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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

GE

GE Profile Debuts Range Oven With Connected Pizza Oven Built In

Last Fourth of July, my neighbor invited me over to show off his new outdoor portable pizza oven. I was both impressed and a little bit envious as he dished up scorching hot, leopard-spotted pies in just minutes.

It wasn’t long before I wondered how I could get my own pizza oven, only without going outside to cook. I could go the Breville counterop route, but I wanted something built-in so I could pretend I was like like our friends over at Modernist Cuisine.

Turns out unless I wanted to spend ten thousand bucks or more, there weren’t any options. Until now. That’s because GE Profile has debuted a new range that has an integrated pizza oven built into the combo appliance for $3,499 called the Trattoria Pizza Oven.

The oven, which features a full pizza oven inside a dual oven range appliance, was the brain child of long-time Louisville-based GE Appliances’ engineer Eric Johnson. Johnson had seen how GE Appliances had created a purpose-built high-temperature pizza oven for its high-end Monogram brand and wondered if a pizza oven could be built into a conventional oven. He created a prototype and showed it to leaders who liked what they saw. As a result, the product was the first to be commercialized through the GE Profile Innovation Studio, which the company launched in February of this year.

While the Monogram pizza oven is a high-tech wonder in itself in with its ability to cook pizza in just a couple minutes without any extra ventilation, Johnson had to work within the confines of what could be done within a more traditional range. While the new pizza oven uses traditional range heating elements (which reaches 550 degrees, compared to the 1300 degrees in the Monogram oven), it has some extra features built in to cook a nice pie including an aluminum alloy cooking surface that heats quickly and maintains temperature, a built-in precision surface temperature sensor to monitor and adjust temperature, and a broil amplifier to distribute heating throughout the cooking chamber.

GE Appliances positions the Profile Innovation studio as a place where new product concepts are launched with an eye towards early adopters. Unlike FirstBuild, which is also located in Louisville, the Profile Innovation Studio seems less about crowdsourced product prototype concepts and more focused on building new appliance concepts for GE Profile that could be commercialized fairly rapidly in fairly small production runs.

You can watch the hero reel intro for in GE Profile’s video below.

GE Profile Trattoria Pizza Oven

Editor note: This article originally had the new product as GE. It has been changed to reflect this new product is from GE Appliances and the company’s Profile brand.

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.

GE Wants Chibo to Be the All-in-One Cooking Class Platform For the Instagram Influencer Set

If you’re like me, you’ve watched some of your favorite food creators and chefs on Instagram or Twitter offer up cooking classes in recent months as a way to connect with followers and monetize during the pandemic.

In practical terms, what this usually means is an otherwise busy chef selling tickets through an event platform like Eventbrite, scheduling the class through emails, and then dialing into a Zoom or Google Hangout.

All of this works ok and it much easier than it would have been just a couple of years ago, but Taylor Dawson thought there was maybe a better way for culinary creators to share their skills online than through a patchwork of disparate platforms.

Which is why he and an internal team at GE created Chibo, a turnkey social cooking platform that includes scheduling, ticketing, online video streaming and all the other things a chef would need to offer cooking classes online to their community.

According to Dawson, he and his team first started working on the idea in early 2019, they just built a simple website using Wix and stitched together all these pieces themselves. “When we first built this, we basically cobbled all those things together for people, and then filled it in with some guy who sent out emails for you as a way of testing it out,” said Dawson.

The idea was to build a service that would eventually resemble something akin to a Peleton for cooking, but they first had to see what cooks wanted in a platform. After a few months, Dawson and his team saw “hosts didn’t want to handle any of that. So we built it into the platform that you currently see with Chibo.”

Before Chibo, Dawson had just spent a couple years building another product for GE called Giddy, a site that invited people to crowdsource new ideas for products. While Giddy never got the kind of traction they envisioned and the company eventually wound down the effort, Dawson and his team learned a lot about social communities online.

