Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

June

June Oven Update Integrates Whole Foods, New UI with Expanded Instructions

June announced today that its eponymous smart oven will now automatically cook certain foods from Whole Foods in a move that evolves the appliance into more of an all around smart cooking platform.

Available today via an over-the-air-update, all June Ovens will now sport a Whole Foods icon on the touchscreen menu. At first there will be thirty available pre-set Cook Programs that will automatically cook various Whole Foods products including items from its 365 Everday line of frozen foods as well as some prepared fresh food like salmon with lemon thyme rub. In a phone interview, June Co-Founder and CEO, Matt Van Horn said that the June cameras will recognize some items, but if it doesn’t, users can navigate to the item via the June Whole Foods app.

Amazon’s Alexa Fund invested in June at the start of this year, and facilitated the meeting between the oven maker and Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods.

The partnership is actually quite interesting for a couple of reasons. First, through Whole Foods, June has created a food supply chain pipeline without having to build one. Other countertop appliances like the Tovala, Suvie and Brava are marrying their devices with food subscriptions. Yes, you don’t have to use their meals, but they are part of the value proposition. Consumer choice then, becomes more constrained, and those hardware companies then have to manage an entirely different line of business.

Through Whole Foods, June doesn’t need to worry about a food supply chain and can focus on its product only. June users have access to an entire grocery store (for the most part) for loads of flexibility for food that can be cooked with just a few screen taps. Because the June is connected, it will constantly be updated with new products making what you buy from Whole Foods easy to cook.

But for the June hardware itself, the addition of Whole Foods as an icon built into the June makes the oven more like an iPhone. More like a platform. It’s easy to see how June’s touchscreen will make room for additional partners over time.

Whole Foods isn’t the only new feature that’s part of the June software update. The company is also releasing a new UI that includes additional cooking information. My big complaint about the June was the dearth of instructions, which left me guessing sometimes about next steps (like how long to rest a steak). We got a sneak peek at the new June UI earlier this summer, and the update is now live.

Second-Gen June Oven Sells out (for Now)

He (or she) who hesitates is lost, especially if you were hoping to score the second-gen June Oven before school starts. According to the company’s website: “Batch 1” of the newest June is “SOLD OUT” and batch 2 won’t ship until late October.

The new version of the eponymous connected smart oven was attention-grabbing for the $599 price point ($499 during a launch special), which was far less than the $1,500 price tag for the first-gen oven. The June has a built-in HD camera to automatically identify and cook food you place in it, as well as a vast array of presets (64 just for bacon!) to make cooking hands-off, often with no pre-heating required.

What’s notable about the first batch selling out is that June just announced and started shipping their new oven a week ago, on August 7th. We first came across the sold out sign over the weekend, so the company hit that milestone in less than six days UPDATE: A June rep said the company sold out in two and a half days.

Now there are a few things to keep in mind here, of course. We don’t know how many units were in the first batch; it could be 20,000, or it could be 20. (It’s probably not 20.) But the drastic price reduction could have been just the thing wary consumers were waiting for before pulling the trigger.

The number of June Ovens sold could actually have a bigger overall impact than just better sales numbers for the company. If June can establish a large enough beachhead on consumer countertops now, that will leave less room (literally) for other countertop cooking appliances that haven’t hit the market yet.

If you have a June sitting on your counter, how likely are you to buy a Suvie or a Brava? I realize it’s a big market, and each of these appliance makers would probably tell you that competition is good — and they each have a unique technology/solution, and they are paired with their own food delivery service.

But in a world of finite countertop space, it kind of is a zero sum game. I ordered a June (thankfully before they sold out), and assuming it works as promised, I can’t see myself getting a second countertop oven.

We reached out to June to see if we could get any more details and will update this post as we hear more.

June Ships 2nd Gen Smart Oven, Reduces Price to $499

June, the company behind the eponymous countertop connected cooking oven, today announced the release of its second generation June Oven, which is available and shipping immediately for $499.

This is a pretty drastic drop in price for June, which debuted its first generation oven back in 2016 for a whopping $1,500. While expensive, the June was among the first wave of connected cooking devices that could use its HD camera to automatically identify food placed in it, as well as a host of presets to basically do all the cooking for you.

In a phone call with June CEO, Matt Van Horn, he likened the first generation June oven to the first generation Tesla roadster. That expensive electric car only sat two people, but helped pave the way for improved versions in later years. In much the same way, the first June helped clear a path for the much less expensive new one.

The new June features the same cooking area size and carbon fiber heating elements as the first gen oven, but now includes faster cooking and a streamlined touchscreen interface. June touts its oven as a seven-in-one appliance that can bake, toast, roast, slow cook, keep warm, reheat, broil and dehydrate.

One of the more versatile aspects of the June is its ability to add new functionality such as air frying and dehydrating via over the air updates (just like a Tesla!). It can also add new presets for specific foods like steamed corn, or add improve and expand upon existing presets. The June has 64 preset options just for bacon (crispy, chewy, thick-cut, etc.). Because both the first and second gen Junes are on the same software platform, when a new cook program is released, both ovens will get it (Van Horn says the company is working on a rice cooker function right now).

