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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

precision cooking

Spark Grill Wants to Improve Charcoal Grilling. Will Grillers Go For Its Proprietary Charcoal System?

Memorial Day often marks the start of grilling season, and, like most Americans, I’m ready to fire up the barbie after being stuck inside for most of the past two months.

I’m currently using a standard gas grill but lately have been thinking about adding charcoal to my backyard cooking arsenal, which is why I was intrigued when I heard about the Spark Grill. The Spark, which just opened up for preorders this week, looks to essentially add the precision heating capability and ease-of-use of gas to a charcoal grill.

Here’s what Chris wrote about the Spark after the Boulder-based company announced its eponymously-named first product:

The stylish grill ditches the lumps of briquets for a single, flat charcoal “Briq,” and uses a series of stoking and cooling fans for precision temperature control.

The Spark is capable of getting temperatures between a low 200 degrees all the way up to a ripping hot 900 degrees. The grill also has an accompanying mobile app that lets you monitor the temperatures of your cooking cavity and the food you’re cooking.

Anyone who’s tasted food grilled over charcoal would agree the flavor is generally better, but I’ve stayed away mostly because charcoal is more work and I’m pretty lazy when it comes to my backyard cooking.

But from the looks of it, the Spark makes charcoal grilling as easy as gas. This ease-of-use is made possible by the grill’s unique charcoal “Briqs”, which are single-use sheets of charcoal made for the Spark. A standard Briq lasts for about an hour, though the company has indicated they will also have “Quick Briqs”, which go for 30 minutes for the mid-week quick grill, and are working on “slow and low” Briqs, which will go for a couple hours at smoking temperatures.

In short, the Spark presents a tradeoff: gas-like ease and precision with charcoal, but you have to use what is a proprietary charcoal system. I’ve become mostly resistant to hardware that is captive to a single-source for its consumables, but I think I’d be ok with the Spark and its Briq system for a couple of reasons.

First, the company’s FAQ says, technically, one can use regular charcoal with the Spark. This gives me some comfort that my grill wouldn’t be (ahem) “bricked” if the Spark stopped making Briqs for some reason.

The second reason is the company seems well-positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for home grills in a market slightly underserved with innovative new products. As we’ve learned recently with PicoBrew, startups tend to go out business, but it appears there’s strong early demand for the Spark, which helps alleviate (at least for the time being) concerns I would have about going all-in with a startup selling a proprietary consumable.

So while some traditional charcoal devotees might bristle at the idea of a proprietary system, I think there will be enough folks like myself interested in what looks to be an easier way to grill with charcoal to take at least take a look at the Spark.

The product isn’t cheap with a $949 sticker price, but if you hurry you can get in on the third drop (the first two sold out) and snap one up for $799.

Company Which First Made Sous Vide Affordable Reinvents Flagship Product With Wi-Fi & Alexa

Long before there were low-cost sous vide immersion circulators from companies like Anova, ChefSteps and Nomiku, there was the SousVide Supreme.

The SousVide Supreme, first available in 2009, was arguably the first consumer-priced sous vide appliance on the market.  And unlike today’s popular sous vide immersion circulators that are essentially long cylinders that combine with a pot full of water to create a sous vide water bath, the original SousVide Supreme “water oven” is a fully contained sous vide machine not unlike the expensive commercial water ovens first used by professional chefs

It’s easy to forget how instrumental this product was in its early days of sous vide, but consider what Kenji Lopez-Alt wrote after attending an early demonstration of the Sous Vide Supreme by Heston Blumenthal back in 2009:

“I’ll be getting one of these puppies in my kitchen some time in the next couple weeks, and I plan on putting it through some serious paces, so stay tuned to find out what it can do. If the Showtime Rotisserie taught us anything, it’s that kitchen appliances come and go. The difference here is that the Sous-Vide Supreme is more than just another well-marketed appliance. If it really does what it claims to do, it offers home cooks something that has never been offered before: the opportunity to cook their food in exactly the same way that every three-Michelin starred restaurant cooks. Not just a pale imitation of how they cook, but exactly how they cook.”

And while since the SousVide Supreme has seen companies like Anova since steal much of their early sous vide thunder, the company is hoping to steal some back with a complete revamp of their water oven. The company’s new product, the SousVide Supreme Touch+, launched this past week on Kickstarter and surpassed its funding target of $250 thousand in just four days.

