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Podcast: What Does Nomiku’s Demise Mean For Consumer Sous Vide?

Last Friday, Nomiku announced it was closing its doors.

Alongside Anova and Sansaire, the San Francisco based startup founded by Lisa and Abe Fetterman was part of an early class of consumer sous vide startups looking to democratize the high-end cooking technique through technology. Now, nearly a decade after the publication of Modernist Cuisine, only Anova is left standing (after being acquired by Electrolux) while Nomiku and Sansaire are no more. So what does it all mean?

No spoilers here! You’ll have to listen to The Spoon editor podcast to find out.

In addition to discussing the end of Nomiku and the broader meaning of it all, the Spoon editor team also discuss the following stories:

As always, you can listen to this episode of the Food Tech Show on Apple podcasts or Spotify, download directly to your device, or just click play below.

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Consumer Sous Vide Pioneer Nomiku is Shutting Down

Nomiku, a pioneering kitchen tech startup that helped bring sous vide to the consumer market, is shutting down operations effective immediately.

In an email sent to customers this morning, Lisa Fetterman, Nomiku founder and CEO, wrote that the company will be shutting down all operations, including both its sous vide appliance business and its sous vide ready meal business, Nomiku Meals.

In an interview with The Spoon, Fetterman said that while the company saw strong growth in their meal delivery business after the company pivoted one year ago – she said they doubled revenue since the launch of the food business – it just wasn’t enough.

“We just couldn’t get the company to a sustainable place,” said Fetterman.

Fetterman indicated that for long term survival, the company would need to raise capital and that that was going to be challenging in today’s environment. She said that while being a hardware company made it hard to raise additional capital, it was going to be even tougher as a “food tech” startup focused on food delivery.

The demise of meal kit companies “have put a chill on the market when it came to raising funds,” said Fetterman.

The exit of Nomiku from the market marks the end of what has been a fairly rough of couple years for the first wave of startups in the connected cooking market. Sansaire, which started around the same time as Nomiku, shut down in February of 2018. Hestan Cue, maker of a guided cooking system, downsized its team in April, and just a few weeks later ChefSteps, another sous vide startup, had to layoff a significant portion of its team before it got acquired by Breville.

According to Fetterman, the company has been in discussions with potential acquirers, and while she hasn’t ruled out a potential deal, nothing has evolved to the point where she could move in that direction yet.

So for now, at least, Nomiku is no more.

I asked her what that means for existing customers, both for owners of the Nomiku sous vide circulator and of the meal delivery service, and this is what she told me: For food delivery, anyone who has been charged will receive their food. For any new orders in the last week or so that haven’t been charged, those will be cancelled. For those with a circulator, they will continue to support those still under a year warranty “as long as supplies last.”

Fetterman said that those with the circulator can reach out via email to info@nomiku.com for updates and continuing support.

For me, the news of Nomiku’s demise is a real bummer. Fetterman has been one of the industry’s most outspoken and innovative entrepreneurs, and her absence will leave the space just a little less interesting.

For her part, Fetterman is still sorting through how to feel as she shuts down the company she spent the last ten years building with her husband, Abe Fetterman.

“I started the company when I was 22,” said Fetterman. “I’m 32 now. I’ve grown up as an entrepreneur and a person, publicly. It is very easy to feel a huge of sense of defeat failing publicly as well. That’s par for the course.”

When Fetterman started her company a decade ago, she was among the first to see the opportunity in bringing sous vide to the masses. Over time, others entered the market and the competition wasn’t always friendly. At times, the elbow throwing between Nomiku and competitors even spilled into public view.

“When I started Nomiku, I always knew the tremendous risk it held to invent a category and then fight against really cut throat competitors,” said Fetterman.

Despite the outcome, Fetterman said she’s still very proud of what she and the team have accomplished, including centering the company’s manufacturing in the US.

“There were things I couldn’t control, but I feel proud of the way we have run the company, that we always tried to do the right thing and not cut corners. I feel proud that we moved the manufacturing back to the States.”

Fetterman doesn’t know what’s next for her and is planning to take a little time off after ten years of running a startup. When I asked her if she plans on starting another company in the food space, she said it’s too soon to say, but she did think there is still lots of opportunity for innovation in cooking.

“People will always need a simple solution for dinner. That is obvious to everybody. I think the next great food tech company is out there, even in the next year, but it’s hard to say what that looks like right now.”

Whirlpool Patents Induction-Powered Sous Vide Cooking Appliance

Whirlpool has been awarded a patent for a new sous vide appliance that utilizes an induction system to both heat and power a cooking vessel with an internal water circulator. The system described in the patent also has Wi-Fi and a microcontroller to control the cook.

While the description of the system is very detailed (you can read it in all its glory here), below is a brief summary of how it works:

The system includes an induction heating surface that both heats water as well as powers an internal circulator within the vessel. The larger vessel, which sits atop the induction surface, has an internal vessel within it. There is a gap in between the two vessels where water circulates and is heated. The heating system is powered by a magnetic coupling  of two plates.  The internal stirring plate rotates and has heated blades on it, which help circulate and heat the water.

