Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Juicero

Here’s Why the Keurig Model Is So Successful

Lately it seems like every time a new kitchen-related appliance appears on the scene, it’s deemed the new “Keurig for X” model: beer, wine, juice, smoothies, cocktails, and now even cookies. What is it about the idea of a plug-and-play model that appeals to both customers and budding businesses?

On the consumer side, people want something easy and intuitive to use (call it the Apple-ification of our world). Further, calling a new device the “Keurig for X” boils down the high-level technology to a digestible sound bite, reinforcing how easy the tech will be to use.

On the business side, these devices feel like they’re tailored for each individual’s tastes but in fact are pretty standardized and right out of the box. Even though they differ in vital ways, each has mastered the idea of recurring revenue, so important for Keurig’s success. For example, in 2010 it made $330 million by selling brewers but $800 million in K-Cup capsules. That makes this model less like a hardware company and more like a tech company (with constant software upgrades and the associated fees).
chipcookieoven

But in order to master success, companies need to keep the customers’ attention beyond replacement packs. “You have to understand, we’re a one-trick pony,” Keurig’s Dick Sweeney told Boston.com a few years go. “We have a brewer and a K-Cup. We don’t have a cellphone or a flat-screen TV or a microwave to fall back on if the brewer doesn’t make it.” In other words, there’s more opportunity when the devices are connected to smartphones and other tech, but in the long run, to stay ahead of the game, companies need to continue to innovate.

They also need to figure out how to get costs down. A $700 juicer works in a Silicon Valley office environment and is a great initial business model, but to expand that success and customer base to the home market, prices need to drop. An entry-level Keurig model will only set you back about $100, which means every home could have one.

Or maybe, just maybe, we need to stop creating gadgets that resemble the Keurig in any way and instead focus on involving people in the everyday process of growing and making food and drinks so that it’s fun and exciting rather than a chore to be simplified.

The News Show: Smart Cookie Ovens & Malibu Bay Breeze (Podcast)

Mike and Ashley are back talking about the latest in the world of the connected kitchen and foodtech.

To subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show in iTunes, go here. To download this episode, click here.

Stories discussed on the show include:

Appliance as a service 
Juicero’s new CEO
SideChef’s smart easy bake oven for cooking
Teforia’s $12 million infusion
Ashley’s experience with the Nima gluten sensor
Jenn-Air’s Nest integration
Ashley explains why Rhode Islanders are still drinking the Malibu Bay Breeze
A discussion of whether George Foreman actually invented a grill
Smart Kitchen Summit pictures are out!
SKS17 pre-registration has begun!

Enjoy!

Juicero’s Doug Evans On Why Now Was The Right Time To Step Down As CEO

Less than two weeks after he appeared on stage at the Smart Kitchen Summit, Juicero’s Doug Evans made a splash last week by announcing he was stepping down as the company’s CEO and handing the day to day reigns of his high profile connected juicer company to former Coca-Cola North America President Jeff Dunn. Evans will remain Chairman of the company and focus on building strategic relationships.

While the change seems somewhat abrupt, the overall shift makes sense if you look at Evans’ history.  As the former CEO of another juicing concern, Organic Avenue, Evans has showed he is long on vision for innovative new business ventures, but nowhere on his resume does he have experience scaling the type of operation that Juicero eventually needs to meet its ambitious growth plans.

When we asked him about the timing of the news, Evans pointed to the growing complexity of Juicero’s business and Dunn’s experience.

“We have built and launched a phenomenal product and simultaneously launched into both consumer and commercial, so it is the perfect time for an experienced operator to come help me scale this business,” said Evans. ‘With his deep experience running food and beverage businesses, Jeff fits the bill for what we need in every way, and I’m enthusiastic that he’s joining us.”

When you look at the challenges ahead for the juicing startup, at the top of the list is building out more production capacity for the company’s juice packs. Each pack is put together today in Los Angeles in a plant built by the company and then shipped to homes of Juicero customers. Today the company only offers the juice packs in four states – California, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico – and Evans has told me previously the company would need to add additional manufacturing capacity over time to manage a wider rollout.

Adding additional challenges is the time urgency around creating fresh juice packs. Each pack has approximately a 7 day lifespan, meaning distribution has to be well optimized to get from plant to presser in a short amount of time.

