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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

CNET

Hot Off The Press From #SmartKitchen17

We were lucky to have an incredible cadre of journalists at the Smart Kitchen Summit this year, many of them joining on stage as panelists and moderators. Including the event itself, we saw coverage of several company announcements that happened at SKS from groups like Kenmore and NutriBullet.

Here’s a quick highlight reel and some stories to read more about what happened at this year’s Summit:

SmartBrief highlighted the discussions around the future of food retail & grocery, saying:

“The future of food was the overarching topic of discussion at the Smart Kitchen Summit last week in Amazon’s backyard, Seattle, Wash., and while many sessions honed in on new appliances in the consumer kitchen and new technologies to make cooking easier, one session focused on the future of grocery. Focusing on the consumer and how their behavior, demands and perceptions have changed to influence the industry today, Erik Wallin, co-founder of Northfork, a Sweden-based personal shopper service for retailers; Josh Sigel, COO of Innit; and Mike Lee, founder of The Future Market, a forecasting agency that builds concept products and experiences to imagine what the world of food will look like in the next 10-25 years, spoke about the challenges and opportunities that technology represents for the food retail industry.”

Digital Trends covered several new product announcements at SKS, including GE FirstBuild’s introduction of precision bakeware and NutriBullet’s new smart blender.

From the FirstBuild announcement:

“While it won’t be ready for Thanksgiving at your relatives’ abode, GE Appliances and FirstBuild will soon release a line of smart Precision Bakeware — pans that alert you when the brownies are done via an app. FirstBuild was at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle this week to announce the new products. There are smart pans, ovens, and grills, but this is one of the few pieces of the connected kitchen focused on baking.”

From the NutriBullet story:

NutriBullet, along with Perfect Company, wants to make keeping tabs on nutrition a bi”t more seamless with its new NutriBullet Balance blender. The smart blender — introduced this week at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle — has an accompanying app and integrated scale and can recommend recipes based on what you like and your diet.”

CNET’s Ashlee Clark Thompson was on hand not only to moderate a stellar panel on the role of the display (countertop, on fridges, etc) will play on video content for the kitchen, she was also cranking out stories for CNET on announcements like Kenmore’s lineup of smart kitchen appliances. From the piece:

“Kenmore, the appliance brand owned by Sears, has strengthened its ties to Amazon. Its new line of internet-connected refrigerators will work with the Alexa voice-activated digital assistant, the company announced this week at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle.

The Wi-Fi-enabled refrigerators will send alerts to your phone if you leave a door open, when you need to replace a filter and if there are power outages. You’ll also be able to adjust your freezer and refrigerator temperatures when you’re away.”

Celebrity chef and Food Network star stopped by to chat with the NYT Cooking Executive Director Amanda Rottier on stage at SKS and discussed the role of technology and recipes and how the former is impacting the latter. Food & Wine covered their talk and Florence’s announcement that he is joining Innit as their Chief Content & Innovation Officer:

“‘Recipes served a purpose back in the day,” Florence told the audience “but inflexible recipes don’t work with the modern lifestyle anymore.’ Today’s recipe content is one dimensional because it doesn’t know who I am, my family’s nutrition needs and likes/dislikes, the food I have in my fridge, or the appliances I have in my home.’

Innit, on the other hand, does know all of these things. The smart kitchen maker aims to use technology to create a centralized hub for the kitchen, from software that knows what groceries you just bought and can suggest combinations and preparations based on your taste, to automated stoves and ovens that cook the food while you’re away.”

We were excited to have New York Times National Food Correspondent Kim Severson at the Smart Kitchen Summit this year to scope out how tech might be changing cooking for mainstream consumers. While Severson was skeptical about the role of technology and if the vision from some at SKS was took focused on replacing what people love about cooking, it’s always great to have insight from journalists who have their finger on the pulse of consumer behavior.

Severson’s piece in the NYT included:

“The conference, now in its third year, brings together people on the front lines of kitchen technology to try to figure out how to move the digital revolution deeper into the kitchen. The kitchen is where Americans spend 60 percent of their time at home when they are not sleeping, said Yoon Lee, a senior vice president at Samsung. That’s why so many tech companies are focused on it.

Almost everyone here this week at Benaroya Hall, the home of the Seattle Symphony — whether an executive from a major appliance manufacturer, a Google engineer or a hopeful young entrepreneur with a popular Kickstarter concept — agreed that it was only a matter of five to 10 years before artificial intelligence had a permanent seat at the dinner table.”

Huge thanks to all our friends in the press who attended the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit, we look forward to sharing insights into next year and beyond about the future of cooking, food and the kitchen.

CNET Founder’s Next Act Is AI Powered Publishing. His First Product? A Kitchen Assistant.

Update 7/7/17: The company contacted us upon publication of this post to emphasize the Tasted app/skill is still in development and not ready for consumer use. 

The cofounder of one of the Internet’s longest standing and most storied tech media brands – CNET – is onto his next act: creating a diversified media brand for the artificial intelligence age.

Shelby Bonnie, who cofounded CNET back in 1993 and later became its chairman and CEO, is the CEO of a new publishing startup called Pylon AI, a company which describes itself as a “conversational engagement platform company.”

What does that mean? From the looks of it, Pylon aims to create diversified lifestyle content that is delivered to consumers through AI centric conversation platforms such as Alexa or Google Home or bots such as Facebook Messenger or Slack.