You can see a diagram of the blade-system below:

An internal plate with blades circulates and heats water within the vessel gap

The whole system, which is controlled through a user interface on the induction hob/surface, has a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth temperature probe that sends water temperature information back to the induction surface. The system can also be controlled via Wi-Fi and an embedded microcontroller.

With this patent, it looks like Whirlpool has created an interesting induction-based sous vide system that is differentiated from the sous vide circulators from the likes of Anova and Nomiku and the water bath systems that started appearing over a dozen years ago.

As with all patents, there’s no guarantee that Whirlpool will actually productize their innovation. The company filed the patent in late 2015 and it doesn’t appear at this point that the company has brought the system to market. Personally, I think an induction cooktop with a turnkey sous vide cooking vessel is an intriguing new product, so I’ll be keeping an eye out to see what the appliance giant does with this patent.

How will sous vide fit into into the kitchen of the future? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit to find out. 

The Weekly Spoon: Nomiku’s Food Delivery Biz, Anova Nano Review, Amazon Go Is Growing (And So Are We!)

People love our newsletters, so we thought we’d start also making them available as posts. If you want to get the Weekly Spoon in your inbox, just subscribe here. On to this week’s newsletter…

As the worlds of technology and food continue to collide, one trend gaining traction is the pairing of kitchen appliances with food subscriptions.

The idea makes sense. Hardware-only business models are nearly impossible to pull off nowadays, as the combination of ever-faster commoditization cycles, fickle consumers and Amazonification of online commerce make for rough sailing for those startups setting sail into consumer technology. Unless your product becomes a viral sensation – which does happen periodically – you’ll need to develop a sustainable long-tail revenue model (or have a plan for one), especially if you plan to raise funding for your new business.

Consumer sous vide pioneer Lisa Fetterman knows full well the difficulty of building a consumer hardware business. The author and mother of two started Nomiku back in 2012 and has been evangelizing her sous vide circulators ever since, but at a sub-$300 price point, it was hard to pencil out the P&L for a product made in the lofty-rent space of San Francisco.

Fetterman and Nomiku also had to convince consumers to use a product which, while delivering amazing results, also requires a significant behavior change on their part.  For a generation raised on frozen food, having them bag, submerge and sear to get dinner on the table is a big ask.

Which is why Fetterman decided to incorporate the entire meal journey – meal planning, food, and cooking – into the Nomiku experience.  The company introduced their Nomiku Meals last year, a food delivery service that allows consumers to mix and match sides and entrees in prepackaged portions and prepare them in 30 minutes. After starting with a 300 person pilot last May, today Nomiku Meals is available in eight states and makes up the majority of the company’s revenue.

It’s too soon to tell whether Nomiku will ultimately succeed in the face of competition from meal kits companies and Amazon, but from the looks of it, things are off to a good start.

You can read my full piece about how Fetterman is transforming Nomiku into a sous vide powered food delivery company here.

Nomiku isn’t the only company making news in the world of sous vide. Anova started selling their latest-generation circulator to the general public the past week on Amazon, and after picking up a Nano last week at the Anova Kitchen, i put together an appropriately-sized review of the diminutive device. And finally, the Spoon’s Jenn Marston visited a new food hall that uses sous vide to cook everything on the menu.

With the July 4th holiday, it was a light work week for many in the States. To celebrate America’s independence in proper Spoon fashion, Chris Albrecht put together some ideas for a food tech Fourth. Catherine catches us up on efforts by Suggestic to incorporate AR into your diet planning.

If you’re on the east coast, be forewarned: The Spoon in headed your way. We’ll be hosting our first Spoon Food Tech meetup on the future of sustainable seafood in beautiful Providence, RI.  Ashley tells me the summers in Rhode Island are the best in the whole US, and while this Pacific Northwest resident is skeptical, I’m eager to eat some lobster and meet some of you at Providence Pilotworks on the 17th.

As you may have noticed, we’ve been growing here at The Spoon. We’ve added both Chris and Catherine as full-time writers this year, and have my old Gigaom friend Jenn Marston giving us lots of great insights every week.  It’s a great crew, and I’m very thankful to be working with them every day, and I hope you are enjoying their writing and insights into the fast-changing world of food tech.

With so much content, we’ve decided to start publishing the Spoon newsletter twice a week. I know it may not seem like that big of news, but for me, it’s yet another small sign of the exciting growth we’ve been experiencing.

It’s also been extremely gratifying to see what started out as a small idea to bring together the leaders across food, appliances, and tech to map the future of food at an event in 2015 grow into a company. It’s hard to believe that in the short time since we launched SKS in 2015, it now takes place on three continents; we just finished the inaugural SKS Europe, and I’m headed back to Tokyo for our second SKS Japan in August. And of course, we’re busy ramping up for the big show in Seattle in October.

I’m thankful to the sponsors who support us, and all the speakers who share insights about their businesses and where this exciting market is going. And of course, we’re thankful to all those who come to our events and participate in our growing community. We couldn’t do it without you.

