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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Beko Shows Off Grundig Smart Wall Oven that Blasts Water Inside to Clean Itself

Amidst all the faces on cookies, cheese making robots and world champion pizza chefs packed into a Las Vegas casino ballroom last Tuesday evening for the inaugural FoodTech Live @ CES , a new smart wall oven from one of Europe’s largest appliance makers made its US debut.

Called the Gourmet Chef Oven by Grundig, the new built in connected wall oven unveiled by Turkish appliance giant Arcelik (Beko is the US brand for Arcelik) has some interesting features, with one in particular that had the crowd at FoodTech Live buzzing with interest.

Beko unveils Grundig built-in smart wall oven at FoodTech Live at @CES 2019

As can be seen above, the Gourmet Chef not only comes with many of the capabilities you’d expect from a smart oven such as food recognition and guided cooking, but also has a unique self-cleaning feature that includes an internal water spray and special detergent dispenser.

“It cleans, it washes, it dries,” said Sazi Bugay, Product Director for Beko US. “Every time you use it, it gives you a clean interior.”

Admittedly, watching water splash around the inside an oven is a bit discombobulating at first, making one half-wonder for a moment if this is a dishwasher or a cooking box. It also made me ask myself how frequently one would need to wash their oven (raise your hand if you clean your oven pretty much never). That said, self-cleaning features may become a necessity in the age of smart ovens in order to ensure those internal cameras that identify food and enables cook-session monitoring stay relatively clean.

In the end, the self-cleaning feature plus some other nice-to-haves like a dehydration capability, steam oven and baking plate for pizzas make the Gourmet Chef an interesting and differentiated addition to the smart oven space. The Gourmet Chef (as well as Whirlpool’s new offerings which debuted at CES) also underscores the acceleration of a trend I highlighted in my 2019 outlook: the entry of big appliance makers into the smart oven market with built-in offerings that help move the segment beyond just the countertop.

According to Bugay, Arcelik’s new oven will be rolled out in Europe by the end of 2019 and should enter the US market in 2020 under the Beko brand. Pricing has not been disclosed.

Weekly Spoon: Kitchen Projection Interfaces, Amazon Drone Patent & Innit Nabs Arçelik

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If you go to lots of trade shows like me, you know it takes time for innovation to make its way from the show floor into our living rooms.

We’ve all seen this with technologies like virtual reality and 3D food printing; only after years of development and iteration cycles do we get to the point where a product is ready for prime time.

And then there are technologies like projection interfaces that – up until now at least – seem like they’re stuck in development stasis. The idea of a projectable, anywhere surface interface has been discussed for close to a decade in the research and academic community and started showing up on trade show floors about five years ago. Despite this, the concept never seemed to go beyond an occasional product demo.

So last year I started to wonder why exactly the technology hadn’t reached consumers yet. After all, with the likes of Whirlpool, IKEA, and Bosch showing off jaw-dropping demos, it only made sense this technology would find its way to market at some point.

While there’s no clear answer, I narrowed it down to a couple of factors. First, the reality is the technology still needed some refinement to make it both consumer-ready and affordable. Second, appliance vendors often wait for big-tech to take the first leap, and from what I could tell none of the big-tech 5 (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon) seemed particularly active with projection interfaces.

But now, it looks like one big company is committing to bringing a projection interface to market. BSH Appliances showed off a new product concept called PAI at IFA in Berlin this past week. PAI is a movable projector interface that is designed to go on a countertop in a kitchen.

I’m excited that BSH looks to be serious about bringing PAI to market. While some see voice as the dominant user interface of the future, abysmal usage rates of Alexa skills for commerce have shown us that voice in itself isn’t enough.  Consumers are visual, and most things we do in the kitchen are multimodal. Because of this, I believe the dynamic projection interface could a vibrant area in UI development over the next decade.

BSH Appliances wasn’t the only one to make news at IFA last week. Sharp showed up in Berlin with a fridge that featured a built-in vacuum sealer, prompting Chris Albrecht to wonder what exactly types of features he would want in his next fridge.

Smart kitchen platform startup Innit had a strong showing at IFA, popping up in a number appliance OEM booths, including that of a new partner in Arçelik.  The Turkish appliance conglomerate behind the Beko and Grundig brands showed off an Innit integration to power guided cooking as part of its HomeWhiz smart home platform.

