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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Miele

The Food Tech Show: Are We Ready to Eat Bugs?

The Spoon team got together talk about the most interesting food and kitchen tech stories of the week, including:

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Miele Shipping the Dialog, Their Oven With Solid State Cooking Tech, to 20 Countries

In 2017, Miele had attendees at Germany’s big appliance fair, IFA, raving with a demo of a new appliance called the Dialog.

The appliance, which uses solid state cooking technology instead of the more antiquated technology featured in microwave ovens, was an exciting development because it was the first time a high end consumer appliance brand had introduced a product with the cutting edge technology.

However, after 2017 we heard little about the Dialog. Sure, at IFA 2018 the German company talked up a meal delivery service through a partnership with another German company MChef, but, other than that, details of when the Dialog would be available were few and far between.

So imagine my surprise when Miele told me this month that the Dialog is now shipping in 20 countries. According to Miele spokeswoman Julie Cink, the Dialog is currently available in European countries such as “Germany (of course), Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy or Great Britain.”

Cink said that in the second quarter of this year, the Dialog will be available in additional European countries such as France, Norway and Greece.

Still no word on when the Dialog will be available in the US. Miele’s executive director and namesake Markus Miele told me via email the holdup is because the required regulatory approval for the Dialog’s RF technology would require significant adaptations to the product.

“The regulations concerning the use of the frequencies are very different and so we have to modify the appliance (a lot),” wrote Miele.

The price tag on the Dialog is high, but in line with what you’d expect for a premium brand like Miele’s biggest product launch in years: 7,990 Euros.

MChef Meal Service Available Across Germany

I was also interested to find out that the meal delivery service we wrote about in 2018 is also available across Germany.

From Miele’s website:

“Customers can order individual dishes or three-course menus for the discerning from MChef, which are then shipped on elegant porcelain plates together with a matching wine to addresses throughout Germany.”

The meal service offers up to 20 different dishes which, according to Miele, are delivered via a “patented transport crate which guarantees freshness; used crockery is returned to the empty crate which is picked up and returned.”

Bottom line, the availability of the Dialog is a big deal and an overall win for solid state cooking. Most appliance companies I’ve talked to are working on developing their own RF cooking appliances, but have yet to push them to market because of the high price tag of the technology. With the Dialog now available, I expect that will put some pressure on other premium brands to look to accelerate their own pushes towards solid state cooking.

Are In-Home Vertical Farms the Next Big Appliance for Connected Kitchens?

A little less than a year ago, The Spoon looked at a number of hydroponic farming devices that could fit into the average person’s apartment. These were for the most part table-top models or units that could hang on a wall. At the time, the concept of having a grow system in your own home seemed more than a little novel.

Fast forward to now and things have changed. Putting an indoor vertical farm in the average consumer’s home isn’t yet a mainstream concept, but as more startups and major appliance-makers alike have shown over the last 12 months, the idea is making its way into the Everyman’s kitchen with more speed these days. Now, thanks to a bunch of concepts shown off at this year’s CES, suddenly the idea of having a smart farm in your kitchen doesn’t seem so novel.

Whether you’re contemplating your own home grow system or just curious, here’s a look at what’s available and what’s in the pipeline.

Aspara

If you’re like me, you have minimal space (almost none, really) in the home for adding much in the way of smart farming systems. Aspara’s hydroponic growing device could potentially solve that problem because it’s small — 14 inches high and 21 inches wide — and could reasonably fit on a countertop, shelf, or even on top of the refrigerator. The system uses a combination of LEDs, an auto-watering feature, and sensors that detect nutrient levels, humidity and air, and other factors to create the optimal grow “recipe” for the plants. 

After a user does the initial planting of the seeds, the Aspara app manages most of the grow process, notifying the user when it’s time to refill the water tank and harvest the plants. It also includes tips and recipes for growing and lets you monitor multiple Aspara farms at the same time.

The device is currently available in Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the U.S. through online retailers. For U.S. buyers, the device currently goes for $259.99 on Amazon for just the machine and $339.99 with a starter seed kit included.

Rise Gardens

Chicago, IL startup Rise Gardens is one of those companies aiming to make a truly “plug in and go” indoor vertical farming system for the home. This one is a standalone console that can be purchased with one, two, or three “levels” for plants and weighs between 60 and 106 pounds depending on the size.