Mike

P.S. Looking to get smart on food tech and meet industry insiders? Join our food tech Slack already

In the 07/06/2018 edition of the Weekly Spoon:

Suggestic Experiments with Augmented Reality to Help You Stick to Your Diet Plan

By Catherine Lamb on Jul 06, 2018 09:38 am
What if you could wave your phone over a restaurant menu and see “through” the descriptions, instantly assessing which dishes are best (and worst) for you to eat? That’s exactly what Bay Area startup Suggestic is working on. When users first open the free app, they set up their goals (lose weight, have more energy) and dietary […]
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Lisa Fetterman Is Reinventing Nomiku As a Sous Vide Powered Food Delivery Business

By Michael Wolf on Jul 05, 2018 02:00 pm
When Lisa Fetterman started Nomiku, all she wanted to do was get the word out about sous vide cooking. “When I first saw these machines in Michelin-starred restaurants,” said the CEO, book author, and mother of two, “I was like ‘Woah, this is it.’” By ‘it,’ Fetterman is referring to the technique employed by the […]
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Video: For Big Food, ‘We’re Past Innovation and Onto Disruption’

By Catherine Lamb on Jul 05, 2018 12:30 pm
Tyson Foods produces a massive one out of five pounds of protein consumed in the United States. Barilla isn’t any slouch either, with its 30% dry pasta market share in the US and 10% worldwide. That’s a whole lotta chicken and pasta, so when execs for the investment arms of these two food giants took the […]
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The Spoon Meetup in Providence: Blue Tech + Sustainable Seafood

By Catherine Lamb on Jul 05, 2018 08:17 am
This month we’re taking our food tech meetups on the road — to Providence, RI! We’re teaming up with SeaAhead and the City of Providence for this event, all about blue tech and sustainable seafood. Through panels and a town hall meeting, we’ll explore how innovation and technology can improve sustainability while still meeting the rising global […]
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Second Seattle Amazon Go Store is Bigger, How Long Until Cashierless Whole Foods?

By Chris Albrecht on Jul 04, 2018 06:00 am
In addition to expanding the number of locations of its Go stores, Amazon is also working on making them bigger. According to a story in Geekwire, Amazon is prepping a second Amazon Go location in Seattle opening in the Fall of this year, and this one will be 3,000 square feet, compared with the 1,800 […]
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A Nano Review Of The Anova Nano

By Michael Wolf on Jul 03, 2018 05:00 pm
When Anova named their newest product the Nano, there was no mistaking the message they were trying to get across: that this, the latest in their lineup of sous vide circulators, is their smallest yet. And so in the spirit of the Anova Nano, I present to you what is an appropriately small review of […]
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Celebrate a FoodTech Fourth of July

By Chris Albrecht on Jul 03, 2018 02:00 pm
It’s weird when a major holiday falls on a Wenesday, right? Do you take just the day off? The first half of the week? The last half? The whole week? Regardless of how much time you take off, we can help make your time at the grill a great one with these FoodTech finds. FOOD […]
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Video: Regional Perspectives on the Connected Kitchen Market

By Catherine Lamb on Jul 03, 2018 01:00 pm
At Smart Kitchen Summit Europe last month, a topic on everyone’s mind was the future of the connected kitchen market. In fact, we had a whole panel devoted to analyzing the regional perspectives of the smart kitchen marketplace: Chris Albrecht of The Spoon moderated the conversation between Holger Henke of Cuicinale, Robin Liss of Suvie, […]
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Impossible Burgers Take to the Skies in L.A. – N.Z. Flight

By Catherine Lamb on Jul 03, 2018 12:00 pm
Airplane food gets an (admittedly deserved) bad rap, but airlines are working to change all that with fresh, vertically-grown lettuce, local craft beers, and, now, plant-based burgers. Yesterday, Air New Zealand sent out a tweet announcing that the buzzed-about Impossible Burger will be available to Business Premier passengers on their Los Angeles to Auckland flight […]
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Is NYC’s Sous Vide Kitchen the Future of Food Halls?

By Jennifer Marston on Jul 03, 2018 11:00 am
Last week, Sous Vide Kitchen (SVK) joined NYC’s sprawling food hall scene, where associations with celebrity chefs are the norm and $300 caviar is a thing. Comparatively, SVK’s take on the food hall concept is far more down to earth, focused mostly around technology and how it can streamline and improve the process of ordering […]
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Lisa Fetterman Is Reinventing Nomiku As a Sous Vide Powered Food Delivery Business

When Lisa Fetterman started Nomiku, all she wanted to do was get the word out about sous vide cooking.

“When I first saw these machines in Michelin-starred restaurants,” said the CEO, book author, and mother of two, “I was like ‘Woah, this is it.'”

By ‘it,’ Fetterman is referring to the technique employed by the world’s top chefs and how it was responsible for some of the best food she’d ever tasted. She figured if consumers had a way to cook sous vide that didn’t involve expensive equipment made exclusively for professional chefs, they would.

It wasn’t long before Fetterman (then Lisa Qiu) and her soon-to-be-husband Abe Fetterman decided to make a consumer-friendly sous vide appliance themselves. The result was the immersion sous vide circulator, something they would later patent and build a company around after a successful Kickstarter campaign.

Lisa Fetterman in Nomiku’s first Kickstarter video

At first, she thought that would be enough.

“How hard would it be to convince people to put food inside a bag and put it in the water, especially when the results are so amazing?”

