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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Guided cooking

Yummly App Adds New Features, Reminding Us It’s Still Around Six Years After Whirlpool Deal

Today, recipe and guided cooking app Yummly announced a refreshed set of features, including what it describes as AI-powered recipe recommendations, an improved meal planner feature, and integration with an upgraded Yummly thermometer.

Since Whirlpool acquired Yummly, the recipe recommendation and cooking guidance app has largely flown below the radar while adding periodic incremental improvements over the years. And as far as I can tell, the announced improvements are par for the course.

This includes the new and improved “AI-powered recipe recommendations,” which sounds a lot like the things the company was promoting almost five years ago when they were touting “AI-powered personalization.” It’s not immediately clear how these AI-powered recommendations differ from previous AI-enabled recommendations, but we’ll have to take the company’s word for it.

The app’s improved meal planner function looks like it’s primarily focused on further building out a shoppable recipe function, something that has become relatively common in recent years for many recipe apps as a way to monetize through affiliate marketing commerce. The Yummly meal-planning shoppable recipe meal planning capability is a premium feature for users through a monthly subscription.

Whirlpool is hardly mentioned in the release (outside of the About Yummly boilerplate at the bottom), and the only real evidence of the company’s influence is the integration with an improved Yummly Thermometer, which is a product that Whirlpool has gone through pains to integrate with a number of their appliances. According to the announcement, the new Yummly thermometer now has three sensors, up from the two sensors in the previous generation.

While Whirlpool seems content to let Yummly operate mainly as a standalone app with its own brand, it seems a far cry from when the company acquired the app and saw it as driving the digital transformation of the appliance giant’s product lineup. Outside of a big splash at CES 2019, which the company described as a “roll-out across multiple Whirlpool brands,” the app hasn’t added all that much in terms of feature sets beyond what it had five years ago, and there’s been scant evidence of any further integration – thermometer notwithstanding – with the broader Whirlpool family.

One reason the app has become something of an afterthought in Whirlpool might be that many of the original stakeholders have moved on. Yummly founder Dave Feller left soon after the deal was done, and Brian Whitlin, who drove much of the product innovation, left in 2021. Add in the fact that the acquisition’s primary champion within Whirlpool, Brett Dibkey – who drove much of Whirlpool’s digital transformation – left in 2020, and the company’s current caretaker mode makes sense.

Fresco Introduces Complete Refresh of KitchenOS Platform, With Aim of Delivering True Multi-Brand Device Contol

Today, Fresco announced the launch of its KitchenOS platform, a ground-up refresh of its smart kitchen software suite. As part of the announcement, the company revealed that Instant Brands, the maker of the popular Instant Pot smart pressure cooker, would be the first brand to launch the new KitchenOS with the Instant Pot Pro Plus.

The new KitchenOS, which includes new firmware, apps, and smart recipes, is the result of a two-year effort by the Dublin-based company designed to enable multi-appliance control and a new personalized user experience.

In an interview with The Spoon, Fresco CEO Ben Harris said the company realized in 2021 that in order to achieve a scalable approach to the smart kitchen, they would need to rebuild the platform from the ground up. They began to work on the new platform, accelerating their pace last year after a $20 million Series B investment.

“When we launched the Drop scale nine years ago, we received a lot of inbound interest from appliance manufacturers who saw the need for a neutral platform for the kitchen and the inevitability of one interface for the entire kitchen and their expectation that there would be one screen for orchestration,” said Harris. “They all want the back-end infrastructure, they all want the apps, they want the IoT branded for themselves, but customized with similar components under the hood.”

This led to numerous partnerships and many custom-built apps for appliance brands, but the problem, according to Harris, was that as the inbound requests started to multiply for custom-built customer-facing apps, it really began to slow the company’s ability to build products.

“We would tweak something on the platform over here, and it would cause problems over there,” said Harris.

According to Harris, the company faced three major problems around this time. First, they had to build new firmware for every single appliance, which meant it took nine months to launch a new product. Second, the company had to build a new UI for every appliance. And finally, they had to create new recipes for an appliance to work with the appliance firmware and app.

Limited cross-brand connectivity was another issue. Because each brand had a custom app and entirely unique firmware, a brand’s appliances could only communicate with another brand’s appliances through the Fresco app. Harris and the Fresco team knew that to achieve the promise of the smart kitchen, this would need to change.

