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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Meyer

Cookware Darling Great Jones Gets Scooped Up by Meyer. Is the DTC Home Goods Wave Over?

This week, Fast Company broke the story that Great Jones, a popular DTC cookware maker for the millennial set, had been acquired by cookware giant Meyer. In Meyer, Great Jones joins a portfolio of brands that includes Farberware, Anolon, Hestan (including the tech-powered products under Hestan Cue), Circulon, and Rachael Ray. According to Fast Company, Great Jones’s six employees will join Meyer, and cofounder and CEO Sierra Tishgart will become Meyer’s executive creative director.

Meyer is an interesting destination for Great Jones, a startup that experienced rocketship growth early on through viral social marketing through Instagram for products such as its “The Dutchess” Dutch oven. From there, the company rode a bit of a roller coaster through the pandemic, some internal strife, and ultimately ran into an icy fundraising environment as investors cooled on DTC startups in recent years.

The DTC cool-off struck across all consumer goods categories as it became clear, particularly after pandemic restrictions lifted, that growth would ultimately be limited unless brands established some brick-and-mortar channel strategy. DTC OG Warby Parker realized this fairly early, opening its first retail storefronts over a decade ago, which management has admitted have been so successful they have plans to open 900 of them.

But glasses aren’t cookware – you don’t need to try a pan on to see how it looks, after all – so why would the company need to show up on retail storefronts? Part of the reason is rising digital marketing costs, which have increased by 20% since 2021, and growing costs of direct shipping goods to consumers.

But perhaps the biggest reason is customer conversion in-store is often much higher than online, particularly as more and more brands have popped up across the cookware category in recent years. While Great Jones had already entered retail in places like Nordstrom, Meyer’s access to a vast array of brick-and-mortar retailers will no doubt accelerate the brand’s growth as it gets significantly more exposure to customers who primarily buy things through retail.

Still, even as one of the early success stories for DTC home goods gets scooped by a legacy home goods brand like Meyer, other DTC cookware startups like Caraway and Misen continue on. But word that Misen had a significant layoff last year shows that the high-flying DTC cookware brands of the past decade may continue to struggle unless they combine forces with a big, established retail-oriented brand or invest in building their own retail channels.

With the acquisition of Great Jones, Meyer – an admittedly staid brand outside of its venture into connected cooking with Hestan Cue – hopes to inject the DNA of an online native brand across the company, signaled by making Great Jones’ Tishgart the company’s new executive creative director. Smart move because, in the future, the companies that succeed will likely be those that have strength at retail and can also navigate social media and online channels.

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.”

Hestan Cue Looks To Sell The Concept of Guided Cooking

It was at last year’s Housewares show in Chicago I first noticed a trend which I call ‘guided cooking’. Guided cooking, also called ‘smart cooking’ by some, employs a combination of sensor-enabled cookware, precision heating and software to create a cooking system that both educates the consumer and orchestrates a cooking experience.

Here’s how I described ‘guided cooking’ in my piece:

It was this combination of the pan, burner and app and the guidance system they had built that really led me to see the possibilities around this new category. I am not a great cook by any stretch of the imagination, but I cooked one of the tastiest pieces of salmon I’ve ever had in about 20 minutes. The experience was enabled through technology, but the technology didn’t take me out of the experience of cooking. Further, I can see as I gain more confidence using a system like this, I can choose to “dial down” the guidance needed from the system to the point I am largely doing most of the cooking by myself (though I don’t know if I’d ever get rid of the automated temperature control, mostly because I’m lazy and it gives me instant “chef intuition).

The product I describe here is an early version of the Hestan Cue, a guided cooking system developed by Hestan Smart Cooking, a division of cookware giant Meyer. The Hestan Cue caught my attention that day because of its ability to have the different elements of cooking – pan, heat source and the education/recipe information from the app – all work in concert together well to actually make me cook better.

Since last year, more companies have begun to embrace the concept of guided cooking. However,  I don’t think I’ve seen as compelling a combination of the these elements as I’ve seen with the Hestan Cue, so now, a year later, I’m am watching with significant interest as the company looks to bring the product to market through partners such as Williams-Sonoma

Williams-Sonoma has created a video showing consumers talking about the product:

Can a Machine Really Teach You How to Cook?

Will it succeed? While it’s too soon to tell – mostly because it’s really hard to predict the exact mix of utility, pricing and presentation that will capture the imagination of the consumer in a short term time horizon – I am fairly confident that the combination of automation and software guidance is an irreversible long-term trend we’ll see more of in coming years.

The Williams-Sonoma video starts by asking the question, “Can a machine really teach you how to cook?” I like that approach because my first thought using the device was I could learn from the Hestan Cue, that it could be my “cooking buddy” to help me figure out new meals and recipes. This messaging also taps into the growing appetite among millennials to learn more about cooking. Beyond the explosion of online video tutorials, increased interest in things such as cooking classes and teaching kitchens has shown people are hungry to learn cooking skills, and the Hestan Cue and products like it offer a new approach.

However, I also think it’s important to emphasize the ease of use and utility of Hestan Cue. If you’re like me, once you learn to cook a meal, you want to eventually cook it again. This means over time you will want to deemphasize the teaching aspects and transition to lighter cues and guidance around the cooking of a meal. My first impression of the Hestan Cue is that it could do this, that it does have significant convenience utility, and so I think it will be important for the company and its retail partners to emphasize this aspect over time.

Long term, the products should also be interoperable with built-in cooking appliances. The Hestan Cue comes with its own small induction burner pad, which makes it great as a starter cooking appliance or for someone who wants to try out induction heating. However, many if not most people will want to work with their own cooktops.

My sense is the company will continue to iterate on the concept of guided cooking beyond this first product. Meyer founder Stanley Cheng, who as an early innovator in non-stick cooking surfaces helped make Meyer one of the world’s biggest cookware companies, is personally invested and excited about the concept of smart cooking. Having helped usher in the modern world of cookware, I can imagine he sees the Hestan Cue as a starting point for the next generation of cookware.

If you want to see the Hestan Cue as demonstrated by one of its creators, Jon (JJ) Jenkins, you can watch my video interview taken at the Housewares show below:

A Walk Through Of The Hestan Cue from The Spoon on Vimeo.

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