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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

foodtech

The Cloud Kitchen Pie is Growing. Are The Slices Thick Enough to Sustain Everyone?

Early technology markets tend to have a shine to them, especially when everything is still new and most of us are learning what all the changes mean.

But, as we’ve seen with spaces like ride sharing and food delivery, this initial optimism can give way over time to a more cold-eyed reality as new models are put into practice. And it’s often the split of the spoils that is the biggest source of disenchantment with new business models, which sometimes means a recalibration is needed to make sure critical players are compensated fairly.

Judging from an email from Spoon reader JD, a ghost kitchen operator out of the UK, it sounds like ghost kitchen and delivery models could use such a recalibration of the model to make it more sustainable for some of the participants:

Making money from a restaurants perspective is not easy in ghost kitchens with the current commissions. The aggregators don’t appear to be making any real money either. The transfer of costs from rent and over head to aggregators is not a real win.

Without lower labour and food inputs-which likely leads to lower quality. High aggregator commission also lead to high consumer prices. No fly wheel here but aggregators are promoting ghost kitchens to show rising order volumes for their funders.

I asked JD if he thought greater scale through more centralized production could resolve some of these issues. His answer in short? It could help, but it’s complicated.

Centralization of production is one way to help square the circle.  We use a centralised model, scale helps on this for sure and quality checks etc.  Add in better ways of farming and supply chain and there is a chance to get somewhere.

The pie is getting bigger in my view and I feel will continue to do so. Stuffing ever more brands into dense locations appears to offer selection to consumers but I am not entirely sure that fairy tale ends well. Some good brands will win and those slower or less focused, as is the way of the world will fade away.

However the utility cost of the delivery fulfillment model is such that its costs (in current non drone format) are too high and lead to higher consumer prices, reduced consumer access due to higher prices and overall a model no one is yet making any real money from but we all seem determined will work. Yes too many aggregators can be an issue but I prefer too many than too few!! Self delivery is also still an option, i’m not opposed to at all, there could be tie ups here.

All in all, perhaps better supply chain including centralized production and drones will I think allow some good businesses to flourish and balance things a little bit. I don’t like to think food is winner takes all because we will end up with awful food!

Interesting that JD is a believer that the use of drones or lower-cost, human-less delivery is required to make the model work. If you look at the investment of delivery brands into delivery bots (sidewalk and otherwise), they’re probably thinking the same thing.

Finally, we like getting reader mail with views from the trenches like this one from JD. Drop us a line if you have something to say. Also, we’ll be discussing the business model and other topics in our upcoming cloud kitchen deep dive. Join us!

Surplus Veggies and High-Tech Farm Cooperatives: FS6 Accelerator Announces New Cohort

Food System 6 (FS6), a San Francisco Bay Area-based food and agriculture accelerator program, just announced the participants for its fifth cohort. The six chosen startups are focused on creating sustainable solutions for farmers, ranchers, and other upstream food producers.

All participating startups will receive a year of mentorship and support in areas like business development, marketing, and R&D. Through FS6’s partnership with investment fund 1st Course Capital, each cohort member will also get a $25,000 cash investment after they complete the accelerator program (in exchange for 1.5 percent in equity).

Without any further ado, here are the participants in FS6’s newest cohort:

  • Firebrand Artisan Breads – Oakland-based bakery supporting the local community through employment and high-quality breads and pastries.
  • Central Grazing Co. – Regenerative farming enterprise selling lamb and leather made from animals raised on the company’s zero-waste Kansas farm.
  • Matriark Foods – Upcycles surplus farm produce to create healthy vegetable products for large foodservice establishments like hospitals, food banks and schools.
  • Revel Meat Co. – Small-scale butchery and meat wholesaler focused on local meats raised in the Pacific Northwest.
  • Farm Generations Cooperative – Piloting GrownBy, an online sales platform for direct market farmers.
  • Keller Crafted Meats – Whole-animal butcher and charcuterie producer and distributor, purchasing from local farms.

These startups are more on the ag side of agtech, but all are thinking creatively to reinvent a certain aspect of how our food is produced. Farm Generations Cooperative and Matriark especially are tapping into some trends we’ve been seeing a lot of at The Spoon, like online marketplaces and upcycled food.

Food accelerator and incubator programs are so hot right now. It seems like practically every company, especially Big Food brands, is rolling out their own, hoping to attract a pool of startups to potentially acquire (and help then keep a finger on the pulse of innovation). As a nonprofit, FS6 has a slightly different agenda — though both are hoping that through mentorship and investment, they can help a new group of companies succeed.

