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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cuciniale

AEG Rolling Out Smart Induction Cooktop and Wireless Sensor Probe At IFA

Electrolux’s AEG brand is rolling out a new smart cooking system in the form of a new induction cooktop (hob) with a wireless sensor probe at IFA next week.

The new AEG SenseCook system, which was first uncovered by design site Yanko, features what the company claims to be the first wireless and battery-less sensor probe for an induction cooktop. The SenseCook induction cooktop gets realtime temperature reading from the sensor probe and automatically adjusts temperature of the heating surface.

It’s an interesting move by Electrolux in that it’s the first time the European appliance giant is getting into smart surface cooking. The company’s early smart kitchen efforts (such as its partnership with Innit) have centered around cavity/oven cooking, but this marks the first effort to integrate smart cooking technology into the company’s induction cooktops.

The Electrolux/AEG news follows an announcement by Hestan Cue’s parent company, Meyer, in January at the Kitchen and Bath show of a new appliance range with built-in smart surface cooking. The Hestan smart appliance line and the AEG SenseCook system are a natural evolution from first generation smart cooking systems like that of the Hestan Cue, FirstBuild’s Paragon and the Cucianale that feature portable countertop induction burners. Longer term, I expect most appliance brands will build smart cooking intelligence into their larger cooktop appliances and AEG and Hestan are early indicators of that trend.

With IFA next week, I expect we’ll see a flurry of smart cooking news over the next few days, so stay tuned to the Spoon as we’ll be tracking all of it.

Company Behind Henckels Knives Takes 25% Stake in Smart Kitchen Startup Cuciniale

Zwilling, the company that owns the Henckels knife brand, is taking a 25.1 percent ownership stake in guided cooking startup, Cuciniale, the two companies announced today. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Cuciniale system uses a combination of induction cooktop, temperature sensor and app-delivered instructions to digitally assist people each step of the way through the cooking process.

Both Zwilling and Cuciniale are based in Germany, and the partnership will provide the literally centuries-old Zwilling with the technology to move beyond standard housewares and into the intelligent cooking space. At the same time, Cuciniale will get a boost from the global reach and brand recognition of Zwilling.

This deal isn’t the first partnership for Cuciniale. At the Eurocucina fair in Milan last month, Italian kitchen hood manufacturer Elica showed off a demo of a smart induction cooking system powered by Cuciniale’s technology.

As digital recipes become the center of the action in a connected kitchen, guided cooking will become increasingly important. Once you have all the ingredients, you’ll want to make sure everything is prepared correctly, which is where companies like Cuciniale come in.

But they aren’t the only ones. The Zwilling/Cuciniale announcement follows a number of partnerships between big brands and startups to deliver guided cooking to home kitchens. Whirlpool bought and integrated Yummly’s software platform into its devices. Electrolux will equip some of its home appliances with Innit’s cooking software. LG is adding both Innit and SideChef for similar integrations. And the smart cooking division of Meyer, Hestan Smart Cooking, has started injecting its cooking smarts into high-end appliances such as induction and gas cooktops.

Cuciniale launched in the U.S. as a Kickstarter campaign in 2016. That campaign was halted part way through when the company found a partner.

You can be sure I’ll be asking what this new Zwilling partnership means for Cuniciale when its CEO, Holger Henke is on stage with me at our Smart Kitchen Summit in Dublin on June 11. Get your ticket today to hear what he has to say, and to rub shoulders with all the important food tech players from around the world.

Guided Cooking Trend Continues Momentum In 2018

Two years ago at the Housewares Show in Chicago, I saw the emergence of a new trend called guided cooking. At the show, companies like Cuciniale, Oliso and Hestan Cue showed off early efforts to combine sensors, software, precision heating and content in an orchestrated experience that guides home cooks through the creation of a meal.