It’s clear the company has lots of work ahead as it looks to distribute its juice packs nationwide in the US and eventually overseas, so it makes sense Evans and the board (of which Dunn was a member) would see the need to bring on more expertise to help execute on the former CEO’s vision.

Below you can read Doug’s thoughts on Juicero’s future under Dunn below. You might also want to check out his recent appearance at the Smart Kitchen Summit to hear the back story of how he built the company.

~

How do you think Dunn’s experience at Coca Cola and later Campbells will be applied at Juicero?

Evans: Jeff brings a unique blend of big food brand and emerging food tech experience with him to Juicero, and I believe this unique perspective is what will be so valuable to us. On one hand, he has 30 years of experience managing and growing iconic brands. On the other, he’s passionate about the role technology and innovation can play in improving the fresh experience — and has invested in and advised some of the most promising food startups. As Juicero seeks to reinvent the fresh produce category as we know it, Jeff’s blended perspective will help us leverage the best of both worlds.

One of your new roles in the press release was focusing on strategic relationships. What does this mean and what are some examples (in abstract) of relationships you can see yourself driving?

Evans: The strategic relationships I’m focused on span everything from business partnerships in appliances, technology, food and in brand-relevant spaces, to potential customers in existing or new channels, to potential investors. As Juicero’s founder, I can uniquely tell Juicero’s story and explain our vision in a deep way.

As founder and the visionary behind Juicero, was the move to a professional CEO a sign that the company is moving into more of an execution phase?

Evans: We’ve executed aggressively since day one and will continue doing so. As Juicero expands its consumer consumer and commercial offerings, we need a leader like Jeff who has deep experience scaling fresh food and beverage businesses.

Connectivity Should Add Value, and Other Lessons We Can Learn From Juicero’s Business Model (VIDEO)

When Doug Evans decided to start a new company a few years ago, he asked himself one question. “What could I do that would have the biggest effect on human health?” he wondered. “The answer was juice.”

That might sound like hyperbole when talking about Juicero, the first connected-kitchen countertop cold-press juicer. We are talking about liquid kale, after all. But because of the company’s goals, functionality, and business model, which Evans discussed at the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle (watch the video below), it’s so much more. Here are three ways Juicero exemplifies a progressive mindset.

Make Something Useful

Unlike the big, bulky juicer that I have in my closet and never use, the Juicero is designed for people to use one to two times per day. It requires one touch to work and doesn’t need to be cleaned. Juicero provides ready-to-go packs of vegetables and fruit, delivered straight to your door.

“Is [a product] adding value to me as a consumer, or is it a liability because it means you have to maintain those services and consumers have to rely on those services?”

The company has set up an ecosystem that others can now use to maximize consumer health. “We have a cold supply chain, farm direct produce, IoT channel, appliances — You can use your imagination to think what else you can put through there that would make it easier for people to have other items that are made with fresh, ripe, raw, organic produce,” Evans said.

Connectivity Should Add Value

“Is [a product] adding value to me as a consumer, or is it a liability because it means you have to maintain those services and consumers have to rely on those services?” Richard Gunther of Universal Mind asked. These are essential questions in this wild west of connected-kitchen gadgets. In Juicero’s case, its app does everything from ordering automatically for enterprise accounts to telling home users that a pack in their refrigerator is about to expire. A scanner inside the juicer syncs with your app to tell you what you’re drinking, and if the pack is expired, the Juicero will not juice it. Talk about fresh.

Think Outside the Home

Evans is wisely following Keurig’s business model, focusing on restaurants, businesses, and other food service opportunities before moving to the end user market. The system only needs 10 square feet of space to work and doesn’t require someone to wash, peel, and juice produce as well as get rid of waste, making it an easy addition for restaurants and more.

Right now Juicero is only available in California and is available for purchase online. Watch the video to find out more!

2016 Smart Kitchen Summit: Day One Recap

A few people have mentioned to us how crazy it was to launch a brand new publication the same week we were hosting the second annual Smart Kitchen Summit. They were not wrong – but lucky for us, the reception for both has been great.

