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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chefling

Fridge Cam Maker Smarter Launches New Models at CES, Announces Acquisition of Chefling

Smarter is off to a busy 2023. At CES in Las Vegas today, the fridge cam and kitchen tech startup announced a new lineup of fridge cams. And, if that wasn’t enough, the company also announced they have acquired smart kitchen software maker Chefling.

The new lineup of fridge cams includes an update to the company’s original model. The FridgeCam2 has an extended 3-month battery life, an upgraded processor, and easier one-click set-up via the device’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. In addition to new FridgeCam, the company also introduced the FoodCam Mini, a small form-factor model that can be placed in the fridge or the pantry.

Smarter is also debuting the FridgeCam Pro this week, a model targeted at appliance manufacturers who want to retrofit a fridge cam into their refrigerator models without significant redesign. According to Smarter, the Pro model, which is powered by a USB-C connection, can be added to a fridge without having to make expensive modifications to an OEM’s pre-existing hardware.

Above: Smarter Image Recognition Technology

In addition to new hardware, the company announced it had acquired Chefling, a startup whose software helps home cooks manage food inventory, create shopping lists and plan meals. Smarter plans to pair Chefling’s food inventory database with its food image recognition capabilities to create what it says is the most advanced food inventory management system available.

Chefling, which got early traction through a partnership and investment from Bosch, has been pretty quiet for the last year and a half. By putting its software into the hands of Smarter, it gives its technology new life through the newly combined companies’ fuller suite of software targeted at the difficult task of consumer inventory management.

“The software offered by Chefling is the missing piece of the puzzle in terms of providing a full end to end service,” Chrisian Lane, CEO of Smarter, said in a release sent to The Spoon. “Taking the hard work out of stock keeping, meal planning and deciding what you need to buy next. We have automated the entire planning and cooking experience, making it the ideal assistant for the kitchen”.

Smarter also announced a new inventory management software tool it calls KitchenSync. The tool, paired with Smarter’s computer vision, can determine whether food is in stock or not. The software can factor in other sensor data (such as a weight sensor) and determine whether an item needs to be replenished. The software can also integrate with a customer’s online grocery service and can match food inventory to purchases.

If you want to check out Smarter’s new FridgeCam lineup, they’ll be at Showstoppers at CES.

Smarter Managing Director Isabella Lane will be on stage tomorrow at the CES Food Tech Conference on the future of cooking session.

Food Tech News: Chefling Increases Personalization Offerings, More Whole Foods Go Dark

This weekend you might be trying out a new banana bread recipe, tackling a crossword or just leaving your house for some fresh air (with a mask, of course). We celebrate the small victories.

We also celebrate our weekly food tech news roundup! This edition has stories on Chefling’s new partnership with Edamam, Whole Foods continuing to go dark, Postmates’ new curbside pickup, and Impossible Foods’ upcoming cookbook. Enjoy!

Chefling teams up with Edamam for more personalization
Smart kitchen startup Chefling announced this week that it would work with Edamam, a nutrition analysis company, to improve its offerings. Chefling currently has an app that suggests recipes to users based on ingredients they have in their kitchen. Now it will use Edamam’s food and nutrition database to help better tailor said recipe suggestions based on lifestyle and diet, such as keto, gluten-free and vegan. 

Photo: Impossible Foods

Impossible Foods to unveil cookbook
Plant-based meat company Impossible Foods has opened preorders for its cookbook, which will debut on June 16. The cookbook has 40 recipes from well-known chefs, like Michael Symon and Traci Des Jardins, all featuring Impossible’s “bleeding” meatless beef. The book will retail for $21.82 on Amazon and $3 of each sale will be donated to No Kid Hungry.

Photo: Whole Foods

Whole Foods marches forward with “dark” stores
This week Whole Foods opened its sixth “dark” store since the pandemic in Chicago (h/t GroceryDive). To meet unprecedented demand for online groceries, Whole Foods has been converting its locations to delivery-only stores, also known as “dark” stores. Some of these locations had not yet been opened to the public, while others have transformed to allow some foot traffic while reserving most space for delivery grocery fulfillment. 

