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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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When It Comes to Cooking Videos, Gen Zers Love TikTok, Millennials Embrace YouTube

As a former industry analyst, I’m a sucker for survey research exploring how we cook, eat, and shop for food. Luckily for me, word of a new research study landed in my inbox this morning from (of all places) Home Run Inn Pizza. Okay, so not exactly Nielsen, but the study used a good sample size (2,000 US respondents) and had a mix of gender and regional representation. In other words, it seemed to be designed well enough to elicit decent results.

The survey focused on food behavior by Gen Z and Millennials. I’d seen studies like this before – heck, we’ve even conducted them here at The Spoon – but what stood out to me about this one was just how vital the dominant video platforms are nowadays when it comes to gaining cooking inspiration. According to the survey, 71% of Gen Z (between ages 9 and 24) and 67% of Millennials watch cooking videos but differ substantially in what platforms they watch the videos on.

Source: Home Run Inn

According to the study, Gen Zers are more than twice as likely (38% compared to 16% of Millennials) to watch cooking videos on TikTok. A more significant percentage of both groups said they watch cooking videos on YouTube, but Millennials usage far outpaced Gen Z respondents (66% of Millennials compared to 47% for Gen Z). Instagram usage was surprisingly low, with only 7% of Millennials and 4% of Gen Z saying they watch cooking videos on the platform. Neither Millennials (9%) nor Gen Z (3%) watched much traditional TV when watching cooking videos. According to the survey, both generations – 56% of Gen Z and 29% of Millennials – use TikTok for recipe discovery and learning cooking techniques.

Source: Home Run Inn

Another surprising data set was the kitchen gear each used to cook food. According to the survey, both generations rely most heavily on the stovetop, with two-thirds of Gen Z and Millennials saying that was their primary appliance. Interestingly, only 10% of Gen Z and 8% of Millennials said air fryers were their go-to, and an even smaller percentage – 6% for Gen Z and 4% for Millennials – said the microwave oven was their primary cooking appliance. For some reason, the survey didn’t ask about pressure cookers, an oversight, in my opinion, despite the struggles of the pioneering Instant Pot.

Finally, a significant percentage of both generations can be scolded for being poor company when using technology while breaking bread with others. According to the survey, 81% of Gen Z admit they have stared at their phone while dining with others, compared to 60% of Millennials.

If you’d like to see the study’s full results, you can find it here.

BonBowl Looks Like a Pretty Great Personal Induction Cooker

It’s been a long time since I was single and living alone, but I remember a particular hassle from that time was cooking for myself. Aside from not being a very good cook, recipes often made too much food for one person, took too long to create, and the clean up was a pain.

Too bad the BonBowl didn’t exist back then. The BonBowl is a new personal induction cooking system that promises to help people whip up fresh-cooked meals without a lot of complications.

The BonBowl has two parts, the induction cooktop base and a specially designed bowl that fits on top of it that cooks and is also the serving dish. BonBowl is compact enough to stay on a kitchen counter, and the bowl is big enough to serve a generous-sized meal for one. Because it uses induction, there isn’t a hot surface to be wary of, and it plugs into a standard outlet. The bowl is also dishwasher safe, making cleanup easy.

Because consumers in the U.S. might not be familiar with induction cooking, the BonBowl website (there isn’t a mobile app yet) also features a number of recipes for guidance. All of the recipes feature five ingredients or less that you can find at most stores and take less than 15 minutes to cook.

BonBowl’s launch is coming at a time when the global pandemic has re-shaped our eating habits and more people have been forced to eat at home. While restaurants are re-opening, people are still wary about dining there. Restaurant delivery is an option, but it has ethical complications (it’s also expensive!). Having a personal cooker like a BonBowl could come in handy, especially if there’s a second wave of coronavirus on its way.

There has been some renewed interest in innovative at-home cooking appliances. Earlier this week, Tovala announced that it raised $20 million for its connected oven and meal service. The oven itself has a scan-to-cook feature that allows for easy meal preparation.

BonBowl is bootstrapped and was founded by Mike Kobida, a veteran product designer whose previous company, Spectrom3D was acquired by MakerBot in 2015. Kobida currently has three patents pending on the BonBowl.

Single people, or anyone interested in compact cooking appliances, can pre-order the BonBowl right now for $129, and it will ship throughout the U.S. on July 21.

As It Turns Out, Italians Are Making Lots More Bread (and Pasta) Too During Quarantine

Here in the States, there’s been lots of talk about how we’ve become a nation of bread bakers with the arrival of quarantine life.

As it turns out, bread baking is an international phenomenon. In a recent Medium post by the CookPad team, they analyze recipe usage data from their Italy team to show how interest in bread making has spiked in the Bel Paese an order of magnitude higher than before the pandemic.