This year we added a pre-conference day to the Summit along with an opening reception and showcase of the newest startups in the space. The pre-conference workshops were a big hit – speakers like renowned kitchen designer talked the future of kitchen design and what it means to create an emotionally smart kitchen. Folks from Char-Broil, Dado Labs and Behmor talked about the work of building a product for the connected kitchen and Williams-Sonoma, b8ta and Anova dove into the challenges of taking products to retail.

pre-conf workshop

The workshop sessions ended with insight from the VC world about what’s compelling for funders and what they’re seeing in the smart kitchen / food tech startup space. Mark Valdez from Playground Global commented on the necessary elements for a winning product, saying:

“Change user behavior or adapt user behavior – these are the elements of category defining products.”

vc-panel

 

Startup Showcase

Welcoming the newest companies creating connected and smart food and kitchen devices, the SKS opening reception featured a Startup Showcase with fifteen finalists showing off their products. We saw Alchema, a unique home-brew cider maker alongside SproutsIO, a smart micro garden that allows a user to grow fresh produce conveniently right at home. From a cocktail maker, a temperature sensor and timer, a 3D food printer and a mobile gluten sensor, attendees were able to see some of the most exciting new products  in the kitchen ecosystem across cooking, beverages, health & wellness and other areas.

startup showcase

mikewolfopeningreception

Day Two of Smart Kitchen Summit starts today, with a full day of panels, workshops, keynotes and of course the Smart Kitchen Summit sponsor demo area where attendees will get to sample fresh juice from the folks at Juicero, enjoy yummy food from Hestan Cue’s smart cooking system and finish the day with PicoBrew’s best home brewed beer.

Stay tuned for the recap of Day Two!

Meet The Self-Cleaning Keurig For Smoothies

LivBlends was a perfect food startup for Silicon Valley – a no-mess, high tech, healthy snack solution that fit nicely into the cadre of employee perks offered by the area’s companies. A Y Combinator smoothie startup, LivBlends was founded in 2013 as a delivery-based business, selling containers of fresh smoothies to the chefs at popular tech companies like Twitter and Stripe. Some questioned the business model and overall sustainability of fresh smoothie delivery, but LivBlends was quietly working on a much bigger product – at the time, an unnamed device that made smoothies and cleaned itself.

Fast forward to 2016 – meet Replenish. The evolved, renamed company formerly known as LivBlends, Replenish is still a food startup, but instead of delivering smoothies, they’ve made a machine that blends them for you. The Replenish machine is a self-cleaning blender that takes prepackaged fruit and vegetable cups and produces ready-to-drink smoothies. Dubbed the “Keurig for smoothies,” the group is going after the commercial market and inviting businesses to place Replenish machines in their break rooms and cafeterias for free. Then, for a fee, customers can order pods in a variety of flavors and forms, including fruit, coffee, spice and vegetable based. According to TechCrunch, each pod costs between $3.50 and $5.00 depending on what’s in them.

In its early days, Replenish had to prove itself to the market and would set up pop up smoothie giveaways in office buildings. Eventually, the service got so popular, the company moved to subscription models with early clients like Uber. Now, Replenish hosts machines in some of the most popular tech employers in San Francisco and has set its sites on the broader B2B market in the U.S.

How big is the market for fresh, in-office smoothies? “Our first sweet spot is the small, medium size office of 10-100 people. There are about 1.1M offices in the U.S. in that range,” the company wrote in an early blog post. Using those numbers along with average cup revenue and daily penetration, Replenish estimates their market size at $8.2 billion. Beyond medium sized office-based companies, the startup hopes to go after other on-the-go places where the convenience of a smoothie is an easy sell, including gyms, hotels, malls and airports. The ingredients in the pods are healthy – the founders’ mission was to create a better alternative to the traditional office snack – and contain no added sugar and are often organic. The pods themselves are even good for the planet and 100% recyclable.

The creation of the Keurig has spawned all kinds of pod-based beverage companies, including food tech darling Juicero – or, the Keurig for fresh juice. Juicero has raised $70 million in startup funding so far, and unlike Replenish has gone after both the consumer and B2B market with a consumer kitchen model currently on sale. However, in an early blog post, the Replenish founders did add, “The second phase of the company is building a consumer machine that can sit on any kitchen counter.”

