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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

ChefSteps

Conversational Cooking: Exploring Chatbots As a Cooking Interface (Podcast)

When I tell people I cook with Facebook, they give me a strange look.

But using Facebook’s chatbot as a cooking interface is surprisingly natural. The first cooking company to create a Facebook Messenger chatbot interface is ChefSteps, who launched their Joule-Messenger integration earlier this year.

The chatbot is part of the company’s larger vision around the idea of ‘conversational cooking’, which I discuss with the ChefSteps CTO Michael Natkin.

You can download this episode here. Make sure to subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Allrecipes And Others Leveraging Amazon For Guided Cooking Efforts

Allrecipes, one of the web’s original food and recipe pioneers, is making yet another move into the smart kitchen.

And not surprisingly, the nearly twenty-year-old company has once again partnered up with crosstown online commerce giant and newly minted grocery store chain operator Amazon to do so.

This week Allrecipes announced it is one of the first companies to launch a video skill for cooking. The company’s new Alexa video skill fuses video and photos with step-by-step instructions to make their recipes fully immersive cooking guides.

Meredith (owner of Allrecipes) President Stan Pavlovsky highlights how the addition of voice and video transitions a simple recipe into an interactive experience: “Voice-led experiences are playing a rapidly growing role in helping home cooks discover and prepare recipes with ease. Adding visual guidance to that experience is the next step. With this skill, Allrecipes turns the cooking show of the past into an interactive and fully customizable experience that has more than 60,000 paths to choose.”

As recipes become more interactive and increasingly connected to cooking hardware through software, a new battleground is opening up to become the guided cooking software platform for the kitchen. While the new Alexa video skill no doubt creates new partnership opportunities for Allrecipes to work with cookware and appliance manufacturers, it also puts them more directly in competition with other players creating cooking guidance systems centered around recipe information.

Just this past month, cooking app maker SideChef launched its first app from a new publishing platform designed to create personality-centric guided cooking apps. The Budget Bytes app, created in cooperation with well-known food blogger Beth Moncel (the author behind the popular Budget Byes blog), combines photos, Alexa voice guidance with step-by-step instructions for the user.

This move follows efforts by companies like Drop and Innit to create guided cooking software platforms that connect directly with third party appliances and cookware through IoT technology.  Others, like ChefSteps and Hestan Cue, have created fully integrated systems that fuse recipe driven visual instruction apps with sensor-enabled cooking devices.

At the center of much of this activity is Amazon, acting as an IoT and AI “arms dealer” with Alexa and its hardware platforms to help power companies in the kitchen space to create new products and accelerate transitions to new business models. The new SideChef app integrates with Alexa, as does ChefSteps for its Joule connected cooking appliance. And while we have yet to see any significant move by these companies to utilize Amazon’s image recognition APIs, it’s just a matter of time before one of these companies incorporates the company’s computer vision technology as part of a guided cooking system.

Of course, Amazon partners always have to wonder which parts of the business the Seattle giant will ultimately decide to enter themselves. As we saw with Nucleus, Amazon often will partner with companies and then create specific products that look similar to those products. And, as Geekwire points out, with Whole Foods Amazon now has access to a large cache of recipe information. Chances are they will eventually look to that data more closely with the Alexa and Dash platforms to power their own devices and create opportunities for direct commerce.

But for now, Allrecipes and others are happy to work with Amazon to help transition the recipe from a simple list of ingredients to interactive guidance platform.

Anova Opens Pre-Orders For The Sub-$100 Nano

This week, Anova opened up pre-orders for their Nano, the company’s first sub-$100 sous vide circulator.

The device, which ships in October, is 25% smaller and a full pound lighter than the company’s Wi-Fi Precision Cooker. Perhaps more importantly, the Nano comes in about $70 less than the company’s flagship product. The full price for the Nano is $99, (if you move fast, you can preorder the Nano for $69), marking the first time Anova has dropped below the $100 mark.

The new lower-priced machine comes at a time when the sous vide market is getting more competitive. ChefSteps has been doing well with the Joule (and recently released a lower-cost version of their own), and low priced competitors like Gourmia have attracted budget conscious consumers. With the Nano and its $99 price tag, Anova hopes it can attract value customers looking for a low-priced sous vide circulator.

Later this year the company will ship its second generation Pro circulator for $299.  The company’s Precision Oven, a combi-oven that the company announced last year at the Smart Kitchen Summit, was originally expected to ship this summer, but the ship date has been bumped back to summer 2018.

