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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

housewares

Home Goods Holding Company Pattern Brands Announces $60M in Funding, Buys GIR

Patterns Brands, the DTC holding company that evolved out of brand agency Gin Lane, has announced that it has taken on $60 million in new debt and capital equity financing and that it has acquired silicone utensil specialist GIR. As part of the announcement, Pattern announced that it was planning on using some of that new funding to hunt for other interesting DTC brands to scoop up.

From the announcement:

By definition, what we’re doing is a roll-up. But our interest lies where it always has, since before this trend started. We care about building brands that matter to our generation. And what some roll-ups risk missing is that lasting value doesn’t come from forcing big, short-term profits. You have to strengthen the brands. You have to give them a community where they can thrive.

Up to this point, Pattern has consisted of two brands: The Equal Parts cookware and Open Spaces storage products brand. Spoon readers may remember we’ve written about Equal Parts early experiment of bundling text-based guidance from chefs with their cookware. The company looks like they’ve since dropped those early efforts at bundling cooking guidance and have become a more traditional DTC cookware brand.

For its part, GIR got its start when founder Samantha Rose had a successful Kickstarter campaign for a silicone spatula, has since become pretty successful kitchen utensil and accessory business.

One thing that’s not clear is whether the deal includes the Voltaire coffee grinder business. Back in 2015-16, GIR founder Rose had launched a Kickstarter campaign for an IoT connected burr coffee grinder. It took a while for GIR to ship the grinder and eventually it did. The grinder got its own website and looks like it might be a separate business at this point.

Pattern is one of a number of home goods startups looking to become the preferred brand of millennials as they settle down, buy homes and just generally begin acting more like their parents. Pattern, Caraway and Misen have all taken fresh looks at housewares categories and have focused on building robust direct-to-consumer channels through online storefronts and social media.

Last year, Storebound, which combined a similarly adventurous approach around categories with an heavy focus on online channels was acquired by Groupe SEB. With Pattern’s new debt and equity-funded warchest, I have to wonder if we’ll see a flurry of new DTC home goods acquisitions as bigger brands look to scoop up those brands with fast-growing businesses.

Inspired Home Show Canceled Due to Coronavirus

Another trade show has gone down due to the coronavirus.

Last month we learned the Inspired Home Show (previously known as the Housewares Show) had cancelled the portion of its annual trade show that featured OEM parts from manufacturers in China. Today we learned they’ve called the whole thing off.

From the announcement issued today by the International Housewares Association:

“After careful consideration regarding the ongoing spread of Covid-19 (Coronavirus) overseas and recent cases in the United States, the International Housewares Association’s Board of Directors has decided not to hold The Inspired Home Show 2020, scheduled to take place March 14-17, 2020 at McCormick Place in Chicago.”

It’s an extraordinary move to cancel a trade show less than two weeks before it opens, but it’s an illustration of how fluid and fast-moving the situation is around the coronavirus.

Just a few weeks ago we learned that Mobile World Congress was cancelled in its entirety, and while another big show, the Natural Products Expo West in Los Angeles, is expected to open this week, there’s been a huge number of exhibitor cancellations in recent weeks and some forecast the show’s attendance could be down by as much as 60%.

If it wasn’t already obvious that COVID-19 was drastically changing the 2020 outlook for nearly every industry (including housewares and kitchen appliances), the cancellation of the North America’s biggest small home electronics trade show should drive the point home.

We’ll have more on the implications of this cancellation in coming weeks.

Podcast: What Caught Our Eye at the Housewares Show

The International Housewares Show is big. Very big. More than 60,000 professionals from all corners of the world convened in Chicago last week to check out the latest and greatest products coming soon to a home near you (or to your home).

Whether you attended in person, or missed it this year, we’ve got you covered. Mike Wolf and I walked the show floor to find the best bits of connected kitchen tech.

In this podcast, we talk about how the whole smart home industry is maturing, the prevalence of connected devices, and the very cool things we came across (precision heated plates and baby bottles!).

Guided Cooking Trend Continues Momentum In 2018

Two years ago at the Housewares Show in Chicago, I saw the emergence of a new trend called guided cooking. At the show, companies like Cuciniale, Oliso and Hestan Cue showed off early efforts to combine sensors, software, precision heating and content in an orchestrated experience that guides home cooks through the creation of a meal.

As I said of my effort to make salmon with the Hestan Cue, using a guided cooking system for the first time was something of a revelation:

“…this combination of the pan, burner and app and the guidance system they had built that really led me to see the possibilities around this new category. I am not a great cook by any stretch of the imagination, but I cooked one of the tastiest pieces of salmon I’ve ever had in about 20 minutes. The experience was enabled through technology, but the technology didn’t take me out of the experience of cooking. Further, I can see as I gain more confidence using a system like this, I can choose to “dial down” the guidance needed from the system to the point I am largely doing most of the cooking by myself (though I don’t know if I’d ever get rid of the automated temperature control, mostly because I’m lazy and it gives me instant “chef intuition).”

Fast forward a couple of years and the guided cooking trend continues to gain momentum. A number of companies talked up new guided cooking platforms at CES in January, from big appliance makers like Whirlpool and LG to big tech platform providers like Google and Amazon.

And at the Housewares show in Chicago this week, guided cooking was everywhere. Hestan Cue, now shipping, was on display this week in the Smart Home pavilion. iCuisine, a startup that utilizes a modular sensor to connect to everyday kitchen tools to a guided cooking app, had its own take on step-by-step cooking instruction. Vorwerk’s Thermomix showed off their all-in-one multicooker with built-in guidance and talked about the company’s online recipe platform, the Cookidoo.

Over at the Gourmia booth, the prolific maker of low-cost connected cooking devices showed off a variety of connected devices, including a Thermomix-like multicooker with built-in cooking guidance. The company’s head of product told me the Gourmia multicooker will eventually act as a smart kitchen hub that enables cross-device cooking orchestration with other Gourmia appliances. As I left the booth, celebrity chef Cat Cora was performing a cooking demo in the booth and talking about the concept of smart recipes.

Gourmia’s Thermomix clone (currently only available in Europe)

Chefman, another maker of low-cost connected cooking appliances, showed off its sous vide cooking app with newly integrated guided cooking capabilities at the show, and a company spokesperson told me the company plans to add guided cooking to all of their connected cooking appliances this year.

Meanwhile at SXSW (which annoyingly was at the same time as the Housewares Show this year), Innit announced the release of Google Assistant functionality within the Innit app they first demoed at CES. With Google Assistant, a home cook can navigate the Innit app’s guided cooking features via voice. According to company COO Josh Sigel, the release marks the first third party app which is completely controllable via Google Assistant.

Of course, like any new trend, there will be hits and misses as products roll out. Early reviews of the Tasty One Top have been somewhat subpar, while my experiences with some of the early Amazon video cooking skills have been hobbled by lack of YouTube integration and the early stage of cooking capabilities in their Alexa skill API.

All that said, I think we can expect lots more in the guided cooking space as 2018 unfolds. I saw a slew of products in Chicago under embargo that are slated for later this year that offer new approaches to guided cooking, and there will no doubt more guided cooking products being developed in stealth that should see the light of day at IFA and Smart Kitchen Summit.

Bottom line: what started as a trend a couple years ago is fast becoming a central theme for appliance makers big and small, making 2018 a big big year for guided cooking.

The Cubit Is A Modern Tape Measure That Makes Home Design A Drag & Drop Experience

Hanging pictures or measuring for simple home decorating tasks can be arduous. Not only is it time consuming to get things exactly right using that pencil and old school tape measure, it’s also hard to visualize how things will look until you have that picture hanging on the wall, which often means there’s a hole or two to patch up when the job is done.

But what if you could pull your room into an app and see how things look in digital format before you actually starting pounding nails?

That’s the idea behind Cubit. The product, which won the best of innovations award in the smart home category for CES 2017, comes from product design entrepreneur David Xing and his company Plott. Xing and his team normally design products for companies such as Black and Decker through his other company NWi, but they knew with the technology in Cubit they had a winner that they could bring to market under their own brand.

