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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Guided cooking

Google Assistant Is Becoming A Guided Cooking Platform. We Talk To The Person Leading The Charge

Back in April, Google’s Emma Persky wrote a post telling the world that Google has been working on a recipe guidance capability for Google Assistant.

At last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, she gave a little more detail on what exactly the company has been up to.

Persky, who runs point for Google Assistant’s cooking guidance team, told the Spoon’s Allen Weiner how much of the focus has been on building in contextual understanding of recipes.

“We can talk you through step by step how to cook a recipe and answer contextual questions about how to do that,” said Persky. “To do this, we have to build a deep model of what a recipe actually looks like. Have to take the text of a recipe and understand that text so we know what pasta is, we know what type of pasta you’re talking about, we know what the units are, we know the cooking temperature.”

“On the other side, we know what the user is saying. We have a whole bunch of machinery at Google that is able to understand what a user is saying and turn that into a machine question. We have a whole bunch of data about how different people ask these questions, which we use to build a model and understand these types of questions.”

When asked about how Google is utilizing company competencies like search and YouTube, Persky said that while there’s been significant work done here, there’s an opportunity to get better.

“We do a pretty good job now when you ask on your phone or desktop ‘how do I sauté an onion?’ we show you a nice video of how to sauté an onion.”

But, she said, “there’s a lot of opportunity for guided cooking feature to more deeply integrate with this, so when your recipe says sauté the onion, and you don’t know how to sauté the onion, we are able to return these types of video answers on on Google Home platform to help you become a better chef over time.”

Persky also discussed how she thought web content schemas could evolve to create a foundation for richer content through platforms like Google Assistant.

“When it comes to companies that have this kind (recipe) data available to them, there are a lot of opportunity for finding ways to increase the fidelity of the data that we have access to. At the moment we have schema.org markup, which is a good first pass. We don’t have a lot of detail and use machine learning to extract a lot of the context from that. And I think where there’s an opportunity to where a lot of people working on this stuff is to find ways to access more high fidelity data that we could offer to the users as an improved experience.”

When asked by Weiner how schema.org and other web markup languages could improve, she had this to say: “There’s a lot of work we can do to improve the quality of that markup. For example, right now the markup just has one block of text for all the instructions in the recipe, but actually if we could break that down and have a step by step, it would be easier for us to parse that out. Right now we have to apply machine learning across that to do that.”

It’s a really good conversation to understand what Google has been up to as they look to combine recipe content with their voice AI platform. You can watch the full conversation between Allen Weiner and Emma Persky below:

Ed note: Answers in this interview have been edited slightly for brevity/clarity

Oliver Aims To Take One Pot Cooking To The Next Level

The holy grail of convenience cooking has always been the one pot solution. Since the early 1970s, the CrockPot and other less famous brands of slow cooking machines dominated the kitchen as the solution for “set it and forget it” meals. Whether it was pork roasts, applesauce, stews or chili, the Crock Pot lets users combine (mostly) raw ingredients, turn the device on and come back later in the day to a fully cooked meal. In 2009, with the rise of the electric pressure cooker, the Instant Pot debuted and the debate began as to which technology was actually more useful.

The Instant Pot has a slow cooker feature, but the love of the device comes from its ability to produce cooked food in a much shorter amount of time through pressure cooking.

But whether you’re team Crock Pot or team Instant Pot, one thing remains true: one pot cooking tech hasn’t changed much in the last 40+ years. They still require users to dump a slew of ingredients all at once into a large bowl (or manually add different ingredients at different times) and hope it all cooks perfectly. But not every food item requires the same amount of time – or the same levels of heat – to cook.

This was the challenge Else Labs was trying to tackle with new one pot automated cooking machine Oliver. The technology and device design allows ingredients to be divided into dispensing canisters and then placed into the pot for cooking when the recipe-driven app tells it to.

Else Labs Founder & CEO Khalid Aboujassoum sat down with The Spoon’s Allen Weiner at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit.

“This technology takes slow cooking to a new level. You can taste every ingredient – they all have the right texture and right flavor because they were cooked correctly,” said Aboujassoum.

Oliver isn’t exactly a slow cooker; it mimics the way you’d cook on a stove top (saute onions first, add vegetables, cook meat around it, make the broth separate, etc) – but it enables automation and connectivity to take over and relieve the cook from standing over the stove for the entire process.