Replenish just completed a $3.8 million round of funding and is currently taking pre-orders from companies who want to be early adopters of the self-cleaning smoothie machines on their website.

Food Venture Firm Raises $42 Million To Advance A New Food System

PowerPlant Ventures, a year-old venture firm supporting plant-centric companies that deliver better and more sustainable nutrition announced the closing of a $42 million fund. Aimed at improving the global food system, the fund’s goal is to leverage the power of plants to support the next wave of better-for-you food companies and brands.

The firm was founded in 2015 by Mark Rampolla, founder of ZICO Coconut Water, which was acquired by Coca-Cola in 2013 along with Kevin Boylan and T.K. Pillan, co-founders of the largest vegetarian restaurant chain in the U.S. and Dan Beldy, former Managing Director of Steamboat Ventures, Disney’s VC arm. Powerplant Ventures plans to advance a portfolio of emerging companies across the intersection of food and technology and work with companies that are focused on impacting the global food system with transparency and sustainability.

Our Take: The food business right now is an investor’s dream: a multi-trillion dollar industry in the middle of some major disruptions. From food shortages and unsustainable food production methods to major innovation happening around food science and technology to generational demand for healthier foods to eat and easier and faster ways to eat them – there’s opportunity at every turn. PowerPlant Ventures wants to invest in companies that are tackling several of these core problems using plant-centric solutions.

Why plants? “Plant-based food companies are changing the world by providing better nutrition delivered in more sustainable and ethical ways,” commented Mark Rampolla, Co-Founder of Powerplant Ventures. The firm and its startup fund will look to tap into the demand created by millennials and younger generations for healthier, more transparent food sources and look for companies crafting efficient solutions that could help solve growing global food shortages. The fund’s initial investments include companies in both those categories, including organic online grocer Thrive Market and cold-press juicer startup Juicero. Food delivery might currently be netting the biggest slice of the food tech investment pie, but healthy and sustainable food investment is catching up.

Doug Evans Wants Everyone To Have Great Juice, So He Built a $700 Home Juicer

This interview is with Doug Evans, the Founder of Juicero. We interviewed Doug for the Smart Kitchen Show podcast. You can hear Doug’s interview here.

This Conversation Series interview is condensed and slightly edited for readability. You can read the full interview transcript here.

Michael Wolf: What is the Juicero?

Doug Evans: First it’s a software platform. The platform tracks the produce from the farm all the way through the Juicero press and provides visibility and transparency into the ingredients, into the source of the farm, into the nutrition, when it was created and when it expires. We built this software platform that connects to our financial planning system as well as into the cloud, into our website, and mobile and Android and iOS, so we have a full software system that actually comes with the Juicero press.

It’s also hardware, which is literally one part iPhone and one part Tesla roadster. It is a consumer device that has industrial strength and capability, all designed to extract the juice or the nectar from fresh, ripe, raw organic fruits and vegetables. Those fruits and vegetables actually come in the form of a pack, so we actually have in the Los Angeles region 110,000 square foot refrigerated LEED Gold-certified processing facility where we receive produce from the farm.

Michael Wolf: How do the packs work?

The vision is not to store inventory produce but to take the e-commerce orders and then reach out to our 14 farm partners, source the produce, have it transported to us on refrigerated trucks, and then inside our facility, we triple wash them, chop them, mix them, and put them into these packs. The packs have allowed design in engineering and their packaging a very unique QR code put on them, and that QR code can be read by an iPhone or an Android and the pack also gets read automatically by a scanner inside of the Juicero Press.

Michael Wolf: You created an entire fresh pressed juice value chain ecosystem all the way from sourcing to processing to the press. Was there any other way to do? You feel like you had to do this entire I guess delivery system and press.

Smart Kitchen Notes: Juicero & June Funding Show Growing Interest In Smart Kitchen

Even though the Smart Kitchen Summit is six months off, we’re getting very excited as we put together our early list of speakers and panels. Adding to the excitement is the growing interest the broader tech community is taking in the smart kitchen, as evidenced by the high-profile funding rounds for smart kitchen startups like Juicero and June, while lots of new and interesting startups are entering via Kickstarter and elsewhere.

