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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Panasonic

Fresco Deal With Panasonic Brings Device Control & AI-Powered Planning to HomeCHEF Multi-Oven Lineup

At CES 2024, Panasonic announced that it had struck a deal with smart kitchen OS startup Fresco to integrate the Fresch kitchen OS platform with the Japanese brand’s multi-oven countertop cooking appliances.

The deal covers the US market and will see Fresco’s technology bring a new set of connected features to Panasonic’s multi-oven products, the first being the HomeCHEF 4-in-1 multi-oven. According to the announcement, the Fresco AI assistant will reside within the Panasonic app, allowing users to tailor recipes according to their dietary needs, substitute ingredients based on pantry availability, and change serving sizes and cooking preferences. Users can control cooking modalities, enabling steam cooking, air frying, and more through the app and get alerts about cooking status.

The deal marks a significant win for Fresco with one of the leading microwave manufacturers in the world, one that has been relatively aggressive about adding new cooking capabilities through its HomeCHEF multi-oven line. The partnership is interesting because it’s one of the first partnerships by a major microwave company to bring device control and AI-assisted cooking to their lineup.

According to Fresco, the HomeChef 4-in-1 will first be released in the US market in late 2024.

Panasonic Testing Delivery Robots in Japanese Smart Town

Electronics giant Panasonic announced today that it has started testing autonomous delivery robots on public roads in the Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town in Japan. Initial tests started in November; the company aims to begin home delivery tests in February of 2021.

Panasonic said the this first phase will include the home delivery of “packages and products using a smartphone app.” While food wasn’t specifically mentioned in the press release, the company pointed out the growth of food delivery and lack of labor to carry out those deliveries. Additionally, Panasonic talked about the growing need for contactless delivery options, thanks to the pandemic.

Panasonic got permission from Fujisawa City authorities to begin its self-driving tests. The autonomous robots will be connected via a public network, and a human operator will monitor the robots from a control center and take over driving should the need arise.

The city of Fujisawa itself sounds interesting. From Panasonic’s press announcement:

Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town is an urban development project located on the former site of Panasonic’s factory in Fujisawa City, Kanagawa Prefecture, with the participation of 18 groups including Panasonic and Fujisawa City. As a real smart town where more than 2,000 people live, it is working on sustainable urban development while also aiming to solve issues facing society and the community through the implementation of mechanisms jointly designed by the companies, local governments, and residents involved with the town, and through the creation of new services.

Panasonic’s delivery robot move is part of a broader trend, as we see cities from around the world begin rolling out delivery robots on public streets. In Russia, Yandex robots are making restaurant deliveries in Moscow. The Postmates Serve robot is making deliveries from the Pink Dot market in the West Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles. And Woowa Brothers delivery robots have started making food deliveries in Seoul, South Korea.

We’ve seen an increase in robot activity since the pandemic forced restaurants, grocery and delivery services to establish contactless delivery options. Robots can remove at least one form of human-to-human interaction when getting your food. But robots have other advantages as well, such as the ability to work around the clock and potentially bring down the cost of delivery, making it more affordable to more people.

But as Panasonic’s announcement shows, there are still legal and technical hurdles that need to be overcome. Even in the smart town it helped form, Panasonic still needs to get permits and run tests before it can dive right in to dropping by someone’s front door.

Panasonic and PopID Aim to Make Paying With Your Face the Norm at Restaurants

Using facial recognition to order and pay for food has long been an intriguing concept for restaurants, albeit one that comes with a bit of a creep factor. But now that the pandemic has accelerated the need for contactless systems in restaurants, it may become more widespread.

Case in point: this week, Panasonic and Cali Group’s PopID announced a new partnership that lets restaurant customers pay with their faces at drive-thrus and kiosks. PopID’s technology, which includes its PopPay “wallet,” will be integrated into Panasonic’s ClearConnect Kiosk, which offers restaurants the hardware, software, and UI/UX design needed to install self-order kiosks at restaurants. The two companies will also jointly integrate PopPay at drive-thru systems.