Postmates introduces curbside pickup
On-demand delivery service Postmates announced this week that it was instituting curbside pickup. The new service is meant to help businesses who are reopening navigate the bumps and serve consumers who might be hesitant to go inside the store. To use the feature, sellers can turn on the curbside pickup option from their Postmates dashboard. Consumers can then “Check In” to let the merchant know they’re outside. Postmates is also making the curbside pickup option available for their own delivery drivers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The machine learning capabilities at the core of UltraConnect have taken time to build and have gotten stronger as Chefling’s user base has grown into the hundreds of thousands, said Amar. As he told Chris last January, reaching over 600 thousand users meant “giving Chefling the hundreds of thousands of data points (recipes searched for or browsed, recipes chosen, frequency of cooking, etc.) required to do more deep learning and, as Krishna put it “unleash the algorithms.””  

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

PantryChic Partners With Chefling To Power Smart Pantry System

In the world of the connected kitchen, there’s been no shortage of tech-forward scales, fridges and ovens the past few years, but one area that’s remained remarkably devoid of innovation has been ingredient storage and dispensing.

Which is why I’ve long been intrigued by PantryChic, a startup I started following back in the smart kitchen early days back of 2015. The product is the brainchild of company CEO Nikki Lee, who’s been working alongside her husband Chris to bring the smart canister and ingredient dispenser system to market for over five years.

When we caught up with Nikki last year, she said they had plans to ship the product in 2018, but as Chris Albrecht noted in a follow up story the company had missed their ship date.

I asked them via email what happened, and Chris Lee said they delay was due in part to some partnerships they had been working with bigger companies that could have required potential product modifications, but that “diligence is taking longer than we expected we had to make some strategic decisions and we decided to move forward so we don’t miss this year.”

Which brings us to this week’s announcement at the Housewares Show, which is the company is  teaming up with Chefling to integrate the software startup’s AI-powered digital assistant for the consumer kitchen with the PantryChic system.

One of the last pieces the company needed to put into place as it looks to ship the product is software, and according to Chris Lee it made sense to partner with a company like Chefling.

“We chose to partner on the app side versus launching with our own App because the technology has advanced so rapidly with the integration of home assistants,” Chris Lee told me via email. “Chefling’s app design and customer value proposition are in line with what we were building and their integration of AI is very advanced making our partnership decision very easy.”

With PantryChic’s integration of Chefling, consumers will be able to track, manage and order ingredients from within the Chefling app. According to the release, the Chefling app will also recommend recipes based on what you have in your smart canisters and the app will track inventory and will be able to automatically re-order.

The deal is a smart move for Chefling, adding an interesting pantry solution to what has been a growing roster of larger appliance partners for its kitchen assistant. By adding PantryChic, the Chefling app will now be able to connect inventory management as a feature to select BSH Appliances powered by Bosch’s HomeConnect smart home platform as well as GE Appliances using GE’s U+ Connect platform.

According to Nikki Lee, the PantryChic will start shipping in July and will sell for $299, which includes the Chefling app, a base unit and three smart canisters.

Now With 600,000 Users, Chefling Turns On its Machine Learning Switch

Chefling released an update to its kitchen assistant app this week that the company says will create more personalized recommendations. The app update also includes enhanced pantry management as well as smart appliance controls.

Previously, we described Chefling’s service this way:

With the Chefling app, users can scan barcodes or take a picture of their receipt to monitor what foods they have in their fridge and pantry (and keep tabs on when that food will expire). Based on your food inventory, Chefling’s smart cookbook will then recommend recipes you can make. If you are missing any ingredients, Chefling automatically creates a shopping list for you and as you check these items off this list, the app keeps track of the new food available for newer recipe recommendations.

I spoke with Chefling Co-Founder Amar Krishna by phone and he said that prior to this week’s update, Chefling used “brute force” algorithms to make recipe recommendations because of its smaller data set. This time last year, the company had roughly 150,000 users. That number has since grown to 600,000 users, giving Chefling the hundreds of thousands of data points (recipes searched for or browsed, recipes chosen, frequency of cooking, etc.) required to do more deep learning and, as Krishna put it “unleash the algorithms.”

The result, Krishna said, is highly personalized recipe recommendations. Open the app, and it will serve up smarter, better, more accurate recipe recommendations based on the food you have. “It should know you more than you know yourself,” he said.

