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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cold brew

Food & Drink Pods Were Everywhere at CES, but Do Consumers Want Them?

If you were seeking out food tech at CES last week (and believe me, we were), you might have noticed an awful lot of one thing: pods. I was surprised by how many companies I saw demo-ing pod-based food or beverage system. Here are just a few:

Fresco’s olive oil press

Fresco
Tucked into the Italy pavilion at Eureka Park I stumbled across Fresco, the maker of a “Keurig of Olive Oil.” Insert frozen pods of olive oil into the EVA device (which is about the size of a French Press), press a button, and in five minutes you can collect your cold-pressed olive oil. You can select different varietals of olive oil and even choose infused flavors, like chili or basil.

When I saw this I instantly flashed back to the Juicero debacle — do you really need a device to thaw pods of frozen olive oil? According to the reps at the booth, though, you kind of do. The EVA heats olive oil to its ideal temperature, between 20 to 25 °C (77 °F), where you can taste all of its flavors.

The machine costs €79 ($87) and each frozen pod is around €1 ($1.11). For now only Italians can order Fresco, but the company is trying to move into the U.S. While Italian cucinares (cooks) might shell out extra euros to get optimally extracted olive oil, I’m not sure American home cooks will have the same level of devotion. Especially when they could just buy fancy olive oil from their local co-op or farmers market.

CES 2020: N2FALLS' portable nitro coffee

N2FALLS
You’ve probably heard of (or tasted) coffee pods, but nitro cold brew is a new entrant to the pod-based caffeine space. Korean company N2FALLS makes small cylindrical pods which, when inserted into the partner drink lid over a glass of water, expels compressed nitrogen-infused coffee concentrate. Voila — a nitro cold brew. Or if you do it over milk, a nitro latté! The company also makes pods for tea, juice and even booze-free wine.

Coffee prices vary by quantity but average to about $3 per capsule. For now N2FALLS is only available in Korea, but the company is in the midst of planning a U.S. expansion. Initially they’ll sell their pods in brick & mortar shops (the rep I spoke to named Amazon Go as a target) before selling online.

Tigoût
Argentinian startup Tigoût is a pod-based machine that bakes up wee single-serve desserts (think: Belgian chocolate cake or a white chocolate blondie). Insert a pre-prepped frozen pod (or two) into the machine, press start, and in a couple of minutes you’ll have a piping-hot sweet treat. Tigoût has a connected app so you can monitor your bake remotely and reorder capsules as needed.

The device itself costs $400 and each pod is $1.50. Right now there are 12 options, including six savory offerings. Tigoût’s founder and CEO Rodrigo Córdoba, who showed me the machine on the CES show floor, plans to launch the company officially in December of this year.

CES 2020: A Demo of Drinkworks, the Pod-based Cocktail Robot

Drinkworks + Bartesian
Adventurous CES goers could sample the hard stuff thanks to a few pod-based machines. Drinkworks and Bartesian are both cocktail-mixing robots which rely on flavor capsules to make classic drinks.

Drinkworks, which is the result of a joint venture between Keurig Dr. Pepper and Anheuser-Busch, is a countertop appliance which turns pods into cocktails, ciders, and even beers. Just pop a capsule — which already contains alcohol — into the machine, press a button, and out comes your drink of choice. You can see it make me a Moscow Mule at CES in the video above (which, yes, I drank at 10am cause Vegas). Drinkworks is available in select states for $299 and the pods cost around $3.99 each, depending on the drink.

Like Drinkworks, Bartesian is also a pod-based cocktail robot. It uses capsules filled with juice, bitters and other mixers. However, unlike Drinkworks, however, Bartesian users have to provide the spirits themselves — which allows for more customization but also adds an extra step (and expense) to the process. Bartesian devices are currently available at retailers around the country (and online) for $349.99.

Pod people?
Clearly food & bev companies have seen the success of Keurig and Nespresso and decided that pods = the future. And there’s some validity to that. Pods offer near-instant gratification (assuming you remember to reorder them) and a high level of consistency. They also give consumers the option to switch things up according to their mood — if you want a hazelnut espresso one day and a vanilla one the next, no problemo — and provide hardware makers recurring revenues.

But while pods do allow some level of wiggle room, their very nature means that they still end up trapping consumers. You may be able to choose the flavor of your cold brew/dessert/cocktail pod, but you’re reliant on the pod itself to get the finished product — and that means you’re beholden to a specific appliance manufacturer. Consumers can chafe against being locked into food ecosystems. Pods also don’t give you wiggle room to tweak a recipe — for example, if you like a slightly less boozy cocktail or a sweeter cold brew.