Want to see Anova CEO Steve Svajian speak about building a smart kitchen company? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit.  Also, make sure to subscribe to get The Spoon in your inbox. 

ChefSteps Expands Further Into Food With Launch Of Pre-Cooked Meals

Back in February, I  wrote about ChefSteps’ plan to create a meat ‘marketplace’ that would connect “independent ranchers with ChefSteps users, offering them direct access to high-quality meat and ingredients at great prices.”

As it turns out, this effort was part of a larger initiative to expand into food sales that is starting to come into fuller focus. The most visible part of this foray into food sales is the company’s growing business selling meat and fish sourced from local food providers in the Seattle and Portland markets. In the Seattle market, the company offers fresh meat and fish from four local providers (three for meats, one provider of fresh fish). The kits for sale on the company’s website range in price from $79 to $239. And yes – one package, the ‘Mountain of Meat,’ includes 30 pounds of steaks. (Holy meat sweats).

And now, the company has started selling pre-cooked, frozen meals.The pre-cooked meals are sold as what ChefSteps is calling, ‘Joule On-Demand BBQ.’ The meals are all single-serve portions and range in price from $7 to $12. Unlike the fresh meat and seafood, the pre-cooked meals from ChefSteps offer local shipping as a fulfillment option.  Deliveries are fulfilled by PostMates.

The Mountain of Meat meal kit from ChefSteps

These pre-cooked meals appear similar to those announced by Nomiku in April. As with Nomiku’s new meal kits, the BBQ meals are intended to be prepared in a shorter amount of time than traditional sous vide, usually less than an hour.

This move into pre-cooked meals by both ChefSteps and Nomiku shows the growing effort by both companies to expand the appeal of sous video to a broader audience.  Sous vide has traditionally appealed to foodies who are willing to invest more time in preparing chef-like meals, but with pre-cooked meal offerings, the companies believe sous vide becomes more appealing to those home cooks who prioritize convenience.

Of course, pre-cooked meals aren’t the only way to make cooking with sous vide easier for the home cook. ChefSteps and Anova have both been busy launching hands-free voice interface integrations this year, and in February ChefSteps became the first cooking appliance company to launch a chatbot for cooking with their Facebook Messenger bot.

So what became of the meat marketplace teased by the company’s February job listing? According to ChefSteps CEO Chris Young, the idea was to create a nationwide marketplace for “sous vide ready ingredients during the holiday season last year in partnership with the Snake River Farms brand.” As part of the effort, they sell meats nationwide to help ChefSteps customers get, as Young put it, a “center-piece protein for their holiday meal.”

As they worked on the plan, ChefSteps realized that costs of setting up a nationwide delivery system would be too high at this time, so for now the company is content to work out the kinks while selling meat and delivering pre-cooked meals in the Seattle and Portland markets.

“We’re continuing to experiment based on the positive feedback we’re getting from our Seattle and Portland customers, and we’re very aware that we have customers across the United States,’ said Young. “We definitely want to be able to serve those customers asap, but only when we think our service will deliver the experience and value our customers expect from us.”

Make sure to subscribe to the Spoon newsletter to get it in your inbox. And don’t forget to check out the Smart Kitchen Summit, where ChefSteps CEO Chris Young and many others will speak at the first and only event about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen. 

Wanna Sous Vide Some Bacon? Smart Kitchen Data Shows You’ll Do It On Saturday

I don’t know about you, but Sunday evening dinner at my house usually means something simple like sloppy Joes, tacos or even the occasional brinner.

But not everyone mails it in when it comes to the end of the weekend meal. According to data gathered by ChefSteps, which recently reached the milestone of a million meals cooked by users of their Joule sous vide immersion circulator, users of the cooking appliance are making decidedly tastier meals like lamb chops and tenderloin roast for their Sunday evening meals.

Three Joule cooking guides that are popular on Sunday

It used to be that any guess about what people cooked on a given night was just that, a guess, often times based on survey data. But when a device is connected, it’s actually possible to look at usage data in realtime.

Data like cooking frequency and the types of meals people are cooking on what nights. According to ChefSteps CEO Chris Young, about 2 in 10 users are likely to use their Joule on any given day, and about 4 in 10 are likely to use it each week. Each Joule has about a 70% likelihood of being used in a give month.

