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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Guided cooking

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.

Thermomix Partners with Drop for Smart Appliance Control and Grocery Ordering

Thermomix is adding Drop’s smart kitchen software to its all-in-one kitchen appliance, the two companies announced from the stage today at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) in Seattle.

Through the partnership the Thermomix TM6 will connect with other smart kitchen appliances and third-party applications through the device itself. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Thermomix will now soon be able to preheat an oven, order groceries and optimize recipe content with the push of a button. Thermomix said the first integrations will hit the market in 2020.

The TM6 has more than 20 culinary features including chopping, mixing, blending, different types of cooking including sous vide and fermentation. The device also features guided cooking for more than 50,000 recipes. All that functionality ain’t cheap, however, as the device itself costs $1,500.

But that hasn’t been a daunting price tag for people outside of the U.S. where the device is more popular. What’s more, people aren’t just buying the device, but as we also learned at SKS this week, the company has a crazy high subscription conversion rate:

In addition to appliance control, Drop’s software also does recipe discovery and re-sizing, ingredient swapping, and grocery lists. Thermomix is not the first all-in-one cooker to integrate Drop’s software. Last month Drop announced that it would expand its partnership with Kenwood to be on the CookEasy+ multi-function cooking appliance. Today’s press announcement also said that 40 million Drop-enabled appliances from brands such as GE Appliances, Bosch, Electrolux and LG Electronics will ship over the next three years.

LG Appliances Will Automatically Cook Tovala Meals

LG announced today that it will integrate Tovala’s cooking technology into select LG ovens and ranges later this year. This means that people will be able to cook Tovala meals without the need for Tovala’s countertop smart oven in yet another move that makes the startup more of an open cooking platform.

Cooking Tovala meals with LG appliances will be a little different than cooking with the Tovala smart oven itself. Customers will scan the Tovala meal’s barcode with the Tovala mobile app, which will communicate the automated cook program to the connected LG appliance. What’s curious is that not all of the compatible LG models include a steam cooking function, which Tovala’s oven has, so we wonder how that will impact the finished product.

More importantly, however, is that this is the second move in as many weeks where Tovala has opened up its products. Last week, the company introduced the Scan the Store feature for its smart oven that allows people to scan the barcodes of store-bought foods and have the device automatically cook them. That move broadened the utility of the Tovala oven, and today’s partnership makes the company’s meal plans available to people who don’t own a Tovala. Though that potential audience can’t be very big, as I don’t imagine there are a lot of people without Tovala ovens clamoring for the company’s meal kits.

However, partnering with LG may not be about getting new meal kit customers, it could be making those meal kits more useful to existing customers. What isn’t mentioned in the press release is whether the larger cooking cavity of a traditional oven will allow people to cook more meals at a time. As my boss, Mike Wolf noted in his second-gen Tovala review, because the oven is small, it’s not as ideal for cooking for a family of four.

Tovala’s moves are part of an overall trend in opening up cooking platforms. The June smart oven has a dedicated Whole Foods button to automatically cook foods from that grocer, and will probably add more buttons. And instead of developing its own service, Brava offers accompanying meal kits from a number of different providers in its marketplace.

For its part, LG is racking up all kinds of outside software partners including Drop, Innit and Sidechef.

Ztove Starts Shipping Smart Cooking System In Europe

Back in 2016, I received a short message from an inventor in Denmark asking if he could make me pancakes.

While it’s not every day someone reaches out and asks to make pancakes, it wasn’t all that surprising given the inventor, Peter Favrholdt, had created a prototype for a smart cooking system and I was one of the few people writing about the technology at the time.

Ztove founder and me in 2016

As it turned out, Favrholdt had learned we were holding a meetup in San Francisco and decided to travel from Denmark to attend the event.  While I didn’t get to taste Favrholdt’s pancakes on that trip, I got a chance to hear his story and encouraged him to apply for the Smart Kitchen Summit’s startup showcase.