It was around the same time they realized this approach was not scalable that Harris and the rest of the team started discussing the evolution of the Fresco platform with one of the company’s advisors, Steve Horowitz. Horowitz, who was added to the board when his firm invested in Fresco (then Drop), was with Google during the early days of Android and helped lead the engineering team that developed what would become one of the world’s dominant mobile operating systems.

In 2021, the company went back to the drawing board and started to rethink how they could build a more scalable platform that didn’t require building entirely new custom apps and delivered on the promise of true appliance-to-appliance interconnectivity. To achieve this, the company began working on what Harris described as a universal firmware and universal appliance UI that would work with all appliances connected to the Fresco platform.

Shots from the new Fresco/Instant Brands App

According to Harris, getting there required a step back to examine the commonality across appliances and a reimagining by the company of how they view the universe of appliances in the kitchen.

“We used to build appliances by their category, like stand mixer, oven, blender,” said Harris. “But we actually realized that we needed a sort of universal communication layer between recipes and between appliances.”

Harris says this step-back enabled them to realize that there were 77 common cooking capabilities in the kitchen – such as bake, broil, steam, etc – and across these cooking capabilities, there were 8 ways to describe them such as time, temperature, and cooking speed.  

“Suddenly, we now had, architecturally, from a back end point of view and then from a customer UI point of view, this set of universal concepts that we can have to join recipes and appliances, and to have appliance control,” said Harris. “We rebuilt the consumer experience with this multi-brand appliance control that sits inside our appliance partner apps, to reflect this top-to-bottom experience that ultimately allows us to deliver on the vision of this universal appliance control that can orchestrate all of your appliances.”

This new approach would need buy-in from their partners. That’s because it would require each appliance to have a new firmware and a new app that included access to a common Fresco account alongside the appliance brand’s account. From a customer perspective, it’s this single Fresco account identification, that sits within the different brand apps, that would enable the cross-brand connectivity.

“When you set up an account and our partner apps, you agree to basically set up the dual account both with Instant Brands and Fresco at the same time,” said Harris. “And you agree to both the Instant Brands and the Fresco terms and conditions. And then that allows both the individual tenants for Instant Brands and each one of our partners, and then also the sort of interconnectedness that’s brought by Fresco.”

One obvious concern appliance brands may have with having a single Fresco account embedded within different apps to connect across brands is that customer data privacy is protected both for the customer and the individual brands. According to Harris, that privacy was their top priority in architecting their new platform.

“That’s a real, clear, hard-line,” said Harris. Harris said each brand would get its own “data warehouse for lack of a better term”, and they ensured that each set of data would adhere to all data privacy rules. Harris said that if a customer opts in, their data would be part of aggregate, anonymous data around usage to help appliance brands build better products. But, in the end, “nobody sees anyone else’s user data, and they only have their own appliances and their own users that they are interacting with.”

Beyond the new architecture to enable cross-device interactivity, Fresco also focused on redesigning the customer experience, implementing design tenets from the likes of Apple Watch and other Apple Carplay to help guide users during the cook. Unlike early guided cooking platforms, however, Fresco focused on making sure the user would have as much or as little assistance as they needed and made sure to clearly communicate information to customers in a way that ensure they were informed and had control.

In rethinking the customer experience, Harris gave a shout-out to Wired writer Joe Ray, whose review of the Drop/Fresco platform gave them clarity on what they needed to focus on. 

“Joe Ray did an amazing job of calling out the issues with the experience we’ve built. And that was obviously a catalyst in the process, in really assessing the underlying data, and for to ask ourselves if we are delivering on our promises.”

According to Harris, the complete rebuild of the code base was a long and difficult process, but it was a necessary one given the direction of the smart home and smart kitchen. He pointed to Matter (he says Fresco will integrate as devices become Matter-compliant), and how all the big smart home brands were aligning around the standard. However, kitchen products, he pointed out, were fundamentally different and needed a platform like Fresco.

“This is where the future is, this is what Matter is building,” said Harris. “All of these appliances starting to be able to work together in any location. We’re just accelerating that we’re delivering it today, instead of waiting years before that Matter becomes a reality.”

