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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

future of coffee

My Spinn Check-In: Grind-Brew Coffee Machine Still On Track For Early 2018

May 2018 Update: You can read my latest post on my personal Spinn saga here.

My wife has given me one rule when it comes to my penchant for buying new kitchen gadgets: If a new one comes in, one must go out.

It didn’t take me long to make the calculation and commit when I bought the Spinn Coffee machine a year ago. After all, not only does the machine use a special patented centrifugal brewing system to make crema-like coffee, but it also combines a grinder with a coffee brewer.

“See,” I would tell her. “This two-in-oner lets me eliminate a coffee grinder!”

A year later, one delay and no coffee maker, I’m left wondering if the money was well spent.

I emailed Spinn CEO Roderick de Rode to see how things are going. I’d become a bit concerned after my initial email to company cofounder and one of the inventors of the Spinn’s centrifuge brewing technology, Roland Verbeek (who I interviewed for the Smart Kitchen Show), bounced back.

De Rode responded and, after telling me that Roland had left the company to start a yoga retreat, he assured me that the Spinn is still on track for an early 2018 shipment.

He even offered to refund my money, and I said no, in part because I still want the thing, but also because I believe his assurances. This is in large part because the company has done a good job updating the Spinn community with very detailed breakdowns of the improvements they’ve been making to the Spinn.

In the last one, sent in October, detailed progress made on the grinder, bean reservoir and how they’ve been able to shrink the overall size of the machine from a towering 17.5 inches to 13 inches.

And just this week, the released a video showing the highlights from the development process:

The Making of Spinn

But most convincing for me is the progress the company has made on building out a roaster network. Like many connected kitchen startups, the company is hoping to build a recurring revenue stream through consumables, and Spinn’s spin on that idea is through auto-replenishment of specialty coffee through a network of independent roasters. de Rode told me that as of this point, the company has signed up an impressive 140 roasters.

You can see where many of the roasters are on this map (also pictured below):

Product delays are almost expected nowadays, and anyone who’s bought hardware from a startup takes a risk. Some of the things I use when calculating risk before laying down my own hard earned money on a startup’s product is the founder team, how unique their idea is (patents help), whether they regularly update the community on progress, and if the company spends time building out a sustainable business model.

For the most part, Spinn looks to check all those boxes, and I’m pretty confident I’ll get my new coffee grinder/brewer in early 2018.

And if I don’t, who knows. Maybe I can still get a refund and use it to take the wife to a yoga retreat.

Breville’s New Espresso Machine Is Almost Like A Home Robot Barista

It’s no secret that robots are changing the way the food and beverage industry is creating food, serving its customers, designing products and automating tasks that used to belong to people. Startups like Cafe X are actually staffed with fully robotic baristas who will make you a delightful (and fast) cup of coffee with no real human involvement.

But it’s not just Silicon Valley startups getting in the mix – companies like Breville are thinking about how to automate tasks and deliver appliances that give consumers quality without leaving the house. Enter Breville’s newest invention, the Oracle Touch, which is the closest you can probably get to hiring a barista to come to your house and make you the perfect espresso-based beverage. The Oracle Touch has – you guessed it – a touchscreen and a bunch of advanced technology inside that gives it the ability to create a drink from scratch without much human input at all.

The Oracle will grind the beans, tamp down the ground espresso, infuse and pour a shot and steam your milk of choice to the exact desired standards (without anyone having to hold the wand or container.) In a market where fancy espresso machines usually require some know-how and Keurig-type machines make brewing coffee with a button-push super simple, it makes sense for Breville to try and create the best of both worlds.

The machine, of course, isn’t cheap and not meant to be a hugely mainstream device. But Wired reviewer and food writer Joe Ray has a lot of great things to say about the Oracle, including:

“The Oracle cleverly straddles a line, offering an impressive amount of customization and hands-on time, while automating enough that you’d have to try hard to make a bad drink…for those who are able to plunk down $2,500 on an espresso maker, Breville has created an outstanding machine.”

I took first balked at the price, but when considering my $4.50 a day soy latte habit, I spend about half the cost of a Breville automated espresso machine in a year on barista-created beverages. And I have to leave my house to get them.

