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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

FirstBuild

FirstBuild’s Latest Funky Kitchen Gadget is a Device Which Feeds & Manages Your Sourdough Starter

In a world where many kitchen appliance brands have downsized or eliminated their innovation arms, FirstBuild, the device innovation and incubation for GE Appliances, is generating (and building) more ideas than ever.

The group, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, has developed 104 products and features, with 37 making their way into the GE Appliances portfolio. Along the way, it has raised over $5.2 million through crowdfunding and built a community of 245,000 builders who submit ideas, vote on projects, and occasionally back them financially.

Unlike traditional corporate R&D departments, FirstBuild invites its community of makers, engineers, and consumers to contribute ideas and test prototypes in its 35,000-square-foot makerspace at the University of Louisville. This approach has led to some viral hits, including the Opal Nugget Ice Maker, which launched on Indiegogo and raised $2.8 million before a prototype was even completed. FirstBuild was also the birthplace of the Arden indoor smoker, a CES 2024 hit that is rapidly gaining a fanbase in the grilling community.

Sourdough Sidekick - Design Reveal (UPDATE)

FirstBuild’s latest project is designed for home bakers who love sourdough but don’t want the hassle of maintaining a starter. Currently in prototype stage, the Sourdough Sidekick automates the feeding process, ensuring the starter stays healthy and ready without the daily commitment. While traditional methods require constant attention, FirstBuild claims the Sidekick can sustain a starter for up to seven days, adapting to the home baker’s schedule. The device features a built-in flour hopper, water tank, and a smart dispensing system that measures and delivers the right amounts to keep the starter thriving. It will also monitor ambient kitchen conditions, making adjustments as needed to optimize fermentation.

Of course, FirstBuild’s Sidekick isn’t the first smart sourdough manager on the market. Fred Benenson, former head of data for Kickstarter, created Breadwinner during the pandemic, a smart sourdough monitoring device that tracks a starter’s growth and notifies bakers when it reaches peak activity, ensuring optimal baking times. Priced at $50, Breadwinner features real-time monitoring and smart notifications, allowing bakers to receive alerts via email, pop-ups, or SMS.

The Sidekick, in contrast, is more of a full-fledged automated feeder and management appliance, offering a more hands-off approach. Given its more advanced functionality, it’s likely to come at a significantly higher price than Breadwinner’s affordable $50 price tag.

While the sourdough craze of the pandemic has certainly cooled, my guess is there are still far more home bakers today than there were five years ago and there’s a good chance rising food prices may even spark a new wave of would-be bread bakers looking to make fresh loaves at home. If that’s the case, FirstBuild’s Sourdough Sidekick could arrive at just the right time to offer enthusiasts an easy way to feed both their baking obsession and their hungry starters.

Holy Smokes: FirstBuild’s Arden Indoor Smoker Hits Crowdfunding Target in Two Minutes

FirstBuild, GE Appliances’ innovation arm, has launched its latest crowdfunding campaign, and this one looks like a potential home run.

The same group that brought you the Opal ice machine and the Paragon induction cooktop are now bringing an indoor pellet smoker called Arden to market via a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. The Arden can smoke up to two racks of ribs at a time or a small brisket, all inside your home without setting your fire alarms off.

The Arden uses a smoke-elimination technology that requires no additional filters to clean or replace. According to FirstBuild, the technology was first developed for GE’s smart hearth oven and has now been incorporated into the Arden.

The unit uses the same pellets used with other smokers. Once the smoke is pulled out of the chamber and into the smoke eliminator, it eliminates all smoke and just CO2 and water are exhausted into the kitchen. This allows users to sit the Arden on a countertop and smoke a slab of meat without any special venting.

You can take a look at the Arden and hear some of the answers about the technology in the video below.

