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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cookpad

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.

Cookpad Has 100M Active Monthly Users, Broadens into Original Hardware Design with a Hard/Soft Water Device

Cookpad, the Tokyo-based global recipe hosting site, revealed that it is developing its own hardware design ambitions with a new connected hard and soft water dispensing device called Oicy Water.

Oicy Water, which is still very much in the prototype phase, was unveiled at the Smart Kitchen Summit: Japan today. It works by affixing a bottle of hard water and a bottle of soft water to the top of the machine. Controls on the device as well as an accompanying mobile app allow you to control the hardness of the water you’ll cook with by mixing the contents of the two bottles as it dispenses.

You may know on some level the difference between hard and soft water—hard water contains minerals like calcium and magnesium, and soft water is treated and the only ions in there are sodium. It turns out, however, that whether you use hard or soft water can impact the flavor of what you cook. This is where Cookpad’s device could come in handy.

While it’s still a ways off, Cookpad’s plan is to fine tune recipes on its site with precise hardness controls. Let’s say you are making a pasta, a Cookpad recipe could tell you to boil it in water that is 20 percent hard water. Eventually, that digital recipe will talk with the water device and automatically dispense the exact amount of water with the proper hardness recommended.

The Oicy Water is the first piece of hardware designed internally at Coopad and is part of Cookpad’s larger plan of being at the center of a connected kitchen. Last year it launched its “Oicy” initiative at our Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe. As we wrote at that time:

OiCy (pronounced “oh-ee-shee”, which is a roughly translates to “おいしい,” the Japanese word for delicious), will take recipes uploaded to Cookpad’s site and turns them into a machine-readable format that connected appliances can understand.

So if you were trying to make a particular Cookpad spaghetti recipe, OiCy would pull data from the recipe, and “talk” to different connected appliances you might have in your kitchen and guide you each step of the way. Depending on the number and type of appliances you’d have, it would automatically boil your water, tell you when to add/remove pasta, dispense seasonings, etc..

This is actually the second hardware device that Cookpad has been associated with, the first being the Oicy Taste, which is a connected seasoning dispenser (it’s design didn’t originate at Cookpad). It’s easy to see how both of these devices play into the overall ecosystem Cookpad wants to create. By having a Cookpad recipe “talk” with appliances, users can automate the process of portioning out the right water, at the right hardness level and amount and type of seasoning — allowing them to focus more on the actual act of cooking.

This communication with devices doesn’t just help the end user to cook; it can also help Cookpad fine tune its recipes. As connected machines dispense precise amounts of ingredients, they will report back to Cookpad how much of an ingredient is dispensed. So if enough users don’t like the result of a particular recipe, Cookpad can track the aberrations in the amounts of various ingredients used.

In order to be truly useful, Cookpad will need to collect a lot of data from users on how they like or dislike recipes. But amassing a data set that big is something the company is already well on its way to creating. Cookpad says it has roughly 100 million active monthly users across 72 countries and 29 languages. Further, Cookpad has two million users paying $3 a month to access premium features. That’s a revenue run rate of $72 million a year.

Cookpad wanting to design a hardware system from the ground up makes sense, as they can tailor a device to their software. The harder question to answer, at least for the Oicy Water in the U.S., will be how many people actually care about the hardness of their water enough to buy bottles of soft water?

This article has been updated to say “roughly 100 million active subscribers,” and earlier version said “more than.”

SKS Japan: Excitement, Growth & a Rapidly Maturing Food Tech Ecosystem

Last week I was in Tokyo for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan. It was the second edition of our Japanese event, and while it’s only been twelve short months since that first gathering, the amount of progress I witnessed in the Japan food tech scene over the course of the two days in Tokyo was amazing.

Here are some of the trends, products and innovators that stood out to me last week:

In Japan, Much of the Innovation Comes From Big Companies

For those familiar with Japan, you’ll know it’s not surprising that much of the innovation comes from within established companies. These “intreprenuers” often work in R&D or as part of new business units specifically to innovate new product concepts.

One of these innovation units is Panasonic’s GameChanger Catapult. We’ve written about Catapult as they’ve been showing off innovative product concepts like a food softener for the elderly or home fermentation system.  As it turns out, the innovation unit from Panasonic is still working on those ideas as well as a few new ones.

One of Catapult’s product concepts is Tottemeal, which first showed up at SXSW in Austin in March 2017 as a product concept called Bento@YourOffice. It was comprised of an IoT-powered smart fridge and app system, which is similar in concept to Byte Fridge in that both offer fresh food for sale. Since SXSW last year the company has approached partners and refined the concept to work with any fridge.  The company is now testing out the service in Panasonic’s event/innovation hub, Kura-Think, in Tokyo.

Another large company that’s been busy working on future-forward food tech concepts since last year’s SKS Japan is CookPad. The digital cooking site, which boasts 100 million users worldwide, introduced a smart kitchen platform a couple months ago called OiCy that connects their recipes with appliances to create a guided cooking platform. At SKS Japan, the company outlined the future vision for OiCy in the form of a six-level roadmap for the smart kitchen platform. They also announced an updated partner list which includes hardware manufacturers such as Sharp and Hitachi.