Xing describes the Plott Cubit as a mixed reality platform. “We can take the real, put it into the virtual, so you can design with context and scale. Once you’re done with your design, you can take it and put it out into the real world.”

In other words, Cubit makes home design a drag and drop, app-centric experience.

I think the ability to convert simple home remodeling from a painful exercise in trial and error to one in which my measurement tools are integrated with a digital design application is appealing. I can see significant advantages and time savings by being able to visualize how things look in digital, especially if there’s an easy conversion of the design back into physical measurements for when I’m ready to pound nails.

Of course, there are plenty of laser-powered tape measures on the market, but this is the first I’ve seen that integrates seamlessly with a digital design application. I’m interested to try Cubit to see how accurately it translates measurements back to physical dimensions once I do the in-app design. The good news is I won’t have to wait very long. Xing told me they are talking to numerous retailers and they expect the Cubit to ship this September.

You can watch my interview with Xing above.

Want to meet the leaders defining the future of food, cooking and the kitchen? Get your tickets for the Smart Kitchen Summit today.

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Live From Housewares Show : How Will Smart Home Change Housewares Industry?

Mike showed up at the Housewares Show in Chicago this past week to discuss how the smart home will change the world of blenders, vacuum cleaners, cookware and home furnishings. Joining him was the Nathan Smith, CTO of Wink, Carley Knobloch, HGTV’s smart home expert, and Chris Young, CEO of ChefSteps.

Smart Home Tech Will Disrupt The Housewares Industry. Discuss.

After walking the show floor at last year’s Housewares Show in Chicago, I became pretty excited. As with most consumer industries, I’m convinced the housewares industry will witness significant change over the next decade as disruptive new technology ushers in new business models, services and creative new products that will reshape the entire space.  Based on what I saw on the show floor and heard in my conversations, it felt like we were only in the first or second inning of this shift.

All of which meant most of the change to this important industry is still to come, so when I was asked by the Home and Housewares Association to develop and moderate the keynote panel for this year’s show, I knew there would be a whole bunch to talk about. To do that, I knew I would need panelists who could provide smart, provocative and diverse but complimentary viewpoints to help the audience understand the issues and walk away with actionable insights.

That’s exactly what I got. Here are the panelists for the keynote panel entitled ‘How The Smart Home Is Disrupting Housewares’:

Nathan Smith – CTO, Wink. Wink is one of the most high-profile startups of the modern smart home wave, and Nathan has been there since the beginning.

Carley Knobloch – As HGTV’s resident smart home expert, Carley’s focus is always on the end-consumer and whether a given product is solving real problems or just technology for technology’s sake.

Chris Young – as CEO of ChefSteps and co-author of Modernist Cuisine, Chris has his feet firmly planted in both the world of culinary innovation and hardware creation for consumers. Finding that middle ground that brings professional-like skills in the form of connected hardware is something Young’s been focuses on

We discussed a bunch of things, including the shifting retail landscape, the arrival of artificial intelligence and connected commerce, consumer experiences and use-cases, the importance of product utility, virtual assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, Millennials and cooking and so much more.

Based on what I learned this year, I’m convinced the housewares space is waking up to the opportunity of the connected home. I can’t wait to see how much will change by next year’s show.

You can watch the entire panel by clicking play above.

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The Story of RJ Batts, Fourteen Year Old Inventor Of The Tip Tough

Not all kitchen innovation has to be high-tech to have a great story.

In fact, the tale of fourteen-year-old inventor RJ Batts is one of the cooler stories I heard this week at the Housewares show in Chicago. Standing at his booth among rows of other makers and creators more than twice or thrice his age, RJ told me how his concept, the Tip Tough – a finger protector for slicing and dicing on a cutting board – went from idea on paper to buzzed-about product at this year’s big home products trade show.

It all got started when RJ’s dad cut his fingers slicing food. Determined to figure out a way to protect his dad’s fingers in the future, RJ picked up a sketchbook and drew the first conceptualization of the Tip Tough. After a quick online search told them there wasn’t anything like this available, RJ and his family began to investigate how to bring the product to market.

The Tip Tough

Without any knowledge of the mechanics of product creation, RJ soon enrolled in a local program for young inventors called the Young Entrepreneurs Academy at the Salisbury (MD) Area Chamber of Commerce. The program gave RJ and his family what they needed to know to craft his pitch, understand fundraising and get a sense of how to bring the product to market.

“They guided me through learning how to go to business,” said RJ. “Without that, the product would have been sitting in a sketchbook, and I wouldn’t have to know what to do with that.”

He soon competed in a local startup competition at Salisbury University, where he received $15,000 for second place in a competition where he beat out many adults. And this week at the Housewares Show, RJ was featured in the Inventor’s Corner as the younger inventor at the show.

RJ and his company, Picklehead, are running a Kickstarter for the finger protector and plan to bring the stainless steel Tip Tough to market by July. They are planning on shipping a plastic version of the Tip Tough later this year.

While it may not be a smart kitchen device, the Tip Tough fulfills an obvious need, something many more modern – and connected – devices can often struggle with.  On my panel this week about the future of the smart home, my panelists talked about the need for simplicity of focus and creating obvious value in the minds of the consumer. As someone who gets annoyed I can’t cut that final piece of steak as finely as I’d like, I am a big proponent (as are my fingers) of simple, straightforward and non-connected innovation like the Tough Tip.

You can hear my interview with RJ above and support his Kickstarter here.

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The Company Behind PancakeBot Brings Us A Crazy Connected Coffee Table

First they helped take pancake making next-level with the PancakeBot, a pancake robot that helps the cook go beyond those Mickey Mouse and Death Star cakes you made for your kids into the world of pancake selfies. And now, StoreBound, a home product innovation company founded by longtime housewares executive Evan Dash (a recent guest on the Smart Kitchen Show podcast), wants to help us up our coffee table game with the SoBro, a “smart home” coffee table that comes complete with a built-in refrigerator, Bluetooth speakers, device charging ports and more.

I caught up with Dash at the Housewares Show to ask about the SoBro.  He told me the idea for the SoBro was to create the ultimate mancave coffee table, one which any guy or girl would love to put in their TV room, game room or that one-room flat and become the life of the party. In fact, the name of the product, SoBro, actually speaks to its target market: Bros.

No doubt, the specs are the most impressive I’ve ever seen for a piece of furniture I usually put my beer and popcorn on. It features a full refrigerator (“It’s not a cooler,” Dash emphasized.”It has a compressor”), ports to plug in your gadgets, Bluetooth to connect to music sources that will play music out of a set of stereo speakers and a subwoofer and an LED screen on the top of the coffee table.

The SoBro will retail for $1000, but early buyers can get it for $549 on Indiegogo.

You can hear more about the SoBro from Evan Dash in the video above.

Evan Dash, CEO of StoreBound, will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Get your tickets today. 

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Amidst Coffee Makers & Cookware, SproutsIO Talks Personal Produce At Housewares

Amidst the coffee makers, cookware and bartenderbots in Chicago this week at the International Home and Housewares Show, SproutsIO stood out as the one and only maker of a connected microgarden.

The SproutsIO microgarden, which allows an individual to grow vegetables in their home without soil or sunlight, is headed to market this year after a successful Kickstarter campaign last fall in which the company raised over $116 thousand. The SproutsIO will retail for $799, a price company CEO Jenny Broutin Farah believes will come down over time as they reach more efficiencies through high-volume manufacturing.

Broutin Farah told me (you can view the interview above) that one of the major benefits of SproutsIO is it grows vegetables much more quickly and efficiently than traditional soil-growing. The reason, she said, is the device can fully tailor growing conditions to each seed type, something which is difficult if outright impossible in traditional growing environments. According to Broutin Farah, SproutsIO can grow vegetables with just 2% of the water required in a traditional soil garden and 40% of the nutrients.

The company, which was one of the 15 startup showcase finalists at the Smart Kitchen Summit last October, will also monetize through selling seeds through a subscription service to user of the SproutsIO device.

You can hear the full interview above with Jenny Broutin Farah.

Housewares 2017: Somabar Pushes Robo-Bartender Into Production

This week at Housewares I caught up with Somabar, a company that makes cocktail-mixing robots.

I talked to company CEO, Dylan Purcell Lowe, who told me they’ve started production of the company’s robot bartender, which won best of show for the appliance category at CES 2016.  The device, which you can preorder for $429, is now in the hands of beta testers. The company expects to start shipping new orders by fall of this year.

According to Purcell Lowe, interest in the Somabar has come from both the consumer and professional/enterprise markets. The device, which has enough capacity to serve up to 300 drinks, would work well in hotels or restaurants according says Purcell Lowe, which is why their next generation Somabar will come in two versions: one for consumer and one for the pro market.

You can check out my interview with Purcell Lowe above and watch a quick walk-through of the Somabar below via Instagram.

We checked out the Somabar robotic bartender at #ihhs2017. #futureofdrink #foodtech #robotics

A post shared by Smart Kitchen (@smartkitchensummit) on

Gourmia Is Putting A Camera On A Connected Air Fryer

The International Home + Housewares Show starts this weekend, and we know we’re going to see lots of announcements around the smart kitchen. Gourmia is one of the first, announcing this week that they’ve added a camera to the brand’s line of connected air fryers.

Gourmia is a well-known brand in the small appliance world and has been working to brand itself as a premier IoT name in the kitchen. They’ve gotten into the smart sous vide machine game and added connectivity to their air fryers and pressure cookers. Now they are putting cameras inside their air fryers to give consumers a front row seat to watch their food get crispy.

We’ve seen cameras play a bigger role in the smart kitchen over the past few years, whether it’s inside the June Oven, a unique tabletop smart oven that knows how long to cook something using machine learning and interior cameras, or fridges that allow you to see what’s inside without opening the door. But are cameras really changing the game in the kitchen, or are they just bells and whistles to drive up price points and make cooking a little more fun?

Maybe it’s a bit of both. In some instances, cameras are working in cooperation with powerful AI software engines to remove the guesswork from cooking, like with the June Oven. In other cases, the camera is a bonus feature that maybe adds a bit of convenience to your day by letting you see if you need milk while you’re at the grocery store.

The Cook Cam might seem like a fun, unique feature to some consumers and it’s clear Gourmia is out to lead the way in adding connectivity to small appliances.

Gourmia founder Heshy Biegeleisen commented,

“During 2017, we intend to enable over 100 sku’s with IoT, all of which can be controlled with just one app. The addition of the built-in Cook Cam in our IoT product line is a major introduction. Gourmia is proud to be leading the way in bringing smart kitchens into the home.”

In the case of the Gourmia Air Fryers, the Cook Cam allows users to see via the smartphone app each stage of the cooking process. If you’re an anxious chef, says Gourmia, you’re able to keep better track of where your food is in the cooking process and prevent overcooking. The Gourmia app will also let you upload your pictures to Instagram, in case taking pictures with your phone and uploading them has become too arduous.

But adding connectivity to all of our devices is causing some to raise concerns about cyber intrusion and privacy. And putting cameras inside appliances adds another layer of privacy issues – the New Food Economy lays out the downside in a recent piece. Are companies adding cameras and connectivity to spy on us and ultimately sell us more stuff? Probably. The big wow factor of the IoT, after all, is less about efficiency and connection and more about all the data that these connections will generate. The NFE piece points out that privacy policies for these devices often give the manufacturer “broad latitude” to capture whatever information they’re capable of collecting.

“let’s not pretend that the cameras creeping into our kitchen are about social sharing and perfectly cooked meals. There’s much more to it, and the companies behind the smart kitchen revolution aren’t actually that stupid.”
– New Food Economy

Should we be worried about this? Possibly – and at the very least, we should be having these discussions and paying attention.