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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Instant Pot

New Lawsuit Accuses Private Equity Company of Plundering Assets of Instant Brands

The long, convoluted, and increasingly dark tale of the acquisition of Instant Brands (the maker of the Instant Pot) by Cornell Capital took another turn last week with the filing of a complaint on behalf of the company’s creditors to recoup up to $400 million in losses. The filing alleges that Cornell Capital LLC and its leadership orchestrated a series of fraudulent maneuvers that ultimately led to the downfall of the once-popular Instant Pot maker.

The story begins in May 2017, when Cornell Capital, a private equity firm founded by Henry Cornell, acquired World Kitchen, later renamed Corelle Brands. Seeking further growth through acquisition, Cornell Capital used Corelle Brands to acquire Instant Brands in March 2019 for $615 million.

However, the complaint states that shortly after the acquisition, Cornell Capital discovered that Instant Brands’ financial records had been misstated, particularly the 2018 EBITDA—a crucial metric for business valuation. A “shit show” is how Ken Wilkes, then CEO of Corelle Brands, described Instant Brands’ financials. This discovery meant Cornell Capital had significantly overpaid for Instant Brands.

In the wake of this revelation, Cornell Capital threatened legal action against Instant Brands’ sellers (Robert Wang, the inventor of the Instant Pot, and his co-founders Yi Qin and Dongjun Wang) for fraud. Wang, Qin, and Wang negotiated a restructuring agreement in February 2020, which significantly reduced the purchase price in exchange for releasing them from liability.

In a move that would later become central to the lawsuit, Cornell Capital secured for itself the sole entitlement to a future $200 million dividend from Instant Brands. Additionally, Corelle Brands filed a $268 million claim with its representations and warranties insurer in May 2020, alleging that the misstated financials had inflated the acquisition price.

According to the complaint, Cornell Capital pushed forward with its plan to extract a dividend from the company despite knowing about Instant Brands’ overstated valuation and declining financial performance. In March 2021, Instant Brands approached lenders to secure financing for a dividend recapitalization, all the while concealing the truth about its financial woes. The complaint states that Cornell Capital and Instant Brands withheld information about the misstated financials, the purchase price reduction, and the ongoing insurance claim. Adding another layer of concern, they also failed to disclose an investigation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission into potential safety hazards with the Instant Pot—a revelation that could have deterred potential lenders.

Through this withholding of information, the complaint alleges that Cornell Capital successfully secured a $450 million term loan in April 2021. This loan, along with $100 million of Instant Brands’ cash reserves, was allegedly used to fund a $345 million dividend, the vast majority of which went to Cornell Capital, its co-investors, and Instant Brands’ sellers, leaving the company insolvent.

As Instant Brands’ financial situation deteriorated, Cornell Capital engaged in what the lawsuit describes as a desperate attempt to salvage its investment. In January 2023, less than two years after the dividend payout, Cornell Capital orchestrated the transfer of almost all of Instant Brands’ tangible assets—estimated to be worth $200 million—to newly formed unrestricted subsidiaries. These assets were then used as collateral for a $55 million loan from Cornell Capital Partners LP. This maneuver, termed the “UnSub Transaction,” was allegedly designed to strip Instant Brands of its remaining valuable assets and shield the earlier dividend payout from scrutiny under bankruptcy laws. However, the UnSub Transaction only served to worsen Instant Brands’ financial standing and ultimately failed to prevent its bankruptcy filing in June 2023.

Needless to say, the complaint paints a damning picture of Cornell Capital’s actions, accusing the firm and its leadership of orchestrating a scheme to enrich themselves at the expense of Instant Brands’ creditors. The complaint seeks a comprehensive accounting of the financial maneuvers undertaken by Cornell Capital, requesting that the court void the $345 million dividend and other payments made to the defendants. Additionally, the trustee is asking for the recovery of the value of those transfers and is seeking an award of no less than $400 million to compensate for the losses incurred by Instant Brands’ creditors.

Luckily for everyday consumers, most of this news will never reach them, and Instant Pots still appear to be making their way to store shelves. However, the heyday of Instant Pot as the hottest kitchen device is long gone, and Instant Brands no longer churns out new product variations every six to nine months. While we may never know why Instant Brands’ founders misstated the financials to facilitate the sale, it’s possible they were trying to strike while the iron—or Instant Pot—was hot, given the influx of Instant Pot clones flooding the market at the time.

Ninja’s Thirsti Drink Machine Shows Why It Went Public While Other Countertop Brands Go Out of Business

When I first got the email this morning from the Ninja PR rep, I got excited and thought maybe the company had gone and created a drink replicator similar to the one from Cana.

“SharkNinja’s First Hydration System, Ninja Thirsti, Allows Users to Create Thousands of Drinks at the Touch of a Button,” the press release declared triumphantly.

Ok, Ninja, you’ve got my attention.

Reading further, it became clear that the new Thirsti machine isn’t going to create any drink – coffee, tea, juice, beer, wine – at the push of a button. Instead, we have a machine taking on the Sodastreams and Philips of the world with a new home fizzy drink maker, only with a couple of interesting twists, including the ability to mix two flavors at once and vary the level of carbonation and flavor intensity. The new Thirsti will sell for $179 and will soon be available at major retailers like Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon.

The product isn’t a bad one – in fact, it looks like an improvement on what you can get from others in the category – it just isn’t a make-anything personalized drink machine like the Cana. But, unlike the Cana, the Thirsti will ship and be available at a competitive price point (the Cana was going to sell for $900).

In other words, the product was made for today, not the future, with a slightly different twist on what’s out on the market. And as I write those words, I may have just summarized SharkNinja’s guiding North Star principle because it seems the company does it repeatedly.

They did it when they offered up their Creami countertop ice cream and smoothie maker in 2021, which the NY Times compared to a professional machine in the Pacjojet in its ability to whip frozen treats in a similar fashion as a professional machine in the Pacojet (though with a few red flags).

They did it again when they entered the BBQ/smoker space, creating an interesting-looking outdoor grill and smoker, about which Home & Garden had to say the following: “Many grills have multiple cooking functions, but there isn’t anything on the market quite like the Ninja Woodfire Outdoor Grill. Not only does it grill, but it can roast, bake, air crisp, dehydrate, broil, and best of all – smoke meats and vegetables to perfection.”

And we can’t forget how the company was one of the first to offer a combination air fryer and pressure cooker in 2018, a year before Instant Pot got around to offering the product combo.

And it’s these products that are, in a sense, why Ninja is going public while others are puttering along with lesser market share and, in some cases, going out of business.

If you’d asked anyone back in 2019 who would go public in 2023, most would have pointed to Instant Pot, not SharkNinja. But today, it’s SharkNinja that is growing revenue (it had $3.76 billion in the 12 months ending in March) while Instant Brands is reorganizing its business under chapter 11 and laying off employees.

The spin out comes six years after SharkNinja was acquired by Chinese small appliance entrepreneur (and Joyoung founder) Wang Xuning, who used private equity financing to do the deal and create a new company in JS Global Products with SharkNinja at the center. Now, years later and with hundreds of patents to its name, SharkNinja has plans to go public.

The countertop appliance business is a very tough one to compete in. Still, Ninja has thrived due to its willingness to create new mashup concepts for products, often with interesting design choices, all packaged around unique and memorable brand names for each line. This contrasted with companies like Instant Brands, which would at times create products that seemed derivative of its initial ideas, or like Gourmia and other copycat brands, whose knockoff products didn’t have the same quality feel or brand line cohesiveness.

So while Ninja hasn’t offered a drink replicator, give them time. They’ve shown they can surprise us, and maybe someday, that will be with something straight out of the pages of science fiction.

Thin Margins & Competitive Moats: Analyzing Instant Brands Journey to Bankruptcy

Instant Brands, the parent company behind the Instant Pot, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today, as first reported by Bloomberg. The company, which also owns the Pyrex glassware brand, announced they’d reached a deal for a new $132.5 million financing line of credit to support the company as it navigates the bankruptcy process and figures out a new path forward.

Signs of trouble first surfaced for Instant Brands earlier this year when the Wall Street Journal reported the company had hired advisors to help it restructure. At the time, the company had a $400 million line of credit trading at a severe discount due to rising interest rates. According to Bloomberg, the combination of high-interest rates, waning access to new lines of credit, and a dwindling cash position forced the company to finally file for Chapter 11.

So what happened? How did Instant Brands, the company behind what was once the fastest-growing countertop appliance in the US, go from high flyer to Chapter 11 in just a few short years?

Below are some of the reasons I believe led to the company’s current predicament:

The Pressure Cooker Category Reached Saturation Very Quickly

Part of the reason for the success of the Instant Pot was the fantastic value for the consumer. In one multifunction appliance, the consumer had a rice cooker, steamer, bean maker, yogurt machine, sauté pan – you name it – all for $100 or less. It was hard to beat, which is why Instant went from zero brand recognition a decade ago to becoming eponymous with the category it created (or, in a sense, reinvented) in just a few short years.

The problem with exponential growth is you can get to market saturation very quickly. The product (and its clones) was affordable to almost anyone, and before long, anyone who wanted one had one. But unlike high-margin tech products like the iPhone, the Instant Pot isn’t something most consumers want to replace every few years.

Clones, Ninjas, and Narrow Competitive Moats

While the Instant Pot’s reinvention of the pressure cooker was an innovative take on an older category, it was easy to knock off. Because of this, it wasn’t long before a slew of low-cost copycats flooded Amazon and other online retailers.

At the same time, fast-moving brands like SharkNinja kept on innovating. They jumped on new cooking appliance categories (like air fryers) more quickly than Instant Brands, which has admitted to being late to the category. Instant’s CEO has stated the company is continuing to look for its next hit, even as it enters into financial reorganization.

In some ways, the ease with which low-cost copycats and brand-savvy bigger companies like SharkNinja were able to create similar products that were instantly competitive with Instant Brand’s showed just how small, in retrospect, Instant’s competitive moat was. In other words, there was no significant technology, manufacturing or brand differentiators that companies entering the market had to overcome.

Non-Premium Pricing and Low Customer Loyalty

While Instant became synonymous with the smart multicooker category, the brand didn’t necessarily build significant brand loyalty. Customers, who often bought their Instant Pot or clone for end cap fire sale pricing, didn’t necessarily view the Instant Pot brand as something unique or irreplaceable. Other categories like built-in ovens, refrigerators, or coffee makers usually have bigger price tags and connotations of premium user experiences. At the same time, the Instant Pot often seemed cheap in price and quality. Much of the damage around the brand’s low-rent image was self-inflicted.

Buy High, Sell Low

When Corelle and Instant Pot announced the merger of the two companies, the combined value of the new entity was estimated at around $2 billion. Much of that market value was attributable to the white-hot Instant Pot, which meant Corelle would pay out the nose to bring the company and its fast-growing product lineup into the fold.

While I don’t have the projections that Corelle put together to rationalize the debt load they would take on to finance the acquisition, it’s probably not too big a leap to say they didn’t forecast sales of Instant Pot cooling off as fast as they did. And, as detailed in the Journal in March, the company hasn’t come close to finding a successor hit to help the company get on the right path again. At the same time, the lean operating model of the Instant Pot’s early days (which had four employees in 2013) is long gone, making way for the layered corporate bureaucracy of Corelle (the combined company had 1,900 employees earlier this year).

The bottom line is Instant Brands became highly leveraged right as the product started to reach market saturation. In the following years, Instant has moved slower than its competitors like SharkNinja and Dash, who have come out with often better-looking products in new categories at equal or lower prices. The result is this week’s announcement.

It’s really too soon to tell how the company will far going forward. Post-bankruptcy, Instant will have a clean balance sheet but a much smaller innovation team, and without the company founder Robert Wang (who left the company’s operation in late 2021), it’s not clear where the next big company-changing idea will come from.

Fresco Introduces Complete Refresh of KitchenOS Platform, With Aim of Delivering True Multi-Brand Device Contol

Today, Fresco announced the launch of its KitchenOS platform, a ground-up refresh of its smart kitchen software suite. As part of the announcement, the company revealed that Instant Brands, the maker of the popular Instant Pot smart pressure cooker, would be the first brand to launch the new KitchenOS with the Instant Pot Pro Plus.

The new KitchenOS, which includes new firmware, apps, and smart recipes, is the result of a two-year effort by the Dublin-based company designed to enable multi-appliance control and a new personalized user experience.

In an interview with The Spoon, Fresco CEO Ben Harris said the company realized in 2021 that in order to achieve a scalable approach to the smart kitchen, they would need to rebuild the platform from the ground up. They began to work on the new platform, accelerating their pace last year after a $20 million Series B investment.

“When we launched the Drop scale nine years ago, we received a lot of inbound interest from appliance manufacturers who saw the need for a neutral platform for the kitchen and the inevitability of one interface for the entire kitchen and their expectation that there would be one screen for orchestration,” said Harris. “They all want the back-end infrastructure, they all want the apps, they want the IoT branded for themselves, but customized with similar components under the hood.”

This led to numerous partnerships and many custom-built apps for appliance brands, but the problem, according to Harris, was that as the inbound requests started to multiply for custom-built customer-facing apps, it really began to slow the company’s ability to build products.

“We would tweak something on the platform over here, and it would cause problems over there,” said Harris.

According to Harris, the company faced three major problems around this time. First, they had to build new firmware for every single appliance, which meant it took nine months to launch a new product. Second, the company had to build a new UI for every appliance. And finally, they had to create new recipes for an appliance to work with the appliance firmware and app.

Limited cross-brand connectivity was another issue. Because each brand had a custom app and entirely unique firmware, a brand’s appliances could only communicate with another brand’s appliances through the Fresco app. Harris and the Fresco team knew that to achieve the promise of the smart kitchen, this would need to change.

It was around the same time they realized this approach was not scalable that Harris and the rest of the team started discussing the evolution of the Fresco platform with one of the company’s advisors, Steve Horowitz. Horowitz, who was added to the board when his firm invested in Fresco (then Drop), was with Google during the early days of Android and helped lead the engineering team that developed what would become one of the world’s dominant mobile operating systems.

In 2021, the company went back to the drawing board and started to rethink how they could build a more scalable platform that didn’t require building entirely new custom apps and delivered on the promise of true appliance-to-appliance interconnectivity. To achieve this, the company began working on what Harris described as a universal firmware and universal appliance UI that would work with all appliances connected to the Fresco platform.

Shots from the new Fresco/Instant Brands App

According to Harris, getting there required a step back to examine the commonality across appliances and a reimagining by the company of how they view the universe of appliances in the kitchen.

“We used to build appliances by their category, like stand mixer, oven, blender,” said Harris. “But we actually realized that we needed a sort of universal communication layer between recipes and between appliances.”

Harris says this step-back enabled them to realize that there were 77 common cooking capabilities in the kitchen – such as bake, broil, steam, etc – and across these cooking capabilities, there were 8 ways to describe them such as time, temperature, and cooking speed.  

“Suddenly, we now had, architecturally, from a back end point of view and then from a customer UI point of view, this set of universal concepts that we can have to join recipes and appliances, and to have appliance control,” said Harris. “We rebuilt the consumer experience with this multi-brand appliance control that sits inside our appliance partner apps, to reflect this top-to-bottom experience that ultimately allows us to deliver on the vision of this universal appliance control that can orchestrate all of your appliances.”

This new approach would need buy-in from their partners. That’s because it would require each appliance to have a new firmware and a new app that included access to a common Fresco account alongside the appliance brand’s account. From a customer perspective, it’s this single Fresco account identification, that sits within the different brand apps, that would enable the cross-brand connectivity.

“When you set up an account and our partner apps, you agree to basically set up the dual account both with Instant Brands and Fresco at the same time,” said Harris. “And you agree to both the Instant Brands and the Fresco terms and conditions. And then that allows both the individual tenants for Instant Brands and each one of our partners, and then also the sort of interconnectedness that’s brought by Fresco.”

One obvious concern appliance brands may have with having a single Fresco account embedded within different apps to connect across brands is that customer data privacy is protected both for the customer and the individual brands. According to Harris, that privacy was their top priority in architecting their new platform.

“That’s a real, clear, hard-line,” said Harris. Harris said each brand would get its own “data warehouse for lack of a better term”, and they ensured that each set of data would adhere to all data privacy rules. Harris said that if a customer opts in, their data would be part of aggregate, anonymous data around usage to help appliance brands build better products. But, in the end, “nobody sees anyone else’s user data, and they only have their own appliances and their own users that they are interacting with.”

Beyond the new architecture to enable cross-device interactivity, Fresco also focused on redesigning the customer experience, implementing design tenets from the likes of Apple Watch and other Apple Carplay to help guide users during the cook. Unlike early guided cooking platforms, however, Fresco focused on making sure the user would have as much or as little assistance as they needed and made sure to clearly communicate information to customers in a way that ensure they were informed and had control.

In rethinking the customer experience, Harris gave a shout-out to Wired writer Joe Ray, whose review of the Drop/Fresco platform gave them clarity on what they needed to focus on. 

“Joe Ray did an amazing job of calling out the issues with the experience we’ve built. And that was obviously a catalyst in the process, in really assessing the underlying data, and for to ask ourselves if we are delivering on our promises.”

According to Harris, the complete rebuild of the code base was a long and difficult process, but it was a necessary one given the direction of the smart home and smart kitchen. He pointed to Matter (he says Fresco will integrate as devices become Matter-compliant), and how all the big smart home brands were aligning around the standard. However, kitchen products, he pointed out, were fundamentally different and needed a platform like Fresco.

“This is where the future is, this is what Matter is building,” said Harris. “All of these appliances starting to be able to work together in any location. We’re just accelerating that we’re delivering it today, instead of waiting years before that Matter becomes a reality.”

Instant Brands and Vorwerk Invest $20 Million in Smart Kitchen Specialist Fresco

Smart kitchen startup Fresco announced today that it had raised $20 million in Series B funding from kitchen appliance mainstays Instant Brands and Vorwerk, the company behind Thermomix. According to the release, a third company has also participated in the funding round and will be identified later this year.

Fresco, which up until earlier this month was known as Drop, plans to use the funding to bring on additional talent and invest in product development. The company, which currently has a workforce of 50 employees, plans to double its headcount over the next two years.

In both Instant Brands and Vorwerk, Fresco is bringing on investors that are also customers. Fresco started working with Instant Brands, the company behind the popular Instant Pot pressure cooker, in 2019, and last year Fresco developed the Instant Brands Connect app to work with the company’s new premium pressure cooker, the Instant Pot Pro Plus. Vorwerk and Fresco first announced their partnership in 2019 at the Smart Kitchen Summit, a deal in which Fresco was to power device connectivity and online shopping for the Thermomix TM6.

Fresco is among a group of technology platform players building software to power appliance inter-connectivity, cooking assistance, and meal planning for the kitchen. However, while many of the company’s peers have increasingly focused on powering online grocery shopping experiences (including Whisk, which ultimately helped Thermomix with its on-device shopping), Fresco has doubled down on guided cooking, meal planning and device interconnectivity.

I asked Fresco CEO Ben Harris why they decided to focus more on the cooking portion of the meal journey and not emphasize grocery commerce like its peers. According to Harris, it was a matter of focus.

“We absolutely see the value in plugging into grocery,” said Harris in an interview with The Spoon. “It’s a strategic decision to make sure that we build the best guided cooking experience.”

Fresco’s latest funding follows a $13.3 million Series A funding round led by Alpha Edison and Morpheus Ventures in 2020. At the time of their Series A, the company emphasized its intent to build the ‘kitchen operating system,’ a positioning that was not all that surprising given Alpha partner Steve Horowitz’s role as the lead developer for the Android operating system. With its latest investment, the company’s messaging is still essentially the same (with maybe a slightly less tech-forward framing) as it brings on popular consumer brands behind Instant Pot and Thermomix as investors.

“Instant Brands and Fresco are working together to develop innovative breakthroughs in the kitchen, and beyond,” said Ben Gadbois, CEO and President of Instant Brands, in the release. “This investment deepens our partnership further and supercharges these initiatives.”

As for those wondering who the third investor might be, while Fresco is keeping that quiet for now, Harris did offer a clue: Unlike Vorwerk and Instant Brands, Harris said the other investor is not a countertop appliance brand, but is instead a manufacturer of large appliances. The Fresco CEO said he expects more partners to invest in the future.

“We expect to announce more partners in the future investing in the platform and this is just really the first cohort.”

Instant Brands Launches Instant Pot Pro Plus and Drop-Powered Connected App

Instant Brands, the company behind the popular Instant Pot line of multicookers, announced today it has launched a new connected multicooker, the Instant Pot Pro Plus, and an all-new Instant Brands Connect app.

The new app was developed in partnership with smart kitchen software company Drop. The two companies began working together with the launch of a guided recipes app in 2019, but that first app was strictly a recipe app with no control features. The new app allows the user to select recipes and initiate cooks, customize recipes, monitor cooking progress, get notifications, delay cooking start, and change steam venting methods. Users of the new Connect app will have access to 1500 recipes to start.

The plan is for the Instant Brands Connect app to allow cooks to eventually connect multiple Instant Brands products. Today customers can download it and will be able to pair the new Instant Pot Pro Plus. Instant has indicated it has a number of other smart products planned in the pipeline, which means we’ll see more Instant Pots, air fryers, and maybe even a coffee maker or two connected to the app. And while the app currently does not have a shoppable recipe feature, I can imagine that functionality in potential future versions.

For Drop, the new app is a strong validation for the Dublin-based startup’s smart kitchen OS. Instant Brands had previously built an app for its Instant Pot Smart Wifi pressure cooker, but with this launch, the multicooker giant is standardizing its connected device strategy around Drop’s smart kitchen platform. Instant Brands sits alongside other big kitchen brands such as Bosch, Electrolux and Thermomix on Drop’s smart kitchen OS partner roster.

The new Instant Pro Plus is available today for $169.99 and the app can be downloaded today in the app store.

StoreBound’s Evan Dash Wants to Create a Housewares Brand for a New Generation

“Breville was doing incredibly well,” said Dash. “They were still fairly new. And a lot of brands were chasing them to the high end. And then you had this whole like lower end, that was just in shambles, fighting over price, price price.”

While Dash didn’t want to necessarily compete with Breville or fight over tiny margins in a brutal price competition, he saw an opportunity in between the two.

“It really left this beautiful gap in the middle that we felt like we could step into with great design, great quality, great value, and a social media strategy.”

Ten years later, he and his wife sold the company they had built after growing their revenue to $100 million by focusing on that neglected middle space with their flagship namesake brand, Dash.

While the terms of the sale to French consumer goods conglomerate Groupe SEB were not announced, a conservative revenue multiple of 3-5 times sales would easily put the acquisition within the half a billion dollar territory, which would put the deal possibly higher valuation than that of the Anova acquisition by Electrolux (but well below the Instant Brands $2 billion estimated deal size).

So how did Dash go from an idea to $100 million company in a decade? According to Evan Dash, it was in large part thanks to their focus on young consumers who didn’t feel any loyalty to the brands their parents had brought into the home.

“While everybody talks about how the ‘millennials are up and coming, but they really don’t have the money to spend,’ they absolutely do”, said Dash. “And they are so influential, they’re influencing their parents generation, even their grandparents generation and a lot of cases.”

A big part of attracting the attention of those customers was through the use of social media, primarily Instagram. According to Dash, that early emphasis on Instagram was influenced by his own kids.

“They were showing the way that they could build momentum,” said Dash. “And one of them had a sports page, and he was editing jerseys of doing jersey swaps of players. And he had 10,000 followers.”

Beyond speaking to younger consumers through social media, much of the focus by Dash was creating products that not only looked different than those he and Rachel had grown up with, but were designed to be more user-centric.

“We tended to look at products with fresh eyes,” said Dash. “For example, we launched a two slice toaster early on and my head designer for toasters came to me and they said, ‘Hey, Cuisinart has one through six on their control, and KitchenAid has one through seven on their control. Can we just say light, medium, dark, defrost and keep warm?’

Armed with the resources of a company like Groupe SEB, Dash doesn’t have any plans to slow down. The company will expand into products that focus on circular economy, and Dash also hinted at plans for bigger products like refrigerators.

Spoon Plus subscribers can read the full transcript of my interview with Dash or watch the full interview below. If you’d like to learn more about Spoon Plus, you can do so here.

The Zega is A Pot That Keeps Cooking Even After You Turn Off the Stove

Do we really need another cooking pot for our food?

If you had asked me a week ago, I would have said we’re good. After all, there’s the Instant Pot, which has become my weeknight workhorse during the pandemic for cooking everything from stew to rice to dumplings. Then there’s the hero of the potluck, the slow cooker, still making us happy with meatballs and party dips after all these years.

But then I saw the Zega on Indiegogo and it had me wondering if I could fit another cooking pot into my life. Zega makes what it terms “walkaway cookware,” which is pretty much just what it describes: cookware you can start a meal in and leave it (or even take it with you).

The Zega uses a design similar to that of a Yeti mug or a Thermos — double-walled thermal insulation — which allows it to maintain a high temperature for a long period of time even after you take the device off the stove. You put your food in, heat it up, turn off the heat, and the food continues to cook.

Hence the “walkaway” label.

While my Instant Pot and crockpots cover me for pretty much any pot-based meal I want to cook, I was considering adding the Zega to the repertoire for a couple of reasons. First, it saves energy. Not having to have an appliance plugged in for a few hours while I cook just seems more efficient.

I also like the walkaway aspect. Whether you’re an adult with young kids or you just want to run errands while the evening meal is cooking, this idea makes sense to me.

The Zega comes in two styles: connected and analog. The actual Zega pot is the same cookware, and it’s the knob that determines if you have a connected or analog version. You can see how each looks below.

The Zega app asks you whether you have a connected or analog version and gives you specific instructions tailored for each. If you have an analog version, you’re instructed to cook food to a certain temperature using the analog knob (“cook over high heat until the temperature gauge reaches the red zone”). The connected version remotely monitors the cooking and will send you notifications when a meal is done.

Now of course, this is a product that is available via Indiegogo and, as with any crowdfund campaign, deserves all the usual caveats. But from what I can see, the product seems well on its way towards shipping.

Before they had sent the product to Indiegogo, the team raised $550,000 on equity crowdfunding platform Venturecrowd. In my view, raising money from investors to build out manufacturing capabilities and funding the initial production run is the right order of things. Hardware campaigns often go wrong when founders raise funds from backers who want a product and then realize they don’t have enough money to actually build out their manufacturing line.

The company’s Indiegogo campaign, which has raised $69,000 as of this writing, says the products will be manufactured in July and delivered to backers in August, all of which sounds right if you assume the company used its equity funding to lock in manufacturing and has it ready to go.

Will “walkaway cookware” become its own new category? Too soon to tell, but the founders hope so. In their investment prospectus on Venturecrowd, the company forecasts the Zega could hit $3 million in sales this year and $12 million by 2022.

We’ll see. For now, I just hope they ship since I ended up backing the product, which is saying a lot from a guy who’s gotten pretty jaded at this point with hardware crowdfunding (hello, Spinn).

You can watch the Zega intro reel below:

Zega Intelligent Cookware

Here’s How People Are Using Their Instant Pots During Quarantine

By now we’ve all read about how people have changed their eating and cooking habits during the quarantine. But how exactly are they using their Instant Pots, arguably the runaway countertop cooking success story of the last few years, and the first cooking gadget many millennials ever purchased on their own?

To find out, I decided to check in with the maker of the Instant Pot appliance and they shared some data on exactly how people are using their multicookers ever since the pandemic forced the entire world to stay home and start cooking.

One of the big things that changed is the cyclicality of the normal cooking week. In a typical non-pandemic week, Sunday is the biggest day for Instant Pot by a substantial margin, with 25% off all cooking activity occurring on the day of rest.

During quarantine, cooking days have become more evenly distributed as people are home pretty much all the time and Sunday only accounts for 17% of cooking activity. Conversely, Friday, which normally represents the weekly cooking activity nadir, has jumped from 9% of all cooking activity to 13% during the quarantine.

Apparently you can make bread with your Instant Pot (who knew?), and just like with pretty much every other cooking device, the multifunction cooker has seen a sharp increase in loavemaking. The chart above shows how total searches for bread recipes jumped 700% right as the US went into social distancing in early March. Interestingly, this increase is almost identical to the 800% jump in breadmaker sales that happened at the same time.

The search for comfort has also been well-documented. That embrace of more carb-centric food has meant a significant drop in vegan and vegetarian diets, where searches dropped 82% by the week after social distancing had been announced.

And it wasn’t just plant-forward diets that took a hit during coronavirus, as Keto-centric recipes saw a 70% drop in the searches in the same time period.

The big question is will all of these forced changes brought on by the jarring impact of a forced quarantine stick around? My guess is some of the behavior change will have some staying power beyond summer as consumers adjust to lower overall incomes and continue to cook at home more as they head back to work (even at reduced or moderated schedules), but that we will see (and already are seeing) some partial snap-backs to behaviors and routines that were in place before the quarantine.

With Consumers in Quarantine, Connected Cooking Companies Spring Into Action With Tailored Content

With a good chunk of the world’s population currently in quarantine, most of us are cooking at home a lot more nowadays.

Along with all this home cooking has come a massive spike in demand for information for culinary how-to, ranging from recipe suggestions to tutorials on how to do everything from making rice to baking bread. While many are simply searching Google for recipes, others are settling in to learn cooking skills to help them learn to get food on the table.

This sudden hunger for cooking-related guidance has led some tech-forward cooking startups to ramp up the content as they look to both satiate newfound interest in cooking skills while also giving quarantine bound consumers something to do with their time.

Here are a few ways in which kitchen tech startups have ramped up their efforts to serve homebound consumers:

Hestan Cue

While the Hestan Cue already walks users through recipes with step by step instructions, the guided cooking startup has launched Hestan Cue Cooking School, a series of virtual classes to help users of the connected cooking platform build up on their cooking skills during quarantine.

Built with the virtual class platform Teachable, the initial classes cover techniques for cooking beef, eggs and vegetables. The cool thing is that while the classes suggest you use your Cue for certain steps, you can use the classes even if you don’t have the Hestan device.

According to Hestan Smart Cooking managing director John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen, about one third of the Hestan Cue users have signed up for courses.

Anova

Sous vide specialist Anova has always been active in creating cooking content for their user community, and over the past month they’ve gone quarantine cooking focused by creating content to help consumers with everything from making pantry staples to batch cooking. And for the parents with bored kids, Anova suggests enlisting them to help with the brisket.

Thermomix

Thermomix is known for its in-person sales model for the high-end multicooker, but in the age of COVID-19 they’ve gone virtual with a “quarantine kitchen” series of cooking demos and are also allowing potential customers to book online cooking demos with the TM6 sales team.

You can see one of their latest episodes of their quarantine kitchen series below:

SideChef

SideChef is also ramping up its quarantine specific content. In early March they created a quarantine cooking recipe collection. A month later, and with virtual happy hours firmly planted in the stay-at-home zeitgeist, they’ve created a guide for virtual dinner parties.

Instant Pot

The massively popular pressure cooker is famous for leaning on its Facebook community to create content for them. Still, the company seems to have recognized our new shared reality and is letting people know that Instant Pots can help you cook bread while you’re cooped up during quarantine.

Food Network Kitchen

While the Food Network Kitchen app doesn’t seem to have created any tailored content for quarantine bound consumers, they have seen a big jump in usage and consumers look for more ways to cook. Company spokesperson Irika Slavin told me via email that Foodnetwork.com has seen “double digit increases” in page views and the Food Network App, the guided cooking premium offering launched in October, has seen what Slavin describes as a “triple digit increase” in visitors.

ckbk

ckbk is a ‘Spotify for cookbooks’ app that puts pretty much any cookbook or recipe just a click away.

Since ckbk only offers access to existing cookbooks, the company isn’t creating any quarantine specific content, but they do have a good idea of what people are cooking. Company founder Matthew Cockerill told me he’s noticed most of his subscribers, and the world in general, seem to be moving in sync over the past month through what he calls the ‘seven stages of cooking grief.’

“So first of all it was about the prepping – stockpiling durable good – beans and pasta,” said Cockerill. “Then came the “staff of life” basics bread and baking. And after that, I think, there’s a need for some comfort, yes, but also some relief from the monotony. Which is where I think chocolate and dessert cravings are kicking in. It’s either that or alcohol. And in many cases both!”

“Lastly,” he continued, “we’ve also seen a trend of interest in ways to use the new found time which people see stretching out ahead of them, with longer-term projects” like baking bread.

Cockerill told me that new subscriptions are up 250% over pre-COVID times. If you want to cook your way through grief, the company is giving away 30 days free access to their app to help you cook through your pantry items.

Food Tech News: Califia Farms Raises $225M, Tyson Instant Pot Kits and Corn Fiber Chocolate

After a week of frigid winds and school closures in the PNW, we at the Spoon are looking forward to a long weekend. Hopefully you have a break too.

But before you start queuing up a Netflix series to binge, catch up on our latest food tech news roundup. We’ve got stories on Tyson’s new Instant Pot meal kits, a patent to reduce the sugar in chocolate, and a massive fundraise for plant-based dairy. Enjoy!

Tyson rolls out Instant Pot Kits
This week Tyson and Instant Pot announced their new speedy-cook collaboration: Tyson Instant Pot Kits. The kits contain prepped ingredients, including Tyson chicken. You dump all the ingredients into an Instant Pot and the meal is ready to serve in 20 minutes. Tyson Instant Pot Kits are currently available at select retailers and will roll out nationwide this spring. Pricing has not been disclosed.

Mondelez patents tech to reduce sugar in chocolate
If you’re trying to cut down on sugar in the new year, we might have good news for you. Mondelez has patented a process to reduce the sugar content in chocolate by up to 50 percent (h/t GroceryDive). The new technology uses soluble corn fiber as a stand-in for sugar, and apparently does not significantly affect chocolate’s sweet taste or physical appearance. Mondelez owns brands Cadbury, Toblerone, Chip’s Ahoy and more, so we could see reduced-sugar chocolate popping up in those products sometime soon.

Califia Farms raises $225 million Series D
Plant-based food & bev company Califia Farms announced this week that it had completed $225 million in Series D financing. The round was led by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) with participation from Temasek, Claridge, Green Monday Ventures, and more. This brings the company’s total funding to a whopping $340 million. Founded in 2010, Califia Farms is known for its dairy-free milks, yogurts, and cold-brew coffee blends. The company will use the new capital to build on its popular oat-based platform, increase production, and ramp up global expansion.

The 2019 Kitchen Technology Year in Review

2019 was an action-packed year in world of food tech. Among other things, we saw an explosion in new products that promise to change what we eat, rapid change in food delivery models, and something of a slow motion food robot uprising.

The consumer kitchen also saw significant change, even if things didn’t move as fast as some would hope. As we close out the year, I thought I’d take a look back at the past twelve months in the future kitchen.

It’s An Instant Pot and Air Fryer World and We’re Just Living In It

Here’s an experiment: Next time you’re making cocktail-party conversation, ask someone about their most recent cooking gadget purchase for the home. Chances are its either an Instant Pot or an air fryer.

The above chart shows why this should come as no surprise, as it plots consumer interest in the Instant Pot and air fryer categories (as determined by Google searches) over the past five years. It also shows the seasonality of that interest (both spike during the holidays) and how air fryers have closed the gap with Instant Pot.

Regardless of how the two products perform relative to one another, the big takeaway is that the Instant Pot/pressure cooker and air fryer represent the two breakaway categories in countertop cooking over the past few years, and that trend continued strong in 2019.

Why? Because both products give consumers lots of cooking power to create a variety of meals at a low entry price point. Add in what are large and vibrant online recipe communities for both product categories, and you can see why both only became more popular in 2019.

Next-Gen Cooking Concepts See Mixed Results

Outside of pressure cookers and air fryers, 2019 was a decidedly mixed bag of results for next-gen countertop cooking concepts. June and Tovala both plugged along selling their second generation ovens, Suvie started shipping its four-chamber cooking robot and Brava’s “cook with light” oven tech sold to Middleby. But unlike the air fryer and Instant Pot, none of these new products have gone viral.

Why?

First, most of these products are fairly expensive, often coming in at $300 or above. That’s probably too high to convince enough consumers to take a chance on a new product in a new product category they don’t know much about.

Second, consumers need to better understand these new products. While I don’t expect Thermomix to replicate the success they’ve found with direct-sales in Europe in North America, there’s a reason such a premium priced product has succeeded in Europe: it has made consumer education and evangelism core to the business model.

Finally, the market has yet to see a product with just the right mix of new technology and high-value user-focused features that supercharges consumer interest. That said, there are some new products like Anova’s steam oven or the Miele Dialog’s solid state cooking (I’m told most big appliance makers are working on a similar product) that could potentially capture the imagination of consumers.