For those who are a little more hands-on with their meals, the new June can act like a regular oven, so you can manually set the temperature and the cook times however you like. The June is also Alexa-enabled for those who want to control their cooking appliance with their voice.

In addition to a new interface, the June also comes with an improved sealed cavity to keep more heat in the oven, this allows the new June to cook faster than its predecessor. Van Horn told us that cooking a salmon with the first gen June took 12 minutes to cook, in the second gen June, it takes just nine minutes — and there is no pre-heating required.

That’s right, no pre-heating. “People don’t like to pre-heat,” said Van Horn, “One hundred percent of our one-tap cook programs have no preheat.”

Van Horn actually demonstrated this for us during our video call by cooking a steak in real time. He just placed it on the rack and it went through its baking and broiling cycles and before we finished our call he had a completely cooked steak.

Internally, here at Spoon HQ we had been wondering what was up with June in recent months. We had noticed earlier in the year that the company was no longer taking orders for the first-gen and we feared the worst. While the first-gen was a powerful device, $1,500 for a second oven that takes up countertop space was cost-prohibitive for most people.

So now we know the company was working on this second-gen device. But the introduction of this new June comes at a very different time in the connected kitchen space. June is no longer the only countertop heating appliance to make cooking your meals easier.

Since the first June, rivals have come to market such as the Tovala, and the Suvie, with its four-zone cooking, is on the way. The June may have an edge over these devices, however, as it is more versatile, being able to cook anything easily, not just food from an accompanying subscription. And while the June’s carbon fiber heating elements are neat, they’re still fairly conventional as far as heating technology goes, while a raft of new ovens from Miele, Markov and Brava boast entirely new forms of heat application and are making their way to market.

June will have the jump on the competition as it is shipping today. You can order it directly from June’s web site. The actual retail price for the base model, which includes food thermometer, solid core aluminum cooking pan, roasting rack, wire shelf, crumb tray and companion app, will be $599, but is $499 for a limited time at launch. The Gourmet package, which includes everything in the base package plus an extended 2-year warranty, 3-year recipe subscription and set of 3 air baskets will be $799, or $699 for a limited time at launch.

Podcast: Designing Products For The Smart Kitchen With Matt Rolandson

What does a robot barista, smart oven and precision heated coffee cup all have in common?

They’re all technology-forward food products that product design firm Ammunition Group had a hand in creating.

I recently caught up with Matt Rolandson, a partner with Ammunition Group, to talk about designing new products for the smart kitchen and the future of food.

We’re kicking off our new season of Smart Kitchen Show, so make sure to subscribe in Apple podcasts and check out past shows here on The Spoon. You can listen to the show below, download it here or listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.

Brava Comes Out of Stealth, Introduces Oven That Cooks With Light

Today Brava, a smart kitchen startup based in Redwood City, California, announced their first product.

Called the Brava, the eponymously named oven can reach temperatures of 500 degrees within seconds and is supposed to use less energy during a cook session than a typical oven uses during preheating, all by cooking with high-intensity light technology that had previously been used in industrial applications like heating metal and semiconductors.

The Brava oven, the company says, is “the future of cooking.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the beginning of the story.

Cooking For Mom

The company had its origins six years ago when one of the cofounders, Dan Yue, was having a holiday dinner with his parents and watched as his mom spent most of her time preparing the meal in the kitchen.

At the time, Yue was transitioning from away from the social gaming industry, where he was the founding CEO of a company called Playdom.  Yue’s company was acquired by Disney and Yue had some time on his hands, so he started thinking about a new kind of oven that could help someone like his mom spend more time with her family and not have to bounce back and forth to the kitchen.

It was pretty early, and so the idea of a smart oven was new, but even back then Yue knew the oven should be more than smart. He thought it should also be better than traditional ovens by making cooking more convenient and approachable.

The idea stuck with Yue, but he soon became preoccupied with another new company he had started in the food space (meal kit company Green Chef), and it wasn’t long before he put the idea for a new oven on the back burner.

It would be a few years later before the idea got new momentum, which would come in the form of Yue’s former high school classmate Thomas Cheng. When Yue told Cheng about his idea, what became Brava almost seemed preordained since Cheng had been investigating new heating technologies. Before that, Cheng had also been working with smart home startup August helping to develop the company’s smart lock technology but was looking for a new challenge.

Yue was still busy with Green Chef, so it would be Cheng who would spend almost the entire next year in a garage working on developing early prototypes of what would become the Brava oven, experimenting with high-intensity lights, which up to that point had largely been used to heat metal.

It wasn’t long before these experiments led Cheng and Yue believe they were onto something. They thought they could build a “different kind of oven.”

A New Kind Of Oven

Back in the fall of 2016, Brava had just reeled in a $12 million funding round and boasted an all-start founder team that included August’s former head of hardware (Cheng), the founding CEO of Playdom (Yue) and an ex-Samsung/Disney executive named John Pleasants, who would become the company’s CEO.

But Brava was in stealth and that would pretty much be all the news the company revealed for the next two years. So when the company invited me down to visit their lab and see the top-secret project they’d been working on for the past couple years, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

I’d already known a few things going in:

Of course, I also knew Brava isn’t the first company interested in recreating cooking. It’d been an interesting few years in the world of food tech, and we’ve seen a variety of new and interesting approaches to rethinking the oven.

First, there was June, who made a smart oven with machine vision and software to create more precise cooking sessions. Then there was Tovala, who paired a smart steam oven with a food delivery service. Last fall Miele introduced the first consumer oven to use RF solid state technology, while this year I discovered a company called Markov had been issued a few patents to essentially make a smarter microwave. This year we also learned about Suvie, a four-chamber cooking robot that utilized a unique water routing technology to apply heat and steam food.

The lobby at Brava

So when I arrived at Brava’s nondescript office in Redwood City, I was eager to learn more about exactly how the company had developed an entirely new way to cook. I checked in the lobby and was soon greeted by company CEO John Pleasants, who led me into a large room where about a dozen or so busy workers, not surprisingly, looked like they were preparing to launch a new product in a couple of weeks.

We made our way into a conference room, and we started to talk about the product.

Pleasants told me about his early days with the company and how they’d started out working in a house (“it was very much like the show Silicon Valley”) until they moved into this office building. He gave me a presentation which featured an overview of the new oven, and he talked about who he thought was the target market (he sees two main groups to start: tech-forward consumers who love food and anyone who doesn’t think cooking at home is a viable option). We even ate some food cooked in the oven (crisped cheese) that was tasty.

Before long, we got up to look at the oven.

Brava prototypes

Here’s where I was introduced to Thomas Cheng, now the company’s CTO.

During those early days in the garage, Cheng worked on prototype after prototype, most of which I saw when he took me over to a wall where they had lined all of them up on a table.  There were probably ten or so prototypes, progressing from the first that looked something like a college science project to the final version that was pretty close to the final production version.

Cheng talked about those days working in the garage and how he experimented with the light-heating technology to figure out how to use it. The intensity of heat was so high (“I remember trying to simulate frying, and I blackened my fries in like two seconds”), so it would take some work to figure out how to apply it in a consumer oven.

Part of the answer would be advanced sensors.

“Heaters are kinda useless by themselves,” explained Cheng. He walked me over to another table with a variety of sensor probes on it, and he picked one up.

Brava probe sensor prototypes

“This sensor probe is made of platinum, manufactured in Switzerland and mounted in gold alloy,” said Cheng. “It’s kinda pricey, but it has the performance.”

Cheng explained that the oven needed this pricey probe in the final production model because the company’s heating technology needed a guidance system to apply the heat.

The sensor probe, combined with the oven’s internal camera, send information to the oven’s computational engine, which then guides how the heat should be applied in near real time.

“Part of the magic of Pure Light cooking is we can move from pan searing to direct energy transfer to bake within three seconds,” said Cheng. “It’s almost like having an oven, an induction skillet and a special light cooking device with a robot mediating between these things.”

It sounded neat, but I was still curious about how the light heating technology actually worked. This was when Cheng showed me his whiteboard.

Brava’s technology explained (kinda)

The whiteboard had a hand-drawn version of what is the visible spectrum. Cheng described how the Brava used different wavelengths along this spectrum from the Brava’s light bulbs to apply heat either indirectly to the food for baking emulation using longer wavelengths (“that’s how we do baking emulation like a toaster oven”) to smaller wavelengths where the photons hit the heating tray directly (“this is how we emulated induction skillet heating”).

Needless to say, it’s complicated. I asked Cheng if they’d written a white paper on the technology to explain it, and they said their patent applications went in depth into the tech (feel free to dive in).

Just as my brain reached the midway point between fried and scrambled as I tried to understand the explanation for manipulating light wavelengths for the purposes of cooking food, Cheng and Pleasants asked if I’d like to try some food. I quickly said yes.

Cooking With Light

They took me into the company’s test kitchen where I was introduced to the culinary team. They were standing a row of long metal tables that had Bravas on top and trays of food ready to go into the oven.

Cooking with the Brava

Pleasants explained the culinary team spends its days preparing different types of foods and concocting recipes that the Brava oven can use. Because the technology is completely different from traditional ovens, the culinary team had to with the hardware and software teams to create cooking parameters for each type of food and specific guided cooking recipes to help guide the users of the oven.

In short, I was now in the place where the company honed the raw power of light-powered cooking into a polished user experience.

Lindsay West, a chef by training who had previously worked with Sur La Table and now part of Brava’s culinary team, walked me through the features of the Brava and explained their development process. Another culinary member showed me how to start a cook and make sure the food is correctly placed on the tray.

