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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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GoSun Debuts the Dream, a Hybrid Solar-Powered Tiny Home

Apparently being the king of solar cooking wasn’t enough for Patrick Sherwin.

That’s because this week the CEO of GoSun, a Cincinnati-based startup focused on building solar cooking products, debuted a hybrid solar-powered tiny home on wheels. Called the Dream, the portable home is packed with features for the sustainably-focused traveler or off-gridder who just wants to be able to plop this thing in the middle of a field somewhere.

Not surprisingly, the Dream features a bunch of the GoSun systems that the company has launched in recent years, including a GoSun Fusion hybrid solar/electric oven, the GoSun Chill portable high-efficiency refrigerator and the GoSun Flow water purification system.

There’s also a bunch of interesting new features that go beyond the company’s mainline cooking products that make the Dream a fully self-sufficient tiny home for the sustainably-minded weekend warrior or doomsday prepper:

Full Solar System. A full solar PV array on the roof, an on-board lithium ion energy storage battery, inversion, and control systems all included with the Dream.

A Complete Solar Kitchen. Each Dream comes complete with a GoSun Solar Kitchen package. GoSun launched the Solar Kitchen last year, which includes a GoSun Fusion solar oven, a solar table (with built-in solar panel) and a high efficiency electric cooler.

A Smart Retractable Awning. In his guided tour (see below), Sherwin emphasizes the importance of indoor-outdoor living (probably to be expected by a guy who started a solar cooking startup), and shows off a sixteen-foot wide awning that will automatically retract when it senses a wind is kicking up.

A Composting Toilet: A flush toilet comes standard, but hyper-sustainably focused users can get an optional upgrade gives you a toilet that separates liquids from solids.

Hideaway, Liftable Queen Sized Bed on Tracks: This is maybe my favorite feature, a queen sized bed on a track system for daytime storage. This means that during the day the bed is lifted up to the ceiling, allowing users to use that space with a small table below. When it’s time to hit the sack, you just click on the switch and the queen sized bed comes down.

In a way, the creation of a fully featured solar-powered tiny house makes sense for GoSun, which started with a simple solar powered oven for campers and has slowly been adding products over the years such as refrigeration, water systems and lighting.

According to GoSun, the Dream will be available in 2021 and sell starting at $69,500. For those looking to go off grid, you can reserve your’s with a $500 down payment.

You can watch Sherwin give a guided tour of the GoSun Dream below:

Solar Off-Grid Tiny House

Solar Cooking Startup GoSun Adds Water Filtration To The Product Lineup

GoSun, a company that makes everything but the kitchen sink when it comes to solar-powered kitchen gear, has added, well, a kitchen sink as part of a new solar water sanitation product called the GoSun Flow.

Announced last week, the GoSun Flow is a full solar or USB powered water sanitation system. Beyond the baseline product, which includes a pump, filter, water bank and solar panel, the Flow will have a number of upgrade options such as a sink and a shower that could make the Flow a complete away-from-home water station. The company will start taking orders in May for the Flow and prices for the baseline product will start at $139.

Adding water to the product mix makes sense for GoSun. The company was already providing cooking gear for campers and the off-the-grid crowd and had started to add other products to the lineup over the past year including reusable portable cutlery and portable chillers. With a solution for water, the company makes their solar kitchen pretty much self-sufficient and adds a bath (or at least a shower) to boot.

If there is a company well-positioned in the cooking space to take advantage of uncertain times, it’s GoSun. Just as people have started panic-buying 25 pound bags of flour and rice at Costco to hunker down for the long-haul, GoSun can help the neighborhood doomsday prepper actually cook their food while being fully off the grid.

The company seems to agree now is their time. In addition to launching new products like Flow, GoSun is equity crowdfunding its next round of capital through StartEngine. They’re already raised $637 thousand and is aiming for $1.07 million at a $14 million valuation. Last year the company sold $1.5 million in product, so that puts their valuation at a somewhat rich 9 times revenue, but like I said, a company like GoSun is one of the few companies in the space that could benefit from the uncertainty.

Two Trends to Watch Out for in 2020: Pop-Ups and Equity Crowdfunding

Based on the volume of digital ink I devoted in 2019 to cashierless checkout and robot-related startups, you’d think that I would pick those sectors as trends to watch in 2020.