As I said of my effort to make salmon with the Hestan Cue, using a guided cooking system for the first time was something of a revelation:

“…this combination of the pan, burner and app and the guidance system they had built that really led me to see the possibilities around this new category. I am not a great cook by any stretch of the imagination, but I cooked one of the tastiest pieces of salmon I’ve ever had in about 20 minutes. The experience was enabled through technology, but the technology didn’t take me out of the experience of cooking. Further, I can see as I gain more confidence using a system like this, I can choose to “dial down” the guidance needed from the system to the point I am largely doing most of the cooking by myself (though I don’t know if I’d ever get rid of the automated temperature control, mostly because I’m lazy and it gives me instant “chef intuition).”

Fast forward a couple of years and the guided cooking trend continues to gain momentum. A number of companies talked up new guided cooking platforms at CES in January, from big appliance makers like Whirlpool and LG to big tech platform providers like Google and Amazon.

And at the Housewares show in Chicago this week, guided cooking was everywhere. Hestan Cue, now shipping, was on display this week in the Smart Home pavilion. iCuisine, a startup that utilizes a modular sensor to connect to everyday kitchen tools to a guided cooking app, had its own take on step-by-step cooking instruction. Vorwerk’s Thermomix showed off their all-in-one multicooker with built-in guidance and talked about the company’s online recipe platform, the Cookidoo.

Over at the Gourmia booth, the prolific maker of low-cost connected cooking devices showed off a variety of connected devices, including a Thermomix-like multicooker with built-in cooking guidance. The company’s head of product told me the Gourmia multicooker will eventually act as a smart kitchen hub that enables cross-device cooking orchestration with other Gourmia appliances. As I left the booth, celebrity chef Cat Cora was performing a cooking demo in the booth and talking about the concept of smart recipes.

Gourmia’s Thermomix clone (currently only available in Europe)

Chefman, another maker of low-cost connected cooking appliances, showed off its sous vide cooking app with newly integrated guided cooking capabilities at the show, and a company spokesperson told me the company plans to add guided cooking to all of their connected cooking appliances this year.

Meanwhile at SXSW (which annoyingly was at the same time as the Housewares Show this year), Innit announced the release of Google Assistant functionality within the Innit app they first demoed at CES. With Google Assistant, a home cook can navigate the Innit app’s guided cooking features via voice. According to company COO Josh Sigel, the release marks the first third party app which is completely controllable via Google Assistant.

Of course, like any new trend, there will be hits and misses as products roll out. Early reviews of the Tasty One Top have been somewhat subpar, while my experiences with some of the early Amazon video cooking skills have been hobbled by lack of YouTube integration and the early stage of cooking capabilities in their Alexa skill API.

All that said, I think we can expect lots more in the guided cooking space as 2018 unfolds. I saw a slew of products in Chicago under embargo that are slated for later this year that offer new approaches to guided cooking, and there will no doubt more guided cooking products being developed in stealth that should see the light of day at IFA and Smart Kitchen Summit.

Bottom line: what started as a trend a couple years ago is fast becoming a central theme for appliance makers big and small, making 2018 a big big year for guided cooking.

Hestan Cue Available For Preorder As New Generation of Guided Cooking Systems Come To Market

Last March at the Housewares show in Chicago, I had scheduled a meeting to swing by housewares giant Meyer’s booth to check out a demo of a new product they were calling the Hestan Cue.

All I knew about the product was it had morphed out of work done by Meld, a startup founded in 2014 to create a retrofit smart knob to add some aftermarket automation and control to existing stove tops. After a successful Kickstarter, Meld was stealthily acquired by Meyer and for the next six months no one heard from the connected cooking startup.

So when I got invited to see what had become of Meld, I was naturally intrigued. I had no idea what I was going to see at the Meyer booth, but I suspected it might be something similar to the retrofit knob Meld had built.

I quickly realized after I had arrived was they had scrapped that idea entirely and created something much cooler: a guided cooking system.

The next hour was eye opening, as chef Philip Tessier, Hestan’s in-house culinary director (and soon-to-be gold medal winner at what is essentially the culinary Olympics), asked me to cook salmon for him. Naturally, I was a bit nervous cooking for an award winning chef, but ultimately had no problem making some tasty fish using the guidance provided by the Hestan Cue app.