The Kitchen 2030: How Food & Cooking Will Change in the Future (Video)

If you’ve been following The Spoon since the early days of 2015, you might remember that our flagship event that started it all was the Smart Kitchen Summit. Dedicated to the quiet revolution that was happening in the consumer kitchen, SKS became the event to examine the tech disruption upending business models and changing the way we source, cook and eat our food forever.

So it was fitting that our opening panel at the first CES Food Tech Conference was “The Kitchen 2030: How Food & Cooking Will Change in the Future,” featuring some of the leading companies in the kitchen and appliance industries. The panel discussion was hosted by Michael Wolf, CEO and founder of The Spoon and included Khalid Aboujassoum, Founder & CEO of Else Labs, Dochul Choi, Senior Vice President at Samsung, Robin Liss, CEO at Suvie and Kai Schaeffner, executive at Vorwerk (Thermomix).

The panel talked about where and how cooking, storing and even shopping for foods has shifted in the last several years; with more transparency and information about the foods we eat, the digitization of the recipe, guided cooking features and a whole new wave of kitchen appliances that may change the entire layout and function of the consumer kitchen.

“The Kitchen 2030” panel can be viewed in its entirety below — leave a comment with your predictions for the next decade of innovation in the connected kitchen.

4.5 Million Thermomix Owners are Using the Cookidoo Online Recipe Platform

While a number of companies are trying to build cooking robots for the home, the closest thing to a do-everything cooking appliance on the market today is the Thermomix.

And nowadays, it seems a lot of homes have a Thermomix, at least according to a recent post by the company.

According to the post, Thermomix sold one TM6, the latest generation multicooker, every 23 seconds in 2020, which translates to about 1.37 million for the year. While that may seem like a drop in the bucket for an industry that moves almost 700 million units annually, it translates to big numbers when you consider the price of the product. At $1,500 per unit, topline revenue for the TM6 pencils out to about a little over $2 billion, which would be a significant market for any countertop cooking appliance. In fact, compare that to the estimated total pressure cooker market size of $5.5 billion, which puts the TM6 market alone at almost 40% of the market for Instant Pot and all its various copycats.

And that’s not even the most interesting part of the update. According to Thermomix, there are now 4.5 million total Thermomixes connected to the company’s digital cooking platform, Cookidoo. That number includes both TM6 models and the previous generation TM5s. That’s up from about 1 million total users for the appliance’s digital cooking platform since 2017.

Engagement is also pretty high. According to Thermomix, Thermomix users make about 750 thousand meals a day using Cookidoo, which translates to about one in six Thermomix users each day.

As regular Spoon readers know, the company’s recipe platform has come a long way since four years ago. The company has enabled the platform to connect to other appliances for coordinated cooking and last year added the ability to shop for food via the Cookidoo platform. And this year, the company rolled out a new companion appliance in the Thermomix Friend in select markets (the Thermomix Friend is not yet available in North America), which coordinates cooking with the TM6 from one screen.

Cooksy Uses Cameras and Thermal Sensors Above Your Home Stove for Guided Cooking

While there is quite the range of guided cooking assistants for home cooks, Cooksy is looking to deliver guided cooking by adding a device above your home’s range. Launching a crowdfunding campaign today on Indiegogo, Cooksy is a small camera and thermal sensor that you affix above your cooktop. As Cooksy’s cameras and sensors monitor the temperatures of your pan and food, it talks with an accompanying mobile app, alerting you if your pan is too hot or too cold, when to flip foods and when to remove them.

Cooksy has a level of intelligence, so it can identify some foods the user places in a pan, like salmon, for instance. The device also comes pre-loaded with some recipes. But as Cooksy President, Jeff Knighton, explained to me by video chat this week, Cooksy is mostly about user-generated content. Yes, Cooksy can identify salmon in the pan, but if you’re not following a specific recipe from the app, it won’t provide specific guidance.

What it will do is provide data around the user’s experience cooking that food — the aforementioned salmon, for instance. That data might include how hot the pan is, when the salmon gets flipped, and when it gets removed from the heat. Cooksy saves all that information so that the user can bring it back up once they cook salmon again. Cooksy will ensure the pan is at the same temperature as before and that the user flips the salmon and removes it from the heat at the same times they did before.

Cooksy’s goal is to have users share their cooking experiences with a larger community. In addition to recording your cook, the system has basic editing tools that allow you to chop the video down to just its essentials and easily input ingredient and other recipe information. This means that if a professional chef cooks a steak and uploads their video doing so, users could replicate the same cooking process at home.