Oliver does what Crock Pot and Instant Pot can’t – understand the sequence and temperature of how each ingredient should be cooked and mimic those actions the way a human cook would. Oliver dispenses at the right time and heats to the right temperature with a robotic stirring arm built in to stir as needed.

“Tell Oliver ‘I need food by six’ and the machine will do the math for you in terms of when to start, stir, dispense and stop,” said Aboujassoum.

Another differentiator? Oliver records the work of pros so busy home cooks can replicate their work. According to Aboujassoum, the recipes generated from the Oliver app are all created with professional chefs. As the chefs make their recipes with Oliver, Oliver and the app capture all the actions, recording the sequence so it can be automated and replicated for Oliver users. Eventually, the plan is to let the Oliver user community contribute and add recipes using this same method to capture a more diverse range of content.

It took almost 40 years for the Crock Pot to have a serious competitor but it seems the Instant Pot may not enjoy the same length of time as a crowd favorite. Oliver is poised to launch in 2018.

 

Hestan Cue System Adds Chef’s Pot To Cookware Arsenal

The Hestan Cue, a connected cooking system that features an induction burner and – up til now – a single choice of cookware in a Bluetooth-enabled pan, just added a new cookware option: the Chef’s Pot.

Announced today, the Chef’s Pot is similar to the Hestan Cue pan in that is features a smart Bluetooth module and syncs with the smart induction burner that comes with the Hestan Cue system. Like the pan, the Chef’s Pot can also be used with the Hestan Cue app, the three of which (cookware, burner, app) orchestrate a guided cooking experience with synchronized video tutorials that communicate with the pan and induction burner system.

Adding a pot also makes sense since even if you’re new to the kitchen, you’ll eventually need more than one piece of cookware. With the Chef’s Pot, owners of the Hestan Cue can now make soup, braise a chicken or slow cook some pork. To accommodate the new culinary directions enabled by a pot the Hestan Cue app has also added new recipes.

Like the Hestan Cue itself, the Chef’s Pot isn’t cheap. The new connected cookware runs $299, which is a pretty penny since you can pick up an entire cookware set for about two hundred bucks.

Long term, you have to wonder whether the Hestan Cue technology will find its way into more Meyer cookware. Meyer, Hestan Smart Cooking’s parent company, is one of the world’s largest cookware companies, it’s growth fueled in the 80s in part by Stanley Cheng’s innovations in non-stick cooking surfaces. Thirty years later, it’s possible the company’s next wave growth will center around intelligent cookware.

SKS 2016 Flashback: The Cooking Automation Continuum

With Smart Kitchen Summit 2017 just days away, here at the Spoon, we thought we’d revisit some of our favorite session from last year.

This session, “The Cooking Automation Continuum: From Guided Cooking to The Cooking Robot,” was a fun panel moderated by your’s truly that explored the various ways innovators are looking to apply automation and robotics to food and cooking.

There’s no doubt that cooking automation is a continuum. We see basic automation in hugely popular cooking devices today such as the Instant Pot and Thermomix, while there are those exploring the outer boundaries of how to apply automation and robotics to create fully cooked meals.

We talk about all of this in this session.

The panelists for this session are Darren Vengroff, the (then) Chief Scientist of Hestan Smart Cooking, Timothy Chen, CEO of Sereneti Kitchen, and Ehsan Alipour, the CEO of Oliso.

We will be exploring cooking automation and robotics at this year’s Summit. If you’d like to see these sessions, talk to the innovators and become smarter about the future of cooking, you can still get tickets at the Smart Kitchen Summit website. Use the discount code SPOON for 25% off of tickets. 

Hestan Cue & ChefSteps Integrate Apps, Show Us Glimpse Of The Future

Today Hestan Smart Cooking and ChefSteps debuted a deep link integration between their two cooking apps. What this means is the user can initiate a cook within the Hestan app, seamlessly transfer to the ChefSteps Joule to sous vide a protein like steak, and then finish the cook with the Hestan Cue smart cooking system.

This from Hestan’s app page:

“We’ve come together with the team at ChefSteps to bring you a new “Sous Vide” mode for Mix & Match with sear-only recipes. Each recipe links directly to the corresponding protein in the ChefSteps’ Joule app for seamless sous vide cooking. Our team of culinary scientists developed these recipes to give you the best sear and the crispiest skin to pair with all of your favorite Cue sauces (plus a few new ones from our friends at ChefSteps)!”