While I think those segments will continue to grow steadily over the coming months, the two trends I’m most fascinated by are the ones I actually wrote very little about this year. If you’re looking for a couple of big, juicy trends I think you should pay attention to, you should explore semi-permanent pop-ups and equity crowdfunding.

Pop-up stores have been around for a while, but there are a number of startups looking to capitalize on their small footprint and easy setup to create new retail experiences. AiFi creates nano-stores are small, self-contained shipping container-like boxes that house an operation like a convenience store. These stores are cashierless (like Amazon Go), so customers can walk in, grab what they want and go.

Zippin is another company building out cashierless retail experiences, though it’s “Zippin Cube” is more customizable. The Zippin Cube is modular, so it can fit into existing, odd-shaped real estate. The Cubes can also hold coolers and come pre-wired, so they can be assembled and up and running in as little as three weeks.

Both Zippin and AiFi allow retail brands to quickly, easily and inexpensively set up pop-up stores in sporting venues, office lobbies or even music festivals. Retailers can then extend their brand into new venues without expensive and permanent build out. Think: a mini-Safeway at the base of your office building or a 7-11 at Coachella.

The ability to cheaply squirrel these stores into the nooks and crannies of high-volume but unused space will entice retailers to try them out next year.

Speaking of enticing, I expect startups will sing their siren song next year to entice everyday people to pony up through equity fundraising. Unlike the traditional product crowdfunding on Kickstarter, equity crowdfunding offers investors real equity in the companies they back.

GoSun, GOffee (unrelated “Gos” there) and Miso Robotics all launched equity crowdfunding campaigns this year. GoSun has raised $345,000 with 25 days left in its campaign. GOffee raised $1.07 million, and Miso Robotics aims to equity crowdfund a whopping $30 million.

This is actually GoSun’s second round of equity crowdfunding. The company raised $500,000 in seed money from the crowd in 2017. I spoke with GoSun CEO Patrick Sherwin earlier this year about the reason for crowdfunding and he told me:

“Traditional VC will breathe down your neck,” Sherwin said, “And drive everything towards more profit. This gives us more flexibility and keeps us in charge.”

Greater control over their own destiny is an attractive proposition for startups, and equity crowdfunding also has the benefit of giving companies that aren’t located in major VC hubs access to capital.

There are still plenty of SEC hurdles that a company must go through when equity crowdfunding, but I imagine we’ll see a lot more companies go that route to grow the way they want to.

GoSun Crowdfunds Reusable Cutlery Set The Size of a Credit Card

For those who give a fork about single-use plastic waste, there’s a new crowdfunding project with your name on it.

GoSun, maker of the eco-friendly battery-powered fridge and solar oven, just launched a Kickstarter campaign for its GoSun Flatware, a patent-pending set of reusable cutlery that’s so small it fits in your wallet. The stainless steel fork and spoon come in two pieces in a thin metal case roughly the size of a credit card. The pieces are dishwasher-safe and can be snapped together to make small (but functional) cutlery. The theory is you can keep the case in your wallet, so that whenever you go out to eat or pick up to-go food you can use it then and there and don’t need to take the single-use plastic utensils restaurants offer.

With the popularity of food delivery and our collective obsession with convenience, single-use cutlery has become a massive problem. According to National Geographic, more than 100 million plastic utensils are used every day in the U.S. alone. Since single-use cutlery varies in shape and material, they’re super difficult to recycle — which means that the vast majority of spoons, forks, and the like wind up clogging landfills or killing ocean turtles.

While there are plenty of other reusable cutlery options out there, GoSun’s convenience sets it apart. If you keep the set in your wallet, you can’t forget it when you go pick up your Chipotle burrito bowl. It’s self-contained, which means you don’t have to worry about cleaning your cutlery after use, lest you walk around with a dirty fork in your pocket until you find a sink

Clearly I’m not the only one intrigued by this credit card-sized solution to cutlery waste. The GoSun Flatware Kickstarter campaign has raised over $179,000, way more than its $2,500 initial goal, with nine days left in the campaign. Early backers can snag their own set for $20 before the price doubles as it heads to retail on the GoSun website.

The GoSun Flatware is set to deliver in February of 2020. As always, it’s good to be healthily skeptical towards crowdfunded hardware projects. However, this is GoSun’s seventh crowdfunded project, and several of its products are already shipping, so it seems like a relatively safe bet that backers will actually get the goods.