Of course, that also requires people to do the work of creating recipes and uploading them to the app. Which may or may not be a big deal, depending on how user-friendly the Cooksy app is.

Cooksy is coming to market just one week after Miso Robotics launched a similar cameras+tablet solution for professional kitchens. Miso’s artificial intelligence capabilities seem more robust, with the ability to recognize foods and automatically tell when they are done cooking (no recipe required), but Cooksy could theoretically help home cooks make sauces, stir frys, basically any dish you cook on the stove.

Cooksy, however, won’t come cheap. Early birds backing the project on Indiegogo can pledge $389 for a standard Cooksy, or $479 for the Cooksy Pro, which features greater thermal resolution and more on-board storage. If you are at all interested, you may not want to wait, because the retail price is 40 percent more ($649 for the basic and $799 for the Pro). That is not cheap. Especially if you consider you can pick up an entire six-piece set of Hestan Smart Cookware or a June Oven for $600. And you don’t have to wait. Cooksy is supposed to ship in November of this year, though as avid readers of The Spoon know, crowdfunded hardware campaigns have a tendency to miss their deadlines.

Hestan Cue Adds New Multi-Cooker Chef’s Pot to its Lineup

Hestan Cue, which makes connected pans and cooktops for guided cooking, announced this week the addition of a 5.5 quart Smart Chef’s Pot to its lineup. According to a press announcement sent to The Spoon, the new Chef’s Pot can act as a multi-cooker, performing a number of different function in the kitchen.

The new Chef’s Pot is similar to Hestan’s other smart pans in that it features embedded temperature sensors and Bluetooth connectivity. Hestan Cue’s pots and pans, induction burner and recipe app work in conjunction with one another to precisely control the temperature while cooking. The system automatically adjusts the temperature to avoid over and under cooking items.

With its deeper basin, Hestan Cue is positioning the new Chef’s Pot as a multi-function device in the kitchen. According to the press announcement, the new Chef’s Pot can perform more than eight different cooking functions, including deep frying, slow cooking, and candy making.

Dubbing its smart Chef’s Pot a “multi-cooker” seems to be more of a marketing gambit on the part of Hestan to ride the coattails of wildly popular devices like the Instant Pot. It’s not wrong, per se. Smart, precise temperature controls does give the Hestan Cue system flexibility to tackle a number of different cooking functions. So if you buy into the Hestan Cue ecosystem, there is greater flexibility to be had. Plus, the connected recipe apps will walk you through what you are cooking.

This type of functionality isn’t cheap, however. The 5.5 quart Chef’s Pot and Induction Cooktop will set you back $499. If you already have the Hestan Cue Induction Cooktop, the 5.5 quart Chef’s Pot on its own costs $299.

KloveChef Opens Up Voice-Guided Cooking Platform to Publishers

KloveChef, the voice-guided cooking startup cofounded by one of India’s biggest celebrity chefs in Sanjeev Kapoor, is opening up its platform this month to publishers wanting to add voice-guided cooking functionality to their recipes.

The new tool will allow anyone who has recipe content — chefs, cookbook authors, bloggers or food retailers — to upload their recipes to KloveChef’s platform via a web interface and it will convert them into a voice-guided recipes.

“We will democratize the interactive recipe creation and distribution,” said Bahubali Shété, KloveChef cofounder and CEO, in an interview with The Spoon.

Shété told me that recipe publishers will be able to use KloveChef to publish their recipes across a variety of voice platforms such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Google Home and Amazon Fire TV. To do so, they just copy the recipe URL or paste the full recipe into the web interface and KloveChef will convert into a voice-guided recipe.

Shété also said that publishers will have the option of letting users send their recipes posted on other web channels such as YouTube or Pinterest to their voice assistants for guided cooking.

KloveChef is opening up their voice platform after finding some success with their Alexa voice skill targeted primarily at home cooks in India. According to Shété, the guided cooking assistant has a total of 465,000 users and 100,000 monthly active users.

Shété says publishers can make money through KloveChef if the recipe is converted into a shopping list. The recipe-to-shopping list feature, which KloveChef has been testing through its app in India, currently has over 1 million recipes converted into shopping lists via voice search.