“When we were working on Giddy, I was all about community building, and especially really motivated by this idea that social media is a passive practice,” said Dawson. “We wanted to create community around getting people active and doing interesting things and sharing the same things that they’re really doing as opposed to sitting around and scrolling through social media feeds.”

Of course, nowadays there is no shortage of online cooking classes, ranging from those cobbled together Zoom calls all the way up to Masterclass’s with the world’s best chefs. There are also a number other platforms that have gone from in-person to online cooking classes, and even some who have opportunistically pivoted towards cooking from a completely different online focus.

But according to Dawson, his team’s research found these platforms were not tailored towards the specific needs of a culinary creator who wants to offer a high quality, interactive cooking experience.

One of the very basic things they added is the ability to support a number of cameras.

“None of those platforms allow you to have multiple angles that cameras,” said Dawson. “So we built in a feature that allows people to wirelessly connect the camera to their laptop, and then you can just switch views by hitting the number keys.” Chibo supports up to five camera angles according to Dawson.

They also found that trying to manage the technical aspect while also offering live cooking classes is tough for many chefs.

“People are not very good at managing their microphones, and that can be super distracting,” said Dawson. “So we created a microphone cueing feature that notifies the chef or the host when someone has a question, gives them a really clear ‘this is the person that has the question’. And then when that person gets done asking the question, just pushes the next person at the top of the queue.”

Dawson said they also wanted to make a platform that would allow chefs to make money more easily than with a roll-your-own solution, which meant also allowing them to serve more students at once.

“We figured out pretty early on that the available platforms would allow you to get to 10 or 20 people participating alone, but that wasn’t going to be enough to make a platform valuable enough for a host to want to run classrooms. So we had to start adding features that made it possible for them to get to 50 or 100 people joining an event.”

Dawson said that their cooks can make anywhere from $500 to $2000 per live event, and that many are also selling their video library of pre-recorded cooking sessions.

Despite progress, the Chibo team is still moving fairly slowly, hoping to get 50 hosts by the end of the year, and they are focusing specifically on online influencers who, unlike the celebrity chefs who can make money through TV shows and selling cookbooks, are still hustling to make a living.

That means “anyone who has an audience of, say 10,000 to 150,000 people,” said Dawson. “When you’re in that spot, you’re in the spot where you’re still grinding hard to get to the point where you most people want to be, which is ‘I want to quit my day job and I want to do this full time’.”

All this makes sense, but I still wasn’t sure why GE, a company that makes money selling appliances, is building an online cooking community. According to Dawson, that’s usually the first question they get when they reach out to new cooking hosts.

“When we present ourselves to the new a new host, they ask, ‘well, do I have to have GE appliances in my home?’ And the answer is no. This isn’t about that.”

“GE has shown over the past five or six years and ability to create separate spaces that allow for the growth of something where we don’t instantly understand how we’re going to monetize it,” said Dawson.

I also wondered whether Chibo could serve as a content platform for content for their Kitchen Hub, the kitchen TV screen they company recently added to a microwave oven. The answer is yes.

“There is a clear path toward making this a good fit with the Kitchen Hub,” said Dawson. ” And I think there’s also a fit with our brands, in many different ways of thinking the next few months you’ll see us doing some stuff that’s supported by the Profile and Café or Monogram brand.”

If you are a chef and want to apply to teach classes using Chibo, you can fill out an application here.

Rise Gardens Raises $2.6M in Fresh Funding for Its At-Home Hydroponics Platform

Chicago-based startup Rise Gardens has raised $2.6 million in seed funding for its indoor grow system, according to TechCrunch. The round was led by True Ventures. 

Rise is one of a growing number of companies making self-contained indoor farms designed not for mass production of leafy greens, but for the average person’s home or apartment. The hardware-software system looks like a piece of furniture, requires minimal setup by the user, and is controlled via a smartphone app. In theory, at least, that means you don’t need a degree in agricultural studies or even a good track record with gardening to grow herbs and lettuces for your own personal meals.