The Brava user interface was fairly straightforward, a small color touchscreen display that allowed you to program a cook, as well as instructional videos to show you specifics for each recipe. In short, the Brava user interface is heavy on guided cooking.

You can see us walking through the interface and inserting food into the Brava in the video below:

Then they fed me.

The food was good. It included salmon (moist), steak (tasted like sous vide cooked) and even ice cream (it was at this moment I was ready to declare the Brava a miracle machine, at least until West told me they’d only roasted the strawberry topping for the ice cream).

A Brava cooked meal

Of course, any demo prepared with a chef in a room is going to be good, but from what I could tell the Brava cooked all the meals, did it quickly and they tasted delicious.

Building A Brand

By now we were near the end of my visit. We discussed things like business models and talked about the food delivery service they’ll be offering (with Chef’d) and how all their food will be locally sourced and high quality.

As we talked, I thought about how the company seemed like it had the potential to create a new type of cooking appliance. But at the same time, I knew that developing new companies in mature hardware markets is really difficult. Not only do you have to compete with bigger, more deep-pocketed incumbents, but you have to face other startups trying to do that same thing. Sonos, which most would agree reinvented how we think about home audio – is currently struggling to get an IPO off the ground after being beaten to a pulp by the Amazon Echo over the past couple years.

I asked Pleasants about why they thought they could be different and why they don’t just license their technology to a big appliance maker.

“We think we have something special and we think we can build a brand,” he said.

Maybe I was just still under the influence of a tasty lunch, but as Pleasants said it, it didn’t seem all that ridiculous. After all, microwave ovens sit in pretty much every home nowadays, something that wasn’t the case in the 1960s.  It had been a long time since the dawn of the microwave era and, at some point, new innovations will come along and get adopted.

Will that next-generation heating technology be cooking with light? Too soon to say.  I do think that at some point the company should license the technology to established brands like a Whirlpool or Electrolux and Pleasants seemed open to it … in time. But first, he thinks the company can build a brand.

“I think everyone in this company believes we can be a multi-billion dollar company that is changing the way we cook and eat at home,” he said.

If you want to hear Brava CEO John Pleasants tell the story of Brava, make sure to be at the Smart Kitchen Summit. 

Big Appliance Makers Start Cooking With Camera-Enabled Smart Ovens

When June launched its smart oven a couple years ago, the idea of having a camera inside to intelligently determine cooking parameters was pretty darn novel.

And ok sure, while having a CTO like Nikhil Bhogal – one of the chief contributors to much of the iPhone’s early imaging innovation – on the founder team made it all make sense in retrospect, I would still argue that an oven with machine vision was pretty far-fetched.

Now however, fast forward a couple of years and June is no longer the only game in town when it comes to machine-vision enabled consumer ovens. In fact, some of the kitchen’s bigger players are jumping on board with the idea of a camera-powered cooking cavity.

One company which recently joined June with its own camera-enabled oven was Hoover, a division of Italy’s Candy. The Vision, which Hoover announced last fall, has a built-in camera within the oven cavity as well as a touch display on the front which allows users to use apps like Spotify and view cooking centric content such as recipes and video-guided cooking instructions.

You can see the £1,499 appliance in action in a demo reel below:

And now, Electrolux is joining the camera-enabled oven party. Last month, Europe’s biggest appliance manufacturer announced a new oven with a camera inside, the CombiSteam Pro Smart. The oven, which has built-in sous vide capabilities, will first be available in Sweden and Norway.

Interestingly, this is not the first time that Electrolux has announced a camera-enabled oven. The company first floated the concept in 2014 and made an announcement about the AEG ProCombi Plus at IFA 2015, but from what I can tell this first product never shipped.

And while there’s been other crazy ideas like a camera-enabled air fryer (thanks Gourmia) over the past couple of years, the only company to really make a go of camera-powered consumer cooking is June.

Now, that’s about to change as big appliance makers look to leverage cameras to help the consumer do more in the kitchen.

Drop Kitchen Nabs $8 Million In Funding As Kitchen Tech Investment Heats Up

Drop Kitchen, a smart kitchen software startup based in Ireland and San Francisco, just received an $8 million Series A funding round led by Alsop Louie Partners. The round, which also included investments from Frontline, WI Harper and Irish celebrity chef Ross Lewis, brings the total investment in Drop to nearly $12 million.

According to Drop, the company plans to use the funds to “continue development of Drop’s KitchenOS platform for connected appliances in the smart kitchen of the future as well as to support the company’s partnerships with appliance manufacturers worldwide.”

The news is further indication the market for kitchen tech investments is heating up. Just yesterday we heard that June had received additional investment through Amazon’s Alexa fund, while a couple weeks ago The Spoon broke the news that Tovala had raised $9.2 million in Series A funding.

For Drop, the funding is a validation of the company’s new strategy, which marks a departure from the company’s initial focus on creating its own hardware (the Drop scale) and instead focusing on developing a software platform (Drop KitchenOS) for partners such as Bosch and GE.