Arden Indoor Smoker: Your Questions Answered

The Arden is just the latest product concept to emerge out of FirstBuild, GE Appliance’s incubation hub and micromanufacturing facility located in Louisville, Kentucky. While some FirstBuild products have been home runs (like the Opal ice machine), others have been small hits (like the Mella mushroom fruiting chamber) or didn’t make it out of the infield at all.

With the Arden, it looks like FirstBuild may have another extra-base hit on its hands. The machine hit its crowdfunding target within two minutes of launching today on Indiegogo and hit $300 thousand within 30 minutes. The Arden is at over $433 thousand from 653 backers as of this writing.

Those interested in picking up the Arden indoor smoker can buy it for $649 on Indiegogo, a 40% discount from the unit’s expected retail price of $1,099.

FirstBuild is Making a Smart Mushroom Fruiting Chamber for the Home

One of my wife and I’s inside jokes is the reason we fell in love was our mutual dislike of mushrooms. When we first met, we both thought most forms of fungi that crossed our plates were gross. A few gray hairs (on my head, not hers) and years of marriage later, we can both be adult enough nowadays to eat the occasional mushroom when offered, even if we both would still prefer to hold the mold.

That said, I have come to marvel at the power of fungi in recent years and am all for people (except me) eating more mushrooms, so I was excited when I saw that FirstBuild is working on taking its mushroom fruiting chamber from prototype to product.

You can catch a glimpse of the new Mella Smart Mushroom Fruiting Chamber in action below in the video from FirstBuild.

Introducing Mella: The Smart Mushroom Fruiting Chamber

With sensors for humidity and temperature monitoring, the ability to monitor the mushrooms via a web dashboard and email alerts, closed-loop humidity control with a small refillable water basin, and air filter with duel inlet fans, the appliance has all the bells and whistles to help the aspiring fungiculurist create a high-tech fruiting chamber on their kitchen countertop. Plus it looks cool. The fruiting chamber is surrounded by glass, which lets you check out the your growing fungi.

So why is FirstBuild creating a mushroom growing appliance? The main reason is probably because weird and interesting new appliance concepts are largely the reason the organization exists. FirstBuild, which became somewhat well known with product concepts like its precision cooking Paragon cooktop and Opal ice maker, essentially acts as a product innovation engine for GE Appliances. The group crowdsources new ideas, builds prototypes, and occasionally – like with the Opal – will take the prototypes to full production.

FirstBuild has a microfactory that can do small batch manufacturing, so oftentimes the group will make small one-off manufacturing runs of products like the Forge clear ice system. Other times, the product never gets out of prototype, like it looks like happened with the Arden in-home smoker (bummer) or the Saucemaster 3000.

The move into a grow system for mushrooms isn’t the only sign that FirstBuild has become home-grow curious since earlier this year the company prototyped a smart garden system. It’s also possibly a sign the innovation group is following its parent company’s lead in exploring home grow systems as part of a broader home appliance offering.

If you want to get in on the mushrooom farming fun, stay tuned. FirstBuild says the campaign (which we presume will be on Indieogo) is coming soon.

SKS 2019: Disrupting Large Food Corporations from the Outside In

When you envision a company that’s “disruptive,” you probably picture young startups tinkering away in a garage. But major food corporations also want to earn that title and keep a pulse on the newest consumer trends.

So how do large organizations that have been around for decades and span continents stay fresh and new? That’s exactly the question that Larry Portaro, Director of GE’s FirstBuild and Victoria Spadaro Grant, CTO of Barilla and President of Blu1877 tackled during a recent panel at SKS 2019. 

If you’re part of a large company trying to emulate the agility and creativity of a startup, you should watch the whole panel video below. Here are a few insights into how large corporations successfully disrupt from within:

Independence is key
Firstbuild is a rapid-production hardware company that also happens to be a subsidiary of GE. While they may be part of a giant appliance company, Portaro emphasized on the SKS that having some level separation — their offices are actually 8 miles away from GE’s HQ in Louisville, KY — is key to building an innovative culture within their company. By establishing themselves as a separate entity, Firstbuild can have the freedom to experiment and really “mix up the DNA” of their parent company, as Portaro put it onstage.

