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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Guided cooking

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.


Instant Pot and Drop Partner for New Guided Cooking Recipe App

Instant Brands, the company behind the Instant Pot, and Drop, which makes smart kitchen software, today announced that the they have developed and launched a new Instant Pot recipe app.

Available for both Android and iOS, the new Instant Pot recipe app will feature roughly 1,000 recipes for Instant Brand appliances such as the Instant Vortex Air Fryer, Instant Ace Blender, and, of course, the full line of Instant Pot pressure cookers. The app will include step-by-step guided cooking recipes powered by Drop that adjust accordingly based on the number of people being served as well as ingredient substitutions.

One Drop feature this new Instant Pot will not have is device control. So while the Instant Pot app will walk you through the steps of making a particular recipe, it won’t allow you to, say, automatically turn on an Instant Pot from the app’s recipe. (Being at the device itself is probably a good idea for something like controlling a blender.)

Powering the Instant Pot app is another nice feather in the cap for Drop. The company announced an integration with Thermomix, another popular standalone appliance, last month. Drop also has deals with Bosch, Electrolux, GE Appliances, and LG Electronics using its software, the Instant Pot has a massive installed base of millions of appliance owners. Those appliance owners are also vociferous in Facebook groups, so if the Instant Pot app works well (or doesn’t), believe me that community won’t be shy about sharing their experience online.

The new Instant Pot recipe app launches today, those using the older version of the app will be migrated to this newer version.

Equal Parts Bundles Coaching With Cookware In Effort To Lure Millennials Into the Kitchen

For those new to cooking, it’s easy to feel lost the first few (or few dozen) times in the kitchen.

But what if you had a personal cooking coach to text with questions about techniques, meal suggestions or even dinner party tips? That’s the idea behind Equal Parts, a cookware brand from Millennial-focused direct-to-consumer startup Pattern Brands.

Here’s how Equal Parts coaching+cookware works:

When you buy a new cookware set from Equal Parts, you get an accompanying bundle of cooking guidance as part of the package. Guidance comes in the form of eight weeks of seven-days-a-week text messaging access to cooking coaches that provide advice on pretty much anything related to the meal journey, from teaching new cooking skills like sautéing to walking through a meal plan to grocery shopping guidance. Coaches are available each day from 4 PM ET to Midnight ET.

The cookware + coaching kits range in price from $65 for a utensil bundle all the way up to $499 for a 20 piece “Complete Kitchen” bundle that includes pans, knives, mixing bowls and more.

Once your eight weeks of text-based coaching is up, you’re ready to spread your wings and fly solo or, as the company puts it on their website, it’s time to “build your intuition in the kitchen” because, after a couple months, “you won’t need us anymore”.

Guided Cooking For The Millennial Generation?

In a way, Equal Parts offers guided cooking, only instead of using connected pans and software, the Millennial-focused brand offers up personalized guidance in a delivery format that is second nature to pretty much anyone in the under-35 crowd: texting.

Another difference with connected products is the temporal nature of the guidance. While products like the Hestan Cue offer the prospect of continuous guidance over the lifetime of product, the reality is most folks usually have a few go-to meals they cook, so the idea of weaning people off of their coaching makes sense. I also suspect giving a limited time window to use the coaching probably is enough to incentivize many to actually use it and not shove their pans in the drawer.

The company behind Equal Parts is a venture funded startup from Pattern Brands, a company founded by some of the marketing agency whizzes who helped launch direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker, Everlane and Bonobos.  While many of the early D2C success stories have been largely focused on fashion and lifestyle categories, the kitchen and other more “domesticated” brand concepts have come into focus the last few years as Millennials move both into parenthood and up the career ladder.

And while Equal Parts is a new take on cookware, it isn’t the first new take targeted at the under-35 set.  Great Jones is another buzzy cookware brand that launched in the last few years, and let’s not forget Buzzfeed Tasty’s cookware brand partnership with Walmart. Tasty has also tried its hand at guided cooking with the Tasty One Top, a product it seemed to lose some interest in over the past year as many of the core team behind the product like Ben Kaufman  (ed note: Buzzfeed emailed us to let us know that Ben Kaufman is still acting as company CMO through the end of this year even as he focuses on his new startup Camp) have moved on.

So will text-message powered coaching be the secret ingredient to establish Equal Parts as an up-and-coming cookware brand? Too soon to tell, but it’s definitely worth a shot.  While the Instant Pot may have become the first cooking gadget Millennials can call their own, the race to become the cookware brand for a generation is too big an opportunity to pass up.

SideChef Launches Guided Cooking Integration With Bixby, Samsung’s AI Assistant

This week, SideChef announced an integration with Samsung’s intelligent voice assistant Bixby. The partnership centers around the launch of a voice-activated guided cooking capsule (capsules are Samsung’s equivalent to Amazon Alexa skills) which will give users of Bixby-powered mobile phones access to approximately 15 thousand recipes, most with step-by-step video-powered cooking instructions.

From the news release:

“Users can hone in on the exact recipe they would like by adding natural language constraints, such as dietary restriction, cuisine type, and even specific ingredients. Once a recipe is selected, SideChef provides video instruction through Bixby to guide home cooks through the entire recipe preparation process, from start to finish.”

While Samsung’s voice assistant doesn’t quite have the same degree of loyal usership as, say, Google Assistant on mobile phones or Amazon Alexa in the home, it is installed on a whole lot of Samsung products. Last year Samsung CEO D.J. Koh declared that the company’s AI assistant could reach a total of 500 million devices if it were to be installed on every Samsung device.

Of course, to reach that massive audience, SideChef’s new capsule would then have to be installed by the consumer, who will be able to find it on the Bixby Marketplace (Samsung’s “app store” for Bixby Capsules). Samsung launched the marketplace in mid-2019, and the newness of the store may actually play to SideChef’s advantage as theirs is probably one of the few recipe-centric voice apps and most likely the only guided cooking capsule on the still relatively bare shelves of the Bixby marketplace.

This move comes a year after SideChef launched on Amazon’s video-enabled Alexa devices, the Alexa Echo Show and Echo Spot, and just a couple months after the smart kitchen software startup announced an integration with Haier’s smart fridges at IFA 2019. While it isn’t immediately clear if the Bixby integration will put SideChef on Samsung Family Hub refrigerators, I would expect that will happen sooner rather than later.

Finally, while SideChef continues to rack up appliance partnerships, the company is also beginning to explore partnerships with big CPG brands. Last month the startup partnered with Bacardi through its Alexa integration to enable step-by-step drink mixing.  This trend of food brands integrating with smart kitchen software platforms isn’t limited to SideChef, as SideChef competitor Innit announced a partnership in September with Mars through a Google Lens integration that will enable both guided cooking and personalized meal and nutrition recommendations.