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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Microsoft

As Political Fight to Ban Natural Gas Rages On, Microsoft and Others are Pressing Ahead With All-Electric Kitchens

If you’ve paid attention to natural gas regulation over the past few years, you’re probably aware a growing number of municipalities and state governments have pushed to ban the use of the gas hookups in new home and office builds as they look for ways to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.

It started with Berkeley in 2019, and since that time, a number of cities in California and New York have followed suit with efforts to restrict or outright ban the use of natural gas. Predictably, GOP-controlled legislatures around the country have fought back by passing “preemption laws” that prohibit cities from banning natural gas. According to CNN, twenty states with GOP-controlled legislatures have preemption laws prohibiting cities from banning natural gas.

But while the political battle between old-world gas adherents and those looking to reduce our reliance on gas rages on, big companies like Microsoft are reading the tea leaves and building electric kitchens. According to a story in Fast Company, the software giant is building an all-electric kitchen in one of its newest buildings in Redmond, Washington.

From Fast Company:

It’s a 13,000-square-foot LEED Platinum-rated green building, with 400 pieces of electric kitchen equipment capable of preparing about 1,000 meals a day across 9 dining concepts featuring different cuisines. The space is being used to test out products, processes, and menu items before spreading to more than 77,000 square feet of food preparation and kitchen space for upward of 10,000 meals a day when the full campus expansion begins opening in 2023.

Microsoft is just the latest company to start transitioning its office space – and its kitchens – to all-electric as they see the writing on the wall when it comes to local mandates. In 2020, Adobe broke ground on an 18-story all-electric building for its new headquarters. Alloy Development started development in 2020 on a five building all-electric project.

The reason for these moves is clear. According to the Building Decarbonization Coalition, gas combustion in buildings accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions (12%) than all in-state power plants (9%), so by moving towards all-electric buildings, companies can make a significant dent in meeting sustainability targets.

As for Microsoft, the effort includes designing new types of cooking equipment that can meet the needs of feeding their workforce. The company wanted to continue creating a variety of different kinds of menus, including ones that traditionally utilize fire-intensive cooking styles such as woks, so they worked with an outside designer to develop an induction wok cooking system.

Fast Company: To figure out a solution, Microsoft partnered with the commercial kitchen equipment manufacturer Jade Range. Over the course of two years they co-developed a new kind of wok-cooktop combination that allows both the motion a chef needs and the constant contact induction cooking requires. The novel wok system, with a pan that fits inside a bowl-shaped cooking surface, has stood up to side-by-side taste tests among Microsoft workers, comparing gas and induction wok dishes. 

While the U.S. has long trailed Europe in its use of induction cooking, the push for building electrification has given increased momentum and has started to force the hand of many hold-outs who have long preferred gas cooking equipment.

Food Tech News: Kroger Pilots Contactless Pay, How QSRs Could Change the Whole Food System

Had your fill of food tech news for the week? Of course you haven’t. With that in mind, here are a few more bits and bites to carry your appetite for food tech through the weekend.

Kroger Launches Contactless Payments

Kroger launched a pilot for contactless payments in Seattle, WA this week. The test will take place in the grocery retailer’s QFC division, and allow customers to use their mobile phones to pay for groceries. The system accepts a number of payment types: Apple, Google, Samsung, Fitbit, and mobile banking apps. 

Microsoft and Land O’Lakes Bringing More Tech to Rural Areas

Farming technology is all well and good, but farms first need to have access to broadband. As AgFunder points out, 18 to 40 million Americans do not have that connectivity, especially those in rural areas. To address that issue, Microsoft and Land O’Lakes said this week they are working together to bring more connectivity to farms and rural areas.

Hostess Opens Innovation Lab

Hostess Brands has opened a new innovation lab in Kansas that employs researchers, product testers, and bakers creating new kinds of snack cakes. The lab will test and develop new prototypes for food products, which means we could well have a new kind of Twinkie in our hands in the future.

How about now no cow?