According to the data, interest in the recipe for “pane di grano duro” (which translates to ‘durum wheat bread’ in English) jumped 12-fold, garnering more views during the lockdown than the entire top 10 recipe list did pre-lockdown.

Image Credit: CookPad

And also much like the States, Italians are also seeking comfort through food. Views for ice cream, torta, and fried rice balls were way up. And this being Italy, it should be of no surprise that pasta-making saw a huge increase: Fettuccine saw over a 700% jump in interest in during quarantine.

Italians are also sharing what they are making online too. According to Cookpad, “cooksnaps” (where cooks take photos of their creations) have jumped 3-fold in the app.

I guess it shouldn’t be any surprise that Italians (and Brits, Canadians and pretty much everyone else) are baking more bread and cooking more in general. The big question is what all this forced-home cooking will do to behavior in the long term and what it means for different participants in the food and cooking ecosystem. It will be a couple of years before we can gauge the staying power of new habits learned during this time, but my guess is all of this quarantine cooking is, at the very least, giving some of us skills that can better equip for life.

Comfort Food & Scratch Cooking: What the Data Tells Us About COVID-19’s Impact on Home Cooking Habits

While it’s hard to see the bright side of things during the dark days of the coronavirus pandemic, one potential silver lining is the fact most consumers are cooking more at home. Research has shown that home cooking not only often can lead to healthier overall lifestyles, but it’s also a good life skill to teach kids.

And whether you’re taking a casual tour of social media or looking at data from any number of sources, signs today definitely point to more of us making our own food. A lot more of us.

But what specifically do the numbers say? First, that a lot of people are learning to make certain types of food for the first time.

Whether it’s something as simple as making rice…

Or something a little more complicated like making bread, interest has spiked to all time highs.

But it’s not just Google searches that are shifting, but actual purchase data of cooking equipment. According to NPD analyst Joe Derochowski, demand for gear to make food at home has jumped significantly.

According to tracking data from NPD for the week ending March 21st, purchases of bread makers were up 800% when compared to the same week a year ago. Electric rotisseries were up nearly 4 times the previous year, while pasta makers were pacing at 3 times their normal sales when compared to a year ago.

While people are learning the basics and scooping up housewares to help them prepare more food at home, they’re also looking for recipes that lets them pinch a penny or two. Chicory, a shoppable recipe app platform used by recipe publishers, has seen a spike in interest for low-cost “bowl food” like soups and stroganoff.

The table below shows a snapshot in time look at the top daily recipe views near the end of March:

What the table data tells us is that people are making comfort food that can stretch a buck, which is not all that surprising since many of us have been thrust into financial uncertainty in relatively short order.

While there are many differences between the great recession and today’s crisis, it is instructive to look at what happened then to get an idea of how behaviors changed during the downturn. Data from NPD shows those categories that saw an increase between February 2007 (pre-crisis) and February 2010 (post-crisis) were pasta dishes, bread and cereal.

In other words, not only did we look to make food that was affordable such as pasta and casseroles then, but we also consumed more carbs, which tend to be cheaper than protein-heavy foods.

And while we are once again cooking more food that will feed us more affordably, unlike the 2008 and 2009 time frame, early indicators show that recent behavior shifts might be driven in part by a desire for food self-sufficiency rather than just saving a buck. Data from Chicory shows in the chart below there’s was a massive spike in mid-March in interest in scratch cooking.

Naturally, part of the interest in making things like corn bread and cookies is due to most of us having more time on our hands, but I also have to wonder if the rapid growth in interest in things like making things like tortillas and basic bread is because some consumers worry they might have to make these staples at home for the foreseeable future.

How permanent these behavior shifts will be depend in large part on how the COVID-19 crisis resolves itself over the course of 2020-2021. My guess is the lingering effects of the Coronavirus crisis will be longer and deeper than that of the great recession and, ultimately, result in more permanent behavior changes than we saw from the last big downturn.

The Complete CES 2020 Kitchen Tech Report

At this year’s big tech show in Vegas, there was no shortage of food tech. Everything from Impossible Pork to robot cooking assistants were on display, and so after spending five days in the desert checking out the latest and greatest, here’s my wrap-up of everything I saw in kitchen tech at the show:

Lots of Smart Fridges

It may be hard to believe in 2020, but Internet connected fridges have been showing up at CES for two decades. Of course, with powerful machine vision and food inventory tracking systems, today’s smart fridges are a lot more useful than these attempts from yesteryear even if they’ve yet to be widely adopted.