As part of the announcement, Drop also indicated that well known venture capitalist Stewart Alsop, founder of Alsop Louie, will join the board.  The company also indicated that Chef Ross Lewis will help lend his expertise in developing the company’s platform and wants to utilize Drop technology in his own kitchen.

“I have always known that smart technologies were going to become incredibly important in the kitchen — so much so that I built my own digital recipe system for Chapter One’s kitchen,” Lewis told The Spoon. “When I saw Drop’s app, I knew it was the future and I wanted to integrate it into our kitchen here. I am working closely with the team to share my culinary expertise to guide all future developments, and look forward to adding recipes myself.”

I had a chance to ask Drop CEO Ben Harris a few questions about the news. You can see our interview and the full announcement below.

You indicated the capital will be for further expanding Drop’s kitchen OS and to support its appliance partners – can you be more specific on this? (hire headcount/developers, etc)?

Harris: We have been incredibly efficient with the small bit of capital we have brought in to date, by working both hard and smart. We intend to continue in that vein by investing in areas that we feel is most important to our partners and users.

There seems to be an increasing number of efforts to provide kitchen software platforms to big appliance makers. How is Drop different from other companies in terms of technology?

Harris: The kitchen is getting more and more complicated, not less. We have cooking food processors, pressure cookers, temperature probes, steaming ovens – and much more to come as more sensors are being added to the kitchen. Yet recipes (one of the most popular content medias online) know nothing about individual kitchens or their owners. They are therefore only shared with the lowest common denominator of functionality, leveraging the most basic and generic of appliances e.g “roast in an oven for X time at temperature Y”. Even non-connected kitchen appliances are capable of so much more. Drop’s responsive recipe format and technology adapts recipes to you and your kitchen – to allow those you and your appliances to shine. Through this adaptation, we ensure users get to fully benefit from the decades of research and development that manufacturers have been putting into their appliances, and through an incredibly intuitive experience. Resulting in an equivalent leap of turning a featureful WAP phone into an iPhone.

When will we see GE and Bosch products with Drop software?

Harris: Right now you can connect and control over 100 models of GEA, Bosch, Siemens and Neff ovens from the Drop Recipes App, with more to come.

Amazon announced the cooking capabilities built into the Alexa Smart Home API today – how is Drop working to build in new interfaces such as voice to enable people to cook in new ways?

Harris: Right now, all I can say is – we understand how important voice is for the kitchen.

The Drop Scale is still available for sale on Amazon – is Drop continuing to produce its own hardware?

Harris: The Drop Scale is simply a reference design as to how well hardware and software should integrate in the kitchen. We are 100% focused on the software platform right now, with our appliance partners building the hardware.

Any particular plans or ways in which Chef Lewis will be involved?

Harris: Yes – Ross is now involved in our development cycles. His culinary expertise is guiding our features and appliance integration/control strategies.

Drop Kitchen’s Full Announcement:

Smart Kitchen Company Drop Secures $8M in Funding Led by Alsop Louie Partners

San Francisco, CA and Dublin, Ireland (January 4, 2018) – Smart kitchen company Drop, today announced that it has closed $8 million in Series A venture financing, led by Alsop Louie Partners with participation from internal investors Frontline and WI Harper, and Ireland’s top chef, the Michelin-starred Ross Lewis. Drop also announced that Founder and lead Partner, Stewart Alsop has joined the company’s board of directors.

The money will be used for working capital to continue development of Drop’s KitchenOS platform for connected appliances in the smart kitchen of the future as well as to support the company’s partnerships with appliance manufacturers worldwide.

In 2017, Drop launched partnerships with Bosch and GE Appliances, making it possible for owners of connected ovens to control them straight from a recipe on the Drop platform. This coming year, the company will be announcing multiple new partnerships with the world’s largest appliance brands.

“This investment will allow us to accelerate our trajectory towards becoming the de facto platform for the smart kitchen that empowers anyone to make delicious food at home,” said Ben Harris, CEO and co-founder. “We found the perfect investor in Stewart Alsop and the team at Alsop Louie, who bring experience in growing global platforms such as Twitch, and Stewart himself has a wealth of indispensable experience, leading NEA’s investment in TiVo and sitting on Sonos’ board for seven years.”

“We invested in Drop Kitchen because Ben and his team have a real vision for how to transform the basic cultural experience of cooking and consuming food in the home, as well as making it more entertaining and engaging,” said Stewart Alsop, partner, Alsop Louie Partners. “We think Drop can make that experience magical by partnering with every consumer appliance maker around the world.”

Amazon Brings Cooking Capabilities To Alexa Smart Home Skill API

While over 50% of Echos end up in the kitchen, a lack of cooking-specific commands and categories within the popular voice assistant’s smart home API has meant few people actually prepare food with Alexa today.

But that could soon change.

That’s because today Amazon introduced built-in cooking controls for cooking appliances into the Alexa smart home API. Initially rolling out in microwaves from Whirlpool and others, the new cooking capabilities will let users define time and temperature parameters and will eventually use the Alexa voice interface to walk through cooking a meal.