A user assembles the garden — much as you would a piece of furniture from IKEA, from the looks of it — then downloads the app, which controls the lighting and nutrients schedule and reminds the user when it’s time to water the plants. Each garden comes with a starter pack of 12 plant pods that can be inserted directly into the grow trays. 

Price ranges from $549 for a single-level console to $949 for a triple. 

Agrilution’s Plantcube

Not to be confused with Plantycube (see below), the Plantcube made headlines at the end of 2019 when its maker, a German company called Agrilution, was acquired by appliance-maker Miele. Less device than full-on kitchen appliance, the Plantcube automates temperature, light, climate, and water levels of the indoor vertical farm, and can be controlled from within the Agrilution app. 

The appliance looks like a wine cooler and is about the same size. However, unlike a wine cooler or any of the systems listed above, the Plantcube is meant to be built directly into your kitchen cupboards or beneath a countertop. That would perhaps explain the price point: €2,979 (~$3,300 USD), a figure most consumers wouldn’t spend on an indoor farm right now. Even for those who would, the device is currently only available to those in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxemburg or the Netherlands.

Even so, the concept Plantcube pushes is one to watch. It’s entirely possible that appliances like these eventually become as common in the home kitchen as microwaves. The price point would have to come way down for that to become a reality, which is one reason we’re watching Plantcube closely in the future.

GE Home Grow

As The Spoon’s Mike Wolf wrote recently, CES 2020’s standout in the consumer kitchen was GE because, “rather than create product demos designed as show-off vehicles for new technologies, GE illustrated how these technologies could be employed in a cohesive, systematic way to provide consumers answers to some of their biggest problems.”

Among those technologies was Home Grown, GE’s indoor gardening concept that uses a combination of hydroponics, aeroponics, and soil-based grow systems that are built directly into the kitchen design. For each of the three systems, water, nutrient, and light delivery are controlled through an app, which also guides the user through the seeding and harvesting stages of the grow process. 

The system also offers consumers information on the health benefits of each plant as well as how to prepare herbs and greens in meals once they are harvested. 

Home Grow is purely conceptual at this stage, so there’s no price point on these systems. Like the Plantcube, however, GE is thinking bigger than the just-another-appliance concept and imagining a system that can encourage healthier eating, reduce food waste, and increase consumer education around the foods they’re eating.

Honorable Mentions

We’ve covered these in-depth already, but LG and Plantycube are also at the forefront of bringing vertical farming technology into the consumer kitchen. Both showed off products at CES this year.

LG’s forthcoming appliance is the size of a fridge and, as I wrote recently, “takes many of the functions found in commercial-scale indoor farming and applies them to a device specifically made for the average consumer.”

N.thing’s Planty Cube, meanwhile, is a highly modular indoor farming system that can be small enough to fit on a countertop or large enough to serve cafeterias at schools, offices, and other institutions.

Since things are never as simple as they seem, there are obviously still a lot of questions around these “plug-in-and-grow” systems. Will they raise consumers’ utility bill significantly? What happens if they break? Are they worth the cost if they can only grow leafy greens and not more substantial veggies, like carrots or broccoli? 

Many more questions will sprout up as companies introduce new systems to the consumer market, and it’s ok that those questions won’t get answered immediately. The more important point here is that entrepreneurs and corporations both are testing new ways to make food cleaner, more local, and more in the consumer’s control. Right now, we need concepts as compact as an Aspera and as conceptual as GE’s Home Grown right now to help get us there.

Vertical Farms Will Become Key Parts of Your Grocery Store and Your Kitchen Cabinets in 2020

At this point we can expect vertical farming to play an important role in our future food system — one that goes beyond selling greens to upscale markets in gentrified urban neighborhoods. Exactly what that future role looks like is less certain as we move into 2020. Commercial-scale vertical farms, which grow millions of heads of greens in warehouses and shipping containers, still has a lot to prove in terms of economics and scalability.

While the industrial-scale model continues trying to prove itself in 2020, the place we may see the most compelling developments for vertical farming in the next year is actually in the consumer realm. E. coli outbreaks and bleached salad (among many other factors) have contributed to an uptick in consumer demand for fresher food that’s traveled fewer miles between the farm and the table. If the last year taught us anything, it’s that putting the farm is right next to your table, or at least at your local grocery retailer, is becoming a popular strategy for providing healthier, more traceable greens to consumers, and that trend will continue in 2020.