The way in which ChefSteps determines what a given person is cooking with the Joule is through analyzing the different cooking guides, the visual instructions found in the Joule app that walk users through a recipe.  According to Young, about half of Joule users use the cooking guides when making a meal, with the other half cooking in manual mode.

Young says that as the company has released more cooking guides, usage of ‘guided cooking’ has jumped from 30% to 50% of all cooking sessions with the Joule. He also indicated that the company is also able to effect behavior by releasing certain guides.

“When we create a guide, we can spike demand,” said Young. “When we published the overnight bacon cooking guide, bacon cooking went through the roof.”

And when is bacon cooking popular? Saturday, of course.

You can check out the which days of week each cooking guide are most popular by looking at the graphic below:

Usage of Joule cooking guides by days of the week

And since this is sous vide we’re talking about, it’s not altogether surprising that the most popular type of meal cooked with the Joule is steak. After steak, chicken, pork and eggs also show up as favorites.

You can see the overall ranking of the meal types by popularity below:

Popularity of all meals by type for the Joule

Live From Housewares Show : How Will Smart Home Change Housewares Industry?

Mike showed up at the Housewares Show in Chicago this past week to discuss how the smart home will change the world of blenders, vacuum cleaners, cookware and home furnishings. Joining him was the Nathan Smith, CTO of Wink, Carley Knobloch, HGTV’s smart home expert, and Chris Young, CEO of ChefSteps.

Smart Home Tech Will Disrupt The Housewares Industry. Discuss.

After walking the show floor at last year’s Housewares Show in Chicago, I became pretty excited. As with most consumer industries, I’m convinced the housewares industry will witness significant change over the next decade as disruptive new technology ushers in new business models, services and creative new products that will reshape the entire space.  Based on what I saw on the show floor and heard in my conversations, it felt like we were only in the first or second inning of this shift.

All of which meant most of the change to this important industry is still to come, so when I was asked by the Home and Housewares Association to develop and moderate the keynote panel for this year’s show, I knew there would be a whole bunch to talk about. To do that, I knew I would need panelists who could provide smart, provocative and diverse but complimentary viewpoints to help the audience understand the issues and walk away with actionable insights.

That’s exactly what I got. Here are the panelists for the keynote panel entitled ‘How The Smart Home Is Disrupting Housewares’:

Nathan Smith – CTO, Wink. Wink is one of the most high-profile startups of the modern smart home wave, and Nathan has been there since the beginning.

Carley Knobloch – As HGTV’s resident smart home expert, Carley’s focus is always on the end-consumer and whether a given product is solving real problems or just technology for technology’s sake.

Chris Young – as CEO of ChefSteps and co-author of Modernist Cuisine, Chris has his feet firmly planted in both the world of culinary innovation and hardware creation for consumers. Finding that middle ground that brings professional-like skills in the form of connected hardware is something Young’s been focuses on

We discussed a bunch of things, including the shifting retail landscape, the arrival of artificial intelligence and connected commerce, consumer experiences and use-cases, the importance of product utility, virtual assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, Millennials and cooking and so much more.

Based on what I learned this year, I’m convinced the housewares space is waking up to the opportunity of the connected home. I can’t wait to see how much will change by next year’s show.

You can watch the entire panel by clicking play above.

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Q&A With Crowd Cow’s Ethan Lowry

Used to be if you wanted to buy meat directly from a farmer without a middleman, you’d have to go find a farmer to sell you a side of beef.  The only problem is, not many of us have a giant freezer to hold hundred of pounds of meat let alone time to drive out and find a farmer.

Enter Crowd Cow. The company makes directly sourcing meat from a farmer much easier through crowdfunding a cow (or technically a heifer or steer) with others online.

The company was founded after former UrbanSpoon founder Ethan Lowry heard a friend rave about the beef he had bought directly from a farmer. Before long, he half-joked with his eventual co-founder Joe Heitzenberg that they should crowdfund a cow.

They eventually did just that and, when to their surprise it worked, Crowd Cow was born.

We decided to catch up with Ethan to ask him a few questions about his company that is trying to bring meat directly to the consumer through crowdsourcing.

Wolf: Grass fed beef delivery services tend to serve local geographies. How do you plan to scale Crow Cow as you go nationwide?