Once customers register for a PopID account, they can use PopPay at any restaurant that accepts the technology. They’ll be able to view past orders and loyalty points, reorder items, and, of course, pay for their meals without the need for human interaction. You can watch a quick explainer video here.

Facial recognition at fast-casual and QSR restaurants has been slowly gaining momentum over the last couple years. Bite, which works with ToGo’s and Noodles World Kitchen, among other restaurants, also offers facial recognition in its kiosks. Some restaurants, namely Dallas-TX Malibu Poke, have offered face recognition for years.

PopID’s tech is already in a number of restaurants, including Cali Group-owned CaliBurger, Bojangles, and Dairi-O. The Panasonic partnership is meant to expand the number of PopID deployments.

The flip side, of course, is that users have to be comfortable with giving away their face data in order to use the this convenient, socially distanced form of ordering and payments. Biometric data remains a controversial topic and comes with its fair share of security and privacy concerns. That means restaurants and tech companies deploying these systems have a responsibility to communicate with customers about how they use the data — and how well they protect it.

In a pandemic-stricken world, some of these systems actually do more than let customers order and pay for meals. Cali Burger recently launched a modified system (using PopID) that can, as well as processing ordering and payments, take staff and guests’ temperatures. A handful of restaurants, including Cali Burger, are using this feature, and if the sensors detect someone has a fever, that person is not allowed to enter the building. 

So while privacy concerns will always be a risk with facial recognition, the ability of these kiosks to actually ensure the safety of guests and staff could sway more folks to hand over their personal data. At the very least, the privacy tradeoff may seem more worth it. 

Week in Restaurant Tech: Ordermark Expands Kiwi Deal, Blaze Takes on Big Pizza

McDonald’s grabbed the main spotlight this week for its acquisition of voice-order tech company Apprente, which it says could make your future drive-thru experience faster and simpler. But while Mickey D’s continued its evolution from burger chain to tech company, plenty of other new developments unfolded in the restaurant space this week past week.

If you want to learn more about the latest in restaurant technology, be sure to head to Seattle this October 7–8 for The Spoon’s Smart Kitchen Summit. Grab your tickets here and come on down.

Panasonic Unveils Kiosk-as-a-Service Solution
Panasonic, which has over 11,000 kiosks deployed at QSRs around the country, introduced a new hardware-software offering this week that promises a one-stop-shop solution for restaurants when it comes to integrating kiosks into daily operations. Dubbed ClearConnect, the platform rolls hardware, the company’s iQtouch software, installation, integration with existing restaurant systems, and after-sales service into a single system restaurants pay a monthly fee for. The new solution also includes a suite of drive-thru technologies. No voice-order capabilities yet, but it’s only a matter of time before we see such a feature make its way to the kiosk.

Ordermark Expands Kiwi Partnership
Ordermark, who helps restaurants organize and streamline restaurant orders, said this week it has expanded its partnership with Kiwi, whose six-wheeled bots enable autonomous delivery service on a few different college campuses right now. According to the press release, the deal gives Kiwi access to Ordermark’s portfolio of restaurant customers, which will expand as the former rolls its bots out to other locations, including Sacramento and Palo Alto.

Image via Blaze Pizza.

Blaze Wants to Take on Big Pizza With Delivery Strategy
LeBron James-backed pizza chain Blaze unveiled two new initiatives this week: larger pies and an integrated delivery partnership with DoorDash. Up to now, Blaze has been known for its 11-inch personal pies loaded with customizable toppings that don’t exactly travel well. The addition of larger, more shareable 14-inch pizzas makes Blaze’s offerings better candidates for delivery. As with a growing number of integrated delivery options, customers can place orders directly through the Blaze website or app and still get food delivered via a DoorDash driver. (Customers can also order Blaze via DoorDash or Postmates.) Blaze also says it’s taking on Big Pizza with this new delivery partnership — though it will be some time before an upstart pizza brand has the same reach as a behemoth like Domino’s.

