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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Smart Kitchen Roundup: Suvie Adds Air Fry to Cooking Robot, Combustion Launches ‘MeatNet Cloud’

It’s been a quiet summer in the world of kitchen tech, but over the past week, some interesting news has dropped. Here’s a roundup of the stories from this past week:

Suvie Rolls Out Suvie 3.0 Plus With Airfry

Suvie, the company behind the multi-zone kitchen cooking appliance with built-in refrigeration, announced today the launch of its Suvie 3.0 Plus. The 3.0 Plus adds air-frying capabilities to the appliance, powered by the addition of dual convection fans, one in each cooking zone. This means users of the new model can air fry in one zone while using any one of the other 15 cooking modes in the other zone.

According to CEO Robin Liss, the addition of air frying was in part due to feedback from the Suvie community. Liss says they’ve added other new features, including a new ‘ Mix & Match’ mode that allows users to to prepare different meals in each zone simultaneously.

“A lot of people like to have a Chinese takeout night,” Liss told The Spoon. They’ll buy orange chicken and maybe Mongolian beef, and you can cook the orange chicken in the top zone and the Mongolian beef in the bottom zone. Mix and Match mode lets you do that.”

The new Suvie 3.0 Plus will be priced at $429 with a meal subscription plan. The company will also continue to sell the Suvie 3.0 base model, which will remain at $299 with a meal plan. Liss says they hope to ship the new model to customers in late September.

Combustion Adds ‘MeatNet Cloud’ and SafeCook

Combustion, the maker of the Predictive Thermometer, announced this week that they have added two new features to the 8-sensor device: MeatNet Cloud connectivity and SafeCook.

If you’re wondering what the heck MeatNet is, it’s Combustion’s trademarked term for its ad hoc Bluetooth network that connects its thermometer, the Combustion display and the app on a smartphone. With the addition of MeatNet Cloud, Combustion thermometer users can now monitor a cook live and in real-time from anywhere.

To enable MeatNet Cloud, you have to jump through a few set-up hoops. You’ll have to enable a smartphone or table device as a bridge (the Combustion thermometer only has Bluetooth, it needs a Wi-Fi powered device to deliver the cooking data to the cloud), and once your bridge device is connected (and left at home when you leave), users can monitor the state of the cook with another mobile device while they are taking a run to the store to get some BBQ sauce or wood chips for their smoker.

Combustion also announced the addition of SafeCook, which the company says “uses “integrated” or cumulative bacterial destruction to determine food safety. It adds up the bacterial body count at every step in the cooking process.” This means that Combustion has essentially incorporated all the recommended USDA and FDA temperatures into the app for each type of meat needed to ensure that bacteria is effectively killed. Users who turn on the SafeCook feature will be alerted when the food is safe to eat.

Combustion CEO Chris Young often creates elaborate (and fun to watch) videos around specific topics his company is working on, and this mission to kill food bacteria is no exception. You can check out his new video about how to balance the fine line between making sure your food is cooked enough to kill any bacteria and not overly dry.

Nymble Offloads AI to Cloud and Adds New Features as It Inches Toward Manufactuing

Cooking robot startup Nymble sent out an update this week on new features and their plan to start shipping their cooking robot to customers later this month.

According to the update sent by company CEO Raghav Gupta, the company recently enabled the Nymble cooking robot to offload AI compute to the cloud. The company’s AI, which is fairly straightforward machine learning that enables the appliance to optimize cooking and understand specific routines and preferences of users, has up to this point run on a small model embedded in the appliance. Nymble now says that it AI computation can now be run in the cloud on its larger and faster AI model (which it dubs ‘Teacher’). In the case of slow connectivity, Nymble says that AI compute will run locally on the appliance in its scaled-down AI model (dubbed ‘Student’).

In addition to its addition of cloud AI compute, Nymble has also enabled users to find recipes based on dietary preferences and allergen restrictions and to skip instruction steps in a guided recipe (which, according to the company, was a top request among its beta testers).

These updates come as the company nears the ship date for its cooking robot. According to Gupta, the Nymble robot will start mass production later this month.

Nymble Eyes 2021 Launch For Its Home Cooking Robot

Looking for a little help in the kitchen? Maybe Julia could help.

No, Julia isn’t your neighbor or a chef matched with you through some online marketplace. In fact, Julia isn’t a person at all.

What Julia is is a robot. A cooking robot.

Developed by an India-based startup called Nymble, Julia creates single pot meals using spice and ingredients chambers that dispense food into the cooking bowl, where a robotic arm mixes the meal within the pot. All of this is monitored by a built-in camera.

You can see a video of Julia cooking rice here:

Fried Rice - Julia in-built camera footage

The camera does more than just capture footage. It’s how Julia becomes a better cook.

“The camera provides us with a thermal image of the food which basically represents the temperature of every pixel in the image,” said Raghav Gupta, CEO of Nymble.

Julia uses precise measurements of temperature and location to closely regulate the heat of the food. It also uses the data to create a better quality cook over time.

“It helps us cook food with a repeatable and consistent quality irrespective of the nature and size of ingredient, geography and other external factors,” said Gupta.

Early on, Julia’s programmers hard coded their cook times for specific intervals depending on the recipe. Over time they’ve gathered more data from the camera and heat sensors, and this has helped Julia become of a feedback driven system. The developer team has also created tools for non-technical users, including a “recipe visualizer” that uses camera and sensor data to help create recipes.

While all this technical work is impressive, it remains to be seen if consumers actually want a cooking robot. It’s easy to envision most of us welcoming a high-end cooking bot like that from Moley, Samsung or Sony, but these concepts are still years off from the mass market. And while there have been systems similar in concept to the Julia, the Sereneti never shipped a finished product and Else Labs’ Oliver has yet to ship.

The only cooking bot that’s sold at volume is the Rotimatic from Zimplistic, which is nearing 100 thousand total units in the field. However, the Rotimatic – a unitasker that spits out flatbread over and over – is a much different type of device than the more complex Julia.

In short, since there hasn’t been a product in the market similar to Julia, it’s hard to say if consumers will embrace the idea. My guess is its success will depend on how well it works and how useful it is and whether it makes consumer lives easier. I am particularly curious about how well these systems with pre-loaded ingredient chambers work and if they are easy to clean.

Nymble will try to figure all of this out for themselves as it eyes a 2021 launch. To help do that, the company recently finished some field tests for Julia and is in the process of rolling out additional prototypes to alpha testers in its home market of India (apply here!).

Hopefully Nymble – and we – should know soon.

Here’s The Spoon’s 2019 Food Robotics Market Map

Today we head to San Francisco for The Spoon’s first-ever food-robotics event. ArticulAte kicks off at 9:05 a.m. sharp at the General Assembly venue in SF, and throughout the daylong event talk will be about all things robots, from the technology itself to business and regulatory issues surrounding it.

When you stop and look around the food industry, whether it’s new restaurants embracing automation or companies changing the way we get our groceries, it’s easy to see why the food robotics market is projected to be a $3.1 billion market by 2025.

But there’s no one way to make a robot, and so to give you a sense of who’s who in this space, and to celebrate the start of ArticulAte, The Spoon’s editors put together this market map of the food robotics landscape.

This is the first edition of this map, which we’ll improve and build upon as the market changes and grows. If you have any suggestions for other companies or see ones we missed you think should be in there, let us know by leaving a comment below or emailing us at tips@thespoon.tech.

Click on the map below to enlarge it.

The Food Robotics Market 2019:

Nymble Labs Raises Funding for Julia, the Countertop Cooking Robot

Nymble Labs announced yesterday that it has raised an undisclosed amount of pre-Series A money for its countertop cooking robot dubbed Julia. Investors in the round include WaterBridge Ventures, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and 021 Capital.

Inc42 reports that Bengaluru, India-based Nymble Labs combines robotics, machine learning and the internet of things to create the Julia. The device sits on a countertop and has different compartments for various vegetables, grains, meats and more, and can make bowl or pan-based meals like curries, noodles and turf rice. Julia will come with at least 150 pre-loaded recipes on its app at launch, and will use a combination of sensors and a camera to ensure proper cooking.

The new funding will go towards finishing the development of the Julia, which Nymble aims to launch in the U.S. in 2020. No mention of price.

Nymble Labs had a booth at the Startup Showcase at CES last month (see picture above), but it wasn’t doing any live demos. What Nymble brought actually didn’t feel that far along, so it’s heartening to see that it was at least at a stage where they could attract investors.

The Julia isn’t alone in its automated cooking ambitions. Over in Croatia, GammaChef is building a similar countertop robot that stores, adds, mixes and cooks up ingredients automatically. Elsewhere in India, Zimplistic’s Rotimatic is a countertop flatbread-making robot that can automatically whip up rotis, tortillas, pizza crust and is arguably the most successful home food robot in the world right now.

While we love all this home robot proliferation, the typical kitchen is a zero sum game. There just isn’t room for all these devices unless you re-architect your kitchen to be all countertop space. There will be home cooking robot winners and losers, now we’ll have to see if Julia can justify a place in people’s homes.

If you’re into food robots, you should definitely come to our ArticulATE food robot and automation summit happening in San Francisco on April 16th!