Lowry: Giving consumers across the country access to high-quality, sustainably and ethically-raised beef is exactly what Crowd Cow aims to do. With the rancher relationships we have today, we can reach customers in 14 states. But we’re excited to be national by the end of this summer. To make that happen we need to bring in new ranchers, which is a time-intensive process since we need to do very thorough vetting. We also need to build fulfillment centers across the US so we can efficiently reach customers in different markets.

Wolf: Why use a crowdfund mechanism for each cow? Does it lead to more engagement? 

Lowry: One thing that makes Crowd Cow unique is that we sell the entire animal from a ranch. By crowdfunding each cow, we’re giving consumers exactly what they want, and doing it in a way that doesn’t waste any part of the beef. It’s a nose-to-tail selling experience that you won’t find elsewhere. Some people just love strip steaks and tenderloins, other people just want roasts, and others are really excited to get harder-to-find cuts like oxtail, heart, kidney and tongue.

It gives our customers a sense of community too. It’s not just a one-off purchase they’re making. They, along with their friends and family, can get together and support a particular farmer with a particular story. Also, it’s a bit of a game to watch a cow move towards tipping, the term we use when an entire animal has been purchased. It encourages people to rally their friends and family, buy up shares, and make sure the cow tips.

It’s also important to point out that the small, independent farms we work with can only sell an entire animal. Industrial farms producing thousands and thousands of animals can have them slaughtered and then distribute all the tenderloins to one place and then all the hanger steaks to another. Our farmers don’t work with massive wholesale buyers who do this type of piece-by-piece distribution. They rely on buyers like us, or local butchers and restaurants that can really use all the parts of the animal. We respect this process. We know our ranchers are great at raising delicious beef and we enjoy the challenge of buying the whole animals and finding innovative ways to sell them to consumers.

Wolf: As you go national, do you see regional or even local crowdfund campaigns? (and does that mean the consumer in a specific geography only sees cows that are being crowdfunded in their local geography?)

Lowry: We can’t wait to have partners across the country so we can offer customers locally-raised beef. We’d love to offer California customers California beef and Chicago customers Midwestern beef.

But beyond that, we want customers to experience beef in the same way that you would a fine wine. Beef raised on one ranch actually tastes different from beef raised on another ranch. The flavor comes from what it grazed on during its life, the particular breed it came from (like Angus or Hereford or Wagyu), and importantly the care and treatment it received. It’s exciting to sample beef from different ranchers and find the one you absolutely love.

Crowd Cow is about great-quality beef from the best farmers, but it’s also about experiencing different types of beef and finding your favorites. Featuring regional farms will help us achieve this.

Wolf: Grass fed beef is around 2% nationally, but growing fast. Is your growth a result of this trend as well as the movement towards newer ways to buy food more locally (the Portlandia consumer as you define it)

Lowry: There’s certainly growing interest in understanding how our food is produced. Part of that is consumers being better educated about the downsides to both the animals and ranchers that comes with industrial farming practices. Another part of that is understanding how the food we eat truly impacts our health. When you realize that much of the meat you find at your local supermarket has been pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics, most people would think twice about eating it.

We’re definitely benefiting from this overall food supply chain awareness. Because we partner with farmers that follow ethical and sustainable practices, customers can have confidence in what they’re eating, and it’s a primary reason our customers are telling us that they shop from us. Now, the reason they keep coming back is because this beef happens to be delicious.

I should also note that not all of our beef is exclusively grass fed. We’re certainly open to working with farmers that grain-finish their beef — which means they feed their cattle grain to fatten them up before slaughter. Provided they aren’t using hormones or antibiotics, crowding their animals into pens, or otherwise acting in ways they would ashamed to admit to customers. In fact, we work with some amazing wagyu beef farmers that grain-finish their cattle because it results in a beautifully marbled beef.

What we focus on is transparency. We think people want and deserve to know where their food is coming from, and that supermarket labels are misleading and insufficient. When we ask our customers what really gets them excited about beef from Crowd Cow, it has much more to do with this aspect of our business. Customers care where their food comes from, and we can give them that insight.

Wolf: As consumers move towards local food purchasing enabled through technology-driven marketplaces, how does this look in the future?

Lowry: As consumers, we’ve gotten used to having more and more information about the products we buy, so we can make more knowledgeable decisions and tradeoffs. Digital marketplaces are a fantastic way to get that information. A two-inch label on a grocery store shelf just can’t offer that kind of help.

Wolf: Part of the charm of buying local is getting out and talking to local producers at farmer’s markets, local butchers, etc. Have you thought about ways to keep that alive since you are moving this process online?

Lowry: Absolutely! When you come to our site one of the very first things you’ll see is a complete feature on the farmer whose beef we’re selling that day. You get a video tour of the ranch so you can see their pasture and their grazing herd. We present detailed background about the farmer, their practices and the beef itself.

The digital space is an amazing place to engage with people just like you who may live thousands of miles away. You don’t usually see customers talking to each other at a farmer’s market about favorite recipes, grilling techniques, or even the tastiness of different cattle breeds. But with an online community, we can create this one-to-one experience.

Wolf: One of your local Seattle startup peers, ChefSteps, is looking to build a direct-to-consumer steak marketplace.  Is the market still nascent and big enough to lift all boats, or do you see competition rising?

Lowry: Getting the best quality, sustainably and ethically raised beef delivered to a consumer’s door is quite a bit easier said than done. We let you order just the cuts and quantity you are looking for, from the farm you choose, delivered to you. We have to be unbelievably diligent about who we work with and how we assess their practices, we have to efficiently package and deliver each custom order, and fuel a growing community. That’s no easy task.

Right now we’re not seeing anyone offering what we are, and we know (from hard experience) that it will be difficult for anyone else to do this.

That said, I think other companies talking about the importance of high-quality meat is great for us, and consumers, by simply raising awareness. Our biggest challenge is to get the word out so people realize they have a choice.

Wolf: We focus a lot on the future of the kitchen. Have you thought about ways to leverage growing interest in cooking tech and new technology in the kitchen for your business of crowdfunding cows?

Lowry: Each and every Crowd Cow beef cut is vacuum-sealed in a food safe pouch and then flash frozen. At a very basic level, this makes it easy to keep fresh in your freezer until you’re ready to cook it up. But, this is also really great for sous vide cooking. Customers are always sending us pictures of their sous-vide-prepared meat and it looks amazing.

As the cost of sous vide devices comes down and the features and quality get better and better, I’m sure more customers will want to try it out. At this point an Anova is less than $150, and it’s an amazing little machine. We’re definitely excited to help people learn more about sous vide and how it can help them prepare restaurant-quality beef at home.

I also think new food tech innovations like June, the “smart” oven, align beautifully with what we’re about. This is a device that’s designed to give you high-quality food, coupled with convenience and simplicity. That’s almost exactly what we’re trying to do with Crowd Cow — bring you the best quality beef, with the convenience of ordering online and home delivery.

Wolf: Can you see extending Crowd Cow into other forms of locally produced food?

Lowry: Definitely. There’s a ton of demand for ethically and sustainably raised meat. Almost since day one we’ve had customers asking us for pork, chicken, lamb, fish and other more exotic meats.

Right now however, we’re hyper-focused on finding fantastic beef farmers across the US. Once we’ve nailed that, we’ll work with farmers to offer other great products.

I Made Steak With Facebook Messenger. Here’s How It Went

We know that over half of Echos end up in the kitchen, making Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa a good option for those looking for a new-fangled way to help make food.

But what about Facebook Messenger? While we don’t have exact numbers on how many use Facebook’s communication app while in the kitchen, with over a billion downloads of the app in Google Play Store alone, my guess would be a lot.

Still, that doesn’t mean we think of Messenger as an interface to, well, our steak, but that’s exactly what ChefSteps thought when they announced they’d created a Facebook Messenger bot for the Joule.

I’d used Alexa in the past to cook with my Joule, and it worked well for things like starting a cook and checking water temperature, but I wanted to see how cooking with Facebook would go and to see if a bot of the non-voice variety was useful when preparing the nightly meal.

Here’s how it went.

First I went to the ChefSteps support page for using Messenger and tried to talk with my Joule, which I had inserted into the water with a nice ribeye. I was told I would first need to log into my ChefSteps account. Fair enough.

Once logged in, the ChefSteps Chatbot, which we’ll call Joule-bot for this post, reminded me of what I’d named it and gave a few clues about what it could do.

I decided to jump right and tell Joule-bot what I wanted to cook a steak. I got a pop-up message telling me a little about sous vide complete with a visual guide to doneness (a big focus for ChefSteps overall with their guided cooking approach for the Joule app).

As you can see above, the tone of the bot is casual but also informative. I like the ability to choose the length of cook with their visual doneness guide. This is an advantage over cooking with Alexa which (obviously) can’t show you how what a cook will look like as a voice bot.