GoSun isn’t the only one thinking outside of plastic when it comes to single-use cutlery waste. Another notable company is Planeteer, which nabbed first prize at the SKS 2019 Future Food competition. The startup makes edible single-use spoons, so instead of ending up in the trash or recycling bins they truly leave no trace.

Single-use cutlery waste is an immense problem, so it’s refreshing to see companies developing creative solutions. I actually ended up backing GoSun Flatware myself, so hopefully that means at least a few plastic forks in the ocean.

GoSun Goes to Crowdfunding to Kickstart its Series A

GoSun, the company behind the eponymous solar-powered ovens, announced today that it was cowdfunding its Series A round of financing. Technically, the company is looking to, pardon the pun, kickstart its Series A by raising just $500,000 on the StartEngine equity crowdfunding platform. If it reaches that goal, it will then go to private investors to try and raise an additional $1.5 million.

GoSun makes a variety of outdoor products including its titular ovens, which use a combination of parabolic reflectors and insulated chambers to cook food using only direct sunlight. The company expanded this year with a hybrid solar + electric outdoor cooker, a solar-powered portable fridge and a DIY version of its solar oven.

This is actually the second time GoSun has crowdfunded its financing. In 2017, the company raised $500,000 in seed funding, which then allowed it to get lines of credit with the bank to pay for its growth. “We’re a crowdfunded company,” Patrick Sherwin, CEO of GoSun told me by phone today. “Every new product is launched on the crowd. We just go to the crowd first.”

Given the success GoSun has had–the company says it has sold 35,000 products across 60 countries and earned $1.6 million in revenue in 2018 — I asked Sherwin why his company wasn’t going with more traditional routes of funding like venture capital.

“Traditional VC will breathe down your neck,” Sherwin said, “And drive everything towards more profit. This gives us more flexibility and keeps us in charge.”

As with any crowdfunding venture, and especially equity investing, there is no guarantee of a financial return for investors. Indeed, given the slower, deliberate pace at which GoSun wants to move, and without pressure from VCs, who knows when an investor would see any potential return. Caveat emptor.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post mentioned GoSun valuation and minimum investments. We were asked to remove this public information by GoSun in reference to SEC rules. We are honoring that request while we work to understand the particular issues around it further.

GoSun Releases DIY Kit to Get People to “Tinker” with its Solar Oven

If making your own meals at the top of a mountain using only the power of the sun just seems too easy, then GoSun has a deal for you. With its new DIY kits, you can now construct your own solar oven as well.

GoSun builds fuel-free ovens that use a combination of parabolic reflectors and a cylindrical cooking chamber to cook food using only direct sunlight. The company makes a range of solar ovens from an ultra-portable version that weighs only two pounds ($139), to a higher-end solar + electric cooker ($399).

But all of those versions have actual designs with the components already built. With GoSun’s new DIY kit, which costs $119 or $149 depending on the size you buy, all you get is the chamber, a roll of reflector material and some cooking tins. Not only do you have to assemble it, but you have to come up with an oven design to base that assembly on.

That seems pricey, especially given the time it will take to design and build your own oven, but the cooking chambers are specific evacuated tube ovens, and not just something you’d grab at the Home Depot.

The idea of a DIY solar oven is in keeping with the ethos of a company that crowdfunds new products. But I reached out to GoSun Founder and CEO Patrick Sherwin to see if this was part of any larger initiative for the company. He emailed saying that this was “more of an experiment” and “our customers are frugal and DIY oriented. we are trying to serve more solutions to get more people tinkering with vacuum tube ovens.”

We’ve written before about how selling DIY kits could be a smart path for smaller startups. Companies can spend fewer resources on assembly, shipping parts is cheaper than shipping fully finished products, and customers are increasingly sophisticated about making things.

There are downsides however, as I’ve learned first hand. Companies need to make assembly instructions super clear, a lack of QA can lead to faulty parts being shipped, and any accompanying software in particular must be as bug-free as possible.

GoSun, however, is foregoing most of these issues by turning the entire process over to the customer. There are no instructions to follow and no software to install. Customers for the DIY kit will probably self-select, meaning that they’ll be fine with the lack of guidance, and will probably look forward to building their own oven and sharing designs with the GoSun community.

Of course, if GoSun’s DIY kit is too much work, people can always turn a Pringles can into a solar cooker.