So what features does the Sous Vide Supreme Touch+ have that earlier generations of the product does not?

Quite a few:

Touch screen.The old SousVide Supreme control screen, which had buttons similar to those of an Instant Pot or Crockpot, will give way to a new touch screen on the front of the Touch+ (though the video of the touch screen makes it seem the screen requires pressure similar to that of the old buttons)

Wi-Fi

This is the first Sous Vide Supreme model with Wi-Fi, which allows for remote cook enablement, alerts and app based control.

Speaking of app…

App

With Wi-Fi on board, the SousVide Supreme finally enters the app-control age. The app includes the usual remote on-off control features, but what is most intriguing is the new app will include the ability to program recipes.

Clear lid

This is the first Sous Vide Supreme model with a clear lid. A fairly obvious improvement, but a welcome one since who doesn’t want to see what they’re cooking?

Alexa

Finally, the new SousVide Supreme Touch+ will have Alexa. While voice control almost seems like a requirement for those of us who buy connected kitchen products, the company could have easily just added Wi-Fi and app control and called it a day. Kudos to the creators for future proofing their newest version with Alexa compatibility.

Overall, this new generation of the SousVide Supreme looks to be a major step forward for a company founded by Drs. Patrick and Mary Dan Eades, a married couple that first cobbled together their own DIY sous vide bath after tasting a room service pork chop that was cooked sous vide. The new machine, which is available for $349 on Kickstarter (early bird pricing of $249 and $299 have already sold out) will be available to backers in March of next year and will retail for $599.

If you want to hear about the future of precision cooking and the connected kitchen, make sure to come to the Smart Kitchen Summit. Just use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets.

Anova Opens Pre-Orders For The Sub-$100 Nano

This week, Anova opened up pre-orders for their Nano, the company’s first sub-$100 sous vide circulator.

The device, which ships in October, is 25% smaller and a full pound lighter than the company’s Wi-Fi Precision Cooker. Perhaps more importantly, the Nano comes in about $70 less than the company’s flagship product. The full price for the Nano is $99, (if you move fast, you can preorder the Nano for $69), marking the first time Anova has dropped below the $100 mark.

The new lower-priced machine comes at a time when the sous vide market is getting more competitive. ChefSteps has been doing well with the Joule (and recently released a lower-cost version of their own), and low priced competitors like Gourmia have attracted budget conscious consumers. With the Nano and its $99 price tag, Anova hopes it can attract value customers looking for a low-priced sous vide circulator.

Later this year the company will ship its second generation Pro circulator for $299.  The company’s Precision Oven, a combi-oven that the company announced last year at the Smart Kitchen Summit, was originally expected to ship this summer, but the ship date has been bumped back to summer 2018.

Want to see Anova CEO Steve Svajian speak about building a smart kitchen company? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit.  Also, make sure to subscribe to get The Spoon in your inbox. 

With Investment In Nomiku, Samsung Expands Presence In The “Connected Kitchen”

Today Nomiku, maker of sous vide immersion circulators, announced their latest generation connected cooking appliance and the launch of a subscription meal service that will deliver frozen, pre-cooked meals that owners of the new Nomiku can cook in 30 minutes or less. As part of the announcement, Nomiku also announced that Samsung Ventures had invested in the company.

Food delivery marks an ambitious new direction for Nomiku, one of the original sous vide startups that has been shipping immersion circulators since 2013. By moving into subscription food delivery, Nomiku has its first business line with recurring revenue. The move also makes Nomiku one of the first companies to create a connected hardware device tied to a subscription meal service. While other companies such as Whirlpool and Barilla have been selling RFID powered cooking systems with specially designed packaged food for a couple years, and startup Tovala announced a meal subscription service tied to their cooking appliance last year, Nomiku appears to be the first to launch a meal subscription plan with intelligent auto-reordering built into the connected cooking appliance.

By offering fast-prep meals, Nomiku is also hoping to expose sous vide cooking to a wider audience. Sous vide is often seen as the domain of foodies, the types that are willing to wait longer for a cook to finish in exchange for a better tasting meal. By accelerating the cooking process, the company hopes to change the perception of sous vide circulators from a device synonymous with slow cooking to one that offers both convenience and better tasting food than other fast-cook methods such as microwave ovens.