It wasn’t all IFA this week. This week the Spoon scooped yet another Amazon patent in which the Seattle tech giant shows an innovative new method for delivery drones to generate power while in transit by harnessing both wind and kinetic energy.
After the news of a $30 million funding round for Farmer’s Fridge, I’m looking forward to a panel at Smart Kitchen Summit on the future of lunch. We’ll be discussing how new technologies, business models and delivery formats are all colliding to change what we eat every day, including at work.  You can read Chris’s piece on Farmer’s Fridge, a startup we’ve been covering for the past year.

Speaking of Smart Kitchen Summit, we’re less than five weeks away from our flagship show exploring the future of food and cooking. We have an amazing program planned, and not only will we have executives from big appliance brands like Whirlpool, GE and more, but we’ll also have startups from the smart kitchen, food robotics, restaurant tech, retail and more to discuss and showcase how each of these industries are changing to disrupt the consumer meal journey.  Make sure to get your tickets now and use the discount code NEWSLETTER (You can also use this link which has the code already applied).

That’s it for now. Have a great rest of the week.

Mike

P.S. Make sure to tune into this weekend’s episode of the Smart Kitchen Show podcast, where I have a great conversation with the CEO of the startup behind what is arguably the most successful consumer food robot ever made. You won’t want to miss it!

In the 09/06/2018 edition:

Ordermark Raises $9.5 Million for its Online Order Management Tools

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 06, 2018 10:23 am
Ordermark, a startup that helps restaurants unify and organize online orders, today announced that it has closed a $9.5 million Series A led by Nosara Capital. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $12.6 million.

Nima Peanut Sensor Now Available, Gluten Sensor Selling at Select CVS Stores

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 06, 2018 06:00 am
It’s back-to-school time, which means my son is once again eating lunches in a cafeteria. I doubt his school is unique, but it actually has separate tables for kids who bring in peanut butter sandwiches.

With its own Grocery Delivery Service, Walmart Grabs More Data

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 05, 2018 04:00 pm
Walmart is leaving no stone unturned when it comes to getting you your groceries. As of today, that includes testing out its own delivery service (h/t Food Dive). The retailing giant announced a pilot program for its new last-mile delivery service, dubbed Spark Delivery, which will deliver groceries directly to customers’ front door.

For Goodr’s Jasmine Crowe, Blockchain Is a Key Piece to the Food Waste Puzzle

By Catherine Lamb on Sep 05, 2018 02:00 pm
Food waste is generating quite a lot of interest as of late; but one buzzword that might give “food waste” a run for its money is blockchain.

Innit Adds Arçelik To Growing List of Appliance Partners

By Michael Wolf on Sep 05, 2018 12:00 pm
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.

Farmer’s Fridge Stocks up with $30M

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 05, 2018 10:54 am
Farmer’s Fridge, the company which makes vending machines that dispense healthy meals such as salads and protein bowls, today announced that it has raised a new $30 million round of funding led by Innovation Endeavors. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $40 million.

Seltzer? Sous Vide? Smart Apps? What Cool Things do you Want in a Fridge?

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 05, 2018 07:33 am
For those old enough to remember, there is an episode from season two of The Simpsons where Homer designs a car for the average American. The result, as you can imagine was a hodge-podge monstrosity that featured bubble domes, three horns, shag carpeting and cost $82,000.

Bear Flag Robotics Raises $3.5 Million for Autonomous Tractor Tech

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 04, 2018 10:00 am
The common refrain from robotics companies is that they help with manual, repetitive tasks. And when you run a farm, there are plenty of manual, repetitive tasks, and Bear Flag Robotics raised $3.5 million seed funding right before the holiday weekend to help agricultural workers out with them.

Amazon Patent Points to In-Flight Recharging For Delivery Drones

By Michael Wolf on Sep 04, 2018 06:54 am
Ever since Jeff Bezos teased the idea of drone deliveries on 60 Minutes in 2013, the tech world has been abuzz with the idea. At the time Bezos said that the reality of drone deliveries wasn’t there yet, but he thought it just might be in 4-5 years.

FoodPlus Sells Surplus Food (in Slovenia) so it Doesn’t go to Waste

By Catherine Lamb on Sep 04, 2018 06:00 am
Based in Slovenia, FoodPlus began in 2015 when co-founder Dalibor Matijevic began searching for a way to cut down on food waste by redistributing surplus food. He developed a B2B platform for companies to buy and sell extra food at a super low cost — creating a new revenue stream and keeping food out of landfills.