The GoSun “Chill” Portable Fridge is Hot, Blowing Past Indiegogo Goal on its First Day

Summer is almost here (finally!). Time to literally dust off the old plastic cooler stowed away in your garage and fill it with ice and beverages for the balmy days ahead. Better yet, toss that cooler out completely, skip the bags of ice entirely and get the GoSun Chill, which uses a battery pack to create what is essentially a portable mini-fridge.

This is what at least 130 people decided as they collectively plunked down $80,000 dollars on Indiegogo for their own Chills. That means it took less than a day for GoSun to blow past its $12,000 goal for the campaign, which still has 31 days left.

GoSun is famous for its outdoor ovens that cook using the power of the sun, literally. Reflective mirrors and vacuum insulation capture heat from the sun even on a mountaintop to cook meals without electricity (though the company does offer a hybrid solar/electric model).

As The Spoon’s Mike Wolf found out at CES this year, GoSun is cooling things off with the Chill. It uses a battery pack to power brushless DC compressor motors that turn the Chill into a cooler that requires no ice (though it can make ice, if need be) and will keep your beers cool all day off a full charge.

The Powerbank delivering all that juice to the Chill can also be used to charge your phone when you’re out at the park or on the boat, and even has a light. Additionally, GoSun is offering solar panels so you can keep charging the Powerbank throughout the day.

Backers can pick up a GoSun Chill for $479, which is a lot of money to keep your Keystones cold. Plus, they won’t ship until August, which means you’ll only get a month of use out of it before this Summer’s done.

And as we feel compelled to say with every crowdfunded hardware project – caveat emptor. There are plenty of hardware companies that never fulfilled actual products to the people who backed them. Though GoSun has a track record of actually bringing products to market, so perhaps that’s one thing I can Chill about.

GoSun Debuts The 'Solar Kitchen', Including a Solar Powered Mini-Fridge

GoSun Debuts The ‘Solar Kitchen’ So You Can Cook (and Chill) Around The Clock

If you think solar powered cooking is something you can only do when the sun is out, think again.

That’s because GoSun, the company which got its start five years ago when it debuted its first solar oven on Kickstarter, has evolved its product line to what is essentially a fully self-contained “solar kitchen” that can cook (or chill) at any time of the day or night.

At the center of the company’s solar kitchen concept is the GoSun Fusion, a hybrid oven that can cook using solar power or electricity. With the Fusion, a user can cook a meal with solar power in about an hour. At night, the Fusion can cook a meal in the same amount of time by drawing power from the new lithium ion power bank product the company is debuting at CES. The power bank will receive its energy from an accompanying foldable solar panel, also being rolled out at CES.

While all this cooking is great, you and I both know a kitchen is not complete without something to keep your food (or beer) cold. GoSun now has that covered too. The company also unveiled the GoSun Chill, which the company calls a cooler but, according to GoSun CEO Patrick Sherwin, it’s actually a fully operable mini-fridge.

“It’s crazy how efficient this technology has gotten,” said Sherwin. The Chill (read fridge) has a “brushless DC compressor motor inside allows you to keep a couple cases of beer cold for entire day with this power bank.”

According to Sherwin, the Fusion will be shipping in a little over a month and the new power bank, solar panel and Chill cooler will be for sale in March via Indiegogo and will ship in the summer.

You can watch my full interview with Sherwin from CES Unveiled below:

GoSun Debuts The 'Solar Kitchen', Including a Solar Powered Mini-Fridge

Celebrate a FoodTech Fourth of July

It’s weird when a major holiday falls on a Wenesday, right? Do you take just the day off? The first half of the week? The last half? The whole week? Regardless of how much time you take off, we can help make your time at the grill a great one with these FoodTech finds.

FOOD
The Fourth–and most summertime grillin’–is all about the meat. Normally, we’d suggest you purchase your steaks and burgers through CrowdCow, which meticulously sources all of its meat from small ranches. But your guests will be hungry tomorrow, so here’s a twist, maybe try a meatless option this year?

I know! I know! “Heresy!” you cry! But really, we love the Beyond Meat burger patties available at many local grocers. The company says it wants their plant-based meat that “bleeds” in the supermarket butcher section, but I’ve only ever found it frozen with the other alterna-meats.