Long story short: he did, and he won. His system, which features a Bluetooth connected pan, an induction cooktop, and an app to orchestrate the cooking process was picked by a panel of experts and Favrholdt and Ztove were crowned the winner of the 2016 Startup Showcase alongside 3D food printer nufood (in 2016 we had a tie).

Longer story short? A week ago I saw on Linkedin that Ztove had started shipping its smart cooking system to customers.

When I asked Favrholdt for more details, he told me the Ztove was now available in Denmark through the company’s website and would soon be available in physical retail.  He also told me they’d managed to create a product line that included two intelligent pans and a large saucepan, as well as three different cooktops.

“On the smart cooktop side we offer a table top dual burner called “DUO,” which sells as a bundle including a frying pan and a saucepan (USD 1599),” said Favrholdt in an email.

More intriguing is that two of the cooktops are built-ins.

“For home use, most people want built-in smart induction cooktops,” he wrote. “Ztove currently has two models – a “normal” 24 inches (USD 1049) and a “wide” 31 inches model (USD 1599) both with four cooking zones but having different width and arrangement of the burners.”

When I asked Favrholdt about how he was able to fund development of the product, he pointed to winning the Startup Showcase at SKS.

“Bringing home the SKS trophy also had a significance,” he said. “Ztove won a couple of grants in Denmark, and in 2017 we were enrolled in the Odense Robotics Startup Hub – an accelerator program for early startups in the field of robotics. In 2018 we got a small investment allowing us to increase the pace and building the company bringing the Ztove products to market.”

With their funding, they were able to find manufacturers for the components of the Ztove systems and start a small factory in Denmark where the final units are assembled by hand.

Favrholdt and the Hestan Cue team at SKS 2016

By finally shipping, Ztove joins Hestan as one of the few companies delivering smart cooking systems that focus on surface cooking, including intelligent cookware, cooktops, and an app. But that’s not the only connection between these two companies; As it turns out, Favrholdt connected with the Hestan team back on that 2016 trip to San Francisco.

“I brought Ztove’s first prototype and was thrilled to get to meet the Hestan Cue team,” said Favrholdt. “It was terrific talking to someone as passionate about smart cooking as myself.”

Groupe SEB Acquires Cooking Site 750g

Groupe SEB, which owns a portfolio of small appliance and cookware brands, announced this week that it has acquired French recipe site and digital media publisher 750g International. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Based in France, Groupe SEB operates in more than 150 countries around the world through its small appliance and household brands such as All-Clad, Tefal and Krupps. Products include cookware as well as air fryers, induction hobs, pressure cookers, countertop ovens and more.

750g claims it is the second largest cooking site in France, and according to the press announcement, the site holds 90,000 recipes and instructional videos, published in 5 languages and generates 10 million visits a month.

The press announcement is coming to us through rough translations, but it’s pretty easy to see SEB’s strategy here. Marrying 750g’s recipe content with SEB appliances and cookware, could create new guided cooking opportunities for the appliance maker. We saw a similar European move earlier this year when Zwilling took a 25 percent stake in fellow German guided cooking startup Cuciniale.

The acquisition of 750g moves SEB further up the stack. By having content operating under the same umbrellas as the hardware, it’s easier for SEB to integrate instructions and guided cooking operations directly into their appliances. Rather than just selling you one device one time, SEB can wrap an expansive, already built, recipe ecosystem that device that customers subscribe to.

Guided cooking is a trend we’re following here at The Spoon. Startups like Innit and SideChef are striking up partnerships around the world with appliance makers like LG and Electrolux, while Hestan is now integrated into GE appliances.

But in addition to going deeper up its existing cooking stack, having a content arm like 750g also allows SEB to broaden its stack. Having a digital cooking platform can open up new opportunities in discovery and e-commerce (a la shoppable recipes), or expand into digital cookbooks or perhaps even food delivery. Miele is doing something along these lines as it invested in shoppable recipe platform, KptnCook and partnered with MChef for food delivery for its Dialog ovens.

The recipe is not dead, and SEB’s acquisition of 750g shows that to navigate the future of cooking, hardware companies will need to develop content strategies as well.