There’s also the negative environmental aspect to consider. While some pods are technically recyclable, most end up in landfills. That could become a bigger issue as consumers begin to prioritize sustainability more and more.

Despite their obvious convenience, will the cost of pods — both literal and environmental — keep consumers away? Clearly a bunch of companies at CES don’t think so. But I’m not so sure that the pod-volution of food and drink will take off — especially for more niche products, like olive oil.

Instead, I think we’ll see a growth of smart devices like the Picobrew, which can work with the company’s Picopacks or let consumers add their own ingredients. Even Keurig is getting on-board. You can buy the company’s proprietary pods, but many machines also let you buy reusable pods and add your own coffee for more of a customizable and waste-free twist. The DIY aspect still keeps consumers within the hardware device’s ecosystem, but allows them more flexibility (and sustainability). That’s the type of tech I’d like to see more of at CES 2021.

riff cold brewed

Riff Cold Brewed Launches New RTD Sparkling Coffee Cherry (not Coffee Bean) Tea

Riff Cold Brewed, a ready to drink beverage maker in the coffee space, recently released its new Alter Ego beverage, an innovative line extension that uses coffee fruit—not coffee beans—to insert itself into the increasingly diverse RTD beverage aisle. 

The drink is made from cascara, the dried coffee “cherry” that’s left behind once the beans are harvested. Cold brewed and carbonated, Alter Ego is a slightly-sweet alternative to the super sugary drinks that are common in grocery stores and gas stations, with 6g of sugar, 35 calories, and 105mg of caffeine—roughly the same amount as a small cup of coffee.

You may have tasted cascara at a hip coffee shop. Prepared like a tisane or tea, it’s known for its fruity flavor, a subtle sweetness, and a mild acidic tang.

We spoke to Paul Evers, Co-Founder and CEO of Riff, about how this product fits into the greater strategy of Riff: “We see the opportunity as consumers are seeking more natural, clean-label alternatives,” he said. “It’s positioned as a sparkling coffee tea.”

In coffee producing countries, spent coffee cherries are sometimes used as compost or sold to exporters to be distributed as tea in the United States, but more often than not, they end up in massive piles at the end of the farm, left to rot.

“We remove harmful environmental impact from rotting cascara that creates methane and toxins that leak into the soils,” Paul explained. “This allows farmers to turn their spent cherries into a new revenue stream. It can be a good uplift for mostly family-owned farms.”

With the c-market price for coffee beans left at under $1 per pound for over a year, the global coffee industry is in crisis. Millions of coffee producers aren’t turning a profit this year. Being able to monetize cascara, a byproduct that’s typically been considered waste, can help make up that difference for farmers.

Riff Cold Brewed isn’t the first company to try bringing cascara into the mainstream. Raleigh’s Slingshot Coffee released the first RTD cascara product back in 2013, and was quickly followed by both industry leaders and startups like Stumptown and Caskai. 

But Paul’s confident the growing competition isn’t too big of a problem: “Many existing cascara products over-extract from the cherry, so the end result is too heavy and strong. Our product is light and refreshing.” The drink’s smoothness also makes it a great base layer for further innovation, so Paul also is exploring launching new flavors from juice concentrates, like stone fruit, berry, or ginger.

As someone who’s tried cascara from several origin countries—tasting flavors I didn’t expect, from honey to lime to bell peppers—I was curious how Riff would handle the diverse range of flavors of cascara. Paul sent me a few cans so I could find out. The first thing I noticed was the cascara’s natural fruitiness, which is similar to that of a cherry or red berry and slightly sweet. The natural mild acidity, enhanced by the carbonation, added a citrus note that made me think of a fruit-infused lemonade. It was smooth, refreshing, and delicate.

The Original Alter Ego is now available in stores across the Pacific Northwest at $2.99 SRP for a 12fl oz can. However, it’s also Riff Cold Brewed’s first product that can be shipped at ambient temperatures, thanks to improved pasteurization processes, making it ripe for direct-to-consumer sales via the company’s website.

PicoBrew Goes Coffee-First With New ‘Brew Computer’, The Pico MultiBrew

PicoBrew, the Seattle based startup that’s made a name for itself with countertop beer brewing appliances, has set its sites on a different type of beverage with its newest product, the Pico MultiBrew: coffee.

In short, PicoBrew has taken the technology it has developed over the past decade for high-precision beer brewing and applied it to making the perfect cup of joe. The MultiBrew will use what the company calls “brew programs” to govern the time, temperature and fluid flow of each coffee brew.

If that sounds like a very high tech approach to coffee brewing, that’s because it is. This shouldn’t be all that surprising since PicoBrew’s founding trio includes a couple of former Microsoft execs and a food scientist.