Personally, I think the Beyond Meat patty is a delicious replacement for the traditional meat burger, so much so that I stock up on extra when I’m at the store just to have it around when I crave it. Beyond Meat won’t fool any carnivores, but it’s a tasty substitute and perfect if you’re trying to cut back on your red meat intake.

BRING THE (CONTROLLED) HEAT
Everyone has an opinion about the best way to grill, we won’t waste your time with some obscure technique. We will however, recommend a pair of devices that can help make your steaks and other proteins turn out great.

Photo: Anova

Sous vide-ing your steak is a fantastic way to get juicy meat with no overcooking. There are a ton of sous vide wands out there that will turn any pot of water into a precision-heated circulating bath. We like the ChefSteps Joule and the new Anova Nano (review forthcoming). They are small, well built, and work with an accompanying mobile phone app to bring your meat to a desired internal temperature. Sure it takes a little longer, but it also helps remove the risks of over- or undercooking your precious steaks.

Stylish holder/charger.

Regardless of whether you sous vide or not, you can use the Meater thermometer to get just about any type of meat to the proper temperature. The Meater is kinda big (like a beefy nail) that sits in your protein while you cook it. Using the Meater app on your phone, you can keep track of both ambient and internal temperatures, and Meater will even tell you when to pull out and rest your meat to achieve optimal results.

If you’re going camping and want a greener experience, you could grab a GoSun portable grill that cooks food by simply harnessing the power of the sun.

BEER
The good news is, if you live in the right location, you can still run out and buy your own PicoBrew to make homebrewing much easier. The bad news is that even if you bought one today, there isn’t enough time to brew and ferment your beer before tomorrow. (Maybe just pop by Spoon founder Mike Wolf’s house for a bottle of his.)

PLAN FOR NEXT YEAR
It’s never too early to start planning for an epic Independence Day celebration next year. Here are some items to put a pin in and revisit next summer:

  • If it makes its crowdfunding goal, the Ambassador 5-in-1 grill features rotating cooktop that spins through flattop and grate surfaces.
  • The Bartesian cocktail robot (due out by the end of this year) can whip up delicious boozy concoctions on demand.
  • And for the truly adventurous, you can throw a slice of ketchup, yes, a “slice” of ketchup on next year’s burger.

No matter how much time you’re taking off, have a Happy Fourth of July, everybody! Be safe.

GoSun Goes Hybrid with New Fusion Solar + Electric Cooker

Up here in the Pacific Northwest it’s camping season! While I’m not much of a deep woods kinda guy, but I do enjoy a good car camp. But the one thing that bothers me about camping is the one-time use propane tanks for cooking. You literally burn through them and throw the canister in the garbage. That’s just wasteful.

Eco-friendly outdoor cooking is getting a jolt today with the launch of the GoSun Fusion Kickstarter Campaign. The new device uses both solar energy and a rechargeable electric heating system to cook up your favorite camp foods. (UPDATE: the Kickstarter has already been funded, raising more than $30,000 in half a day.)

GoSun has been making a range of solar powered cooking devices since 2013. Its line of portable grills feature a cylindrical cooking chamber heated by a pair of parabolic reflectors, which capture the sun’s heat and focus it on the cooking chamber.

This type of solar cooking obviously works best when there is plenty of direct sunlight. So to help out when the clouds roll in or night time hits, GoSun has added a 150-watt electric heater to the Fusion.

The Fusion’s electric heater can be powered using a car’s “cigar port,” or you can pay extra to get a lithium-ion power bank. To step it up even further (and spend more), you can also get a solar panel charger for the optional battery pack.

GoSun Founder and CEO Patrick Sherwin told me that the Fusion can get up to 550 degrees Fahrenheit when the cooking chamber is empty. With good sunlight, it will cook a meal for five people in an hour.

This may seem like a long time for hungry campers, and the Fusion is not good for things like searing and broiling. But by using it, you do get the satisfaction of cooking without burning fuel or creating waste from those single-use propane tanks.

You can back and receive a bare bones Fusion without the battery pack for $299 on Kickstarter. Models with the optional battery will cost $449, and the version with the additional solar panel charger for the battery pack will set you back $619. Units will ship in April of next year.

Based in Cincinnati, OH, GoSun has sold 20,000 units in the past five years. The company has a track record of delivering, which is good in the age of failed crowdfunded projects. The company has raised a million dollars in seed funding.

If you’re looking for a cleaner way to cook during next year’s camping season, the Fusion could be a bright idea for you.