A research project from Princeton University is getting data from vertical farming and working to make an open-source framework for aspiring vertical farm companies.

New Year, New Food: U.K. Grocery and QSR’s Cash In on Veganuary
In the U.K., large grocery chains and fast-food joints alike are taking advantage of the growing interesting Veganuary — and plant-based eating in general.

January 4, 2019

Gourmia to Roll Out Smart Multicooker, Coffee Brewer, and Dehydrator at CES

This year will be my first time at CES. Based off of what I’ve heard about the gigantic event, I’m expecting to discover new food tech startups, see new smart kitchen appliances in action, and get very sore feet.

I know at least one range of new products I’ll have to check out. Brooklyn-based smart kitchen company Gourmia just announced that it will be unveiling three new countertop appliances at CES: a 7-quart air fryer, which also functions as a rotisserie and dehyradrator; an 11-in-1 deluxe multicooker (similar to the Instant Pot); and a 10-cup coffee grinder and brewer.

All the devices are connected and can be controlled by the Gourmia mobile app, called Mia. They’re also compatible with Alexa or Google Home. Users can say either “Alexa, ask Mia,” or “Hey Google, ask Mia” to remotely manage cook times or change modes using their voice. The whole “asking a voice assistant to ask another service” thing is definitely annoying and might be more trouble than its worth when you could just do it on your phone, but hopefully Gourmia will find a way to get around it soon.

On the surface, none of these products seem particularly groundbreaking: after all, Gourmia’s lineup already features several IoT-enabled air fryers, multicookers and coffee grinder/brewers, which are already voice compatible. I’ll have to stop by their booth at CES to see if Gourmia’s newest appliances can sweep me off my (tired) feet.

January 4, 2019

Editor Roundtable Podcast: 2019 Predictions And CES Preview

We’re just a couple days out from CES, and the Spoon team is heading to Vegas to hunt down all the food and kitchen tech stories we can find (and to throw a little party).

Before that, though, here’s another quick look at our predictions for the year 2019, which the crew discussed on this week’s Editor Roundtable Podcast:

- Smart kitchen outlook for 2019
- What will happen in food delivery
- CBD predictions for coming year
- What will happen in the white-hot food robot market

As always, you can listen to the pod by hitting play below, downloading it direct, subscribing on Apple podcasts, listening on Stitcher or anywhere you find podcasts.

December 4, 2018

Eat My Face! How One Entrepreneur Found Meaning By Printing Faces On Cookies

A few years ago, David Weiss went through a bout of career self-reflection.

He was working as a sales rep for a sweater wholesaler in New York City and found the work unfulfilling. So eventually, he did what so many of us dream of doing when a period of career stagnation comes along: he quit and travelled the world.

“I had a year’s salary in the bank, so I said, ‘I’m outta here,'” he told me in a phone interview.

And he was. Over the next year and a half, Weiss spent time in Israel, Indonesia and Thailand, and it was this last country where he would find the ticket for what would be his next journey.

Weiss was at a three-day silent meditation retreat in northern Thailand when he met his future business partner, a chiropractor named Farsh Kanji. Like Weiss, Kanji had cashed out of his former business and was traveling the world. Eventually they found each other and, luckily for both, their meditation wasn’t exactly silent.

Instead, they started talking about an idea that would become the focus of their future company: printing faces on food.

Real-Time Face Printing

Weiss and Kanji knew that the technology to print photos on food already existed. For example, there were already online services that could print your loved one on a cake and have it sent to your house in a few days. What they wanted to do is take this idea further by letting people snap pictures and print their image on food at events in real time.

From there, it wasn’t long before they got down to business. First thing they knew they had to do was to figure out the technology to actually print on food.

The technology can also print on drinks

“We had some friends who understood printing technology,” said Weiss. To work with food, they explored modifying an ink printer and printing with food coloring.