Panasonic’s DishCanvas Uses AR to Put Moving Images on Your Dinner Plate

They say that before you even take a bite of your food, you eat first with your eyes. Panasonic seems to be really taking that idiom to heart with the new product from its innovation incubator GameChanger Catapult.

DishCanvas is a smart plate (no, not that kind of smart plate) equipped with a display which can project moving images. It’s controlled through a smartphone app, through which you can select your desired pattern, texture, and movement to be projected on the dinnerware, as well as any desired transition effects. The dynamic image loop is then “played” on the DishCanvas plate.

We got to check out DishCanvas’ prototype in Tokyo this week at SKS Japan. The plate is made up of a glass top, a display, and batteries. Eventually the display technology will be built into the plate itself, but for now it’s pretty low-tech — essentially just an iPad slide underneath a corresponding dish. The GameChanger Catapult team who showed off the DishCanvas told me that they’re also hoping to make the images interactive, so you could theoretically rearrange images or even play games while you eat.

As I noted, DishCanvas is currently just a prototype. But the team member I spoke with told me that Game Changer Catapult is already in early talks with Disney to use the plates in their parks for children.

Which, to me, is a pretty smart use case. What kid wouldn’t be more likely to eat their veggies if they placed on a plate displaying life-like versions of their favorite Disney characters?

I could also imagine DishCanvas being used in fine dining. For example, a fancy Michelin star restaurant could create custom plate displays to communicate more information about the ingredients used in each dish. Maybe a rare steak would be served on a plate bearing a moving image of rustling grass in a field where the cow once grazed, or a grilled fish could be placed atop a display of ocean waves.

DishCanvas corresponds to a new movement of augmented dining which tackles not just the taste of food, but the entire eating experience. From scotch tastings enhanced with VR to leveraging sounds  to change the flavor of food, companies are experimenting with ways in which technology can enhance our meals by appealing to all five of our senses.

Here at the Spoon, we cover lots of technology aiming to optimize the way your food tastes. But it’s good to remember that smell, sound, touch, and sight play a role in how we eat, as well.

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:

The Spoon Newsletter: European FoodTech Investment, Future of Grocery, SKS Vids

This is the post version of our weekly (twice-weekly, actually) newsletter. If you’d like to get the weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

Catherine here! Pleasantly full from sampling Pizzametry’s pizza-making robot/vending machine, ready for a weeklong sojourn to Copenhagen to eat as many cinnamon rolls and fermented things as humanly possible.

Speaking of Europe, this week I spent a good chunk of time sifting through piles of data on the state of European food tech. Now, I’m not complaining — we at the Spoon love a good data sift, the nerdier the better. And we uncovered some interesting trends emerging across the Atlantic. Check out our distilled report to find out which companies, investors, and countries are forging the way in European food innovation.

There’s plenty of action right here in our own backyard, too. Take food delivery: a whopping $3.5 billion has been invested in startups in the space this year alone — and it’s only October.

We’re also seeing a lot of companies experimenting with delivery methods. Chris wrote about how Kiwi’s food delivery robots are rolling out in Los Angeles, which he thinks is a smarter play than Uber’s goal to start delivering your pad thai or chicken burrito via drone.

Outside of delivery, robots are also continuing their march into the restaurant space. Chinese hot pot chain Haidilao has teamed up with Panasonic to launch a Berlin location with a completely robot-run kitchen. Maybe good news for consumers, but bad news for people looking for entry-level restaurant jobs.

In the front of house, Jenn wrote about the partnership between Ordrslip, a company which powers mobile apps for restaurants, and payment software Square. Together, they can help smaller mom-and-pop eateries enter the age of mobile ordering and payments — something that’s becoming less of a nicety and more of a necessity.