I have to admit, I like the idea of self-publishing recipes to voice platforms. It reminds me of the early days of ebooks, when authors would use technology from early pioneers like Smashwords to put their books into the world and on other popular platforms. Perhaps not all that surprisingly, just as like those early days of ebooks, recipe self-publishers are relying on Amazon to reach the end consumer, only instead of Kindle this time it’s Alexa.

It’s too soon to see how successful KloveChef will be in attracting cooks for its voice guided recipe assistant outside of India. In its home market, they’ve been able to leverage the large reach of Kapoor, while here in the states, Alexa tends to favor its featured partners such as Food Network or Tasty. KloveChef will have to compete with the algorithm-favored partners through attracting recipe publishers such as popular food bloggers or food retailers with built-in audiences to accrue a sizeable user base.

Looking forward, the company hopes to also attract users by making the platform better over time. One of the early features will be adapting guided cooking where users can speed up a recipe or slow it down depending on their experience. The company plans to release the new capabilities by mid-August.

Thermomix Users Can Now Order Ingredients With Launch of Shoppable Recipes on Cookidoo

Thermomix announced today they have launched ingredient shopping on the Cookidoo, the Thermomix multicooker’s digital recipe and meal planning platform.

The new capability allows Thermomix users to add a recipe’s ingredients to a digital shopping list and order them through the Cookidoo app. Fulfillment of the order (delivery or pickup) is done through a third-party grocery retail partner of the shopper’s choosing.

The new shoppable recipe feature will be available to users of any Cookidoo-compatible Thermomix model (TM5, TM6 and TM31) in the U.S., Germany and the United Kingdom.

You can watch how it works on the video below:

Those using the TM6 can add ingredients from any of the 50,000 or so recipes available through the Cookidoo interface by simply clicking on the “Add to Shopping List” option directly on the appliance’s touchscreen. From there, they head over to the Cookidoo mobile app or website to review the list, remove items they may already have, and add additional items to the list. They can then select a grocery retailer or online grocery service provider like Instacart to fulfill the order.

According to Thermomix’s head of consumer experience, Ramona Wehlig, bringing ingredient shopping and delivery to the users of the Thermomix completes the meal journey for their users.

“We had the weekly planner and curated shopping lists,” Wehlig said by phone, “but we never closed the gap in the meal journey until the ingredients were delivered.”

Wehlig said the company has been developing shoppable recipe functionality for the past year and a half. The company started trialing an early version capability through pilots in Germany. These initial pilots, which used technology developed by Thermomix, helped the company to understand the digital grocery shopping process and to fine-tune the ability to do things such as ingredient matching.

However, as the company pushed to accelerate its shoppable recipes efforts, it started looking for a partner to help them scale. This brought them to Whisk, a shoppable recipe and digital food platform startup acquired by Samsung Next last year. Whisk powers a number of grocery commerce capabilities in the connected kitchen, including (not surprisingly) on the Samsung Family Hub fridges.

“The core aim [of working with Whisk] was to scale faster,” said Wehlig. “This allows us to connect our users with more grocery stores in a shorter time frame.”

For Whisk, the addition of Thermomix helps cement an already strong position as one of the primary shoppable recipe platforms. While I haven’t seen updated numbers for a while, back in 2018 Whisk told me its platform touched 20 million users each month. With the addition of Thermomix — first in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S., later globally — the company will get millions more.

For Thermomix, the integration of shopping capabilities from the Cookidoo digital recipe platforms opens up potential new revenue streams through various forms of partnerships with CPG brands and any commissions passed on from the third party grocery platforms. For users, it adds another nice feature and could entrench the Cookidoo recipe platform as their primary digital shopping list manager.

CKBK, the Spotify of Recipes, Launches Guided Cooking with NEFF Partnership

Recipe subscription service ckbk announced this week that its guided cooking features are now integrated with the NEFF Home Connect platform, allowing users to control the NEFF N 90 oven directly from select recipes.

The partnership between ckbk and BSH, NEFF’s parent company, was announced last September. In an press release sent to The Spoon, ckbk said its subscribers can now choose from one of 2,000 Home Connect recipes and send the correct temperature, time and cooking method directly to the NEFF oven directly from the app.

The integration also works in reverse, so users can select a mode from their N 90 oven and be presented with a list of recipes specifically for that mode.

As part of the launch, NEFF is throwing in a three-month trial of ckbk for customers who buy a WiFi-enabled N 90 NEFF oven. That free trial extends up to six months if the oven is synced with the Home Connect app.