“We’re ex-software guys and computer guys, as well as coffee and beer guys,” CEO Bill Mitchell told me last week when we visited the PicoBrew offices near the University of Washington to take a peek at the MultiBrew prototype. “So it made sense for us to start with the hardest drink [with] beer and go from there.”

While the MultiBrew is the first ‘coffee-first’ machine from PicoBrew, it isn’t the first that makes coffee. In fact, Mitchell’s brother Jim (a PicoBrew cofounder and a food scientist by training) started making coffee with their very first appliance, the Zymatic, and both the PicoBrew Z (pro unit) and Pico C (consumer) can make cold brew.

And then there’s the Pico U, the multi-beverage brewing appliance the company unveiled in the spring of 2018 and ultimately pulled the plug on even after hitting their Kickstarter funding target.  According to Mitchell, what they heard from their community was that while they liked the Pico U’s ability to make multiple types of drinks like coffee, beer and kombucha, ultimately the U wasn’t coffee-forward enough.

“Coffee, coffee, coffee is what we were told,” said Mitchell.

And so unlike the PicoBrew U — which looked like a scaled down version of the Pico C — the MultiBrew looks and acts like a coffee maker, allowing the user to brew different sizes ranging from single serve to a full carafe of coffee. The MultiBrew also lets users brew using their own coffee grounds or from pods that are made of the same compostable pulp paper material as with the Pico’s beer-ingredient packaging, the PicoPaks.

While I’ve given up on Keurig because coffee from pods generally tastes bad (not to mention all the plastic waste), PicoBrew has a spin on coffee pods that could make me reconsider. Not only are they are designing their own (compostable) pods that will not only apply precision parameters specifically designated by the coffee’s roaster, but are also designing the pods to mimic pourover brew methods rather than the brute force heated water injection method used by a typical pod-brew system.

Mitchell showed me a prototype of a MultiBrew brewpod with an laser-cut pattern through which the water will be poured on the coffee (photo below).

Similar to the way the company worked closely with craft brewers to create ingredients for PicoPaks, they are now in discussions with a variety of craft coffee makers about the possibility of cobranded coffee pods for the MultiBrew.  Unlike Keurig, which tightly controls the supply of coffee that goes into their coffee pods, PicoBrew is telling smaller roasters they can both provide roasted beans for their high tech system as well as optimized brewing parameters for the specific roast.

With all this emphasis on coffee, it should be noted that the MultBrew is true to its name and does brew drinks other than coffee ranging from kombucha to golden milk to, yes, beer. The MultiBrew will allow users to brew beer using the same kegs as the Pico C by putting the keg directly under the dispense mechanism (rather than using plastic tubing of the Pico C).

While the multi-drink capability of the MultiBrew does makes it stand apart from other high-tech coffee machines on the market, will it be enough? There’s certainly lots of competition in the high-tech coffee space, as companies like SharkNinja have sold millions of the Ninja Coffee Bar while newer entrants like the Terra Kaffe are in market with products that not only can grind coffee, but can make espresso and milk-based coffee drinks using highly-tailored brewing parameters.

We will see soon enough. The MultiBrew, which will be priced “in the same range” as the machines like the Ninja Coffee Bar (below $200), will be available for preorder in the fall and will ship in 2020.

Your Guide to Faster, Fancier, Better Cold Brew, Thanks to Tech

If you’ve left your house in the past month odds are you walked past a boatload of people carrying plastic cups filled with cold brew coffee. Maybe you were even one of them.

Cold brew coffee — that is, coffee that is slow extracted in cool water to make a smoother, less bitter beverage — is so hot right now. So it’s no surprise that companies are hungry (thirsty?) to cash in on this trendy drink outside the coffee shop.

There’s ample opportunity. Mintel reported that in 2017 only 7 percent of coffee drinkers made their own cold brew at home. Many people thought it took too long (cold brew requires at least 12 hours of steeping), or that the flavor of the homemade stuff wasn’t up to snuff. But a whole slew of devices and products are trying to reinvent your relationship with cold brew, outside the coffee shop.

Sure, you could keep it low tech and just to steep some coffee grounds overnight in your French Press and call it a day. But for those who want to make their own cold brew faster, fancier, and better than ever, here’s your guide:

Coffee brewed in a PicoBrew Z

Smart homebrewing company PicoBrew has cold brew coffee-brewing capabilities for its Pico Z and Pico C devices ($4.99 for a reusable cold brew filter, $399 to $2,749 for the Pico’s themselves). It significantly speeds up the process so you can have cold brew, dispensed from a Pico mini-keg, in two hours. Plus it looks cool — mini-keg!