Jenn also has the story about an epic Twitter thread from the founder of CircleUp about the future of grocery. Ryan Caldbeck’s seventeen-tweet thread told the story of a three hour conversation he had recently with an unnamed CEO of a large grocery chain. He provided a few key takeaways from the conversation, including how low-pricing is a losing strategy and how the old axiom “location is everything” holds less relevancy in an era of delivery-everywhere. What does matter? Product selection optimized by “non-commoditized data”. You can read Jenn’s post about Caldbeck’s thread here.

Also from this week: Chris wonders if 2019 could be the year that we move beyond traditional meat, as plant-based meat continues to gain popularity with vegetarians and flexitarians alike. It’ll be a while longer before the average person can sink their teeth into cell-based (also called cultured or clean) meat, however. In anticipation of its market launch, the USDA and FDA hosted a joint meeting earlier this week to discuss how they would label this emerging technology.

Oh yeah, one more thing: Our photos and video page from Smart Kitchen Summit 2018 is in. We have all our photos up and a bunch of videos (with most being up by next week), so check it out!

That’s all from me! Farvel (Danish for see ya later.)

Catherine

In the 10/26 edition:

Video: Richard Blais Wants to Make a Drone Delivery Service for Donuts
During his fireside chat at the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, Richard Blais talks about his thoughts on the future of food technology in the restaurant and home kitchen: food delivery, robotics, and drone-delivered donuts.

Product Selection Will Drive Future Growth for Grocery, Says CircleUp’s CEO
Whether it’s about personalizing the shopping experience, changing the way stores are set up or shoppable recipes, most folks in the food industry have an opinion about what will drive future growth for grocery retailers. This week, another voice joined the conversation and offered a new take on where retailers should be looking in terms of future of grocery.

Haidilao and Panasonic Team Up for Robotic Hotpot Restaurant
Haidilao, which operates a hotpot restaurant chain, has partnered with Panasonic to open up a robot-run kitchen in Beijing on October 28. The new automated kitchen will reportedly be used to help Haidilao expand to up to 5,000 locations around the world.

Trendwatch: Is 2019 the Year We Move Beyond Traditional Meat?
Consumption of beef and chicken was estimated to hit a record high this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But traditional meat’s time at the top of the proverbial food chain may be nearing an end, if two new 2019 prediction pieces are to be believed. But how close is that to the truth?

Allergy Fears and Transparency Among Issues at latest USDA/FDA Meat-ing
Earlier this week, scientists, entrepreneurs, and concerned members of the public got together to discuss the future of cell-based (also called “cultured” and “lab-grown”) meat during a joint meeting put on by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A big issue on the table: labeling.

Video: To Survive, the Future Kitchen Must be Personalized, Flexible, and Emotional
The first panel of the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) North America tackled the disrupted meal journey. Just after Jon Jenkins, Director of Engineering at Hestan Smart Cooking, Dana Cowin, former Editor in Chief of Food & Wine, and Michael Wolf kicked off SKS by discussing how the kitchen has to adjust if it will survive in the future.

Bee Vectoring Technology Uses Bees to Apply Pesticide on Crops
Bees are pretty remarkable creatures (once you get past all that stinging). They pollinate crops, make delicious honey, and if a Toronto-based agtech company, Bee Vectoring Technology, has its way, bees will be used to apply pesticides to crops to help ward off disease and increase yields.

$3.5 Billion Invested in Food Delivery Startups This Year
Investors have a big appetite for food delivery companies this year. The Wall Street Journal reports on Pitchbook data revealing that $3.5 billion has been invested in food and grocery delivery startups so far in 2018.

Kiwi Delivery Robots Expand into Los Angeles
If you live in the Westwood area of Los Angeles, you can see sunshine, the occasional movie star, and now delivery robots shuttling food to hungry local denizens. According to the Daily Bruin, Kiwi Campus started rolling out its delivery robots at the beginning of this month.

Cookitoo Brings Rental Kitchen Marketplace from Down Under to the Bay Area
Australian startup Cookitoo is bringing their online marketplace for underutilized kitchen space to the Bay Area, with hopes to expand into other U.S. cities over the next year and a half.

Haidilao and Panasonic Team Up for Robotic Hotpot Restaurant

Haidilao, which operates a hotpot restaurant chain, has partnered with Panasonic to open up a robot-run kitchen in Beijing on October 28. The new automated kitchen will reportedly be used to help Haidilao expand to up to 5,000 locations around the world.

According to Bloomberg, the new Haidilao location will feature robots that “will take orders, prepare and deliver raw meat and fresh vegetables to customers to plop into soups prepared at their tables.”

The two companies say the Beijing Haidilao will be the world’s first restaurant with a fully automated kitchen. We don’t have many details on exactly how the automation technology will work at the new Haidilao, but it seems like Spyce in Boston may already have that mantle.

Regardless of who is or isn’t first, Haidilao’s Beijing robotic restaurant most certainly won’t be the last. Haidilao and Panasonic have formed a new $20 million joint venture called Ying Hai Holding Pte. to manage the automated expansion. They’re also planning to establish 5,000 Haidilao locations, up from the current 360.

A Ying Hai rep told Bloomberg that a shift to automated labor instead of human labor will make that aggressive growth more feasible.

As we have covered quite extensively, robots are all the rage in the restaurant biz around the world. In addition to the aforementioned Spyce (which just raised $21 million), there is also Cafe X‘s coffee-slinging robot barista, Caliburger’s burger-cooking Flippy, Creator‘s burger building robot, and, over in France, Ekim‘s pizza-making robot. Bringing it back to Asia there’s the Seoul, Korea Pizza Hut which uses Bear Robotics’ Penny and Alibaba’s Robot.he restaurant in Shanghai. Elsewhere in China, JD.com plans to open 1,000 of its own robot restaurants.

Robots are really good at repetitive, manual tasks — like chopping or cooking the same thing over and over again. A robot won’t get burned on a hot stove or cut itself (or take a smoke break). So automation make a lot of sense for high-volume restaurants where the menu and cooking procedures are the same every day.

Of course, opening up more than 4,000 automated restaurant locations means fewer jobs for us humans. Right now, that feels like a more abstract problem since robot restaurants are still somewhat of a novelty. But if half of us are cool with robots preparing our food, and it’s cheaper for companies to implement (perhaps translating into cheaper food for us), eating at a restaurant like Haidilao could easily become the new normal — but working at one will become more rare.

SKS Japan: Excitement, Growth & a Rapidly Maturing Food Tech Ecosystem

Last week I was in Tokyo for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan. It was the second edition of our Japanese event, and while it’s only been twelve short months since that first gathering, the amount of progress I witnessed in the Japan food tech scene over the course of the two days in Tokyo was amazing.

Here are some of the trends, products and innovators that stood out to me last week:

In Japan, Much of the Innovation Comes From Big Companies

For those familiar with Japan, you’ll know it’s not surprising that much of the innovation comes from within established companies. These “intreprenuers” often work in R&D or as part of new business units specifically to innovate new product concepts.

One of these innovation units is Panasonic’s GameChanger Catapult. We’ve written about Catapult as they’ve been showing off innovative product concepts like a food softener for the elderly or home fermentation system.  As it turns out, the innovation unit from Panasonic is still working on those ideas as well as a few new ones.

One of Catapult’s product concepts is Tottemeal, which first showed up at SXSW in Austin in March 2017 as a product concept called Bento@YourOffice. It was comprised of an IoT-powered smart fridge and app system, which is similar in concept to Byte Fridge in that both offer fresh food for sale. Since SXSW last year the company has approached partners and refined the concept to work with any fridge.  The company is now testing out the service in Panasonic’s event/innovation hub, Kura-Think, in Tokyo.

Another large company that’s been busy working on future-forward food tech concepts since last year’s SKS Japan is CookPad. The digital cooking site, which boasts 100 million users worldwide, introduced a smart kitchen platform a couple months ago called OiCy that connects their recipes with appliances to create a guided cooking platform. At SKS Japan, the company outlined the future vision for OiCy in the form of a six-level roadmap for the smart kitchen platform. They also announced an updated partner list which includes hardware manufacturers such as Sharp and Hitachi.