Does this type of technology mean we’ll see the downfall of the traditional coffeehouse? Not likely. Robotics and automation are certainly disrupting many areas of the food service industry, but coffee shops still offer a product and an atmosphere that many people can’t or don’t want to replicate at home. While the price points of home automated espresso machines might come down over time, the more likely impact will be to baristas themselves as automation and advancements in robotics are coming close to replacing the job of grinding, measuring, stamping, steaming and combining ingredients to create the perfect caffeinated beverage.

Spinn Centrifugal Grind-Brew Coffee Machine Delayed Until Early 2018

Well that’s a bummer.

The Spinn grind-brew coffee machine which utilizes a patented centrifugal brewing process has been delayed “5-6 months” according to a letter from Spinn CEO, Roderick de Rode, sent this weekend.

According to de Rode, the company delayed the shipment of the Spinn to work on three things: Reducing grinder noise, reducing the size of the machine and speeding up serve time.

From de Rode’s letter:

Currently, we’re encountering two areas (ed note: I think he meant three) that are not yet up to our standards:

(1) The sound created by the grinder – we don’t want you to experience the same heavy sound disturbances typical of a common coffee brewer. That’s why it’s important to us to continue to refine the hardware so that the machine isn’t noisy for you.
(2) The height of the machine – originally, we listed the machine to be 17-18 inches tall, but believe we can achieve better dimensions. We want the Spinn machine to fit underneath any kitchen cupboard, so we decided to spend extra time and resources to decrease its height without compromising the build in other ways.
(3) The serving time – reduce the serving time for the optimal user experience. Tests showed longer serving times than expected so we dedicated resources to improving speed without compromising the quality of the coffee

de Rode goes on to say that rather than ship a product that is not fully optimized, they’d rather delay shipment 5 or 6 months to “continue development.”

While all the improvements described by de Rode seem reasonable, it’s always worrisome for backers (like myself!) when a startup delays shipment. Particularly worrisome about this news is it’s clear from de Rode’s letter that the company got all the way to the expected shipment date without having pushed the product into the tooling phase. From the looks of things, they are still working on overall design and plan on continuing doing so over the coming months.

Bottom line: Unless the company has built in time for tooling and ramping up production into the 5-6 month “design” window, an early 2018 ship date could be tough to hit.

Perhaps one ray of light in this story is Spinn is a little further along than traditional hardware startups in that they already have a licensing deal for their centrifugal brewing process. They’ve licensed their technology to Nestle for Nespresso for the Vertuoline of coffee makers.

You can read the full text of the letter to backers below:

This is Roderick, co-founder, and CEO of Spinn, Inc. Thank you for taking this journey with us from the very start. It’s been a crazy yet amazing ride so far.

I’ve listened to the questions our customers have asked through social media, email and our support channels. One of the most common questions was regarding the timeline for developing the Spinn machine, and I want to answer this directly.

My team and I have spent the past few months tasting tons of coffee and perfecting the Spinn machine to be everything we promised to you. Starting with sourcing the highest quality hardware components, to developing an easy-to-use and intuitive software experience. As we continue to test the prototype, we’ve become more and more excited by the results and especially Spinn’s unique aromatic taste. We hope it will be to your liking, and invite you to take a peek at one of our first demo videos:

Along the way, we’ve also encountered technical challenges that come with building brand-new technologies. Right now, we’re so close to being ready, but there are extra tests, developments, and features we want to consider in order to deliver a flawless machine to you. So, I want to share the specifics about where we’re at in the process.

For the last 7 months, our engineering team mates based across three continents have put the Spinn machine through rigorous tests. Brewing over a thousand cups of coffee, they’ve been working to perfect the following:

Hardware – identifying and eliminating every problem we find.