Some of the companies showing off smart fridge tech at this year’s CES included LG, Samsung, Bosch and GE. Bosch showed off a two-camera smart fridge powered by Chefling, a partnership that shouldn’t be all that surprising given BSH Appliances’ investment in the smart kitchen software startup.

LG’s latest smart fridge, which includes the popular Instaview transparent front door feature, now reorders food when inventory gets low. Samsung’s latest smart fridges use Whisk technology (a company they acquired last year) to suggest recipes based off of your in-fridge inventory. Smarter was also in Vegas at FoodTech Live showing off their retrofit fridge cam.

Home Grow Systems Get a Look

For the first time at CES, big appliance brands showed interest in allowing home grow systems to take root in the kitchen. Both Samsung’s BeSpoke grow system and the LG’s system were evolved proof of concepts that utilized sensors and allowed the home gardener to monitor the status of their plants within the form factor of a standup fridge.

GE’s Home Grown took the home farm out of the fridge and made the entire kitchen a multilayered food grow system. You can watch a video of a booth demo of the concept below:

CES 2020: A Tour of 'Home Grown', the GE Appliances Garden Kitchen Concept

All of the grow systems on display by big appliance brands were more proof of concepts than shipping products. I’ll be interested to see if any of them roll out these products in the next year. Of all the systems, the Samsung Bespoke home grow systems seemed to be the closest to a market-ready product.

Intelligent And Adaptive Surfaces

One of the big trends sweeping food tech is personalization, so why not apply the principle of personalization to our physical space as well? GE did just that with a concept called Shift, an adaptable kitchen that, well, shifts to adapt to each person’s specific requirements. The idea isn’t new. The first winner of the Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase, a German startup called Tielsa (now KimoCon), makes an app-controlled, adjustable kitchen platform that adjusts the height of the surface space to the specific user.

The Wireless Power Consortium had a full kitchen built out at CES 2020, showing off how their Ki kitchen standard using induction heating and wireless charging worked. Speaking of induction, one of the most innovative entries in intelligent surfaces at CES 2020 was from design firm GHSP, who showed off technology for a video-enabled induction cooktop. I know Americans are in love with their fire cooking, but hopefully new ideas like this will generate interest in what is clearly a superior (and flexible) technology in induction. You can check out a quick video of GHSP’s concept below:

Drink Tech Was EVERYWHERE

Drinks have always been a little easier to serve up in the future kitchen than cooking technology, and this year was no different as we saw well over a dozen next-gen beer, booze, coffee and tea machines sprinkled around the show floor.

On the booze front, CES 2020 had offerings from Drinkworks and Bartesian, while on the beerbot side, we saw offerings from PicoBrew, BEERMKR, MiniBrew and INTHEKEG to name a few. Noticeably absent was LG’s HomeBrew, the automated beer making appliance concept they debuted a year ago at CES 2019.

When it comes to coffee tech, longtime Spoon readers shouldn’t be surprised at my excitement over seeing a working production model of the Spinn coffee maker, a product I’ve been covering since I pre-ordered one way back in 2016 (we’ll have a video of the Spinn later this week). Terra Kaffe had a TK-01 on hand at FoodTech Live to demo the machine’s grind and brew (and milk frothing) capabilities, while MoJoe Brewing was showing off its portable coffee making system.

You can watch Chris’s interview with Spinn CEO Roderick de Rode and take a look inside the Spinn in the video below:

CES 2020: A Look at the Spinn Grind and Brew Coffee Maker

DNA & Microbiome Driven Diets

With DNA testing now fast and affordable, it’s not all that surprising to see offshoot concepts that capitalize on the information provided by a person’s profile. One of CES’s most buzzy startups in this space was DNANudge, a French company that is offering a wearable that tells a person whether that CPG product they picked up in the grocery store is a good fit for them. On the microbiome front, Sun Genomics was at FoodTech Live to show off its personalized microbiome kit.

Food Waste Reduction & Sustainability

One area that has traditionally lacked innovation is in the management of food waste in the home. While we still didn’t see a whole lot around food waste prevention tech outside of ever-more-advanced machine vision making its way into our fridges, there was a scrappy Canadian startup was showing off a cool new concept for home composting. The Sepura, made by British Columbia based Anvytech, automatically routes your solids into a food compost bin and disposes of your liquids.

You can see CNET’s video tour of the Sepura composter below:

Food Inventory Management

In addition to a number of food recognizing fridges, there are also a few other products on display showcasing how we could better manage our food. The Ovie smart food tracking system was on display at FoodTech Live, while a new entrant into the smart food tracking space, PantryOn, showed off a new dry pantry tracking system that will notify you and reorder an item when the product is low. While the PantryOn is a bit pricey with a retail price of $900, I am glad to see some companies think about innovating in the pantry.