Japan’s Startup Ecosystem Is Gaining Momentum

While much of Japan’s innovation comes from within large organizations, there are also signs of a rapidly maturing food tech startup ecosystem.  Part of the growth is being driven by Japan’s bigger companies like Kirin (who launched their own accelerator). However, there were also a number of young and innovative entrepreneurs that spoke at SKS Japan such as Integriculture’s Yuki Hanyu and Open Meals’ Ryosuke Sakaki.

We’ve written about both companies before in the Spoon. Chris Albrecht was the first to write about Integriculture’s impending $2.7 million funding round when he covered Shojinmeat, the open source project from Hanyu. As Northeast Asia’s only lab-grown meat startup, CEO Hanyu has big plans to jumpstart alternative meat production in the Asia market, and discussed his plans for doing just that.

Open Meals made a big splash this March at SXSW with their sushi teleportation demo. While true food teleportation may be a ways off, the Open Meals vision of creating a food digitization and printing framework is pretty fascinating. Company CEO Sasaki presented an ambitious 100-year look into the future for the idea around food digitization that spanned from digitized food restaurants in Tokyo in just two years and eventually sees space colonies where we’re sharing food experiences in real time with people on earth.

Dinner time in space

Japan’s Smart Kitchen Community Embraces Ideas From US & Europe

The Japan smart kitchen/food tech community is also really interested in innovation happening from the West. One of the speakers at SKS Japan this year was Jon Jenkins, the head of product for the guided cooking group within Meyer, Hestan Cue. Jenkins, who goes by JJ, gave a talk about the role of technology and software in the kitchen and later gave a hands-on demo of the product to a capacity crowd:

It wasn’t just cooking demos. A highly engaged audience packed the room to hear conversations with innovators from the US and Europe such as Jason Cohen of Analytical Flavor Systems talk about the impact on AI on food personalization and flavor. They also heard from Suvie’s Robin Liss as she discuss her company’s four-chamber cooking robot and how today’s appliance companies need to start innovating around food services. The Future Food Institute’s Sara Roversi talked about taking her food innovation platform, which she started in Europe, across the globe. They also listened to Amar Krishna of Chefling and Kevin Yu of SideChef discuss the differences between the smart kitchen platform market in the US with CookPad’s Tad Yoshioka.

Collaboration, Innovation & Community

The biggest takeaway for me from this year’s SKS Japan was there a growing sense of collaboration, innovation, and community in Japan’s food tech market.  Part of it was the hard work of our partners for SKS Japan, SigmaXYZ, who have done a great job over the past year fostering the SKS community. But, just as with the US and Europe, it’s clear now that the Japanese market was ready for an event to catalyze innovation and to bring it together, and I couldn’t be more thrilled that event is SKS.

I’m excited to see how our event in Japan has just done that and has become the go-to food tech event in the Japan market and for much of Asia and I can’t wait to go back next year. I hope I’ll see you there.

If you’re interested in being a part of our global community, don’t miss SKS in Seattle in less than two months!  Robin Liss, Jon Jenkins, Jason Cohen and many more will be there, so you will not want to miss out. You can check it out here and don’t forget to use discount code SPOON for 25% off tickets!

Is Honda’s Robocas the Future of Food Carts?

Li’l autonomous robots are being deployed for various purposes in warehouses and in our homes. But Honda’s new Robocas robot, may actually help entrepreneurial-minded folk start up their own mobile food business.

The bright-eyed (literally) Robocas concept vehicle made its debut at the Tokyo auto show last week. It’s very Eve-from-Wall-E in its looks. Bright white with rounded edges and a cute LED “face.”

[TMS2017] Honda ロボキャス Concept / Honda RoboCas Concept

It’s been described as a robot cooler that follows you around, and technically, that is true. But with its ability to haul your stuff and its retractable awning, Honda has visions beyond giving you an easy way to lug around a half rack at your next tailgate.

If you believe the Robocas’ promotional video, you can do anything with the Robocas. From running an ice cream stand, to a mini coffee-stand to, ummm… DJing on the beach (like, right at the water’s edge).

All joking aside, you can easily see that if Robocas ever becomes a reality how it could launch a ton of pop-up food carts. The robots agility and ability to carry inventory and equipment would allow people to set up shop quickly just about anywhere.

For those who don’t want to start a business, but still want their beverages delivered by robots, you can hold out hope that Panasonic’s autonomous fridge makes its way to market.

The IFA 2017 Smart Refrigerator Roundup

Fridges are sexy again.

Ok, so maybe they weren’t ever sexy in the first place, but if you were at IFA this past week, you would have seen a host of fridges with interactive touchscreens, image recognition software, internal cams and even the ability to move around the home and deliver a frosty one.

If this year’s CES and IFA are any indications, the fridge is fast becoming the focal point for many appliance makers, who are jumping at the opportunity to remake their product with advanced hardware and software that transform their fridges into the smart kitchen – and smart home – hubs.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the fridges that were on display at IFA:

Haier Link Cook Series

Haier showed off their Link Cook series of smart refrigerators, a new line of products that looks similar in feature set to the Samsung Family Hub refrigerator.

Haier smart fridge "Link Cook" @IFA 2017

The Link Cook series of fridges is part of a broader lineup from Haier. According to Ashlee Clark Thompson at CNET, the Link Cook is part of “Haier’s U+ Smart Home Platform, which connects the Link Cook Series to a Haier oven and range hood. According to Haier, you’ll be able to select a recipe on the refrigerator, automatically send the heating instructions to the oven and view the recipe on a small screen on the range hood.”

At this point, Haier is vague on timing and pricing. It will be interesting to see is if Haier’s new fridge eventually enters the US market under the GE brand.

Samsung’s Family Hub

Samsung tends to make its biggest news at CES, but it had a nice update on some new features and partner integrations for its flagship smart fridge at IFA.

While the company has had voice commands (both Alexa and its voice assistant, Bixby), they announced expanded voice command features at IFA. From the press release: “Family Hub’s voice capabilities provide a new way to interact with the refrigerator. Users can ask for the time and weather updates, search the internet, read news articles, play music and radio, add items to their shopping list, and even view inside of the refrigerator without opening the door.”

It also became more evident that Samsung sees their Family Hub as the central command center for the smart home. They teased this at CES and at the Smart Kitchen event at Samsung’s NYC location in June, but now users can use the Samsung Connect smart home features from the fridge. Samsung Connect, based on the SmartThings platform (which Samsung acquired a few years ago), is now built into the fridge.

Panasonic’s Mobile Fridge

Panasonic turned in one of the most intriguing showings of IFA as far as future kitchen tech is concerned, showing off an AI-powered kitchen assistant and a combo microwave-steam oven, but the show stealer was their moveable fridge named “Cool.”  Cool utilizes similar technology employed by any number of robot vacuums in that it has internal sensors that measure the distance between itself and obstacles in its way like, say, a kitchen island, and continuously develops a map and improves its understanding of the overall home layout as moves around.

Cool, which is about the size of a dormitory fridge, does not currently have a price or ship date.

Smarter/Liebherr

The smart fridge showing at IFA wasn’t all touch screens and robot fridges. Smarter, the smart kitchen appliance startup from the UK founded by Dragon Den wunderkind Christian Lane and his wife Isabella, showed off production models of the smart fridge cam is debuted last year at IFA and also had a major partner announcement. The company announced that their FridgeCam smart fridge camera would ship with every smart refrigerator from German industrial conglomerate Liebherr, the biggest privately held manufacturer of refrigerators in the EU (and also the inventor of the tower crane).  The deal is a good one for Smarter. While the announcement did not break out what percentage of total volume from the German manufacturer is smart, the company ships an estimated 2 million fridges per year.

The Rise of the Smart Fridge

In many ways, this focus on the fridge by big appliance manufacturer makes sense. In many homes, the fridge is the central focal point of the kitchen, where pictures, school assignments, and shopping lists go. Why not digitize that?

The fridge is also where the bulk of our fresh food is stored, all of which have a limited lifespan. Smarter fridges could help us manage this inventory and make sure we waste less (and keep us from buying redundant food that will inevitably be wasted).

Lastly, no platform really dominates the kitchen screen, but with the rise of guided cooking, the growing popularity of food and cooking content, and more and smarter appliances to manage, the front of the fridge makes sense for that big attractive touchscreen.

And of course, there are those of us there are who have long dreamed of a day when a robot assistant could bring us a beer. Just who could have predicted that robot would also be a fridge?

Startups Aim To Bring Fresher Choices To The Office Vending Machine

Office life can often mean tight deadlines, which in turn often means making tough choices like ‘Funyuns or Fritos?’ when lunch rolls around.

But for those of us who believe that no time starved employee should have to sustain themselves on bags full of salt and high fructose corn syrup, things may be looking up: a new crop of startups are trying to revisit the office vending machine and bring fresher choices to those of us chained to our desk.

One of those startups is Byte Foods. The company operates a fleet of smart fridges installed in office break rooms and cafeterias throughout the Bay Area.  The company, started by the husband and wife team of Lee and Megan Mokri in 2015, licenses their fridges stocked with fresh food from local producers such as Blue Bottle and Mixt Greens. Companies pay a monthly service fee, and Byte manages food inventory, payments and allows the employer to check out purchasing patterns with a web based dashboard. Employees access the food by swiping their card, choose what they want, and a bill is sent to their smartphone.  Each food item has a small RFID tag on the bottom which helps the fridges determine which items the employee has chosen.

The Mokris ran food delivery startup 180 Eats before getting into fresh vending machines. The current version of Byte is a result of 2016 acquisition of Pantry, a company which made the fridge and software tech licensed by Byte when they launched in 2015. After a year of perfecting the combined offering of fresh food delivery with the product licensing model inherited from Pantry, the company is now looking to expand beyond the Bay Area with the cash from their recent $5.5 million funding round.

Another company bringing fresh food to office cafeterias as well as other locations such as O’Hare airport is Chicago based Farmer’s Fridge. The company, which operates in about 75 locations throughout the Windy City, stocks their fridges with fresh salads made in their kitchen. Customers can check their fridges for inventory with the Farmer’s Fridge app, which also helps them to find locations around town.

Like Byte, Farmer’s Fridge recently received an investment to fuel growth. The company recently received a $10 million investment led by French food giant Danone’s venture arm, Danone Ventures.  The investment team also includes former McDonalds CEO, Don Thomson, through though venture firm he founded, Cleveland Avenue.

It’s not just American startups who are rethinking the vending machine. Foodles, a French startup, is using a model similar to Byte where they will install turnkey connected vending machines stocked with food for $3,400 per month. The company, which is operating in a dozen locations throughout Paris, has raised just over $2 million in funding.

And as it turns out, big companies are also toying with the idea of fresher food from the vending machine. At SXSW this year, Panasonic showed off a smart vending machine called ‘Bento@Your Office’, which dispensed – you guessed it – bento boxes for employees.

In some ways, this new crop of startups is taking many of the ideas created by micromarket movement that’s started to gain traction over the past few years. Fresher food and better technology have started to push vending machine operators across the country evaluate new models. The vending market, which is a $20 billion plus market across food and other items, is a potentially significant opportunity for those looking to shake things up.

And that’s exactly what this new crop of startups bringing fresher food to offices looks to do. The race is on to create national footprints as these companies look beyond their home markets to find new customers for their turnkey fresh vending concepts.

And hopefully, for those of us racing to meet deadlines, we will soon have more choices than Funyuns or Fritos for lunch.

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