While the ckbk/NEFF partnership has been in place for months, the guided cooking space has seen some renewed interest lately in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic. People sheltering in place were cooking more and companies like Hestan made its Hestan Cue Cooking School available for free back in March. And earlier this week, Drop announced $13.3 million in funding for its “kitchen OS” software.

Will interest in home cooking continue as quarantines let up? Studies show that despite re-openings, consumers are still reluctant to go back into restaurants, so we won’t be abandoning our kitchens quite yet. And there are a lot of people out there who would probably still welcome some high-tech guidance with their cooking.

With Consumers in Quarantine, Connected Cooking Companies Spring Into Action With Tailored Content

With a good chunk of the world’s population currently in quarantine, most of us are cooking at home a lot more nowadays.

Along with all this home cooking has come a massive spike in demand for information for culinary how-to, ranging from recipe suggestions to tutorials on how to do everything from making rice to baking bread. While many are simply searching Google for recipes, others are settling in to learn cooking skills to help them learn to get food on the table.

This sudden hunger for cooking-related guidance has led some tech-forward cooking startups to ramp up the content as they look to both satiate newfound interest in cooking skills while also giving quarantine bound consumers something to do with their time.

Here are a few ways in which kitchen tech startups have ramped up their efforts to serve homebound consumers:

Hestan Cue

While the Hestan Cue already walks users through recipes with step by step instructions, the guided cooking startup has launched Hestan Cue Cooking School, a series of virtual classes to help users of the connected cooking platform build up on their cooking skills during quarantine.

Built with the virtual class platform Teachable, the initial classes cover techniques for cooking beef, eggs and vegetables. The cool thing is that while the classes suggest you use your Cue for certain steps, you can use the classes even if you don’t have the Hestan device.

According to Hestan Smart Cooking managing director John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen, about one third of the Hestan Cue users have signed up for courses.

Anova

Sous vide specialist Anova has always been active in creating cooking content for their user community, and over the past month they’ve gone quarantine cooking focused by creating content to help consumers with everything from making pantry staples to batch cooking. And for the parents with bored kids, Anova suggests enlisting them to help with the brisket.

Thermomix

Thermomix is known for its in-person sales model for the high-end multicooker, but in the age of COVID-19 they’ve gone virtual with a “quarantine kitchen” series of cooking demos and are also allowing potential customers to book online cooking demos with the TM6 sales team.

You can see one of their latest episodes of their quarantine kitchen series below:

SideChef

SideChef is also ramping up its quarantine specific content. In early March they created a quarantine cooking recipe collection. A month later, and with virtual happy hours firmly planted in the stay-at-home zeitgeist, they’ve created a guide for virtual dinner parties.

Instant Pot

The massively popular pressure cooker is famous for leaning on its Facebook community to create content for them. Still, the company seems to have recognized our new shared reality and is letting people know that Instant Pots can help you cook bread while you’re cooped up during quarantine.

Food Network Kitchen

While the Food Network Kitchen app doesn’t seem to have created any tailored content for quarantine bound consumers, they have seen a big jump in usage and consumers look for more ways to cook. Company spokesperson Irika Slavin told me via email that Foodnetwork.com has seen “double digit increases” in page views and the Food Network App, the guided cooking premium offering launched in October, has seen what Slavin describes as a “triple digit increase” in visitors.

ckbk

ckbk is a ‘Spotify for cookbooks’ app that puts pretty much any cookbook or recipe just a click away.

Since ckbk only offers access to existing cookbooks, the company isn’t creating any quarantine specific content, but they do have a good idea of what people are cooking. Company founder Matthew Cockerill told me he’s noticed most of his subscribers, and the world in general, seem to be moving in sync over the past month through what he calls the ‘seven stages of cooking grief.’

“So first of all it was about the prepping – stockpiling durable good – beans and pasta,” said Cockerill. “Then came the “staff of life” basics bread and baking. And after that, I think, there’s a need for some comfort, yes, but also some relief from the monotony. Which is where I think chocolate and dessert cravings are kicking in. It’s either that or alcohol. And in many cases both!”

“Lastly,” he continued, “we’ve also seen a trend of interest in ways to use the new found time which people see stretching out ahead of them, with longer-term projects” like baking bread.

