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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Instant Pot

Why Do Some Smart Kitchen Companies Succeed While Others Fail?

Teforia, the maker of a $1000 (originally $1500) connected tea infuser, announced this week that they would shut down immediately.

In a letter to customers, Teforia CEO Allen Han wrote: “we simply couldn’t raise the funds required in what is a very difficult time for hardware companies in the smart kitchen space.”

I’m not entirely surprised the company couldn’t raise funds. High-priced consumer product startups with a business model that feels even vaguely similar to that of Juicero have experienced pushback from potential investors ever since the high profile juice startup went under. While the two companies are certainly different in many respects, there were enough similarities (high price point, subscription business, easily replaced with alternative methods) to warrant the comparison among a jittery investor class.

But as I read Han’s letter, I started to wonder if what he said is true: are smart kitchen companies having a hard time? Or, as I started to suspect, are some having difficulty while others are flourishing?

On the one hand we have seen companies like Juicero and Teforia struggle and go out of business. But then there are companies like PicoBrew, Perfect Company, and InstantPot, all of which have thrived as they’ve brought new products and approaches to the kitchen.

As I thought about this, I started thinking about the differences between the companies that are succeeding in this space vs. those that go out of business. As it turns out, I think there are some lessons we can learn from observing companies that have had success in this market.

Here are a few characteristics of those companies who are succeeding in the smart kitchen market:

A product should give the consumer new capabilities that would otherwise be too difficult or time consuming without it

A good example is PicoBrew. If you’ve ever wanted to make beer but didn’t want to the mess of traditional home brewing, the PicoBrew is a game changer. By applying precision brewing, pre-proportioned ingredients and the ability to brew famous recipes for well-known microbreweries, the startup from Seattle has created a reliably successful model of creating new products every year as they march down the cost curve with each product.

Teforia, on the other hand, made tea, something billions of people do everyday in their home without much effort.  While the concept of adjusting flavor notes and antioxidants is an interesting concept for a tea aficionado, as it turns out tea is something that you can make rather easily.

A product should be either affordable or provide immense value 

The Thermomix TM5 is one of those products you’ve probably heard about but very likely don’t have. That’s because the 12-in-1 multicooker commands a pretty penny and has only recently become available in the US.

Normally one would not put the words  “$1500 countertop appliance” and “popular” in the same sentence, but Thermomix has seemingly cracked the code by creating an uber all-in-one appliance that slices, dices and cooks you dinner. The company continues to evolve the product as well, adding a connected recipe community and an associated app that continues to gain traction.

While the Teforia critical acclaim showed its value relative to the status quo, the value wasn’t differentiated enough from low-cost knock-offs like this Gourmia tea diffuser which sells for about a tenth of the price.

Smart Kitchen products need a community

Want to sell lots of product? Create an active and passionate community.

Perhaps the best example of this is the Instant Pot. The popular connected pressure cooker has an extremely active social community which includes a Facebook group of nearly three-quarters of a million Facebook users who share recipes and cooking tips online. Independent Facebook Instant Pot communities, each numbering in the tens of thousands, have also sprung up to facilitate recipe sharing.

While some might say a sizable community is the result of a viral product, Instant Pot’s case suggests the opposite where a product’s success was fueled by the community. Early on, the team behind the Instant Pot worked to actively build a community of Facebook influencers who would spread the word. Word got around, and the product started gaining traction. Eventually, the product moved up Amazon’s sales charts, and the combination of a strong community reinforced by sales momentum created a virtuous circle that continues to this day.

There are others ways to build and leverage communities to sell connected kitchen products. ChefSteps created a community around high-quality video content before they launched their first hardware product in the Joule, while Anova started its community with crowdfunding campaigns and the company continues to water and feed the #anovafoodnerd community even after they were acquired by Electrolux.

Smart kitchen companies need to experiment with multiple business models

Smart kitchen product success often relies as much on business model experimentation as it does on cool technology. The Perfect Company is a good example of this since the company has not only created a successful line of low-cost connected scales like the Perfect Bake and Perfect Drink, but they’ve also actively worked with large appliance brands to create a separate line of licensing revenue for their technology. Last year the company announced a deal with Vitamix for their tech, while this year they announced a new deal that provided the technology foundation for the newest generation of the Nutribullet. The company has also created a new business line that creates insights around consumption metrics tied to their scales.

I don’t know if Teforia was actively looked at other models (the company pointed us to their statement on their website), but I would have been surprised if they hadn’t at least looked for licensing partners for their tea brewing tech.

Of course, it should be noted that often times a fate of a company is due to a number of factors beyond their control. The Juicero news no doubt added strong headwinds for Teforia as they searched for more funding and, if Juicero never happened, we might not be talking about Teforia.

Lastly, while every segment, including the smart kitchen, has their share of Juiceros or Teforias, anything more than a casual look around shows there is no shortage of companies innovating and succeeding in the future kitchen space.

 

High Pressure Success: How The Instant Pot Became A Kitchen Phenomenon

For many, the old school pressure cooker is a daunting metal pot that grandma heaved onto an oven burner to cook tough, fibrous ingredients like beans – an unwieldy home kitchen device that’s coming back in a big way thanks to a whole lot of high-tech reinvention. Fast forward 60 years, and young cooks can’t stop talking about how their new cooker handles.

Why all the interest in such an old school product? Two words: Instant Pot.

When it debuted a few years ago, the Instant Pot hit that sweet spot between trendy cooking and millennial convenience that a whole lot of people were looking for (and maybe a few very surprised marijuana enthusiasts). It’s popularity soon skyrocketed, and soon had its own Facebook groups and dozens of Instant Pot cookbooks. Nowadays you can find the Instant Pot near the top of Amazon’s top selling kitchen appliances and in brick and mortar everywhere.   

High Pressure Success

So how did the Instant Pot become such a phenomenon, especially among the younger chefs? We’ve boiled it down to five reasons that the Instant Pot is really resonating:  

  1. Quick, easy, affordable: Nowadays people cook for convenience. We like to cook several meals worth of food at once. We like to make food plans and then stop worrying about dinner. We also like cooking in our own kitchens more frequently than before. It’s no surprise that millennials have re-embraced the pressure cooker as a part of their kitchens. It’s super easy to use, a snap to clean up when you’re done, and you can easily plan and program cooked meals hours before you are ready to eat. It’s sort of like having a tiny secondary kitchen sitting on your counter, working out the details and getting meals ready while you can go out and work on your own details. And oh yeah: all this starting at $100.
  2. Smart and multifunction: Perhaps the biggest reason for the success of the Instant Pot is multifunction. It’s a virtual Swiss army knife with 14 different smart programs that offer slow cooking, pressure-cooking, and other methods to prepare specific foods like poultry, rice, chili, stews, and more. Everything is backed up by an array of sensors and an internal computer that keeps things from going off the rails – 10 different safety mechanisms keep you from making serious mistakes. In other words, it fits right into our dream kitchen.  It also has Bluetooth and an recipe app when you just don’t feel like hovering.
  3. Going fresh, going raw: The Instant Pot has benefitted from the trend towards healthy eating. As can be seen from a glance at any of the Instant Pot cookbooks, there’s a heavy focus on how to make health foods like yogurt (which has its own setting), sweet potatoes, whole grains, squash, and any number of paleo meals.
  4. Flexible and forgiving: While Instant Pot is fast and flexible, but also forgiving. This allows for experimentation for cooks new and old. Because all flavors remain intact and infused all foods in the pot, even a slight change in the recipe can make a big difference. That’s good news for today’s home chefs that want to perfect their techniques.
  5. Community and influencer marketing: From the very beginning, the company behind the Instant Pot, Double Insight, encouraged and  fostered online communities on Facebook, Pinterest and other social platforms. They also reached out to influencers to get them to write about the Instant Pot. Today you can find dozens of Instant Pot groups on Facebook where people share recipes and cooking tips, all of which raise awareness and bring more users into the Instant Pot community. The leading Instant Pot Facebook group, Instant Pot Community, has grown by 130 thousand in the last four months alone to nearly half a million members.

Of course, the Instant Pot isn’t the only game in town. Gourmia and Cuisinart have similar products that offer multifunction capabilities at the same price point. But none of these products have gone viral like the Instant Pot, so chances are it’s Instant Pot’s competitors who are feeling the pressure. 

Happy 50th Birthday, Microwave. Here’s Why You Won’t Make It To 100

Happy 50th birthday, microwave oven.

This year, the ubiquitous cooking box born out of an accidental discovery by a Ratheon military researcher has reached the half century mark, and as the last new cooking appliance category to become indispensable in nearly every American home, it’s certainly a milestone worth celebrating.

However, there are signs that the fast-cook workhorse will soon be on the decline as newer, better technologies make their way to market. On this 50 year celebration of the microwave, let’s consider how pervasive they’ve become and the many reasons the microwave oven will not be around for its hundredth birthday.

Surpassing Oven and Ranges

Ever since Amana introduced the first countertop unit back in 1967, consumers have embraced the convenience of the microwave. They helped usher in an era of fast-cook food like microwave popcorn and pizza, and as the microwave became cheap and plentiful in the 70s, they were soon everywhere.

Eventually the microwave rivaled traditional ovens and ranges in adoption, and today there are more microwaves sold quarterly than gas ranges.

Microwave Unit Shipments 2005-2017. Source: Statista

Still, for all its success, the microwave’s future is in doubt.  Perhaps the biggest reason is that while the microwave is fast and efficient, it’s actually pretty poor at its job. Not only do microwaves cook and reheat food unevenly, they are not good at cooking multiple items simultaneously.

And it’s these shortcomings that have opened the door for newer technologies such as…

Here Comes RF Cooking

RF cooking, which utilizes solid state (semiconductor) technology in place of the microwave’s old school technology, cooks with a much higher degree of precision.

Here’s what you can do with an RF cooking enabled oven:

  • Cook multiple foods at once within the same cooking chamber at different temperatures
  • Can sense when a food is done
  • Cook evenly across and through an entire piece of food rather than the uneven cooking results you get with a microwave

There are multiple companies with RF cooking technology products in development. One is Goji Food Solutions, which originally developed its RF cooking technology for medical applications as a way to heat tissue evenly. The company claims to have 147 issued patents in the area of RF solid state heating and another 76 pending. Other companies, such as NXP, have chip solutions that early system builders are bringing to market. Lastly, there is an industry consortium called the RF Energy Alliance that includes Whirlpool as a founding member that is working on standards for solid state RF technology.

Let’s Get Steamed

Tovala Oven

For many years, the combi oven has become the darling of chefs for its ability to combine multiple cooking modes (convection, steam, combination) into one and its ability to produce delicious food. However, despite its many advantages, the combi oven has been relegated mostly to the pro kitchen despite efforts by high end manufacturers such as Miele and Jenn-Air to bring to the home.

But that may change soon, as companies such as Anova and Tovala to bring low-cost counter top combi ovens to market for under $500.  The Tovala oven first sold to backers through a crowdfunding campaign and will be available for under $400 this year, while the Anova oven, which is expected to ship in mid-2018, will sell for under $500 when available.

The Instant Pot Generation: Slower Cooking Takes Hold

Lastly, while we may never see an end to prepackaged convenience food, it’s safe to say the heyday of the Hot Pocket is well past us. More and more Millennials are embracing slow cooking by using revamped old-school products with modern tech flourishes like the Instant Pot. This multifunction pressure cooker has become a phenomenon, garnering over 18 thousand reviews on Amazon to become the #1 overall product in the kitchen and dining category.

The Instant Pot

By adding multiple cooking types beyond just pressure cooking such as rice and yogurt mode as well as processor-driven programmable cook modes and automation, the Instant Pot has tapped into a generation of young cooks and wannabe cooks who love Swiss Army knife devices that can save space by combining multiple functions while also producing high quality results.  There are best-selling cookbooks, as well as dozens of websites and large and active Facebook and Reddit communities where enthusiastic Instant Pot users share recipes and cooking tips.

So, while it’s time to step back and wish the one of the most unlikely success stories of the modern kitchen a happy 50th birthday, it’s also a time to recognize that the microwave’s best days might be behind it. Newer and better technology technology, combined with changing consumer behavior, could mean we might be celebrating a new type of cooking appliance 50 years from now.

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