The app update also comes with a new food inventory feature. Through manual barcode and receipt scanning, Chefling has always kept track of what you add to your cupboards, but it didn’t know when they were removed. With this update, after you make a recipe, you can click to “Update Pantry” and it will subtract the amount of each ingredient used to make the recipe. This way the app knows how much of a particular ingredient you have left for future cooking.

Chefling is now also able to control certain Bosch smart appliances in your kitchen. From the recipe you can do things like set the oven or fridge temperature, or even turn on the coffee machine.

There are plenty of apps looking to become your kitchen assistant besides Chefling, namely Innit and SideChef. And all of them are striking deals with smart appliance manufacturers. Will this update be enough to help Chefling break through? We’ll have to see once it gets cookin’.

The Recipe Isn’t Dead. In Fact, It’s Becoming The Center of Action In The Digital Kitchen

At last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, celebrity chef Tyler Florence said: “the recipe is dead.”

Needless to say, it’s a bold statement. There’s no doubt that Florence is right to suggest that things are changing quickly in the age of Tasty cooking videos and that the time-worn practice of looking up recipes in cookbooks is something people are doing less every day.

But if today’s news about another Amazon integration with a popular online recipe site is any indication, I’d suggest the recipe is far from dead. In fact, it looks more and more like the recipe is becoming the center of action in the digital-powered kitchen.

And it’s not just Amazon that likes the idea of shoppable recipes. Companies like Northfork have integrated with the some of Europe’s biggest grocers to enable recipe-driven shopping, while big players like Google are building guided cooking recipe capabilities into their virtual assistant platforms.

Then there are AI-centric startups looking to take the recipe and add extra intelligence to it to make things more personalized and interactive. Companies like Wellio, Chefling and Pylon.AI are doing interesting work here.

Then there’s the recipe itself becoming fused with connected cooking hardware. Everyone from one of the world’s largest cookware companies in Hestan to the world’s biggest appliance maker in Whirlpool to cookbook disruptor Tasty are creating recipe-guided hardware.

And finally, if technology-driven integrations and one columnist’s opinion aren’t enough to convince you, there’s always old-school chefs like Christopher Kimball (check out our podcast!) who think the recipe has a long life ahead of it.

So no, the recipe is not so much dead as evolving. Instead, as our recipes become digitized and more connected, they’re becoming the center of action in the connected kitchen.

As Jon Jenkins suggested at last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, software isn’t only eating the world, but we are eating software. That software includes whatever the recipe is becoming which, in short, is probably just better, more evolved version of the recipe.

Chefling Is The Smart Kitchen Personal Assistant You Never Knew You Needed

The Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase provides a platform for exciting startups, inventors, culinary makers and cutting-edge product companies to showcase what they are working on and let others experience it firsthand. Now in its third year, the Startup Showcase + PitchFest take place during SKS on October 10-11, 2017 in Seattle and is sponsored by the leading maker of soups and simple meals, beverages, snacks and packaged fresh foods, Campbell Soup Company. Campbell’s will provide a $10,000 cash prize to the winner, announced at live at SKS.

Created in 2016 by a group of Northwestern University grads, the Chefling app was designed to be the ultimate smart kitchen assistant. The app, available on both Android and iPhone aims to resemble life spent in the kitchen of an average family and comes with three main features: a home inventory management system that syncs across devices, a colorful shopping list and a smart cookbook that suggests recipes based on available ingredients.

The home inventory management system monitors what a user buys and then keeps an eye on freshness levels, based on purchases. It also syncs across every family member’s device so any quick trips to the grocery store are simplified. The shopping list feature allows users to organize and create a list that is not only easy to browse, but easy to share. The cookbook feature browses a user’s inventory using an algorithm that calculates recipe matches based on what is in the pantry.

Chefling also has Amazon Echo and Google Home skills so users can operate the app hands-free through voice control.

Chefling’s long-term goal is to bring the platform outside of the phone and into smart fridges, as well as incorporating advanced A.I. elements and image recognition technology to create an assistant that is truly integrated with the home kitchen.

Learn more about Chefling at http://www.chefling.net/.

Use this link to get 25% off to the Smart Kitchen Summit & see the startups in action!