PicoBrew isn’t the only home beer brewing company getting into cold coffee. Growlerwerks, previously known for its countertop brewing devices, is in the midst of a successful Kickstarter campaign for its nitro cold brew-making uKeg Nitro ($199 MSRP). Nitro cold brew, which has the creamy, lightly-carbonated texture of Guinness, became a household name once Starbuck’s started selling it. Growlerwerks isn’t alone — other companies like KEG STORM and Royal Brew also have countertop nitro cold brew makers.

The Dash cold brew coffee maker.

One of the hardest parts about making cold brew is having to wait until it’s ready. Cuisinart and Dash both have devices that will let you make a cup in 30 minutes or less. Cuisinart (~$52) uses spin technology to quickly extract the flavors from coffee grounds. Dash ($99.99), which promises to make a cup of cold brew in only 5 minutes, uses something called “cold boil technology” for its extraction, with mixed reviews.

Photo: Trader Joe’s

If mess is your main cold brew complaint, quite a few companies are making pre-filled cold brew bags (sort of like giant tea bags, but with ground coffee) which you can steep and then toss with no cleanup. Cold brew bags may be relatively low-tech, but they’re still a valuable upgrade to your home brewing process. Because is there anything worse than trying to scrape old coffee grounds out of a French Press? They’re also a steal — bags go for as low as $5.99, which will brew you 7 cups of cold coffee.

If cold brew’s smooth, inoffensive flavor just isn’t nuanced enough for you, check out what Elemental Beverage Company is brewing. They use a cooling coil technology to “snapchill” freshly-brewed coffee, which they claim makes a better, fuller-flavored cup of joe than the cold brew method. Elemental will eleventually sell their Snapchiller machine to cafés, but if you want a taste now you can order some cans of snapchilled coffee online ($4.99 each). If you’re feeling really fancy, you can spring for their $200 bottle of snapchilled artisanal coffee (yes, I’ve tried it and it is worth it).

—

Summer is just starting, so it’s not too late to invest and up your cold brew game all season. Me though, I’m a bit of a traditionalist. I think I’ll stick to using my old-school French Press.

I Drank a $200 Bottle of Snapchilled Cold Coffee

Summer is around the corner, which means it’s about to be cold brew season. (Hallelujah.)

However, one company has created a way to chill fresh coffee that apparently makes it taste better than cold brew. Founded in 2012, Elemental Beverage Company‘s Snapchiller technology (side note: Great Marvel villain name) can chill a 12-ounce cup of hot coffee to a pre-set temperature in 60 seconds. This process makes a chilled cup of joe faster than cold brew, requires fewer beans, and has a fuller range of flavor.

We first saw the company’s technology in action at the Specialty Coffee Expo back in 2018, when it was still called the Cafe Cold Wave. This year Elemental sized up their tech has begun pre-selling the machines for $5995.

Elemental Beverage Co’s Snapchiller.

I can certainly see higher-end coffee shops investing in the Snapchiller as a faster, cleaner, and cooler-looking alternative to cold brew. But perhaps a bigger market opportunity is Elemental’s new canned Snapchilled coffees, which the company unveiled at the Specialty Coffee Expo this past April.

So far the company has released three varietals featuring single-origin beans from farms in Ethiopia, Columbia, and Burundi. Ryan McDonnell, Elemental’s Chief Coffee and Tea Officer, told me in a phone interview that they’re planning to change the coffees a couple of times per year depending on what’s in season (yes, coffee is seasonal!)

The canned coffees launched in early May on Elemental’s website and are already on backorder. A 6-pack will set you back $29.95, which shakes out to a little under $5 a can — it’s not cheap, but also not significantly more than what you’d pay for a cold brew from your local coffee shop.

Photo: Catherine Lamb.

It also tastes way better. I tried Elemental’s new canned coffees and came to the conclusion that yes, they are indeed a level up from regular cold brew. The coffee was clean, light, and super smooth, without a hint of bitterness. Each coffee also had an incredibly distinct flavor. The back of the cans had details about the processing methods, origin, and tasting notes of each coffee bean. After drinking some I think it’ll be hard to go back to the bland smoothness of regular cold brew.

While Elemental’s canned Snapchilled coffee might be worth the price tag, they also offer a super high-end product that is a bit more of a reach. The company sells a 750 mL bottle of rare Gesha coffee that will set you back — wait for it — $235.

If that price sounds truly shocking to you, well, it did for me too. But according to McDonnell, it’s all worth it. The limited-batch bottles are made with beans that score 90+ on the Coffee Quality Institute’s Q Grading Scale, which puts them in the top 0.1 percent. The beans also cost a whopping $450 a pound.