Once I chose medium rare (you didn’t think I wanted a Trump Cook did you?), Joule-bot asked me a few more questions to understand how to go about cooking my ribeye.

 

Once it knew I was cooking fresh and how thick the steak was, it was able to set the temperature. As you can see, I had already started the Joule (with Alexa – meaning I technically had a battle of the bots over my evening meal), so it told me, in essence, my water was running a bit hot. The Joule, like other sous vide circulators, can adjust down as it lets the water cook and will then hold the temperature, which is what happened for my cook.

You can also see that Joule-bot told me that that it is still young and hasn’t fully matured, meaning it wouldn’t be able to send me notifications in Messenger about when things were done. This is where Joule’s native app has an advantage over the Joule-bot.

I decided I wasn’t done with Joule-bot, since I wanted to see if it could help me out with my ribeye prep and post-cook. I decided to ask it a few more questions and see how it responded.

When I asked it how to prepare steak, wondering if I could surface some of the same types of information that Joule app does with its cooking guides. While it didn’t give me the same, concise cooking guide I get within the Joule, it did give me a link which provides access to much of the same information on the ChefSteps website.

My next message confused Joule-bot a bit, mostly because I think of my language choice. I was trying to get Joule-bot to tell me something it had already done (2 hours of cook time) with a specific question about that. Instead, it guessed that I was trying to see when my Joule would ship by surfacing an FAQ question.

While the logic wasn’t perfect, I think the response was fine. Since Joule-bot lets the user give feedback, this will help refine the bot’s logic over time. It also gave me lots of options of what to do next, with links to the ChefSteps community forum, recipes and also the option to file a support ticket.

Conclusion

Overall, cooking with Facebook Messenger was an interesting – but for now limited – experience. Joule-bot allowed me to set temperature based on visual guidance, told me in a conversational voice when my meal would be done, and directed me to the information rich ChefSteps website when it didn’t have the answers.

What it didn’t do was provide notifications, a big difference which gives the Joule app an advantage for now.  Joule-bot also didn’t have the richness of information provided by the in-app cooking guides (though, as mentioned, it did send me links to the ChefSteps website).

Compared to Alexa, Joule-bot has an advantage in the type of the information it can provide, such as visual guides around doneness.  However, Alexa commands are just a little easier (what’s easier than talking?) and I could see how Alexa would be preferred over Joule-bot when I’m preparing food with my hands.

Lastly, it’s important to ask the question: is cooking with Facebook Messenger a good idea?For now, I would say the Joule app is a better experience, but over time a bot could have some advantages. Messenger’s conversation logic is very good, and those used to using chat as a way to interface with people may also find it also a good way to control their things (like the Joule). I also think as many of us tire of apps for every device, Messenger is a logical candidate to become that universal app, especially as bots become better.

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ChefSteps Working On Marketplace To Connect Cattle Ranchers With Consumers

Just last week, ChefSteps announced the rollout of a new Facebook Messenger bot to assist users of its Joule sous vide cooker in the process of making a meal. This just a few months after adding an Alexa skill for the Joule, and we know from conversations with the company they have plans to create a platform that would enable influencers like chefs to create branded content for the Joule.

If this wasn’t enough to convince you the busy Seattle cooking startup has a whole lot of balls in the air, there’s one more business they’d like to add to their juggling act. According to a job posting on ChefSteps.com, the company also has plans to launch a new line of business that allows independent ranchers to sell their meat directly to users of the Joule.

According to the job listing, the new product manager position will oversee a marketplace that connects “independent ranchers with ChefSteps users, offering them direct access to high-quality meat and ingredients at great prices.”  The new position would oversee the marketplace and help to manage the home delivery service portion of this new line of business.

It’s an interesting move for ChefSteps. The world of high-quality meat is one that is largely still dependent on the traditional wholesale food distribution business, with the vast majority of meat still being bought through grocery and food retail.  Changing this business would take a heavy lift, but given that sous vide customers are already somewhat enlightened when it comes to the quality of food, ChefSteps probably believes it can extend that higher awareness into the actual steak purchase itself.

Could it work? Maybe. Success would be dependent on whether there is an underserved market for quality steaks and if ChefSteps can provide a unique way to connect producers of meat and consumers that has interesting economics for both parties.