From the Alexa developer blog:

Customers are increasingly using voice user interfaces (VUIs) as a hands-free way to manage their lives, and hands-free control is especially valuable when cooking. With the built-in cooking device controls in the Smart Home Skill API, you will make it easier for your customers to control your cloud-connected microwave. Instead of pressing multiple buttons to enable advanced microwave features, your customers can now use their voices. For example, a customer can say “Alexa, defrost three pounds of chicken” or “Alexa, microwave for 50 seconds on high.”

Initially, there are four new capability interfaces in the Smart Home Skill API – Alexa.Cooking, Alexa.Cooking.TimeController, Alexa.TimeHoldController, and Alexa.CookingPresetController. You can leverage these interfaces today for microwaves and for appliances that support preset cooking. The interfaces are designed for future extensibility as support for more cooking devices becomes available.

The new Alexa cooking capability understands food categories (for example, Alexa will take a food term from the Echo user – such as “sockeye salmon” – to categorize food in the “Fish” category) and cooking modes.  Appliance makers are able define their different cooking modes that are discoverable within the Alexa app, which means users will be able to access modes such as “defrost” in products such as Whirlpool’s line of connected microwaves. The new cooking capability from Amazon also allows appliance makers to make their presets libraries available through Alexa.

While Whirlpool’s expected to be the first to launch the new Alexa cooking capability for its connected microwaves (no exact date has been given), Amazon also announced Samsung, GE, Kenmore and LG are all working to bring the new Alexa cooking capability to market.

And finally, one last piece of news embedded in the announcement: The company has invested in June, high profile maker of the June connected oven, via the Alexa fund. This means, of course, you can expect the June oven to work with Alexa’s cooking capabilities sometime in 2018.

Enjoy the podcast and make sure to subscribe in Apple podcasts if you haven’t already.

Beyond The Countertop: June Introduces Intelligent Wall Oven For $1,995

June, the company behind the intelligent countertop convection oven, has introduced its first wall oven, the June Pro.

The June Pro, available for sale today on the company’s website for $1,995, comes in a 24″ wall model, with other sizes to be made available soon. In addition to being the company’s first wall oven, the June Pro will have the same features which made the original June stand out, such as in-oven HD camera, fast-heat carbon fiber heating elements, app control, and automatic software updates. The June Pro’s internal dimensions are the same as the countertop model, with a height of 12.8 inches, 19.6 inches wide, with a depth of 19 inches. The June Pro, which is expected to ship within 30 days, comes with “white glove” installation service.

I caught up with June’s CEO, Matt Van Horn, by phone to talk about their new product. When asked about the biggest difference between the June Pro and other ovens, he didn’t hesitate.

“The best feature of the June is it’s the first appliance to get better over time instead of worse,” said Van Horn. “All the learning we are able to collect from consumers that make it available to us, all that gets pushed into software updates.”

The June Pro wall oven

While some Wi-Fi capable ovens from other manufacturers such as GE have added new software features in the field such as Alexa compatibility, June takes it to another level. Van Horn pointed to a recent software update that June rolled out a few weeks ago that added slow cooker and warming drawer capability to existing June countertop ovens.

“We literally build new appliances in software,” said Van Horn. “We researched slow cookers and figured out how to do that with our current hardware.” The new slow cooker and warming drawer feature will be available in the wall ovens as well according to Van Horn.

One of the selling points of the June countertop oven was its ability to identify foods using an internal HD camera, which provided the necessary information for the oven to initiate an adaptive cooking program as well as monitor the progress of a cook.  When it first shipped last December, the original June could identify up to twenty-five food types, a number that was expected to increase over time.  While Van Horn wouldn’t tell me how many foods the original June could now identify over half a year after shipping, he did point to how continuous changes to the June OS allows the company to make improvements to the June’s adaptive cooking programs.

“One of the biggest complaints from customers was our bacon cook program,” said Van Horn.  When the company analyzed the data, they realized one of the most important variables when cooking bacon was the number of slices.  Cooking one slice of bacon required a completely different cook program than when cooking nine slices of bacon. Eventually, they adapted the program, so the oven automatically accounts for the number of slices (the internal camera will identify this) while also allowing for the user to input variables such as desired crispiness in the June app.

“We turned one a one sized fit all bacon program into 36 bacon programs,” said Van Horn.

One big positive with June’s new product is it is much more in line with pricing for its product category. While the first June oven had many features which set it apart from others in its general category, it was hard for many to accept a price point that was five to ten times more than other countertop convection ovens. At $1,995, the June Pro is a bit more pricey than some other 24″ wall ovens but doesn’t induce the same kind of sticker shock as the original June (which will, for now, remain priced at $1,495).

I’m also interested to see if and when the June Pro becomes available through brick and mortar retail. Like the June countertop oven, the June Pro will first only be available through the company’s website (the original June can now be bought through Amazon). While I realize going to brick and mortar retail would require the company to give up significant margin, I still think many consumers want to see how an oven looks built into a kitchen, even if that kitchen is a display unit in a Home Depot.

My biggest critique of the June Pro is its small internal dimensions. At the same exact size as the June countertop, it’s one cubic foot interior is much smaller inside than traditional 24″ ovens, which usually come with a five cubic foot cooking chamber. Consumers used to multiple oven racks or cooking tall items will probably pass on this device. Based on this, it will be interesting to see if future ovens offer a larger internal capacity.

Despite this, I think this is a big announcement for June. Simply having a built in oven product opens the company up to a whole new set of consumers.  Discriminating cooks who want access to high-end cooking features often available only in professional ovens that go for $10 thousand or more can now access some of those in an oven for two thousand bucks while not having to give up counter space to do it.

Hear June CTO Nikhil Bhogal speak at Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle on October 10-11, 2017. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets. 

June Adds Multiple Pairing As More Kitchen Devices Get Over The Air Updates

Last week, June announced via email it had added the ability to pair and control the June Oven from multiple iOS devices. Prior to the update, June users were limited to a single device to control their smart oven at any given time.

According to the company, the feature was accelerated due to demand from the June user community.

Nikhil Bhogal, CTO for June, told the Spoon “The community spoke and the ability to pair multiple phones or iPads to June quickly became the top requested feature. We had slated to launch this during the second half of 2017 because it touches JuneOS, June Cloud and the companion app. After getting the feedback in early January we quickly prioritized the feature.”

One of the promises of connectivity is the ability to improve the products over time, and companies like June and PicoBrew are now iterating and adding features using remote upgrades, while large companies such as GE are also adding features such as Alexa voice control to their connected devices.

But these companies are more the exception than the rule in early 2017, as it’s still early days for the kitchen appliance remote upgrade. The ability to add features via software update is still largely a foreign concept for most consumers. However, as devices become more expected, consumers will come to expect an ever-improving consumer experience.

June Gets A Brutal Review. Here’s What The Author Got Right And Wrong

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, whenever a company wanted to get early buzz for a product, they’d send it over to Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal to give it a test run.

Of course, doing so always came with a certain amount of risk since Walt always tells it as it is, and if your product didn’t meet with his stringent requirements for useability and utility, Walt’s review could be the death knell for a product. Conversely, if he liked it, more often than not it would catapult a product into the must have category and holiday buy lists.

Nowadays with the proliferation of blogs and technology journalists, there are a thousand Walt Mossbergs (including Walt Mossberg), and while the technology reviewer may not have quite as much sway in the era of crowdsourced reviews on sites like Amazon, a critical review of a new product can still be painful for a company trying to convince consumers to buy its product.

Which brings us to the recent review of the June Intelligent Oven over at FastCo Design, a popular site which often has thoughtful reviews on new products. The review’s headline is the cringe-inducing (if you’re June, at least) “This $1,500 Toaster Oven Is Everything That’s Wrong With Silicon Valley Design”.

Ouch.

Of course, there were more positive reviews, but the review by Mark Wilson hits the June on a number of fronts, including some apparent bugs – “the June was texting messages like “NOTIFCATION_ETA_PESSIMISTIC” – as well as not performing as promised when it came to things like cook time.

But there are also bigger critiques in the piece, including Wilson’s belief that the June has overpromised on the simplicity of cooking with the device:

“‘[The] salmon’s incredible,” Van Horn had bragged earlier. Which seemed a stretch to me: “The salmon’s incredible” is what a waiter tells you when somebody at your table can’t eat gluten. Objectively, the fish was cooked to temperature and still moist enough—which you could have done in any oven, really.’

This salmon had become more distracting to babysit than if I’d just cooked it on my own. This salmon had become a metaphor for Silicon Valley itself. Automated yet distracting. Boastful yet mediocre. Confident yet wrong. Most of all, the June is a product built less for you, the user, and more for its own ever-impending perfection as a platform. When you cook salmon wrong, you learn about cooking it right.”

And perhaps the biggest problem Wilson had with the June was the very fact it was trying to automate the process of cooking itself.

“June is taking something important away from the cooking process: the home cook’s ability to observe and learn. The sizzle of a steak on a pan will tell you if it’s hot enough. The smell will tell you when it starts to brown. These are soft skills that we gain through practice over time. June eliminates this self-education. Instead of teaching ourselves to cook, we’re teaching a machine to cook. And while that might make a product more valuable in the long term for a greater number of users, it’s inherently less valuable to us as individuals, if for no other reason than that even in the best-case scenarios of machine learning, we all have individual tastes. And what averages out across millions of people may end up tasting pretty . . . average.”

So what are we to take from all of this? Are Wilson’s points that technology can get in the way of cooking and make things more complicated, and that by using the June a home cook is essentially foregoing the process of learning and the multisensory experience of cooking valid?

Yes, to a point. While we should note this is just one review, the reality is that the June Oven is an early attempt at using advanced technology to improve the experience cooking by making the process easier.

