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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Google

Hey! Google Search, Maps and Assistant Apps Now Help Deliver Your Meals

Google announced yesterday that you can now order food directly through its Search, Maps and Assistant apps. The new functionality integrates with food-ordering services like DoorDash, Postmates, Delivery.com, Slice, and ChowNow, and more are scheduled to follow.

When using Google Maps or Search to find a restaurant, look for the “Order Online” button that ow appears with the results. If a restaurant is participating, you then choose the delivery service, as well as pick up or delivery times.

If you’re using Google Assistant, you say “Hey Google, order food from [restaurant].” And if you’ve ordered a certain meal through one of the delivery partners before, you can say “Hey Google, reorder food from [restaurant],” and your past orders surfaced for you to select again.

Google says the new functionality is available now in thousands of cities across the U.S. The company’s blog post only mentions using your phone, and the animated gifs embedded are all screenshots of a phone in action, so it’s not clear whether food ordering works with other Google Assistant platforms like the Google Hub or other smart displays.

Google’s direct integration with food delivery apps is also further recognition that restaurant delivery is here to stay, and is only going to get bigger. This news comes just a day after DoorDash announced that it had raised another $600 million in funding, indicating investors are still bullish on delivery’s future.

Google’s official mission may be “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” but lately it seems like the company is more interested in helping you eat faster. Yesterday’s announcement means you don’t have to take an extra step of opening delivery apps like DoorDash on your phone when searching for a meal. The company has also released its AI (for the most part) assistant, Duplex, which makes restaurant reservations for you. And if that weren’t enough, Google Wing has gotten approval to make drone deliveries, which are bound to include things like lattes by air.

Happy Happy CallJoy: Google Creates Virtual Phone Agent for Small Businesses Like Restaurants

When Google debuted its Duplex AI voice assistant last year, a lot of people freaked out over the way it sounded human enough to trick an actual person on the other end of the line. Sidestepping the ethical debate over human-sounding AI for a moment, I wasn’t as concerned because it seemed that at some point, Google would create a virtual assistant for small businesses. That way Google would own and get data from both the caller and the business on the receiving end.

This week, Google did just that — kinda. The company unveiled CallJoy, a phone-based virtual assistant for small businesses that can help with tasks like placing orders and provides a Google Analytics-like insights into customer calls.

Once CallJoy is activated, the small business gets a local phone number. CallJoy starts blocking spam calls, and the CallJoy assistant offers up a greeting with basic information like business hours, location, etc..

Based on a Google Blog post, CallJoy doesn’t appear to be a full-on AI assistant carrying on conversations with incoming callers. In the case of restaurants, if a caller wants to place a to-go order or make a reservation, the CallJoy assistant will text the caller with a link to complete those tasks online. Landline calls and other requests get forwarded to the business’ main number.

CallJoy records and transcribes all calls so a business owner can tag and search conversations for particular topics. CallJoy also provides a dashboard to keep track of metrics like call volume, returning callers, etc. Having these type of analytics can provide restaurants with insights that might otherwise be lost.

What Google doesn’t spell out is what happens if a Duplex rings up CallJoy. What does AI-driven virtual assistant small talk sound like?

Restaurants interested in CallJoy can sign up today to request early access. Once implemented, the service costs $39 a month.

CallJoy - Answer with intelligence

ArticlATE Q&A: Google Brain’s Vanhoucke on Robots, AI and Programming vs. Learning

The hardware of a robot is only as good as the software brain that powers it. This is why we are so excited to have Vincent Vanhoucke, Principle Scientist with the Google Brain team speak at our upcoming ArticulATE conference.

In addition to being the director of Google’s robotics research efforts, Vanhoucke has spent his career researching artificial intelligence and machine learning. Before we sit down with him at the show, we wanted to give you a little taste of what he’ll be talking about with a brief Q&A that we conducted over email.

If you want to see Vanhoucke in person and be a part of the discussion on the future of food robotics and automation, get your ticket to ArticulATE today!

What is Googley about robots and automation?

There is something new and exciting happening in the world of robotics: thanks to the advances in deep learning of the last few years, we now have vision systems that work amazingly well. It means that robots can see, understand, and interact with the complicated, often messy and forever changing human world. This opens up the possibility of a robot helper that understands its environment and physically assists you in your daily life. We are asking ourselves: what could happen if the devices you interact with every day could carry out physical tasks, moving and picking things up — if they could ask ‘How can I help you’ and do it directly?