Speaking of Juicero, the connected juicer startup came out of stealth last week, and we have the story of the company’s $700 cold-press home juicer and home subscription service. We also discuss SideChef’s attempt to integrate its cooking app with a variety of third-party devices to enable easy connected cooking experiences, and take a look at some of the first data points around Dash Button usage.

If you prefer to consume smart kitchen info in podcast form, you can hear a conversation with Kevin Yu of SideChef and David Rabie of Tovala in this episode of the Smart Kitchen Show, and you can hear Juicero founder Doug Evans discuss the vision behind the company here.

In Smart Kitchen Summit news, we have assembled have a great bunch of speakers for Smart Kitchen Summit 2016 (we’ll be announcing them soon), but we still have slots open. We’ve opened up a call for speakers, so for those who are passionate and feel they have something to say, let us know a little about you and what you would be interested in talking about.

Lastly, we’re six months out from the main event as of today, but early early bird ticket prices expire at the end of May. If you are interested in a ticket, newsletter subscribers can get an extra 5% discount through April.

Now onto the news and analysis.

Meet Juicero, The First Big Stealth Startup Of The Connected Kitchen Era

Back in the early days of the digital home, one secretive startup named Rearden Steel captured the imagination of many in space, quite a feat in a market with no shortage of buzz or aspiring entrepreneurs hoping capitalize on growing consumer interest in connected entertainment. Sure, the company’s Atlas Shrugged inspired name had something to do with the intrigue, but a bigger reason for the high level of interest in the company was that Rearden was to be the next act for Steve Perlman.

Perlman had built quite a name for himself as the founder of Internet to TV startup WebTV. Eventually WebTV was acquired by Microsoft, and not too longer after Perlman left to create Rearden Steel. For over a year people wondered what exactly he was up to, and when he eventually lifted the veil, it was clear Perlman hadn’t strayed far from his digital living room roots with Moxi, a company building connected entertainment devices and software. Read More

SideChef Wants To Set The Standard For The Smart Kitchen

Imagine you pull up a guided cooking app and choose a steak and roasted vegetable recipe. The app tells the oven to preheat for the veggies, and your connected scale prompts you to weigh out the recipe’s ingredients. Your sous vide cooker begins to heat the pot of water to the exact temp needed to cook the perfect sirloin. You use one app, and one platform to walk through the recipe and control your entire cooking experience. Sound futuristic? This is the kitchen SideChef hopes to create. Read More

Quick Hits:

Amazon Adds More Dash Button, But Are Consumers Using Them?

The Gist: Amazon added more products to the list of Dash Button partners, bringing the total number of available products to over a hundred. However, according to online shopping panel research company Slice Intelligence, about half of those who have buttons are using them.

Our Take: Amazon keeps adding new buttons, and why shouldn’t they? Brands love it and the press keeps writing about it, as the button is unique in that it’s the widely deployed IoT platform for brands and push-button shopping.  For brands, there’s really no downside by creating a button for your product, and I imagine Amazon is pretty overwhelmed with requests from CPG product managers.

slice intel

Source: Slice Intelligence

As far as data goes, Amazon never releases very good data to give you an idea of how any new initiative is doing, so I never take too much stock in data points such as “Dash orders are up 75%”.  So that makes the Slice Intelligence data interesting, which is the first real data around usage I’ve seen. While user panel data is never perfect, I think around 50% usage for Dash Buttons overall and the brand breakouts for top Buttons overall is not surprising to me and feels pretty accurate.  I’m interested to see how this data trends over time as we see the offering of Buttons expands and we see new product categories – including everything from condoms to beef jerky – roll out.

June and Juicero Funding Rounds Show Investor Interest in Smart Kitchen

The Gist: June, the smart countertop oven that sees your food and cooks it to perfection closed on a $22.5 million dollar Series A funding round last month. The round was led by Eclipse, a VC interested in companies combining hardware, software and data, and included new and previous investors and brings the total amount raised to date to $30 million. June also announced a delay in shipping, pushing back initial pre-order fulfillment from the summer until the holidays. This came a week before the Juicero news of a $70 million round.