They did eventually convince people, but it wasn’t as easy as she’d anticipated.

“They didn’t know the time and temperature, they needed help with recipes,” Fetterman said of her initial customers. “They treated it as a totally new way of cooking.”

Which it was. To help, Nomiku built another sous vide appliance which was smaller and more powerful than the company’s first product. Another difference from the first generation product was this one had Wi-Fi.

“I made the Wi-Fi Nomiku so you can send recipes directly to the machine,” she said.

The result?

“There was still friction,” said Fetterman. “People kept asking me, ‘Hey is this the right bag?’ and ‘Can you make me a vacuum sealer next?'”

Abe Fetterman working on the Nomiku Wi-Fi

The reality was that for a generation who grew up on frozen food and microwave ovens, the idea of vacuum sealing food in a bag, submerging it in water for hours and then searing it seems like a lot of steps. The problem was they need more help, and Nomiku’s CEO now knew that she couldn’t solve it by simply building a new sous vide appliance.

What she did know was that consumers liked the quality of the food cooked with the precision heating technique, but it wasn’t enough to convince them to commit to cooking sous vide. What they wanted, she realized, was more convenience.

So Fetterman started to rethink her company; not just the hardware that heats the food, but the entire experience of cooking sous vide. She knew by now that for most consumers, asking them to bag, sous vide and sear their food was too much. She also knew that while the quality of microwave food wasn’t as good, it did have one major advantage: the experience was super easy. That’s because not only does the microwave heat food up fast, but it also has an entire ecosystem around to deliver a streamlined cooking experience that goes something like this: pop in a frozen meal, zap it, eat.

Eventually, Fetterman decided to recreate the entire experience for her consumers,  one which included not only a sous vide circulator, but the food itself. She had decided that Nomiku would make the act of creating a meal easier by offering pre-packaged, pre-portioned, and pre-cooked sous vide meals. All the consumer would need to do is scan the RFID tag on each component of a meal – usually a main course and a couple of sides — and drop them into the water. In thirty minutes, food is ready to eat.

Nomiku’s new RFID-scanning circulator

The shift was a big one. Not only did Fetterman develop a new Nomiku with an RFID scanner to recognize the meals and set the timer on the circulator, but she also had to set up an entire supply and delivery chain around food.

That do that, Nomiku would not only need more funding (which they got from Samsung) but would also need to start working with copackers and logistics companies to create an end-to-end food delivery business.

She decided to start small, initially shipping products in beta to just 100 customers in May of last year, and expand from there.

So where has this new direction taken Fetterman and Nomiku?

In short, it’s completely changed the company. Nomiku has gone from primarily selling hardware to offering a complete food solution for consumers. All one has to do is go to the company’s website and try to buy a sous vide circulator to see the shift in focus: If you enter in a zip code that’s not within the area where Nomiku sells their meals, you’re told to check back later. In other words, they’ve become a meal-first company — that also sells a sous vide circulator to help make it all possible.

Nomiku’s website is primarily focused on their meal service

The good news is if you don’t live in one of the eight western states where Nomiku sells their meals, there’s a good chance they’ll get to you soon. According to Fetterman, they plan to hit profitability in their current region over the next two months and to ship nationwide by the end of the year.

While the shift for Nomiku was something Fetterman saw as necessary to expand the addressable market for sous vide cooking, it just so happened to also align well with the current thinking in Silicon Valley, where nowadays a VC’s first piece of advice for hardware startup founders is usually about the necessity of creating a recurring revenue business model.

All you have to do is look at the early returns on Nomiku’s new food efforts to see why: In the company’s early days, they’d make the business work by selling a $300 device and snagging whatever margin they could walk away with after parting with hardware costs, retail margin, and ongoing support expenses. With their new business, Fetterman says the company now has a $144 average food order and a retention rate of 81% for food customers who order their third box of food from Nomiku.

All that adds up to what is perhaps the biggest sign of change for the company: According to Fetterman, just a year after launching the food business, Nomiku now derives the majority of its revenue from food, not hardware.

Nomiku isn’t alone in trying to pair cooking hardware with food delivery. Tovala, a smart kitchen startup from Chicago, sells a smart oven with a food delivery service. Suvie, a Boston-based kitchen startup started by Reviewed.com founder Robin Liss, also plans to offer food delivery with its “kitchen robot.”. Belgium’s Mealhero has created a steamer to go with its frozen food delivery services. Chefsteps, another startup selling a sous vide circulator, has experimented with food delivery in the past and has hinted it will do more in the future.

However, despite Nomiku’s early success in the shift towards food delivery, it’s probably too soon to say how things will shake for them out in the long term. Meal delivery business models are still in the early stages, consumers are notoriously fickle when it comes to committing for the long term, and the big guys like Amazon continue to expand the types of food they’re bringing to consumers.

That said, Lisa Fetterman remains committed to the same goal today that she had when she first started Nomiku.

“We are here to eradicate every obstacle between a person and a delicious plate of food.”

Sansaire Announces It Is Shutting Down

Today Sansaire, one of the first consumer sous vide hardware startups, announced it is shutting down.

