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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Whirlpool Smart Kitchen Announcements Include Cooking Automation And Yummly 2.0

Whirlpool is kicking off CES with a slew of smart kitchen announcements, including an update to the Yummly personalized recipe app, voice integration with Google Assistant and scan-to-cook guided cooking technology.

Whirlpool made a huge effort at CES 2017 to move further into the smart kitchen space, showing off a suite of connected appliances. Then, in May of last year, the company acquired recipe app startup Yummly and gained an entire community of users and a host of food content.

Whirlpool spent the rest of 2017 working on taking full advantage of the Yummly acquisition and is introducing the results of its work today at CES 2018. Among the brand’s many kitchen-related announcements, Whirlpool is launching Yummly 2.0, a new version of the recipe and cooking resources app that includes image recognition, meal scheduling features and an enhanced guided cooking experience when using Whirlpool connected appliances to cook.

Ingredient Recognition 

The next-gen Yummly app will include built-in image recognition software powered by machine learning to recognize multiple foods in one picture and dole out recipe recommendations based on what foods are shown. With a large database of food images, Yummly will continue to get better at identifying the food that users have on hand, using machine learning to evolve and grow its knowledge base.

In the Whirlpool mobile app, the company is launching the new Scan-to-Cook technology, a feature that allows users to scan a UPC barcode on frozen food packages and an existing set of instructions including temperature and cooking time for that particular food will be sent to the appliance. Scan-to-Cook setting can be customized to individual preferences if a food is preferred more or less cooked than the standard settings.

Guided Cooking Gets Better

For home chefs that have Whirlpool’s connected range or microwave, Yummly is now able to identify recipes that will work with those appliances and send cooking instructions to the device while following an interactive step-by-step tutorial in the app with images and video. While the user is instructed on what to chop, wash and prepare, the participating oven can be heating up and preparing a timer so it’s ready to go when they are. 

Starting in the spring of 2018, users will also be able to control their connected appliances straight through the Yummly app – a good sign that the brand plans to continue to invest in the platform as the center of their smart kitchen strategy in 2018.

Same Day Grocery Ordering 

Many smart appliances offer grocery list integrations, but Whirlpool takes it a step further in the Yummly app. The ingredients are categorized automatically in an attempt to make shopping easier (better than my Amazon Alexa grocery list which is just one giant list of things I may or may not have already bought) but even better – a new integration with Instacart means you can get the ingredients you need, delivered in about an hour.

Scheduling, Voice, Remote Start

The Yummly app lets users schedule their meals out for the week and let them know when it’s time to start cooking based on the scheduled desired eating time. And, like almost every other company at CES, Whirlpool is announcing integration with Google Assistant to be able to control connected appliances through voice command. Details on the integration weren’t provided but with Google pushing back at Amazon’s domination in voice assistants, it’s not surprising that they’re pursuing the kitchen as a space to gain mindshare. Additional features in the app lets families remotely start their appliances from outside the house to warm up the oven and get the kitchen ready for dinner.

For more #smartkitchen news at CES, follow @TheSpoonTech, @SmartKitchenCon and @michaelwolf for updates.

The Albertsons Instacart Deal isn’t Just About Amazon

Albertsons announced a deal today that will have Instacart providing same day grocery delivery for more than 1,800 of its stores by the middle of next year.

Upon news of the deal breaking, many were quick to call this a defensive move to better compete with Amazon/Whole Foods. Tactically speaking, yes, that was certainly a motivating factor. But there is a far more fundamental change happening to our relationship with food — and delivery plays a big part in it.

Food is almost becoming a utility. And while it’s not quite like turning on a spigot, Amazon and Instacart already offer same day delivery of the food you want (in major metropolitan areas). It’s only a matter of time as they refine and optimize their logistics to winnow that delivery window down to the smallest time unit possible between ordering online and a knock at your door.

Suddenly, the meals we want to make at home are not constrained by the food we already have and/or the time we have to go to the grocery store. If we are struck by inspiration, we can order the ingredients we want and have them waiting on our doorstep (or in our home or refigerators).

Back at our Smart Kitchen Summit, celebrity chef Tyler Florence declared the “recipe is dead.” Instead of starting with a list of ingredients you need to get in order to make something, Florence believes in starting with what you already have and then algorithmically generating a recipe from that.

But that line of thinking presupposes that you only have access to the ingredients in your pantry. With same day grocery delivery, you are no longer shackled by that presupposition. Make the recipe you want! If you don’t have the ingredients right now, you can get them in plenty of time without having to leave the house or work.

We already see this happening with shoppable recipe lists, like the one recently announced by AllRecipes. See a recipe you like? Click the button and all the ingredients will be sent to you. As The Spoon founder Mike Wolf put it, the combination of same day delivery and shoppable recipes basically means customizable meal kits on demand.

The increased availability of ingredients will open up more recipe options, and smarter kitchen devices will help people cook better, while online communities encourage and inspire. This will open up new avenues of creativity and push people to make new meals they’ve never considered before.

Same day delivery has the power to spark an evolutionary change our entire relationship with food. Just as we want our music, movies and news on demand — so too will we want our meals.

Albertsons isn’t the only one thinking about this. Instacart has now signed up top five U.S. grocers including agreements with Kroger, Costco and even an exclusive arrangement with Whole Foods (until 2021).

Location, Location, Location: Food Tech and the Science of Knowing Where You Are

Let’s face it, we aren’t getting any less busy. As we all juggle jam-packed schedules, the convenience of services and apps that can efficiently bring food to us is squarely in the spotlight. In all likelihood, you have already tried or you rely on food apps and services that make getting good food hassle-free. Even the names of some of the emerging apps in this arena reflect ease and efficiency. Just consider Seamless, which lets you browse menus from local restaurants, order within the mobile app, and have the food delivered to you quickly.

Meanwhile, the market for food delivery service for daily meals is exploding. Here, you may think of providers such as Blue Apron, Fresh Direct, and Hello Fresh, but titans including Walmart and Amazon are muscling into the market. We recently tested a Wagyu burger meal kit delivered by Amazon and the experience was as easy as it was tasty. The purchase experience, delivery time, packaging and presentation, cooking experience and quality of meal were all high-caliber. Here is a shot of the plated Wagyu burger kit meal from Amazon:

The finished meal

Should the Blue Aprons of the world be concerned as titans encroach on their businesses? The answer is yes, and the reason is that the titans are in command of powerful location intelligence driven by big data. Not only do goliaths like Amazon and Walmart oversee gargantuan data stores that include information on consumer preferences, but they have ever more powerful tools to yield insights from that data. They know where you are, what you like, what your delivery preferences are, and much more.

Over the years, a player like Amazon has learned powerful lessons about customer loyalty, leveraging delivery infrastructure, and more. These players can harness sophisticated location intelligence.

As this blog post notes, Instacart, a same day grocery delivery service, has published a series of choropleth data visualizations showing the deliveries that it fulfills over seven days, by analyzing GPS generated location data for orders across many locations, as seen here:

These visualizations help Instacart optimize its location intelligence. According to the company: “The application that decides what orders each shopper should fulfill is called our ‘fulfillment engine,’ and it is just one component of our overall logistics system, which also forecasts demand and shopper behavior, manages capacity and busy pricing and plans and adapts our staffing.”

Take a look at some of the visualizations here, and the discussion of machine learning algorithms, to see how sophisticated location intelligence can truly be.

According to a recent Forbes Insights report, “The Power of Place: How Location Intelligence Reveals Opportunity in Big Data,” location intelligence is becoming a very competitive arena. “Organizations today are using location-based data and analytics to do just that in a number of ways, from reducing costs through augmenting address verification to improving customer experiences with in-store location technology.”

On the food tech front, where delivery windows and personal preferences really matter, location intelligence is a rapidly growing business differentiator.

A Bittersweet Ending And New Beginning For KitchenBowl’s Waliany

Last fall when I reached out to KitchenBowl founder Ryan Waliany about speaking at the Smart Kitchen Summit, he told me he was in the process of acquisition talks for his company, and because of the likelihood that he would be in the middle at the deal at the time, he would have to decline.

Now, with his the cooking education and discovery site a part of Japan’s ABC Cooking School, he’s willing to share some of the deal’s backstory.

Waliany, who told Geekwire the deal sprung out of a cold email sent to ABC Cooking School a year ago, says the new owner of the KitchenBowl assets plans to use it to expand the company’s online presence. ABC, which runs cooking studios in 134 locations in Japan as well as in China, Korea, and Singapore, also sees leveraging what they have with KitchenBowl to create an online community for their students to connect in between classes. KitchenBowl will continue to offer image-heavy recipes but the main focus over time, according to Waliany, will be to convert online visitors to cooking class customers.