We’ll check back in a year and see how FS6’s Cohort 5 is doing.

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!

The Rocean Smart Seltzer Maker is Shipping This Spring, After a Stay at the Swanky Conrad New York

If you’re in Vegas right now for CES, there’s a good chance you’re sitting in a hotel room sipping from a hotel-supplied bottle of water as you read this. Sadly, most of us do it, despite knowing the wastefulness of single-use plastic.

But I get it; Vegas’s dry air makes us thirsty, and, let’s face it, hotels aren’t great at providing in-room solutions for filtered water. (And also: have you ever tasted Vegas tap water?)

Here’s the thing though: more and more of us are moving through the day with our own reusable water bottles, and if we just had an in-room solution we’d fill up there before heading out to conquer our day.

Well if you’re staying at the Conrad New York this coming March, you’ll actually have the chance to fill your bottle water up with filtered (not to mention fizzy and flavored) water in-room. That’s because the swanky NYC hotel is going to put a Rocean smart water machine in every one of the hotel’s 463 rooms for a limited time.

The ritzy chain decided to give the water machines a go after a 40 day pilot this past November-December where they installed a Rocean in a single room. According to Rocean’s Chief Commercial Officer Andre Jaquet, guests in the room consumed 1.2 liters of water per day from the Rocean on average, the equivalent of 5-6 hotel-furnished single use plastic water bottles. Hotel management ran the numbers and realized, over the course of a year, they could eliminate about 1 million plastic water bottles from going into the waste stream.

One million plastic water bottles is a lot of water bottles. Extrapolate that across the tens of thousands of hotels in the US that provide single-use plastic water to guests, and you can see how big an impact these types of solutions could make if widely deployed.

Sadly, there are some business model inhibitors to making this happen, namely that lots of hotels charge guests for water bottles. But Rocean envisions a future where hotels could charge for extras like flavors and other add-ins like caffeine or nutrients that could replace the income from selling single-use plastic.

Friend of The Spoon Richard Gunther, who looked at the Rocean for the Spoon in 2018, told me what he likes most about the machine is it can be plumbed directly into your own water system. “That makes it really easy to use,” he said.

What I like most about the Rocean is the product’s aesthetics. Like many, I’m finding my kitchen countertop increasingly crowded, and if I’m going to put another device in my kitchen, it had better look good.

This one does, in no small part due to a former architect. Unlike so many of the high profile connected consumer products coming out of Silicon Valley nowadays, the product’s design wasn’t the result of some engagement with a high-priced design firm like Frog or IDEO, but instead it was the brainchild of architect-by-training and cofounder Mohini Boparai.

Boparai and husband, CEO Sunjay Guleria, conceived of the concept for the Rocean when living in India and Amsterdam and trying out different seltzer makers and filtration systems. They soon began to think about the impact a good built-in filter and carbonation system could make on reducing plastic, and soon Rocean was born.

If you aren’t traveling to New York soon to stay at the Conrad, you’ll be able to buy a Rocean smart water dispenser for your home soon. The machines, which had originally expected to ship in December of 2018, are now on track for a spring 2020 shipment after a $6 million venture infusion from investment firm Blue and a handful of celebrity angels like John Legend and South African DJ Black Coffee.

The machines will sell for $349, which will come with a starter of a couple flavors and a CO2 canister. Additional flavor add-ins and CO2 refill canisters will be available through the company’s website.

Whisk Launches Consumer Facing App That Makes Any Recipe Shoppable

Today Whisk, maker of a B2B food and cooking commerce platform that was acquired earlier this year by Samsung NEXT, announced it was launching its first consumer-facing app on both iOS and Android. The app allows consumers to take any recipe they discover online and make it into a shopping list that they can use to buy food online or take with them on a trip to the corner grocery store.

The new app includes integrations with voice assistants like Alexa and Bixby, allowing users to add ingredients or items to a shopping list with their voice. It also includes a browser extension so users can clip recipes they find on the web and turn them into shopping lists and push into online shopping carts.

Once a user converts the recipe into something shoppable, they can then choose from one of the 32 grocery commerce partners that Whisk has integrated into the app. Online grocery partners for Whisk include Walmart among others.

While there are plenty of shopping list apps out there, the ability to clip and import any recipe discovered on the web and convert it into a shopping list seems pretty useful. Add in the social/family sharing capability, and it’s like a Pinterest meets Pocket for food making.