What are some broad applications that AI and machine learning are really good at right now and where is biggest room for improvement?

Perception at large has made enormous progress: visual understanding, localization, sensing, speech and audio recognition. Much of the remaining challenge is to turn this progress into something actionable: connecting perception and action means understanding the impact of what a robot does on the world around it, and how that relates to what it sees. When a robot operates in a human environment, safety is paramount, but also understanding social preferences, as well as people’s goals and desires. I believe that enabling robots to learn, as opposed to being programmed, is how we can establish that tight degree of human connection.

Do you need massive amounts of data for training AI, or do you just need the right data?

Improving data efficiency has been a major focus in recent years. In the early days of deep learning, we explored what was possible when lots of data was available. Today, we’re probing whether we can do the same thing with a lot less data. In most cases, the answer is yes. In robotics, we’ve been able to leverage lots of simulated data for instance. We’re also finding new ways to improve systems on the fly, as they operate, by leveraging data-efficient techniques such as self-supervision and meta-learning.

Computer vision + AI is shaping up to be a versatile and powerful combination (spotting diseases on crops, assessing food quality, automating store checkout). Where is this technology headed and what are some untapped uses for it?

If you look at the perception systems that have evolved in animals and humans, they’re largely driven by function: for instance, our own visual system is very good at sensing motion, and at focusing its attention on the entities that we interact with in a scene. Computer vision systems don’t work like that today, because we haven’t closed the loop between sensing and acting. I think that one of the grand challenges of computer vision is how to optimize visual representations for the tasks we care about. Robotics will enable us to close this functional loop, and I expect that we will see the technology improve dramatically as a result.

What is your favorite fictional robot?

Japanese giant robots were a fixture of TV shows when I was a kid in 80’s France. Of the lot, I’m going to have to go with UFO Robot Grendizer out of sheer nostalgia. Today, I find inspiration watching Simone Giertz’ terrific robot contraptions on YouTube.

Newsletter: Markov’s “Google Cafeteria in a Box”, Disrupting Office Food & Future of Beer

This is the post version of our weekly newsletter. If you’d like to get the weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

Office Food is Hot

If you’ve spent any time inside a cubicle farm during your career, you know that office food can often be uninspiring. You forget to pack a lunch and chances are unhealthy options are all you have to choose from when it comes to the break room vending machine.

Luckily for us worker bees, the office lunch is having a moment, in large part thanks to the influence of Google. Google’s food service, under the stewardship of Michiel Bakker (who spoke at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit), has become the industry gold standard by showing how instrumental food is in keeping workers happy and productive.

Most companies, however, don’t have the resources of a Google, which means that emulating the search giant’s food program is often easier said than done. That’s why one startup named Markov has launched a new food service offering called Hot Pantry that they are basically pitching as a “Google cafeteria in a box.”

Readers of the Spoon may associate Markov with their Level smart oven, a cooking appliance that uses patented RF beam steering technology to cook food at different heat levels within the cooking chamber. Markov is still primarily a cooking technology company — the Hot Pantry service comes with their smart oven, after all — but the startup is now partnering up with food companies to stock the fridges (also provided by Markov) of mid-sized companies who do not have similar resources to invest in their food program.

I started writing about the growing momentum in startup activity behind new food options for the office a couple of years ago, and this year it seems like we’ve seen even more momentum for this space. Markov is just the latest startup to jump in, and Chris Albrecht this week wrote about a handful of others offering new takes of office food.

I’m excited about this newfound interest in feeding people well at work. So many of us spend a huge chunk of our lives sitting behind a desk, it makes sense for us — and our employers — to be considerate about how we are feeding ourselves.

Photo: Michael Wolf, in Pike Brewing Co’s Beer Museum

AI’s Impact on Food is Growing

The Level oven is just one example of how artificial intelligence — or AI — is becoming more important in food; a trend that shows no indication of slowing down.

Another example of this trend is highlighted in a story this week by Chris which looks at how food industry employers in China are implementing big-brother-esque AI systems to monitor kitchen workers for unsanitary conditions.

From the piece: Installed cameras will monitor the kitchen, and if they catch unsanitary behaviors, as analyzed by the AI, an alert is sent to the manager. The system will also be hooked into equipment like fridges to detect any anomalies that might cause problems.