In a way, the company that Bonnie and other CNET alumni Mike Tatum and Cliff Lyon are creating is reminiscent of Bonnie’s last company, Whiskey Media. Only this time, instead of a collection of different web-based lifestyle media brands, Pylon AI is using a combination of apps and AI platforms like Alexa and Cortana as the content publishing system.

One of Whiskey Media’s most popular brands was tech lifestyle-focused Tested, so now it’s not all that surprising that Pylon AI’s first consumer lifestyle brand is called – you guessed it –Tasted. As the name suggests, Tasted is all about food and comes in the form of voice-assistant apps such as the Tasted Alexa skill, a companion web or iOS app.

What’s intriguing for the smart kitchen crowd is Tasted is essentially a guided cooking system, using a combination of voice assistant, web apps and mobile apps like its newly launched iOS app to help guide the consumer through the creation of a meal.

Tasted uses Alexa and visual guidance to help users to cook

Another interesting aspect of Tasted is it employs the talents of well-known cooking personalities such as Catherine McCord, the creator of Weelicious, and Regan Cafiso, a former editor for Food Network and Martha Stewart. This idea of using popular cooking personalities is a standard playbook option to create buzz for a new platform, but what’s more intriguing is Tasted is another example of the nascent trend of established cooking talents such as Heston Blumenthal and Beth Moncel are embracing AI-centric cooking platforms to reach consumers.

A Pylon AI spokesperson told me that they are still operating in stealth mode, so the company isn’t talking about their forward-looking strategy, but my guess is that we’ll soon see other brands like Tasted in other lifestyle verticals.

For Bonnie, Pylon represents an intriguing new direction for a long-time media innovator. After creating one of the world’s most iconic tech media brands in CNET and a diversified web media brand in Whiskey, he is now looking to AI-powered conversation assistants like Alexa and Facebook Messenger as the next frontier to reach consumers.

Want to understand how AI will impact cooking and the food ecosystem? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets. 

CNET Is Not A Fan Of The Teforia Infuser

As more smart kitchen products hit the market, we’re seeing more consumer-facing reviews of the pros, and of course the cons, of these connected devices. CNET has expanded their coverage into the smart kitchen and reviewer Brian Bennett took a closer look at the new tea Infuser from Teforia, the startup trying to revolutionize how consumers brew tea.

The one obvious thing about Teforia’s flagship product is the price point – $1500 is a lot of money to drop on a specialty beverage maker and CNET harps on this a lot throughout the review.

But price aside, Bennett does mention the sleek design (although complains that it is plastic) and enjoys watching the tea infuse and turn from leaf to liquid. But when it comes to the outcome, he’s generally unimpressed and points out that when he tried the same tea with the $200 Breville tea maker, the Breville came out on top.

When Bennett told Teforia his results, their response wasn’t super reassuring either.

According to Teforia, I’d need to run something truly exceptional through the Infuser in order to really appreciate it — something rare, handmade and close to $100 per pound.

Teforia’s move to elevate the tea business, an ancient beverage and an industry that hasn’t experienced much innovation is noteworthy, even if their first product fails to justify the high price point. Check out the full CNET Teforia review here.

Podcast: The New Food Network – Food Media & Discovery in Age of Buzzfeed

This episode features a conversation from the stage of Benaroya Hall in Seattle at SKS16. Included in the conversation are:

Ashlee Clark-Thompson, CNET; Tiffany Lo, Buzzfeed/Tasty; Kevin Yu, SideChef; Esmée Williams, AllRecipes

The panel description from this session is as follows: The number one video publisher in the world today is Buzzfeed’s Tasty, which had almost 2 billion views in the month of May for its short how-to cooking videos made for the Millennial generation. In the age of apps and online video, cooking discovery and education is changing rapidly and this panel will explore what the Cooking Channel of tomorrow will look like.

Samsung Begins To Ship The Family Hub Refrigerator

The Gist: Samsung had the most high profile of the smart kitchen product debuts at CES this year with the Family Hub refrigerator, an Internet-connected fridge with a massive 21-inch screen and a hefty six thousand dollar price tag.  This week Samsung announced commercial availability of the product.

Our Take: Of all the categories in the connected kitchen, the connected refrigerator is most likely to receive a healthy dose of skepticism. That’s because companies like Samsung, LG and Whirlpool have been trying to fuse the Internet with the fridge since the early 2000s, and the result has been a string of fairly clunky products with little staying power and even less tangible consumer benefits. However, in recent years the arrival of low-cost cameras and internal sensors have intrigued consumers and, as a result, Samsung and others have decided to give the connected fridge another go.

While we felt the LG smart fridge was perhaps the most interesting of this year’s CES crop due to intriguing features like the ability to see what’s inside by knocking on the front of the fridge, the Samsung Family Hub also was interesting for different reasons. For one, the massive Tizen-powered touch screen on the front offers a lot of screen real estate for tailored apps. The inventory manager app also appears interesting, giving consumers some new ways to do fairly easy (but not perfect) inventory tracking using photo-tagging (as demoed here in the initial CNET review).

Bottom line, the challenge for Samsung will be adding enough value to make the fridge’s big price tag seem worth it, while also managing to keep the device relevant and up to date from a technology perspective in a category where consumers expect 10 or 15-year life spans from their fridges.