That’s where the Rise Gardens app comes into play. When we spoke in January of this year, Rise’s Head of Product and Strategy, Diego Blondet, explained how the app automates tasks in the growing process a farmer would normally do, such as calculating the temperature of the farm, determining nutrition and pH levels, and figuring out when to water. Rise’s app works with a sensor that automates those calculations and notifies users when it’s time to water or feed their plants.

Blondet also said he believes automated indoor farming will make its way into the design of most kitchens at some point in the future. In fact, that’s already happening, with 2020 so far being a year when startups and large appliance-makers alike have unveiled indoor farming devices designed for the average home. Seedo, Verdeat, the Planty Cube, LG, and GE are all on that list. 

As The Spoon’s Publisher Michael Wolf pointed out not long ago, the COVID-19 pandemic could accelerate average folks’ adoption of indoor farming. The recent panic buying spree reminded us that grocery store supplies aren’t infinite, and that there are glaring issues with our current food supply chain. As Mike said:

“As the coronavirus has forced all of us to think more about our food supply, some consumers have gone beyond just buying a little extra food to store away. Now they are thinking about how we could ensure access to food independent of breakdowns in the system.”

Rise Gardens’ founder Hank Adams told TechCrunch that since shelter-in-place orders landed in the U.S., the company has seen a 750 percent increase in sales. 

Heads of lettuce won’t feed a family of four, of course, but according to Adams, Rise looks at itself as more of a supplement to your weekly groceries, rather than a replacement. Which is, frankly, one of the more honest takes on indoor vertical farming, an industry that’s often been praised as being the future of agriculture but still can’t grow a root vegetable. 

Since leafy greens are difficult to ship because of their delicate nature, they’re an obvious area for vertical farming to target. Few at-home systems currently allow for the volume of greens the average family, or even the average person, would need in a given week. Since Rise’s system is a little bigger as well as modular (you can add shelves to it over time), it could provide a good blueprint for what at-home vertical farms should look like when they start to become the norm in kitchen design.

Plants, Personalization & Precision Cooking: A Look at GE Appliances’ CES 2020 Lineup

Each year, it seems one appliance brand stands out at CES with an interesting new take on the kitchen that intrigues with the possibilities.

At CES 2019, it was Whirlpool, who shocked and awed with the sheer amount of new product concepts they rolled out, including an augmented reality-enabled smart oven.

This year’s CES standout in the kitchen was GE Appliances. Not because the appliance company had a whole bunch of cool products ready to roll out to market, but more because they showcased a bigger way of thinking around solving real-world issues. In other words, rather than create product demos designed as show-off vehicles for new technologies, GE illustrated how these technologies could be employed in a cohesive, systematic way to provide consumers answers to some of their biggest problems.

Here are the three demos I saw at the GE Appliances booth that caught my attention:

Home Grown

While intelligent home grow systems seemed to catch on at CES this year with big appliance brands for the first time, the most interesting conceptualization of an indoor, tech-powered gardening came from GE. The company’s Home Grown concept featured a mix of hydroponics, aeroponics and soil-based grow systems built into the design of the kitchen as part of a cohesive sustainable kitchen workflow.

You can see a full walkthrough of the Home Grown concept below:

CES 2020: A Tour of 'Home Grown', the GE Appliances Garden Kitchen Concept

One thing that struck me about the Home Grown concept is it commanded a lot of space. I have to wonder how many consumers would be willing to give up such a large part of their kitchen counter real estate to growing food, and I can see how brown thumbs like myself would be worried they’d soon have dead plants spread across their entire kitchen.

That said, Home Grown is largely conceptual at this point, so the company shouldn’t be penalized by more practical concerns like the sheer size of the demo. Once (and if) the products gets closer to market, GE can make adjustments with different size gardens to fit specific needs.

Shift

GE’s ‘Shift’ proof of concept showed how the company saw itself at the center a fully intelligent – and personalized – physical kitchen space.

So what is Shift? In the simplest terms, it’s an adaptable (or shiftable) physical kitchen space that personalizes itself towards the needs of each user.