China’s been perhaps the most aggressive in employing AI in surveillance systems with technology such as facial recognition, so it’s not all that surprising employers would embrace the technology as a way to squeeze more productivity out of workers. The march forward of AI and automation is inevitable in service industry jobs, but it’s also worth noting there’s a growing discomfort among workers and society at large about this technology. Bottom line: the societal reaction to cutting edge technology and its impact on us as both employees and consumers will become as much the story as the technologies — and their capabilities — themselves.

Speaking of automation, it was a topic that came up during a meetup we held this week in one of Seattle’s most historic craft brewpubs, where I led a conversation on one of my favorite subjects: beer. On the panel Annie Johnson, onetime Homebrewer of the Year and master brewer for PicoBrew, said that she believed that automation led to better beer. “To get good beer, you need automation,” she said.

The meetup also spanned other topics, including the big impact millennials are having on the beer market. This generation’s growing influence on all things food has led to a trend that Erin James of Sip Northwest calls the “adulting” of beverages that are traditionally non-alcoholic, such as kombucha and sparkling water.

From Catherine Lamb’s wrapup: According to James, in the millennial demographic, beer has surpassed spirits as the most popular alcoholic beverage. However, this audience is not just driven by taste. “They’re also very value-driven,” she explained. And they value both ingredient sources (local is king), opt for local craft breweries and prefer cans to bottles (for environmental reasons).

We had lots of other great stories this week, so make sure to check them out below.

Also, if you haven’t heard about our new one-day event on food robotics and automation, Articulate, you will want to check out our site. We’ve added some great new speakers, including person leading the charge in robotics for Albertsons, Narayan Iyengar, and Sony’s chief robotics engineer, Masahiro Fujita. Early Bird tickets for this April 16th San Francisco event are on sale now, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Finally, our CBD slack chat went so well, we’re going to do it again. We will be announcing our new one next week, so make sure to sign up for our food tech slack if you want to participate in the next one!

Have a great rest of your week,
Mike

In the 01/31/2019 edition:
Robots + Connected Kitchen Appliances Can Help Diabetics Manage Diets
Anyone with kids knows that getting them to eat healthy can be a challenge. That challenge is compounded if your child has a disease like diabetes, where their diets must be strictly managed. That’s where Belgium-based IDLab thinks robots can help, especially for older kids who are a little more independent. In the video below, […]

Markov Rolls Out Hot Pantry Food Service, A ‘Google Cafeteria’ in a Box
Let’s face it: Not every company is a Google when it comes to profitability, technology prowess or lunch. Wait, lunch? Yep. Google’s food program has become the gold standard in the tech world and beyond for its healthy choices and focus on sustainability, and has played an outsized role over the past decade in raising […]

Domino’s Just Made It Even Easier to Deliver Pizza — in Saudi Arabia
If you order Domino’s pizza, your days of relaying special delivery instructions to the driver could soon be over. The pizza chain-turned tech company just announced via a press release it has expanded its partnership with location-technology company what3words to Saudi Arabia. Domino’s has already been delivering to geographic locations called Hotspots like parks and […]

Now With 600,000 Users, Chefling Turns On its Machine Learning Switch
Chefling released an update to its kitchen assistant app this week that the company says will create more personalized recommendations. The app update also includes enhanced pantry management as well as smart appliance controls. Previously, we described Chefling’s service this way: With the Chefling app, users can scan barcodes or take a picture of their […]

For the Future of Beer, “New is King” — That Means Cannabis, Automation, and Glitter
Fittingly, we held our Future of Beer food tech meetup last night at Pike Brewing Company’s Beer Museum, which features an epic collection of memorabilia spanning from the invention of beer in 6,000 B.C Sumeria to Prohibition to the craft brewery revolution of today. But we were concerned with where beer is heading next.

Costa Vida’s Journey to Tablet Hell and Back
“It was hard to find that line between encouraging the innovation and maintaining sanity,” Costa Vida’s Dave Conger recently said of his company’s journey into restaurant-delivery technology. As is the case for most restaurants now, the fast-casual chain saw the need to implement delivery and its accompanying pieces of technology into daily operations to keep […]

Is Big Brother Coming to Restaurant Kitchens?
As if food service didn’t have enough to worry about, what with robots predicted to automate many of jobs and put employment of actual humans in jeopardy. Now, even those humans who still have kitchen jobs in the future may have to contend with Big Brother peeking over their shoulder as they work. ECNS.com has […]

Restaurant Delivery Deals Change the Game for Super Bowl Snacking
Vegan burgers, free NFL gear, and mysterious boxes are all part of this year’s lineup.