Large Appliance-Makers Continue to Dabble in Innovation

So here’s what some of the big appliance brands with resources did in 2019: Whirlpool came out of the gate fast with a lineup of new smart cooking appliances at CES 2019, including a pretty cool modular smart oven concept in the SmartOven+. Electrolux launched a new Drop-powered blender and partnered with Smarter to add machine vision and connected commerce features to its smart fridge camera platform. Turkish appliance giant Arcelik debuted a combo cooking and washing product concept under the Grundig brand.

Overall though, it wasn’t a big year for appliance-makers on the innovation front. Many of us waited for these companies to launch some of their more promising technologies, like Miele’s Dialog or BSH Appliances Pai interface, but neither effort seemed to move forward much, at least in any public way, in 2019.

A Sputtering Consumer Sous Vide Market

It was a bad year for those who make sous vide gear. In mid-year we learned that ChefSteps, maker of the Joule sous vide circulator, would be laying off a significant amount of the team after they ran into money problems. And, just a little over a week ago, one of the first consumer sous vide startups in Nomiku announced it would be shutting its doors.

Why did the consumer sous vide market lose steam? My guess the primary reason is because sous vide cooking is just too slow as an everyday or multiple-time-per-week cooking method. While some like Nomiku wanted to position the sous vide as a replacement for the microwave, it just isn’t convenient enough and requires too many steps for culinary average joes accustomed to the push-button cooking of the microwave. The reality is over time many sous vide circulators ended up stuck in the kitchen drawer.

Software Powers The Meal

At Smart Kitchen Summit 2017, Jon Jenkins said we will all someday “eat software” as it becomes more important in how we create food in the kitchen. Evidence of this was everywhere in 2019 as companies rolled out new software features to do things like cook plant-based meat to companies like Thermomix and Instant Brands betting big on software for the future.

We also saw kitchen-centric software players like SideChef, Drop and Innit loaded up on more partnerships with appliance and food brands to better tie together the meal journey, while Samsung NEXT acquired a digital recipe and shopping commerce platform in Whisk.

In short, it’s fairly obvious that for a kitchen appliance brand to survive, it’s becoming table stakes to have something of an evolved software strategy.

Amazon Continues Its Push Into Kitchen

If there’s been one takeaway from watching Amazon over the past few years, it’s that they see the food and the kitchen as an important strategic battleground. This past year did nothing to dispel this belief as the company introduced their own smart oven and continued to file weird food-related patents. Amazon also pushed forward with new delivery concepts for the home that bring together the different parts of the Amazon portfolio (voice ordering, smart home, grocery and more).

Grocery Delivery Space Race

Amazon wasn’t the only one looking to connect the smart home to grocery delivery this year. Walmart also debuted a new in-fridge delivery service called InHome. Meanwhile both companies and big grocery conglomerates like Kroger continue to invest in robotics and home delivery.

The reason for this growing interest in innovative home delivery concepts is pretty simple: more and more consumers are shopping online for groceries. Big platform players like Amazon and Google see a massive new opportunity, while established grocery players are forced to innovate to play defense.

No One Has Recreated The Success of the Keurig Model (Yet)

While much of the early focus for new kitchen startups has been on copying the Keurig model of pairing a piece of kitchen hardware with a robust consumer consumables business, unfortunately none have really been able to emulate the model for food products. There’s been no shortage of cocktail making robots, coffee, 3D food printing, chai tea and others attracted the the concept of recurring revenue that food sales bring, but as we’ve seen it’s hard to emulate the pod model approach.

Some, like Tovala, look to have had some limited success on pairing cooking hardware with food delivery, while others like Brava, Nomiku and ChefSteps weren’t able to create sustainable models. Genie and Kitchenmate are making a go of it in the office environment, while Level couldn’t and had to shut its doors earlier this year.

I expect kitchen hardware entrepreneurs to try to continue to pair food sales with products, but I expect that it will be tough sailing unless the company land upon very compelling, easy-to-use solution that turnkeys the cooking solution.

Cooking Media: A Peloton For The Kitchen Emerges

Forget Buzzfeed Tasty quick-play cooking videos. In 2019, we saw the emergence of other players providing deeper, more personalized cooking guidance that emulates what Peloton or Mirror have done with home-fitness instruction. Food Network made the biggest splash with its Food Network Kitchen concept while others like FET Kitchen are creating their own hardware platforms.

For Buzzfeed’s part, they haven’t given up on Tasty quite yet. Instead, they partnered up with Amazon to push their recipes onto the Echo Show, complete with step-by-step guidance. The combo creates essentially what is a fairly quick and easy guided cooking product.

Food Waste Reduction Comes Into Focus — Everywhere But The Home

If any place is lacking in innovation when it comes to reducing the amount of food we throw away, it’s the consumer kitchen. Sure, some startups are trying to rethink how we approach cooking by helping us to work with the food we have, while others are rethinking the idea of food storage, but innovation in home food waste reduction is lacking when compared to what we are seeing in restaurants and CPG fronts. We hope this changes in 2020.

True Home Cooking Robots Remained A Futuristic Vision in 2019

While single-function taskers like the Rotimatic did significant volume and others like Suvie positioned itself as a “cooking robot” for the home, the reality is we saw no significant progress towards a true multifunction consumer cooking robot. Companies like Sony see the opportunity to create a true home cooking robot, but for now food robots remain primarily the domain of restaurants, grocery and delivery.

Bottom line: It was an exciting year in the connected kitchen and we expect 2020 to be even more exciting. Stay tuned next week for my outlook on what to expect!