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.

Projected Video Interfaces May Be The Future Of The Kitchen. Why Aren’t They Here Yet?

With all the talk about Alexa nowadays, you’d think the future has arrived and we have our interface: voice.

But before you give up all your iPads for Echo Dots, take a moment to consider how much you use touch interfaces on a daily basis. While voice will no doubt play a huge role in the future of the smart home, touch continues to proliferate. Not only are car makers adding interactive touch screens, restaurants and pretty much everywhere else we go is getting better touch interfaces, while products in our kitchen like refrigerators are getting better and better touch interfaces.

And now, touch is combining with gesture recognition in a new science-fiction spin on interfaces that is gaining favor among product designers. The ‘projected interface’ -- where an image is projected onto a flat surface to make what is essentially an interactive touch screen through the use of machine vision -- is a new product interface concept that has captured the imagination interface designers in the kitchen over the past few years.

Projected Interface Demos Are Everywhere

Below are a few high profile projected interface product demos rolled out over the past few years:

Whirlpool, the world’s largest appliance maker, started talking about their interactive cooktop three years ago at CES 2014. You can see in the video how the Whirlpool smart cook top utilizes projected video as an interface.

Whirlpool® Interactive Cooktop at CES 2014

Over a year later, people were wowed by the projected interface used by IKEA in its 2025 future kitchen concept video:

IKEA Concept Kitchen 2025

At this year’s CES, Bosch seemed to embrace the concept of the projected interface, incorporating it into not only a demo of its coffee making robot:

Spotted at #ces2017: coffee robot at the @Bosch booth.

A video posted by Michael Wolf (@michaelawolf) on

And high-end German consumer electronics manufacturer Grundig has been showing off its VUX projection interface concept for the past year and a half:

GRUNDIG Control System VUX (english)

So, why all this interest in projected video interfaces and, more importantly, why haven’t any of these “visions of the future” made it to market yet?

Why Projected Video Interfaces Are Inevitable

It’s clear why projected video is a popular concept for demos: it looks cool. The very idea of turning any flat surface into an interactive interface is one that, at least for now, wows the user. Of course, that could change over time if these interfaces become more commonplace, but isn’t that true of every new technology? For now, projected interfaces could be used in a variety of interesting ways that consumers would love.

As for appliance makers, projected interfaces present an exciting new way to create consumer experiences. Think about it: Product designers used to working with tiny screens would find a much bigger pallet in projected interfaces, allowing them to create more compelling experiences that open doors to more education, instruction, and marketing content. Projected interfaces would also allow them to refresh their product interface regularly, rather than being stuck with the same small, mono-color screen for the life of the appliance.

If It’s So Cool To Demo, Why Aren’t Projected Video Interfaces In Market Yet?

If the projected video interface is such a crowd pleaser, why does it only seem to show up in concept videos and on trade show floors in “kitchen of the future” concept demos?

Here are a few possible reasons:

It’s still early, and projected interfaces are not quite ready for prime time. Most of the demos we see are all created for highly controlled demo experiences.  It may be that making projected video interfaces work in a mass-market environment in the consumer kitchen isn’t as easy as they’ve made it look in a demo video.

Implementing projected video requires a complicated setup. The IKEA 2025 kitchen concept utilizes a “smart light” concept which would require the consumer to have a specialized projector and an intelligent camera that can then read the gestures of the consumer installed above a table.  The other demos also have separate projection systems installed above the work surface. This type of set up would mean these systems are likely expensive and require a new installation method to which appliance makers and their channels are not accustomed.

Appliance Makers Move Slow. While all of these demos make clear that the projected interface is a promising concept, it’s important to remember appliance makers don’t introduce radical new concepts quickly.

Still, I’m hopeful that maybe Whirlpool, Bosch or IKEA will introduce an actual product at next year’s CES using projected video rather than just a concept demo. I do suspect that some, if not all, of the big appliance makers, are working on productizing projected interface enabled products. I also suspect disrupters may be working on something in this area.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if the world’s most disruptive company, Amazon, has something up their sleeves. After all, I keep hearing that the online giant has a bunch of crazy new products in store for us this year, so who knows, maybe the “kitchen computer” of the future is a social robot that has a projection video interface built in to go with Alexa.

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