Giant Foods Opening a Physical Hub for Ecommerce Orders
GIANT Foods announced yesterday it will open a new physical hub in Pennsylvania that only services ecommerce orders. With this move, Giant joins the ranks of grocery stores architecting new experiences to accommodate the growth in online shopping. Opening Feb. 12 in Lancaster, PA, the new 38,000 sq. ft. hub will be called Giant Direct, […]

Lavva Uses Pili Nut to Make Legit Delicious Plant-Based Yogurt
As a lactose-intolerant person who loves her morning yogurt & granola, I’ve tried my fair share of vegan yogurts. Usually I’m disappointed. Most plant-based yogurts are bitter or have an off-putting grainy texture; some just taste like a straight-up cup of either soy or coconut.

Journey Foods Leverages A.I. to Make Healthy Gummies (Huzzah!)

One of the hard parts of being an adult — and there are many — is that gummies are no longer considered an acceptable afternoon snack. But today Journey Foods is unveiling a sort of reimagination of the fruit snack; one which is packed with nutrients and also promotes biodiversity.

The Chicago-based startup launched about 18 months ago, though the inspiration goes back much further. Founder and CEO Riana Lynn, who had previously started a food traceability company and served as an entrepreneur in residence at Google, got the idea for Journey Foods after she spent a stint traveling around the world. Inspired by the widespread biodiversity she saw (and tasted), Lynn decided to bring some of her most nutrient-rich findings — like baobab and seaweed — back to the U.S. and transform them into healthy snacks. 

The first product is the aforementioned fruit snacks, which Lynn calls “Micro-Foods.” Not only does that sound more legit than “gummy candy,” the name also communicates the caliber of nutrition research and technology that goes into Journey Foods’ products. “We are more of a hybrid biotech/CPG company,” Lynn told me over the phone. “I guess you could just call it food tech.”

Tech indeed. The company has three patents pending on the nutrition biotech that powers their products. They’re also testing out different sugar technologies, so people with dietary restrictions can still eat the Micro Foods.

The fruit chews, which come in Strawberry Chia Seed and Mango and Cayenne Spice, cost less than $1.50 per single-serve pack, which is slightly more expensive than many natural fruit snacks — but not much. “We’re really focused on accessibility,” Lynn told me. Journey Foods will make the bulk of their money from B2B sales and custom product creation for big CPG companies.

As of now, the Micro-Foods are available on Amazon and the Journey Foods website, and are being tested in 80 retail locations around the country. They’re also in a variety of corporate offices, and Lynn told me they’ll debut the Micro-Foods in select hospitals later this year.

Journey Foods also has a B2B product development tool called JourneyAI. It’s essentially an AI-powered database that helps the startup identify and catalog ingredients which could be used to make nutrient-dense foods, speeding up the trial and error of product R&D with their third-party CPG partners.

Journey Foods’ chews take advantage of a few food trends in one fell swoop. First of all, they’re capitalizing off of growing consumer demand for healthier foods, specifically snack foods. The global healthy snacks market was valued at more than $23 billion in 2018, according to Grand View Research, and doesn’t show any signs of slowing. Consumers are also getting more adventurous in their snacking, looking for new, exotic flavors. Finally, adding the buzzword “biodiversity” to their marketing, legit as it is, could help Journey Foods capture more ethically-motived consumers.

The decision to target B2B partners is also a smart play, specifically in hospitals and tech company offices. At the former, the Micro-Foods could help patients, specifically kids, get the nutrients they need. And at tech offices, which are renowned for their gigantic snack walls, Journey Foods can offer a healthier alternative to, say, gummy bears.

Lynn told me that next, Journey Foods will add new flavors to its lineup of Micro Foods products, incorporating ingredients like marine greens, probiotics, and vegetables. Down the road, the company will launch new nutrient-dense products outside the gummy realm. Journey Foods is currently in the midst of a fundraising round, with participation from Backstage Capital and other VC firms. The startup was also the first chosen to join the Soylent Innovation Lab earlier this month and was awarded a $15,000 grant and office space in L.A. Hopefully that translates into a lot more gummy chews that we don’t have to feel guilty about.

Lifesum Unveils a Google Assistant Version of Its Health-Tracking App

It being the time of year when most of us set some health-related goals, Lifesum picked an apt time to unveil its latest offering. Yesterday, the Swedish company officially unveiled a Google Assistant version of its nutrition app, which allows users to track meals, weight, and water intake using their voice instead of a phone or watch.