Smart Schnozzes

Long-term, more intelligent sensors – and the software and AI that stitches together all the information gathered from these technologies – are going to make the kitchen truly sentient, which is why I always make sure to check out the new digital nose technologies every year while at CES.

While there was no shortage of electronic noses at CES this year, one digital schnoz that stuck out Cyrano de Bergerac-style was that from Stratuscent. The company’s technology, originally developed by NASA, can be used in a variety of verticals, but the company’s initial focus is food applications. Company CEO David Wu told me they are currently talking to appliance manufacturers about the possibility of including Stratuscent tech in their products.

Countertop Cooking

On the counterop cooking front, Anova was at CES showing off its Precision Oven, which is slated to appear sometime this year. The company was demoing the benefits of steam throughout the show, including showing off how steam can help make much better bread. You can watch a walkthrough of the Anova oven from food tech innovator Scott Heimendinger below, who has been helping Anova with the oven.

CES 2020: A Look at the Anova Precision Steam Oven

One product that seemed to get lots of buzz at CES was a multicooker called Julia from CookingPal. The device looks and acts in large part like a Thermomix, with the main difference being a separate touch screen interface in the form of a 8.9″ display. The touch screen has a camera on it that, according CookingPal, will recognize food and suggest recipes. From there, the Julia offers video-powered guided cooking, and afterwards has a self-clean mode.

Cooking Robots

Much like big appliance brands caught home garden fever, many also seemed bitten by the food robotics bug. Chris covered much of what was on display, most of which struck me as futuristic visions of how robotics could be implemented in a consumer or professional kitchen to make our lives easier. Not that futuristic or far off is a bad thing – what seemed crazy ten years ago often seems pedestrian in the present, and I expect at some point some of these products will be commercialized.

One that’s worth a look is the Samsung Bot Chef. While a bit reminiscent of the Moley robot arm kitchen robot, the Samsung bot’s fine motor movements and handling of kitchen utensils was impressive, suggesting that maybe a home robot chef isn’t as far off as I might think.

Samsung Bot Chef first look at CES 2020

Key Takeaways

When I was doing my research on what to expect at this year’s CES for foodtech, I was surprised at some of the big ideas that were debuting at the show.

While CES normally is where gee-whiz technology debuts, this year appliance and home brands seemed to thinking bigger with concepts that could potentially solve real-world problems like reduce food waste or help those with special needs.

There also seemed to be a big focus, generally, on the kitchen as a place to employ cutting edge technologies ranging from AI, robotics, virtual reality and more. Big appliance, it seems, has realized what we’ve long believed: the kitchen is the heart of the home.

Finally, it seems personalization is grabbing hold in a big way. Everything from personalized nutrition to physical cooking spaces to meal plans is on the menu, something that I think aligns well with the broader push towards more personalized worlds in this era of data abundance.

We’ll be continuing the conversation about personalization at Customize, our Food Personalization Summit, in NYC on Feb 27th. Join us!

Hey Joe, the Smart Kitchen Isn’t Stupid, It’s Just Getting Started

We have a rule in our house where we try to use the word “and” instead of “but.” So it is in that spirit that I write how I’ve met WIRED’s Joe Ray. I’ve eaten dinner with Joe Ray. I think Joe Ray is a brilliant writer and product reviewer.

And.

I think his recent piece on how “The ‘Smart Kitchen’ Is Very Stupid,” misses the mark and is worth responding to.

You should read the full piece, but the gist of what Ray’s complaint can be summed up in his opening graph:

The app-connected kitchen gadgets, the experimental tiny ovens, the microwaves you can talk to, and the recipe apps? They’ve failed. While our first whack at the connected home kitchen was interesting and occasionally even fun, for the most part, it has flopped like a soufflé.

To be fair, there is a lot Ray gets right: kitchen appliances should have controls on the actual devices, not just controls via an app; the apps themselves have pretty weak content; and don’t even get me started on voice-controlled microwaves.

I think the underlying issue is that Ray likes to cook. Though I haven’t eaten his food, he’s probably a really good cook. I, however, am not. And honestly, I don’t really want to learn all about cooking. Food tech, however, and connected kitchen appliances in particular, have actually helped me become a decent cook.

For example, a few weeks back I made ribs for the first time, thanks to the Traeger WiFi-connected electric smoker. I had never tried making ribs before because they seemed to take such a long time and be so complicated. Who wants to spend that many hours making something that doesn’t work out? Or, my greater fear, makes people sick because it wasn’t cooked properly.

While the Traeger had controls on the device itself, I was also able to follow the in-app recipe and more importantly, monitor the smoker remotely. Rather than going out to the smoker itself, I just pulled out my phone to make sure it was still at the right temperature and check on the timer.