Our Take:  The word in Silicon Valley is overall funding has been slowing down dramatically in the last few months, which makes these two high profile funding rounds for smart kitchen companies make me think that food tech and the connected kitchen is a particularly bright spot in an overall down market. This would be in line with what we saw in 2015, where overall food tech venture investing was up significantly, and we expect more and more food tech investors see opportunity in the kitchen as companies look to reinvent cooking.

Lowe’s / HoloLens partnership

The Gist: Lowe’s is bringing virtual reality to kitchen design

Our Take: We’ve seen connected technologies changing many elements of the kitchen including recipes and methods we use to guide our cooking and the devices and appliances we use to store and cook our food. But bringing HoloLens virtual reality into kitchen design is perhaps the first foray into changing how we build and create our kitchens in the future.

Smart Kitchen Summit News

Speaker Submission now open!

Are you passionate about the future of food and the kitchen? Are you a world class expert on a topic that would educate and amaze at Smart Kitchen Summit 2016? We want to hear from you! We are putting together an amazing roster and a great program and you might be part of it. Submit today!

That’s it for this week. Subscribe to our newsletter here if you haven’t already and make sure to take advantage of early early bird pricing for Smart Kitchen Summit. 

Smart Kitchen Notes: Juicero In Restaurant Biz, Keurig Gets Kold Feet

In This Edition…

  • The early success of Juicero in the pro market
  • Keurig kills the Kold
  • America’s Test Kitchen launching new food science site
  • PicoBrew ships the first Pico
  • Alchema connected cider maker brewing over at Hax
  • A podcast interview with Hestan Cue chief scientist Darren Vengroff about the furture of cooking

It seems like foodtech and the connected kitchen are gaining momentum, and nowhere is that more evident than in NYC in the first half of June. Not only will the Innit debut at Pirch SoHo next week (we’ll see you there!), the Big Apple is home to the Food Loves Tech event this week.

Around the rest of the country we also saw some interesting developments in kitchen and food tech, including the news that Keurig Green Mountain will kill the Keurig Kold, growing interest in the intersection between cooking and science from America’s Test Kitchen and, here in the NorthWest, PicoBrew just shipped their first Pico unit to a super backer (who wrote a review!).

That and we investigate how Juicero is making significant headway in the restaurant and business market, a new connected cider maker that’s incubating over at Hax, and we also tell you a little about our venue for Smart Kitchen Summit 2016.

Speaking of SKS16, you have just a little while longer for early bird ticket prices, so you might want to hurry on over and get your ticket today.

And oh yeah, we have a great podcast interview with Hestan Cue’s chief scientist, Darren Vengroff! We talk about the early days of the sous vide movement and the emergence of guided cooking. Make sure to check it out (and subscribe!).

The Juicero, A $700 Home Juicer, Already Finding A Home In The Pro Market

Like many, I initially got sticker shock when I saw the price of the Juicero, a pod-based connected cold-pressed juicing machine. At $700, the device is a bit spendy for all but the most dedicated juicers or those with lots of discretionary income.

The Juicero

The Juicero

Which is why I had lots of questions when I sat down with the company’s CEO, Doug Evans, when he visited Seattle this spring to discuss the home juicer.  A natural salesmen, he didn’t blink at the question and insisted he’d easily find a market for the product. I suspected he could be right, particularly since there was likely a market among upper-income home juicers who are tired of the mess and work it requires to get to athe single glass of juice. In many ways, home juicing is in the same primitive stage of expense and mess that the homebrew space has been in the last few decades prior to the arrival of new home brewing systems such as PicoBrew and Brewie. Read More

 

Podcast: The future of cooking with Darren Vengroff

This episode of the Smart Kitchen Show features the Chief Scientist for Hestan Cue, the division of cookware giant Meyer creating a next-generation smart cooking product called the Hestan Cue.

Darren was there in the early stages of sous vide, helping to run eGullet when Nathan Myhrvold and others started frequenting the site and forming a community that would provide the foundation of what would eventually become the modern sous vide market.

Darren and Mike discuss the early days of sous vide, the evolution of precision cooking, the emergence of a new appliance category called guided cooking systems and much more. If you’re interested in the future of cooking, this is a good episode to check out.

Keurig Kills The Kold

This week we learned that Keurig Green Mountain was discontinuing the Keurig Kold home soda machine. The company would be laying off 130 workers, mostly from the pod production side of the business.

