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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chris Young

Combustion Acquires Recipe App Crouton

Combustion, the smart thermometer startup founded by ChefSteps cofounder Chris Young, has acquired popular recipe app Crouton.

Crouton, developed by New Zealand-based software engineer Devin Davies, is a highly rated app that lets users organize all their recipes in one place. After launch, Crouton soon began gaining traction and critical attention (Apple awarded the app its 2024 Design Award for Interaction). Like many independent developers who experience success, Davies soon found himself having to manage the business side of running a startup—something he realized wasn’t aligned with his strengths.

“One thing I’ve come to realise about myself over the last wee while, is that what I care about most is designing interfaces that make it as easy as possible to get things done. User experience and what not,” wrote Davies in a blog post announcing the acquisition. “I’m not an entrepreneur or keen business leader. Stepping into full time indie and really trying to steer the ship highlighted to me just how much that jazz isn’t me. I actually really enjoy being just a part of the puzzle, not the whole puzzle.”

Davies had discovered Combustion’s open-source developer tools and had integrated the thermometer with Crouton. That work caught the attention of Young and the Combustion team.

“A year or so earlier, I had added support to Crouton to quickly set up the thermometer and also display its information as a Live Activity alongside your recipe. I jumped at the opportunity to collaborate and spent a few weeks working with Combustion to bring Live Activity support to their app like I had with Crouton.”

Before long, Young and Davies realized it made sense to join forces.

For Young, it’s clear that moves he’s made since starting Combustion – including acquiring Crouton – are based on insights he learned the hard way after building ChefSteps. At his previous company, Young spent millions of dollars creating expensive media-rich recipes for the ChefSteps website and the Joule sous vide app, only to eventually realize most consumers preferred finding recipes on the open web. With Crouton now in the fold, Young’s is now letting organic consumer usage behavior guide his product rather than trying to force behavior change on the consumer.

Young also learned his lesson with the ChefSteps Joule, where any software integration required resource-draining custom work. From the get-go with Combustion, he opened up access to the device’s real-time Bluetooth, which allowed developers, like Davies, to build cool software experiences around the Combustion thermometer.

Post-acquisition, Crouton will remain a standalone site, and Davies will lead both the development of Crouton and the Combustion app. For Davies, it seems like the perfect fit.

“So what is changing? Well, kind of nothing. I’m still very dedicated to Crouton and its future just got a lot brighter! I’ll still be the lead developer but now Crouton is backed by a whole team. A team with a deep knowledge of cooking and technology, that will help Crouton do even more! “

With Second Gen Lineup, Combustion Adds Wi-Fi to Product Mix and Ups Thermometer Temp to 900°F

Earlier this month, kitchen startup Combustion announced several upgrades to its product lineup, including a second-generation precision thermometer that can withstand temperatures up to 900°F and a new connected display that, for the first time, incorporates Wi-Fi into the Combustion product mix.

In addition to the thermometer and display updates, the company introduced a new wireless fan called the Combustion Engine. This device pairs with Combustion’s thermometer or the recently announced Grill Gauge to help control temperatures on outdoor grills.

I caught up with Combustion CEO Chris Young last week to discuss the new updates. He told me that the number one feature request from customers has been Wi-Fi connectivity.

“The thing about Wi-Fi is that consumers want it because, once you’re connected, you can keep an eye on things while you’re away,” Young told The Spoon.

Young, who previously worked on integrating Wi-Fi into the ChefSteps (now Breville) Joule, understands the significant complexity that Wi-Fi adds from a product management standpoint. This complexity is why Combustion took its time incorporating Wi-Fi into a product lineup that, until now, had relied solely on Bluetooth.

“Everybody inside the company who’s worked on this has experience doing it at scale and carries some scars from those efforts,” said Young. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it, so we took our time.”

That deliberate approach involved deciding where to include Wi-Fi—ultimately in the charging sleeve and display—and where not to include it, such as in the thermometer itself. The company also worked on managing battery life and ensuring efficient data transmission from the Wi-Fi chip.

Another major upgrade is the thermometer’s ability to withstand and measure temperatures up to 900°F, higher than most conventional consumer ovens can reach. Young explained the significant technical challenges involved in designing a device capable of performing at such high temperatures.