MyFavorEats Lets You Customize Recipes to Your Likes and Your Kitchen

One of the biggest themes we hear about in the future of recipes is the ability to fully customize recipes to accommodate allergies, dietary needs, and plain old dislikes. (Sorry, olives!)

MyFavorEats, one of the 13 companies pitching at the Startup Showcase for the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) next week, is working to make recipes modular, so home cooks can easily swap out ingredients or customize them to their particular appliances. Read our Q&A with co-founder Orly Rapaport to learn a little more about how MyFavorEats is leveraging AI to transform the way we interact with recipes forever, then get your tickets to see her pitch live at SKS next week!

The Spoon: First thing’s first: give us your 15-second elevator pitch.
MyFavorEats: We use AI to transform online linear text recipes into a machine-readable, easily customizable format. Users can easily swap ingredients and personalize meals to their particular dietary preferences, and adapt recipes to their new kitchen appliances.

What inspired you to create Myfavoreats?
I am a home cook and a software engineer. I like to cook and to experiment with innovative gadgets in the kitchen. I realized the need for a tool that would help me tweak recipes to meet various dietary needs and to easily adapt recipes to my new kitchen appliances.

What’s the most challenging part of getting a food tech startup off the ground?
Food and kitchen digitization opens up a new world of cooking experience. This is a new domain that is still under development, being pushed by startups as well as big enterprises. With various stakeholders’ involvement, it is quite clear that standardization and technological alignment are needed to ensure a holistic scalable user experience.

How will Myfavoreats change the day-to-day life of its users?
MyFavorEats will give home-cooks the flexibility to personalize their favorite recipes. It would help recipe publishers to automatically upgrade their linear text recipe sites into a smart, revenue-generating format. It would provide kitchen appliance manufacturers a tool for automated scalable recipe generator.

What’s next for Myfavoreats?
We are now focused on launching pilots together with recipe publishers and appliance manufacturers.

Thanks, Orly! See her pitch live onstage at the Smart Kitchen Summit next week — tickets still available. 

Hestan to Announce its Smart Cooktop Solution at Smart Kitchen Summit Next Week

Hestan Smart Cooking will publicly announce the availability of its guided cooking system for appliance manufacturers at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) in Seattle next week.

Until this year, using the Hestan Cue guided cooking system required a standalone induction burner with accompanying sensor-embedded smart pans. With this move, Hestan Cue’s smart cooking technology to be built directly into cooktops from other companies.

Christoph Milz, Managing Director of Hestan Smart Cooking said during an interview with The Spoon that the Hestan Cue smart cooking system requires appliance makers to integrate a smart board into their cooktop, and will require the consumer to use Hestan Cue smart cookware as well as the accompanying app. At first, Hestan Cue’s technology will work with induction cooktops, with other modalities (gas, etc.) available later on.

The Hestan Cue system’s three parts work in harmony to help guide cooks through the cooking process. For example, if you want to cook salmon with a nice sear on the outside, but medium rare on the inside, the pan “talks” to the cooktop to say when it reaches the right temperature, and as the person goes through each step of the recipe, the app “tells” the smart board to adjust the heat accordingly, and so on.

Earlier this year, Hestan’s sister company (Hestan Residential), debuted a Cue-powered smart cooktop at the Kitchen and Bath Show in Miami. Hestan Smart Cooking has also signed on GE Appliances in the U.S. and Oranier in Germany as Cue cooktop partners. Hestan’s smart cooking technology will be available in GE’s Cafe line of appliances and will ship before the end of the year. Oranier’s Cue-enabled cooktops will ship in Germany in 2019.

Strategically, this is a smart move for parent company, Hestan Smart Cooking and its Cue platform. If the company can make its technology easy enough to implement without coming at too much of a price premium, Hestan sets itself up as a full-stack guided cooking solution. Because it will be in both the appliance and the cookware, it can offer more precise guidance than competitors offering integration into just the appliance side.

In addition to the cooktop news, Milz said that Hestan Smart Cooking would also be API integrations for smart ovens and be releasing oven recipes this fall.