As I wrote at the time:

“It was this combination of the pan, burner and app and the guidance system they had built that led me to see the possibilities around this new category. I am not a great cook by any stretch of the imagination, but I cooked one of the tastiest pieces of salmon I’ve ever had in about 20 minutes. The experience was enabled by technology, but the technology didn’t take me out of the experience of cooking. Further, I can see as I gain more confidence using a system like this, I can choose to “dial down” the guidance needed from the system to the point I am largely doing most of the cooking by myself (though I don’t know if I’d ever get rid of the automated temperature control, mostly because I’m lazy and it gives me instant “chef intuition).”

It’s been almost a year since I first used the Hestan Cue, and in that time new products have started to emerge on the guided cooking front. ChefSteps has created a cool cooking guidance system for their sous vide circulator, the Joule, while new features in Pantelligent‘s software has made this smart pan into a guided cooking system. Danish startup Ztove is creating a system similar to the Hestan Cue, while Cuciniale is selling what it calls ‘intelligent cooking systems’ that feature an induction heating surface and a variety of cookwares with a sensor probe. Lastly, multicooker leader Thermomix continues to evolve their fifth generation product into what is essentially a guided cooking system powered by a 12-in-1 cooking tool.

And now, the Hestan Cue is available for preorder on the Williams-Sonoma website and will begin shipping in March.

The product’s price carries an MSRP of $699 but is available for $499 online.  The price is a bit higher than other products like the Joule, so the choice of high-end retailer Williams-Sonoma makes sense. I expect Williams-Sonoma will have in-store demos for the Hestan Cue, something needed to convey the concept of guided cooking.

No matter which way you slice it, it looks like we can expect more guided cooking systems on the menu in 2017.

Cuciniale Launches Intelligent Cooking System In US (via Kickstarter)

Early this year when I first wrote about the guided cooking trend after the Housewares show in Chicago, one of the companies I mentioned was German startup Cuciniale.

The company, founded by former executives of professional kitchen range maker Rational, first debuted parts of what would become its intelligent cooking system back in 2014, but only began to show the fuller vision of what became the intelligent cooking system in fall of last year.

With the company launching the US version of its guided cooking system on Kickstarter today, I decided to speak with Cuciniale CEO Holger Henke, the former CMO of Rational, about his company’s journey over the past five years and how Cuciniale differs from the other guided cooking systems making their way to market.

Wolf: How long have you been working on the Cuciniale intelligent cooking system?

Henke: The company was founded in 2012 and we’ve been working on the system for five years. We released a retrofit solution in the Sensor+/App in 2014, but that version required the user to manually set the appropriate heat.

Wolf: How is the Cuciniale Intelligent Cooktop different from other “guided cooking” devices such as the Hestan Cue or Pantelligent?

Henke: For one, it works with any induction cookware (ed note: the Hestan Cue comes with its own induction – and Bluetooth connected – cookware, while the Pantelligent is not induction compatible).

Second, heat and cooking time are optimized automatically to the varying food properties. The probe (GourmetSensor) measures temperature of the pan and within the food accurately and quickly.  We use artificial intelligence homed by a huge amount of empirical knowledge on automatic cooking and this allows us to set the heat with great accuracy (within 1 Watt accuracy) depending on the amount, weight, size, structure and composition of the food.

Wolf: How does the European and US market differ for smart kitchen and guided cooking?

Henke: On one hand, the needs of the consumer are the same in the US, Europe and China. They want to cook better and in a more convenient way.

However, US and, surprisingly, Chinese consumers are more open to smart innovations in the kitchen. Europeans tend to be much more hesitant and conservative. As a result, we believe the speed of adaption will be the higher in the US and China compared to Europe.

Wolf: Can you tell us how many of the retrofit system and the Cuciniale intelligent cooking system have been sold?

Henke: We’ve sold thousands of the retrofit system (the stand-alone Sensor prob/app), but without any marketing support. The built-in version of the smart induction cooktop was announced in September 2015 during IFA (ed note: A European trade show similar to CES) and will begin to ship in 2017 in Europe and the US.  We will sell Cuciniale technology through different, smaller European premium brand names with a ‘powered by Cuciniale’ logo. We will do the same in Asia and in the US as well.

You can find out more about the Cuciniale intellgent cooking system at Kickstarter.