“You’re getting into exotic circuit board materials. Oxygen does crazy things at 900 degrees and starts to attack copper. So behind the scenes, it was a massive production process improvement that should result in higher reliability, better high-temperature performance, and what is essentially the most extreme submersible thermometer you could imagine.”

Early responses to the upgrades have been positive on the Combustion Reddit forum, where Young is active in answering user questions. The company expects to ship the new thermometer next month and the Combustion Engine in the spring of 2025. For those looking for a deal, the company is clearing out its Gen-1 thermometers (I have one, and it works well) ahead of Thanksgiving.

Chris Young: Generative AI Will Provide Big Payoffs in Helping Us Cook Better, But Overhyping It Will Burn Some Folks

Chris Young has never been shy about providing his thoughts about the future of cooking.

Whether it was on stage at the Smart Kitchen Summit, on his YouTube channel, or a podcast, he’s got lots of thoughts about how technology should and eventually will help us all cook better.

So when I caught up with him last week for the Spoon Podcast, I asked him how he saw things like generative AI impacting the kitchen and whether it was necessary for big appliance brands to invest in building out their internal AI competencies as part of their product roadmaps for the next decade. You can listen to the entire conversation on The Spoon podcast.

I’ve excerpted some of his responses below (edited slightly for clarity and brevity). If you’d like to listen to the full conversation, you can click play below or find it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

On the resistance by some to using advanced technology to help us cook better:

Young: “A lot of people are focused on going backward in the kitchen. They want to go back to cooking over charcoal and cooking over fire. That can be fun, but if you look back at what it was really like in the 19th century, the kitchen was not a fun place to be.”

“The modern kitchen is much healthier and much safer. And it does a better job of cooking our food. But we’ve kind of stalled, in my opinion, for the last couple of decades of really innovating and creating a compelling vision of what the future of the kitchen can be. I think the idea that our appliances are too stupid to know when to turn the temperature up or down to cook my food correctly is bizarre in the modern world where sensitive, high-quality sensors are cheap. And we have unlimited compute and AI now to answer a lot of these questions that humans struggle with, but I don’t see the big appliance companies or the incumbents doing this on their own. So, my small contribution was to create a tool that measures temperature and makes it very easy for people to do things with those measurements.”

On why it’s important to create a vision for the future of a technology-powered kitchen:

Young: “My criticism with a lot of people in this space is they haven’t sold a vision of what the future of that your kitchen could be like that resonates with people, that feels human, that makes it a place I want to go that is forward-looking rather than backward-looking. The kitchen of the 1950s, the kitchen of the 1920s, feels more human, feels more relatable, and I think people want that. It’s not to say you can’t create a forward-looking vision of a kitchen where it’s easier to cook food, it’s easier to bring people together and have everything work out right, but nobody’s really creating that vision.”

Combustion’s thermometer runs its machine-learning calculations on the chip within the thermometer rather than in the cloud where many AI compute happens. Young explains how – and why – they made that possible:

Young: “One of the crazy challenges was this is some pretty hardcore math. I think even we initially thought, ‘Oh, we’re gonna have to run this on the cloud, where we essentially have unlimited compute to run these fairly sophisticated algorithms.’ But we have some very clever software and firmware people on our team who have a lot of experience doing these kinds of hardcore machine-learning algorithms. And we were able to basically figure out some clever trick techniques to get the stuff running on the thermometer. The benefit is that it means the thermometer is always the ground truth; if you lose a connection, if you walk too far away, or if Bluetooth gets interrupted, or if any of that happens, the thermometer doesn’t miss a beat. It’s still measuring temperatures, it’s still running its physics model. So as soon as you reconnect, the results are there, and nothing has been lost.”

Young on the benefit of generative AI:

Young: “In the short term, AI as it’s being marketed is going to be disappointing to a lot of people. It’s going to burn some people in the way that IoT burned some people. But there’s going to be meaningful things that come out of it.”

“…When I was playing with ChatGPT 3.5 and I would ask it cooking questions, the answers were mostly garbage, as judged from my chef perspective. When GPT 4 came out, and I started asking some of the same questions, the answers were actually pretty good. I might quibble with them, but they wouldn’t completely fail you and they weren’t garbage. And if you modified the prompt to rely on information from Serious Eats, ChefSteps, or other reputable sources, all of a sudden, I might have given you a different answer, but it’s not necessarily better. And in many cases, what people want is a good enough answer. Building those kinds of things into the cooking experience where, when you run into a problem, or you’re confused about what this means, something like the Crouton app, or the Combustion app, or a website can quickly give you a real-time good enough answer, that actually solves your problem and keeps you moving forward and getting dinner done. Those I think will be really, really big payoffs, and that stuff’s coming.”

Young on whether big food and appliance brands should invest on building their own AI internal competency:

Young: “It’s hard to give advice when that’s not my business. But I have a few observations from having worked with these companies. It’s very hard to sustain a multi-year effort on something like an AI software feature. For these companies, that culture doesn’t exist, the way of thinking about the long term payoff of software tends to not be a strength of these companies. And so while they have the resources to go do this, the willingness to make those investments and sustain them, for years and years and years, and learn and iterate, that hasn’t proven to be their greatest strength.”

“I think that is kind of why there was an opportunity for Combustion, and for a company like Fisher Paykel (ed note: Fisher Paykel has integrated the Combustion thermometer to work with some of their appliances) to recoup the millions and millions of dollars, we’ve invested in the AI in our algorithms team. (Fisher Paykel) could maybe build the hardware, but doing the software, investing in the hardcore machine learning research, I think it would be very hard for them to sustain that effort for three or four years when they’re only going to maybe sell 12-25,000 units a year. We’re in a much better position because we can spread it across the entire consumer base.”

“And so I think you’re going to see more partnerships emerging between the big appliance companies that can provide the infrastructure, the appliance that’s got ventilation over it, that’s plugged into a 240 volt, 40 amp or 50 amp circuit. They’re going to be very good at that. If they basically open up those appliances as a platform that third-party accessories like the predictive thermometer can take advantage of, I think over the long term, they actually take less risk, but they actually get a market benefit.”

“Because as more small companies like Combustion can get wins by integrating with these appliances inexpensively and easily, making our products more useful, I think you’ll start to get a lot of things like the rice cooker no longer has to be a dedicated appliance that you put in a cabinet. Instead, it can be a special pot that goes on the stove. But now it can communicate with the stove to do what a rice cooker does, which is turn the power on and off at the right time. And now a lot of these small appliances can migrate back to the cooktop, they can migrate back into the oven.”

If you want to hear the full conversation with Chris Young, you can click play below or find the episode on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Combustion Releases Physics-Based Prediction Engine for Connected Thermometer

Today, Combustion announced that they have made a new physics-based prediction engine available for the Combustion smart thermometer.

According to the company, the prediction algorithm in this new over-the-air software upgrade, which they are calling the “new physics engine phase 1,” differs from the previous prediction algorithms in that it incorporates the ability to build a full simulation of the food in software. While the past model looked at the change in temperature and pacing of that change to predict when the food will be done, the new system will begin to factor in data around water migration, evaporation of moisture, and other factors interpreted from the eight sensors in the probe. From there, Combustion says they will be able to factor in temperature stagnation in large cuts of meat during BBQ (known as “stall”) and carry over.

The company’s announcements said that during phase 1 of the rollout, the new physics predictive model will run during the first 30% of the cook and then “switch over to the original predictive engine.” This is because Combustion expects “the new engine to make some mistakes and that early predictions may not always be stable.”

The announcement about the new update, free to existing Combustion thermometer owners, claims it “isn’t just a tweak to the existing algorithm, it’s the first step toward a new kind of cooking math.” I used the Combustion this past Thanksgiving and look forward to trying out the new features.

When Combustion launched its multisensor probe last year, it was a wake-up call for the existing smart thermometer market, which had developed mainly around single-sensor connected solutions. Since then, Meater has come out with the Meater 2 Plus, which has five internal sensors and an ambient temperature sensor, and other companies are likely developing multisensor versions of their thermometers. Combustion’s push to upgrade its software to create new capabilities is part of the company’s effort to stay ahead of the market as others look to adapt their hardware.

Chris Young, the CEO of Combustion, dropped into Dave Arnold’s Cooking Issues to talk about the new update and the broader vision for the thermometer, which includes making it open for other developers. Young says that the product has an open API, and they “have a lot of people creating cool stuff with” the thermometer.” You can listen to the interview portion where Young talks to Arnold about the thermometer updates in the embed below.

Cooking Issues Episode 124 | Chris Young Returns

Chris Young’s Combustion Launches Predictive Thermometer for Presale

When Chris Young first announced his new product a year ago, he made it clear he wasn’t making just another Bluetooth-connected thermometer.

“I started building the first thermometer in the world to actually measure the real cooking temperature which can profile your food so that it can estimate things like how big is the food and how fast is it cooking,” Young said.

Young made a convincing case at the time, explaining how the product, the Combustion Predictive Thermometer, would utilize eight sensors to monitor the core, surface, and ambient temperatures and give a cook an idea of the food is done. Getting that gradient temperature is important because, according to Young, only with that can you (or your thermometer) correctly calculate the true cooking temperature and how fast an item will cook.

Now, a year later, Young’s first product from his new company is finished and is available for presale on the company’s website.

Outside of making the industry’s first predictive thermometer, Young also wanted his new product to be extremely simple to use. That drive for simplicity was motivated by his experience at Chefsteps, where the team working on the Joule spent lots of time and resources troubleshooting the sous vide circulator’s networking technology (the Joule sous vide circulator requires a paired smartphone to operate).

In short, Young learned that sometimes simpler is better when it comes to cooking, and with the Predictive Thermometer, simplicity comes in the form of a paired timer that has a big display and doesn’t require an app or set up out of the box (though an app is available for those who want one). According to Young, the thermometer utilizes the built-in beacon technology to broadcast the cooking data to the timer and any other Bluetooth-connected appliance that wants to communicate with it.

Young didn’t reveal pricing last year when he announced the product, but now we have it: The thermometer and timer are regularly $199 but are available now for presale for $139. You can preorder one on the company’s website.

Chris Young on MrBeast: “Everything Just Changed About Restaurants” (Podcast)

If you want to be a chef, the first thing Chris Young thinks you should do before parting ways with a king’s ransom in the form of time and money at culinary school is to just jump directly into the fire.

“If you think you might want to be a professional chef, the best thing you should do is go intern at a restaurant for maybe six weeks,” said Young. “And if you still think that’s a good idea, after six weeks of getting your ass kicked, then by all means be a professional chef.”

This response from Young came during a live podcast interview on Clubhouse where Young and I started talking about the future of restaurants.

One of the biggest changes the onetime Fat Duck employee and coauthor of Modernist Cuisine sees on the horizon is how new models powered by technology, like ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants, will reshape the restaurant. While Young still thinks there will always be demand for places where people can go, sit down, and have great food made by a chef a few yards away in the kitchen, that world – in other words what we’ve known for centuries as a restaurant – will be increasingly upended by the arrival of new models created by the likes of virtual restaurant concepts like that MrBeast Burgers.

“I saw that and went ‘everything just changed about restaurants,'” said Young.

Young pointed to Apple and the consumer electronics industry to explain his thinking.

In the world of electronics, “the people that design the product are very rarely the people that also manufacture it,” said Young. “That’s something we figured out in a lot of things. Apple designs. Apple engineers. Apple does not assemble [products], they have somebody else who specializes in assembly do that.”

But restaurants – unlike most other industry nowadays – remains for the most part vertically integrated.

“Restaurants are kind of weird because you’ve coupled the creative with the manufacturing,” said Young. “You might not think of a restaurant as a factory, but it’s a small micro scale, horribly inefficient factory.”

And according to Young, what MrBeast and others like him has showed is the restaurant can be unbundled.

“What MrBeast showed is we’re going to be able to take apart the creative, the marketing, and everything about the concept and we’re gonna be able to completely divorce that from the manufacturing. If you have a great idea and if you have an audience that gives a shit, then you’re going to be able to do a deal with people who specialize in the manufacturing of recipes and you’ll be able to roll out a national chain of your bagel joints. Within a couple of weeks and everybody who wants one of your bagels can get one of your bagels.”

So what exactly should a young would-be culinary empire builder do if they are excited about this crazy unbundled restaurant future according to Young?

“Learn to cook,” said Young. “But maybe you should [also] build a YouTube channel, rather than trying to invest in a restaurant.”

In other words, you should know your way around a kitchen, but also understand that might not mean a career cooking in a dine-in restaurant.

“My advice is you really want to be thinking about what the restaurant is going to be in the future,” said Young, “and a little less about, ‘do I go get a culinary education and start cooking in a restaurant?’ I think that world is largely over.”

You can listen to my full conversation with Young on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen by just clicking play below.

Chris Young Wants to Bring Cheat Codes for Good Cooking to the Masses With His New Startup, Combustion Inc.

When Chris Young started working on Modernist Cuisine with Nathan Myhrvold almost 15 years ago, their original idea was to simply write a book about sous vide cooking.

“I still have emails where we thought it’d be a few hundred pages, we could get it done in a year,” Young told me in a phone interview.

As most know, Modernist Cuisine would grow far bigger than a hundred pages, and take much longer than a year to write. And while much of the multivolume work is dedicated to sous vide cooking, what Young and other early sous vide enthusiasts knew was that this cooking technique with a fancy name was just a means to a more important end: mastery of time of temperature in cooking.

“If you look at Modernist Cuisine, about half of the book is dedicated towards explaining the physics of heat transfer in the kitchen,” said Young. “Because [the application of heat] often makes the difference between a meal being spectacular and a meal not [being] so great.”

So when Young went on to found ChefSteps and eventually build a sous vide appliance with the Joule, the ultimate goal was always to give the cook mastery over the two elements that are so important in creating good food.

“Time and temperature are just sort of these cheat codes to better cooking,” said Young.

Chris Young

If helping aspiring cooks master these cheat codes was the bigger picture and sous vide was just one means to this end, Young realized at some point he had to go beyond sous vide cooking. That meant launching a new company called Combustion Inc. and making a thermometer.

But not just any thermometer. This one would come packed with eight different temperature sensors.

Why so many?

According to Young, when cooking a roast or a chicken, it’s important to not only get the temperature inside the meat, but to get the gradient temperature throughout it, including its surface and ambient temperatures. Only then, according to Young, can you properly calculate the true cooking temperature, how fast an item will cook, and when you should take it out.

Like any self-respecting chef-slash-cooking-technology entrepreneur, Young had hacked together a solution for his BBQ that allowed him to closely monitor internal and surface temperatures, but knew the solution with all of its wires and multiple thermometers wasn’t something wasn’t exactly approachable for the average consumer.

“I have a fairly kludged together a bunch of electronics,” said Young. “It’s not what I would call productized.”

Here is where he saw an opportunity to create a thermometer that would give him the type of data to help achieve the results he wanted. While there is certainly no shortage of smart thermometers on the market, Young felt none of them were able to give him the information he wanted to cook they way he wanted.

The Combustion thermometer, kitchen timer and app

“I started building the first thermometer in the world to actually measure the real cooking temperature which can profile your food so that it can estimate things like how big is the food and how fast is it cooking.”

Young wanted to build a thermometer that could be fairly sophisticated when it came to telling temperature and predicting when meat should be done. He also wanted the device to communicate this information with not only a paired kitchen timer (the other initial product from Combustion), but also with apps. He also knew, however, after having built the Joule, connected products can be also have their problems.

“I lived that,” said Young. “I know this probably as well as anyone at this point, because like we were all in on IoT, and we got it working pretty well, and I can tell you how painful it was. When it inevitably breaks, who’s responsible? And so the experience for the consumer is all this IoT shit that is just dumb.”

It was that experience with the Joule and the polarizing responses to connected devices that made Young rethink how to create a connected product. While he wanted to make a thermometer that is connected, with all the benefits that could bring, he also wanted one that worked out of the box without a complicated pairing and set up.

The answer was to make the temperature data freely available by broadcasting it using a built-in Bluetooth capability. That meant instead of going through a complicated pairing experience with its own app, the thermometer can utilize the beacon capabilities built into the Bluetooth spec to broadcast the time and temperature data of the chicken, roast or whatever is being cooked.

“We actually said, ‘Look, there’s nothing super secret about your temperature data,'” said Young, adding that the thermometer “advertises its data every 200 milliseconds” and all that data is just part of a beacon.

The beacon technology built into Bluetooth is what allows products like the Tile tracker other other devices to broadcast messages to your smartphone to give it updates. With the Combustion thermometer, the built-in Bluetooth beacon technology will send cooking data to the Combustion kitchen timer, (the other new product announced today) or its app (Yes, there is an app for those who want one, but Young makes it clear it’s not necessary). The device will also be able to send information to other Bluetooth-enabled appliances, like GE or BSH ovens, that want to communicate with it.

Young spent plenty of time at his last company making sure his device worked with other appliances, but it was painful. There were lots of meetings negotiating complicated technology and business arrangements for the Joule to integrate with other devices. These types of months-long negotiations were exactly what the onetime ChefSteps CEO wanted to avoid at his new company.

“This is sort of a version 2.0 business model,” said Young. “Because inevitably the old way involves a huge tussle between the appliance manufacturer’s desire to have a platform and app and the startup’s desires. I’m simply saying I make my money when I sell thermometers and I make my money when we sell other things.”

Young told me Combustion Inc. will sell the thermometer and the kitchen timer as a pair, but will also sell each separately. He wouldn’t give me pricing, saying only that they won’t be super cheap but also won’t be astronomically expensive. He said they plan to make them available by this summer via their website and not (as of yet) in retail.

In a way, Young’s efforts feel more like he’s making a tool for cooks rather than trying to monetize a venture-funded startup. It’s not unlike Dave Arnold and his Searzall and Spinzall products. That’s not to say Young isn’t looking to make money or doesn’t have big plans; he says the thermometer is only the beginning.

But, after a less-than-satisfying final chapter to the ChefSteps story, I can see why he’d want to get back a bit to the roots of what he started all those years ago with Myrhvold, which is to provide cooks with tools to better use the cheat codes to make good food.

Sous Vide Chocolate?

Here’s more evidence that, as Chris Young hypothesized a few months ago, sous vide is the new microwave: People are using devices like the Anova to temper chocolate.

I know, I know: We all thought that chocolate appeared in its finished form like a magical food from the gods. But it actually takes a lot of steps to make a shiny, delicious chocolate bar, the last of which is tempering, which means heating and cooling the melted chocolate to the right temperature so that certain crystals develop, making it shiny and shelf-stable. If it’s not, it will develop white blotches and streaks that change the texture entirely.

Pastry chefs and chocolatiers use all sorts of methods to temper chocolate, such as “tabling” it, which is visually and technically challenging. Theo Chocolate, for example, tables all the chocolate for its confections (think thousands of candies every month).

People who aren’t such purists use, you know, a machine to do this work. Those machines are huge, so you’ll often find home cooks tempering chocolate in the microwave.

Or at least, you used to. Recently I discovered a new recipe for tempering chocolate that seems even easier: sous vide! Simply heat the chocolate in a vacuum-sealed bag to a certain temperature in the water bath, “squish it around in the bag,” reduce the temperature of the water bath, squish a little more, and then pull it out. Who says you can only use your Anova to make a steak or some eggs?

I love the idea of this shortcut. It uses updated technology (the microwave is so 1966) in a new and no-nonsense way to transform a technically difficult task into one that anyone should be able to do. At the same time, I’m not sure it would really work. After all, when melted chocolate touches water, it seizes and gets all clumpy and unworkable: With this method, you’re submerging chocolate in the enemy.

But I get it: We’re all obsessed with chocolate, and anything to get our hands on it is going to be popular. Take 3D printing. “The first thing people want to 3D print is chocolate,” said Luis Rodriguez Alcalde, a 3D-printing expert who runs 3 Digital Cooks. Dozens of printers claim that they’ve mastered printing chocolate, which means they have to have mastered tempering, right? Some even say it’s the easiest medium to work with. But anyone who has tried tabling chocolate or making it from scratch knows that’s far from the truth.

Regardless, this kind of innovation only helps transform the tools and techniques that professional and home chefs use in the kitchen, demystifying and democratizing cooking for all.

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