Japan’s Startup Ecosystem Is Gaining Momentum

While much of Japan’s innovation comes from within large organizations, there are also signs of a rapidly maturing food tech startup ecosystem.  Part of the growth is being driven by Japan’s bigger companies like Kirin (who launched their own accelerator). However, there were also a number of young and innovative entrepreneurs that spoke at SKS Japan such as Integriculture’s Yuki Hanyu and Open Meals’ Ryosuke Sakaki.

We’ve written about both companies before in the Spoon. Chris Albrecht was the first to write about Integriculture’s impending $2.7 million funding round when he covered Shojinmeat, the open source project from Hanyu. As Northeast Asia’s only lab-grown meat startup, CEO Hanyu has big plans to jumpstart alternative meat production in the Asia market, and discussed his plans for doing just that.

Open Meals made a big splash this March at SXSW with their sushi teleportation demo. While true food teleportation may be a ways off, the Open Meals vision of creating a food digitization and printing framework is pretty fascinating. Company CEO Sasaki presented an ambitious 100-year look into the future for the idea around food digitization that spanned from digitized food restaurants in Tokyo in just two years and eventually sees space colonies where we’re sharing food experiences in real time with people on earth.

Dinner time in space

Japan’s Smart Kitchen Community Embraces Ideas From US & Europe

The Japan smart kitchen/food tech community is also really interested in innovation happening from the West. One of the speakers at SKS Japan this year was Jon Jenkins, the head of product for the guided cooking group within Meyer, Hestan Cue. Jenkins, who goes by JJ, gave a talk about the role of technology and software in the kitchen and later gave a hands-on demo of the product to a capacity crowd:

It wasn’t just cooking demos. A highly engaged audience packed the room to hear conversations with innovators from the US and Europe such as Jason Cohen of Analytical Flavor Systems talk about the impact on AI on food personalization and flavor. They also heard from Suvie’s Robin Liss as she discuss her company’s four-chamber cooking robot and how today’s appliance companies need to start innovating around food services. The Future Food Institute’s Sara Roversi talked about taking her food innovation platform, which she started in Europe, across the globe. They also listened to Amar Krishna of Chefling and Kevin Yu of SideChef discuss the differences between the smart kitchen platform market in the US with CookPad’s Tad Yoshioka.

Collaboration, Innovation & Community

The biggest takeaway for me from this year’s SKS Japan was there a growing sense of collaboration, innovation, and community in Japan’s food tech market.  Part of it was the hard work of our partners for SKS Japan, SigmaXYZ, who have done a great job over the past year fostering the SKS community. But, just as with the US and Europe, it’s clear now that the Japanese market was ready for an event to catalyze innovation and to bring it together, and I couldn’t be more thrilled that event is SKS.

I’m excited to see how our event in Japan has just done that and has become the go-to food tech event in the Japan market and for much of Asia and I can’t wait to go back next year. I hope I’ll see you there.

If you’re interested in being a part of our global community, don’t miss SKS in Seattle in less than two months!  Robin Liss, Jon Jenkins, Jason Cohen and many more will be there, so you will not want to miss out. You can check it out here and don’t forget to use discount code SPOON for 25% off tickets!

Cookpad Launches OiCy to Connect Recipes and Appliances

Cookpad, the global recipe hosting site, today revealed OiCy, a new service that connects recipes with appliances to create a guided cooking system for smart kitchens.

OiCy (pronounced “oh-ee-shee”, which is a roughly translates to “おいしい,” the Japanese word for delicious), will take recipes uploaded to Cookpad’s site and turns them into a machine-readable format that connected appliances can understand.

So if you were trying to make a particular Cookpad spaghetti recipe, OiCy would pull data from the recipe, and “talk” to different connected appliances you might have in your kitchen and guide you each step of the way. Depending on the number and type of appliances you’d have, it would automatically boil your water, tell you when to add/remove pasta, dispense seasonings, etc..

But that type of full connected kitchen implementation is still a ways off. Right now, OiCy only works with a limited set of select recipes in Japanese, and the company has only just begun talking with appliance manufacturers in Japan about implementing the software into future versions of devices that wouldn’t come out until sometime next year.

You can see how OiCy works in this video showing off a prototype Japanese condiment dispenser that talks with a Cookpad recipe to create sauces necessary for that dish.

At the heart of the digital kitchen is the recipe, and Cookpad has 4.3 million of them from 68 countries and across 23 different languages. So translating that content into a machine readable format will give them a solid base for creating a wide ranging, global guided cooking system.

Translating recipes into a machine readable format, however, is no small task. Cookpad recipes are user generated, so there is no standardization around the way they are written, so data is all over the proverbial place. Cookpad is starting with Japanese recipes and the Japan appliance market because 55 million of it 90 million active user base is in Japan.

While Cookpad has the recipes, it’s playing catch up when it comes to appliance manufacturer relationships. Rival recipe sites such as Innit and SideChef have already formed relationships to integrate their guided cooking software into appliances from LG and Electrolux.

As it happens, I’ll be on-stage, moderating a panel with Miles Woodroffe, CTO of Cookpad at our Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe conference tomorrow. So I’ll be sure to ask him about OiCy’s roll out and role within Cookpad.