With startups, grocery stores, major appliance-makers, and others now exploring this area, some of these developments are already happening.

In your grocery store.

Many companies are now looking to shorten the supply chain between the farm and the consumer when it comes to produce. One way is to put the farm right in the grocery store. These aren’t massive facilities growing millions of heads of lettuce. Rather, they’re typically standalone, highly modular pods or units that can be set up right in the produce section. 

German startup InFarm highlighted this approach in 2019 when it partnered with Kroger to place units in 15 of the grocery retailers stores. The company also partnered with UK retailer Marks & Spencer for a similar venture in Britain. 

Another route is for farming startups to partner with major food distributors, as Square Roots has done by building farms near or on Gordon Food Service’s distribution centers. Gordon operates 175 of these across North America, and proximity to those facilities means Square Roots can get its greens distributed to a larger selection of grocery retailers.

In your kitchen cabinets. 

Indoor farms that fit in the home aren’t new. There are plenty of standalone, tabletop, or wall-mounted devices out there that let the average consumer grow greens year-round. What is new is that major appliance-makers are now exploring the possibilities of indoor farming as not another gadget for the kitchen but an integral part of that space’s design. 

We saw this recently when Miele acquired the assets to Agrilution, whose automated Plantcube farm is meant to be built right into the kitchen cabinetry. Just yesterday, LG announced it will be showing off its own in-kitchen smart farm at CES 2020 in a couple weeks.

These aren’t going to be cheap products. Plantcubes cost €2,979 (~$3,300 USD), and that doesn’t include the extra money tacked onto your energy bills each month for things like water and electricity. (LG hasn’t released pricing details yet.) Most likely, these in-cabinet farms will debut in new, single-family homes with ample amounts of space in the kitchen. As more appliance-makers develop products and team up with home retailers (IKEA, I’m looking at you), we’ll likely see the price point on these farms come down and the concept go a little more mainstream. 

LG Will Unveil an Indoor Farm for the Consumer Kitchen at CES 2020

With CES right around the corner, the announcements are pouring in for new gadgets and products to be on display at the Las Vegas show, including those that will change the way we cook, eat, and think about our food. 

Appliance-maker LG is the latest. The company announced this week it will unveil a smart gardening appliance for the consumer kitchen at CES 2020, one that uses advanced lighting, temperature, and water control to let consumers grow greens year-round inside their kitchens.

The as-yet unnamed appliance takes many of the functions found in commercial-scale indoor farming and applies them to a device specifically made for the average consumer. Software, controlled via the user’s smartphone determines the precise “recipe” of LED lights, air, and water the plants need and when that recipe should change based on the time of day. The goal is to replicate “optimal outdoor conditions by precisely matching the temperature inside the insulated cabinet with the time of day,” according to the announcement from LG.

This kind of control means users can grow herbs and leafy greens year-round if they choose, and with considerably more ease than they would have with an outdoor garden. Not only does a controlled indoor cabinet mean no pests (or pesticides for that matter), the companion app basically offers a step-by-step guide each day for growing, monitoring, and harvesting plants. It’s not unlike the many guided cooking apps out there offering granular advice every step of the way so that experts and less experienced users alike can use the tool successfully. 

LG’s new appliance marks the company’s first foray into the indoor gardening space — and possibly a new trend for the future of the home kitchen. Up to now, smart indoor farms for consumers have been mostly standalone devices that don’t necessarily have any connection with the home’s main kitchen. From the pictures, LG’s appliance can be built right into the cabinetry and modular enough to fit many different kitchen formats. 

LG isn’t the only company exploring how to do this. At the beginning of December, appliance-maker Miele acquired the assets of Agrilution, whose Plantcube indoor vertical farm can be directly built into home kitchens.

It will likely be a long time before we see such devices become standard parts of all kitchens. That idea of building indoor farming into the design of the kitchen was a concept explored in depth at SKS 2019 this past October. It looks expensive, time consuming, and complex right now, but more major appliance-makers entering the space means we’re slowly but surely inching towards the day when the cost of such systems can come down and the average consumer might someday see at-home smart farming become a reality. 

Miele Acquires Consumer Indoor Vertical Farm Company Agrilution

Miele announced today that it has acquired the assets of the German company, Agrilution, makers of the Plantcube indoor vertical farm. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Agrilution’s Plantcubes look like wine fridges that are meant to be built directly into home kitchens. The automated systems regulate the lighting, climate, and water levels plants receive, all key parts of delivering the right “recipe” of nutrients to crops grown in vertical farms. Plantcubes cost €2,979 (~$3,300 USD) and are capable of growing a number of different greens including kale, leaf lettuce, basil and more.

