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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Markov

‘Office-Food-as-a-Service’ Startup Level Discontinues Hot Pantry Service

The Spoon has learned this week that Level (formerly known as Markov), a startup that offers a managed office-food-as-a-service offering combining both food delivery and an AI-powered smart oven, has started to pull out of customer installations.

According to our sources, Level employees have picked up the Level oven and fridge that combine to make the Level Hot Pantry service from customer locations this week, telling customers that things “haven’t worked out.”

I reached out to the company and was able to confirm the news.

“We are going to discontinue the Level Hot Pantry program,” cofounder and CTO Arvind Pereira told me via email. “We are working on a transaction and will have more to share in the future.”

Level is (or was) one of a number of different startups trying to rethink and innovate around the office meal. Other startups combining new cooking tech alongside food delivery include Genie and Kitchenmate, while a number of others like Byte and Chowbotics are offering up different spins on fresh food delivery and assembly.

Pereira indicated they are looking at selling the Hot Pantry offering (which presumably includes the food delivery business and the smart oven), but it’s yet to be determined if the company itself will continue as a going concern.

We will update this story as we learn more…

Video: Watch Markov’s Oven Cook at Two Different Temperatures at the Same Time

We like to point out cool things here at The Spoon. Things like this video Markov posted awhile back, showing how it’s Level oven can “steer” heat, essentially cooking two different things at two different temperatures at the same time.

For the uninitiated, the Markov Level oven is among a wave of new, connected countertop cooking appliances that use computer vision and AI for more precise cooking. The Level also has two patents that cover its use of infrared to help evenly apply heat as well as “reflective energy steering,” which helps it precisely apply RF energy in the cooking chamber.

You can see this steering in action in the video Markov posted at the end of January. In it, different cups of colored water are placed in the cavity; one is brought to a boil while the other is not. The video goes through a couple different permutations of this experiment with different placements and water volumes, but it illustrates how the Level is able to cook different foods (like proteins and vegetables) at the same time.

LEVEL oven – differential heating demo from Arvind Pereira on Vimeo.

This multi-zone cooking is part of the pitch Markov is making as it tries to break into the corporate catering space. Also in January, Markov launched the Level Pantry service that combines a Level oven with a special Level food service and fridge. The idea is that hungry office workers can mix and match different proteins, carbs and veggies and cook them all at once. Though definitely cool technology, The Spoon’s Mike Wolf wasn’t sure that the bells and precisely steered whistles would be enough to convince an office manager to invest in anything other than the reliable ole office microwave.

I’m interested in seeing the Markov’s heat “steering” in action. I tried the Brava oven, another in the cohort of newfangled cooking appliances, which uses light to cook. It too offers a multi-zone cooking experience, though I found placement of food within those zones to be imprecise and borderline unreliable.

With its move to corporate offices, Markov’s go-to market strategy is a little different than the Brava or the June. But as the connected oven space heats up, we’ll be writing plenty of stories about all of them (and if you work there, be sure to tell us when you have a cool video up).

Newsletter: Markov’s “Google Cafeteria in a Box”, Disrupting Office Food & Future of Beer

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Office Food is Hot

If you’ve spent any time inside a cubicle farm during your career, you know that office food can often be uninspiring. You forget to pack a lunch and chances are unhealthy options are all you have to choose from when it comes to the break room vending machine.

Luckily for us worker bees, the office lunch is having a moment, in large part thanks to the influence of Google. Google’s food service, under the stewardship of Michiel Bakker (who spoke at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit), has become the industry gold standard by showing how instrumental food is in keeping workers happy and productive.

Most companies, however, don’t have the resources of a Google, which means that emulating the search giant’s food program is often easier said than done. That’s why one startup named Markov has launched a new food service offering called Hot Pantry that they are basically pitching as a “Google cafeteria in a box.”

Readers of the Spoon may associate Markov with their Level smart oven, a cooking appliance that uses patented RF beam steering technology to cook food at different heat levels within the cooking chamber. Markov is still primarily a cooking technology company — the Hot Pantry service comes with their smart oven, after all — but the startup is now partnering up with food companies to stock the fridges (also provided by Markov) of mid-sized companies who do not have similar resources to invest in their food program.

I started writing about the growing momentum in startup activity behind new food options for the office a couple of years ago, and this year it seems like we’ve seen even more momentum for this space. Markov is just the latest startup to jump in, and Chris Albrecht this week wrote about a handful of others offering new takes of office food.