Cockerill told me that new subscriptions are up 250% over pre-COVID times. If you want to cook your way through grief, the company is giving away 30 days free access to their app to help you cook through your pantry items.

Delish to Host Instagram Live Cooking Classes for Parents and Kids

If you’re a parent working from home with kids out of school, chances are you’re on the lookout for creative ways to distract them — hopefully while they learn some things.

Maybe one of those things will be how to cook. Recipe platform Delish is launching an Instagram Live series to teach parents and kids how to cook together.

According to an email from Delish, the series will be hosted by the platform’s editorial director Jo Saltz and her children. Episodes will air each weekday at 1:00pm ET and last 15 to 20 minutes (the first episode aired today). If you can’t tune in at that time, episodes will be saved in a Highlights section of Delish’s Instagram so you can watch when you’re ready.

Each #CookingTogether lesson will feature “kid friendly” recipes like pizza waffles and something called puppy chow (which I just had to Google and must say, I now want very badly).

Healthy? Not exactly. But kids can be picky, and if you’re already fighting a battle trying to keep them educated and entertained it’s not exactly the time to try and sell them on broccoli, too.

I don’t have kids myself, but I think Delish’s #CookingTogether series is a smart way for the recipe brand to make the best of the current situation — and differentiate themselves from other recipe site competitors. While people are quarantined at home they’re looking for both inspiration on what to cook and free ways to entertain themselves (and their children).

I bet before the coronavirus pandemic has died down, we’ll be seeing a lot of recipe services experimenting with new tactics to cater to the new normal.

Guided Cooking Deals to Help You Eat Better While Social Distancing

Being in the business of covering food news, it’s easy to be all doom and gloom right now. While the COVID-19 outbreak is certainly causing huge disruptions in the foodservice industry, there are some silver linings.

The coronavirus — and subsequent social distancing measures — could have a real effect within our own kitchen. Reuters reported last week that quarantined folks in China have been spending time in their kitchens and learning to cook, leading to increased downloads in recipe apps and guided cooking services.

If you’re also cooped up at home and looking to flex your cooking skills, there are plenty of great services out there to help you learn to be a better chef. And good news — some are even offering deals!

We’ve listed some below, and will be updating the list as we learn of more. If you notice any are missing please leave us a comment or email tips@thespoon.tech.

Plant Jammer
If you stocked up on a bunch of vegetables but aren’t sure exactly how to turn them into meals, Plant Jammer could be a useful guide. The service, which is available via a website or an app, uses AI to generate vegetarian recipes based on what you have available at your house (which could be very helpful if you’re trying to make use of what you have without hitting up the grocery store).

As of today Plant Jammer’s paid features will be free to all users. According to an email from the company, they will assess how long to continue the offer based off of the progression of the coronavirus outbreak.

Photo: Hestan Cue

Hestan Cue

If you have a smart cooking system Hestan Cue at home and want to finally learn how to use it to make fancy restaurant meals at home, you’re in luck. The company, which makes a connected cooktop and pan set that connects with your phone to guide your cooking, is now offering a free Hestan Cue Cooking School. The first course is all about Mastering Eggs — other courses have not been announced yet. If you want to follow along, you can sign up here.

Photo: Now Serving

Bookstores

It’s never been a better time to invest in cookbooks: you get new recipes to try, great reading material, and are able to support local bookstores that have had to shutter to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Now Serving, L.A.’s only cookbook bookstore, is trying to beef up sales by offering free online shipping. If you’re in the area you can also get curbside pickup. The Book Larder, Seattle’s only cookbook bookstore, is also offering free shipping on orders over $50.

Photo: ckbk Instagram

ckbk
Looking for cooking inspiration and bored of your usual staples? Online subscription service ckbk lets you browse a bunch of cookbooks virtually — sort of like a Spotify for cookbooks. Interested folks can use the code WECANCOOKTHROUGHTHIS to get a 30 day free trial to ckbk, which allows them to browse 360 cookbooks and 85,000 recipes to find new recipe inspiration.

Photo: Blue Apron

Meal kits
Some of us need a little more hand-holding during our cooking process. In that case, several meal kit services are offering discounts. Blue Apron is offering $60 off through March, and Hello Fresh has a variety of promotions going (including $80 off over four weeks).

Do you have a guided cooking service offering a deal to help folks cook during this trying time? Give us a shout in the comment section or drop us a line.