The concept video below was put together by GE to illustrate how Shift could help a wheelchair-bound user:

CES 2020: The GE Appliances "Shift" Kitchen Concept Reel for Special Needs User with Wheelchair

In an era where everything is becoming more personalized, the idea of a personalized physical space based on the specific needs of the person makes lots of sense. Much like we have the ability to adjust our car seat to fit our own height or buy shoes that fit our feet, there’s no reason why in an era of lower cost robotics, IoT and smart sensors we shouldn’t think about adapting the space around us to fit our needs.

Kitchen Hub 2020

Finally, at CES 2020 GE rolled out the second edition of its Kitchen Hub , its kitchen screen/home command center.

You can see a walkthrough of the product shot at the GE Appliances booth below:

CES 2020: A Look at the GE Kitchen Hub 2

The most obvious difference with the new version is GE made the video touch screen the front door of a usable microwave oven. They also added an additional camera over the counter prep station as an option as well as improved food image recognition. Tying the experience together for food recognition and guided cooking is the Freshly app (powered by SideChef), which will recognize food, suggest recipes, and provide cooking guidance.

Also cool: The improved machine vision allows the system to recognize progress within a cook session. Below the Kitchen Hub camera captures a picture of a steak on the grill and let’s the user know that it has reached the desired doneness.

What struck me most about this version of the Kitchen Hub compared to the 2018 first edition is how the latest version just seems more practical. As a useable front screen for the microwave, Kitchen Hub is simply more useful and less awkward than as a standalone TV screen sitting atop your cooking range.

It’s also seems to fit more organically as a natural part of a next-generation kitchen. By coordinating the various cooking systems and, eventually, what’s in the fridge (SideChef is powering Haier smart fridges ), it seems GE is working towards building a platform that delivers valuable cooking assistance, inventory management and smart home control without being overly forced.

I left GE’s booth thinking that while much of what they showed off is still a few years away, I appreciate the moonshot thinking of the Home Grown, Shift and the practical advances they’ve made with their Kitchen Hub platform.

Food Tech News: GE’s Latest Kitchen Hub, New Vegan IKEA Meatballs, and Meal Delivery Galore

Happy Saturday! This week was a big one for us at The Spoon — we kicked off our shiny new Future Food newsletter covering all things alternative protein, from plant-based meat to insects to cellular agriculture. Make sure to subscribe here.

But for now, let’s turn to this week’s food tech news. We have stories about IKEA’s new plant-based meatballs, GE’s latest smart kitchen hub, and a new frozen meal delivery service. Enjoy!

Mosaic, a new frozen meal delivery company, launches on East Coast
There’s a new D2C meal delivery service on the scene. This week Mosaic, a company which ships frozen, pre-cooked vegetarian bowls to consumers’ doorsteps within one day, began operations on the East Coast. The bowls range in price from $8.99 to $12.49 which is pretty pricey compared to what you’d find in the freezer section of the grocery store, but on par with traditional meal kits. Mosaic raised a seed round of funding in 2018 and is planning to launch in new cities soon.

Photo: GE

GE’s starts selling new kitchen hub, amps up SideChef partnership
The latest version of GE’s kitchen hub, which made its first appearance at CES this January, is now hitting store shelves (h/t CNET). Priced around $1,199, the hub has a built-in smart touchscreen which includes guided cooking capabilities from SideChef.

In fact, SideChef and GE have been ramping up their partnership lately. Sidechef’s app is now connected to a sizeable 74 GE ovens and ranges, allowing home cooks to set cook times, monitor temperature, and change up the cooking mode on their connected appliances.

Photo: IKEA

IKEA’s making a meatier version of their plant-based meatballs
Vegetarians who love Swedish meatballs, rejoice. The Daily Mail reports that IKEA is developing a new plant-based version of their famous meatballs which will look and taste more like the “real thing.” The Swedish furniture giant launched a vegan meatball made of chickpeas and vegetables back in 2015, but this new version will apparently be more in line with the more realistic offerings from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. IKEA plans to trial their new meatballs in early 2020.

Photo: Wegmans

Wegmans teams up with DoorDash
This week East Coast supermarket chain Wegmans announced that it will partner DoorDash to launch its Wegmans Meals 2GO food delivery service. Hungry people can use the Wegmans Meals 2GO app to order from the Wegmans’ prepared food section, which includes pizza, salads, and sushi. Customers can opt for carry-out or curbside pickup, or can get delivery for orders of $20 or more if they live within a 5 mile radius. So far the service is available in two locations in Rochester, New York and one spot in Virginia, and Wegmans plans to roll out the service to 40 stores by the end of this year.

Did we miss anything? Tweet us @TheSpoonTech!

Innit Partners With Tyson To Bring Packaged Food Giant Into The Smart Kitchen

By selling one in every five pounds of chicken, beef or pork in the US, it’s safe to say that Tyson Foods is responsible for a whole bunch of the food that goes onto consumer plates.

And now, if smart kitchen platform company Innit has its way, consumers will soon be cooking all that meat (and maybe eventually some of the lab-grown stuff) with the help of QR codes, Google smart displays and connected appliances.

That’s the vision anyway that will be on display this weekend in New York City as the company demos an integration developed by Tyson at the Food Loves Tech conference. According to Innit CEO Kevin Brown, the company will show off its integration with GE ovens and a Google smart display.

The demo will start “with a QR code on a package of Tyson protein, connecting via Google Assistant to Innit, and sending an expert cook program to a GE oven (that is) tailored to that SKU,” said Brown via email.

It makes sense that Innit, who has been busy partnering with big appliance brands like GE, LG and Electrolux over the past year, now has its sights set on packaged food brands. The company, which acquired Shopwell in 2017 and recently relaunched that platform at Smart Kitchen Summit, has a huge database of CPG information that it can tie directly to optimized recipes.

As for Tyson, partnering with a company like Innit makes sense as well. Through Innit’s integration with Google Assistant, packaged food brands like Tyson can get recipes and integrated advertising onto what is a rapidly growing installed base of smart displays. This deal could also allow them to create cook instructions optimized for specific appliance brands (350 degrees in a GE oven might be slightly different than 350 degrees in LG or Whirlpool) and have them sent directly to the oven.

The news caps off a busy time for Innit. Not only did they launch their app into the UK this past week, they will also unveil the first fruits of their partnership with small appliance division of Philips. The company will show how a Phillips air fryer is discoverable within the My Appliances section of the Innit app and how a home cook has access to “appliance-aware modular meals with video guidance on how to use the appliance,” according to Brown.

Stepping back, the move to integrate packaged food providers into the connected kitchen marks a step forward in the space as companies like Innit try to tie together the various pieces of the cooking journey. At the Smart Kitchen Summit last month, one of the issues brought up on stage was the need for greater connections between the various platforms to enable more seamless digital-powered cooking experiences. While fragmentation isn’t going away anytime soon, the connection between food and appliance is an important one and it will be interesting to see if other big CPG brands get on board with the connected kitchen.

GE Launches New Microwave with Scan-to-Cook Technology

If your store-bought mac-n-cheese always comes out of the microwave molten on the outside but frozen on the inside, you might be interested in GE’s newest appliance, which the company announced today.

The GE Smart Countertop Microwave lets you use your smartphone to scan the barcode on food packaging. Heating instructions are then sent directly to the microwave complete with cooking times and power levels.

As the GE press release rightly points out, the average microwave has 10 power levels, but if you’re like me, you only use one, turning the microwave into a blunt instrument that nukes everything from pizza pockets to re-heated leftovers on full blast, the roof of my mouth be damned.

The GE Smart Countertop Microwave comes with 3,000 different frozen, refrigerated and shelf-stable items pre-programmed, and will be updated as time goes on. If you want to go more manual with GE’s new microwave, it’s also Alexa-enabled, so you can use voice commands to do things like stop the microwave or add more time.

This is the first scan-to-cook appliance for GE, who is playing a little catch up here, since Whirlpool debuted appliances with similar features more than a year ago. GE’s microwave is on sale for for a limited time and is coming bundled with an Echo Dot for $154.98, after that the MSRP is $139.

While limited to pre-packaged items with barcodes right now, scan-to-cook technology is a good example of the guided cooking trend we are following here at The Spoon. Appliance manufactures like Electrolux and LG are partnering with software startups like SideChef and Innit to not just heat your food, but also help you through the entire cooking process.

Even if what you are cooking is simply microwaveable mac-n-cheese.

Update: We were initially given the wrong price for the GE microwave. We have updated this post with the correct pricing.

Should Appliance Makers Use ‘DRM’ In The Kitchen To Lock In Consumers?

One of the biggest insider debates in the world of digital entertainment over the last couple of decades has been whether or not big content conglomerates should use what is called “Digital Rights Management,” or DRM, to protect their content.

The idea behind DRM is that it ensures anyone who uses a digital product, such as a movie or an album, has purchased the right to said product. In a way, it makes sense. After all, companies that invest billions of dollars in content rightly don’t want to see their content stolen and distributed on the Internet.

But DRM had a dark side. Not only did organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America go overboard and make consumers’ lives more painful by pushing to have DRM slapped on everything, but DRM also became a way to effectively hold consumers captive, reduce choice and hurt the overall consumer experience. Anyone who tried to make a copy of an HD movie DVD circa 2008 can attest to this.

Which brings us to the kitchen. With the modern kitchen becoming ever more digital, are appliance and food makers in danger of falling into the same trap?

Some already have. The first big digital kitchen “DRM” attempt was by Keurig in 2014 when they announced the Keurig 2.0 would require that consumers only use Keurig approved pods. This was an affront to anyone who values consumer choice.  Not only did hackers create a workaround, but consumers responded and eventually forced Keurig to reverse their position.

Others like Juicero followed suit (and we know what happened to them, though they had bigger problems than their juice-pod DRM). The big lesson I think we’ve learned is that consumers resist being held captive in one product ecosystem.

Which brings us to this tweet from Jeremy Stretch (hat tip to my friend Stacey Higginbotham for bringing this tweet to my attention):

Jeremy recently purchased a GE fridge and quickly noticed his $2k appliance had an RFID reader to verify whether or not he was using a GE-branded water filter. Because of this, he opted to return the fridge.

I understand the business case for requiring consumers to use a particular brand of filter. And, to be honest, I am much more likely to be accepting of a first-party water filter vs. being held captive to a premium food consumable. But, that doesn’t mean as a consumer I wouldn’t jump at the chance to use a third-party water filter.

Stepping back, however, it’s worth examining if appliance brands should use this technology to restrict consumer choice to a brand’s own products.  In a way, RFID-enforced “DRM” can certainly help to accelerate a recurring revenue business like water filters or drink pods. On the other hand, consumers bristle when it comes to less choice.

And, perhaps even more importantly, these restrictive systems can also be shortsighted. Keurig owes some of its massive success to the availability of cheaper coffee pods; in early markets, the more choice, the better.

This is a lesson early connected kitchen startups like PicoBrew already recognize. While users of the Pico beer brewing appliance currently have to use a new PicoPak purchased from PicoBrew every time they make a batch of beer, the company is working on a beta for fill-your-own disposable pods and also has a reusable polycarbonate ingredient holder on its product development roadmap.

Others like Tovala (and the soon to ship Suvie), which offer food subscription services for their hardware, have wisely chosen not to restrict consumers to only using only their food “pods.”

As for GE, I have no doubt the company will continue to use RFID to enforce the use of their own water filters. And, because a water filter is something consumers only buy every 6-12 months, I don’t really think this will create the same type of anger that a food-consumable DRM would (i.e. Keurig 2.0).

That said, I would still encourage appliance makers to use DRM judiciously.  While most consumers have been trained to use hardware DRM by the likes of home printers, they certainly don’t like it, which of course means they’ll eventually they’ll find away around it.  If there is an option for a non-captive alternative for a consumable, many consumers will opt for that.

And if it’s a food consumable? Forget it. Not only have we seen the kind of anger something like Keurig’s DRM created, but brands should realize that they don’t need DRM to get consumers to buy first-party products. There is a significant percentage who will choose Keurig pods even if they are more expensive. In other words, there are always those consumers pay for convenience and are loyal to brands, at least if you treat them right. If you don’t, these consumers will stay away, and the overall market suffers.

Bottom line? Appliance makers would be wise to learn the lessons of past mistakes around using DRM and understand that by giving consumers more choice, there’s a much better chance of being rewarded in the marketplace.

The Battle For The Kitchen Screen Got A Lot More Interesting At CES 2018

When I wrote about the battle for the kitchen TV last June, the launch of the Echo Show was one of the signals that told me companies were beginning to pay attention to the space. Half a year later, my own usage of the Show has helped me better understand why.

That’s because ever since Amazon’s video-enabled Alexa assistant entered our home, it’s the first thing my eyes are drawn to as I enter the kitchen. The continuous scroll of news and weather, integration with popular apps like Pandora and Allrecipes, and access to videos all have quietly made the small screen indispensable for my entire family.

And now, with a slew of standalone smart displays and kitchen-centric video screens at CES last week, I’m more convinced than ever as we enter 2018 the kitchen TV market will be a fascinating one to watch.

Here are some of the kitchen screen entrants from this year’s big consumer show:

Echo Show And The Competitors

In some ways, the Echo Show and its small screen competitors are the early favorites. Whether or not to purchase a $200 or below (today the Show is on sale for $179) countertop video-enabled voice assistant is a much easier decision to make than that of a $3 thousand fridge. And now, with Google pouring money into the space, you can expect many more choices and over time.

CES 2018 featured some new smart displays on, um, display, many of them designed to be used with Google Assistant. I suspect at some point Google will likely come out with a first-party device (like the Echo Show), but for now we have displays from the likes of Lenovo, Philips and JBL and the initial reviews are pretty positive.

Fridge TV

Hard to believe, but Samsung’s already on version three of its Family Hub fridge, a product that is fast becoming the central focus of the CE giant’s broader smart home strategy. I stopped by the Samsung CES showroom at the Aria to check out the Family Hub 3, and I have to say the new screen looks good.

And as is often the case, LG has followed Samsung’s lead with the ThinQ Instaview Fridge but took things one step further by making their smart screen translucent so you can also see what’s in your fridge. You can see a demo of the LG ThinQ Instaview Fridge here:

While the idea of fridge TVs continue to gain steam, some argue that there’s a mismatch between the life cycle of cutting-edge tech and that of installed appliances. An appliance is an investment, something most consumers expect to last up to a decade. Technology, on the other hand, can be outdated after a few years. This argument resonated after talking to someone at the Samsung booth, who told me the Family Hub gen-1 likely wouldn’t be updated to the third generation software that is coming out with the Family Hub 3, (though the Family Hub Ones in the field were recently updated to Family Hub 2 software).

Despite this, I think the centrality of the fridge in most kitchens and the early relative success of the Family Hub will fuel interest in making the fridge the star of the kitchen TV market.

The GE Kitchen Hub 

One of the more interesting concepts in kitchen TV I saw at CES was the GE Kitchen Hub, a screen/smart home controller designed to sit above your oven.  The Kitchen Hub, which was originally conceived in GE Appliances innovation hub FirstBuild, not only has voice and gesture control capability built in but works with Zigbee and Z-Wave to connect to your smart devices.

You can see Digital Trends video walkthrough with the Kitchen Hub below:

GE Kitchen Hub - Hands On at CES 2018

The concept of the Kitchen Hub sits somewhere between the Amazon and Samsung approach, a device that’s separate from a large appliance (and their long life cycles), but one that is also a built-in. The product is priced in that middle territory as well, coming in at $600.

I like the idea of the Kitchen Hub. A separate built-in screen, one that is more affordably priced than a hybrid appliance/TV product and that can also act as a smart home control center is a potential winner. Of course, a lot will rely on execution, but overall this is an intriguing product to watch.

One thing’s that clear: the battle for the kitchen TV became a lot more interesting at CES 2018. Check back at the Spoon and subscribe to our newsletter to monitor our coverage of this market over the next 12 months.

Amazon Brings Cooking Capabilities To Alexa Smart Home Skill API

While over 50% of Echos end up in the kitchen, a lack of cooking-specific commands and categories within the popular voice assistant’s smart home API has meant few people actually prepare food with Alexa today.

But that could soon change.

That’s because today Amazon introduced built-in cooking controls for cooking appliances into the Alexa smart home API. Initially rolling out in microwaves from Whirlpool and others, the new cooking capabilities will let users define time and temperature parameters and will eventually use the Alexa voice interface to walk through cooking a meal.

From the Alexa developer blog:

Customers are increasingly using voice user interfaces (VUIs) as a hands-free way to manage their lives, and hands-free control is especially valuable when cooking. With the built-in cooking device controls in the Smart Home Skill API, you will make it easier for your customers to control your cloud-connected microwave. Instead of pressing multiple buttons to enable advanced microwave features, your customers can now use their voices. For example, a customer can say “Alexa, defrost three pounds of chicken” or “Alexa, microwave for 50 seconds on high.”

Initially, there are four new capability interfaces in the Smart Home Skill API – Alexa.Cooking, Alexa.Cooking.TimeController, Alexa.TimeHoldController, and Alexa.CookingPresetController. You can leverage these interfaces today for microwaves and for appliances that support preset cooking. The interfaces are designed for future extensibility as support for more cooking devices becomes available.

The new Alexa cooking capability understands food categories (for example, Alexa will take a food term from the Echo user – such as “sockeye salmon” – to categorize food in the “Fish” category) and cooking modes.  Appliance makers are able define their different cooking modes that are discoverable within the Alexa app, which means users will be able to access modes such as “defrost” in products such as Whirlpool’s line of connected microwaves. The new cooking capability from Amazon also allows appliance makers to make their presets libraries available through Alexa.

While Whirlpool’s expected to be the first to launch the new Alexa cooking capability for its connected microwaves (no exact date has been given), Amazon also announced Samsung, GE, Kenmore and LG are all working to bring the new Alexa cooking capability to market.

And finally, one last piece of news embedded in the announcement: The company has invested in June, high profile maker of the June connected oven, via the Alexa fund. This means, of course, you can expect the June oven to work with Alexa’s cooking capabilities sometime in 2018.

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Innit Launches its Connected Cooking App

Innit, the connected food platform, today released its iOS app, which the company hopes will become a GPS in the kitchen by letting users control different smart appliances and customize the meals they prepare.

The Innit app is a Swiss army knife of sorts, with tools to help you through the entire cooking process: automatically create shopping lists, get instructional videos for how to prepare each meal and control smart appliances directly from your phone.

A big selling point for the app is that it works with multiple connected kitchen platforms. Innit currently works with GE Appliances and Bosch Home Connect devices, and says it has partnerships with Philips Kitchen Appliances, Perfect Company and Chef’d, though details of those deals won’t be made available until early next year.

Innit also partnered with celebrity chef Tyler Florence to create content for the platform. Florence declared at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit that he had written his last cookbook and that the recipe is dead. Those old school forms of instruction, Florence said, will be replaced by the types of micro-content that the Innit App provides.

So it’s a little surprising when you open the app and are greeted by a list of recipes. Though tapping on them reveals what Florence was talking about. I selected a chicken wrap recipe and was immediately given the option to customize various elements, presumably based on what items I already had in my kitchen. This chicken wrap could, for example, be made with flank steak or fish.

From there, Innit walks you through the prep with the ingredients you’ll need (which can be turned into a shopping list), as well as phone-friendly, narrator-less, close up videos of how to chop, mix and cook each ingredient.

We’ll be providing a more in-depth look at the app in a future post. For the curious, Innit for iOS is available today, though at the time of this writing, you could only access by visiting innit.com and receiving a texted link.