I’m excited about this newfound interest in feeding people well at work. So many of us spend a huge chunk of our lives sitting behind a desk, it makes sense for us — and our employers — to be considerate about how we are feeding ourselves.

Photo: Michael Wolf, in Pike Brewing Co’s Beer Museum

AI’s Impact on Food is Growing

The Level oven is just one example of how artificial intelligence — or AI — is becoming more important in food; a trend that shows no indication of slowing down.

Another example of this trend is highlighted in a story this week by Chris which looks at how food industry employers in China are implementing big-brother-esque AI systems to monitor kitchen workers for unsanitary conditions.

From the piece: Installed cameras will monitor the kitchen, and if they catch unsanitary behaviors, as analyzed by the AI, an alert is sent to the manager. The system will also be hooked into equipment like fridges to detect any anomalies that might cause problems.

China’s been perhaps the most aggressive in employing AI in surveillance systems with technology such as facial recognition, so it’s not all that surprising employers would embrace the technology as a way to squeeze more productivity out of workers. The march forward of AI and automation is inevitable in service industry jobs, but it’s also worth noting there’s a growing discomfort among workers and society at large about this technology. Bottom line: the societal reaction to cutting edge technology and its impact on us as both employees and consumers will become as much the story as the technologies — and their capabilities — themselves.

Speaking of automation, it was a topic that came up during a meetup we held this week in one of Seattle’s most historic craft brewpubs, where I led a conversation on one of my favorite subjects: beer. On the panel Annie Johnson, onetime Homebrewer of the Year and master brewer for PicoBrew, said that she believed that automation led to better beer. “To get good beer, you need automation,” she said.

The meetup also spanned other topics, including the big impact millennials are having on the beer market. This generation’s growing influence on all things food has led to a trend that Erin James of Sip Northwest calls the “adulting” of beverages that are traditionally non-alcoholic, such as kombucha and sparkling water.

From Catherine Lamb’s wrapup: According to James, in the millennial demographic, beer has surpassed spirits as the most popular alcoholic beverage. However, this audience is not just driven by taste. “They’re also very value-driven,” she explained. And they value both ingredient sources (local is king), opt for local craft breweries and prefer cans to bottles (for environmental reasons).

We had lots of other great stories this week, so make sure to check them out below.

Also, if you haven’t heard about our new one-day event on food robotics and automation, Articulate, you will want to check out our site. We’ve added some great new speakers, including person leading the charge in robotics for Albertsons, Narayan Iyengar, and Sony’s chief robotics engineer, Masahiro Fujita. Early Bird tickets for this April 16th San Francisco event are on sale now, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Finally, our CBD slack chat went so well, we’re going to do it again. We will be announcing our new one next week, so make sure to sign up for our food tech slack if you want to participate in the next one!

Have a great rest of your week,
Mike

In the 01/31/2019 edition:
Robots + Connected Kitchen Appliances Can Help Diabetics Manage Diets
Anyone with kids knows that getting them to eat healthy can be a challenge. That challenge is compounded if your child has a disease like diabetes, where their diets must be strictly managed. That’s where Belgium-based IDLab thinks robots can help, especially for older kids who are a little more independent. In the video below, […]

Markov Rolls Out Hot Pantry Food Service, A ‘Google Cafeteria’ in a Box
Let’s face it: Not every company is a Google when it comes to profitability, technology prowess or lunch. Wait, lunch? Yep. Google’s food program has become the gold standard in the tech world and beyond for its healthy choices and focus on sustainability, and has played an outsized role over the past decade in raising […]

Domino’s Just Made It Even Easier to Deliver Pizza — in Saudi Arabia
If you order Domino’s pizza, your days of relaying special delivery instructions to the driver could soon be over. The pizza chain-turned tech company just announced via a press release it has expanded its partnership with location-technology company what3words to Saudi Arabia. Domino’s has already been delivering to geographic locations called Hotspots like parks and […]

Now With 600,000 Users, Chefling Turns On its Machine Learning Switch
Chefling released an update to its kitchen assistant app this week that the company says will create more personalized recommendations. The app update also includes enhanced pantry management as well as smart appliance controls. Previously, we described Chefling’s service this way: With the Chefling app, users can scan barcodes or take a picture of their […]

For the Future of Beer, “New is King” — That Means Cannabis, Automation, and Glitter
Fittingly, we held our Future of Beer food tech meetup last night at Pike Brewing Company’s Beer Museum, which features an epic collection of memorabilia spanning from the invention of beer in 6,000 B.C Sumeria to Prohibition to the craft brewery revolution of today. But we were concerned with where beer is heading next.

Costa Vida’s Journey to Tablet Hell and Back
“It was hard to find that line between encouraging the innovation and maintaining sanity,” Costa Vida’s Dave Conger recently said of his company’s journey into restaurant-delivery technology. As is the case for most restaurants now, the fast-casual chain saw the need to implement delivery and its accompanying pieces of technology into daily operations to keep […]

Is Big Brother Coming to Restaurant Kitchens?
As if food service didn’t have enough to worry about, what with robots predicted to automate many of jobs and put employment of actual humans in jeopardy. Now, even those humans who still have kitchen jobs in the future may have to contend with Big Brother peeking over their shoulder as they work. ECNS.com has […]

Restaurant Delivery Deals Change the Game for Super Bowl Snacking
Vegan burgers, free NFL gear, and mysterious boxes are all part of this year’s lineup.

Giant Foods Opening a Physical Hub for Ecommerce Orders
GIANT Foods announced yesterday it will open a new physical hub in Pennsylvania that only services ecommerce orders. With this move, Giant joins the ranks of grocery stores architecting new experiences to accommodate the growth in online shopping. Opening Feb. 12 in Lancaster, PA, the new 38,000 sq. ft. hub will be called Giant Direct, […]

Lavva Uses Pili Nut to Make Legit Delicious Plant-Based Yogurt
As a lactose-intolerant person who loves her morning yogurt & granola, I’ve tried my fair share of vegan yogurts. Usually I’m disappointed. Most plant-based yogurts are bitter or have an off-putting grainy texture; some just taste like a straight-up cup of either soy or coconut.

Markov Rolls Out Hot Pantry Food Service, A ‘Google Cafeteria’ in a Box

Let’s face it: Not every company is a Google when it comes to profitability, technology prowess or lunch.

Wait, lunch?

Yep. Google’s food program has become the gold standard in the tech world and beyond for its healthy choices and focus on sustainability, and has played an outsized role over the past decade in raising awareness about how important food is in creating a productive work environment and satisfied employees.

The only problem is not every company has the resources of Google or a food service visionary like Google Food director Michiel Bakker to lead the charge, especially those small to midsize firms where food is sometimes an afterthought.

But now Markov, the company behind the Level smart oven, wants to change all that by providing the food service hoi polloi with a turnkey service that turns their break rooms or kitchenettes into mini-Google cafeterias. The San Francisco startup’s new service, called Hot Pantry, combines the Level smart oven with food delivery that keeps an employer’s fridge (also provided by Markov) stocked with healthy food choices ranging from breakfast items like red flannel hash to mix and match lunch offerings like Tuscan short ribs and kimchi fried rice.

The Level oven

According to Markov CEO Leonard Speiser, the company isn’t building out its own kitchen (unlike consumer-focused Tovala, maker of a smart steam oven), but instead is partnering with food companies to create the various food offerings.

“We took our technology and partnered with the food service industry to provide companies of 30 to 300 employees with a little slice of the Google experience in their own office kitchenette,” Speiser told me via email.

The move into office food service is an interesting one for Markov, which has largely been known to this point for its next-gen smart oven that utilizes a patented cooking technology to steer RF beams within the cooking chamber. But providing a turnkey food offering paired with its oven might just be a smart business move to differentiate itself from the increasingly crowded market of startups looking to reinvent the office cafeteria with fresh and healthy food options.

While the Level oven is an impressive device, I think one of the company’s biggest challenges will be communicating to office managers why an office food service needs something other than a standard microwave oven. Cooking tech nerds like myself can appreciate the uniqueness of a cooking box that can see its food, steer RF signals and heat different foods at different rates and temperatures within the same cooking chamber, but communicating that to an office worker is a different story. This is probably why Markov’s consumer-facing messaging puts a big emphasis on the oven’s interactive front-display touch screen, which provides visually rich information about Hot Pantry’s food offerings, ingredients and nutritional information.

Another key variable that will help determine the success of Hot Pantry is pricing, something the company is not disclosing at this time. While the corporate market is less price-sensitive than the fickle consumer market, oven or no oven, Markov will need to be price competitive with other corporate food service providers.

Today the Hot Pantry is only available in the Bay area, but Markov hopes to expand Hot Pantry eventually to new markets.

“It would be great if all companies could offer Google programs, but most don’t have the scale,” said Speiser. Markov hopes to change that, and the company’s CEO thinks they may even have a leg up on the search giant in one area:

Unlike Google, “the Level Hot Pantry experience is open 24/7,” said Speiser.

Video: How Epic Fails Helped Markov Make a Robot that Cooks

“Innovation” is a word that’s thrown around an awful lot in the technology world, and food tech is no exception. But creating actual innovation — that is, solving a problem in a new way — is really, really hard. And it usually requires a lot of failure.

Which is why Arvind de Menezes Pereira, CTO of automated systems company Markov, started off his solo talk at the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit with videos of SpaceX’s test rockets exploding, one after another. “Most of us would see a failure like this which is so expensive and think: there’s no point doing this,” he said. But SpaceX kept chugging along and, eventually, they were able to land a rocket on a target in the middle of the ocean.

Though they weren’t dealing with space rockets, that sort of persistence came in handy when the Markov team began developing the LEVEL: a device that could cook fast like a microwave, precisely like a sous vide, and prepare multiple food items simultaneously. “We didn’t know [it] was possible in the beginning,” said Pereira. “But we decided to do it anyway.”

Cut to many destroyed egg whites later (“cheaper than rockets,” Pereira joked), and the Markov team had their SpaceX moment. Check out his full talk to hear how he identifies and tackles grand challenges in the smart kitchen (don’t worry, there’s a handy food-related acronym in case you forget).

Watch the full video below.

Innovating The Hard Way: How Tech Companies Can Solve Real Problems in Cooking

Look out for more videos of the panels, solo talks, and fireside chats from SKS 2018! We’ll be bringing them to you hot and fresh out the (smart) kitchen over the next few weeks.

BSH Appliances Patents Camera-Enabled Microwave Oven

While microwave ovens still can’t be turned into cameras, it turns out cameras may be making their way inside of microwave ovens.

That’s because BSH Appliances recently was issued a patent for just that: a microwave oven with a camera for observing food inside the cooking chamber.

The patent, issued last week, describes a cooking system that puts a camera behind a glass panel (for shielding from food splatter) and a metal shielding plate perforated with small holes.

A camera captures images through a perforated shielding plate

The camera, which is attached to the mesh metal shielding plate, is able to capture images through a hole or group of holes while still staying safe from microwave radiation.

The patent also describes how the system could connect the camera to an LCD or LED screen on the front of the cooking appliance for viewing what is inside or to a wireless network for remote viewing on a mobile device.

While some may ask whether a camera-powered microwave is even necessary (who wants to watch a Hot Pocket get hot after all?), the reality is the camera acts as a sensor which could enable AI-powered cooking applications such as real-time precision heat adjustment.  Companies like Markov are building next-generation microwave ovens with RF steering capabilities that leverage an infrared camera, and Brava has built an oven with a camera to dynamically adjust a cooking session.

And who knows, with Amazon now heating up the microwave market, what’s to keep the tech giant from adding a bit of its machine vision magic to generation two?

While the idea of smart ovens with cameras inside are not new, a consumer microwave oven with a camera has not, to our knowledge, made its way to market.  With BSH Appliances figuring out a way to shield a built-in camera from radiation, you have to wonder if we’ll see a camera-enabled Bosch microwave soon.

Which Smart Appliances Will Survive the Kitchen Countertopacolypse?

You could see the growth of our Smart Kitchen Summit this year just by looking at the sponsor section. Back in 2015, the sponsor area was a few tabletops scattered around the back of the room. Four years later, we had an entire promenade featuring three demo kitchens with full appliances and a host of smaller startups.

Among those showing off their wares were: June, Brava, Markov and the Rotimatic. These are all sizeable countertop cooking devices that are too big and bulky to store in a pantry or shelf, so they have to be semi-permanent fixtures on your kitchen counter. Which got me thinking, how many appliances can one kitchen fit?

Because it’s not just those companies vying for your counter space. There’s also: Tovala, Suvie, Amazon’s Microwave, Bartesian, Picobrew U, and Breville’s new Pizzaiolo, not to mention whatever coffee maker you have, a stand mixer, and maybe a food processor or blender.

Phew!

That doesn’t even include the amount of counter space you need just to prepare food. A quick search shows that the average kitchen only has 26 to 30 square feet of workable countertop space. My June alone takes up 2.6 square feet, almost a tenth of the square footage for an average American countertop.

At least the June does multiple things (oven, toaster, heaven-sent re-heater of pizza). As much as I’d love a Rotimatic, I can’t quite justify the counter space (or the $1,000) for something that only makes flatbread. Same goes for the Pizzaiolo.

The Brava and the Markov are interesting because of the new technologies they bring to traditional devices (light and AI, respectively), so they at least have the potential to change how we cook and replace existing devices.

But will these new appliances attract sizeable enough audiences? Will they achieve such a level of permanence in our cooking life that we will change the way kitchens are architected?

I rarely use my traditional oven, but I can’t imagine a kitchen without one. Perhaps that’s just my age showing, but it seems like we’ll always have the big, bulky, cooktop + oven combo (if not two ovens) and a fridge, and work out from there. Then again, maybe countertop induction burners can replace a traditional cooktop as well, allowing you to cook anywhere in the kitchen (and freeing up counter space!).

But who knows, the kitchen as we know it may be dying. Perhaps between more on-demand delivery of groceries and restaurant food, and the potential rise of prepared meal kits in supermarkets, we just won’t need the traditional appliances that we grew up with. Maybe the space once reserved for our oven(s) can now be freed up for something else, something more unitasking like a Rotimatic or a dedicated pizza device.

The point of all this is, is that there are a lot of devices coming to market, and none of them are cheap. In the case of the kitchen, it is a zero sum game. The addition of one device means less room for another, so when the kitchen counteropocalypse comes, there will be winners and losers.

Restaurant Kitchens of the Future will be Smarter, AI-Driven and More Competitive

We throw around the term “smart” plenty of times when analyzing kitchen devices. But there’s one man who is truly trying to make the way you cook food — and the devices that help you do it — much smarter: Arvind Pereira. He’s the co-founder and CTO of the Markov Corporation, a startup leveraging AI to create a smarter electronic oven. Sort of like a microwave 2.0 — one that uses computer vision to better apply heat to perfectly cook each food to its optimum temperature.

We’re thrilled to have Pereira at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) in Seattle this October! To prime your palate, we asked Pereira a few questions about the role that AI and machine learning will play in the future of the smart kitchens and restaurants of the future.

This interview has been edited for clarity. 

What motivated you to apply your experience with AI and machine learning to the food and cooking industry?
I have always been very excited about applications of robotics and AI to various industries due to my background in hardware and software. The first time I worked on something related to food was back when I was a newly-married grad student at USC. My wife Svetlana (who is a software engineer) and I began working on a fun side project app that allowed us to manage our food more efficiently: picking out recipes for the week and creating grocery lists out of what we had in the refrigerator. I wanted to use computer vision to detect the contents of the fridge, but never got around to it. I didn’t do anything interesting related to food after that, until the end of my stint at Clover.

I’d say that my daughter Charlotte and Leonard (the founder of Clover) are probably the biggest motivators in getting me started on my journey of using AI in the food industry. When Charlotte was born, I was badly sleep-deprived, and decided to build an AI-powered baby monitor using various sensors including visual and thermal cameras. My goal there was to have my intelligent monitor take actions like controlling the temperature of the room to keep Charlotte comfortable, in order to potentially obviate the need for us to wake up more often than really needed.

I’d just begun working on this idea in my spare time when I mentioned it to Leonard (who is my Markov co-founder now). It turns out he had been thinking about building a device that cooked food accurately using thermal feedback — and my baby monitor, which was closing the loop around room temperature, reminded him of it. After that I couldn’t stop thinking about how to develop a cooking device that could cook precisely and quickly. While I felt confident that I could design the electronics, software and AI for such an oven, I didn’t know enough about high-power radio frequency (RF) to build a device with the control we would need. When I met our third co-founder Nick through a search in our extended networks though, I knew that we had the core team that could make this happen (assuming it could even be done).

Tell us more about the Level, Markov’s AI-powered oven. What makes it so unique?
Level is designed to be fast like a microwave, but precise like a sous vide machine. It does this through two synergistic technologies: a proprietary heat steering technology and novel AI algorithms, which work together to cook precisely. Level senses the temperature of the food using a thermal camera, and then steers the heat into areas that are not yet hot while keeping heat away from areas that are too hot. We are the first device (to our knowledge) that can cook multiple items of food to different temperatures by using that feedback.

Since Level uses RF to heat food, it is ideal for hot grab-and-go meals prepared in the moment. We use deep learning and specialized adaptive algorithms cook precisely and with control. Not only does Level constantly get better through software updates, and learn to recognize/cook more items through over-the-air-updates, but the AI literally learns to cook better on its own by analyzing every cooking session performed. Over time, each Level benefits from information gleaned by every other Level that has cooked before it. We hope to delight our customers with these improvements, letting them cook food better and faster with much higher consistency.

What role do you see AI playing in the future of food, specifically in the kitchen?
The fastest moving subfield within AI is machine learning, which has made big strides in the fields of computer vision, speech recognition and even natural language processing. It is exciting to see many companies start bringing AI and robotics to the kitchen space by leveraging these advances in perception to automate or simplify cooking. AI is going to be embedded in every appliance we own, and these appliances are going to be networked together to synergistically help us perform our tasks more easily.

Robots and AI are already helping us perform various jobs within the food industry: harvesting vegetables and fruits, processing meat, cooking food, and even delivering it to customers at restaurants. People want to automate these processes to combat shortages of trained labor, increase quality control, and simplifying cooking through automation. AI is going to be at the center of almost all these transformations. Perception and learning are critical pieces in helping build better, more intelligent cooking devices.

Before founding Markov, you worked at Clover — a company which manufactured and provided POS terminals to, among other places, restaurants. How do you see tech changing the restaurant industry?
Yes, Clover is very popular in restaurants and we had customers that ranged from single family-owned restaurants to restaurant chains. What struck me as interesting about restaurants was how difficult it was to make the business work. As a result, when we started Markov, I spent a lot more time thinking about how to solve pain points for this industry. If we can help restaurants serve better food, reduce training time for staff by simplifying the cooking process, and improve the transparency around food quality, this should help make restaurants easier to run.

Clover allowed merchants to get an amazing view of their businesses through the data we could share with them through our own apps, or via third party ones. Quality control is hard to achieve across chains of restaurants. Connected equipment will help in a big way — this is already happening with smart homes, and similarly the restaurants of the future are going to be more connected, more automated, and easier to manage, both within the restaurant and across larger chains.

Automation is clearly becoming a bigger part of the meal journey — how should companies adjust their strategies to embrace this?
Automation in the food industry is inevitable. Over time, as businesses find it harder to employ trained workers at affordable wages, companies that have the technology to manage their operational costs are going to have a competitive advantage over companies that do not.

While traditional kitchens will continue to exist, we expect that it will be more economical to provide good food through the commissary model or with just-in-time delivery, or via grab-and-go sales. Just like Amazon used the internet to disrupt retail, by optimizing food preparation and delivery, companies that can execute on more efficient models which cut costs and deliver superior value are likely to win over more customers and out-maneuver their competition.

As cooking becomes more automated (and simpler) I think businesses will gain from it — and gain new competition. Companies will have to watch where automation is heading and look for opportunities to gain efficiencies through smarter allocation of resources and real estate, and ensure that they are staying up to date with technology that helps them run their businesses better.

I think summits like SKS help provide insights into what the future of food is shaping up to be. The future is definitely exciting in the food industry, and technologies that enable automation like AI and robotics are going to have an increasingly big role to play in shaping it.

—

Thanks, Arvind! If you want to see him speak more about the role AI will play in the future kitchen, at home and in the restaurant, snag your tickets to the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th in Seattle.

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. 

Markov Issued Patents For A Smarter Microwave Oven

A few months ago, The Spoon discovered how then-stealth startup Markov corporation was looking to use AI to make a better microwave. This past week, we’ve discovered the company has since taken significant steps towards locking up some intellectual property that could help them do just that.

Since the spring, the company has quietly began to talk about their oven – the Level – which essentially is exactly what I predicted back in March:  a smarter electronic oven which uses computer vision and other forms of machine learning to better apply energy. And just this in the past two weeks, the company, which counts eBay founder Pierre Omidyar as an investor, was awarded the two patents that originally tipped their hand.

As I wrote in March:

According to the first patent application entitled “Electronic oven with infrared evaluative control“, the company has developed technology for a control system that utilizes infrared camera sensors to assist in the cooking process. The patent application describes how they plan to use an infrared camera as part of a learning and control system that will more evenly apply heat as compared to a more traditional microwave oven.

This patent application appears to be related to another a patent application from the company founders called “Electronic oven with reflective energy steering“, which describes a way to use RF/microwave energy to more precisely and evenly apply the heat within the cooking chamber.

Markov’s technology looks like a significant upgrade to traditional microwaves, which suffer from uneven heating due to their inability to apply electromagnetic waves consistently across cooking zones for the duration of the cooking session. By using AI to better steer the electromagnetic energy more precisely, users will get better results.

Based on my original sleuthing, I had found the company had indicated it had raised an initial $20 million in funding.  According to this May article in the Wall Street Journal, the company has since raised its total funding to $25 million.

While Markov is currently offering demos of the Level, it has yet to reveal pricing for the oven.

You can see the a hero reel of the Level in action below.

Scoop: Omidyar Invests in Markov, A Startup Building An AI To Change Cooking

Last week we learned about Spero Ventures, a new $100 million investment fund that had been spun out of the Omidyar Network. According to Forbes, the new venture fund has eBay founder Pierre Omidyar as its sole limited partner and counts a company called Markov as one of its first investments.

What exactly the still-stealth Markov does is a mystery, at least until you do a little digging. Markov’s team includes much of the founding team behind the retail point of sale startup Clover Network (including CEO Leonard Speiser), as well as engineers from the likes of Facebook, Linkedin, and Google. While neither Markov’s website nor Crunchbase details how much the company has raised (as of this writing Crunchbase didn’t even have Markov listed), the company subtly lets us know this information via Linkedin, where the company profile says they’ve raised $20 million.

What do they plan to build with that money? Markov’s website uses purposefully vague language about what exactly it does (“The Markov Corporation builds products that can see the world, understand it, and then take an action”), but does say they are building “convolutional neural networks and deep reinforcement learning combined with hardware to make magic.” Their Linkedin page indicates they are building AI that will automate hardware that does “boring work”.

AI. Automation. Neural networks. While that sounds like any number of pitches coming out of silicon valley nowadays, things got interesting for me when I saw how the company’s head of channel sales, Rich Miller, describes Markov: “Revolutionizing a space that hasn’t seen innovations in decades using Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Computer Vision to change the way food is cooked in commercial applications.”

Based on that description, we can surmise that company is building AI for cooking. In a way that sounds similar to the technology behind June, which uses computer vision and machine learning to help their high-end consumer smart oven cook, only Miller indicates Markov’s target market is commercial kitchens.

All of which what makes what I found next even more interesting: two patent applications from the company’s founders. According to the first patent application entitled “Electronic oven with infrared evaluative control“, the company has developed technology for a control system that utilizes infrared camera sensors to assist in the cooking process. The patent application describes how they plan to use an infrared camera as part of a learning and control system that will more evenly apply heat as compared to a more traditional microwave oven.

This patent application appears to be related to another a patent application from the company founders called “Electronic oven with reflective energy steering“, which describes a way to use RF/microwave energy to more precisely and evenly apply the heat within the cooking chamber. This patent application includes an image that compares and contrasts cooking eggs with a traditional microwave:

To a system (using the technology in the patent) that more evenly applies energy:

Based on these clues it looks like Markov has developed an AI controlled electronic cooking appliance that utilizes infrared vision to gather data as part of a control system that more precisely and evenly applies electromagnetic energy to heat and cook food. While we have no idea if this is all Markov has developed – there might be a lot more they are working on – that they’ve applied for patents for this lets us know it’s what they see as one of their main core technologies.

It’s interesting to note that there has been significant IP built over the past couple years for new solid state cooking systems that use RF energy in the cooking process.  The demo from Miele at IFA showed off an oven that utilizes solid state cooking with technology that applies RF energy with surgical precision.  Early in 2017, the IBEX One, a solid state cooking appliance for pro kitchens, was announced as well with similar technology.

How exactly this Omidyar-invested company’s technology will be used in practice is where things could get interesting, so we’ll be keeping an eye out for further developments.