The Lifesum app, which has already amassed a large following for its Android and iOS versions, uses a combination of data and motivational psychology to help users track their food intake and meet goals around their health, like losing 10 pounds or learning to like broccoli. Upon signing up, users take a brief test to help them choose an appropriate diet plan (e.g., keto, high protein, etc.), then track protein, fat, and carb intake for each meal via the app. A weekly score tells the user how on-track their food consumption is with their set goals, and offers tips for improvement. At just over $3/month, it’s also a pretty good bargain for the number of features you get.

The obvious plus of combining an app like this with Google Assistant is that one need not pull out their phone and input every single meal or glass of water they want to track. You simply tell Assistant to talk to Lifesum when you want to log items. The Lifesum app will also issue challenges based on a location you give it (this is completely opt-in). If you’re in your kitchen, for example, it might tell you to hide sugary foods.

That said, Lifesum’s Google Assistant app isn’t yet as robust as we expect it to become in future. Right now it’s really more of a companion to the mobile versions of the app. You can tell Google Assistant to track meals, but to record the specific foods and other details, you’ll have to go into your phone later. So for now, at least, the Lifesum app simply acts as a placeholder. If you don’t have time to record all the details of your enormous supper directly after the meal, you can just say “track a large dinner,” then fill in the details once you have time. Also, since Google Assistant’s usefulness varies based on location, using the Lifesum app in certain scenarios, like a loud restaurant, would be difficult.

The global fitness app market is predicted to grow to $2 billion by 2023. Lifesum raised $10 million in 2016, and there’s a lot of other capital going around this space. Nutrition and fitness training app Freeletics closed a $45 million Series A funding round in December. MyFitnessPal, who was acquired by Under Armour back in 2015, is another popular food- and fitness-tracking app out there.

Lifesum for Google Assistant is only available in English at the moment. The company indicates it will eventually bring full functionality to the Assistant app, and welcomes suggestions for features from current users.

I’m not sure how useful this version of the app is right now, given its current limitations and the fact that it’s not that hard to take your phone out of your pocket and put some numbers in. Nonetheless, it’s nice to see some companies experimenting with how voice command can play a role in keeping track of what you eat and setting realistic goals around that.

Surprise! Amazon Says it Sold a Lot of Amazon Devices (and Instant Pots, too!)

Amazon put out a news release today touting its record-breaking holiday shopping weekend. And, in what will come as a shock to absolutely no one, the company said the best-selling products across all categories sold on Amazon.com were Amazon devices like the Amazon Echo Dot, which Amazon just happened to put on sale… on Amazon.

Get where we’re going with this?

The retail giant is always vague on details, and this release proved no exception, saying only that it was the “Biggest holiday shopping weekend ever for Echo devices, with millions sold worldwide—all-new Echo Dot was the #1 selling product on Amazon globally, from any manufacturer, in any category.”

FWIW, last December, when Amazon released a similar batch of vague statistics, the company reported selling “tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices” worldwide over the entire 2017 holiday season.

OK, obviously Amazon releasing glowing stats about Amazon devices sold at a discount is a total corporate puffery, and I am complicit in writing about it. But, as vague as these stats may be, they are important to consider as more people adopt smart kitchen tech. Amazon’s Alexa is locked in a battle with Google Home to be your preferred voice ecosystem. Dominating voice control could in turn determine which kitchen appliances you buy, or impact where you buy your groceries.

Hardware startups, software developers and appliance makers alike want to align with a winner when it comes to incorporating new smart tech into their products. Amazon can create its own dominance by dint of controlling one of the largest e-commerce companies on the planet. Consider that at last count, Amazon had 100 million Amazon Prime subscribers worldwide. That’s a huge user base to be potentially guided into buying an Amazon Echo device.

The more Echo devices are sold, the more people will want to use Alexa in their homes, which means more third-party support for even more devices and apps. The more third party devices and apps that incorporate Alexa means that Amazon is collecting even more of our data, which Amazon can then use to sell us more stuff, more of its own stuff (like groceries from Whole Foods) or even create more of its own devices like the Alexa microwave, which, now that we mention it, was not mentioned in the Amazon press release.

The point is, the more Amazon can flex its retail power, the more it can dominate the emerging world of smart assistants and voice control in our homes.