The same goes for my June oven. Sure, with some practice, I could probably learn how to make cod well. But the June does it all for me with the tap of a button, and the fish turns out great. Plus, the June has multi-generational appeal in the Albrecht house. My septuagenarian parents like the fact that the oven shuts off when you’re done so they won’t forget (my dad literally used to touch all the oven burners with his hands before leaving the house to make sure the stove wasn’t left on), and my 9 year old son is able to make pizza and chocolate chip cookies (super healthy eating in the Albrecht house) on his own thanks to the June’s computer vision and automated cook programs.

It’s important to realize as well that food tech is an entirely new category in cooking; there will be some bumps in the road as appliances and consumers figure out the best way to work with one another.

I think Ray is right that if startups and appliance makers are going to disrupt the kitchen, they should spend a lot more time working on creating products that are intuitive and make the act of cooking easier. There needs to be a particular emphasis on not just hardware design, but app UI design as well.

And what I want to remind Ray of is that the needs of cooking experts are not the same as those of the n00bs or the never-want-to-be’s.

Having said all that — see you onstage at SKS in two weeks, Joe!

From Pop Rocks To Spicy Snickers: Why Data Science Is The Future of Food Creation

When I think of interesting food products, I often think of Bill Mitchell, a legendary food scientist who stumbled upon what would eventually become Pop Rocks.

Hunkered inside a General Foods research lab in the 1950s, Mitchell discovered that mixing sugar with carbon dioxide in his mouth caused them to fizz and pop. The prolific food researcher — who would go on to invent a number of other innovative products like Tang and Cool Whip — filed for a patent on his idea in 1959. It took a couple decades for Pop Rocks to become a part of the 1970s cultural zeitgeist, but the fizzing candy is still sold to kids around the world today.

That’s the thing with food: so much of what has makes it to store shelves, whether Pop Rocks or the popsicle, is the result of magical mistakes. But in the era of smart phones, connected appliances and Amazon Alexa, this may soon change. Increasingly, new products will be less likely to come from happy accidents like that of Dr. Mitchell’s and instead will grow out of insights gleaned from consumer data made available through connected platforms.

Take the recent story about Mars using Alibaba data to create a spicy Snickers bar. According to Bloomberg, Mars used data gathered through the Chinese Internet giant’s various online platforms that showed customers who like chocolate also buy spicy food.

From the story:

That prompted the creation of the Spicy Snickers candy bar, which incorporates the Sichuan peppercorn, the source of China’s famous “mala” (numb and spicy) taste. Typically Mars spends two to three years developing a new product; the Spicy Snickers came together in less than one.

It’s not just Internet giants getting in on the action. Because every Joule sous vide appliance from ChefSteps is connected, the kitchen startup knows what customers are cooking at any given time. The company is able to analyze this data to unearth potential opportunities for new products.

For example, Joule usage data showed one of the biggest challenges time-starved consumers face when creating a sous vide meal is creating multi-ingredient sauces to go with a protein. This catalyzed the company to create a new product called Joule Ready sauces that solves for this exact problem. The Seattle startup has also built an agile production process that allows them to scale up new sauces based on consumer usage data and double down on popular ones.

While data-driven product development has been on the rise for some time, products like the spicy Snickers are a sign food companies are embracing data insights to take new risks and speed time to market.  And this embrace of data is only the beginning. A whole host of new startups are building upon the foundation of better food and consumer data to build AI platforms that not only will discover new products faster, but ensure a much higher likelihood of success.

Just as we saw with baseball, there might be some old-schoolers that decry the world of food undergoing its own Moneyball revolution. As for the inventor of Pop Rocks, I suspect Bill Mitchell would have been ok with it.

The reason? His grandson — also named Bill Mitchell — runs a little connected beer brewing appliance by the name of PicoBrew.

Markov Issued Patents For A Smarter Microwave Oven

A few months ago, The Spoon discovered how then-stealth startup Markov corporation was looking to use AI to make a better microwave. This past week, we’ve discovered the company has since taken significant steps towards locking up some intellectual property that could help them do just that.

Since the spring, the company has quietly began to talk about their oven – the Level – which essentially is exactly what I predicted back in March:  a smarter electronic oven which uses computer vision and other forms of machine learning to better apply energy. And just this in the past two weeks, the company, which counts eBay founder Pierre Omidyar as an investor, was awarded the two patents that originally tipped their hand.

As I wrote in March:

According to the first patent application entitled “Electronic oven with infrared evaluative control“, the company has developed technology for a control system that utilizes infrared camera sensors to assist in the cooking process. The patent application describes how they plan to use an infrared camera as part of a learning and control system that will more evenly apply heat as compared to a more traditional microwave oven.