If QSRs swapped beef with alternative proteins in their products, they could completely alter the food system. That’s the premises of an excellent new article from Wired, which outlines the problems with our over-reliance on beef and how fast-food chains can use their wide availability and low prices to change consumer attitudes about meat.

Here is a List of Cashierless Tech Companies Gunning for Amazon Go

Bloomberg has a story up today about the Portugal-based startup, Sensei, titled “Amazon Go Faces Unlikely Challenge From Checkout-Free Startup.” The headline caught my eye because it isn’t unlikely at all, in fact, it’s quite likely. While Amazon has a substantial headstart in getting cashierless stores to market (10 and counting), Bezos’ behemoth faces all kinds of technological challenges from companies big and small in the checkout-free space.

As a quick refresher, cashierless checkout stores are retail environments that allow the shopper to walk in, grab what they want and leave without standing in a checkout line. Some combination of high-tech sensors and cameras keep track of what you buy and charge you automatically. Different companies have different approaches, some of them more advanced than others, but here’s who’s out there right now:

Caper: Rather than installing cameras and sensors in the store, Caper shifts that technology to its smart shopping carts, so retailers don’t have to spend a lot of money to retrofit their locations. Current versions of the cart require the user to scan items, but they’ve said computer vision is coming to make recording what you put in your cart automatic. Caper has raised $3 million raised and says it is in use by two major unnamed grocery store chains.

DeepMagic: Rather than scaling up, DeepMind scales down to create unattended kiosk shopping experiences that are meant to live inside existing locations (think: Hotel or office lobbies). Even these mini, mini shopping stores will face off against Amazon, as the company is reportedly looking to shrink Go stores to fit inside offices to feed hungry workers. DeepMagic is self-funded and has been used by Cisco to sell swag at one of its conferences.

Grabango: A relative newcomer to the cashierless space, Granbango came out of stealth earlier this year. It uses lots of tiny smartphone camera-sized cameras mounted on the ceiling to saturate its computer vision field and keep track of purchases. Grabango’s hook is that it integrates with the store checkout system, so when shoppers are done, they can still pay with a credit card or cash without a cashier scanning each item. Grabango has raised $17.3 million and says it is in pilots with three major grocers and one convenience store chain.

Microsoft: Microsoft isn’t one to let a cross-town rival like Amazon dominate a market without putting up a fight. But right now we’ve only heard reports of the Redmond giant working on cashierless tech with Walmart (another Amazon rival). Another clue that Microsoft cashierless tech could be forthcoming is its recent partnership with Kroger to pilot a new type of tech-forward, smart stores.

Sam’s Club: The Walmart-owned Sam’s Club opened up an experimental store last year, which requires the use of Walmart’s Scan & Go app to pay for items.

Skip: Similar to Sam’s Club approach, Skip is another small entrant in the cashierless space that is targeting convenience stores. Shoppers download and use the Skip app to scan and purchase items in the store. Skip is currently iN use in several western convenience store chains and has raised $5 million in seed funding.

Standard Cognition: While Standard Cognition has its own working store in San Francisco, it’s mainly there to showcase its cashierless chops. Standard Cognition’s website makes a big deal about it not using facial recognition and being built around privacy. The company has raised $51 million in funding and says it has agreements with four retailers across Asia, North America and Europe.

Trigo Vision: Israel-based Trigo Vision retrofits existing stores with off-the-shelf cameras and computer vision to create its cashierless experience. The company has raised $7 million, is in a pilot with an unnamed European retailer and last November signed a deal with Israel’s Shufersal to implement checkout free shopping across all of that chain’s 272 locations.

V7 (formerly AI Poly): We haven’t covered this company fully here at The Spoon yet. AI Poly recently rebranded its retail efforts as V7, and now uses AI Poly for vision AI for the visually impaired and blind. The V7 website says its AI system can plug into and work with existing security cameras, depending on the number a store operates.

7-11: The convenience store chain’s tech works more like a self-checkout than true grab-and-go retail. In the pilot store the company launched towards the end of last year, shoppers use the 7-11 app to scan items and then manually pay for them at separate checkout stations.

And now we can add Sensei to this list. Are there any others we’re leaving out? Any stealthy ones you want to spill the beans on? If so, drop us a line and let us know!

Microsoft Continues March into Grocery Stores with Albertsons Partnership

Microsoft and Albertsons are partnering to integrate Microsoft’s Cloud and AI technologies into Albertsons grocery stores, the two companies announced today. This deal marks another move by Microsoft into major grocery retail operations, following a partnership with Kroger last month.

Details of the new Microsoft/Albertsons partnership are light, with the pres release saying the arrangement “includes immediate and long-term initiatives to digitally transform the customer journey, optimize operations and deliver better products and services”

According to the two companies, part of transforming that customer journey includes “eliminating the friction” customers experience either trying to find products or while standing in checkout lines. Though they don’t say it specifically, this could indicate that the two companies will be working on cashierless checkout at Albertsons stores.

Microsoft has long been rumored to be working on such technology, and there has been a flurry of activity in the cashierless checkout space ever since Amazon launched its Go stores last year. A number of startups are working on cashierless checkout with some, like Grabango, already in pilots with grocery chains.

While this deal with Albertsons is more of a general relationship announcement for Microsoft, the Redmond giant made a more concrete pact with Kroger last month. Microsoft is actually working with Kroger to build out two tech-heavy pilot stores that made extensive use of smart displays and sensors for inventory management. Additionally, those Kroger + Microsoft solutions are meant to be packaged up as a turnkey package that can be sold to other grocery stores.

Both of these announcements seem to be, at least in part, targeted at Amazon. First both of these deals involve Azure, Microsoft Cloud answer to Amazon’s AWS, so Amazon is being shut out of that line of business. But more broadly, ever since Amazon bought Whole Foods, grocers everywhere have ratcheted up their technology efforts to stave off Amazon from dominating the industry.

In addition to launching this new high-tech initiative with Microsoft, Albertsons is also getting into the robot game. The grocer partnered with Takeoff to build out a test mini-automated fulfillment center in the back of one of its stores. We’re actually talking with Narayan Iyengar, SVP of Digital and eCommerce at our upcoming ArticulATE summit in San Francisco in April. While he’s on stage, we’ll see what else we can get out of him about Microsoft as well.

Kroger Partners with Microsoft for Smarter Grocery Stores

It looks like Kroger isn’t taking its foot off the innovation pedal anytime soon. The grocery giant announced today that it has partnered with Microsoft to create a smarter, tech-enabled store with solutions that can be packaged and sold to other retailers.

Two pilot store locations — one in Microsoft’s hometown of Redmond, WA, and one in Monroe, OH, near Kroger’s HQ — will be outfitted with an array of IoT sensors and digital displays powered by Azure, Microsoft’s answer to Amazon Web Services.

These high-tech stores will feature the Enhanced Display for Grocery Environment (EDGE) advanced shelving system that uses digital displays to show prices, sales and nutritional information. But the digital displays also act like electronic guides for in-store shoppers using Krogers self-checkout app. Consumers can assign a particular icon to an item (a banana, for instance), and the EDGE display will show that icon so the shopper can identify it quickly. These displays can also be used for Kroger employees collecting items for online orders. The smart displays could also be a source of revenue as in-store advertisements.

Elsewhere in these smart stores will be an array of sensors and cameras which can keep track of inventory for faster re-stocking, and monitor temperatures in cold cases to prevent spoilage.

What’s also interesting about this partnership is that the two companies plan on packaging this smart system and selling it to other retailers. Grocery giants like Kroger and Albertsons have been investing heavily in technology in an attempt to prevent Amazon/Whole Foods from gobbling up the entire sector. So Kroger and Microsoft offering up a turnkey solution could be attractive to smaller and mid-level grocery chains.

Worth noting are the things not mentioned in this press release. There’s no mention of cashierless checkout, which we only bring up since it’s been rumored that Microsoft is working on that technology with Walmart. Additionally, and this is more out there, Monroe is also where Kroger is building out its first robot-powered smart distribution warehouse. Kroger spent last year investing heavily in technology like the smart warehouse, self-driving delivery vehicles and an innovation lab. This year, we may get more insight into how all these pieces will come together and integrate with one another.

Amazon Opens Second Go Store Amid Rising Cashierless Competition

Amazon is opening is second Go store in downtown Seattle this morning. The new Go will be slightly bigger smaller (UPDATE: initial reporting on the second location was incorrect. Turns out the store is smaller.)than the first location, and will feature the same cashierless. technology that allows customers with the Amazon Go mobile app to walk into the store, grab what they want and leave without having to wait in line or stop to pay.

We loved shopping at Amazon Go and even named the store as one of our FoodTech 25 companies that are changing the way we eat. The seamless experience points to an inevitable future where high-tech cameras, sensors and computer vision all work together to make every grocery trip faster and checkout line free.

While Amazon would still be considered the leader in cashierless shopping, the landscape for the technology is more crowded since the first Go store launched in January. Cross-town rival Microsoft is reportedly working on such technology and chatting with Walmart about putting it to use in the retail giant’s stores.

Then there are smaller startups coming to market hoping to disrupt Amazon’s disruption. Zippin just unveiled its cashierless software platform and is set to open up in San Francisco next month. Israel-based Trigo Vision is piloting its software, which the company said can already scale to a full-size grocery store. Others such as Caper and AI Poly are also launching their own solutions.

Cashierless checkout certainly isn’t a zero sum game. There are plenty of retailers in the world looking to create a more efficient (and profitable) buying experience for customers. But for the time being, Amazon is definitely the pioneer. Its first-mover status gives it plenty of data and real-world experience to iterate faster than its competition.

In addition to the two Seattle locations open now, Amazon is opening up new Go stores in San Francisco and Chicago. And, lest we forget, Amazon owns Whole Foods, giving the company access to a network of full-sized retail locations in which to experiment and scale.

For those in Seattle who want to shop at the new Go store, you can find new the Seattle Central Library at 920 Fifth Ave.

Can Bitcoin, Bakeries, and Banning Straws Fix Starbucks’ Lagging Growth?

Starbucks may have projected slower growth recently, but it looks to be business as usual for the coffee retailer, and that business traversed several industries and a couple continents this week.

Most notably, Starbucks is reportedly one of the key backers of a new company, Bakkt, which the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) created to better integrate cryptocurrencies into global commerce. In other words, there’s a high possibility Starbucks might accept Bitcoin as payment one of these days.

But as my hero John Oliver says, “this is a brand new, very complicated space and literally nobody knows how it’s going to develop so you need to be careful.” And while there’s much ado about crypto lately, the reality is that Bitcoin and others remain highly volatile in terms of price, which is one of the biggest reasons more retailers haven’t adopted them as forms of payment.

That could change, partly because Microsoft is providing the cloud infrastructure for Bakkt and companies like consulting heavyweight BCG are involved. There’s also this telling statement from Starbucks: “As the flagship retailer, Starbucks will play a pivotal role in developing practical, trusted and regulated applications for consumers to convert their digital assets into US dollars for use at Starbucks.”

Starbucks has been an undisputed leader in mobile payments over the years, so its involvement in the space isn’t that surprising, and it could make cryptocurrency more attractive to investors and therefore less volatile. The question is, will it be enough to turn hype into a mainstream form of payment?

Interestingly, in some overseas markets, Starbucks has been criticized of acting too slow when it comes to technological advancements. That’s a big reason for the company’s move this week to strike a partnership with Alibaba and integrate delivery services into its business in China. Starbucks will use the Alibaba-owned food-delivery service Ele.me to enable delivery at 2,000 stores by the end of the 2018. The deal includes a virtual store that integrates with Alibaba’s apps like Alipay and Hema.

Starbucks currently has 3,400 stores in China, with plans to double that number by 2022. But it’s also facing a lot of competition in this market, particularly from Luckin Coffee, who charges less and also just raised $200 million. That said, Starbucks still controls about 80 percent of the coffee market in China, and the company claims this deal with Alibaba “opens up 500 million or more active users of those apps that will have access to Starbucks.”

Stateside, the coffee giant has a slightly different tactic: standalone bakeries. This week, Starbucks opened the first of a planned 1,000 Princi bakeries, a “high-end Italian bakery chain.” The shop serves a mix of pizzas, pastries, beer, wine, and, of course, coffee.

Starbucks backed Italian bakery chain Princi in 2016; the Seattle store is the test location for this “upscale retail strategy.” Because apparently paying almost $5 for a latte is no longer considered upscale. Starbucks opened a Princi at its Reserve Rotary and Tasting Room last fall, as well as one at the Flagship Reserve store at the Starbucks HQ. This new location is the first standalone store. NYC and Chicago locations are in the works.

Starbucks is also one of the major chains joining the movement to ban single-use plastic straws, having recently announced it will eliminate them from all stores by 2020. But with all of the above expansion, not to mention Starbucks’ general reach, which is huge, will trading straws for sip-able lids make a difference?

That’s what several folks are wondering. The Guardian even weighed the new lids against the old lid-and-straw combo and found the former to be slightly heavier, therefore using more plastic. Starbucks’ notes these new lids are “made from polypropylene, a commonly-accepted recyclable plastic that can be captured in recycling infrastructure,” but that only matters if people actually recycle the lids. The numbers aren’t encouraging — only around 9 percent of the world’s plastic is recycled. Color me cynical, but since Starbucks partially helped create the disposable coffee world we live in, I’d say the company’s going to need a bigger fix if they want to make a true impact in terms of waste reduction. Hopefully they’ll continue to prioritize addressing waste issues, even as they push to pick up those lagging numbers.

We’ll have a chance to ask more at the next Smart Kitchen Summit, when we talk to Ben Pote, Starbucks’ Director of Culinary, Global Product Innovation. Swing by if you’re in the area, and leave your thoughts, musings, and rants on all this news in the comments below.

Report: Microsoft Working on Amazon Go-like Cashierless Tech

Microsoft is reportedly working on its own cashierless checkout technology in a bid to take on cross-town rival, Amazon, according to a story in Reuters.

The reported technology is similar to the Amazon Go store experience, where what you put in your cart is automatically tracked and charged to you without the need to go through a checkout line or cashier. Reuters goes on to report that Microsoft has engaged in talks with Walmart about the technology.

If true, the news isn’t that surprising for a number of reasons. First, Amazon Go uses technology like computer vision and artificial intelligence to know what you put (and keep) in your bag. Computer vision and AI are two areas of focus for Microsoft research. Second, we’ve known since December that Walmart is exploring its own computer vision-based cashierless store experience (and last month, the retailer killed its Scan and Go approach to cashierless shopping).

Finally, and most obvious, nobody wants to cede even more of the future of shopping to Amazon, and grocery shopping is no exception. Amazon already owns Whole Foods and is expanding discounts and two-hour delivery for its 100 million-strong Prime members. Plus, the first Amazon Go store is very impressive, is expanding into Chicago and San Francisco, and absolutely should be replicated elsewhere.

Moves like these have sent grocery retailers scrambling to compete. Target and Walmart are expanding their two-hour delivery service. Albertsons partnered with Instacart, and Kroger just invested more heavily in Ocado to build out twenty rapid-delivery robot warehouses here in the U.S.. Not to mention Walmart experimenting with its own fridge-to-fridge delivery service similar to Amazon Key.

Plus, other smaller players are working on their own versions of cashierless tech. All_ebt has Amazon Go-like ambitions for those on food stamps. Caper has its own computer vision and deep learning smart checkout cart. And AI Poly, whose CEO is speaking at our Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle, has its own autonomous market in the works.

So while Microsoft provided a big “no comment” for Reuters, the idea of the Redmond giant working on such technology shouldn’t come as a news flash to anyone following the industry.

Microsoft Gets Visual Food Logging Patent

Microsoft appears to be applying its computer vision and AI smarts to make watching what you eat easier. The Redmond giant was awarded a patent yesterday for “Food Logging From Images.” That basically means, you can take a picture of your food and Microsoft will provide you with its nutritional information (calories, protein, vitamins, etc.).

Yesterday’s patent indicates that it is a continuation of a previous Microsoft patent in May of 2017 for “Restaurant-Specific Food Logging From Images.” Restaurants are called out specifically in this new patent because the Microsoft Food Logger would use GPS to know when you’re at a restaurant. From there, the Food Logger could use information from text menus online via Yelp! or a restaurant’s own site to assess nutritional information.

The technology would supposedly also work outside restaurants, using image recognition to understand home cooked meals as well. And there are tools to allow the user to edit or correct any inaccuracies in what the Logger identifies. So if you slathered butter on a piece of bread, you could specify the amount.

The obvious use case with this patent is a mobile phone app, which is listed. However, Microsoft goes even further to say this technology would work with camera-equipped glasses. From how the company describe it, if you walk into a restaurant wearing these hypothetical Food Logger glasses, you would almost get Terminator-like vision looking at the nutritional content of various meals people around you were eating.

The idea of taking a picture of food and automatically getting its nutritional content isn’t new. Apps like Lose It and Calorie Mama AI say they offer the same type of functionality. Samsung even recently added Calorie Mama’s technology into its Bixby virtual assistant.

Google, of course, has also been working on food recognition for awhile. And this week it came to light that Google is reportedly adding human-powered food identification capabilities to Google Maps. Humans labeling pictures of food taken from different angles and visibility will be beneficial to help train Google’s image recognition algorithms.

Right now, this is just a patent for Microsoft, so who knows how this will ever make it to market. But that market is huge, and it’s unlikely Microsoft will sit on the sidelines.

Five For Food: Cortana Skills Begin To Roll Out, Including A Handful For Foodies

Earlier this month, Microsoft finally debuted its own home virtual assistant/speaker combo alongside a developer platform for third party skills. A couple years behind Echo/Alexa, it’s no surprise the new platform has lots of catching up to do when it comes to third party skills.

But let’s give credit where credit is due: Not only did Microsoft beat Apple to market with a home voice assistant, they also have a decent early slate of skills. Checking in on the Microsoft skill listing, there are a total of 55 total skills as of today, of which five are food related.

Here are the five food skills currently available for Cortana:

Food Network: Like the Alexa skill, this Cortana skill allows users to ask Cortana for a recipe for a meal made on any number of shows. Users can “ask for recipes by ingredient, course or chef. You can also search our TV schedule by show, chef and time/date to find showtimes and episode details.”

Domino’s Pizza: Pretty simple: users can order Domino’s pizza with this Cortana skill. By adding Microsoft’s voice assistant,  Domino’s is available on all three of the big home assistant platforms, including Alexa and Google Home.

Open Table: The Open Table skill is also pretty straight forward: like the popular mobile app, the Cortana Open Table skill allows you to make reservations. To get started, the user has to do a little up front work and fill in their basic contact details such as name, email, phone.

Bartender: This one is a fun but simple skill – you can ask it to give you the recipe for your favorite cocktail and it will walk you through it. This skill is made by BigOven, a Seattle based digital recipe and food content startup founded by ex-Microsofter Steve Murch.

Cook.ai: Of the five Cortana food skills, this is my favorite. While I didn’t try it on Cortana (I don’t yet have a Cortana device), I was able to give it an Alexa version of this skill a test run and liked the concept. The neat thing with Cook.ai is it combines a voice assistant with a web app at Cook.ai to walk you through a recipe. You start by first enabling the skill, then you are instructed to pair a device (I paired my Mac). The skill then takes you through a recipe step by step, showing each stage of the recipe in the web app on the paired device. You give voice commands to move from step to step. Cook.ai is also working iOS and Android apps (and I assume also Windows), though I found the web app worked just fine.

Microsoft Unveils Echo Competitor Powered By Cortana

Microsoft is not necessarily a leader in the smart home these days, trailing Samsung, Apple and Google in platforms and hardware offerings and instead focusing on other core offerings. But as the Amazon Echo and then Google Home voice assistants jumped onto the scene, the tech world speculated about whether Apple and Microsoft would put their respective AI voice assistants – Siri and Cortana – into physical devices, too.

Rumors abound that Apple is about to do just that – but they’ll be last to the table as Microsoft previewed its Cortana-powered wireless speaker on Monday. Ahead of their BUILD developer conference, which starts tomorrow, Microsoft showed off the Invoke, a speaker manufactured by Harman Kardon and enabled by the company’s digital voice assistant.

Invoke does what Google Home & Echo do for the most part – weather reports, news, music, reminders, timers, etc – and the details thus far are fairly underwhelming. The company reported Invoke will offer “deep integration with Microsoft’s suite of knowledge and productivity tools,” making it a potentially interesting tool for home offices or businesses as a scheduling tool. The device will also have integration with Skype, allowing users to make calls via the platform.  It will certainly sound better than the Echo with Harman Kardon audio engineering and design behind the speaker – and that feature alone might drive audiophiles to Invoke over the competition.

Microsoft’s blog does not detail how or if the device will allow for third-party developers to build additional features and functions – something both Echo and Google Home are capitalizing on to add use cases and turn the speakers into sous chefs, personal assistants and smart home controllers.

Harman Kardon’s press release announcing the speaker definitely positions the audio brand to offer a competitive device to other premium smart speakers like Sonos – with a high-powered AI engine inside. The speaker will have seven microphones and advanced ambient noise technology to help Cortana hear you even in loud environments – another area where HK’s contribution could give Invoke an edge over the Echo. Pricing wasn’t given yet but the product should be available via Microsoft stores in the fall.

With the BUILD conference starting tomorrow, we’ll be sure to share updates and details about Invoke and the features it might bring to the home and kitchen.

What Happened To Smart Fridges In 2016?

As we continue our end of year wrap-up series, we wanted to drive into some smart kitchen appliance categories to see what happened (or didn’t happen) to the category as a whole and make some predictions for what’s on the horizon for 2017.

Hey Alexa, what’s in my fridge?

If there was a darling of connected tech in 2016, the Amazon Echo was it. Voice control was barely a whisper at CES last year and by September, if you didn’t have voice control baked into your smart home or entertainment device (or at least have it on your product roadmap), you were irrelevant. And Alexa fit right into the kitchen, with hands-free control in the one room if the house you don’t want to be touching your smartphone.

Voice control makes more sense for devices that do stuff – telling Alexa to pre-heat the oven is a pretty useful skill. So, the Amazon Echo compatibility for fridges is a shorter list, but worth a look:

  • GE – GE launched their Geneva skill to control a range of GE Wi-Fi appliances, including fridges but also ovens and washing machines. For fridges, Alexa can control the temperature, turn the icemaker on or off, prep hot water for coffee or tea, or just give you a status on how the fridge is doing.
  • The Samsung Family Hub connects to Amazon Echo and you can use Alexa to control all the things on the Hub’s OS like Pandora but you can also order groceries through the Groceries by Mastercard app, mirroring Amazon’s own ordering services available through voice.

Speaking of Samsung…

The fridge as the home hub

The concept of the connected fridge isn’t a new one, with appliance makers adding Wi-Fi connectivity to their products for the last several years. One of the companies on the early smart fridge bandwagon was Samsung, who began talking about an internet refrigerator back in 2001. Later during that decade, Samsung was demoing smart fridges at CES; the fridge displayed a small-ish touch screen with basic connected functionality.

Then came the Samsung Family Hub. A beast of a machine (in both size and price), this fridge first debuted last year at CES 2016 with its official launch in May. With its giant 1080p touchscreen on the front, it looked at first glance, like a version of their other Wi-Fi connected fridges on steroids. But the Family Hub actually packs some interesting features that while might seem frivolous at the outset, actually hint at some larger tech trends for fridges and other appliances in the future.

The giant touchscreen features interesting apps like the Groceries by Mastercard app which allows you to order food from FreshDirect and ShopRite, right from your fridge. The fridge also gives users the ability to photo tag their items to keep track of what’s there.

The other future-facing features are the cameras placed in the fridge’s doors to let you see what’s inside when the doors are closed. Why would we want to do that? Well to check when you’re at the grocery store to see what you’re out of, for one. You can also look inside the fridge from the touchscreen on the front, negating the need to open the doors. LG debuted similar functionality at CES 2016, with theirs using a “knocking” feature and a clear window on the front of the fridge to let someone knock, illuminate the interior lights and see what’s in the fridge without opening the door.

But ordering groceries from your fridge’s touchscreen and being able to see what’s inside from your phone in a supermarket isn’t really the compelling story here. The story is what Samsung (and others) haven’t yet put inside this device – and what will make refrigerators way smarter in the future.

The fridge as a part of the kitchen’s OS ecosystem

Moving from connectivity and entertainment to a true smart appliance, the fridge of the future might actually have a database of knowledge and machine learning behind it that will allow it to know things about your food. Startups like Innit are pioneering a new category using food data along with image recognition software to allow an appliance like a refrigerator to recognize food without any user inputs and generate useful information from that. Information like a recipe that could be made with the contents left in the fridge on the day before shopping day would help prevent food waste and also give users helpful ideas for dinner.

The technology concept driving Innit is what’s missing from the Samsung Family Hub and every other Wi-Fi connected fridge. Cameras and connectivity are great, but when something requires the user to constantly input and maintain a database in order to fully deliver on its usefulness, it falls apart. Consumers don’t want another thing to have to update, they want tech that makes things easier.

Innit’s partnership with appliance giant Whirlpool is proof that manufacturers are recognizing the shortcomings of current technology. And the opportunity in the kitchen isn’t going unnoticed; Microsoft announced in a blog post in early September it too is planning to build a fridge with a connected, machine learning based platform. Microsoft will collaborate with Liebherr’s appliance division to create a platform that uses computer-based deep learning algorithms with imaging software to recognize food that’s placed inside a refrigerator.

Unique to Microsoft is the modularity they’re building into every “SmartDevice ready” appliance, theoretically making any refrigerator purchased today easily upgradable in the future. Products like the Samsung Family Hub fridge have been criticized for offering a host of features without any clear answers on how the device will keep pace with future innovation and developments. With the price tags on connected appliances still one to three times what consumers pay for their dumb counterparts, future-proofing these products seems critical to their long-term success. This coupled with the longer buying cycles of white goods mean appliance manufacturers might start thinking about their revenue streams and what kind of role that plays, whether that’s through a grocery replenishment partnership or technology upgrades that offer new functionality.

Appliance-As-A-Service (AAAS….?) 

Mike Wolf wrote a post here at The Spoon and an even larger analysis at the NextMarket blog on the concept of paying monthly fees to obtain a consumer good, or what’s known as the “X as a service” model. Much of the consumer market is trending towards a service or subscription model, from streaming videos to clothing and furniture. Could kitchen appliances follow suit?

Bad acronym aside, it’s not completely crazy. We’re finally seeing appliances evolve to provide significant value beyond the existing reactive position they’ve held in the kitchen for the last fifty or sixty years. There’s machine learning and artificial intelligence set to change how we cook and how tasty and well-prepared the food we sit down to eat will be along with connectivity giving us capabilities and efficiencies that might make us want to cook more with more convenience. But the current trajectory requires consumers to piece together a smart kitchen and then also keep tabs on upgrades and seek out tech support for issues they encounter. What if appliances like smart fridges could be purchased as a service, with upgrades and support and maybe other services baked in?

Though we haven’t seen any company make a serious move towards AAAS just yet, we think it’s an area to watch in 2017 and beyond. If for no other reason than it’s actually a pretty awesome acronym.

With CES 2017 just a week away, we’re sure to see more developments in the smart fridge and more broadly, smart kitchen appliance category.