The motivation for moving into ancillary areas to their current hardware business is clear. The consumer sous vide appliance market is heating up, as companies like Anova, who is now part of Electrolux, and ChefSteps are starting to see increased competition from low-cost brands such as Gourmia and InstantPot.  ChefSteps early success with the Joule resulted from successfully tapping into the company’s large online community, but recent moves suggest that they see continued innovation around new features and services as a way to keep ahead of the crowd.

Hestan Cue Available For Preorder As New Generation of Guided Cooking Systems Come To Market

Last March at the Housewares show in Chicago, I had scheduled a meeting to swing by housewares giant Meyer’s booth to check out a demo of a new product they were calling the Hestan Cue.

All I knew about the product was it had morphed out of work done by Meld, a startup founded in 2014 to create a retrofit smart knob to add some aftermarket automation and control to existing stove tops. After a successful Kickstarter, Meld was stealthily acquired by Meyer and for the next six months no one heard from the connected cooking startup.

So when I got invited to see what had become of Meld, I was naturally intrigued. I had no idea what I was going to see at the Meyer booth, but I suspected it might be something similar to the retrofit knob Meld had built.

I quickly realized after I had arrived was they had scrapped that idea entirely and created something much cooler: a guided cooking system.

The next hour was eye opening, as chef Philip Tessier, Hestan’s in-house culinary director (and soon-to-be gold medal winner at what is essentially the culinary Olympics), asked me to cook salmon for him. Naturally, I was a bit nervous cooking for an award winning chef, but ultimately had no problem making some tasty fish using the guidance provided by the Hestan Cue app.

As I wrote at the time:

“It was this combination of the pan, burner and app and the guidance system they had built that 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 by 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).”

It’s been almost a year since I first used the Hestan Cue, and in that time new products have started to emerge on the guided cooking front. ChefSteps has created a cool cooking guidance system for their sous vide circulator, the Joule, while new features in Pantelligent‘s software has made this smart pan into a guided cooking system. Danish startup Ztove is creating a system similar to the Hestan Cue, while Cuciniale is selling what it calls ‘intelligent cooking systems’ that feature an induction heating surface and a variety of cookwares with a sensor probe. Lastly, multicooker leader Thermomix continues to evolve their fifth generation product into what is essentially a guided cooking system powered by a 12-in-1 cooking tool.

And now, the Hestan Cue is available for preorder on the Williams-Sonoma website and will begin shipping in March.

The product’s price carries an MSRP of $699 but is available for $499 online.  The price is a bit higher than other products like the Joule, so the choice of high-end retailer Williams-Sonoma makes sense. I expect Williams-Sonoma will have in-store demos for the Hestan Cue, something needed to convey the concept of guided cooking.

No matter which way you slice it, it looks like we can expect more guided cooking systems on the menu in 2017.

Cinder Grill Now Shipping As Precision Cooking Market Heats Up

The long-anticipated Cinder grill is finally making its way to customers.

Earlier this month the company announced on Facebook that production units will be shipping to those who pre-purchased the Cinder. The grill, which uses two aluminum cooking plates with embedded temperature sensing in an enclosed (but not airtight) cooking chamber, has been available for preorder for the past year at a price of $399, $100 below the MSRP of $499. The company expects to have all US preorders delivered by the end of February and Canadian preorders shipped by the end of March.

Shipping product marks the end of a long journey for CEO Eric Norman and Cinder, which have been working on the grill for five years. The company filed patents in 2012 and 2013 for precision cooking techniques, and has been working to bring the product to production ever since.

As the company neared production at the end of last year, they experienced slight production delays due to the complicated nature of the grill, which Norman explained in a recent blog post:

“…we analyzed the build rate using data from a sophisticated measurement system and discovered the rate of production was far below our goal. Factory estimates were off because Cinder is an order of magnitude more complicated than any electric grill ever produced. The accuracy and testing requirements of Cinder are high, requiring different part suppliers to coordinate in unfamiliar ways. This was the cost of going for super high-quality while shooting for a reasonable cost. Sometimes logistics or communication were not smooth, requiring more time and effort than expected.”

Cinder now joins a growing group of companies bringing precision cooking products to the consumer market. At this year’s big tech show in Vegas, leading sous vide circulator company Anova announced a refreshed lineup and showed off a demo model of its precision oven, FirstBuild announced a new version of the Paragon with guided cooking capabilities, while upstart Gourmia continued their aggressive rollout of products.

With all of this action, there’s no doubt precision cooking will have an interesting 2017.