Elemental also sent me some of this pricey coffee, which comes in what looks like a fine whiskey bottle. It’s packaged along with two tulip glasses that are meant to be frozen before serving. The Gesha will keep for at least two months in the fridge but once its opened is meant to be drunk quickly, like champagne. I tried some of this fancy-pants brew and it was… crazy delicious. Smooth, fruity, and light, I would gladly start every summer day with a cup of the stuff. But would I ever shell out over 200 bucks for it? Not a chance.’

Apparently, plenty of people would. McDonnell said the Gesha coffees are almost out of stock. They plan to keep offering distinctive, higher-end brews highlighting rare beans “on a regular basis.”

Elemental isn’t in retail yet, but they’re doing cold brew pop-ups around their home base of Boston. We could chalk their early inventory sell-out as just a company getting their footing with a new product, but it doesn’t bode well if these Snapchilled coffees take off.

I’m betting that they will, at least once they head into retail. Consumers — especially Gen Z — are starting to care more and more about their coffee, seeking out specialized and sustainable brews. In a sea of bottled and canned cold brews, Elemental’s chilled coffee stands out with its high quality, sourcing transparency, and nuance of flavor.

Cold brew, watch out. It’s Snapchill season.

RISE Brewing Co. Blends 3 Major Coffee Trends into One Canned Latté

Cold brew is cool. Oat milk is hot (in the metaphorical sense). Put them together, add some nitrogen, and you’ve got the buzzy concoction that is Rise Brewing Co’s nitro cold brew cans.

Founded in 2014 in New York City, Rise Brewing Co. was originally a few friends who started hawking kegs of nitro cold brew — that is, cold brewed coffee charged with nitrogen to make it rich and creamy, like Guinness — to local restaurants. Soon they started rolling out the kegs into office kitchens, and in 2016 started canning their brews and selling them through retailers along the East Coast. In May of this year they started selling their cans via Amazon.

According to COO Melissa Kalimov, Rise Brewing Co. is the U.S.’s first shelf-stable nitro cold brew. The cans have a widget at the bottom very similar to the one in a Guinness can, which replicates the nitro beer experience (and gives you the *crack* — hisssssss sound when you pop the top). See the video below for the full sound experience. (Apologies for the low quality, I took the video one-handed.)

Cold brew has also been experiencing a boom these past few years: it has more caffeine and less acid than hot coffee, so it gives you a stronger buzz and less of a stomachache. From 2015 to 2017, cold brew sales grew by a whopping 370% to $38.1 million.

And while products like the Gravity Cold Brewer, the Dash Cold Brew Coffee Maker, and the PicoBrew Z Series let you make your own cold brew at home, adding nitro to the mix is outside most home barista’s skillset. Nitro certainly isn’t necessary to get the cold brew buzz, but it is pretty tasty: it’s smooth, creamy, and has a frothy head — sort of like iced coffee meets Guinness. Many coffee shops have hopped on the nitro trend, including Starbucks, who put nitro cold brew on tap in 2015.

In addition to their original black brew, Rise Brewing Co. also has a few more adventurous flavors. Last summer they launched two new cold brew options, one mixed with lemonade and the other blood orange juice. In August of this year, the company launched their nitro latté line, with both traditional and oat milk options. “With so many cold brew coffee makers coming into the space, we wanted to show ourselves as innovators,” said Rise co-founder and CEO Grant Gyesky.

Photo: Specialty Coffee Association/Square.

Bringing oat milk into the mix was a smart choice for Rise Brewing Co.. The 2018 Square Coffee Report released last month showed that oat milk is the third most popular alternative milk in the U.S., but that could soon change — sales have increased by 425 percent since June 2017. Oat milk also has less separation and, in this ex-barista’s opinion, goes better with coffee than almond or soy milk. Plus, it won’t affect people with nut or soy allergies.

I had the opportunity to try the brew out for myself and let me tell you, it’s pretty darn good. There’s a distinct oatmeal flavor to the oat milk latte, but I actually liked it — and as someone who’s lactose intolerant, I could drink it without a stomachache. (I’d recommend skipping the more adventurous Lemon and Blood Orange cold brew, however.) The one problem is that it’s almost too easy to drink: the creaminess makes it go down smooth, so you can end up drinking one super-fast and not realize it until the jitters kicked in.

Rise cold brew cans retail from $2.99 to $3.49, which is cheaper than a cold brew from your local coffee spot (at least in urban areas). Add the portability aspect — and the fact that you don’t need to keep them chilled — and Rise Brewing Co. is a great option for caffeinating on the go, or keeping on hand for the mid-afternoon office lull.

Apparently, other people think so, too. The company raised $2.3 million in July of this year, bringing their total funding to $4.9 million. Let’s see if they can keep milking the coffee trends.