According to the press announcement, Miele came on board after Agrilution failed to raise more financing and filed for insolvency on Dec. 1. Agrilution will become a subsidiary of Miele, and almost all of Agrilution’s employees will be transferred over to Miele.

Having an in-kitchen grow system makes a lot of sense for people wanting to reduce their carbon footprint as well as have more transparency into and control over the food that they eat. These small farms could be especially appealing to those that don’t have the space, inclination or talent to grow their greens outside. In fact, building hydroponic grow systems directly into cabinets was a trend predicted during a panel on the future of the kitchen at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit.

The acquisition of Agrilution also seems like a smart play for Miele. Since Agrilution was in insolvency, the assets for the company probably weren’t that expensive. Miele has also shown that it isn’t afraid to shake up the traditional kitchen with new appliances like its solid state RF oven, its own meal delivery service, and investments in digital recipe startups like Plant Jammer and KptnCook.

A big player like Miele could also help push indoor farming systems more into the mainstream. Miele has the market muscle other in-home farming startups like Seedo, SproutsIO, or Ponix just can’t match. The only question remains is whether in a world of on-demand food delivery, people will have the patience to grow their own greens.

Touchscreens, Guided Cooking and Electromagnetic Waves Take Center Stage at IFA Berlin

Connected kitchens. This was the top trend in kitchen appliance technology at IFA 2018 last month. All the big brands in the kitchen space were either announcing partnerships, or discussing them. Electrolux and AEG were on hand to show off their smart cooktops and connected ovens and their partnership with Google Assistant. Miele expanded on their Dialog oven range with the MChef meal delivery service. LG was also there to launch their kitchen range, including their Signature Kitchen Suite (SKS), as well as coin a new phrase — Technicureans!

Technicureans is what LG is calling their potential SKS customers. Technicureans, according to them, are ‘a new generation of forward-thinking cooks, combining their passion for food with their appreciation of innovation’. I thought they were called ‘early adopters’, the beloved description of the technology startup world, but I like the premise. Whether the name, which is trademarked, will catch on I can’t say, but I like the idea.

LG launched this product to Europe in grand fashion. They had a stand alone pod outside in the Sommergarten at IFA, filled with their own brand of smart appliances, accompanied by beautiful kitchen furniture by Valcucine, who partnered with them. What I found inside was incredibly impressive. Three kitchens, packed full of connected appliances. Touch controls on ovens with built-in recipes and beautiful interfaces.

LG demonstrated their new touch screen kitchen interface, which works with all their appliances, and is powered by Google Assistant and the Innit platform. Users can select a recipe on Innit using the smart display, which uses wi-fi to talk to the oven. The display will also walk the user through each step, allowing the user to bring up an instructional video if necessary.

This isn’t exclusive to LG and Smart Kitchen Suite, however. Google has already announced three other smart displays with Sony, Lenovo, and JBL, so we can expect these to appear on the market very soon.

AEG, who took centre stage at IFA instead of their parent company Electrolux, launched their new smart SenseCook cooktops with videos and demonstrations on how it all works. The first two cooktops in the range have specific jobs. SenseFry, which provides an automatically adaptable temperature for pan frying, and SenseBoil, which constantly monitors water temperature, adjusting where necessary to prevent a pan boiling over. If consumers opt for the SensePro cooktop, which is the top model, they get both the fry and boil features, as well as a battery-less, wireless temperature probe which constantly reads the internal temperature of the food, regulating temperatures to keep cooking on the right track. It also featured a touchscreen control panel, which is home to recipes and temperature controls. I really like this product. They are covering off a few of the main pitfalls of cooking. Anything that makes it simpler to get great results has my approval.

As for Electrolux, their main kitchen focus was on their connected ovens, with a demonstration room dedicated to their partnership with Google. The closed room allowed them to demonstrate how you can use their ovens with voice control to navigate through the whole cooking cycle. They also showed off the oven’s built-in camera, and it’s ability to share to social media. Innit’s partnerships also extend beyond Electrolux and AEG, with GE, Bosch, Beko and LG currently tied up, and more in the pipeline. Consumers will be able to connect with a whole host of connected ovens and appliances through this app, and even order their groceries through it.

Miele also had its Dialog oven, which now adds electromagnetic waves (like a microwave) to the existing cooking functions. Essentially, the waves read the texture and surface of the food, adjusting the cooking mode and temperature accordingly. It works alongside the fan and the heat in the oven cavity for the best results possible. Although the technology is similar to that of a microwave, the Dialog oven uses the technology in a less aggressive way, and doesn’t blast food like a microwave.

Miele also announced their partnership with MChef, a meal delivery startup out of their native Germany. The premise is that you order your food by 12:30pm, and it’s all delivered the next day, ready to work with the recipe app and the oven. The ingredients actually come prepared on porcelain plates. Consumers merely remove the wrapping, and tell the app what they’re cooking. That’s it! This is the way to get the most out of your Dialog oven, although it will no doubt come at a price. Miele are launching this in select regions in Germany, before rolling out nationwide. Although Miele haven’t released pricing for their MChef service, already the oven is priced way above these countertop options, and also has the need to be built-in.

The thing I had hoped to see was more US startups making a play for Europe. There’s some great technology coming out of the US, as always, and the European market is ready for it all. The likes of Anova and ChefSteps have their products available on Amazon, but I want more from them. I want to see these products taking root in the department stores, electrical and specialist cooking stores that are so popular in Europe. Meal service is gaining popularity in the UK too, so the likes of Nomiku, Suvie and Tovala could really be making it work. I hope to see more products like this at IFA in the future. Connected kitchens are growing with real force in Europe, and their presence across the board at IFA 2018 highlights that. There was so much attention on them, and far less on the traditional kitchen appliances. It spells it out perfectly. Now is the time to get connected in the kitchen.

Miele Invests in AI-Powered Cooking App Plant Jammer

German appliance giant the Miele Group has bought a minority stake in foodtech startup Plant Jammer. The Copenhagen-based company uses AI to suggest complimentary ingredients and build modular recipes. 

As I wrote back in February:

Vegetarian recipe-generating app Plant Jammer is out to help those with low kitchen confidence who want to cook healthy meals and reduce their food waste. The app creates custom recipes for users based off of whatever ingredients they have in their kitchen—then walks them through how to go from recipe to meal, step by step.

According to a press release, Plant Jammer’s algorithm and “choose your own adventure” approach to cooking is now being tested in Miele’s experimental kitchen. The two companies are working together to improve Plant Jammer’s app and test new ideas for kitchen equipment and interfaces.

Around the same time they took a minority stake in Plant Jammer, Miele also invested in German shoppable recipe startup KptnCook. And just a few weeks before that, they announced that they were partnering with MChef to create a food delivery service for customers who own Miele’s high-end Dialog oven.

My colleague Chris Albrecht posited that Miele’s investment in KptnCook could be used to gain valuable data on customer recipe preferences, then applied to MChef meal development. Down the road, their partnership could also help Miele get into a more direct version of shoppable recipes.

I imagine Miele could use Plant Jammer for a similar purpose. They would collect data on what types of recipes customers “jammed,” then use the information to develop plant-based dishes for MChef. But more importantly, they will use Plant Jammer to see if people prefer their modular recipe creation to the traditional recipe format.

“We set out to find if Plant Jammer’s approach could be a viable alternative to recipes for the next generation and the preliminary tests point to a roaring YES” Gernot Trettenbrein, Executive Director of Miele Venture Capital, said in the press release.

If they discover consumers prefer a more flexible, dynamic recipe creation process to following a list of instructions, that could inform their future plans to get into the shoppable recipe game. At the moment Plant Jammer doesn’t have shoppable recipe integration built into their app, but they do have a service where users can build a shopping list; it’s not hard to imagine them teaming up with an e-commerce company at some point.

Plant Jammer launched in early 2018 and has roughly 10,000 active users. Miele’s investment shows that they’re not sure exactly what the future of the recipe will be, but they’re willing to invest in a few to find out.

 

Miele Invests in Shoppable Recipe Startup, KptnCook

KptnCook, a Berlin-based shoppable recipe startup, today announced that it has received a “seven figure” investment from Miele Venture Capital, a subsidiary of Miele Group, the appliance making giant (and fellow German company). The investment is in US dollars and is the first round of venture funding for KptnCook.

