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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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CKBK, the Spotify of Recipes, Launches Guided Cooking with NEFF Partnership

Recipe subscription service ckbk announced this week that its guided cooking features are now integrated with the NEFF Home Connect platform, allowing users to control the NEFF N 90 oven directly from select recipes.

The partnership between ckbk and BSH, NEFF’s parent company, was announced last September. In an press release sent to The Spoon, ckbk said its subscribers can now choose from one of 2,000 Home Connect recipes and send the correct temperature, time and cooking method directly to the NEFF oven directly from the app.

The integration also works in reverse, so users can select a mode from their N 90 oven and be presented with a list of recipes specifically for that mode.

As part of the launch, NEFF is throwing in a three-month trial of ckbk for customers who buy a WiFi-enabled N 90 NEFF oven. That free trial extends up to six months if the oven is synced with the Home Connect app.

While the ckbk/NEFF partnership has been in place for months, the guided cooking space has seen some renewed interest lately in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic. People sheltering in place were cooking more and companies like Hestan made its Hestan Cue Cooking School available for free back in March. And earlier this week, Drop announced $13.3 million in funding for its “kitchen OS” software.

Will interest in home cooking continue as quarantines let up? Studies show that despite re-openings, consumers are still reluctant to go back into restaurants, so we won’t be abandoning our kitchens quite yet. And there are a lot of people out there who would probably still welcome some high-tech guidance with their cooking.

With Consumers in Quarantine, Connected Cooking Companies Spring Into Action With Tailored Content

With a good chunk of the world’s population currently in quarantine, most of us are cooking at home a lot more nowadays.

Along with all this home cooking has come a massive spike in demand for information for culinary how-to, ranging from recipe suggestions to tutorials on how to do everything from making rice to baking bread. While many are simply searching Google for recipes, others are settling in to learn cooking skills to help them learn to get food on the table.

This sudden hunger for cooking-related guidance has led some tech-forward cooking startups to ramp up the content as they look to both satiate newfound interest in cooking skills while also giving quarantine bound consumers something to do with their time.

Here are a few ways in which kitchen tech startups have ramped up their efforts to serve homebound consumers:

Hestan Cue

While the Hestan Cue already walks users through recipes with step by step instructions, the guided cooking startup has launched Hestan Cue Cooking School, a series of virtual classes to help users of the connected cooking platform build up on their cooking skills during quarantine.

Built with the virtual class platform Teachable, the initial classes cover techniques for cooking beef, eggs and vegetables. The cool thing is that while the classes suggest you use your Cue for certain steps, you can use the classes even if you don’t have the Hestan device.

According to Hestan Smart Cooking managing director John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen, about one third of the Hestan Cue users have signed up for courses.

Anova

Sous vide specialist Anova has always been active in creating cooking content for their user community, and over the past month they’ve gone quarantine cooking focused by creating content to help consumers with everything from making pantry staples to batch cooking. And for the parents with bored kids, Anova suggests enlisting them to help with the brisket.

Thermomix

Thermomix is known for its in-person sales model for the high-end multicooker, but in the age of COVID-19 they’ve gone virtual with a “quarantine kitchen” series of cooking demos and are also allowing potential customers to book online cooking demos with the TM6 sales team.

You can see one of their latest episodes of their quarantine kitchen series below:

SideChef

SideChef is also ramping up its quarantine specific content. In early March they created a quarantine cooking recipe collection. A month later, and with virtual happy hours firmly planted in the stay-at-home zeitgeist, they’ve created a guide for virtual dinner parties.

Instant Pot

The massively popular pressure cooker is famous for leaning on its Facebook community to create content for them. Still, the company seems to have recognized our new shared reality and is letting people know that Instant Pots can help you cook bread while you’re cooped up during quarantine.

Food Network Kitchen

While the Food Network Kitchen app doesn’t seem to have created any tailored content for quarantine bound consumers, they have seen a big jump in usage and consumers look for more ways to cook. Company spokesperson Irika Slavin told me via email that Foodnetwork.com has seen “double digit increases” in page views and the Food Network App, the guided cooking premium offering launched in October, has seen what Slavin describes as a “triple digit increase” in visitors.

ckbk

ckbk is a ‘Spotify for cookbooks’ app that puts pretty much any cookbook or recipe just a click away.

Since ckbk only offers access to existing cookbooks, the company isn’t creating any quarantine specific content, but they do have a good idea of what people are cooking. Company founder Matthew Cockerill told me he’s noticed most of his subscribers, and the world in general, seem to be moving in sync over the past month through what he calls the ‘seven stages of cooking grief.’