Kickstarter: Will Gravity’s Cold Brewer Pull in Crowdfunding Coffee Addicts?

We learned last week from the Specialty Coffee Association and Square that cold brew coffee is hot, surpassing sales of iced coffees here in the U.S. Keeping up with your cold brew habit, however, can get expensive quickly.

To cut down on your cold brew costs, Polar Brew is running a Kickstarter campaign for its Gravity Cold Brew Coffee Maker. This two-in-one system uses a combination of glass carafes and stainless steel filters to let you cold brew your coffee in bulk using either a slow drip or immersion method.

Just add your grounds, pour in your water, and — wait. It takes anywhere from 4 – 8 hours for the drip method and 12 – 24 hours for the immersion method to brew up your batch. When it’s done, remove the grounds container and you’re ready to pour out your first cup without any other steps.

Kickstarter and IndieGoGo have proven fertile grounds (sorry) for homegrown coffee devices:

  • The Rite Press “no mess French Press” broke coffee product records on the crowdfunding platform. It featured a removable chamber that you pushed the grounds into for easy cleaning.
  • After some fits and starts, Bonaverde’s Berlin coffee roaster + brewer in one made it to market.
  • The FrankOne uses vacuum extraction technology to remove the crema from your coffee (and also make cold brew), resulting in a sweeter cup of joe.
  • And over on IndieGoGo, the Cora Coffee Brewer is an IoT-enabled precision pour-over coffee system for hardcore java nerds.

Will the Gravity succeed? So far, Polar Brew has raised $6,500 of its $25,000 crowdfunding goal. Early bird backers can pick up a Gravity system for $45 (it will retail for $90), which the company says will ship in February of 2019. Polar Brew claims that the Gravity system will pay for itself within the first two brews.

The question, however, is do you need it? Ninety bucks ain’t nuthin’ and it’s not that hard to grind your own coffee and let it soak overnight. Perhaps the slow drip option plus the ready-to-pour carafe (that admittedly does look nice) will be enough to create cold brew converts.

Food Tech News Roundup: Cold Brew, Avocados, and Robot-Made Burgers

Were we the only ones whose heads were spinning with all the food tech news this week? Especially the funding announcements. Corporate catering company ezCater raised $100 million, cultured fish startup Finless Foods snagged $3.5 million, and Hungry raised $1.5 million. And that was just in the U.S.! There were quite a few other big fundraising announcements from food innovation companies around the world, from food delivery to meal replacement shakes.

Here are some of the other food tech news bits — funding-related and otherwise — from around the web this week. This one’s a bit longer than usual, so we’ve divided it up into categories for you.

Crowdfunding updates

Dash Rapid Cold Brew Available In Stores
Tired of waiting a grueling 24 hours for your cold brew to be ready? This week Dash Rapid Cold Brew, which claims to create cold brew coffee in 5 minutes, is now available in stores and online. It’s the latest product from Storebound, the company that brought you such tech-enabled appliances as the Pancakebot 3D Printer and the SoBro Coffee Table. After raising funds for the product on IndieGoGo, the product found its way online earlier this year to mixed reviews. At the time, the company told us they were working on adjustments to the product, so let’s hope they’ve gotten those fixed as the product heads to brick and mortar retail for $129.99.

IoT-enabled brewing airlock PLAATO ships
This week PLAATO, an IoT powered smart airlock we wrote about last year that lets you monitor beer fermentation  via phone app, has started shipping. The Norwegian project had raised over $200,000 on Kickstarter, beating its $30,000 goal in the first 12 hours. The PLAATO, which monitors fermentation levels, CO2 amounts, and temperature throughout the brewing process, will retail for $149.

Robots and… more funding.

Creator offers $6 cheeseburgers made by robots
Restaurant/culinary robotics company Creator opened up their robotic burger chef to a select few this week before their June 27th opening. The San Francisco-based company, formerly Momentum Machines, will serve up robot-created cheeseburgers for $6. Automated chefs are all the rage right now, from Miso Robotics’s burger-flipping Flippy to Chowbotics’ automated food bowls. If you want to stay on the cutting edge, be sure to check out The Spoon Automat podcast, which covers all things food robots.

 

Bossa Nova raises funds to scale up inventory robots
This week Pittsburgh-based Bossa Nova raised $29 million to increase the production of their mobile inventory robots. The robots work perform tasks like shelf-scanning to facilitate re-stocking in retailers like Walmart (its currently in more than 40 of its stores), and are apparently 50% more efficient than human workers. This latest funding round brings Bossa Nova’s total war chest to $70 million.

Everything else

Beyond Meat goes to Canada
A&W Services is bringing Beyond Meat burgers north of the border into Canada. Starting July 9th, the national restaurant chain will offer the plant-based patties in its nearly 1,000 locations across the country. This will make A&W the first Canadian chain to carry Beyond products, and will also mark Beyond Meat’s largest restaurant chain partnership to date.

 

Apeel avocados now on Costco shelves
Midwest Costco stores got a new item in their produce section this week: avocados coated with a plant-based protective layer by Apeel Sciences, which should make the fruit last up to four times longer. According to the Washington Post, Costco hopes to roll out these long-living avocados in their stores nationwide. The next Apeel-ified produce to look out for: citrus and asparagus.

 

Nomiku debuts Nima-tested gluten-free meals
This week sous vide startup Nomiku partnered with allergen-testing sensor Nima to put out a bundle of gluten-free meals. Nima’s portable, handheld sensor can detect even trace amounts of gluten, and they just unveiled their peanut sensor a few months ago. The bundle will source from Nomiku’s library of gluten-free options.

Did we miss something? Tweet us @TheSpoonTech!

Cuisinart & Dash Race To Bring Cold Brew Coffee To You Quicker

If you’re a cold brew coffee fan and want to make your own at home, the bad news is making a batch of this smooth tasting joe can take anywhere from 12 to 24 hours. Because of this, most folks just end up heading down to the local coffee shop or grocery store and spend anywhere from $4-7 to satiate their cravings.

But I have some good news for those who want to make their own cold brew and don’t want to wait 24 hours to pour the first cup: Over the past few months, both Cuisinart and Dash started shipping cold brew coffee makers that can put a cup of cold brew in your hands in less than 30 minutes. Each uses a slightly different technology to accelerate the brewing process, but both are drastically different than traditional slow steep makers such as the Toddy.

Let’s first look at Cuisinart’s entry into the quick cold brew market.

Cuisinart DCB-10

The Cuisinart DCB-10 Cold Brew Coffee machine, which debuted last fall, uses what the company describes as ‘rapid-spin technology’ to extract the flavor from the coffee grounds.  While the Cuisinart folks didn’t reveal any specific details about the technology, it sounded a little like centrifugal brewing method used in the Spinn coffee system to me.

The DCB-10 can make a pot of mild, ready-to-drink (many traditional cold brew makers like the Toddy only make concentrate) cold brew in 25 minutes, or you can keep dial up the time to 35 minutes for medium or 45 minutes for a bold brew.

The Cuisinart DCB-10 will set you back $99, quite a bit more than traditional drip cold brew makers, but again you are paying for convenience. Early reviews of the DCB-10 on Amazon seem to be fairly positive.

You can see Cuisinart’s head of marketing Mary Rodgers walk through the DCB-10 in the video below:

Automatic Cold Brew Coffeemaker (DCB-10) Talking Points

Dash Cold Brew Coffee Maker

The Dash Cold Brew Coffee Maker, which claims to make a batch of cold brew in only 5 minutes, was first teased a year ago at the 2017 Housewares show. The company went on to launch a successful Indiegogo and eventually shipped the product before the holidays and can now be found on Target.com.

Unlike the Cuisinart, the Dash cold brew machine uses a technique the company describes as “patent pending cold boil technology” with a pump to “create rapid circulation and create the same results you would get from the extraction of boiling without any added heat.” Also unlike the Cuisinart, you can brew either concentrated or ready-to-drink with the Dash machine.

Early reviews of the Dash Cold Brew system are mixed, with some customers complaining about what one Indiegogo backer described as an “exploding coffee machine” where the top of the brewing chamber comes off during the brew cycle and sprays coffee around the room.

Storebound CEO Evan Dash told me via email that the company is working on “some big improvements” they will be rolling out in the next month or so. Let’s hope one of those improvements is removing the ‘exploding coffee’ problem some users seem to have with the machine.

You can see an explanation of the Dash machine below:

Dash Rapid Cold Brew System

It’s not surprising that as more consumers look for ways to brew cold brew coffee at home, companies look to step up with new products to make the process more convenient. I imagine that we’ll see more solutions in the coming year that accelerates the brewing process.

Now if someone could just figure out how to ferment kombucha quickly to satiate my craving for the fizzy probiotic-laden drink, that’s something I’d be on board with.

Here’s The Most Exciting New Coffee Tech Of 2017

Ready for a jolt of innovation with your morning caffeine fix? Good thing, because 2017 looks like it could serve up a double shot of disruptive coffee technology.

