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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Combustion

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.

Smart Kitchen Roundup: Suvie Adds Air Fry to Cooking Robot, Combustion Launches ‘MeatNet Cloud’

It’s been a quiet summer in the world of kitchen tech, but over the past week, some interesting news has dropped. Here’s a roundup of the stories from this past week:

Suvie Rolls Out Suvie 3.0 Plus With Airfry

Suvie, the company behind the multi-zone kitchen cooking appliance with built-in refrigeration, announced today the launch of its Suvie 3.0 Plus. The 3.0 Plus adds air-frying capabilities to the appliance, powered by the addition of dual convection fans, one in each cooking zone. This means users of the new model can air fry in one zone while using any one of the other 15 cooking modes in the other zone.

According to CEO Robin Liss, the addition of air frying was in part due to feedback from the Suvie community. Liss says they’ve added other new features, including a new ‘ Mix & Match’ mode that allows users to to prepare different meals in each zone simultaneously.

“A lot of people like to have a Chinese takeout night,” Liss told The Spoon. They’ll buy orange chicken and maybe Mongolian beef, and you can cook the orange chicken in the top zone and the Mongolian beef in the bottom zone. Mix and Match mode lets you do that.”

The new Suvie 3.0 Plus will be priced at $429 with a meal subscription plan. The company will also continue to sell the Suvie 3.0 base model, which will remain at $299 with a meal plan. Liss says they hope to ship the new model to customers in late September.

Combustion Adds ‘MeatNet Cloud’ and SafeCook

Combustion, the maker of the Predictive Thermometer, announced this week that they have added two new features to the 8-sensor device: MeatNet Cloud connectivity and SafeCook.

If you’re wondering what the heck MeatNet is, it’s Combustion’s trademarked term for its ad hoc Bluetooth network that connects its thermometer, the Combustion display and the app on a smartphone. With the addition of MeatNet Cloud, Combustion thermometer users can now monitor a cook live and in real-time from anywhere.

To enable MeatNet Cloud, you have to jump through a few set-up hoops. You’ll have to enable a smartphone or table device as a bridge (the Combustion thermometer only has Bluetooth, it needs a Wi-Fi powered device to deliver the cooking data to the cloud), and once your bridge device is connected (and left at home when you leave), users can monitor the state of the cook with another mobile device while they are taking a run to the store to get some BBQ sauce or wood chips for their smoker.

Combustion also announced the addition of SafeCook, which the company says “uses “integrated” or cumulative bacterial destruction to determine food safety. It adds up the bacterial body count at every step in the cooking process.” This means that Combustion has essentially incorporated all the recommended USDA and FDA temperatures into the app for each type of meat needed to ensure that bacteria is effectively killed. Users who turn on the SafeCook feature will be alerted when the food is safe to eat.

Combustion CEO Chris Young often creates elaborate (and fun to watch) videos around specific topics his company is working on, and this mission to kill food bacteria is no exception. You can check out his new video about how to balance the fine line between making sure your food is cooked enough to kill any bacteria and not overly dry.

Nymble Offloads AI to Cloud and Adds New Features as It Inches Toward Manufactuing

Cooking robot startup Nymble sent out an update this week on new features and their plan to start shipping their cooking robot to customers later this month.

According to the update sent by company CEO Raghav Gupta, the company recently enabled the Nymble cooking robot to offload AI compute to the cloud. The company’s AI, which is fairly straightforward machine learning that enables the appliance to optimize cooking and understand specific routines and preferences of users, has up to this point run on a small model embedded in the appliance. Nymble now says that it AI computation can now be run in the cloud on its larger and faster AI model (which it dubs ‘Teacher’). In the case of slow connectivity, Nymble says that AI compute will run locally on the appliance in its scaled-down AI model (dubbed ‘Student’).

In addition to its addition of cloud AI compute, Nymble has also enabled users to find recipes based on dietary preferences and allergen restrictions and to skip instruction steps in a guided recipe (which, according to the company, was a top request among its beta testers).

These updates come as the company nears the ship date for its cooking robot. According to Gupta, the Nymble robot will start mass production later this month.

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

After Last Year’s Thanksgiving Disaster, I Bought a Combustion Thermometer. The Result Was Juicy, Just-Right Turkey

In 2021, I hit a Thanksgiving home run.

After deciding to brine a turkey for the first time, the results were much better than expected. Guests were happy, compliments were given, and when I learned we were hosting again last year, I figured it’d be easy to replicate the juicy, delicious result.

But I was wrong. Last year’s turkey was a disaster, so overcooked that the thing was pretty much an inedible piece of gristle.

What happened? After reviewing the steps and comparing them to the previous year, I realized I simply left the turkey in my old oven for too long without taking the bird’s temperature. When I did take it out to check it with my old-school thermometer, it had an internal temperature of 200 degrees and was climbing quickly. Experienced hands will know that’s WAY too hot – over 35 degrees hotter than the suggested cooking temperature – and the results were what you’d expect: a turkey was so overcooked it was all but inedible.

Needless to say, this year, I wasn’t taking any chances. I was going to invest in a smart thermometer and keep track of the bird’s temperature in real-time.

Which one? I decided I wanted to go with the Combustion because I liked the idea of keeping an accurate read on the bird’s temperature from core to surface (as well as ambient temperature) via the thermometer’s eight sensors. I also wanted to take advantage of Combustion’s predictive technology, which would give me a countdown and notify me when it would hit the target temperature.

I took the Combustion thermometer out of its bright yellow box on Thanksgiving morning. I’d downloaded the app to my phone a day prior, enabled it to connect via Bluetooth with the Combustion app, and ensured the thermometer was fully charged. I estimated the turkey would take about four hours to cook at 300 degrees (that’s with convection – if I didn’t use convection, I’d have cooked it at 325). I put in a target temperature of 160 degrees, knowing the bird’s core temperature would continue to rise after I took it out of the oven and waited.

After about 30 minutes, the Combustion gave me an estimate for when the turkey would hit my target temperature. Unsurprisingly, it was cooking slightly faster than my initial estimates, but I was prepared because I had the Combustion.

I watched the countdown clock tick downward, and when it hit 160 degrees, the app told me it was time to pull out the turkey. I double-checked the temperature with my old school thermometer and it matched the temperature reading on my Combustion thermometer. I put foil over the bird and let it sit for about 45 minutes before carving it up.

The result? A juicy, just-right turkey.

You’re probably asking why I didn’t use a smart thermometer before, and it’s a good question. The answer is I should have, but I figured at the time I could just do the math myself. As it turns out, however, older ovens can be a bit unpredictable (as can turkey cooking time estimates), and now the Combustion will be a permanent fixture come turkey cooking time.

Could I have used another thermometer? Maybe, as long as it has enough sensors to measure the core, surface, and ambient temperatures. While the original Meater had two sensors, it couldn’t measure core, ambient, and surface temperatures. However, Meater’s latest thermometer, the Meater 2 Plus, has five internal sensors and an ambient sensor, so I figured that would have worked great as well.

But after my experience, I recommend the Combustion predictive thermometer. The company tries to get you to buy the pair of the thermometer and the yellow kitchen clock, but I found the app works just find (and meant less clutter on my counter). You can buy the thermometer by itself right now for $119, or buy the thermometer and clock for $159.