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KBIS

January 23, 2020

Meet the Natufia Kitchen Garden, the $13,000 Home Garden System from Estonia

After spending almost an entire week in Las Vegas earlier this month for CES, I reluctantly returned to the desert on Monday for the Kitchen and Bath Show.

And just like I did at the big consumer tech show, I found an oasis inside the convention center in the form of an indoor gardening system. Only this time the leafy greens were not featured as part of a proof-of-concept from the likes of GE, LG or Samsung, but instead inside of a product already on the market from a scrappy startup out of Estonia.

The company is Natufia Labs, a venture backed startup, and the product is the Natufia Kitchen Garden, a $13 thousand home garden that has been shipping in Europe for a year and has just landed in the U.S.

I stopped by Natufia’s booth at KBIS where the company’s CEO Gregory Lu gave me a quick video tour of the Kitchen Garden. As you can see in the video, the product is a self-contained cabinet that creates an optimal recipe of water, lighting and nutrients to help grow, according to Lu, enough output to product “one to two salads per day.”

Water and nutrients are dispensed automatically through the central monitoring system that is controlled via a touchscreen display in the bottom cabinet. Alongside the control system in the lower cabinet is a seedling chamber where the user puts seeds for 10 days in a small seedpod unit to allow them to germinate. From there, the seedlings are transferred into one of the ceramic looking pots in the upper glass chamber where they will grow and eventually be harvested.

Like the Samsung BeSpoke system, I liked the look and idea of a fully contained standup cabinet gardening system with the Natufia. It looked good and I could envision this type of garden system finding a home within my kitchen some day.

However, I have to admit the $13,000 price tag gave me pause. I wondered if I’d be willing to pay that much to add a home grow system, particularly one that — like most of these systems — is largely restricted to growing leafy greens and for the most part does not produce non-leafy green vegetables like cucumbers or ground vegetables like potatoes or onions.

In the end, these types of systems are a lifestyle and design choice that will be made by the home owner. If you’re buying a new house or committing $80,000 or more to a kitchen remodel, adding in one of these systems makes sense if you love the idea of shortening the distance between farm and fork to just a few meters, even if it’s for only a partial list of the items that go in your salad.

There’s also no doubt that these systems make a visual statement, standing out from the usual wall of metal or wood typically found in high-end kitchens.

The Natufia Kitchen Garden is available in the U.S. through select resellers. You can see the guided tour of the Natufia Kitchen Garden below in the video.

A Look at the Natufia Home Kitchen Garden

January 8, 2018

Hestan Introduces Cue Enabled Cooktop & Previews Precision Gas Cooking

Hestan Smart Cooking, the company behind the Hestan Cue guided cooking system, is introducing the first Hestan Cue powered cooktop this week at the Kitchen and Bath Show (KBIS) in Orlando, Florida. The new cooktop will be part of a new residential lineup from Hestan Smart Cooking’s parent company under the Hestan Indoor brand. The company also announced it would preview Cue-powered gas cooking in Orlando.

As you would expect, the new induction cooktop will work with the company’s Bluetooth enabled cookware and eliminate the need for a countertop induction burner. Long term, this move is a logical evolution from the company’s first generation product, which required the consumer to buy both a countertop burner and bluetooth-pan in a box, to one where the company’s bluetooth cookware will eventually work with a home’s built-in appliances.

In fact, when you step back and read this announcement with the broader Hestan and Meyer portfolio in mind, a bigger platform vision comes into focus:

  • Hestan, which has traditionally been the professional appliance brand within the Meyer stable of products, is now moving into high-end residential appliances.
  • The Hestan Cue moves from being a stand-alone product to a platform that powers built-in appliances. In talking to Christoph Milz, the managing director for Hestan Smart Cooking, this is only the first “Cue-powered” appliance. They expect to have more announcements this year, including with third-party appliance makers.
  • The Hestan brands are all part of Meyer, one of the world’s largest cookware companies.  If, as I assume, Stanley Cheng and company see a future where cookware and appliances connect and are powered by software to help consumers cook and make better food, it’s clear they are assembling the pieces to make this future a reality.
  • Working with gas broadens the appeal of the Cue platform and makes it potentially much more relevant in the US market, where gas still reigns. If the company’s technology can be built into gas stoves, that’s a nearly 4 million unit annual market in the US alone into which they can tap.

The move into gas also brings the story of the Hestan Cue full circle. The original team and technology behind the Hestan Cue began as a Seattle based startup named Meld, which had launched a smart retrofit stove knob that allowed users to control gas or electric stove with an app. When Meld was acquired, the company announced it would not ship the knob (they quickly refunded their Kickstarter backers). It was disappointing news at the time since the idea of precision-controlled gas cooking was pretty exciting. But now, it looks like precision gas cooking is coming, only as part of a broader platform-centric approach rather than the original retrofit knob concept.

When I asked Milz about what his company is doing is different from others in an increasingly competitive market for smart cooking platforms, one thing he pointed to the cookware. While a combination of content, software, and hardware is critical, Milz said that mastering the smart cookware piece is something no one else has done.

But, said Milz, the biggest differentiator, is their focus on the end result.

“We’ve always focused and communicated that we’ve built Cue from the ground up to guarantee a high-quality result on the plate. This is the biggest differentiator.”

December 11, 2017

Delta Faucet Will Soon Let You Pour Water With Your Voice (Exclusive)

Want to pour yourself a glass of water with your voice? It looks like you soon can with a Delta Faucet.

The Spoon recently discovered a new Alexa skill from Delta Faucet company that will allow you to do such things are pour a glass of water or fill your coffee machine simply by asking Alexa. The skill looks like it will work with forthcoming voice-enabled Delta Faucet product or products enabled by what the faucet maker is calling its “voice module” and the Delta voice web app.

The only problem is if you want to buy the Delta voice module or register for your Delta voice account with the web app, neither of those exist today. In fact, the only clue to Delta’s voice-enabled faucet – at least as of now – is the Alexa skill called Delta. My guess is the company is preparing to launch a new voice-enabled line of faucets in a few weeks at CES or the upcoming Kitchen and Bath Show.

There’s also a good chance these faucets will connect to Wi-Fi. As far as I can tell, Delta doesn’t seem to have any Wi-Fi enabled faucets on the market today (but they do have a Wi-Fi leak detector), so it’s quite possible the mysterious ‘voice module’ is also a ‘Wi-Fi module’.

So far the Delta Alexa skill has one review, which again is strange because Delta hasn’t yet released its voice module or voice web app. Chances are the review, which calls the Delta skill “Easy Peasy”, was written by a Delta employee familiar with the initiative.

I don’t know about you, but I think using my voice to pour water is one of the cooler and more practical uses for Alexa in the home. I could imagine scenarios where my hands are full or simply messy, and using my voice to turn the water on or off with my voice just makes sense. I guess I’ll just have to wait until Delta actually releases the product that works with the skill before I get my hands on one.

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