This patent application appears to be related to another a patent application from the company founders called “Electronic oven with reflective energy steering“, which describes a way to use RF/microwave energy to more precisely and evenly apply the heat within the cooking chamber.

Markov’s technology looks like a significant upgrade to traditional microwaves, which suffer from uneven heating due to their inability to apply electromagnetic waves consistently across cooking zones for the duration of the cooking session. By using AI to better steer the electromagnetic energy more precisely, users will get better results.

Based on my original sleuthing, I had found the company had indicated it had raised an initial $20 million in funding.  According to this May article in the Wall Street Journal, the company has since raised its total funding to $25 million.

While Markov is currently offering demos of the Level, it has yet to reveal pricing for the oven.

You can see the a hero reel of the Level in action below.

If Cooking Utensils Were Game Controllers, Would Millennials Cook More?

We have a cooking crisis on our hands.

At least that’s if you believe those who suggest Millennials are not mastering basic physical world skills – like cooking – as they wile away the hours staring at screens.

While surveys, including our own, have shown that Millennials are in fact cooking, there’s no doubt they (and my fellow busy Gen-Xers) could benefit from mastering some basic cooking skills. Coming up with reasons for cooking skills education is easy – you can save money, impress friends, try new kinds of food – but perhaps the most convincing argument is there’s a growing body of research showing a correlation between cooking at home and better health outcomes over time.

So, if cooking is good for us and society at large, doesn’t it make sense to get young people cooking more? And if so, the question becomes how to do that?

One way is to bring cooking and food information to young people in a format they can appreciate. Buzzfeed and others racking up billions of views monthly by creating highly shareable content in the form of visually fun cooking videos. YouTube and Facebook are enabling the rise of independent content creators as well as food-focused multichannel networks like Tastemade which tap into a growing hunger for food-specific content.

Another idea is teaching kitchens, which have become fashionable in places like Japan. ABC Cooking School has 125 locations in Japan, and the primary customer for the schools are young Japanese women (9 out of 10 students are women) who want to learn basic cooking skills.

But as most of us in the tech world knows, maybe the most surefire way to create more engagement in an activity is to add a layer of gaming to it.

One way to do that is through gamification. Gamification is the concept of adding game dynamics to almost any online activity. Whether it’s in the form of virtual rewards for your bank or badges from that online class you’re taking, most of us have used some form of gamification, and now cooking apps like SideChef are using game dynamics to get consumers cooking.

Then there are actual video games created to increase interest in a given topic. There’s no shortage of basic video games that integrate some cooking concept, from Nintendo’s Cooking Mama series to Overcooked from Steam, but where these games fall short in that they don’t put cooking tools in your hands. While you may be chopping veggies insanely fast on Cooking Mama, this doesn’t directly translate since you can’t use a game controller to make dinner.

But what if we were to make game controllers out of actual cooking tools? In other words, what if the knives, spoons, spatulas, and pans we used to make dinner with became part of the video game itself?

I know it sounds crazy, but bear with me. If you look at other physical crafts like knitting, creators have already started to make the actual craft tool one in the same as the video game controller.

Take Loominary, an open source game where the video game controller is a tabletop loom. The game’s creators created a computer software game that takes inputs from RFID tags on the loom shuttles and then registers choices made by the user as they start weaving on the loom.

You can see Loominary in action below:

Loominary Prototype Demo

Loominary uses RFID tags embedded in loom shuttles, but there’s no reason cooking tools couldn’t also use other sensors much the way today’s smart footballs and basketballs pack in sensors like accelerometers to track performance, speed and technique. Add in things like machine vision – and there’s no shortage of efforts to layer machine vision with food – and you may have the makings of an interesting video game concept: making dinner.

Imagine being immersed in a video game where you are egged on by a virtual Top Chef panel of judges as you cook a meal. You can compete against yourself, someone in another city, or against a virtual Heston Blumenthal.

At the end of the game, you not only have a score, but you have a dinner to eat.

While the Tasty One Top isn’t a game platform, there’s no reason it couldn’t be. If the company mapped all those Tasty cooking videos to work with the cooktop, why couldn’t they eventually track behavior and even have competitions for the best rendition of Tasty meals made at home?

And who’s to say you couldn’t combine cooking with virtual reality experiences. I’m sure Apple has thought about how the iPhone X’s augmented reality could be applied in the kitchen.

So maybe cookware companies aren’t gaming companies. But, with increasing investment in software and sensors, the arrival of machine vision and augmented reality, I’m betting some companies will look to create a tasty combination of cooking and gaming to get millennials to put on the cooking apron.

Yes, Millennials Are Staying Home To Cook. Here’s What They’re Making

Last week, Buffalo Wild Wings CEO Sally Smith wrote a letter to investors to tell them that times are tough in the world of fast casual dining.

According to Smith, one of the big reasons for the struggles of Applebee’s and others in the world of fast dining is millennials are eschewing mountainous plates of fried fare to cook at home and use food delivery services like Blue Apron.

Here at the Spoon, we’re not surprised. According to a survey we conducted of over 1000 US households, we found that 95% of millennials (age group 18-29) cook weekly at home, compared with 92% of those aged 30-44 and 93% of those aged 45-59.

However, while a slightly higher percentage of millennials do cook at home, they do so less frequently than their older counterparts. According to our survey, 47% of millennials cook at home 5 or more times per week, compared with 55% of those aged 30-44 and 60% of those over 60.

When they aren’t cooking at home, millennials aren’t necessarily heading to their local Red Robin. That’s because as Smith notes, the younger generation has embraced home delivery more fully than their older peers.

As can be seen above, millennials are the biggest adopters of home delivery from restaurants. According to our survey, 36% of those under age 30 have food delivered from their local restaurant, compared with 34% of those aged 30-44 and just 19% of those over 60.  Those aged 30-44 are most likely to use meal kit services (10%), just slightly ahead of the 9% of those under 30 years of age who use meal kit services. Only 3% of those over 60 use meal kits delivery services, according to our survey.

When millennials do decide to cook at home, are they zapping frozen food in the microwave or trying to unleash their inner Bobby Flay with a more complicated multi-ingredient meal?

According to our survey, the most common typical meal (33%) is a simple one or two ingredient meals like burgers or spaghetti, while some choose to spend a couple of hours making a more complicated meal (26%).  It’s clear this isn’t the microwave dinner generation, with just 11% choosing a frozen or instant meal on a typical night.

So when they do cook at home, what type of equipment do use? Pretty much the same as everyone else. According to our survey, the under 30 crowd use stove tops, microwaves and ovens as their go-to cooking equipment for a typical meal, just as their older peers do. Millennials were more likely to use a toaster oven than other age groups, with one-third of respondents under 30 using the quick and convenient device once per week.

Not all hope is lost for restaurants hoping to get some wallet share of millennials. According to our survey, 47% of those aged under 30 still eat out at least once per week, and 21% eat out multiple times per week.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that restaurants don’t have lots of work today, especially when it comes to figuring out how to deal with the robots both in the front and back of house.

Make sure to subscribe to the Spoon newsletter to get it in your inbox. And don’t forget to check out Smart Kitchen Summit, the only event on the future of the food, cooking, and the kitchen. 

2017 Is Going To Be A Year Of Crazy Innovation For The Oven

When you ask people what device in the home is ripe for a technology refresh, the oven usually isn’t at the top of the list.  That’s because most of us use our ovens almost every day, without complaint, for years and decades at a time.

Why change something that works so well?

Except that it doesn’t, and the only reason so many of us think things are fine is, unlike with phones or cars, we don’t know any better since we aren’t regularly exposed to any noticeable innovation in those boring cooking boxes sitting in our kitchen.

But things are changing. Just as Nest showed us a few years ago it’s possible to rethink those white boxes in our homes like thermostats, a slew of companies are now forcing us to reconsider the oven.

June was the perhaps the first, announcing their June Intelligent last year. Today they announced their oven will ship next month, which could mark the beginning of a new wave of innovation in the oven market over the next decade.  Below are some of the technologies which will change the way we think about the lowly oven in coming years:

Precision Cooking: One of the early success stories in the smart kitchen has been sous vide cookers, mostly because of the ability to apply precision cooking techniques to get chef-like results. The thing is, you can do that in an oven too, and that’s exactly what Anova plans to do with its new precision oven.  Others like June and Jenn-Air are thinking the same thing, which should address one of the biggest problems with modern day ovens: wide variability in heating from brand to brand and model to model.  Precision also means optimized cooking depending on the food itself. The reality is 350 degrees in one oven means a very different thing in another oven, and using the same parameters to cook in your Jenn-Air could give you very different results than cooking something in your Samsung. With more precise cooking and temperature control, both appliance makers and food brands can create very tailored instructions for the food type, quantity and for the cooking device itself.

Guided Cooking: One of the most interesting trends in the smart kitchen this year was the explosion of interest in guided cooking. While companies like Hestan and Cuciniale created countertop guided cooking systems that use a pan and induction heating surface, others like Innit want to apply a similar fusion of app-guidance, sensors, and precision cooking to create guided cooking experiences with bigger built-in appliances.  What could make things even more interesting is Innit could extend the guided cooking experience further back towards prep and storage, since their platform also will be used in refrigerators and pantry systems.