Our Take: Like the more popular Keurig coffee machines – now, somewhat awkwardly, called Keurig Hot – the Keurig Kold used a pod-based system, only instead of coffee they made soft drinks. The problem with this idea is that unlike coffee, consumers haven’t been trained to pay high prices for homemade soda, particularly home soda that doesn’t taste as good as the pre-bottled stuff from Big Soda.

My feeling was the Keurig Kold would have done better if it positioned itself as a home pod-based cocktail machine, partly because consumers are used to paying more for cocktails, and most consumers don’t really know how to mix cocktails themselves all that well. Whether or nor the company takes another swing at cold drinks is unclear but, if they do, they might want to make the Keurig Kold the home bartender instead of the home soda fountain.

America’s Test Kitchen Wants to Bring Science to Cooking

Launched over two decades ago, America’s Test Kitchen has become the go-to resource for kitchen cooking instruction for home chefs. Now the group is looking to help take cooking to the next level, and bring new cooks into the mix, with the launch of the Cook’s Science website. The group recently announced its launch, led by executive editors Molly Birnbaum and Dan Souza and aim to add an element of narrative in order to tell stories about the intersection of science and food.

Our Take: This initiative to look at science and technology and examine how they are changing how we cook is part of a growing trend. With the emergence of Guiding Cooking Systems, meal delivery services, app-based cooking gadgets and hands-off appliance functionality, we continue to see efforts to reinvent the core concepts in cooking and appeal to the next generation of cooks in the kitchen. There is a gap in concentrated reporting around this and other related subjects, including food technology, smart kitchen, the convergence of science and tech with food and more. We hope this and other similar efforts will help tell interesting stories and spark a movement that drives the kitchen of the future.

PicoBrew Ships First Pico Unit To Superbacker

PicoBrew recently shipped its Pico unit off of the production line to one of its most ardent backers, Luke Murphy. Murphy, a long-time homebrewer based in North Bend, Washington, backed the first PicoBrew product in the Zymatic, and in a recent blog post discussed his experience with his first brew with the Pico.

From the post:

Set up was a breeze. Really fast and easy. Plug in, turn on, find and log into Wi-Fi, and then register the device on your PicoBrew account. That’s it. 

As for brew day, it’s just about as simple. 1) Fill up the water reservoir and the keg to the defined water level 2) Hook the keg up to the device 3)You pull out the step filter, load in the grain box and hop box, and load the step filter back in. 4) The Pico automatically recognizes the Pico Pack and loads the recipe into the machine. 5) Hit go (after giving a prompt if you want more or less hoppy and more or less ABV). This took less than two minutes.

Clean up was pretty spectacularly easy too. 1) unhook the keg 2) pull out the step filter and dump the grain and hop box into the compost 3) rinse the step filter, this is really easy as there is no residue from grain or hops 4) attached the ball lock adaptors to the line in and line out ball locks 5) have a pitcher of clean water to draw from and an empty pitcher to deposit to. The clean cycle took all of 3 minutes.

All in all, from start to finish, 2 hours and 20 minutes, only 5 minutes that needed a human.

Our Take: We think the Pico is probably one generation away from being a true mass market “Keurig for Beer”, the second generation brewer from PicoBrew will certainly be important in opening up the market beyond hard-core home brewers to casual early adopters and beer enthusiasts. While Murphy is definitely a super-early adopter, his post describes an important ease-of-use around the experience we think will be important as this market expands.

Alchema Home Cider Machine Brewing at Hax Accelerator

The Hax hardware accelerator is an interesting incubator for a variety of hardware startups, but one in particular recently caught our eye. TheAlchema home cider maker is just another example of a growing trend we’re seeing around connected drink makers, including the FirstBuild cold brew coffee maker and the Chime home chai maker.  Whether or not the addressable market is big enough for all of these devices is yet to be seen, but we’re encouraged to see innovation around home beverages. The Alchema is hitting Kickstarter in July.

If you haven’t subscribed to our newsletter, do so today to make sure you don’t miss out on getting this analysis in your inbox every week. And while you’re at it, make sure you get your tickets to the Smart Kitchen Summit soon to make sure you don’t miss your opportunity to meet the leaders of the connected kitchen revolution in October.