While this may seem like a relatively small piece of news, I think it’s an interesting glimpse at what a more fully evolved connected kitchen could look like.

Before I get to why I think that is so, let’s step back and look at the problems the smart home industry has had with broken and incompatible experiences in multibrand, multi-device smart homes.

The Smart Home Is Often Not So Smart

One of the biggest problems with the smart home is consumer confusion and frustration over the incompatibility of different products and consumer experiences. More devices often mean more apps and more connections to manage, the result of which for the consumer can be a growing number of disjointed experiences that often require more work than less technology-centric approaches.

When I surveyed smart home industry executives at the end of last year, they identified consumer confusion over technologies as the biggest hurdle preventing greater adoption in their industry.

Efforts to create widely adopted frameworks like HomeKit have helped, but these are still vendor-driven offerings that don’t eliminate a consumer’s exposure to incompatible apps and broken user experiences. Universal front-end interfaces like Alexa offer great promise and will no doubt play a big part in more seamless and unified experiences across a multi-vendor smart home environment, but today’s voice integrations are often shallow and usually don’t enable inter-product integration experiences.

Which brings us to the kitchen. While the connected kitchen is embryonic compared to the broader smart home, 2017 has seen strong movement among appliance makers, housewares companies and technology vendors who see an opportunity to make their products more connected. Of course, the danger here is the same as with the smart home, where consumers have a bunch of non-interoperable devices and apps and give up because trying to make it all work is just too much work.

In my kitchen, I have a variety of connected food appliances, none of which work together. This includes three sous vide appliances, a connected grill, a beer brewer, and coffee maker. All connected, but none to each other. And while I may not have much need for my coffee maker and my sous vide machine to communicate now (or ever?),  I can see an obvious reason for my sous vide app and my grill app to work together. Taking it a step further, it makes sense for my shopping app, food storage app (smart fridge), oven, countertop cooking apps (sous vide, etc.) to work together to hand off between stages.

But it goes beyond connecting the various cooking steps.  Take health and nutrition, where there are companies like Bosch who are working on food scanners to let us know instantly the nutritional makeup of food in our kitchen There would be tremendous value in allowing that info to instantly be shared with any of my cooking devices, my fitness wearable, and my fitness apps.  I also believe Apple’s HealthKit will someday incorporate info in realtime about the caloric and nutrient makeup of your food intake; that info is not nearly as valuable if it is not useable with a connected kitchen.

So you can see where I’m going. The ability to connect devices, even at the app level, will ultimately reduce consumer frustration and likely result in faster adoption of these products. Longer term, there is great promise in better integration of appliances, and only through greater integration will we realize the promise of a connected kitchen.

Oh yeah, About That News

Still interested in the specifics of the announcement? I caught up with Hestan’s product software lead Jordan Meyer, who told me the three components of the latest version of their app:

The availability of new sous vide recipes. These recipes will walk you visually through cooking sous vide and will work with any sous vide circulator.

The ChefSteps integration. This is where the sous video recipes go next-level. Jordan said that Hestan recognized their smart pan and induction heating system would not cook a 2″ steak as well as a sous vide circulator, so they decided to work with the ChefSteps (he tells me the Hestan folks are fans of the Joule). Where the Hestan does excel, such as sauces and finishing a steak, the user can then use the Cue.

Lastly, Hestan also took some of ChefSteps recipes and added their step-by-step cooking guidance within the app.

Bottom line, this type of device and app integration makes these appliances more usable. If you are a cooking enthusiast who embraces modern tools as a way to put food on the table, eventually you’ll want to ensure your tools work together without suffering from app fatigue or a lack of interoperability.

Today Hestan and ChefSteps showed us what such a connected kitchen might look like.

Bosch’s Friendly Kitchen Robot Shows Off Sous Chef Skills At IFA 2017

When Bosch showed off their kitchen assistant Mykie at last year’s IFA and a few months later at CES, the social robot did little more than project a looped video suggesting how he might help out in the kitchen.

But at this year’s IFA, the little guy seemed all grown up as he showed off a voice-powered interactive demo of guided cooking. In the video captured below, you can see the user giving voice commands to navigate Mykie from step to step, watch recipe preparation instructions, search the web and watch videos of pro cooks preparing the food.

It’s an interesting evolution of Mykie in what is fast becoming a more competitive market for AI powered sous chefs. This year we’ve seen everyone from Buzzfeed Tasty to Whirlpool join others like the Hestan Cue and Cuciniale with guided cooking platforms, while Amazon and Samsung are creating what are voice-powered kitchen computers as extensions of their existing AI and app platforms.

By giving Mykie a name and cute little robot face, Bosch is betting consumers will embrace AI assistants with a little personality. Compared with the faceless Alexa, Mykie certainly seems warmer and one that might even become something of a “friend” in the kitchen. Of course, whether we as consumers will befriend the likes of Mykie is part of a longer-term question around just how realistic home robots and AI assistants become.

Bosch representatives at IFA were still vague on when we might see Mykie make it to market. With CES in just a few months, you have to wonder if the German appliance giant will reveal details in Las Vegas about when consumers might have their own kitchen assistant with a friendly face to help them make dinner.

SideChef Plans To Be The Engine Behind Sharp’s Smart Kitchen Appliances

SideChef began in 2013 with a mission to make cooking easy and fun and to take the guesswork and heavy reading out of recipes. Over time, the recipe app startup has evolved to think of itself as a platform for the connected kitchen and today announced a partnership with electronics and appliance giant Sharp at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Japan.

SideChef will now be the smart software behind Sharp’s connected appliance lineup, powering the mobile app and recipe content to provide guided cooking tools when using the brand’s products. The first internet-enabled appliance from Sharp that will include SideChef’s intelligence is the Sharp SuperSteam+ Convection Oven, an oven that includes a new way to grill, brown and even roast foods using super heated steam.

This announcement builds out SideChef’s vision of being the de facto smart kitchen platform, giving manufacturers software that can bridge the experience and control of different kitchen devices and engage users to go beyond basic connectivity. The Sharp “powered by SideChef” app will include over 5000 machine ready recipes with built-in control for the integrated appliances. The recipes give users a guided cooking experience, automatically setting timers, playing educational videos or suggesting helpful tips based on the ingredients, time of day, season or location.

SideChef’s CEO and founder Kevin Yu says that the company will also help Sharp build an engaged user community and drive relevant content – which is a core strength of SideChef’s business. But Yu hopes to help manufacturers think differently about their IoT strategies and move past connectivity as the end goal.

“We’re not just here to connect things or teach people how to cook. That’s a great goal, but that’s 1.0. We want to help manufacturers see how they can create real engagement and monetization from these platforms,” commented Yu in an interview with The Spoon.

It’s not a surprise that SideChef is thinking beyond the intelligence inside the app to the user experience and engagement. Yu’s background is in game design and development, so he’s often thinking about the gameification of activities in the kitchen.

“The goal is to get the user engaged and willing to spend more money in micro transactions. This is what we think of as modern monetization for the smart kitchen,” he adds.

Sharp is one of a handful of appliance manufacturers looking at third party companies to connect and serve as the content partner behind their connected appliances. Earlier this year smart kitchen startup Drop announced an integration partnership with GE and later Bosch and Innit, a kitchen platform and data company also explored work with Whirlpool in the past.

“Sharp was looking for ways to combine convenience with perfect cooking results from our next generation of smart connected home appliances,” Jim Sanduski, President of Sharp Home Electronics Company of America said in a prepared statement.  “SideChef already offers an award winning mobile culinary platform so partnering with them to integrate cooking operation and control was an easy decision.”

The company plans to roll out its internet-connected line of products starting with the SuperSteam wall oven along with the Sharp app powered by SideChef in fall 2018.

SideChef and Sharp announced their partnership at the first-ever Smart Kitchen Summit in Japan. To see Kevin Yu and others speak at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle in October, use code SPOON for 25% off tickets.

Klove Offers Low-Cost Entry Point To The Smart Kitchen

The current state of the smart kitchen is still, well, kind of expensive. And that’s ok – markets in their early days often produce products with high price tags as demand is still being developed and solutions still being realized. Intelligent ovens, smart fridges, connected tea infusers – it all sounds like an amazing eutopia of high tech deliciousness. But these solutions aren’t making cooking easier for the masses – at least not yet. But some areas of the smart kitchen are starting to produce at mainstream prices – most specifically in the sous vide space with sub $100 machines available at big box retailers like Target.

