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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Ovie

Podcast: Overcoming Obstacles To Build Kitchen Tech Hardware With Ovie’s Ty Thompson

Ty Thompson and the rest of the Ovie team recently passed a major milestone: They shipped their first hardware product.

The product, a consumer food waste management system, was over half a decade in the making. Along the way to market, the founding team faced numerous challenges around funding, finalizing the product concept and design, building prototypes for manufacturing, and finding the right manufacturer to work with.

Ty talks about all of these challenges and the lessons learned, including:

  • Battling mission creep around the product’s vision
  • How to find the right minimum viable product to get it into production
  • What you need to do (and what you shouldn’t do) when looking to find the right manufacturing partner
  • How to balance your life and your day job while hustling to build a startup

And much more!

You can listen to the full episode by clicking play below or you can find it in the usual podcast spaces such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

After Over Half a Decade in Development, Ovie Ships Food Freshness Trackers

Since I first saw the Ovie team standing in a small booth in the bottom floor of the Sands Convention Center during CES 2018, I’ve been following them to see if this group of founders could bring their vision for a smart food tracker to life. The team, which at that time consisted of Ty Thompson, Dave Joseph, and Stacie Thompson, had scratched together a prototype to showcase their idea at the big show: a low-cost visual tracking system to help people waste less food.

I liked the idea, so I was happy – and a bit surprised – to see that after over half a decade, the company’s founders had persevered and finally shipped product. Sure, the original idea – a “smart storage system” that not only included tags but some Tupperware-like containers as well as an app that allowed you to track your food inventory in one place – was a little bigger than what they ultimately brought to market (more on that in a minute), but the reality is it’s hard to ship hardware. Most project teams make compromises by the time the final product ends up in the consumer’s hands.

When I first wrote about them, I called the Ovie Smarterware trackers a ‘Tile for food’; in reality, the idea is a bit closer to an intelligent sticky note system to help you track your food’s freshness. The way the final, shippable product works is you stick Ovie smart trackers (called LightTags) on the food items you want to track, and you tell them how long you want to monitor a food item by clicking the light on the LightTag once for each day. So, for example, I would click a LightTag seven times for a pound of ground beef with an expiration date of a week from now.

As you can see above, if the light is teal, you have more than 24 hours left on your timer. Yellow warns that you have 24 hours or less on that food. The red light means time has run out. According to Ovie, each color has a blink pattern for the color-challenged. The blinks are slowest in the Teal stage and speed up as the expiration date inches near.

The company persevered through a series of challenges to finally reach this point. They launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2018, looked for investors and manufacturing partners, and fought through a pandemic and a significant hardware winter. While the Ovie tag system isn’t exactly as proposed in the company’s Kickstarter, the fact that founders saw it through and shipped it is a pretty impressive feat.

If interested, you can buy an Ovie system on the company’s website.

SKS Q&A: Ovie’s Stacie Thompson on Why Tech is the Secret Weapon to Fight Home Food Waste

The majority of food waste in the U.S. happens at the consumer level, but surprisingly few companies tackling the home food waste problem.

One of the few companies with an actual device aimed at eliminating home food waste is Ovie. The startup creates LED-enabled tags which connect with voice assistants to help you keep track of leftovers in your fridge, so you can make sure to eat things before they go bad and wind up in the trash.

Ovie co-founder Stacie Thompson will be talking about the market potential in solving home food waste at the Smart Kitchen Summit {SKS} in Seattle this October. Check out our Q&A with Thompson below, then head over here to grab your tickets before they’re gone!

Tell us a little bit more about Ovie. What was the impetus for the company?
Ovie is a system that is designed to seamlessly integrate into your kitchen and help you keep track of, and use your foods more effectively. The idea is truly a solution to a very real problem that we all face: that moment when you open the fridge and realize that once again all of that food that you intended to eat is ending up in the garbage because it has gone bad.

The system integrates a visual notification on foods by way of a container, clip and connector that are fitted with a SmartTag. The SmartTag lights green for good, yellow for foods to prioritize and if it’s red, you should probably think twice before consuming it. This allows you to tag and track the foods that matter to you. Once tagged, they’re connected to the app which has a digital “fridge” that allows you to know what you have from anywhere and can give you recipe inspiration based on what you’ve got.

Statistics tell us that 40% of food waste occurs in the home, yet most solutions focus on farms, grocery stores, distributors and restaurants. Why do you think that is?
Food waste is an enormous problem, so I think a lot of companies have focused on those areas because you can see a big impact through the adoption of a relatively limited user group.

When you think about households, that consumer set is really huge — and vastly varied in the way people live and deal with food. So finding a solution that addresses a large portion of this group that will be readily adopted is no small task. Making a meaningful connection with homes is the way that we will see food waste reduced at the household level.

