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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Heston Blumenthal

CNET Founder’s Next Act Is AI Powered Publishing. His First Product? A Kitchen Assistant.

Update 7/7/17: The company contacted us upon publication of this post to emphasize the Tasted app/skill is still in development and not ready for consumer use. 

The cofounder of one of the Internet’s longest standing and most storied tech media brands – CNET – is onto his next act: creating a diversified media brand for the artificial intelligence age.

Shelby Bonnie, who cofounded CNET back in 1993 and later became its chairman and CEO, is the CEO of a new publishing startup called Pylon AI, a company which describes itself as a “conversational engagement platform company.”

What does that mean? From the looks of it, Pylon aims to create diversified lifestyle content that is delivered to consumers through AI centric conversation platforms such as Alexa or Google Home or bots such as Facebook Messenger or Slack.

In a way, the company that Bonnie and other CNET alumni Mike Tatum and Cliff Lyon are creating is reminiscent of Bonnie’s last company, Whiskey Media. Only this time, instead of a collection of different web-based lifestyle media brands, Pylon AI is using a combination of apps and AI platforms like Alexa and Cortana as the content publishing system.

One of Whiskey Media’s most popular brands was tech lifestyle-focused Tested, so now it’s not all that surprising that Pylon AI’s first consumer lifestyle brand is called – you guessed it –Tasted. As the name suggests, Tasted is all about food and comes in the form of voice-assistant apps such as the Tasted Alexa skill, a companion web or iOS app.

What’s intriguing for the smart kitchen crowd is Tasted is essentially a guided cooking system, using a combination of voice assistant, web apps and mobile apps like its newly launched iOS app to help guide the consumer through the creation of a meal.

Tasted uses Alexa and visual guidance to help users to cook

Another interesting aspect of Tasted is it employs the talents of well-known cooking personalities such as Catherine McCord, the creator of Weelicious, and Regan Cafiso, a former editor for Food Network and Martha Stewart. This idea of using popular cooking personalities is a standard playbook option to create buzz for a new platform, but what’s more intriguing is Tasted is another example of the nascent trend of established cooking talents such as Heston Blumenthal and Beth Moncel are embracing AI-centric cooking platforms to reach consumers.

A Pylon AI spokesperson told me that they are still operating in stealth mode, so the company isn’t talking about their forward-looking strategy, but my guess is that we’ll soon see other brands like Tasted in other lifestyle verticals.

For Bonnie, Pylon represents an intriguing new direction for a long-time media innovator. After creating one of the world’s most iconic tech media brands in CNET and a diversified web media brand in Whiskey, he is now looking to AI-powered conversation assistants like Alexa and Facebook Messenger as the next frontier to reach consumers.

Want to understand how AI will impact cooking and the food ecosystem? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets. 

Let’s Talk About Flavor for a Second (VIDEO)

Lately when I talk to chefs and home cooks about the type of food they want to make, I keep hearing the words “like my grandma used to make.” It’s become shorthand for all-natural, healthy food with honest flavor, created using painstakingly slow processes.

I’m totally on board, except for that last part, about the analog attitude. There’s so much technology that can vastly improve the taste and flavor of your food, so that it’s like what your grandma used to make, but even better.

Take a device like the pressure cooker. “A pressure cooker can produce exceptionally tender results while maximizing the flavor extracted from the ingredients,” writes molecular gastronomy guru Heston Blumenthal in the foreword to the Fast Slow Pro brand manual. Sure, you could spend more than 12 hours making chicken stock — or you could get even richer flavors in 1 hour with a pressure cooker, especially one with a screen that gives you instructions and tells you when everything is finished cooking. I recently started using one and have been astounded at the flavor of the foods I make in it: creamy roasted potatoes, intense stock, tender octopus, you name it. Grandma may not have cooked this way, but her recipes would have been even better if she had.

There’s another reason the analog logic doesn’t quite make sense: Grandma (or maybe great-grandma) used to grow her own tomatoes or buy them from a farmstand down the street. Now we go to a megagrocery store to get those tomatoes. “Our food system is not designed for taste and flavor. It’s designed for travel,” said Jennifer Broutin Farah, the CEO of SproutsIO, at the recent Smart Home Summit (watch the video below). That means the food we eat tastes more like cardboard than carrots, cucumbers, or kale. No wonder no one wants to eat their vegetables.

SproutsIO’s connected system makes it easy for everyone (black thumbs included) to grow their own produce at home: The device helps you grow vegetables and fruit from seeds in its modular system, and its smartphone app gives you real-time data about how it’s going. Plus it learns from you to help you grow better. The idea is that if those vegetables and fruits were easy to grow and tasted better, everyone would want to eat them, improving their overall health.

And it’s only one of many kitchen gadgets and products designed to improve your experiences with food, whether that’s growing, cooking, or eating it, to change our diabetes- and obesity-laden country into a healthier one. After all, as Farah said, “small-scale solutions that have high leverage can create great impact.”