AI/Machine Learning: One of the most fertile fields in machine image recognition has been food. Google and a bevy of startups have invested in research to enable a better understanding of food through image recognition, while June and Innit are working specifically to apply AI within the cooking experience itself. In addition to image recognition, the ability of devices to learn and optimize their behavior based on past cooking behavior, user preferences and contextual understanding of the consumer’s needs will lead to significant advances in intelligent cooking systems in the coming years.

New Heating Technologies: One of the biggest changes coming to ovens over the next few years will be the way in which they heat food.  Traditional ovens use electric or gas heating, and in the last few decades, convection heating has become a standard feature on most consumer ovens. But soon we will see a variety of new and interesting heating methods, ranging from the new RF cooking technology from NXP to the steam cooking included in ovens from Anova and Tovala.

Interfaces: One of the biggest changes in ovens will simply be the way in which we interact with them. The old way of programming a cook through a number of often confusing buttons was ripe for a refresh, and most of the new entrants in this space are creating compelling new industrial designs and interfaces. Whether it’s the physical dial on the June or Amazon’s Alexa, we can soon expect that we will be interacting – and talking – to our ovens in vastly different ways in the future.

A Changing Kitchen: More Men And More Tech

When it comes to cooking and food preparation, the roles of men and women have historically been divided. Women have been dominant in the kitchen at homes, staying home and raising children, preparing meals and managing the purchasing decisions around food. In sharp contrast, professional kitchens – the ones in restaurants around the country – are run by men. The National Restaurant Association estimates that around 84% of those who hold the title of Chef in a restaurant are male. But a recent piece in the Washington Post showed an interesting change in domestic kitchens – more men are joining women in cooking at home.

After World War II, men came home from the service and women who had stepped in to work outside the home returned to resume the traditional duties of a housewife. From the post-war era until the last several decades, the dominant role of women in the domestic kitchen has remained stagnant.

But with the rise of women in the workplace and more men staying at home or splitting household duties among working spouses more equitably, men have taken on cooking at a higher rate than ever. Looking at data from the American Time Use Survey compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2015, there is still a 28-point gap between the time men and women spend on food preparation in the home. Today 42% of men, up from 38% a decade before, report spending more time than ever in the kitchen.

Not only are you more likely to see men preparing food in the kitchen, but you’re also more likely to see new gadgets and advanced technologies in the hub of the home as well. The ways we’re preparing food, the tools we’re using to cook and the ways in which we order and store our food are all rapidly changing. Are the two related? Sort of.

The rise of “foodie” culture and the mainstreaming of celebrity chefs have made home cooking more popular than ever with both men and women. But the traditionally male-driven professional kitchen has begun influencing content and programming for home chefs as well. Powerhouses like the Food Network are catering programming to men, with shows like “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives” with Guy Fieri, “Man vs. Food” and “Meat Men,” and appliance and housewares manufacturers increasingly target men with cooking gadgets and gear for the kitchen.

The shift in demographics is felt in the home design industries, too. Men play a bigger role in selecting the look and feel of their kitchens, along with what appliances to put in them. In a National Kitchen and Bath Association (NKBA) survey earlier this year, the top kitchen trend of 2016 was “clean-lined styling” and industry professional described modern kitchen design aesthetics to be more “masculine” and “streamlined.” 

Historically, innovation in kitchen appliances has been low-tech and designed to reduce the workload for women. In the 1950s and 60s, the height of the middle-class suburban woman-as-homemaker role, housework and cooking were seen as time-consuming, demanding work that required a laborious effort. Appliance and housewares manufacturers pumped out gadgets and products to help alleviate the stress and workload of managing the home and cooking for a family. As women entered the workforce and families transformed into a structure with two working parents, the structure and responsibilities began to shift. Innovation and invention today continue to look at making cooking easier, but now target a home with today’s conventions: two working adults and increasingly split food and cooking duties.

Today, both large enterprises and small startups are looking at the food industry and the kitchen as the next big frontier. Investments in food tech and connected kitchen startups are booming and food giants like Kellogg’s and Cambell’s Soup alongside tech giants like Cisco, Google and Amazon are jumping in.  With everyone spending more time cooking and sourcing food, the opportunity to rethink the role of the kitchen is enormous. Appliance makers are looking at ways to make their products more connected and adaptive to the needs of households that are busier but want better quality food. Designers are looking at what it will mean to have the role of appliances change and how newer devices and more technology moving into the kitchen will impact form and function of the space.

What we see today is just the beginning of a radical shift in commerce, appliance technology, design and home cooking that might make the kitchens of the future look very different.