Why did you choose to make Ovie compatible with voice assistants, as opposed to purely controlled through an app?
Is there anything easier than pushing a button and saying “Alexa this is spinach”? Using an app is easy. But we all want what’s easier than easy — we want magic. Voice has become the simplest way for people to outsource tasks in their lives without feeling burdened by tech. That’s especially important in the kitchen where people have their hands busy with a lot of different tasks. We believe Voice is on the way to being the dominant tech interface in the kitchen and makes it a natural way for our tech to fade into the background and be helpful.

What’s next for Ovie?
Wow — such an open-ended question! First and foremost, we’re excited about finally getting this amazing product into people’s hands so that they can start feeling more control of what they have in the fridge and pantry. But Smarterware is just the beginning of many products and partnerships that Ovie has begun and are geared towards helping all of us live more successful, sustainable lives.

Keep an eye out for more speaker Q&A’s as we ramp up to our fifth year of SKS on October 7-8 in Seattle! We hope to see you there.

Worried Those Leftovers will Make You Sick? Ovie’s Tags Will Help

If your fridge is anything like mine, it holds stacks of Tupperware containers filled with various leftovers from meals past. And if your brain is anything like mine, it gets nervous about eating two-day-old salmon, so you leave the fish in the fridge in the hopes that your spouse is either brave enough to chow down — or will just throw it out.

I’m ashamed to admit that these leftover minefields in my fridge lead to way too much food waste on my part. Which is why I’m intrigued by the Ovie food tags. Mike Wolf describes Ovie’s tech pretty accurately as “Tile for food.”

Basically, Ovie makes LED-lit tags that you can affix to food through either a special Ovie container or clip or strap. These tags work with Amazon’s Alexa and when you press the button you tell Alexa “This is lasagna.” From there, Ovie’s LED tags will keep track of how long it’s been in the fridge and alert you when something is about to or has already gone bad. Green light is good, yellow light means it’s nearing the end and a red light means its bad. The company pulls its spoilage information from USDA guidelines.

With the accompanying Ovie app, you can see what foods you have stored and what state they’re in. The app will even make rudimentary pairing suggestions based on other food you have stored with Ovie. So you can enjoy some lasagna, and Ovie might also suggest some green beans that should be eaten soon.

According to Ovie Co-Founder and CEO Ty Thompson, the company is exploring partnerships with recipe apps and delivery services to expand its capabilities. By working with Ovie, a recipe app could see what foods you already have, suggest a recipe and forward a list of any additional ingredients to Instacart for delivery that day.

The Ovie system is not available yet. The Chicago-based company is funded through friends and family at this point and aims to do a crowdfunding campaign at the end of February. When Ovie does hit stores, Thompson says the price points will be roughly $59 for three tags (complete with straps), “a little bit more” for three of the clip version, and close to $89 for three containers.

The big concern for a company like Ovie is when this type of technology gets embedded directly into fridges. LG’s forthcoming ThinQ fridge lets you put virtual stickers on items to let you know when they are about to go bad. And Amazon is researching using scent sensors in the fridge to do the same thing.

That will happen, but over the course of the next five years, there is still a sizable market of people who would rather spend $89 to keep track of food in their existing fridge rather than thousands of dollars on a new one.

One thing that won’t change is how nervous I get about eating leftovers (or even opening the container to see what they are). Hopefully, a system like Ovie’s can help me reduce the amount of food I embarrassingly waste.

The CES Foodtech & Smart Kitchen Trends Wrapup

Every year upon returning from my annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas, someone always asks me, “what was the big thing at CES this year?”

And this year, just like every year, I struggle to answer the question.

The reason? Because there’s never just one big thing. There are usually many big things.

This is in part because it’s such a massive show, one that’s gotten bigger both in scope and attendance over the years, and it’s hard to easily summarize the trends from nearly every corner of tech. Whether your thing is AI, IoT, VR/AR, cryptocurrencies, robotics, CES had something to make you happy.

Because of the overwhelming amount of news and stuff to see, it’s helpful to go to CES with a focus. For me, this year (and really, the last couple years) that focus was kitchen and food tech.  And because there’s no concentrated area at CES for food or kitchen tech (get with the program, CTA), that means I am usually scanning a bunch of different spaces (smart home, fitness, startups) to find interesting new companies or news.

This post is a wrapup of some of the important trends I saw. If I missed anything big (and I’m sure I did), email me, and I’ll update the post.

Smart Kitchen Platforms Emerge

This year was a coming out for connected kitchen platforms at CES. Whether it was Whirlpool’s big debut of Yummly 2.0 (which Brett Dibkey described to me as “the glue” tying together Whirlpool’s kitchen of the future), or offerings powered by Innit, SideChef or Drop, there’s no doubt we saw the intelligent, conscious kitchen undeniably emerge as a major focus for large appliance makers.

What do I mean? Basically, it’s moving beyond simple connectivity and apps to platforms that connect the cooking, storage, commerce, planning and every other aspect of the kitchen into a holistic system. A kitchen that is aware of the food inside the fridge, one where appliances coordinate to each other to help organize the evening or week’s meal, one in which a variety of intelligent sensors and interfaces make your life easier; it was all there. This is, obviously, a big focus for us here at the Spoon, so expect more on this topic later.

Voice Interfaces Everywhere

Speaking of interfaces, we’re on the third year of “Alexa sure seems like it’s everywhere” at CES, but the first year of “Google finally seems to be taking this seriously”. It was just over a year ago that Google finally introduced its development kits for actions for Google Assistant (its answer to Alexa Skills), and twelve months later we finally see the fruits of the company’s labor. We also saw massive investment in CES as Hey Google was plastered all over Vegas, and they had a particular focus on the kitchen with on-site demos of the kitchen with partners like Innit.

Digital Sensing

Part of the intelligent, conscious kitchen is one that understands the food that is in the fridge and on the plate. Some companies were showing off food image recognition tech, infrared spectrometry, digital noses and water sensors.  Companies like Aryballe showed off their high-end professional sensor but also indicated they were working with appliance makers to build the technology into appliances. After-market players like Smarter were demoing their products to companies like Whirlpool. Expect the concept of a sensing kitchen to become more prevalent this year.

Food Inventory Management

Food waste is a big issue everywhere, and there were companies at CES showing off solutions to help us all better track what food we buy.  Startup Ovie, which I would describe as “Tile for food” was showing off its food tracking/management system, while others like Whirlpool and Samsung were talking about how their fridges can help to manage food inventory.

Water Intelligence

Given that it’s one of the world’s most precious resources, it’s always been a bit of a mystery to me why there hasn’t been more attention paid to using IoT and smart technology to manage our water better.  Mystery solved because now it seems the tech world is paying attention. Belkin finally had a coming out party for its long-gestating Phyn water management system while others like Flo had their home water management system on display. Smaller efforts like that of Lishtot, which help us detect whether water is drinkable, were also on display.

Wireless Power

One of the coolest things about the Smart Kitchen Summit last year was the Wireless Power Consortium had its first public demo of its cordless kitchen technology, which features wireless power for small countertop appliances.  I got an early demo at the WPC booth this year as they showed off wireless power for small appliances from Philips and Haier.

I also saw a cool demo using infrared wireless power form Wi-Charge. The concept here is to put an infrared transmitter in the ceiling (they put it in a light installation in the demo) and then transmit power using infrared to various devices. The Wi-Charge folks said their patented tech is currently only targeted at small portable devices, but I’m intrigued with the possibilities for the kitchen as a potential future opportunity.

Specialized Living

I’ve been writing about the massive opportunity for smart home and kitchen innovation for the aging in place market for the past couple years, so I was happy to see a number of companies focusing on this important area.  Much of the focus was on safety, which obviously applies to kitchen/cooking scenarios, but I can also see how smart assistants, robotics and augmented reality could be applied in living scenarios to help folks with limitations due to age.

Robot Invasion

Robots and process automation were everywhere at CES, ranging from cute social robots like LG’s Cloi to delivery robots to the laundry folding robots. Some, like LG, saw the robot as a natural pairing with the kitchen, while others saw robots as more general purpose assistants for the home.  And while we didn’t see the robot chef at CES this year, I expect we’ll see that probably in the near future.

Humanless Retail

AI-driven point of sale devices and “humanless” markets were big at CES. AIPoly won best of show for the second year in a row, while a Bodega-on-wheels startup Robomart had a huge crowd at its booth for much of the show. More modest efforts like the Qvie were on offer to give Airbnb hosts a way to become even more like micro-hotel operators.

New Cooking Boxes Appliances

One of my predictions for the year was a new generation of cooking boxes. I use the term box because they’re not always ovens (though they can be), but often are like the NXP RF-powered smart defroster. We also saw Hestan on the other side of the country (at KBIS) talk about using precision cooking coupled with gas, a throwback to their Meld days.  There were also lots of folks I met with still operating in stealth that plan to debut their next-gen cooking appliances this year, so stay tuned.

Home As Food Factory

All of a sudden, everyone seems to be interested in home-grow systems, whether it’s the backyard IoT grow box from Grow to the Opcom’s grow walls, there was lots of interesting new home grow systems to see at CES. And while I didn’t see anything like food reactors or much in the way of 3D food printers, I expect CES 2019 to rectify that situation.

Smart Booze

Smart beer appliances, wine serving/preservation devices, and IoT connected wine shelves were plentiful this year. CES also gave many the first peek at the home distilling system from PicoBrew, the PicoStill.

We’ll be watching all these trends this year, so if you want to keep up, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter. Also, you can hear about many of these trends at Smart Kitchen Summit Europe, which is in Dublin on June 12th.