Acting company CEO Lukas Svec shared the bad news in an update on the company’s Kickstarter campaign page for the new generation product, the Delta:

“We regret to share that Sansaire will be ceasing development of the Delta and the company will ultimately be closing its doors.  In short, our relationship with the new production facility broke down and has exhausted available funding and manufacturing routes. As we wind down over the next 12 months, Sansaire will be supporting warranties and customer service issues. Kickstarter Backers will be contacted individually regarding next steps.“

Sansaire was one of a handful of companies building sous vide circulators to launch in the 2013 time frame. However, unlike Anova and Nomiku, the company struggled to build its brand in an increasingly competitive consumer sous vide market and was never able to ship its second generation product despite a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2016.

The company was cofounded by Scott Heimendinger, a well known food hacker who tapped into his following to help launch company’s first Kickstarter campaign. However Heimendinger left the company before the launch of Sansaire’s second Kickstarter campaign in 2016 and the company has seen a number of executive departures ever since.

The company’s former COO Valerie Trask left in the middle of the crowdfunding campaign for the Delta. The company named a new CEO in Johnna Hobgood soon afterwards, but she soon left to go work for Amazon in their Amazon Go group. Another executive named Lilac Muller joined as acting CEO last fall, but has since departed the company.

The company raised over $250 thousand for the Delta, its second generation sous vide appliance, in fall of 2016 with a promised spring 2017 ship date. However, as time went on and the executive team turned over, it became increasingly obvious the company was having difficulties.

In one way, Sansaire’s troubles shows the perils of relying on crowdfunded money to bring a hardware product to market. Unless a campaign is wildly successful, the funds raised usually aren’t nearly enough to design, build and bring a product to manufacturing. More often than not, a company requires external investment or a really successful first-gen product (or both) to fund the development of a new product.

With today’s news, it’s apparent that Sansaire didn’t have either.

Update: I caught up with Scott Heimendinger via email to ask him for a comment. He had this to say:

“I’m disappointed, of course, but I processed my grief over Sansaire when I walked away from involvement two years ago. The saddest part is what could have been. Today, the outcomes of Sansaire vs. Anova could not be more stark.

I’m disappointed most for the people who backed the Sansaire Delta on Kickstarter. We built the company originally on the trust and generosity of the Kickstarter community and moved heaven and earth to do right by them throughout. So it’s crushing that the contributors to the Delta campaign in 2016 will be left with their promises unfulfilled.

Although founding and leaving a failed startup leaves some scars, I’m proud to have contributed in some small way to the overall movement of sous vide. I rooted for Sansaire to succeed after I departed, and I’m sure it was a difficult and humbling decision for them to announce the shutdown.”

Tyson Bets On Home Food Delivery & Smart Kitchen With Investment In Tovala

Today Tyson Foods announced they have invested an undisclosed amount in Tovala, maker of smart steam ovens that pair with ready-to-cook home delivered meals. The investment comes on the heels of a $9.2 million series A announced in December. As part of the deal, Tyson will add an observer to Tovala’s board in Tyson Ventures managing director Reese Schroeder.

According to Tovala CEO David Rabie, the deal made sense for them as they started to look toward expanding the Tovala platform beyond their own meals.

“Over time, we will have other brands on the platform where we can automate the cooking, similar to how it works with Tovala meals,” said Rabie in an interview with The Spoon. “This (Tyson) is the first brand and harbinger of what’s to come.”

The move comes at an interesting time for big food companies like Tyson. Consumer packaged good providers are continuing to look for ways to reach the consumer as Amazon continues to wreak havoc on the retail landscape and consumers are increasingly exploring fresh food choices. Home food delivery is seen a potentially interesting – if still yet somewhat unproven – route to the consumer. The move by Tyson follows investments by other big food companies like Nestle, Unilever and Campbell into the home food delivery space.

What’s different about the Tyson’s investment is that with Tovala, they are also moving into the connected kitchen space. Tovala, an alum of the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase, is part of a growing trend of startups looking to pair food delivery with a smart cooking appliance.  Sous vide circulator startups like Nomiku and ChefSteps have both ventured into food delivery, and just this week Suvie, a new startup from the founder of Reviewed.com, is kicking off a Kickstarter campaign for a cooking robot that pairs with the company’s own meal kit delivery. Smart kitchen operating system startup Innit has hinted they will be working with white-label meal kit company Chef’d later this year.

It will be interesting to see where this trend combining automated, assisted cooking combined with meal delivery goes. For companies like Tovala and Suvie, meal delivery provides a form of recurring revenue that more hardware-specific startups like June struggle with. On the other hand, the logistical challenges of building out meal delivery services add more complexity to creating a company. Long term, all of these companies are chasing the idea of creating greater convenience for the consumer. It will no doubt be interesting to see which companies get the combination right and begin to see traction in 2018 and beyond.

The Founder of Reviewed.com Wants To Reinvent Cooking With This Robot Cooking Appliance

A hypothetical question: What do you do for a second act after spending a good chunk of your teens and twenties building one of the leading product review sites in the US?

You start a company to reinvent one of those product categories you used to review.

At least that’s what you do if you’re Robin Liss, cofounder of Suvie, a Boston based startup that is creating a next-gen cooking appliance. Liss, who started what would become Reviewed.com in her basement at the tender age of 13, sold her company to USA Today in 2011 and managed and grow the site as part of Gannett until she left in 2015.

While she didn’t leave Reviewed with plans to create a cooking appliance startup, it didn’t take long before Liss and her cofounder, Kevin Incorvia, conceived of what eventually became Suvie.

Robin Liss and Kevin Incorvia, cofounders of Suvie

“When I was leaving Reviewed.com, I thought I was going to enjoy my time on the beach,” said Liss when I sat down with her this week to talk about her new company. “But when I was at Reviewed I was really into sous vide cooking, and I thought how can I take this to the next level?”

That next-level cooking idea rolling around Liss’s head eventually crystallized into the Suvie, an ambitious new take at a countertop cooking appliance that includes multiple zones for each staple of a typical dinner: proteins, vegetables, starch, and sauces. Put simply, the Suvie cooks each staple separately using optimized processes for each (sous vide for the protein, steam for veggies, a water dispenser/chamber for starches) but syncs the process across the different cooking chambers so they are finished at the same time.

To top it off, Liss and Incorvia insisted on creating an appliance that enabled “cool to cook”, which means the Suvie would keep food chilled all day and initiate a cook remotely via an app. To do that, they started looking into adding refrigeration.

After looking at a variety of cooling methods like thermoelectric cooling (the cooling technology used in wine coolers and, somewhat notoriously after this Wired review, the Mellow), they decided the Suvie would use a compressor. Compressors are standard in most refrigerators, but the problem was they couldn’t find a compressor small enough for their countertop cooking appliance.

Eventually, they worked with a large appliance maker to have a custom compressor made for the Suvie.

“We have a custom, small compressor, which is one of the key parts that make this work,” said Liss.

But unlike a fridge, which cools by forcing coolant into coils and absorbing heat, the Suvie team decided to use water to cool the food. They came up with a novel water-routing concept that takes cold water from a water chamber and distributes it to water jackets in each of the four zones and chills the food until its ready to cook.

When Liss started thinking about her new company, there were a few underlying trends she felt made it the right time to try and reinvent cooking. One was the ubiquity of mobile phones. She saw mobile was becoming more important in people’s lives as a way to not only discover food but would also become they way control their cooking appliances.

She also saw the growth of precision cooking techniques like sous vide and connected appliances as a signal that things would change drastically in the consumer kitchen in coming years.

The last trend she focused on was the rise of meal kits, as she watched the emergence of first generation meal kit companies like Blue Apron and started to think about how they could incorporate meal delivery into their offering.

And it was this last trend that led to her other big idea. Unlike meal kit providers like Blue Apron that have their own warehouses and pack food for shipment, Liss wanted to create a product that they could open to a variety of food packers and distributors as a way to sell their products as part of a meal kit. In short, she saw the beginning of what could become a new distribution platform.

“[Meal kits] are the first step of what will eventually become a platform,” said Liss. “What we’re trying to do is build an appliance that can bridge the technology gap between existing food suppliers and the appliance that can cook it intelligently.”

This early focus on using a variety of food packers and distributors forced the company to make an open approach integral to the design of the Suvie appliance.

“There were some restrictive rules I put on our engineering team at the beginning,” said Liss. “One was we don’t want us packing our own food. The reason we did that is we wanted to make sure the existing food supply chain could easily pack for their device using the equipment on their floors.”

In a way, Suvie is emblematic of a new trend in the smart kitchen space where startups are looking to pair recurring meal subscriptions with smart cooking hardware. Tovala, Nomiku, and ChefSteps are other examples of companies going down this route but, according to Liss, Suvie has a bigger vision.

“That’s really important when you think about the business and platform because that way if new food brands want to pack for Suvie, they don’t have to build new cooking methods, they don’t have to precook stuff. The raw veggie guys don’t have to think about how long it takes to cook the chicken. They can just pack their raw vegetables like their doing now because of this platform.”

To assemble the final meal kits, Suvie has partnered with a local mission-driven organization in the Dorchester area of Boston that employs economically disadvantaged workers.

Liss said the company plans to launch a Kickstarter in February and plan to ship the product by the end of this year. If successful, the campaign will add to already $3.75 million in seed funding that the company has raised. Pricing for the Suvie will be announced next week when they unveil the Kickstarter campaign.

After more than two years working in stealth, Liss is excited to get what she unabashedly calls her “robot multizone cooking appliance” into the world.

“It’s so exciting and so much fun,” she said. “I do wish we got as much attention as the robot cars. I think it’s just as important a category as self-driving cars.”

You can listen to my full conversation with Robin Liss, founder of Suvie, below (or through Apple podcasts).

Six Trends We Might See In Food Tech In 2018

News publications making predictions for the coming year is as much a holiday tradition as eggnog, mistletoe and avoiding awkward political fights at the dinner table. As we put 2017 to bed, let’s take a look at trends that we might see in food tech in 2018. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is filled with topics we returned to time and time again throughout the year.

1. Alterna-Products Will Get More Mainstream. With growing concerns over how meat and dairy impact our planet, there are a ton of alternative products coming to mass market:pea-based burger patties that “bleed,” plant-based shrimp, and coconut milk ice cream, to name just a few. And with investment from accelerators, the whole alterna-space is just going to get better and cheaper.

2. Virtual Restaurants Will Pop Up Everywhere (and Nowhere). Data driven food delivery services such as UberEATS have convinced some real world restaurants to open up virtual ones. These delivery only offshoots can experiment with new cuisines and menu items without the cost of adding additional square footage.

3. Meal Kit Shakeup. The prepared meal kit delivery market is going through an evolution as one of its pioneers, Blue Apron, had a rough year, and more focused services are blossoming around specific markets such as kids, or just sending proteins. Then there are hardware players like Nomiku and Tovala looking to bring their full stack food solutions that can be paired with sous vide machines or smart ovens into more houses. Oh, and then there is Amazon, which may make same day customizable meal kits a thing this year.

4. The Further Instagrammification of Food. The meals you eat can no longer just be tasty, they also have to pop off the plate to impress all your Instagram followers. As Restaurant Business points out, look for “rainbow colors, vertical deserts, smoking cocktails” to be on the menu next year.

5. Artificial Intelligence and Robots Rise Up for Real. Robots are already flipping burgers and now even your face can help you order (both at CaliBurger in Pasadena, FWIW). But robots and artificial intelligence will become more mainstream throughout the food stack next year. From agriculture to reducing food waste, and from food aisles to food delivery, the immediate future is about to get way more high-tech.

6. Amazon, Amazon, Amazon. No company had a bigger impact on the food space this year than Amazon. It bought Whole Foods, giving the e-commerce giant an instant, nationwide, physical presence to better facilitate grocery delivery. It partnered with AllRecipes for shoppable grocery lists and launched an in-home delivery service. And, oh by the way, it just sold tens of millions of Alexa devices this past holiday to make ordering that much easier. But the interesting thing won’t be what existing markets Jeff Bezos and company will exert its influence over, but entirely new categories Amazon will create (visual recognition in your garden!).

What do you think will be the big stories in 2018? Leave us a comment and share your thoughts below.

Smart Kitchen Curious? Here Are Some Black Friday & Cyber Monday Deals For You

Want some new smart kitchen gear? Now might be a good time to pick up a new gadget or two given, well, BLACK FRIDAY.

Below is a quick list of some Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals we’ve spotted for smart kitchen gear from around the web. (If you see any other screaming deals for smart kitchen gear, let me know via Twitter and I’ll keep this list updated):

Mellow 

The Mellow smart sous vide appliance just started shipping and is getting some decent early buzz. The good news is you can pick up this sous vide appliance with built-in refrigeration for $299, a hundred bucks off the list price. Better hurry, the deal expires after Monday.

PicoBrew

If you or one of your loved ones has made a new year’s resolution to become a home brewer, now might be a good time to pick up a PicoBrew brewing appliance. You can get the Pico C right now for $399, a hefty $150 off of the list price of $549.

Hestan Cue

Want to cook like a chef? Try a Hestan Cue guided cooking system. The device, which was just named one of the best tech gifts of 2017 by the Wall Street Journal, is available now through December 3rd for a hundred bucks off. Use the discount code “blackfriday” at checkout.

Instant Pot

If you haven’t become part of Instant Pot community, what are you waiting for? With the 5 quart Instant Pot available right now for only $50 right now over at Walmart, you really have no excuse.

Anova

The leader in home sous vide circulators has dropped the price on their flagship product ofr Cyber Monday week. If you want to pick up a circulator, you can do so now for $99 over at Anova.com.

ChefSteps

If you’re reading this on Thanksgiving, you might want to give thanks for a true Black Friday deal coming your way. ChefSteps will be selling both models of the Joule for $30 off, with the Joule Stainless on sale for $169 and the Joule White for $149. Just head over to the ChefSteps Joule page and use the code BLACKFRIDAY at checkout.

HOPii

If you’re willing to wait and want to try out the HOPii home fermentation system, the HOPii folks are offering a “secret perk” right now through Indiegogo which allows you to have a HOPii system for 50% off. Go here to get access to the deal.

Nomiku

Nomiku has a bunch of deals on its sous vide gear and meal delivery service for Black Friday and cyber Monday. The company’s 2nd generation circulator, the Wi-Fi Nomiku, is on sale for $99 and their newest appliance, the Nomiku WiFi Smart Cooker, is available with $50 worth of meals for $179.

Two New Thanksgiving Uses for that Sous Vide Circulator

I don’t need to tell you about the benefits of sous vide immersion circulators. Devices like the Anova, Joule or Nomiku transform just about any pot of water in a temperature controlled, water circulating, precision cooking machine.

I mainly use my Anova for meats – it’s a fantastic way to bring up the internal temperature evenly without under or over cooking. But given that it’s Thanksgiving, it’s unlikely (and perhaps impossible?) that you’ll sous vide an entire turkey.

However, I came across two other unique uses uses for your sous vide wand that can help make your Thanksgiving even more awesome.