And then there are startups like Klove. The concept behind the Klove stove top knob is pretty cool – it’s a retrofit device that replaces your dumb stove knobs and adds a pretty crazy amount of intelligence into a little form factor.

The Klove smart knob acts as an entry-level guided cooking system – assessing the state of heat on whatever dish you’re preparing and letting you know when to adjust and when you can walk away. Klove comes with a host of recipes to start with, so you don’t have to guess what to cook when you get started.

Klove -Just Talk and cook

With a companion app (because of course) and Google Home / Amazon Echo compatibility, the Klove smart knob also has some machine learning baked in and will adjust recipes based on your preferences over time. Sure it might say to scramble eggs for 5-7 minutes, but maybe you like yours runny. The knob will learn that over time and adjust its alerts accordingly. Like a little digital sous chef who remembers your favorite type of pancake. (Chocolate chip. It’s always chocolate chip.)

There’s even a safety feature built into the device. Try to leave home with your stove on – the Klove app will alert you before you get out the door, ending the days of wondering “did I leave my stove on?” when you get to work. It will also alert you if you walk away from the stove for a minute or two and are needed to turn something up or down. If you’ve ever cooked something too long – or had boiled water overflow and spill onto the stove top, you’ll probably find this feature helpful.

The best part is that Klove is only $29. Well, for now – it’s available for pre-order on Indiegogo for $29 which is technically a price drop from the company’s first unsuccessful crowd funding campaign. But there seems to be some momentum this time around and the sub $40 price point is pretty attractive. If voice control is driving more interest in connected tech in the home, retrofit devices like Klove can help consumers see the value of technology to assist them in cooking better and easier at home.

Klove has had some momentum recently, having raised $250k from investors in a SEED round of funding and being named “The Next Big Thing” in food tech via the Nestle “Next Big Thing” startup competition in London. Klove isn’t the first company to create a retrofit smart knob for stoves – Meld introduced its smart knob in 2015 and went a step further than Klove to be able to automatically control the temperature during cooking as opposed to notifying someone to turn the dial up or down when ready. Meld ended up cancelling its Kickstarter when it was acquired by Meyer Corp (owner of guided cooking brand Hestan Cue) after the campaign was successfully funded. Hestan took the learning and knowledge behind the Meld knob and used it to build its current guided cooking platform – though the actual knob form factor never resurfaced.

Klove has about 4 weeks left to raise the initial $20k to get started on development – and with a few smart knob competitors in the space, it will be interesting to see how they do. For now, you can grab a Klove for $29 as an early bird backer and expect to see the smart knob right around Christmas.

The Tasty One Top And The Rise Of Content Powered Cooking

Back in 2008, Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington wrote a manifesto in which he announced plans to build a low-cost tablet computing device.

While the idea of a technology blog beating computing giants like Apple and Microsoft to market with a tablet seemed preposterous at the time, Arrington continued to pursue his crazy dream. Before long a team had been assembled, prototypes built, and eventually the Crunchpad got pretty darn close to becoming a reality before everything fell apart and instead we got something called the JooJoo.

The Crunchpad

The story of the Crunchpad seemed so improbable in part because of the difficulty of Arrington’s day job. When I went to work for one of Techcrunch’s biggest competitors (Gigaom) during this time, it made me even more fascinated with the story since I saw first hand just how hard it is to run a company tracking the fast-moving world of technology. The idea of actually building the technology in addition to writing about it seemed insane.

I also think part of what made the idea of the team behind a tech blog creating a piece of computing equipment so hard for me and others to wrap our minds around is most of us still view people – and companies – through a Richard Scarry lens on the world. In other words, content companies make content, hardware makers make hardware; food companies make food and so on. Sure, there are weird conglomerate mashups like when GE owned NBC, but often these types of weird combos were the result of merger and acquisition sprees in the 80s.

But if there’s anything we’ve learned from watching companies like Amazon or Google, the old rules don’t seem to apply anymore.  These companies have taught us that once you build a competency in one thing – whether e-commerce or transportation – that strength can often be leveraged to build a competency in an adjacent (or often non-adjacent) space.

Amazon started with books, eventually moved into web services, then to hardware, and now they’re on to grocery stores. Google started with search, moved onto mobile, then IoT and now all sorts of crazy ideas whether its VR, healthcare or balloon-based broadband.