It worked and Selffee was born. Before long, they were taking the tech to events. But in those early days, they still had to work out the kinks. At one event, they were excited to print a cookie for one of Instagram’s early executives, only to have the picture print his face in the wrong colors and too big to fit on the cookie.

They’d eventually fine-tune the process, and nowadays can print on thousands of cookies, drinks or even marshmallows at a single event. For a typical engagement, Weiss says they’ll bring three printers and can batch-print 18 or so cookies in about five minutes. For bigger events, they’ve figured out how to queue logistics and can print thousands of face-printed edibles.

The company has been able to keep marketing costs low because the product often goes viral on social media

“We did the Super Bowl and did about 60,000 faces on marshmallows” said Weiss.

So far in 2018, Selffee has worked over 200 events. According to Weiss, they’ve worked a total of 350 cumulatively their start in 2016. The company also has seven full time employees and has plans to expand globally in 2019 by moving into five markets in Europe.

“From two guys just hacking away, it’s now a successful project that’s my personal ikigai,” said Weiss.

He asked me if I knew what that meant. When I said no, he explained the Japanese term that basically describes a person finding their life’s calling by providing the world something it needs.

While I’ll have to take Weiss’s word on the inner peace he feels, one thing I can say with certainty is he nailed one part of the ikigai equation: the world definitely needed more edible faces on cookies.

If you’d like your face printed on a cookie, come see Selffee and 40 other startups at The Spoon’s FoodTech Live event in Las Vegas during CES on January 8th.

March 15, 2018

Guided Cooking Trend Continues Momentum In 2018

Two years ago at the Housewares Show in Chicago, I saw the emergence of a new trend called guided cooking. At the show, companies like Cuciniale, Oliso and Hestan Cue showed off early efforts to combine sensors, software, precision heating and content in an orchestrated experience that guides home cooks through the creation of a meal.

As I said of my effort to make salmon with the Hestan Cue, using a guided cooking system for the first time was something of a revelation:

“…this combination of the pan, burner and app and the guidance system they had built that really led me to see the possibilities around this new category. I am not a great cook by any stretch of the imagination, but I cooked one of the tastiest pieces of salmon I’ve ever had in about 20 minutes. The experience was enabled through technology, but the technology didn’t take me out of the experience of cooking. Further, I can see as I gain more confidence using a system like this, I can choose to “dial down” the guidance needed from the system to the point I am largely doing most of the cooking by myself (though I don’t know if I’d ever get rid of the automated temperature control, mostly because I’m lazy and it gives me instant “chef intuition).”

Fast forward a couple of years and the guided cooking trend continues to gain momentum. A number of companies talked up new guided cooking platforms at CES in January, from big appliance makers like Whirlpool and LG to big tech platform providers like Google and Amazon.

And at the Housewares show in Chicago this week, guided cooking was everywhere. Hestan Cue, now shipping, was on display this week in the Smart Home pavilion. iCuisine, a startup that utilizes a modular sensor to connect to everyday kitchen tools to a guided cooking app, had its own take on step-by-step cooking instruction. Vorwerk’s Thermomix showed off their all-in-one multicooker with built-in guidance and talked about the company’s online recipe platform, the Cookidoo.

Over at the Gourmia booth, the prolific maker of low-cost connected cooking devices showed off a variety of connected devices, including a Thermomix-like multicooker with built-in cooking guidance. The company’s head of product told me the Gourmia multicooker will eventually act as a smart kitchen hub that enables cross-device cooking orchestration with other Gourmia appliances. As I left the booth, celebrity chef Cat Cora was performing a cooking demo in the booth and talking about the concept of smart recipes.

Gourmia’s Thermomix clone (currently only available in Europe)

Chefman, another maker of low-cost connected cooking appliances, showed off its sous vide cooking app with newly integrated guided cooking capabilities at the show, and a company spokesperson told me the company plans to add guided cooking to all of their connected cooking appliances this year.

Meanwhile at SXSW (which annoyingly was at the same time as the Housewares Show this year), Innit announced the release of Google Assistant functionality within the Innit app they first demoed at CES. With Google Assistant, a home cook can navigate the Innit app’s guided cooking features via voice. According to company COO Josh Sigel, the release marks the first third party app which is completely controllable via Google Assistant.

Of course, like any new trend, there will be hits and misses as products roll out. Early reviews of the Tasty One Top have been somewhat subpar, while my experiences with some of the early Amazon video cooking skills have been hobbled by lack of YouTube integration and the early stage of cooking capabilities in their Alexa skill API.

All that said, I think we can expect lots more in the guided cooking space as 2018 unfolds. I saw a slew of products in Chicago under embargo that are slated for later this year that offer new approaches to guided cooking, and there will no doubt more guided cooking products being developed in stealth that should see the light of day at IFA and Smart Kitchen Summit.

Bottom line: what started as a trend a couple years ago is fast becoming a central theme for appliance makers big and small, making 2018 a big big year for guided cooking.

January 16, 2018

The CES Foodtech & Smart Kitchen Trends Wrapup

Every year upon returning from my annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas, someone always asks me, “what was the big thing at CES this year?”

And this year, just like every year, I struggle to answer the question.

The reason? Because there’s never just one big thing. There are usually many big things.

This is in part because it’s such a massive show, one that’s gotten bigger both in scope and attendance over the years, and it’s hard to easily summarize the trends from nearly every corner of tech. Whether your thing is AI, IoT, VR/AR, cryptocurrencies, robotics, CES had something to make you happy.

Because of the overwhelming amount of news and stuff to see, it’s helpful to go to CES with a focus. For me, this year (and really, the last couple years) that focus was kitchen and food tech. And because there’s no concentrated area at CES for food or kitchen tech (get with the program, CTA), that means I am usually scanning a bunch of different spaces (smart home, fitness, startups) to find interesting new companies or news.

This post is a wrapup of some of the important trends I saw. If I missed anything big (and I’m sure I did), email me, and I’ll update the post.

Smart Kitchen Platforms Emerge

This year was a coming out for connected kitchen platforms at CES. Whether it was Whirlpool’s big debut of Yummly 2.0 (which Brett Dibkey described to me as “the glue” tying together Whirlpool’s kitchen of the future), or offerings powered by Innit, SideChef or Drop, there’s no doubt we saw the intelligent, conscious kitchen undeniably emerge as a major focus for large appliance makers.

What do I mean? Basically, it’s moving beyond simple connectivity and apps to platforms that connect the cooking, storage, commerce, planning and every other aspect of the kitchen into a holistic system. A kitchen that is aware of the food inside the fridge, one where appliances coordinate to each other to help organize the evening or week’s meal, one in which a variety of intelligent sensors and interfaces make your life easier; it was all there. This is, obviously, a big focus for us here at the Spoon, so expect more on this topic later.

Voice Interfaces Everywhere

Speaking of interfaces, we’re on the third year of “Alexa sure seems like it’s everywhere” at CES, but the first year of “Google finally seems to be taking this seriously”. It was just over a year ago that Google finally introduced its development kits for actions for Google Assistant (its answer to Alexa Skills), and twelve months later we finally see the fruits of the company’s labor. We also saw massive investment in CES as Hey Google was plastered all over Vegas, and they had a particular focus on the kitchen with on-site demos of the kitchen with partners like Innit.

Digital Sensing

Part of the intelligent, conscious kitchen is one that understands the food that is in the fridge and on the plate. Some companies were showing off food image recognition tech, infrared spectrometry, digital noses and water sensors. Companies like Aryballe showed off their high-end professional sensor but also indicated they were working with appliance makers to build the technology into appliances. After-market players like Smarter were demoing their products to companies like Whirlpool. Expect the concept of a sensing kitchen to become more prevalent this year.

Food Inventory Management

Food waste is a big issue everywhere, and there were companies at CES showing off solutions to help us all better track what food we buy. Startup Ovie, which I would describe as “Tile for food” was showing off its food tracking/management system, while others like Whirlpool and Samsung were talking about how their fridges can help to manage food inventory.

Water Intelligence

Given that it’s one of the world’s most precious resources, it’s always been a bit of a mystery to me why there hasn’t been more attention paid to using IoT and smart technology to manage our water better. Mystery solved because now it seems the tech world is paying attention. Belkin finally had a coming out party for its long-gestating Phyn water management system while others like Flo had their home water management system on display. Smaller efforts like that of Lishtot, which help us detect whether water is drinkable, were also on display.

Wireless Power

One of the coolest things about the Smart Kitchen Summit last year was the Wireless Power Consortium had its first public demo of its cordless kitchen technology, which features wireless power for small countertop appliances. I got an early demo at the WPC booth this year as they showed off wireless power for small appliances from Philips and Haier.

I also saw a cool demo using infrared wireless power form Wi-Charge. The concept here is to put an infrared transmitter in the ceiling (they put it in a light installation in the demo) and then transmit power using infrared to various devices. The Wi-Charge folks said their patented tech is currently only targeted at small portable devices, but I’m intrigued with the possibilities for the kitchen as a potential future opportunity.

Specialized Living

I’ve been writing about the massive opportunity for smart home and kitchen innovation for the aging in place market for the past couple years, so I was happy to see a number of companies focusing on this important area. Much of the focus was on safety, which obviously applies to kitchen/cooking scenarios, but I can also see how smart assistants, robotics and augmented reality could be applied in living scenarios to help folks with limitations due to age.

Robot Invasion

Robots and process automation were everywhere at CES, ranging from cute social robots like LG’s Cloi to delivery robots to the laundry folding robots. Some, like LG, saw the robot as a natural pairing with the kitchen, while others saw robots as more general purpose assistants for the home. And while we didn’t see the robot chef at CES this year, I expect we’ll see that probably in the near future.

Humanless Retail

AI-driven point of sale devices and “humanless” markets were big at CES. AIPoly won best of show for the second year in a row, while a Bodega-on-wheels startup Robomart had a huge crowd at its booth for much of the show. More modest efforts like the Qvie were on offer to give Airbnb hosts a way to become even more like micro-hotel operators.

New Cooking ~~Boxes~~ Appliances

One of my predictions for the year was a new generation of cooking boxes. I use the term box because they’re not always ovens (though they can be), but often are like the NXP RF-powered smart defroster. We also saw Hestan on the other side of the country (at KBIS) talk about using precision cooking coupled with gas, a throwback to their Meld days. There were also lots of folks I met with still operating in stealth that plan to debut their next-gen cooking appliances this year, so stay tuned.

Home As Food Factory

All of a sudden, everyone seems to be interested in home-grow systems, whether it’s the backyard IoT grow box from Grow to the Opcom’s grow walls, there was lots of interesting new home grow systems to see at CES. And while I didn’t see anything like food reactors or much in the way of 3D food printers, I expect CES 2019 to rectify that situation.

Smart Booze

Smart beer appliances, wine serving/preservation devices, and IoT connected wine shelves were plentiful this year. CES also gave many the first peek at the home distilling system from PicoBrew, the PicoStill.

We’ll be watching all these trends this year, so if you want to keep up, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter. Also, you can hear about many of these trends at Smart Kitchen Summit Europe, which is in Dublin on June 12th.

January 13, 2018

Podcast: The CES 2018 Smart Kitchen & Foodtech Wrapup Show

CES 2018 is in the books. It was a hectic week packed with smart kitchen news and showcases. Mike was on the floor in Las Vegas and reveals the big trends (voice activation everywhere!), the cool news stuff (guided cooking!), and the countertop dishwasher he calls “sexy.”

Take a listen for all the in-depth analysis you need. You can also subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show in Apple Podcasts or download it here.

CES

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