Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution
Despite the complexity of building two businesses at once and presenting them as one integrated whole, Tovala’s managed to build a highly loyal user base with what is arguably the highest lifetime user value in the connected kitchen space.
I decided to catch up with Tovala’s CEO David Rabie and ask him how he’s managed to find success while other companies have struggled.
The interview is an exclusive offering for Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.
Tovala, the Chicago-based smart oven and meal-delivery startup, announced today it has raised a $20 million in Series B funding.
The round, led by agrifood venture capital firm Finistere Ventures, follows $9 million in Series A funding, bringing the company’s total funding close to $40 million.
It’s an interesting time for Tovala to raise such an impressive B round, coming during a pandemic where many venture firms have refocused their efforts on stabilizing existing portfolio investments and large corporate investment arms have either dialed back or outright eliminated venture initiatives.
But while the pandemic has chilled many industries, Tovala has only seen business accelerate the last few months in part due to its position at the intersection of two markets benefitting from quarantine-induced cooking: countertop home cooking appliances and home food delivery.
As we’ve noted here at the Spoon, the combination of stay-at-home orders and restaurant dine-in shutdowns led to an explosion in home cooking activity, which led to countertop home cooking equipment sales growth that was at multiples of normal industry volumes.
But according to Rabie, who I caught up with last week to discuss their latest funding, while Tovala has experienced strong growth during the pandemic, their business had actually started taking off in the second half of 2019.
“The business has been growing really fast for nearly a year now,” said Rabie. “The investors took comfort in the fact that this wasn’t a COVID trend where our business took off and might go away when normalcy returns, but actually the opposite. Business was booming pre-COVID, COVID accelerated that growth, and we believe it will accelerate adoption after COVID as people build new habits.”
Since Tovala started shipping a few years ago, I asked him why business took off last year. According to Rabie, the main difference is they changed how they talked about the product with their customers.
“We went through this exercise over the first half of 2019 to rebrand the company and better speak to our core customer,” said Rabie. “If you come to our website today versus a year ago, it looks like night and day, it’s different messaging, different photography, different videography, different user experience, same core product, just marketed differently.”
After Rabie and Tovala spent time talking to their key customers who used the Tovala multiple times per week, they realized the company’s value was in helping to solve the problem of weeknight dinner. They also realized they weren’t an oven company so much as a service company.
“The oven is the vehicle to access that food but most of our customers are not really in the market for an oven. It was kind of a lightbulb moment.”
After the rebrand, the company has seen an increase in annualized revenue of 300 percent since September of last year. In some ways, Tovala has been the little smart kitchen company that could, continuing to grow and raising more funding as other, more high profile companies, have struggled.
I asked Rabie why Tovala has succeeded when others haven’t.
“A lot of companies haven’t made it and I think there’s a lot of reasons why,” said Rabie. “The first reason is (you need to be) super clear on the problem you’re solving and making sure it’s a real problem.”
He also said that while he thinks a recurring revenue business is necessary nowadays, it can’t just be an afterthought.
“Whatever that subscription component is, it has to be inherent to the product and it has to make a lot of sense.”
Tovala plans to use the new funding round to increase staff, expand production capabilities and fuel growth. And while Rabie indicated they will build on top of their current technology, he made it clear the funding won’t largely be sunk into developing a next-generation oven.
Makes sense for an oven company that isn’t really an oven company.
If you’re a Spoon Plus subscriber, you can see my full interview with David Rabie discussing his latest funding round here.
We at the Spoon have long been curious about Brava, the stealthy smart kitchen startup which recently debuted its first product: an oven which uses the power of light to cook food quickly and precisely, with low energy usage.
Brava’s CEO John Pleasants be speaking at the Smart Kitchen Summit this October on a panel entitled “Reimagining The Cooking Box,” alongside Lisa McManus of America’s Test Kitchen, Matt van Horn of June, and Robin Liss of Suvie. To heat up (zing!) a little excitement for Pleasants’ panel, we asked him a few questions about Brava’s quest to create an oven so good, they’re calling it “the future of cooking.”
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Brava’s oven cooks with the power of light — how did you land on the concept and develop it for the consumer?
The idea for Brava started in our founder’s home thinking about how to solve the age-old problem of the family provider having to frequently go back and forth to the kitchen during a Holiday meal. The idea was to liberate them from that stressful distraction so the family could enjoy each other’s company without worry of burning their food.
At the same time, we believed that cooking technology had remained relatively static for 50 years (i.e., basic convection and conduction in ovens and stovetops) and that to truly revolutionize in home cooking, a better, faster and more dynamic heating method was needed. This spawned the birth of Pure Light cooking: our patented direct energy transfer methodology via highly controllable infrared light. We marry our custom Pure Light heating elements with a sophisticated cooking engine and an array of sensors, machine vision and AI that together delivers fantastic results with very minimal cooking effort.
Why did you decide to pair the Brava oven with a food delivery service?
Our mission is to empower anyone to make amazing food at home, any day of the week. For some people, they will want a full and turnkey solution, including ingredient delivery and preparation. So we will give them that option.
In addition, all the recipes are developed by our culinary team (including the on-oven cooking recipes/instructions) and the food is sourced from some of the finest purveyors in the world. We take great pride in our menus and the quality of our ingredients, and we think our customers will appreciate all the quality and attention to detail we bring to bear here.
Why did you decide to build your own brand with Brava, instead of licensing out your light-cooking tech to larger manufacturers?
We are a technology food and cooking company, focused on a direct to consumer model. We believe all elements ‚ from recipe development to hardware to constantly updating software — all have to come together under a single entity to deliver the type of service we think can truly change people’s routines and lives for the better. We seek to build that company.
Do you think that connected appliances will eventually become the norm in the kitchen, showing up in the homes of everyone, even non-tech-forward consumers? Or will they continue to be a niche product?
Connected appliances are definitely going to become a staple in the home, specifically in the kitchen. But the connection or “smarts” has to be valuable and actually improve people’s everyday lives…and today that’s not always the case.
How do you envision the kitchen of the future? Is it full of connected appliances? Voice assistants? Paint us a picture!
Pure Light Technology in every kitchen 
You can try Brava’s Pure Light Cooking tech (AKA bake things with light!) for yourself at the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th! Tickets are going fast, so don’t delay — we’ll see you in Seattle.
We throw around the term “smart” plenty of times when analyzing kitchen devices. But there’s one man who is truly trying to make the way you cook food — and the devices that help you do it — much smarter: Arvind Pereira. He’s the co-founder and CTO of the Markov Corporation, a startup leveraging AI to create a smarter electronic oven. Sort of like a microwave 2.0 — one that uses computer vision to better apply heat to perfectly cook each food to its optimum temperature.
We’re thrilled to have Pereira at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) in Seattle this October! To prime your palate, we asked Pereira a few questions about the role that AI and machine learning will play in the future of the smart kitchens and restaurants of the future.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
What motivated you to apply your experience with AI and machine learning to the food and cooking industry?
I have always been very excited about applications of robotics and AI to various industries due to my background in hardware and software. The first time I worked on something related to food was back when I was a newly-married grad student at USC. My wife Svetlana (who is a software engineer) and I began working on a fun side project app that allowed us to manage our food more efficiently: picking out recipes for the week and creating grocery lists out of what we had in the refrigerator. I wanted to use computer vision to detect the contents of the fridge, but never got around to it. I didn’t do anything interesting related to food after that, until the end of my stint at Clover.
I’d say that my daughter Charlotte and Leonard (the founder of Clover) are probably the biggest motivators in getting me started on my journey of using AI in the food industry. When Charlotte was born, I was badly sleep-deprived, and decided to build an AI-powered baby monitor using various sensors including visual and thermal cameras. My goal there was to have my intelligent monitor take actions like controlling the temperature of the room to keep Charlotte comfortable, in order to potentially obviate the need for us to wake up more often than really needed.
I’d just begun working on this idea in my spare time when I mentioned it to Leonard (who is my Markov co-founder now). It turns out he had been thinking about building a device that cooked food accurately using thermal feedback — and my baby monitor, which was closing the loop around room temperature, reminded him of it. After that I couldn’t stop thinking about how to develop a cooking device that could cook precisely and quickly. While I felt confident that I could design the electronics, software and AI for such an oven, I didn’t know enough about high-power radio frequency (RF) to build a device with the control we would need. When I met our third co-founder Nick through a search in our extended networks though, I knew that we had the core team that could make this happen (assuming it could even be done).
Tell us more about the Level, Markov’s AI-powered oven. What makes it so unique?
Level is designed to be fast like a microwave, but precise like a sous vide machine. It does this through two synergistic technologies: a proprietary heat steering technology and novel AI algorithms, which work together to cook precisely. Level senses the temperature of the food using a thermal camera, and then steers the heat into areas that are not yet hot while keeping heat away from areas that are too hot. We are the first device (to our knowledge) that can cook multiple items of food to different temperatures by using that feedback.
Since Level uses RF to heat food, it is ideal for hot grab-and-go meals prepared in the moment. We use deep learning and specialized adaptive algorithms cook precisely and with control. Not only does Level constantly get better through software updates, and learn to recognize/cook more items through over-the-air-updates, but the AI literally learns to cook better on its own by analyzing every cooking session performed. Over time, each Level benefits from information gleaned by every other Level that has cooked before it. We hope to delight our customers with these improvements, letting them cook food better and faster with much higher consistency.
What role do you see AI playing in the future of food, specifically in the kitchen?
The fastest moving subfield within AI is machine learning, which has made big strides in the fields of computer vision, speech recognition and even natural language processing. It is exciting to see many companies start bringing AI and robotics to the kitchen space by leveraging these advances in perception to automate or simplify cooking. AI is going to be embedded in every appliance we own, and these appliances are going to be networked together to synergistically help us perform our tasks more easily.
Robots and AI are already helping us perform various jobs within the food industry: harvesting vegetables and fruits, processing meat, cooking food, and even delivering it to customers at restaurants. People want to automate these processes to combat shortages of trained labor, increase quality control, and simplifying cooking through automation. AI is going to be at the center of almost all these transformations. Perception and learning are critical pieces in helping build better, more intelligent cooking devices.
Before founding Markov, you worked at Clover — a company which manufactured and provided POS terminals to, among other places, restaurants. How do you see tech changing the restaurant industry?
Yes, Clover is very popular in restaurants and we had customers that ranged from single family-owned restaurants to restaurant chains. What struck me as interesting about restaurants was how difficult it was to make the business work. As a result, when we started Markov, I spent a lot more time thinking about how to solve pain points for this industry. If we can help restaurants serve better food, reduce training time for staff by simplifying the cooking process, and improve the transparency around food quality, this should help make restaurants easier to run.
Clover allowed merchants to get an amazing view of their businesses through the data we could share with them through our own apps, or via third party ones. Quality control is hard to achieve across chains of restaurants. Connected equipment will help in a big way — this is already happening with smart homes, and similarly the restaurants of the future are going to be more connected, more automated, and easier to manage, both within the restaurant and across larger chains.
Automation is clearly becoming a bigger part of the meal journey — how should companies adjust their strategies to embrace this?
Automation in the food industry is inevitable. Over time, as businesses find it harder to employ trained workers at affordable wages, companies that have the technology to manage their operational costs are going to have a competitive advantage over companies that do not.
While traditional kitchens will continue to exist, we expect that it will be more economical to provide good food through the commissary model or with just-in-time delivery, or via grab-and-go sales. Just like Amazon used the internet to disrupt retail, by optimizing food preparation and delivery, companies that can execute on more efficient models which cut costs and deliver superior value are likely to win over more customers and out-maneuver their competition.
As cooking becomes more automated (and simpler) I think businesses will gain from it — and gain new competition. Companies will have to watch where automation is heading and look for opportunities to gain efficiencies through smarter allocation of resources and real estate, and ensure that they are staying up to date with technology that helps them run their businesses better.
I think summits like SKS help provide insights into what the future of food is shaping up to be. The future is definitely exciting in the food industry, and technologies that enable automation like AI and robotics are going to have an increasingly big role to play in shaping it.
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Thanks, Arvind! If you want to see him speak more about the role AI will play in the future kitchen, at home and in the restaurant, snag your tickets to the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th in Seattle.
He (or she) who hesitates is lost, especially if you were hoping to score the second-gen June Oven before school starts. According to the company’s website: “Batch 1” of the newest June is “SOLD OUT” and batch 2 won’t ship until late October.
The new version of the eponymous connected smart oven was attention-grabbing for the $599 price point ($499 during a launch special), which was far less than the $1,500 price tag for the first-gen oven. The June has a built-in HD camera to automatically identify and cook food you place in it, as well as a vast array of presets (64 just for bacon!) to make cooking hands-off, often with no pre-heating required.
What’s notable about the first batch selling out is that June just announced and started shipping their new oven a week ago, on August 7th. We first came across the sold out sign over the weekend, so the company hit that milestone in less than six days UPDATE: A June rep said the company sold out in two and a half days.
Now there are a few things to keep in mind here, of course. We don’t know how many units were in the first batch; it could be 20,000, or it could be 20. (It’s probably not 20.) But the drastic price reduction could have been just the thing wary consumers were waiting for before pulling the trigger.
The number of June Ovens sold could actually have a bigger overall impact than just better sales numbers for the company. If June can establish a large enough beachhead on consumer countertops now, that will leave less room (literally) for other countertop cooking appliances that haven’t hit the market yet.
If you have a June sitting on your counter, how likely are you to buy a Suvie or a Brava? I realize it’s a big market, and each of these appliance makers would probably tell you that competition is good — and they each have a unique technology/solution, and they are paired with their own food delivery service.
But in a world of finite countertop space, it kind of is a zero sum game. I ordered a June (thankfully before they sold out), and assuming it works as promised, I can’t see myself getting a second countertop oven.
We reached out to June to see if we could get any more details and will update this post as we hear more.
Back in September, news broke of a new company called Brava Home. At the time, details about the new startup were scarce, but Techcrunch and others reported that the company had raised $12 million from True Ventures to create what they were calling a “kitchen appliance”.
I guessed the mystery appliance was an oven, mostly because…well…the company responded to my inquiry with an email using the domain name “bravaoven.com”.
Turns out our crack team of investigators (again, me) was right: Brava is definitely making an oven.
According to a trademark filing uncovered by The Spoon, the company is working on smart oven that has a number of interesting features:
“Digital thermostat that automatically sets cooking conditions based on packaged food cooking instructions.” The Brava oven will have auto-programmed cooking routines based on the oven reading packaged food. I wouldn’t be surprised if Brava is working directly with food manufacturers to create the optimal cooking routines for the food.
“Oven control system consisting of a digital thermostat that can be controlled wirelessly from a remote location; software application for use on computers and hand-held devices to control oven systems in homes and businesses from a remote location.” Translation: app control of the oven.
“Remote video monitoring system consisting primarily of a camera and video monitor for recording and transmitting images and videos to remote locations.” Looks like the Brava oven will have an internal camera like the June Oven.
“Electric sensors; computer software for monitoring oven temperature and food in the oven, controlling the functioning of the oven and the operation of automation systems of an oven.” The oven will use sensors, which will include motion, humidity, temperature and light, to essentially automate the cook. Again sounds June-like.
“Electric countertop food preparation apparatus for cooking, baking, broiling, roasting, toasting, searing, browning, barbecuing and grilling food, namely, cooking ovens.” In case there was any doubt, this will be a countertop device.
As I stated above, The Brava sounds a lot like the June. The biggest discernible difference will be price, as the company indicated early on their first product will be a product for “everyone” and not the “super-rich”. This tells me it will probably come in well below the June’s $1500 and possibly even sub-$500.
Finally, one last bit of intrigue: The trademark is listed as “Status: 774 – Opposition Pending”, which means that someone has opposed their trademark. The who and why of anyone opposed to Brava’s trademark application is a mystery.
Hopefully we should know more later this year, as the company has indicated it will ship product sometime in 2017.
When you ask people what device in the home is ripe for a technology refresh, the oven usually isn’t at the top of the list. That’s because most of us use our ovens almost every day, without complaint, for years and decades at a time.
Why change something that works so well?
Except that it doesn’t, and the only reason so many of us think things are fine is, unlike with phones or cars, we don’t know any better since we aren’t regularly exposed to any noticeable innovation in those boring cooking boxes sitting in our kitchen.
But things are changing. Just as Nest showed us a few years ago it’s possible to rethink those white boxes in our homes like thermostats, a slew of companies are now forcing us to reconsider the oven.
June was the perhaps the first, announcing their June Intelligent last year. Today they announced their oven will ship next month, which could mark the beginning of a new wave of innovation in the oven market over the next decade. Below are some of the technologies which will change the way we think about the lowly oven in coming years:
Precision Cooking: One of the early success stories in the smart kitchen has been sous vide cookers, mostly because of the ability to apply precision cooking techniques to get chef-like results. The thing is, you can do that in an oven too, and that’s exactly what Anova plans to do with its new precision oven. Others like June and Jenn-Air are thinking the same thing, which should address one of the biggest problems with modern day ovens: wide variability in heating from brand to brand and model to model. Precision also means optimized cooking depending on the food itself. The reality is 350 degrees in one oven means a very different thing in another oven, and using the same parameters to cook in your Jenn-Air could give you very different results than cooking something in your Samsung. With more precise cooking and temperature control, both appliance makers and food brands can create very tailored instructions for the food type, quantity and for the cooking device itself.
Guided Cooking: One of the most interesting trends in the smart kitchen this year was the explosion of interest in guided cooking. While companies like Hestan and Cuciniale created countertop guided cooking systems that use a pan and induction heating surface, others like Innit want to apply a similar fusion of app-guidance, sensors, and precision cooking to create guided cooking experiences with bigger built-in appliances. What could make things even more interesting is Innit could extend the guided cooking experience further back towards prep and storage, since their platform also will be used in refrigerators and pantry systems.
AI/Machine Learning: One of the most fertile fields in machine image recognition has been food. Google and a bevy of startups have invested in research to enable a better understanding of food through image recognition, while June and Innit are working specifically to apply AI within the cooking experience itself. In addition to image recognition, the ability of devices to learn and optimize their behavior based on past cooking behavior, user preferences and contextual understanding of the consumer’s needs will lead to significant advances in intelligent cooking systems in the coming years.
New Heating Technologies: One of the biggest changes coming to ovens over the next few years will be the way in which they heat food. Traditional ovens use electric or gas heating, and in the last few decades, convection heating has become a standard feature on most consumer ovens. But soon we will see a variety of new and interesting heating methods, ranging from the new RF cooking technology from NXP to the steam cooking included in ovens from Anova and Tovala.
Interfaces: One of the biggest changes in ovens will simply be the way in which we interact with them. The old way of programming a cook through a number of often confusing buttons was ripe for a refresh, and most of the new entrants in this space are creating compelling new industrial designs and interfaces. Whether it’s the physical dial on the June or Amazon’s Alexa, we can soon expect that we will be interacting – and talking – to our ovens in vastly different ways in the future.
About a week ago, news broke that True Ventures, the early stage venture firm behind such well-known tech brands as Automattic (the company behind WordPress), Fitbit and Ring, has recently taken a shine to the smart kitchen.
True made a healthy $12 million A round investment in Brava which, according to its founders, is building a connected kitchen appliance. While it isn’t Juicero or June money, $12 million is a big chunk of change for a connected kitchen appliance, which made us wonder what exactly the company has cooking.
Media CEO Enters The Kitchen
A quick survey of Brava’s founders and employees on Linkedin tells us they’re a collection of executives with lengthy resumes in the media, gaming and consumer IoT spaces, but not a whole lot of appliance or culinary experience.
The company’s CEO is John Pleasants, a long-time entertainment and content CEO that has spent the majority of his career in interactive entertainment, including stints at Disney, Electronic Arts and, most recently, heading up Samsung’s content group. Just two months ago Variety wrote about Pleasants departure from Samsung and how it signaled the effective end of company’s media ambitions.
Brava’s other co-founders include Thomas Cheng, Brava’s COO, who previously helped lead hardware for smart home startup August, and Dan Yue, the company’s Chief Product Officer, who had worked at Playdom, a social gaming group within Disney, under Pleasants. Yue also was a co-founder of an organic meal kit delivery service, Green Chef, which makes him the only cofounder with food on their resume.
The rest of the team includes a mix of folks who either worked with Pleasants in the past at such stops as Playdom and other folks who cut their teeth at consumer IoT brands such as August Home.
What’s Brava Got Cooking?
While Brava has been cryptic on its website and in comments to reporters, they have given some hints.
First, they have made it clear they are on their website and through statements from Pleasants they are making a product for the kitchen.
We also know from Techcrunch’s interview with Pleasants the product could be more affordable than some of the other high-profile connected kitchen products from the likes of June and Juicero. According to CEO Pleasants, the first Brava product is “…for everyone. We’re aspiring to [produce something that is] well-regarded and high-quality but not for the superrich.”
Pleasants’ comment also indicates that Brava will most likely debut with a single consumer-facing product rather than coming out of the gate with something more industry facing “platform” or a suite of products.
And then there are the clues so obvious when you see them, you should probably just go with it: When we emailed Brava to see if we can talk to them, the response came from an email address with the domain name “bravaoven.com.” In fact, bravaoven.com redirects to the company’s website bravahome.com.
So, is Brava making a smart oven?
Possibly. In fact, probably. If you put together the concept of mass-market pricing and something resembling an oven, a safe guess would be the company’s first product is some sort of standalone countertop device that features connectivity and other advanced tech.
The last clue is an important one, and it comes from Jon Callaghan, who in his introduction post about Brava at the True Ventures blog asks, “The whole home can be connected, but does every part really need to be?”
This is an important question that also serves as a potential clue as to what Brava is doing. As we’ve seen with the June Oven, the biggest advances with what they are doing have to do with things like image recognition and new heating elements, things that could be paired with connectivity to create a useful product, but these are not advances that derive their primary value from a Wi-Fi connection.
Chances are Brava’s first product could and probably will have connectivity, but as we’ve learned following the smart kitchen pretty closely, the reinvention of cooking and the kitchen is something much bigger and broader than just adding Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
Ultimately, what direction Brava’s product takes is just pure guessing at this point. Given co-founder Dan Yue’s relationship with meal kit delivery company Greenchef, this could feature a Tovala-like pairing of a meal service with hardware, or it could just be a consumer grade combi-oven or something similar to the June.
No matter what Brava is up to, we shouldn’t have to wait too long to find out. The company has indicated they plan to ship sometime in 2017, making a CES reveal in January likely.