Nomiku Pork Shoulder pre-cooked meal. Photography by Albert Law

The company plans to start small, shipping to 100 customers in May and expanding to a broader audience in the early summer time frame. The subscription food packages will be modular in nature, consisting of both “mains” and “sides” that can be mixed and matched. The average price of a meal is $15 and, after 20 or so meals, the company says it will credit the price of the Nomiku circulator ($149) towards meals.

The circulator is equipped with an RFID reader, which allows the user to scan an RFID tag on the meals and send the Nomiku circulator specific time and temperature settings for each dish. The device will also be synced with the customer’s existing food inventory and, according to Nomiku, will automatically reorder food when the meals left available are down to four.

The Samsung Connection

One of the most interesting aspects of today’s announcement is the Samsung connection. Samsung’s investment arm invested an undisclosed sum in the company, an amount that Fetterman calls “the most money any single investor has put into Nomiku”. The move marks the second investment in a precision cooking/sous vide startup by a large appliance maker in a short time period, coming just a couple months after the acquisition of Anova by Electrolux.

According to Fetterman, Samsung “is a logical partner for us because they do the connected home.” The investment in Nomiku is, according to Fetterman, a move by Samsung “to dominate the connected kitchen.”

Fetterman said Samsung plans integrate the Nomiku with their smart home platform, SmartThings. Samsung acquired SmartThings almost three years ago, and since that time has had somewhat mixed success in establishing the platform as one which other companies will commit to building around. However, the consumer electronics giant has been fairly successful in their effort to integrate SmartThings with their various product lines in the home such as appliances and TVs. While Samsung had prevously announced an integration of SmartThings with their own Wi-Fi ovens, Nomiku appears to be the first small precision cooking appliance integrated with the SmartThings smart home platform.

Fetterman also told The Spoon that Samsung plans to launch a Nomiku app for the Family Hub refrigerator. The app will come preloaded with the Family Hub and will control the Nomiku device directly from the fridge. Fetterman also believes existing Family Hub models will see in-field software updates that will install the Nomiku app on the connected fridge.

It will be interesting to see where Samsung takes this investment/partnership. I am sure they will be watching Nomiku’s efforts to enter food delivery closely since that business represents a new potential revenue stream for the company. The South Korean consumer electronics conglomerate displayed an early and aggressive embrace of the smart TV market and the associated revenue streams tied to apps included on these new devices. With their investment in Nomiku and the growth of the connected kitchen, one has to wonder if they possibly see food delivery as an enticing new service model in an era of ever-declining hardware margins.

To see Lisa Fetterman and other leaders talk about the future of the connected kitchen, come to the Smart Kitchen Summit. Get your tickets today.

Cinder Grill Now Shipping As Precision Cooking Market Heats Up

The long-anticipated Cinder grill is finally making its way to customers.

Earlier this month the company announced on Facebook that production units will be shipping to those who pre-purchased the Cinder. The grill, which uses two aluminum cooking plates with embedded temperature sensing in an enclosed (but not airtight) cooking chamber, has been available for preorder for the past year at a price of $399, $100 below the MSRP of $499. The company expects to have all US preorders delivered by the end of February and Canadian preorders shipped by the end of March.

Shipping product marks the end of a long journey for CEO Eric Norman and Cinder, which have been working on the grill for five years. The company filed patents in 2012 and 2013 for precision cooking techniques, and has been working to bring the product to production ever since.

As the company neared production at the end of last year, they experienced slight production delays due to the complicated nature of the grill, which Norman explained in a recent blog post:

“…we analyzed the build rate using data from a sophisticated measurement system and discovered the rate of production was far below our goal. Factory estimates were off because Cinder is an order of magnitude more complicated than any electric grill ever produced. The accuracy and testing requirements of Cinder are high, requiring different part suppliers to coordinate in unfamiliar ways. This was the cost of going for super high-quality while shooting for a reasonable cost. Sometimes logistics or communication were not smooth, requiring more time and effort than expected.”

Cinder now joins a growing group of companies bringing precision cooking products to the consumer market. At this year’s big tech show in Vegas, leading sous vide circulator company Anova announced a refreshed lineup and showed off a demo model of its precision oven, FirstBuild announced a new version of the Paragon with guided cooking capabilities, while upstart Gourmia continued their aggressive rollout of products.

With all of this action, there’s no doubt precision cooking will have an interesting 2017.