Alas, Alexa devices weren’t the only thing the company sold over the Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday shopping season. I throw this in here as just a bit of Amazon sales trivia, but Instant Pots continue to steamroll other kitchen appliances, with Amazon saying the Instant Pot DUO60 was also a top seller this past weekend. During the 2017 holiday season, the Instant Pot DUO80 was the top-selling kitchen item.

So take these numbers with the appropriate amount of salt, and be on the lookout for a release from Google touting its own Google Home Cyber Monday sales, followed by another holiday season recap from Amazon at the end of December.

Google’s Geoff Barnes on the Complexity and Potential of Voice Assistants

In the past few years, voice assistants have been playing an increasing role in the meal journey. Take Google, for example; its voice assistant has developed a guided cooking platform, made integration partnerships with big appliance brands, and even added the ability to make eerily realistic-sounding restaurant reservations.

As a Senior Interaction Designer for Google, Geoff Barnes works to constantly improve the user experience with the Google Assistant. Next week he’ll take the stage at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) to speak about how voice can play a helpful role in the connected kitchen. To warm up, we asked him about the uncanny valley, the future of voice technology, and the task he uses his Google Assistant for every single day.

The Q&A has been edited for clarity.

The Spoon: As voice recognition and AI become more and more realistic, how will you develop user experience (UX) to avoid the uncanny valley?
Geoff Barnes: The problem with the uncanny valley as Masahiro Mori described it was in people’s discomfort with the artificial trying to imitate the real and getting uncannily close. But he was dealing with physical robots, and the chasm between an obvious robot and a human being is both hugely multidimensional compared to a voice assistant, and broader than I think most people imagine when they conceptualize the uncanny valley in terms of the ubiquitous chart.

In voice user interface (VUI) — especially in the age of autotune and after decades of AI voices in entertainment and interactive voice response (IVR) in everyday life — I think we’ve both narrowed and made shallow the uncanny valley. The result is that Siri, Alexa, and the Google Assistant sit perched to its left. At this point in history, I think the salient question is less about how to avoid getting stuck in the uncanny valley and more about deciding on which side of it your product can better serve your users.

What are some unexpected things you think about when designing UX for Google Assistant?
What comes to mind first is I do all sorts of things to keep from focusing on how a sample dialog looks in writing. When you’re designing for voice, what matters is how things sound spoken. In school, we all learn not to write the way that we talk. Yet that’s exactly what we want of the Assistant: conversationality. We want to make computers talk like humans — not the other way around. So I read all dialog aloud. I’ll pull colleagues aside to do table-reads with me. We have text-to-speech (TTS) simulators that can play our text in the Assistant’s voice.

Another: I try to think about all the possible ways in which normal use might break the experience. For instance, Google Home has pretty great beam-forming [Ed note: beam-forming is technology which allows it to pick up your voice amid extraneous noise], but the mic still picks up cross-talk and ambient sounds. If something the user says is polluted by stray words, the Assistant needs to be able to help with conversation repair. The same goes for users responding in snippets, sentence fragments, and other partial structures where their intent might not be fully revealed, and thus might not be recognized. Part of human conversation is natural repair in situations like these, so we spend a lot of time designing to emulate that in the Google Assistant.

What role do you envision voice assistants playing in the homes — and kitchens — of the future?
Right now, a lot of what we see people using virtual assistants for is task completion, and I think that will continue. As virtual assistants evolve, though, we’ll see the complexity of tasks they can handle increase, and people will put them to more complicated and valuable use. Imagine virtual assistants that can interpret and address really complex requests, can carry on multiple conversational threads at once without losing track of contexts, and can work with you on a range of time-scales. Suddenly, you’re not talking about a fact-checking timer in the kitchen with you; you’re talking about a presence that can be a communications hub, keep you company while guiding you through complex recipes and routines, and do things like plan your date night — from booking dinner reservations, to hiring the babysitter, to ordering flowers.

What’s something you use your Google Assistant for every single day?
I like to drink good coffee in the morning, and for nearly 10 years, that meant I’d get up and make a Chemex. Friends thought I was a little crazy for not having a pre-set automatic coffee maker, but every automatic coffee maker I’d tried had two problems: First, it made coffee that smelled and tasted like burning plastic, and second, most burners are so hot that they scald the coffee within a few minutes of it being brewed. So you have to make sure you’re awake right when you told the coffee maker you would be, or else your plastic-flavored coffee would be even further burnt by the time you got to it.