Mashed potatoes
First, if you are hosting, what are you doing reading this? Go prepare, you’ve got people coming over! But wait! Before you do, cook your mashed potatoes today. That’s right, get all that mashing and mixing and mess out of the way before the big day. Here’s a trick to re-heating the potatoes without scorching or ruining them.

On a recent episode of the Milk Street radio podcast, J. Kenji Alt-Lopez explained how you can keep your cooked and mashed potatoes in a ziplock bag, store them overnight in the fridge, and then place them in a sous vide machine at something like 150 degrees for an hour to re-heat them without scorching or drying the potatoes out.

Pumpkin pie
And while we are making things in advance, if you are more adventurous and willing to think outside the box and perhaps get a little more deconstructionist with your holiday meal, ChefSteps (maker of the Joule) recently included a recipe for sous vide personal pumpkin pies.

No, it doesn’t involve placing an entire pie in ziplock bag and submerging it. It does involve placing the pie filling in small, individual mason jars and sous vide-ing those. After they are done cooking and chilling, top them off with crumbled graham cracker streusel and some whipped cream. This way everyone gets their own individual dessert.

With a little bit of creativity the sous vide wand can help make your Thanksgiving easier and open up new avenues of creativity. And we’d love to hear about your creativity! How do you use the sous vide for holiday meals? Leave a comment and let us know.

Mealhero Combines Ice, Steam and the Cloud for European Meal Kits

The biggest hurdle I’ve had with meal kit subscriptions is all the work it takes once you get the ingredients. Sure, they’re portioned, but you still have to do a ton of prep work and be a halfway decent cook to make them turn out. Plus, you have to use up the ingredients before they go bad.

Mealhero, a two-year old startup based in Belgium, wants to have overcome these issues through a combination of frozen food plus connected high-tech steamer, and have taken to Kickstarter to expand their European footprint.

Quick note: It’s not easy to suss out all the mealhero details outside of the subtitled Kickstarter video, as almost all of their promotional materials are in Dutch. We reached out to them with some questions, and didn’t hear back at the time of this writing. UPDATE: Jeroen Spitaels, Co-Founder and CEO of mealhero, emailed us back with answers to our questions, which are pasted below.

The mealhero service is comprised of three parts: a box of frozen ingredients delivered to your home, an app to help you assemble your ingredients into a recipe, and a connected three-container steamer to cook them automatically.

The app knows what ingredients you have and can suggest a recipe, or you can assemble a combination of foods how you like. The frozen ingredients include vegetables, starches, and meats and come in their own containers, each with an RFID label. Once selected, you scan each container on the steamer and place the ingredient in its own compartment. The steamer knows how long to cook each individual component, so you don’t have to actually do any cooking.

According to mealhero’s Kickstarter video, they offer 100 ingredients, which can be combined into 300 different meals. And since everything is frozen, it keeps longer.

While most people probably don’t want every meal steamed, mealhero does seems to be taking the friction between meal kit delivery and actual usage. In a similar vein, Tovala combines specialized meal kit delivery designed for its own oven appliance. And Nomiku offers a similar prepared meal service for its connected sous-vide cooker. And elsewhere in the Netherlands, IXL has it’s E-cooker, another three compartment cooker that uses pulsed electric fields for precision heating (and it took home the Innovation Award at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit).

Mealhero currently has customers in Belgium and the Netherlands, and is using Kickstarter to raise $75,000 to grow the business.

THE SPOON: 1. Is mealhero currently available anywhere?

Jeroen Spitaels: mealhero is available in Belgium and The Netherlands. It is geographically limited because of the recurring food service, which we aren’t able yet to ship worldwide.

2. Do you currently have any funding, or are you doing this entirely through Kickstarter?

We already have some funding, Kickstarter is mainly to get more customers and further expand our market. Besides the funding aspect as well.

3. It looks like if successfully Kickstarted, you will roll out in September of 2018. Is this correct? Where will you be rolling out to first?

Correct. We will be rolling out in Belgium and The Netherlands.

4. What is the Kickstarter money going towards?

The production of the smart steaming devices. For now we have funded everything ourselves together with our partner. Which basically means the entire technological development. So the Kickstarter support will be used to – in fact – manufacture all the devices.

5. How much to does mealhero cost? Will the price change once you reach the market?

Retail price is 319 [EUR, $369 USD] for a smart steamer and 1 foodbox. Kickstarter price is 229 [$265 USD] for the smart steamer and 1 foodbox. Afterwords, customer are able to order as many foodboxes as they like for which the price will vary between 9,5 [$11] and 6,5 EUR [$7.54] per meal, depending on the total order size.

6. How do you plan to avoid the challenges other Kickstarter hardware projects have encountered?

At first we did all of the developments ourselves, afterwards we teamed up with an experienced partner in hardware product development for electronics, mechanics and design. Doing so allowed us to gain access to a broad range of possible suppliers for the devices. Furthermore, there is also a consumer guarantee as is the case for all consumer electronics.

7. How do you plan to avoid the challenges other meal kit delivery services have faced?

I’ve been lucky enough to grow up in a family food business in which I’m the 3rd generation. So we already have quite a bit of experience within the food industry. Besides that I believe it is also one of our core strengths that we’re always very open towards partnerships. For instance for the logistical supply chain, we are partnering up with specialized firms.