Previously a user would use Whisk as part of the experience on a Samsung or BSH Appliances fridge or through the website of a publisher partner, but really didn’t connect directly to the brand itself. That all changes with this rollout, as Whisk becomes a consumer facing platform for the first time.

“In the past, a user would have to use Whisk through one of our publisher partners,” said Whisk founder Nick Holzherr in an interview with The Spoon. “Today, anyone can use Whisk anywhere – regardless of whether it’s a user’s own recipe or something they’ve imported from the web.”

Interestingly, while Whisk was acquired by Samsung back in March, the consumer technology giant stayed decidedly low-key when it comes to pushing its brand as part of this new consumer app push. Outside of the new app’s integration with Samsung’s Bixby, a user would be hard pressed to see any real connection to Samsung in the new Whisk offering.

Despite Samsung’s hands-off approach, I imagine Whisk will look to tap its parent company’s resources as it endeavors to get the new app into the hands of consumers. Having consumers download an app is a much bigger ask than having them use a well-know online recipe platform such as Allrecipes (one of Whisk’s publishing partners), so creating trust and enabling discovery will take work. And, once a consumer installs an app, the biggest challenge is making sure they use it.

If you’d like to try out the new Whisk app, you can find it in the following locations: iOS and Android app stores, on the web, Chrome extension, Bixby, Alexa, & Google voice assistants.

The BrüMachen Will Let You Make Joe on the Go, But is it Really Necessary?

When I was a kid, my dad pulled off one of the all time cool-dad moves by connecting the family’s Atari 2600 game console and a small black and white TV to the car battery so my brother and I could play video games in the backseat during a long family trip.

Nowadays, if I saw some mom or dad had gone through such an effort to MacGyver a way for their kids play vids in the car, I would think that’s pretty cool, but I would also think it’s completely unnecessary in an era where we can bring the games along in our pocket.

Which brings me to the BrüMachen, a portable coffee machine that allows you to brew coffee wherever you go by plugging it into car power and brew up a cup of joe on the go.

To use the BrüMachen, the user simply drops in a K-cup (or uses a refillable pod with their favorite grind), adds water, and then brews a cup of coffee. Once brewed, the user can just drink out of the plastic vessel the coffee was brewed in.

It all sounds pretty cool, but I can’t help but wonder why wouldn’t I just bring a thermos or stop at the local AM/PM for coffee? After all, since brewed coffee is as widely available and as easily accessible today as a game of Angry Birds, isn’t the BrüMachen just a modern day coffee equivalent of hooking up a video game console to a car battery?

Admittedly, there are some situations where you can’t actually instantly have a cup of Joe sitting in your cupholder. Maybe you’re camping or on a road trip and have a very specific grind of coffee you prefer that would otherwise be impossible to get on the road. Or, maybe you just are really frugal and are a long road trip and just don’t want to spend a couple bucks for brewed coffee. In those scenarios, I can certainly see where BrüMachen would come in handy.

If and when the people behind the BrüMachen deliver, it will be interesting to see if they can find enough people interested in brewing on the go beyond Kickstarter to make it a successful product. Like they say, there are riches in niches, and the BrüMachen is betting there are enough car campers, remote workers, or fussy coffee drinkers who will like the idea of brewing in their car.

If the product’s early success in any indication, there might just be. So far, the product has 400 backers and has raised over $34 thousand in funding, an indication there is potential demand for a BrüMachen, at least on Kickstarter.

For me, I’ll just keep paying a little more for convenience at my local grab and go, but if you are interested in the idea of a coffee car maker, you can find the BrüMachen here on Kickstarter.

The Food Tech Shöw: Umlauts, Delivery Drones & Sweetgeen 3.0

After a mini-break following the Smart Kitchen Summit, The Spoon editors were back this week to record a brand new editor roundtable edition of the Food Tech Show.

Jenn Marston, Chris Albrecht, Catherine Lamb and myself jumped back on the mic to discuss the following stories:

As always, enjoy the podcast and please leave a review if you enjoy what you hear.

You can listen to the Food Tech Show by on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, by downloading direct to your device or just by clicking play below.

Audio Player

The Food Tech Show Podcast: A Tech-Powered Fourth of July BBQ

Ok sure, our attention spans were a bit short this week and I was at it again with the sound effects, but we managed to record a podcast on this holiday week.

So if you’re heading to that Fourth of July day party across town or just busy preparing lots of plant-based meats to throw on the grill, just load up the latest episode of The Food Tech Show and listen to the Spoon gang talk about:

As always, you can listen to the Food Tech Show by on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, by downloading direct to your device or just by clicking play below.