Enslaving myself to a timer for a bad cup of coffee didn’t sound that great. With the advent of smart switches and Google Assistant integrations, though, I found a great solution: I got a Technivorm Moccamaster (which makes delicious coffee) and plugged it into a Wemo switch that I named “the coffee maker”. Now, every morning when I wake up — no matter whether I’m up early or I’ve overslept — I tell my Google Home, “Hey Google, start the coffee maker,” and in 5 minutes I have a perfect pot of coffee waiting for me two floors away. It’s a real first-world life-changer, but it’s a life-changer nonetheless.

—

Thanks, Geoff! If you want to see him speak more about Google’s work on connected kitchen platforms, snag your tickets to the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th in Seattle.

Innit Adds Arçelik To Growing List of Appliance Partners

The smart kitchen was everywhere this year at IFA, Europe’s big appliance and tech expo, and one company that seemed to be on everyone’s dance card was Innit.

Not only was the company and its smart kitchen platform showing up in the booths of Google, LG, BSH Appliances, and Electrolux, but it also made an appearance with a new partner in Arçelik, the Turkish product conglomerate behind appliance brands Beko and Grundig.

The partnership incorporates Innit’s guided cooking technology and a library of 10 thousand recipes into Arçelik’s Homewhiz smart home platform. Homewhiz, which is akin to BSH Appliances Home Connect, serves as an underlying smart home connectivity platform. With this new partnership, Innit brings HomeWhiz firmly into the kitchen and cooking experience by synchronizing an Innit guide cook with Grundig and Beko connected appliances, sending cooking parameters to the appliances as the user walks through a recipe.

While neither Arçelik or Innit made any announcements in English about the partnership, you can find some in other languages. A Google translated excerpt:

HomeWhiz enables users to control and monitor all home appliances through smart phones like your phone, tablet, or TV. Grundig HomeWhiz can help in deciding on the preparation to be cooked using the cognitive kitchen experience. Using voice control, users can ask for advice on recipes based on the ingredients available in the refrigerator.

For those who want to try something new, Grundig’s partnership with Innit allows HomeWhiz users to access over 10,000 recipes along with step-by-step video tutorials for customized meals according to their preferences.

The expanded presence of Innit at IFA culminates what has been an aggressive push into the European continent that started with the Electrolux partnership announced in April. Before that, the company announced a BSH Appliances Home Connect and LG partnerships at CES, and they were showing with both brands in Berlin.

The LG partnership is interesting in that it ties the Innit platform into LG’s new smart display with Google Assistant to enable guided cooking on LG’s Signature Kitchen Suite ovens. Innit first teased the integration with Google Assistant at CES (with a Tyler Florence demo, no less) and, as of now, Innit is the only multi-modal voice/video guided cooking integration on the forthcoming Google smart displays which are expected to start shipping this month.

GE Appliances and Electrolux Expand Google Assistant Capabilities

The big IFA show is set start over in Berlin, and like CES earlier this year, Google is making a big push there for its Google Assistant, working overtime to get its voice assistant embedded into, well, everything. News about Google integrations are rolling in as both GE Appliances and Electrolux today both announced expanded capabilities with Google Assistant.

First up, GE Appliances, a Haier company, said today that its suite of appliances will work directly with Google Assistant. Previously, GE Appliances required the use of Geneva Home Action in order to talk to Google, so you’d have to say “Google, ask Geneva Home to preheat the oven.” With the new, deeper integration, users can skip the Geneva step and just say “Google, preheat the oven.”

Elsewhere, Swedish appliance giant, Electrolux announced it is expanding its Google Assistant integration. Elextrolux will be adding Google Assistant voice control to its kitchen products in Europe, starting with a smart oven in 2019. Previously, Electrolux had added Google Assitant integration in the U.S. under its Fridgedaire and Anova lines.

Google is currently locked in a battle with Amazon and its Alexa assistant for dominance in the emerging voice control market. While Alexa had a head start and lined up numerous appliance integrations early on, Google has been making headway over the past year. Earlier this year LG announced that its SmartThinq line of connected appliances would work with both smart assistant platforms.

Google’s expanded presence is good because it gives consumers more flexibility when shopping for a new appliance. People shouldn’t have their choice of smart assistant determine what refrigerator they buy.

Food Tech News Roundup: Plant-Based Starbucks, Google’s Wearable Meal Plan, and Grocery Innovation

What a week for food tech fundraising! From DoorDash’s $250 million to a hefty raise for cellular aquaculture company BlueNalu to not one, not two, but three fundraising rounds for food waste startups, it’s been a doozy.

But in between all the raises and self-driving grocery delivery cars and shoppable recipe companies, there were plenty of other food tech stories this week. We rolled them all up right here for your summer weekend perusing pleasure:

Starbucks debuts plant-based blended coffee drinks
This week Starbucks rolled out a new icy beverage to cool down fitness lovers this summer. Their ‘Protein Blended Cold Brew‘ drink is made of cold brew (duh), plant-based proteins and alternative milks, whizzed up to make a frothy, vegan-friendly quaff. One drink is made with almond milk and butter, while the other has coconut milk and cocoa — both bevs have at least 10 grams of protein. With their new creation Starbucks is cashing in big time on three big trends: plant-based dairy, cold brew, and high protein nutrition.

 

Photo: Android Police

Google develops AI assistant to help with your meal plan
News broke this week that Google is creating an AI-powered wellness tool. Called “Google Coach” (though the name might change), Android Police reported that the smart assistant will act not only as a fitness service — tracking times, recommending workouts, etc. — but could also function as a nutrition and meal-planning tool. It will be able to recommend dishes at restaurants to match your diet, and can also generate meal plans and shopping lists, which it will email to you directly. Google will initially roll out Google Coach on Wear OS, but might eventually a develop smartphone application as well.

 

Kroger and Alibaba team up to create an online grocery store
Kroger, the largest grocery chain in the U.S., announced a partnership with China e-commerce giant Alibaba. Together they’ll create a pilot test of an online store, which will sell goods from Kroger’s organic private label Simple Truth in Alibaba’s online marketplace. Like Amazon in the U.S., Alibaba is working to usurp brick-and-mortar grocery stores in favor of online ordering and delivery. And by forming partnerships like this one (in addition to experimenting with robotic fulfillment centers and self-driving delivery vehicles), Kroger is working hard to stay relevant in the shifting grocery market.

 

Walmart reports strongest Q2 in 10 years
Speaking of grocery wars, Walmart appears to be doing pretty well. This week Supermarket News reported that the grocery giant posted its strongest same-store sales growth in 10 years in the second quarter of 2019. President and CEO Doug McMillon credited the strong quarter to e-commerce and other efforts to make shopping quicker and more convenient, such as curbside grocery pickup. Judging by the innovations Walmart has in the works — from its Eden freshness technology to robot shopping carts — the grocery store is experimenting pretty widely to find out how to continue to make shopping even more convenient in the future.

Did we miss anything? Send us a tweet @TheSpoonTech! 

JD.com Investment Puts Google in the Robot Restaurant Biz

Google announced today that it is investing $550 million into Chinese e-commerce company JD.com. Many of the takes surrounding the deal have focused on the access Google will get to the Chinese market (and JD to the American market), and how the deal is an attempt by Google to claw back some product search traffic from Amazon.

Yes, yes, yes. That’s all very important, but let’s take a moment to appreciate something else this investment means: Google is getting into the robot restaurant business! Kinda.

Earlier this month we wrote:

“…JD.com, China’s second largest e-commerce company, will open 1,000 restaurants completely staffed by robots by the year 2020. Though a location hasn’t been determined yet, the first of these robo-restaurants will open in August. It will be roughly 400 sq. meters (~4,300 sq. ft.) and will serve 40 dishes from around China, with customers ordering and paying by smartphone.”

But JD’s robot ambitions aren’t relegated to restaurants. As Axios wrote last week, JD “has built a big new Shanghai fulfillment center that can organize, pack and ship 200,000 orders a day. It employs four people — all of whom service the robots.”

That type of automation is certainly very Amazonian, and perhaps one that could be licensed here in the States much the same way Kroger bought into Ocadao’s robot warehouse technology.

The JD investment becomes even more interesting as it relates to Amazon when you consider the other relationships Google’s been forming. It partnered with Walmart last year for virtual assistant shopping. Just this month, Google partnered with European grocery giant Carrefour SA for online grocery shopping and same-day delivery in France.

Of course, back here at home, Google already has it’s own research efforts around robotics, as well as investments in food robot companies like Momentum Machines and Abundant Robotics.

Now, before you — well, I — get too excited over the idea of a JD robot restaurant host taking reservations from the human-sounding Google Duplex AI, Google’s investment in JD amounts to just 1 percent of the shopping site, and there are much bigger fish to robotically fry than a restaurant chain that hasn’t actually opened yet.