“So first of all it was about the prepping – stockpiling durable good – beans and pasta,” said Cockerill. “Then came the “staff of life” basics bread and baking. And after that, I think, there’s a need for some comfort, yes, but also some relief from the monotony. Which is where I think chocolate and dessert cravings are kicking in. It’s either that or alcohol. And in many cases both!”

“Lastly,” he continued, “we’ve also seen a trend of interest in ways to use the new found time which people see stretching out ahead of them, with longer-term projects” like baking bread.

Cockerill told me that new subscriptions are up 250% over pre-COVID times. If you want to cook your way through grief, the company is giving away 30 days free access to their app to help you cook through your pantry items.

Ckbk Launches Kickstarter to Become Spotify for Recipes

Ckbk, the digital platform that wants to be the Spotify for recipes, launched its Kickstarter campaign today.

We reported on ckbk back in April, explaining the impending service as:

“… an app which compiles a massive database of recipes from well-known and up-and-coming cookbooks. Matthew Cockerill, co-founder of 1000 Cookbooks, polled hundreds of food experts to get their picks for the best, most essential cookbooks ever written.”

Ckbk is looking to raise $25,000 as it continues to license recipe content and build out its app. People who pledge $59 or more can be a “Founder subscriber,” which includes pre-launch access to ckbk, as well as a year-long subscription after the official launch scheduled for October or November of this year. Early backers will also get early access to ckbk starting in September.

Ckbk is to Recipes as Spotify is to Music

Just as you might pay Spotify to access your favorite songs and discover new ones, would you subscribe to a service that gives you access to thousands of classic and modern recipes and serves as a platform to introduce you to new cuisines and meals?

That’s the question 1000 Cookbooks will try to answer with the forthcoming ckbk, a new Spotify-like platform for cookbooks and recipes that will attempt to change how we discover, use and enjoy premium writing about food.

It’s doing this by building an app which compiles a massive database of recipes from well-known and up-and-coming cookbooks. Matthew Cockerill, co-founder of 1000 Cookbooks, polled hundreds of food experts to get their picks for the best, most essential cookbooks ever written.

From there, Cockerill and co-founder, Nadia Arumugam, took on the arduous task of licensing content from these cookbooks. This has been difficult, given the number of literary agents and publishers have been bought by other publishers, leading to a clearance rights morass.

As of now, ckbk has licensed 500 cookbooks, providing access to more than 100,000 recipes from a wide range of popular publications including The Silver Palate, The Cooking of Southwest France, Tyler Florence Family Meal and Weeknight Gluten Free.

These aren’t just PDF versions of recipe pages. The ckbk app will let you search for what you want based on factors such as ingredients, dietary requirements, or specific recipe. Then, just like in Spotify, ckbk will serve up recommendations, allow you to browse its collection of cookbooks, watch videos, and even let you make your own recipe “playlist” that you can share with others.

“Compared to a Google search, ckbk is much richer,” said Cockerill. “You can explore the full chapter in a book, or more from that author.”

While ckbk was announced last week, the actual service won’t be available until May when a Kickstarter campaign will give people the chance to be a founding backer. When it is fully launched, ckbk will have free and premium versions of the service. Cockerill says the free tier will not be ad-supported, and will instead limit the amount and types of content accessible. The premium tier will provide full access and cost “a little bit under $9.99” per month according to Cockerill.

Recipes are certainly experiencing a renaissance as technology transforms them into discovery and commerce platforms. Players like AllRecipes, Fexy Media and BigOven are creating shoppable recipes that let users act quickly on their culinary whims. And other startups such as Innit are creating partnerships that move us closer to customizeable recipe meal kits.

Cockerill says that they are also looking at turning ckbk’s content into shoppable recipes. His team has been adding structure to the data pulled from the cookbooks. “Structure of the ingredient list for integration with shopping carts, or nutrition calculations,” said Cokerill, who said he is always asking “How can we get the most value out of this content?”

And delivering value will be key. In a world where people already have a number of subscriptions (Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Texture, etc etc), potential users will need to feel like they are immediately getting their money’s worth with ckbk. They have to see it as the tool they never knew they needed — which is a tall order. Ckbk must win over passionate foodies who may not want their classic cookbooks in a new format, and simultaneously convince the larger average home cook market to sign up for a monthly subscription.

“We want to build a premium platform that is sustainable for high quality food writing,” said Cockerill. The question now is whether people will pay a premium for it.

If you are interested in the intersection of tech and recipes (and you live in the Seattle area), you’ll want to attend our Spoon Food Tech Meetup on the Future of Recipes on April 25th at Galvanize Seattle.