Due to a combination of emerging taste trends, technologies, and good timing, 2017 is shaping up to be an exciting year in the world of coffee. Here are the products that I’m most intrigued about:

Spinn Coffee

(Update: Read my November 2017 update on the status of Spinn here). Spinn Coffee is a San Francisco startup that is expected to ship its centrifugal brewing system this summer to early backers.  The Spinn coffee maker uses the same centrifugal technology that Nespresso uses in its Vertuoline coffee and espresso maker line (Nespresso licenses the technology from Spinn), only instead of creating a centrifuge within the pod, the Spinn uses its patented technology within an internal centrifuge system.

The new machine will grind whole beans for each cup and brew the consumer’s choice of espresso or drip coffee. The centrifuge spins the brewing coffee spins at a high rate within the chamber to extract flavors from the ground coffee beans.

As would be expected from a modern coffee maker, the Spinn is connected and app-controllable. The company is also working to develop a coffee marketplace that delivers beans from local roasters. While the first batch of Spinns is sold out, the company has made a second batch available for preorder that is expected to ship in the second half of this year.

Spinn - The key to the Best Cup of Coffee

Bonaverde Berlin Roast-Grind-Brew Machine

(Update: You can see our November 2017 video review of the Bonaverde Berlin here). Bonaverde is one of the connected kitchen’s longest running crowdfunding sagas, having raised funding for its roast-grind-brew coffee machine back in 2013. While over two years late, the company finally started to ship to beta testers (aka Kickstarter backers) and are fine-tuning the product for a broader release.

The Bonaverde Berlin is a unique idea and will test just how far coffee lovers will go for a unique cup of coffee. While the home coffee roasting movement has picked up steam in recent years, the typical method for home roasting is to use a dedicated home roaster.  By combining roast-grind-brew into one single device, the Berlin will certainly provide extra convenience and space savings for those interested in home roasting, but it’s too soon to tell how many average consumers are willing to go this far for a unique and fresh cup of coffee.

The Berlin, which will be available to non-Kickstarter backers at the end of this year, will run for $800 or more at retail. The device requires its own special filters to mask the roasting smell as well as – at least initially – that you purchase the coffee pouches from the company that can cost between $1 and $5.  Consumers will eventually be able to insert their own beans to roast, but for now users of the Bonaverde will need to buy their green coffee through the Bonaverde curated marketplace.

You can watch a CNET video review of the product below.

Seva Coffee

In many ways, Seva is a similar concept to the Bonaverde Berlin in that it has created a roast-grind-brew machine that starts with green coffee beans and delivers a full cup of coffee, but the main difference being that Seva uses a proprietary capsule system. The capsules, which are compostable (unlike traditional Keurig based pod system), will allow the user to create a single cup of coffee, unlike the Bonaverde system which brews between 5 and 8 cups with a pouch of their coffee.

Pricing and availability for the Seva Coffee machine are currently not available.

Dash Cold Brew Coffee Machine

While companies like Toddy have enabled consumers to make cold brew coffee at home for decades, a recent surge in interest in the low-acidity coffee brewing method has some wondering if there’s a faster way to make coffee than the usual 8 to 12 hours required for a cup of cold brew.

Enter Storebound, the company behind the PancakeBot and the SoBro connected coffee table. The company showed off a prototype of its Dash Rapid Cold Brew Coffee Maker at the Housewares Show, a device that is expected to short cut the process of cold brew coffee to 10 minutes.  According to Digital Trends Jenny McGrath, the Dash Cold Brew machine uses something called ““cold boil” and lots of filtration.”

Storebound isn’t the first company to take a swing at a quick cold brew machine. First Build, the incubation group for GE that created the Paragon precision cooker, had a fast cold brew prototype called the Prisma that it came about $3 thousand short of funding on Indiegogo last fall, which caused them to put the brakes on development.

Chime Chai Tea Maker

Ok, so admittedly I’m cheating here by including a chai maker, but hey, who doesn’t like chai tea? The Chime connected tea maker, which is expected to start shipping later this year, uses a pod-based system that allows you to brew a highly optimized cup of chai.

Jacked-Up Nitro Cold Brew Keg System

Since so many us like our beer to taste like coffee, it’s only natural that we’d eventually have coffee that tastes like beer.  Or, at the very least, coffee that has a Guinness-like head in the form of nitrogen-injected coffee.

While nitro-injected coffee has been gaining in popularity in recent years, it’s still hard to find unless you live near an adventurous coffee bar. But don’t worry, you can always make nitro-coffee at home if you’re willing to try some of the early nitrogen coffee makers such as the Jacked-Up Nitro. The system, which is available online through a home brew specialty retailer, is available today for $230 and looks fairly straightforward to operate.

However, being the tech nerd that I am, I’m still on the hunt for a home nitro system that is connected and doesn’t require me to go to a home brew specialty shop. Who knows, maybe there’s an innovative startup (hint hint) that will create one that I include in my top coffee tech list of 2018.

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