And so while I was surprised when I learned last week Buzzfeed had launched its hardware device called the Tasty One Top, I also instantly knew this made sense at some level. We are, after all, living in the “throw the rules out” era of Amazon. And yes, the story of Crunchpad showed us that that occasionally a content company can break the Richard Scarry mold.

People – and companies – don’t live in a Richard Scarry world anymore.

But I also realized what I was witnessing with the Tasty One Top made sense because it was indicative of a trend I’ve been thinking about for some time, an idea that in the future cooking companies need to become content and community companies.  I’d witnessed it with the acquisition of Yummly by Whirlpool, and before that, I saw that ChefSteps had been building a large community around its content which it then leveraged into willing customer base for its cooking device called the Joule.

As I wrote when Whirlpool acquired Yummly, the deal “gives Whirlpool a massive infusion of cooking content and community. As newer companies in the connected kitchen like ChefSteps have shown, having strong recipe content and an associated community can create fertile soil upon which to launch new hardware products. With Yummly, Whirlpool now has a built-in community to tap into as it expands is smart kitchen product lineup in the coming years.”

I realized this is the same principle Buzzfeed was capitalizing on, the idea that they could tap into a large community built around compelling content to find a friendly and willing audience into which to tap.

But I also knew it was more than that. What the Tasty One Top further validated for me was the idea of content-powered cooking, where cooking content becomes more than just a dry recipe on a page or a simple YouTube video which we watch to learn a new skill. The idea of content powered cooking is central to guided cooking, something I first started writing about after I first saw the Hestan Cue. In short, guided cooking is where the cooking content not only acts as a helpful set of instructions for the cook but works with an app and sensor-powered appliance to become the guidance system for the entire cooking experience.

When I talked to Buzzfeed Labs’ Ben Kaufman last week about the One Top, he told me that they wanted to turn their Tasty cooking videos into a utility.  To do so, they went back and did the arduous work of breaking down each video into single steps, time-stamping and logging each, and then building an app that would work with the One Top itself.

The result is a content-powered cooking experience, where what began as quick viral cooking videos ultimately become part of the cooking system and experience itself.

Together, the idea of a large community built around content coupled with a cooking product and associated experience powered by the product makes lots of sense. In many ways it’s indicative of what companies like ChefSteps and Hestan Smart Cooking were already building, only coupled with the world’s largest cooking video site in Tasty.

Kaufman told me last week that this is the only cooking appliance Buzzfeed plans on making, in large part because they built the Tasty One Top as a Swiss army knife type of sorts that can work with nearly any type of recipe. But he also said they had more products ideas in mind in which they can build around the “utility” they’ve created in the Tasty cooking videos and app.

I can hardly wait to see what type of Richard Scarry busting concept they dream up next.

Want to hear about the future of connected cooking? Make sure to not to miss the Smart Kitchen Summit. Just use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets. 

Meet The One Top, A Cooking System From Buzzfeed’s Tasty

In just two years, Tasty has become a sensation in the world of food with its quirky cooking videos that have changed how millions of people discover recipes and make meals.  With over a billion video views a month, Buzzfeed’s food brand is usually at the top of the list of video publishers worldwide.

Now, the fast growing media company is looking to tap into the runaway success of Tasty with the launch of One Top, a $149 induction cooktop and temperature probe that combines with Tasty’s cooking video-powered app to provide a guided cooking system.

One Top’s  development was headed up by Ben Kaufman, the head of Buzzfeed Product Labs.  Some will remember Kaufman from his tenure as CEO of Quirky, the innovative product incubator which created such concepts as connected egg trays. While Quirky ultimately hit rough waters, it seems the left field thinking that defined Kaufman’s tenure at his former company might great fit for a company like Buzzfeed.

And let’s be honest: a piece of cooking hardware from a media brand like Buzzfeed is, if anything, left field thinking.

Making Tasty A Utility

Kaufman and his team spent much of the past year working on the One Top. But first, they had to go back and turn Tasty’s library of videos into something that could be used for a guided cooking system.

“Before we even committed to building an appliance, we were committing to make Tasty more of a utility,” Kaufman told The Spoon in a phone interview. To do that, “we went through every Tasty video of all time and time coded each step of the process so the video can loop in the app until you’re ready to go onto the next step. We were thinking, how can we boil this down in a way to make it more of a utility?”

In helping build the One Top, Kaufman was also able to tap into his connections at FirstBuild, the product-lab/microfactory owned by GE which he worked with closely during his time at Quirky.  FirstBuild has spent the past couple years creating their own kitchen-centric product concepts like the Paragon, an induction cooktop that looks at first blush like the One Top.

I asked Kaufman if they were able to leverage the work FirstBuild did with the Paragon in developing the One Top.

“The Paragon is a great device,” said Kaufman. “I had one and used one and would be lying if I didn’t say it was a major source of inspiration for this project.”

But Kaufman said they spent a lot of time improving on what the Paragon team did, including moving beyond a simple probe-based temperature sensor to make the cooktop itself able to sense surface cooking temperature.

“We really looked to differentiate the product from the Paragon with temperature tracking at both the surface level and the probe level,” said Kaufman. “We have that dual sensor technology which will allow us to hold the temperature on the bottom the pan, which is great for searing, slow cooking and a variety of other cooking applications.”

Another major difference is they built the product to scale a much wider audience. Unlike the Paragon which is built in the FirstBuilt Louisville Kentucky based microfactory, the One Top’s manufacturing will be overseen by GE Appliance in China, which will give Tasty access to the appliance company’s highly-scalable manufacturing facilities which are, in large part, responsible for the low $149 presale and $175 suggested retail price points.

By tapping into Tasty’s massive audience, the company may have a recipe for hardware success. One of the biggest challenges for any hardware startup is simply getting the word out. By surfacing the One Top to the 420 million monthly Tasty viewers, the company could have a successful hardware business even if a small number of those viewers actually become One Top owners.

MIT’s Pic2recipe Uses AI To Match Photos to Recipes

The smart folks at MIT have come up with a new food-technology AI breakthrough that has some interesting applications when it comes to meal prep and curating recipes. Called Pic2recipe, the system identifies recipes based on images delivering a list of possible matches and their ingredients. While it is a long way from launch, Pic2recipe not only has value as a standalone app. It could also become a key component of guided cooking systems.

Pic2recipe uses computer vision, a technology long associated with video search. Using a dataset—in this case recipes from All Recipes and Food.com—images are annotated with information about the picture that could then be identified and correlated to the matching recipe. To accomplish this final step, a neural network is trained to find patterns and make connections between pictures and recipes. At this point, Pic2recipe has a database of more than one million recipes.

“In computer vision, food is mostly neglected because we don’t have the large-scale datasets needed to make predictions,” MIT’s Yusuf Aytar said in a recent interview. “But seemingly useless photos on social media can actually provide valuable insight into health habits and dietary preferences.”

A test of what looks to be a beta version of the Pic2recipe system was hit and miss. This enhanced search engine was unable to correctly match a salad and a vegetable stew to the correct recipe. On a third try, this a picture of homemade minestrone soup, Pic2recipe fared far better. Beef minestrone was fourth on the list with a 79% degree of confidence.

Moving forward, it’s easy to imagine Pic2recipe as an app that could feed into a guided recipe system. By showing the recipe ingredients, a user can make any modification necessary for a special diet. For example, the minestrone soup identified in the trial is actually vegan; the recipe shown in the search results can easily be modified by substituting ingredients. So, if you are in an Italian restaurant and snap a pic of your eggplant parmesan, once you make the recipe match, you can cut down on the salt and substitute a lower-fat cheese to make the dish healthier. Send that recipe to your guided cooking system and you are on your way to preparing it at home.

“This could potentially help people figure out what’s in their food when they don’t have explicit nutritional information,” Nick Hynes graduate student at MIT adds. “For example, if you know what ingredients went into a dish but not the amount, you can take a photo, enter the ingredients, and run the model to find a similar recipe with known quantities, and then use that information to approximate your own meal.”

Conversational Cooking: Exploring Chatbots As a Cooking Interface (Podcast)

When I tell people I cook with Facebook, they give me a strange look.

But using Facebook’s chatbot as a cooking interface is surprisingly natural. The first cooking company to create a Facebook Messenger chatbot interface is ChefSteps, who launched their Joule-Messenger integration earlier this year.

The chatbot is part of the company’s larger vision around the idea of ‘conversational cooking’, which I discuss with the ChefSteps CTO Michael Natkin.

You can download this episode here. Make sure to subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.