As we wrote back in January, KptnCook is different from other startups in the shoppable recipe space:

KptnCook provides daily recipes to your phone, bundles together a shopping based on those ingredients, and using your location, points you to a nearby store where you can get all the ingredients.

But KptnCook bucks the recipe app trends in two ways. First, while it creates shoppable recipes, it sends you to real world stores to actually roam the aisles and make your purchases. You can’t order online, and there is no in-store order fulfillment.

Miele seems to be assembling the parts necessary to capture more of the European consumer meal journey. Miele itself makes kitchen appliances, including the new high-end Dialog oven, which uses radio frequency solid state technology for extreme precision cooking. Then last month, Miele announced it had invested in MChef (another German startup) to launch a specialized food delivery service for Dialog oven users. Dialog’s technology allows it to cook multiple MChef meals at once.

As with the MChef deal, there aren’t a lot of details as to how KptnCook will be integrated into any Miele offering. But there doesn’t need to be a ton of integration for Miele to realize value out of this investment.

By investing in KptnCook, Miele gains data and valuable insight into the specific recipes that consumers choose, how often they shop, where they shop, the ingredients they buy, etc.. At the very least, this data could inform what type of meals MChef should create for Dialog customers. Further down, these shopping insights could set Miele up for a more direct version of shoppable recipes complete with online grocery ordering and delivery (right now, KptnCook says that just 1 percent of Germans shop for groceries online).

KptnCook wouldn’t provide any stats around its app usage, which leads me to believe it’s not that high. An investment from Miele could provide a nice marketing boost via the appliance maker’s existing sales channel. For its part, KptnCook said it would use the investment money to build out its marketing and product teams, and double its headcount to 20 people.

Elsewhere in KptnCook’s world, Co-Founders Eva Hoefer and Alex Reeg told me that their app now works with Alexa. Once enabled the Amazon voice assistant will walk users through making recipes step-by-step.

Miele To Launch Food Delivery Service At IFA

At last year’s IFA, German appliance maker Miele made news by announcing the first consumer oven to incorporate solid state cooking in the Dialog.

Their follow up act? Getting into food delivery business.

According to a preview announcement released by Miele, the company is partnering up with a German startup called MChef to deliver meals to customers with the Dialog oven.

From the announcement:

Orders received online by 12.30 h will be delivered the next day, 365 days a year. Up to six dishes can be prepared in a dialog oven simultaneously. The programme with the correct settings is launched direct from the MChef app. The average cooking time is 20 minutes.

It’s an interesting move for the German kitchen giant. While other smaller connected kitchen startups like Tovala, Suvie and Nomiku have jumped into the food delivery business to add a recurring revenue stream on top of their hardware products, established appliance makers have been slower to move into food delivery.

Part of the reason for the lack of offerings from bigger players is likely very simple: food delivery is hard. The week’s news about Chef’d shutting down is not only a testament to this fact, but it also shows the perils of partnering with third parties. One of the major fallouts of the Chef’d shut-down was that it left companies like Nestle, Innit and Brava scrambling to figure out their food delivery strategies with the closure of the white label meal kit startup.

While the details of Miele’s partnership with MChef are still vague, it sounds like the appliance maker is investing resources in the the food delivery startup to help it with the broader rollout of the offering:

Now, a startup called MChef, supported by Miele, is set to deliver the matching haute cuisine to homes around the country. Exquisite plated dishes or entire three-course menus wait to be ordered. When they arrive on the customer’s doorstep, the ingredients are already appealingly arranged on elegant porcelain plates – ready to be cooked to perfection in a dialog oven.

The service, which will formally be announced at IFA, will first roll out in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany in September and will be rolled out nationwide early next year.

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. 

Podcast: Juicero is Dead

Over the past six months, there probably hasn’t been a company more roundly mocked in startup land than Juicero. The funmaking started after a Bloomberg article showed how one can squeeze the company’s juice packs by hand, essentially making superfluous the company’s $400 juicer.

When you raise $120 million, this is a PR problem, one the company seemingly never recovered from.

And so this week, the company announced it is shutting down.

But the company’s problems went beyond an expensive juicer. On today’s podcast, Ashley Daigneault and I discuss how the company had created a nearly impossible logistical and supply chain problem almost from the outset.

We also discuss Miele’s new RF solid state powered wall oven and Sharp’s deal with SideChef, as well as Mike’s trip to Tokyo for the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan.