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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

IFA 2018

Weekly Spoon: Kitchen Projection Interfaces, Amazon Drone Patent & Innit Nabs Arçelik

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If you go to lots of trade shows like me, you know it takes time for innovation to make its way from the show floor into our living rooms.

We’ve all seen this with technologies like virtual reality and 3D food printing; only after years of development and iteration cycles do we get to the point where a product is ready for prime time.

And then there are technologies like projection interfaces that – up until now at least – seem like they’re stuck in development stasis. The idea of a projectable, anywhere surface interface has been discussed for close to a decade in the research and academic community and started showing up on trade show floors about five years ago. Despite this, the concept never seemed to go beyond an occasional product demo.

So last year I started to wonder why exactly the technology hadn’t reached consumers yet. After all, with the likes of Whirlpool, IKEA, and Bosch showing off jaw-dropping demos, it only made sense this technology would find its way to market at some point.

While there’s no clear answer, I narrowed it down to a couple of factors. First, the reality is the technology still needed some refinement to make it both consumer-ready and affordable. Second, appliance vendors often wait for big-tech to take the first leap, and from what I could tell none of the big-tech 5 (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon) seemed particularly active with projection interfaces.

But now, it looks like one big company is committing to bringing a projection interface to market. BSH Appliances showed off a new product concept called PAI at IFA in Berlin this past week. PAI is a movable projector interface that is designed to go on a countertop in a kitchen.

I’m excited that BSH looks to be serious about bringing PAI to market. While some see voice as the dominant user interface of the future, abysmal usage rates of Alexa skills for commerce have shown us that voice in itself isn’t enough.  Consumers are visual, and most things we do in the kitchen are multimodal. Because of this, I believe the dynamic projection interface could a vibrant area in UI development over the next decade.

BSH Appliances wasn’t the only one to make news at IFA last week. Sharp showed up in Berlin with a fridge that featured a built-in vacuum sealer, prompting Chris Albrecht to wonder what exactly types of features he would want in his next fridge.

Smart kitchen platform startup Innit had a strong showing at IFA, popping up in a number appliance OEM booths, including that of a new partner in Arçelik.  The Turkish appliance conglomerate behind the Beko and Grundig brands showed off an Innit integration to power guided cooking as part of its HomeWhiz smart home platform.

It wasn’t all IFA this week. This week the Spoon scooped yet another Amazon patent in which the Seattle tech giant shows an innovative new method for delivery drones to generate power while in transit by harnessing both wind and kinetic energy.
After the news of a $30 million funding round for Farmer’s Fridge, I’m looking forward to a panel at Smart Kitchen Summit on the future of lunch. We’ll be discussing how new technologies, business models and delivery formats are all colliding to change what we eat every day, including at work.  You can read Chris’s piece on Farmer’s Fridge, a startup we’ve been covering for the past year.

Speaking of Smart Kitchen Summit, we’re less than five weeks away from our flagship show exploring the future of food and cooking. We have an amazing program planned, and not only will we have executives from big appliance brands like Whirlpool, GE and more, but we’ll also have startups from the smart kitchen, food robotics, restaurant tech, retail and more to discuss and showcase how each of these industries are changing to disrupt the consumer meal journey.  Make sure to get your tickets now and use the discount code NEWSLETTER (You can also use this link which has the code already applied).

That’s it for now. Have a great rest of the week.

Mike

P.S. Make sure to tune into this weekend’s episode of the Smart Kitchen Show podcast, where I have a great conversation with the CEO of the startup behind what is arguably the most successful consumer food robot ever made. You won’t want to miss it!

In the 09/06/2018 edition:

Ordermark Raises $9.5 Million for its Online Order Management Tools

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 06, 2018 10:23 am
Ordermark, a startup that helps restaurants unify and organize online orders, today announced that it has closed a $9.5 million Series A led by Nosara Capital. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $12.6 million.

Nima Peanut Sensor Now Available, Gluten Sensor Selling at Select CVS Stores

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 06, 2018 06:00 am
It’s back-to-school time, which means my son is once again eating lunches in a cafeteria. I doubt his school is unique, but it actually has separate tables for kids who bring in peanut butter sandwiches.

With its own Grocery Delivery Service, Walmart Grabs More Data

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 05, 2018 04:00 pm
Walmart is leaving no stone unturned when it comes to getting you your groceries. As of today, that includes testing out its own delivery service (h/t Food Dive). The retailing giant announced a pilot program for its new last-mile delivery service, dubbed Spark Delivery, which will deliver groceries directly to customers’ front door.

For Goodr’s Jasmine Crowe, Blockchain Is a Key Piece to the Food Waste Puzzle

By Catherine Lamb on Sep 05, 2018 02:00 pm
Food waste is generating quite a lot of interest as of late; but one buzzword that might give “food waste” a run for its money is blockchain.

Innit Adds Arçelik To Growing List of Appliance Partners

By Michael Wolf on Sep 05, 2018 12:00 pm
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.

Farmer’s Fridge Stocks up with $30M

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 05, 2018 10:54 am
Farmer’s Fridge, the company which makes vending machines that dispense healthy meals such as salads and protein bowls, today announced that it has raised a new $30 million round of funding led by Innovation Endeavors. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $40 million.

Seltzer? Sous Vide? Smart Apps? What Cool Things do you Want in a Fridge?

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 05, 2018 07:33 am
For those old enough to remember, there is an episode from season two of The Simpsons where Homer designs a car for the average American. The result, as you can imagine was a hodge-podge monstrosity that featured bubble domes, three horns, shag carpeting and cost $82,000.

Bear Flag Robotics Raises $3.5 Million for Autonomous Tractor Tech

By Chris Albrecht on Sep 04, 2018 10:00 am
The common refrain from robotics companies is that they help with manual, repetitive tasks. And when you run a farm, there are plenty of manual, repetitive tasks, and Bear Flag Robotics raised $3.5 million seed funding right before the holiday weekend to help agricultural workers out with them.

Amazon Patent Points to In-Flight Recharging For Delivery Drones

By Michael Wolf on Sep 04, 2018 06:54 am
Ever since Jeff Bezos teased the idea of drone deliveries on 60 Minutes in 2013, the tech world has been abuzz with the idea. At the time Bezos said that the reality of drone deliveries wasn’t there yet, but he thought it just might be in 4-5 years.

FoodPlus Sells Surplus Food (in Slovenia) so it Doesn’t go to Waste

By Catherine Lamb on Sep 04, 2018 06:00 am
Based in Slovenia, FoodPlus began in 2015 when co-founder Dalibor Matijevic began searching for a way to cut down on food waste by redistributing surplus food. He developed a B2B platform for companies to buy and sell extra food at a super low cost — creating a new revenue stream and keeping food out of landfills.

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.

Will BSH’s PAI Usher In The Era of the Kitchen Projection Interface?

The idea of using your countertop as a touchscreen interface has been something big tech and kitchen appliance makers have been playing around with for much of the past decade.

First there was Whirlpool’s attempt in 2014:

IKEA served up the idea for its Kitchen 2025 concept a year later:

IKEA Concept Kitchen 2025

And Bosch has been showing off things like this coffee robot with a projection interface for a few years:

Spotted at #ces2017: coffee robot at the @Bosch booth.

A post shared by Michael Wolf (@michaelawolf) on

And this year it looks like the large German appliance conglomerate, BSH Appliances (the company behind the Bosch, Thermador and Gaggenau appliance brands, to name a few), is showing off what looks to be a more evolved version of the projection interface in PAI at IFA in Berlin.

PAI, which stands for ‘Projection and Interaction’, is a system that projects an image onto a flat surface to create a virtual interactive interface for the kitchen.  While the projector incorporates a camera, a speaker, a microphone, two USB ports, WiFi and Bluetooth antennas, the key technology here is a 3D sensor that detects minute movements of fingers on the surface.

According to project manager Markus Helminger, the PAI 3D sensor powers a projection interface that can “be perfectly operated even with dirty fingers and occupies no space on the work surface, so that consumers have enough space for cooking or baking.”

While other efforts at projection interfaces at trade shows have largely been to show off the concept with no concrete plans for commercialization, this time things look different with PAI. According to a German language post about PAI by on the BSH Kitchen Stories blog, they plan on rolling out PAI in February 2019 in China. While there’s no indication as to when we might see the technology in Europe or the US, my guess is we could see the technology in product rolled out in Europe as early as next year.

You can see a demo of the PAI interface (in German) below courtesy of Computer Bild TV:

Bosch PAI: Projektor für die Küche vorgestellt!

The story behind PAI is an interesting one. The technology spun out of development work Bosch was doing in ventilation. According a company spokesperson, researchers were looking to improve the user experience for cooks and “the developers wanted to create an assistance function for an extractor hood that would make it possible to project images from the hood and display recipes on the work surface. In an extensive UX study carried out by Bosch, this idea went down so well that the project was actually carried out.”

According to the company, consumer testers almost universally said they use tablet or smartphone when cooking or baking, but they didn’t like giving up the counter space to these devices required and, perhaps more importantly, they worried touching these devices with dirty hands. As the company worked on the concept more, they eventually decided to not incorporate it into a vent hood but to make the PAI a standalone projection system that allowed the consumer to place it where they desired on the counter.

The company has also integrated the PAI with its Kitchen Stories guided cooking system and its Home Connect platform, which opens up some intriguing possibilities. It’s not hard to envision a Kitchen Stories guided cook experience that shows step-by-step instructions projected onto the kitchen counter. With Home Connect, PAI could also project virtual start buttons, timers and other ways for the consumer to interact with their appliances.

With BSH Appliances – one of the world’s biggest appliance companies – taking projection interfaces seriously, my guess is we’ll likely see other big appliance brands push forward with their own projection interface commercialization efforts in the coming year and we’ll most likely see some of these teased at CES in Las Vegas next January.

AEG Rolling Out Smart Induction Cooktop and Wireless Sensor Probe At IFA

Electrolux’s AEG brand is rolling out a new smart cooking system in the form of a new induction cooktop (hob) with a wireless sensor probe at IFA next week.

The new AEG SenseCook system, which was first uncovered by design site Yanko, features what the company claims to be the first wireless and battery-less sensor probe for an induction cooktop. The SenseCook induction cooktop gets realtime temperature reading from the sensor probe and automatically adjusts temperature of the heating surface.

It’s an interesting move by Electrolux in that it’s the first time the European appliance giant is getting into smart surface cooking. The company’s early smart kitchen efforts (such as its partnership with Innit) have centered around cavity/oven cooking, but this marks the first effort to integrate smart cooking technology into the company’s induction cooktops.

The Electrolux/AEG news follows an announcement by Hestan Cue’s parent company, Meyer, in January at the Kitchen and Bath show of a new appliance range with built-in smart surface cooking. The Hestan smart appliance line and the AEG SenseCook system are a natural evolution from first generation smart cooking systems like that of the Hestan Cue, FirstBuild’s Paragon and the Cucianale that feature portable countertop induction burners. Longer term, I expect most appliance brands will build smart cooking intelligence into their larger cooktop appliances and AEG and Hestan are early indicators of that trend.

With IFA next week, I expect we’ll see a flurry of smart cooking news over the next few days, so stay tuned to the Spoon as we’ll be tracking all of it.

Miele To Launch Food Delivery Service At IFA

At last year’s IFA, German appliance maker Miele made news by announcing the first consumer oven to incorporate solid state cooking in the Dialog.

Their follow up act? Getting into food delivery business.

According to a preview announcement released by Miele, the company is partnering up with a German startup called MChef to deliver meals to customers with the Dialog oven.

From the announcement:

Orders received online by 12.30 h will be delivered the next day, 365 days a year. Up to six dishes can be prepared in a dialog oven simultaneously. The programme with the correct settings is launched direct from the MChef app. The average cooking time is 20 minutes.

It’s an interesting move for the German kitchen giant. While other smaller connected kitchen startups like Tovala, Suvie and Nomiku have jumped into the food delivery business to add a recurring revenue stream on top of their hardware products, established appliance makers have been slower to move into food delivery.

Part of the reason for the lack of offerings from bigger players is likely very simple: food delivery is hard. The week’s news about Chef’d shutting down is not only a testament to this fact, but it also shows the perils of partnering with third parties. One of the major fallouts of the Chef’d shut-down was that it left companies like Nestle, Innit and Brava scrambling to figure out their food delivery strategies with the closure of the white label meal kit startup.

While the details of Miele’s partnership with MChef are still vague, it sounds like the appliance maker is investing resources in the the food delivery startup to help it with the broader rollout of the offering:

Now, a startup called MChef, supported by Miele, is set to deliver the matching haute cuisine to homes around the country. Exquisite plated dishes or entire three-course menus wait to be ordered. When they arrive on the customer’s doorstep, the ingredients are already appealingly arranged on elegant porcelain plates – ready to be cooked to perfection in a dialog oven.

The service, which will formally be announced at IFA, will first roll out in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany in September and will be rolled out nationwide early next year.