Will Impossible’s Massive Restaurant Rollouts Help it Beat Beyond Meat in the Grocery Aisle?

Today fast-casual burger chain Red Robin announced it will be offering plant-based Impossible burgers at all 570 of its U.S. locations starting April 1.

In and of itself, this isn’t huge news. Impossible is already in over 5,000 restaurant locations, ranging from high-end spots like Momofuku to the White Castle fast-food chain. But in light of the Redwood City-based startup’s impending move to retail shelves, it begs the question: will Impossible’s hefty restaurant presence translate to brand recognition in the grocery aisle?

Impossible’s key retail competitor is Beyond Meat, whose plant-based burger patties have been a mainstay in grocery stores since they launched in Whole Foods in 2013. Beyond Meat is in even more restaurant locations than Impossible: almost 11,000 in total. Just this week Del Taco, with whom Beyond had been doing a pilot program, decided to offer the plant-based meat as a taco option in all of their 594 U.S. stores. And back in January Beyond slid onto the menu at over 1,000 locations of the fast-food join Carl’s Jr.

At the end of the day, I don’t think any of Impossible’s recent restaurant expansions will give it a leg up on Beyond in the grocery aisle. Instead, the real differentiators will be selection, taste, and pricing.

Beyond has the upper hand when it comes to variety: in addition to their patties, they also offer plant-based sausages, crumbles, chicken strips, and will soon come out with a ground beef-like product as well as breakfast patties. Impossible hasn’t officially stated what meaty product it will launch at retail, but it’ll likely either be patties or a ground beef replacement.

Taste-wise, both Beyond and Impossible have unveiled 2.0 versions of their signature meatless burgers in 2019. We liked Beyond’s, but Impossible’s blew us away when we sampled it at CES.

The biggest question mark is pricing. Since Impossible and Beyond are both pretty darn good, I imagine many shoppers (myself included) will reach for the option that’s easier on their wallet. Impossible also hasn’t released any pricing information yet, but if they’re smart, they’ll undercut Beyond — which, at $5.99 for two patties, isn’t super cheap.

Taking a macro view, there’s plenty of room for multiple meat-like meat alternatives to be successful in the grocery aisle. The demand is plant-based meats is certainly there: a new study from Dupont Nutrition and Health indicates a growing consumer interest towards meat alternatives, with more than half of Americans increasing their plant-based food intake.

At CES this year Impossible Foods’ CEO Pat Brown also downplayed the competition between meat alternative companies. “If other people are making great [plant-based] products — and this is not B.S. — we love it,” he said.

Of course, competition is competition. People likely won’t be tossing both Beyond and Impossible burgers into their grocery carts. But if plant-based meat sales continue to soar — and I bet they will — I think that more high-end meat alternatives in the grocery aisles will equate to more sales for all involved.

Are Hourly Home Kitchen Rentals the Next Sharing Economy Opportunity?

Call it uberization, the sharing economy or collaborative consumption, the idea that people may have something others want and can rent or sell a portion of it frictionlessly through online marketplaces has changed the game for industries ranging from hospitality to transportation.

Food and cooking is no different. Uber Eats, virtual kitchens and the fast emergence of home cooking platforms in the wake of the passage of AB-626 has shown us food system business models are ripe for reinvention through the power of peer to peer.

But what about home kitchens? More specifically, what if we could simply rent a neighbor’s kitchen – built in appliances, blenders, countertops and everything else – by the hour?

While many of us have an oven, cookware and all the cooking gadgets needed to whip up a tasty meal, others are forced to eat out, have food delivered or impose on a friend either because they are kitchen-less or just don’t have the right set up to cook the big holiday meal or entertain in the way they would like.

What got me thinking this could happen is the recent news that by-the-minute hotel stay app Recharge has moved into the home market. If you’re not familiar with Recharge, they are known for offering access to hotel rooms on a by-the-minute basis so people can nap, shower or…whatever. It works with 50 hotels and now the company says they’ve signed up over one thousand homes for the platform.

With homes available by the hour, I have to think kitchens will be a central attraction for many. Whether it’s hosting a dinner party, baking cookies for the holidays or cooking a week’s worth of home meals for the family, there are all sorts of use cases where hourly access to a kitchen just makes sense.

In a way, hourly access to home kitchens is an extension of what we’re already seeing in the maker market, where concepts like that of Tinker Kitchen have emerged for people who want to get into a fully equipped kitchen to cook a souffle or try out a new cooking appliance.

“We are aimed at people who usually wouldn’t step into a commercial kitchen,” Tinker Kitchen creator Dan Mills told the Spoon last August.  “It’s food for personal enrichment,” he said.

Enrichment makes sense for the aspirational and hobbyist chefs among us, but there are probably lots others who just have an immediate need to make some food or host a party. A platform for renting a home with a nice kitchen would meet that kind of need quite nicely.

So will a sharing economy for the home kitchen take off? It’s too soon to say for sure, but my guess is yes. And the best part is? You can always book an extra hour to take a well-deserved nap on someone else’s bed when you’re done with that culinary masterpiece.

Ztove Starts Shipping Smart Cooking System In Europe

Back in 2016, I received a short message from an inventor in Denmark asking if he could make me pancakes.

While it’s not every day someone reaches out and asks to make pancakes, it wasn’t all that surprising given the inventor, Peter Favrholdt, had created a prototype for a smart cooking system and I was one of the few people writing about the technology at the time.

Ztove founder and me in 2016

As it turned out, Favrholdt had learned we were holding a meetup in San Francisco and decided to travel from Denmark to attend the event.  While I didn’t get to taste Favrholdt’s pancakes on that trip, I got a chance to hear his story and encouraged him to apply for the Smart Kitchen Summit’s startup showcase.

Long story short: he did, and he won. His system, which features a Bluetooth connected pan, an induction cooktop, and an app to orchestrate the cooking process was picked by a panel of experts and Favrholdt and Ztove were crowned the winner of the 2016 Startup Showcase alongside 3D food printer nufood (in 2016 we had a tie).

Longer story short? A week ago I saw on Linkedin that Ztove had started shipping its smart cooking system to customers.

When I asked Favrholdt for more details, he told me the Ztove was now available in Denmark through the company’s website and would soon be available in physical retail.  He also told me they’d managed to create a product line that included two intelligent pans and a large saucepan, as well as three different cooktops.

“On the smart cooktop side we offer a table top dual burner called “DUO,” which sells as a bundle including a frying pan and a saucepan (USD 1599),” said Favrholdt in an email.

More intriguing is that two of the cooktops are built-ins.

“For home use, most people want built-in smart induction cooktops,” he wrote. “Ztove currently has two models – a “normal” 24 inches (USD 1049) and a “wide” 31 inches model (USD 1599) both with four cooking zones but having different width and arrangement of the burners.”

When I asked Favrholdt about how he was able to fund development of the product, he pointed to winning the Startup Showcase at SKS.

“Bringing home the SKS trophy also had a significance,” he said. “Ztove won a couple of grants in Denmark, and in 2017 we were enrolled in the Odense Robotics Startup Hub – an accelerator program for early startups in the field of robotics. In 2018 we got a small investment allowing us to increase the pace and building the company bringing the Ztove products to market.”

With their funding, they were able to find manufacturers for the components of the Ztove systems and start a small factory in Denmark where the final units are assembled by hand.

Favrholdt and the Hestan Cue team at SKS 2016

By finally shipping, Ztove joins Hestan as one of the few companies delivering smart cooking systems that focus on surface cooking, including intelligent cookware, cooktops, and an app. But that’s not the only connection between these two companies; As it turns out, Favrholdt connected with the Hestan team back on that 2016 trip to San Francisco.

“I brought Ztove’s first prototype and was thrilled to get to meet the Hestan Cue team,” said Favrholdt. “It was terrific talking to someone as passionate about smart cooking as myself.”

Editor Roundtable Podcast: AI Everywhere, CBD Crackdown & Finding Love in a Fridge

Sure you’ve tried Tinder or Bumble, but have you looked for love with a fridge?

Now you can, kinda (not really), with Refrigerdate.

Samsung’s gimmicky smart fridge dating service is just one of the topics we talk about on our latest Spoon editor’s roundtable podcast edition of the Smart Kitchen Show.

Other topics include:

  • The growing number of AI-meets-food stories and whether the term AI is being overused
  • The pushback by local city and state governments against the use of CBD in beverages
  • The foodtech accelerator trend (including agtech) and why the new BSH Appliances smart kitchen accelerator may be a new angle for the appliance industry

Joining me on the podcast are the usual cast of characters: Jenn Marston, Chris Albrecht and Catherine Lamb.

As always, you can download the episode, listen to it on your favorite podcast app like Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or Soundcloud, or just click play below.