But what the reviewer misses in his despair about how automation will sacrifice the craft and experience of cooking is that there are many different types of consumers and cooks, including some who would gladly forego the complexity and effort required to get a tasty meal on the table.

And while June’s first attempt at using advanced image recognition and automated cooking may not yet be perfect, it’s an interesting first try that will improve over time. As Nikhil Bhogal, the CTO of June, said at the Smart Kitchen Summit, “Part of the approach (of building a new product) should be building with headroom to grow.”

In other words, one advantage a product like June has is an ability to improve in the field. Other less technologically advanced products are what they are; once they land in a consumer’s home, their problems likely won’t go away.

Of course, Wilson is not reviewing a future product, he’s reviewing the current June Oven, a $1,500 countertop oven with some useability issues and one that comes with lots of promises.  He’s completely right to review the product as it performs today, warts and all.

But I would also suggest before he dismisses the idea of advanced technology like automation in the kitchen, he try products like the Joule from ChefSteps or the Hestan Cue. These products are simpler than the June (and also much lower priced, which helps), but they also do what good tools should do: add simplicity while also elevating a person’s skills. Both use light guidance mechanisms in the form of helpful videos and sensory awareness to make cooking easier, but also only take partial control of the process and allow the home chef to not only experience the act of cooking, but also learn while they are doing it.

And he might also try a Thermomix, the closest thing I’ve used to a really useful “cooking robot” (even though they wouldn’t describe it that way), in that it can almost fully automate a meal like risotto or pasta for you. There’s a reason why the Thermomix has sold millions of its generation 5 multicooker in Europe and that’s because some of us, on some nights, just want someone – or some thing – to make us a tasty meal.

And I imagine a good meal is something even cantankerous product reviewers like Walt Mossberg may even enjoy from time to time.

2017 Is Going To Be A Year Of Crazy Innovation For The Oven

When you ask people what device in the home is ripe for a technology refresh, the oven usually isn’t at the top of the list.  That’s because most of us use our ovens almost every day, without complaint, for years and decades at a time.

Why change something that works so well?

Except that it doesn’t, and the only reason so many of us think things are fine is, unlike with phones or cars, we don’t know any better since we aren’t regularly exposed to any noticeable innovation in those boring cooking boxes sitting in our kitchen.

But things are changing. Just as Nest showed us a few years ago it’s possible to rethink those white boxes in our homes like thermostats, a slew of companies are now forcing us to reconsider the oven.

June was the perhaps the first, announcing their June Intelligent last year. Today they announced their oven will ship next month, which could mark the beginning of a new wave of innovation in the oven market over the next decade.  Below are some of the technologies which will change the way we think about the lowly oven in coming years:

Precision Cooking: One of the early success stories in the smart kitchen has been sous vide cookers, mostly because of the ability to apply precision cooking techniques to get chef-like results. The thing is, you can do that in an oven too, and that’s exactly what Anova plans to do with its new precision oven.  Others like June and Jenn-Air are thinking the same thing, which should address one of the biggest problems with modern day ovens: wide variability in heating from brand to brand and model to model.  Precision also means optimized cooking depending on the food itself. The reality is 350 degrees in one oven means a very different thing in another oven, and using the same parameters to cook in your Jenn-Air could give you very different results than cooking something in your Samsung. With more precise cooking and temperature control, both appliance makers and food brands can create very tailored instructions for the food type, quantity and for the cooking device itself.

Guided Cooking: One of the most interesting trends in the smart kitchen this year was the explosion of interest in guided cooking. While companies like Hestan and Cuciniale created countertop guided cooking systems that use a pan and induction heating surface, others like Innit want to apply a similar fusion of app-guidance, sensors, and precision cooking to create guided cooking experiences with bigger built-in appliances.  What could make things even more interesting is Innit could extend the guided cooking experience further back towards prep and storage, since their platform also will be used in refrigerators and pantry systems.

AI/Machine Learning: One of the most fertile fields in machine image recognition has been food. Google and a bevy of startups have invested in research to enable a better understanding of food through image recognition, while June and Innit are working specifically to apply AI within the cooking experience itself. In addition to image recognition, the ability of devices to learn and optimize their behavior based on past cooking behavior, user preferences and contextual understanding of the consumer’s needs will lead to significant advances in intelligent cooking systems in the coming years.

New Heating Technologies: One of the biggest changes coming to ovens over the next few years will be the way in which they heat food.  Traditional ovens use electric or gas heating, and in the last few decades, convection heating has become a standard feature on most consumer ovens. But soon we will see a variety of new and interesting heating methods, ranging from the new RF cooking technology from NXP to the steam cooking included in ovens from Anova and Tovala.

Interfaces: One of the biggest changes in ovens will simply be the way in which we interact with them. The old way of programming a cook through a number of often confusing buttons was ripe for a refresh, and most of the new entrants in this space are creating compelling new industrial designs and interfaces. Whether it’s the physical dial on the June or Amazon’s Alexa, we can soon expect that we will be interacting – and talking – to our ovens in vastly different ways in the future.