Leverage resources for good
Just because these innovation arms operate independently from their parent companies doesn’t mean they can’t take advantage of their parent company’s resources. Blu1877, the venture arm of Barilla which fosters and invests in early-stage sustainable startups, was founded to “reach out for innovation that would not be in the mainstream,” according to Spadaro-Grant. While it’s a separate entity from Barilla, she made it clear that that doesn’t mean that one can’t help the other. In fact, Blu1877 depends on the “bigger machinery” of its parent company to help grow smaller startups within their incubator.

Add value to the parent company — and challenge them
“Our purpose is to… do the things that are a little crazy,” Portaro said at SKS. That’s how Firstbuild adds value to GE; by thinking outside the box, developing products outside GE’s typical scope and keeping the large company tapped into new hardware trends.

Sparado-Grant went one step further. She noted that innovation arms like Blu1877 don’t only exist to add value to their parent companies, but also to “challenge” them to reexamine their values and paradigms. That means not only sourcing new ideas from within, but also using their resources to foster young startup talent and help grow a new generation of sustainable food companies.

Disrupting a Large Food Company From Within

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.

FirstBuild Wants to Crowdsource A Next-Gen Drink Machine For Your Sink

FirstBuild, the idea incubator and microfactory from GE Appliances, and the company behind the popular Opal Nugget Ice Maker, is hoping to crowdsource a drink machine that could go directly in your sink. The company is teaming up with cloud-based CAD software company OnShape in what they are calling the Drink Sink Challenge, a contest where makers will submit their CAD-based concepts to a panel of judges and the top three winners will be awarded cash prizes.

The contest follows a recent hackathon by FirstBuild in which the winner was a group that proposed the idea of integrating a drink dispenser directly into a sink. From the contest starter kit:

Last month, GE Appliances’ FirstBuild hosted a hackathon where the winning team developed an idea for a drink dispenser combined with a kitchen sink. With the growth of pod-based beverage centers for both coffee and cold beverages, this totally makes sense: Users are looking for more streamlined experiences, especially when precious kitchen countertop space is at stake.

The thing is, this does totally make sense. The great unspoken problem in the digital kitchen revolution is a lack of counter space for all these cool new products, so I really like the idea of building more stuff into the actual counters. And besides, who wouldn’t want a next-gen drink machine built into the sink the dispenses hot, cold and fizzy drinks?

According to the contest rules, any design must dispense one or more of the following:

• Ice
• Hot water served at 170° F or higher
• Single-serving coffee using a Keurig or
similar beverage pod
• Chilled water served at 40° F or lower
• Chilled carbonated water
• Chilled flavored beverages

Making things even more interesting is the contest is cosponsored by Lowe’s and Delta Faucet.  While early FirstBuild products like the Opal Ice Maker and the Paragon have been innovative, they’ve yet to really become mass market products. I’m intrigued to see if whether working with a large retailer and faucet company in these types of competitions could ultimately lead to productization of some cool ideas that reach wider audiences.

Another interesting angle to the competition is it looks like it’s one of the first big competitions for the new Giddy platform from GE Appliances and the folks that created FirstBuild. The platform is primarily an app that enables designers and creators to enter contests that range from ones with cash prizes (like the Drink Sink) to smaller ones like the Napkin Sketch Challenge for reimagining the future of the spice rack. This paper napkin sketch concept is really cool since folks are actually turning in what looks like sketches on napkins. One of my favorites is this Spice Jar Table RFID Reader.

An RFID Spice rack. Source: Giddy creator AaronMcD.

Giddy is somewhat reminiscent of Quirky, the crowdsourced creation company that was closely tied to FirstBuild in its early days.  Quirky, which just debuted a new version of itself under its new owners, had raised $30 million from GE in 2013 to design and build connected home products. Quirky was founded by Ben Kaufman. In a sign that old collaborations never die but are just reinvented, Kaufman’s Buzzfeed Labs teamed up with FirstBuild this summer to help build the Tasty One Top.

Meet The One Top, A Cooking System From Buzzfeed’s Tasty

In just two years, Tasty has become a sensation in the world of food with its quirky cooking videos that have changed how millions of people discover recipes and make meals.  With over a billion video views a month, Buzzfeed’s food brand is usually at the top of the list of video publishers worldwide.

Now, the fast growing media company is looking to tap into the runaway success of Tasty with the launch of One Top, a $149 induction cooktop and temperature probe that combines with Tasty’s cooking video-powered app to provide a guided cooking system.

One Top’s  development was headed up by Ben Kaufman, the head of Buzzfeed Product Labs.  Some will remember Kaufman from his tenure as CEO of Quirky, the innovative product incubator which created such concepts as connected egg trays. While Quirky ultimately hit rough waters, it seems the left field thinking that defined Kaufman’s tenure at his former company might great fit for a company like Buzzfeed.

And let’s be honest: a piece of cooking hardware from a media brand like Buzzfeed is, if anything, left field thinking.

Making Tasty A Utility

Kaufman and his team spent much of the past year working on the One Top. But first, they had to go back and turn Tasty’s library of videos into something that could be used for a guided cooking system.

“Before we even committed to building an appliance, we were committing to make Tasty more of a utility,” Kaufman told The Spoon in a phone interview. To do that, “we went through every Tasty video of all time and time coded each step of the process so the video can loop in the app until you’re ready to go onto the next step. We were thinking, how can we boil this down in a way to make it more of a utility?”

In helping build the One Top, Kaufman was also able to tap into his connections at FirstBuild, the product-lab/microfactory owned by GE which he worked with closely during his time at Quirky.  FirstBuild has spent the past couple years creating their own kitchen-centric product concepts like the Paragon, an induction cooktop that looks at first blush like the One Top.

I asked Kaufman if they were able to leverage the work FirstBuild did with the Paragon in developing the One Top.

“The Paragon is a great device,” said Kaufman. “I had one and used one and would be lying if I didn’t say it was a major source of inspiration for this project.”

But Kaufman said they spent a lot of time improving on what the Paragon team did, including moving beyond a simple probe-based temperature sensor to make the cooktop itself able to sense surface cooking temperature.

“We really looked to differentiate the product from the Paragon with temperature tracking at both the surface level and the probe level,” said Kaufman. “We have that dual sensor technology which will allow us to hold the temperature on the bottom the pan, which is great for searing, slow cooking and a variety of other cooking applications.”

Another major difference is they built the product to scale a much wider audience. Unlike the Paragon which is built in the FirstBuilt Louisville Kentucky based microfactory, the One Top’s manufacturing will be overseen by GE Appliance in China, which will give Tasty access to the appliance company’s highly-scalable manufacturing facilities which are, in large part, responsible for the low $149 presale and $175 suggested retail price points.

By tapping into Tasty’s massive audience, the company may have a recipe for hardware success. One of the biggest challenges for any hardware startup is simply getting the word out. By surfacing the One Top to the 420 million monthly Tasty viewers, the company could have a successful hardware business even if a small number of those viewers actually become One Top owners.

Bringing Connected Kitchen Products to Market With GE’s FirstBuild

It used to take years for GE to bring a new product to market. With FirstBuild, their innovation community/incubator/maker space, they’re compressing the development cycle to months. FirstBuild is helping GE conceptualize and productize for new ideas in the kitchen and beyond, and it’s also helping them enter test market viability through new mechanisms such as crowdfunding.

In this podcast, Mike talks with Taylor Dawson, the lead evangelist for FirstBuild.

You can find out more about FirstBuild at www.firstbuild.com