If you want to see a Hestan Cue-powered cooktop in person, grab your ticket for our Smart Kicthen Summit, which is mere days away.

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.

LG to Integrate Drop into its Smart Appliances

Drop, the smart recipe software startup, today announced a partnership that will put its guided cooking software on LG’s SmartThinq line of appliances. This adds to a growing list of major appliance companies that are working with Drop and further illustrates how LG is taking a very open approach when it comes to software partnerships.

Drop’s software provides guided recipes for cooks, and hardware integreations such as the one with LG allows the user to control appliances via the Drop app. Drop CEO, Ben Harris, told me by phone that the Drop app recently hit half a million downloads and that customers can expect to see the Drop integration start with LG ovens and cooktops go live in the next few weeks.

Drop started off as a hardware maker with its connected scale, but pivoted to creating a “Kitchen OS,” with a heavy focus on recipes, for other appliance companies. The company has also been the subject of a multiyear patent infringement lawsuit brought by Perfect Company.

For Drop, the LG deal bolsters its lineup of existing hardware partnerships, which includes Bosch, GE, De’Longhi and Kenwood (not the car stereo maker).

There are plenty of startups vying to be the main software layer that cooks interact with in the connected kitchen, and they are all going for the same hardware partnerships. Rivals SideChef and Innit both announced integrations with LG appliances at CES earlier this year.

For it’s part, LG is showing that it’s open to being, well, open to all comers in the connected kitchen software space. In addition to SideChef and Innit, LG’s SmartThinq appliances work with both Amazon Alexa and Google.

Based in Ireland and San Francisco, Drop has raised $12 million in funding and has 30 employees.

Announcing the Smart Kitchen Summit 2018 Program

Hard to believe, but we’re just six weeks away from the Smart Kitchen Summit, our flagship industry event that brings hundreds of executives, innovators, startups and media together in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall for two days to forge the future of food, cooking, and the kitchen.

It’s been three years since we held our first in an old cannery in 2015, and since that time we’ve become the hub across three continents for the world’s biggest brands in appliances, food, and tech to connect and discuss food tech.

And now, after lots of emails, planning meetings and Google sheet rejiggering, we’ve released our agenda for the Smart Kitchen Summit! We’ve got an incredible lineup with panels, TED-style talks and fireside chats featuring some of the most exciting people in the space. Check it out!

A few highlights:

  • The Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman will sit down with the person who ran product on both the Amazon Echo and the Juicero –  Malachy Moynihan – to ask why kitchen products succeed or fail.
  • Dr. Karsten Ottenberg, the CEO of one of the world’s biggest appliance manufacturers, BSH Appliances, will talk about how his company is building its future around services.
  • Executives from Cafe X, Chowbotics and Zimplistic will talk about the future of food robotics
  • Walmart’s VP of Food Safety Frank Yiannas will speak on a panel with Raja Ramachandran of Ripe.io and Jasmine Crowe of Goodr about the potential for blockchain to increase transparency and reduce waste throughout the food system.
  • The CEOs of June, Brava, Tovala, and Suvie will talk about how cooking appliances will change over the next decade.
  • We’ll find out why Eli Holzman, the creator of Project Runway & Project Greenlight, has made the intersection of technology and cooking his next big project.
  • Tom Mastrobuoni of Tyson Ventures, Carmen Palafox of Make in L.A., and Brian Frank of FTW ventures will explore strategies for food tech investment, from hardware to CPG and beyond.

That’s just the start. We have sessions on personalized food, the future of restaurants, AI & food, cooking robots, food & cooking data, blockchain & food, IoT security in the smart kitchen, reinvention of the grocery store and much more.

Peppered throughout the day we’ll also have 12 new startups (companies to be announced soon!) pitching their companies before a panel of investors and executives. Our panel of judges will vote on the winner, who will get a $10,000 cash prize! You can view the new full conference schedule here.

Our last shows have all sold out, so make sure you grab your tickets now, and we’ll see you in October!