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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

patent

With USPTO Denial, Perfect’s Lawsuit Against Drop Moves to Trial

The ongoing, multi-year, multi-patent infringement legal battle Perfect Company brought against Adaptics Ltd, maker of the Drop cooking system, will be heading to federal court this summer. This next phase of the lawsuit comes after the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) denied institution of Inter Partes Review. Perfect announced the decision in a press release yesterday.

Without getting too far into the legal weeds, an Inter Partes Review (IPR) is:

“… a trial proceeding conducted at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board to review the patentability of one or more claims of an issued patent.” (via Smith & Hopen, U.S. registered patent attorneys)

Basically, it was Drop’s last chance to keep this lawsuit, which started in 2014, from going to trial. This IPR denial was over Perfect’s Patent 9,772,217, and follows a previous legal win for Perfect over its Patent 8,829,365. With both patents upheld by the USPTO board, the lawsuit moves on to trial in federal court in Tacoma, WA from June 3 – 6, 2019.

At its center, the dispute is over patents around the use of smart scales for weighing ingredients that communicate with apps for guided cooking. Perfect Company products include: Perfect Drink app-controlled bartending system, Perfect Bake app-controlled baking system and Perfect Kitchen PRO app-controlled smart kitchen system. The company also licenses out its technology for products include the Vitamix Perfect Blend and the NutriBullet Balance.

Drop started out in the hardware space, making its own connected cooking scale, but later abandonded that that in favor of integrating its software platform into the likes of GE Appliances, LG, Thermomix and Kenwood.

I spoke with Perfect Company CEO, Michael Wallace yesterday about the IPR denial, and asked him what the end goal of the lawsuit is. “What we’re really doing is protecting our space and our IP with our patents,” Wallace said, “The Adaptics guys have refused to pay a royalty or agree to our terms for a license.”

We reached out to Drop, and its Co-Founder and CEO Ben Harris provided us with the following statement:

“While Drop does not comment on pending litigation, we don’t infringe any of Perfect’s patents and are continuing to challenge the validity of Perfect’s patents in Federal Court. We look forward to our court date in June when a jury will finally decide if Perfect’s patents are valid and remain focused on our mission of building the KitchenOS, a unified solution for the smart kitchen that connects the whole cooking journey, of which Drop Scale is just one of hundreds of appliances.”

What was of particular note in the press announcement surrounding the latest USPTO ruling is that Perfect called out Drop investor Alsop Louie by name. Alsop Louie Partners led the $8 million Series A that Drop raised last year, and I asked Wallace why Perfect mentioned them specifically.

“Alsop made a big bet on them. We thought it was important,” said Wallace, “This is a big investment bet. We decided to call that out. The money they are spending on this case are investment dollars.”

Whether this rattles Drop’s investor remains to be seen, but unless this dispute settles relatively soon, we’ll see both parties in court.

Walmart Files for (Another) High-Tech Shopping Cart Patent

Most of us probably think that aside from the occasional wonky wheel, shopping carts are pretty good as-is. Put stuff in, wheel said stuff around. Done.

Walmart, however, seems hellbent on disrupting the shopping cart with all sorts of high-tech gew-gaws and gadgetry. CB Insights pointed out a new patent application from the retail giant to add a “System and Method For A Biometric Feedback Cart Handle” to its shopping carts.

When you grab hold of the cart, it reads your temperature, pulse, speed and force of grip. As you shop, the cart will monitor your biometrics. If your temperature shot up or down, the cart could call for a customer assistant to make sure you aren’t having a medical emergency. Or, the company could also tell if you are getting stressed out.

The company says it won’t keep any personal data, but as CB points out, anonymized aggregated data could be used to call out biometric trends, such as a group of agitated customers who may be getting into arguments — or maybe all get excited by the same Halloween display.

This patent filing follows one granted to Walmart earlier this year for a robot shopping cart, which could lead customers around the store, remote shopping and surveillance.

What’s funny is that at the same time, Walmart is working hard to negate the need for shopping carts at all. The retailer is testing in-store robot micro-fulfillment centers with expanded curbside pickup, and building out its own delivery network.

But people still like to shop for groceries in-store, so shopping carts aren’t going away any time soon. And who knows if these patents will ever cross over into real life. Perhaps Walmart could patent a mobile high-tech recliner next so people could nap while the robot cart drives around and monitors their sleep.

Microsoft Gets Visual Food Logging Patent

Microsoft appears to be applying its computer vision and AI smarts to make watching what you eat easier. The Redmond giant was awarded a patent yesterday for “Food Logging From Images.” That basically means, you can take a picture of your food and Microsoft will provide you with its nutritional information (calories, protein, vitamins, etc.).

Yesterday’s patent indicates that it is a continuation of a previous Microsoft patent in May of 2017 for “Restaurant-Specific Food Logging From Images.” Restaurants are called out specifically in this new patent because the Microsoft Food Logger would use GPS to know when you’re at a restaurant. From there, the Food Logger could use information from text menus online via Yelp! or a restaurant’s own site to assess nutritional information.

The technology would supposedly also work outside restaurants, using image recognition to understand home cooked meals as well. And there are tools to allow the user to edit or correct any inaccuracies in what the Logger identifies. So if you slathered butter on a piece of bread, you could specify the amount.

The obvious use case with this patent is a mobile phone app, which is listed. However, Microsoft goes even further to say this technology would work with camera-equipped glasses. From how the company describe it, if you walk into a restaurant wearing these hypothetical Food Logger glasses, you would almost get Terminator-like vision looking at the nutritional content of various meals people around you were eating.

The idea of taking a picture of food and automatically getting its nutritional content isn’t new. Apps like Lose It and Calorie Mama AI say they offer the same type of functionality. Samsung even recently added Calorie Mama’s technology into its Bixby virtual assistant.

Google, of course, has also been working on food recognition for awhile. And this week it came to light that Google is reportedly adding human-powered food identification capabilities to Google Maps. Humans labeling pictures of food taken from different angles and visibility will be beneficial to help train Google’s image recognition algorithms.

Right now, this is just a patent for Microsoft, so who knows how this will ever make it to market. But that market is huge, and it’s unlikely Microsoft will sit on the sidelines.