Waliany and his team are moving on after what he said was a three month transition period in which he and the KitchenBowl team migrated the product over to ABC. In addition to the sale of the KitchenBowl assets, Waliany also negotiated a deal for his team (outside of co-founder Serena Wu) to go to work at Uber under Andrew Chen.  According to Waliany, the move doesn’t mean the rideshare company will be increasing its focus on food or cooking anytime soon, as his team will be working on “core product” and not UberEATS (Chen heads up rider acquisition efforts at Uber). Cofounder Wu, who is Waliany’s spouse, will be leveraging some of the food-related learnings from KitchenBowl at Instacart where she is now a senior product designer.

For Waliany, the experience of selling his company and moving on to Uber is bittersweet, but he sees lots of potential for the product and its impact on cooking education under it’s new owners.

“While it’s hard to part with something that was heavily integrated into our lives, we feel at peace, yet excited with ABC Cooking’s vision,” Waliany told me. “It involves creating a new cooking studio based on our technology and changing cooking education as we know it.”

The Year in Food Delivery

Despite a distinct cooling off of investment in the food delivery space this year, some big names like Uber, Google, and David Chang threw their hats in the ring.

That’s because the online food delivery market is estimated around $210 billion, with companies like FreshDirect raising $189 million in the past 12 months. It’s become such a pervasive part of our way of life that Google even added a food-delivery shortcut to Maps. And there are plenty of food-delivery crowdfunding projects to go around.

But enough with the numbers. Here are the highlights in this space over the past 12 months.

More Big Players Joined the Party

This year everyone wanted a piece of the pie. Google started to ship fresh food to customers in California through Google Express. Instacart and the Food Network launched a meal-kit delivery service, and Square acquired startup Maine Line Delivery in Philadelphia to boost Caviar. Meanwhile Facebook and Foursquare made it easier to order food from within their apps through Delivery.com.

NYC darling chef David Chang decided to blow up the entire idea of a nice restaurant by launching Ando, a restaurant that only does deliveries, and he raised the bar on delivery food everywhere by launching Maple, his own delivery service that promises a daily delicious menu.

Plus, where would the year be without a few gimmicks? Taco Bell and Whole Foods both came up with ChatBots that help you order food or suggest recipes, respectively, solely through the power of emojis. And Domino’s will now let you order pizza with one tap on your Apple Watch.

The Year of UberEats

So far I haven’t mentioned the biggest player, though: Uber. The company has had quite the year in food delivery. It shut down Instant Delivery in New York City, then launched UberEats in both the U.S. and London. Next UberEats drivers staged protests over the way the pay structure has been changed, and in November a courier filed a lawsuit against the company for missing food delivery tips. Yikes.

All of this commotion from big names and turmoil within UberEats suggest that the food delivery space is still young enough that no one has solved some of the primary problems within it. Companies are grabbing on to any stronghold they see (emojis! self-driving trucks! drones! more drones!), without regard to the longevity of the solution. Uber has faced the brunt of this fast-paced growth, but we expect to see more struggles in the coming years for other players as well.

Eat Local

This year the quest to eat healthily expanded even more into food delivery. Whole Foods hinted at a “meal solution spectrum” with some sort of delivery component in the future. Good Eggs, which many thought was defunct by this point, rose from the ashes with a $15 million round of funding to help it deliver local, quality food.

And Amazon, never one to be shown up, expanded its Amazon Fresh program to Boston, among other major cities. The difference here is that Boston customers can shop from local markets, a feature that we imagine will be implemented elsewhere if it’s successful in Beantown.

You Say Potato, I Say Share Economy

In such a young and moneyed space, different business models are flying around faster than those drones I mentioned earlier.

Some want to deliver fresh ingredients to customers to help simplify cooking at home. Juicero, for example, delivers prepackaged ingredients for green juice, made in its blender that doesn’t even require cleaning. Similarly, Raised Real wants to deliver ingredients for homemade baby food, thereby making it that much easier to make your baby’s food from scratch (sounds ambitious to me).

Speaking of raising babies and tapping new markets, Drizly raised $15 million for its liquor delivery service, among other parts of its ecommerce model. And DoorDash added alcohol to its food delivery options in California (what about the rest of us?!).

Meanwhile Foodhini calls itself a “for profit social enterprise” and delivers ethnic food made by immigrant chefs: Foodhini and the chefs each receive $2.50 from each meal, after costs.

And BringMe wants to out-Uber Uber by combining delivery with the share economy in Fairfax, VA, enlisting regular folks to deliver food as “bringers.” There are already a few models out there like this, such as Favor in Texas and Tennessee, and we expect to see more too.

Of course, while all of these business models are innovative and interesting, none of them beat the ultimate and original delivery food: pizza.