  • Brewer – increasing the brewer performance during spinning at multiple speeds. Spinning ground coffee mixed with hot water at speeds up to 7000 RPM requires very precise engineering. Reducing vibration and the loss in water temperature are the main focus points.
  • Design – Our talented team of industrial designers has built numerous prototypes over the past few years to bring together a highly advanced brewing technology with precision electronics in a robust and compact design. We understand that preserving space on our customers’ kitchen counter top is of paramount importance, so Spinn is developing the first Bean2Cup coffee maker with the world’s smallest footprint.
    Materials – sourcing, testing and selecting the best and highest quality materials for our machines.
  • Seals – making, testing and improving the brewer’s seal performance between 2000 RPM and 7000 RPM at different coffee volumes and water temperatures, to ensure a leak-proof brew chamber.
  • Bean Funnel – finding and testing the optimum amount of coffee and optimal coffee flow to pass through the bean funnel while filling the brew chamber and creating Spinn’s unique 360-degree coffee bed.
  • Heater – sourcing, testing and selecting the heating element with the best performance to achieve the optimum and adjustable water temperature needed for the different coffee extractions per coffee style for 110V and 220V power outlets.
    Temperature Management – precision engineering combined with material and heat loss analysis for the best in-cup temperature.
  • Conical Burr Grinder – testing a variety of bespoke grinders and develop one that can generate a constant & steady grind flow, adjusted via the control panel in the Spinn App to the required ground size per coffee style. The hardened steel grinder is adjustable through the app. The grind result of the average particle size is between 240 and 1150 micron.
  • Grinder motor – grinders can be noisy so we set out to develop a high-performance grinder that creates less noise than any other grinder on the market. By using a high-quality DC motor with accurate gears and insulation we believe to have achieved our goal. Current endurance testing will provide more data about the robustness of the entire component.
  • Display – test and optimize the sensitivity of the display buttons.
    Filter Material – we developed a unique 360-degree filter mesh with holes as small as 30 Microns (µ) to reduce the amount of coffee grounds ending up in your cup. This unique mesh combined with back pressure generated by 3 nozzles is key for Spinn’s unique aromatic coffee taste.
  • Tea – Americano – a separate hot water spout for tea and Americano was created and tested. The test results turned out positive and the spout will be implemented in the machine.
  • Crema – some of our customers prefer crema in their coffee and some don’t. Spinn set out the challenge to create a machine that can brew both. It took us many months and pounds of coffee but we are happy to announce that we have achieved the way to brew coffee by centrifugal pressure with and without crema.

Software – optimizing user experience, bug fixing, and functionality development

  • Wi-Fi – develop wifi communications on the user side and control the machine’s parameters. We teamed up with our cloud provider Ayla Networks for connectivity to get a great user interface and experience.
  • Spinn Marketplace – we have developed the world’s first connected marketplace for independent coffee roasters to fulfill the orders when machines are running low. Around 150 roasters signed up on the Spinn platform and the first orders are live. When we ship, you will have the option to connect your new Spinn machine to the market, so that your favorite pick of roasters can deliver beans to your door when you’re running low. Developing the world’s first automated platform for deliveries of coffee roasters has been quite an undertaking, but we are proud to deliver a website and system that we trust you will like.
  • Spinn App – will be launching soon for Android and iOS, and we’re running a beta user test as we speak.
  • Roaster platform – developing an intuitive roaster platform for an easy sign up process and implementing recipes.

After many field and lab tests, we’ve resolved these technical challenges that came our way, all taking time and focus to complete. Currently, we’re encountering two areas that are not yet up to our standards:

(1) The sound created by the grinder – we don’t want you to experience the same heavy sound disturbances typical of a common coffee brewer. That’s why it’s important to us to continue to refine the hardware so that the machine isn’t noisy for you.
(2) The height of the machine – originally, we listed the machine to be 17-18 inches tall, but believe we can achieve better dimensions. We want the Spinn machine to fit underneath any kitchen cupboard, so we decided to spend extra time and resources to decrease its height without compromising the build in other ways.
(3) The serving time – reduce the serving time for the optimal user experience. Tests showed longer serving times than expected so we dedicated resources to improving speed without compromising the quality of the coffee

So what’s next?
Between delivering to you in mid-2017, and making sure that the above three improvements were carried through, we made the hard choice to focus on perfecting the product. That means that we’ll be needing an extra 5-6 months to continue development. While we’re getting close to delivering the Spinn machine, we’re not ready to ship this to you yet.

We want you to be confident and happy as you wait another 5-6 months for us to make this happen, and get it right the first time. You’ve already shown our team a lot of patience, but I would love for your continued support.

If you have any questions about anything I’ve shared, or think there’s something we can do in the meantime to help you be more confident waiting for us, let us know.

Thank you again for being part of our journey. Without people like you – who not only believe in ‘better’, but support and instigate ‘better’ – none of this would ever have been possible.

–Roderick, CEO of Spinn Inc.

If you want to want to hear about the future of coffee and the kitchen, make sure to come to the Smart Kitchen Summit. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets.