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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

meal journey

Whisk Launches Consumer Facing App That Makes Any Recipe Shoppable

Today Whisk, maker of a B2B food and cooking commerce platform that was acquired earlier this year by Samsung NEXT, announced it was launching its first consumer-facing app on both iOS and Android. The app allows consumers to take any recipe they discover online and make it into a shopping list that they can use to buy food online or take with them on a trip to the corner grocery store.

The new app includes integrations with voice assistants like Alexa and Bixby, allowing users to add ingredients or items to a shopping list with their voice. It also includes a browser extension so users can clip recipes they find on the web and turn them into shopping lists and push into online shopping carts.

Once a user converts the recipe into something shoppable, they can then choose from one of the 32 grocery commerce partners that Whisk has integrated into the app. Online grocery partners for Whisk include Walmart among others.

While there are plenty of shopping list apps out there, the ability to clip and import any recipe discovered on the web and convert it into a shopping list seems pretty useful. Add in the social/family sharing capability, and it’s like a Pinterest meets Pocket for food making.

Previously a user would use Whisk as part of the experience on a Samsung or BSH Appliances fridge or through the website of a publisher partner, but really didn’t connect directly to the brand itself. That all changes with this rollout, as Whisk becomes a consumer facing platform for the first time.

“In the past, a user would have to use Whisk through one of our publisher partners,” said Whisk founder Nick Holzherr in an interview with The Spoon. “Today, anyone can use Whisk anywhere – regardless of whether it’s a user’s own recipe or something they’ve imported from the web.”

Interestingly, while Whisk was acquired by Samsung back in March, the consumer technology giant stayed decidedly low-key when it comes to pushing its brand as part of this new consumer app push. Outside of the new app’s integration with Samsung’s Bixby, a user would be hard pressed to see any real connection to Samsung in the new Whisk offering.

Despite Samsung’s hands-off approach, I imagine Whisk will look to tap its parent company’s resources as it endeavors to get the new app into the hands of consumers. Having consumers download an app is a much bigger ask than having them use a well-know online recipe platform such as Allrecipes (one of Whisk’s publishing partners), so creating trust and enabling discovery will take work. And, once a consumer installs an app, the biggest challenge is making sure they use it.

If you’d like to try out the new Whisk app, you can find it in the following locations: iOS and Android app stores, on the web, Chrome extension, Bixby, Alexa, & Google voice assistants.

Kitchens Aren’t Going Away, But They Will Adapt To Better Fit A Changing Consumer

When you have a conference focused on the future of food and cooking, people inevitably ask you what the kitchen of the future will look like.

That usually means talking a lot about emerging cooking technologies, new appliances and futuristic kitchen designs — but what if the answer to the question about what happens to the most central room in the home is that, in a world with push-button food delivery, grocery store meal kits and the eventual rise of cooking robots, the kitchen as we know it might cease to exist?

It’s certainly a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past few months, so I figured what better question to ask during the opening session of the Smart Kitchen Summit.

When I put the question to Hestan Smart Cooking‘s Jon Jenkins, he said that when framed in pure economic terms, doing away with the kitchen makes lots of sense.

“It’s hard to make any kind of economic case that it makes sense for you to be doing cooking at home if all you’re cooking for is to get food to fill your stomach up,” said Jenkins.

In other words, if a kitchen’s sole purpose is sustenance, there are lots better ways to spend your money than sinking a whole bunch of it into a space that’s almost always the most expensive room in the house.

That’s why, according to Jenkins, the act of cooking and creating food needs to be about more than just putting fuel in the tank.

“We better hope there’s something more that you get from cooking, that there’s some amount of pride in the thing you created,” said Jenkins. “If that’s the thing we manage to enable with these technologies, then I think all have a really bright future.”

According to Dana Cowin, host of the Speaking Broadly podcast and longtime editor of Food & Wine magazine, it’s this emotional connection to cooking that needs to be the focus for those industries with the most to lose.

Penny the robot brings water to thirsty panelists

“What that means is anyone who is invested in appliances, in cooking, in teaching, in gathering, needs to create even more of a movement of explaining what the value is, and really not actually selling the appliance,” said Cowin. “It’s really what is the emotional transaction that happens here because the physical transaction can be so easily replaced.”

Cowin also felt that the most likely evolution path for the kitchen is that it will morph over time to better fit how people use them.

“One of the things to keep in mind is all kitchens and all people are not created equal,” said Cowin. “Right now we have one kitchen model that people plug into. What we’re gonna see with kitchens of the future is lots more flexibility and a reinvention of what that kitchen model looks like.”

So how might the kitchen adapt to changing consumer behavior?

According to Cowin, kitchens in the future will have smaller appliances, have a bigger focus on recycling packaging from delivery, and may even have managed fridges stocked with food from a service provider.

“I can see a kitchen supplied easily by an outsider like a Farmer’s Fridge, except the home version,” said Cowin.

Ultimately, while both panelists felt that more technology in the kitchen is inevitable, the future of cooking and the kitchen itself will depend on how well the technology serves the consumer beyond simply automating tasks.

“Everything we use in the kitchen aside from our hands is technology,” said Cowin. “It’s investing the intellect in the way food is being made rather than pressing the button.”

You can listen to the full conversation with Dana Cowin and Jon Jenkins on the latest episode of the Smart Kitchen Show podcast by clicking play below or subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

Video: To Survive, the Future Kitchen Must be Personalized, Flexible, and Emotional

The first panel of the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) North America started out not with a bang, but with a beep. Just after Jon Jenkins, Director of Engineering at Hestan Smart Cooking, Dana Cowin, former Editor in Chief of Food & Wine, and Michael Wolf got settled, self-driving robot Penny glided out onto the stage to bring them some water.

This little interruption was actually the perfect way to introduce their panel: The Disrupted Meal Journey. As automation edges its way further and further into our lives and our food, how will that transform the kitchen? Will people still cook in the future, or will they opt purely for food delivery — or just have a robot cook their meal for them?

Don’t worry. The panelists were confident that the kitchen wasn’t going to fully disappear: as long as it could use technology not only to make cooking easier, but also more exciting and emotional.

“If what we’re selling is purely sustenance, you don’t need a kitchen,” Jenkins stated. “We’ve got to hope we’re getting something more out of cooking.” Cowin agreed, adding that home meal preparation should leverage technology to become more “personalized, exciting, and diverse.”

Watch the video below to see the full panel, and hear Cowin and Jenkins’ predictions on how kitchens will have to adjust to survive in the age of ever-growing automation and delivery.

The Disrupted Meal Journey

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.