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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

pressure cooker

J-Lo and A-Rod Get Behind Tiller & Hatch’s Pressure Cooker Meal Kits

Don’t be fooled by that box that you got, it’s just food from (food from) Jenny on the block. Kinda. Tiller & Hatch Supply Co., which is “backed” by Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez, announced today the launch of its new line of frozen meals, which will be available nationwide online and in-stores at Walmart.

While the bling-y nature of its celebrity backers may be attention-grabbing, what caught our eye how Tiller & Hatch’s meals actually work. The company offers a number of different menus including Farfalle with Marinara and Ground Turkey, Coconut Chicken Stew with Vegetables and Rice, and Santa Fe Style Pasta with Chicken Breast. All are shipped frozen and meant to be re-heated in an electric pressure cooker.

While they don’t mention the brand specifically, it seems like an obvious play to reach Instant Pot’s massive installed base. Given that device’s rabid audience, Tiller & Hatch’s approach isn’t a dumb idea. Whether or not it’s enough to sustain an entire business though, is another matter altogether.

Tiller & Hatch isn’t the only meal service targeting pressure cookers. Up in Canada, Presto has been selling frozen meals for pressure cookers over the past year, though they sell their food for $10 a serving. Tiller & Hatch says its meals are roughly $4 a serving.

In addition to the pressure cooker angle, Tiller & Hatch’s go-to market also highlights how frozen food continues to experience its renaissance. No longer just aluminum trays of Salisbury steak and peas, frozen food sales are up two percent over the past decade thanks to millennials’ love of convenience and companies like AquaStar, Buttermilk and Daily Harvest re-thinking what goes into frozen fare.

Then there is the celebrity angle of J-Lo and A-Rod, though we don’t know how involved they even are with Tiller & Hatch. A press announcement sent to The Spoon only says that they have “backed” the service, but we don’t know what that means exactly, and neither celebrity name appears on the Tiller & Hatch website. We reached out to Tiller & Hatch for clarification, and will update accordingly. UPDATE: A spokesperson for Tiller & Hatch emailed to tell us that Lopez and Rodriguez are Co-Founders of Tiller & Hatch. Even so, celebrity endorsement doesn’t always equal success in the packaged meal game. Blue Apron launched a line of Chrissy Tiegen meal kits, and that wasn’t enough to stop the company’s steady decline.

Is J-Lo just a, err, hustler with Tiller & Hatch? Probably not, but it’s worth keeping an eye on the company to see if its pressure cooker approach is enough to win over customers.

Presto Eats May Be the Most On-Trend Meal Kit Company Yet. But Will It Succeed?

Whenever I get word about a new meal kit company, it’s hard not to be immediately skeptical.

It’s no secret that meal kits are struggling: Chef’d surprised everyone when it shut down abruptly earlier this year. Boston hyper-local meal kit Just Add Cooking ceased operations this fall. And Blue Apron’s stock continues to underwhelm. And with complicated supply chain logistics and the challenge of customer loyalty, and its no wonder why. To fight back, meal kit companies are turning towards new sales channels (i.e. drug stores), targeting specific audiences (i.e. kids) and are experimenting with customizeable and frozen ingredients.

But one Canadian company seems undeterred by the bleak, overcrowded meal kit landscape. Based in Vancouver and Calgary, soon-to-launch Presto Eats makes meal kits that can be cooked in a pressure cooker or slow cooker.

“I started Presto Eats because I fell in love with the new wave of kitchen appliances,” CEO Connie Chong told me in a phone conversation. She found that she could get a flavorful meal out of her pressure cooker in 30 minutes, but it still took her over an hour to shop for and prep ingredients. So she decided to create a meal kit specifically targeted at the Instant Pot crowd: millennials and busy professionals who like to cook at home and aren’t afraid of new kitchen technology.

Earlier this year Campbell’s tried a slow cooker meal partnership with Chef’d. The meal kit company shuttered only four months later so it’s hard to get a sense of how successful the partnership was. But it also only offered slow cooker meals, which took 6-ish hours; it didn’t capitalize on the wild popularity of the quick-cooking Instant Pot.

Presto Eats is smart to take advantage of the pressure cooker’s cult-like status. While many meal kit companies advertise ready-to-eat meals in 30 minutes, you still usually have to actually do the whole cooking thing. Presto Eats takes the same amount of time but it’s all hands-off. “The convenience factor is huge,” said Chong. Plus it’s all done in one (Instant)pot, which means fewer dishes.

Since Presto Eats’ meals are destined for a pressure cooker, they can be sold frozen. Which means that consumers can buy them in bulk and cook them on their own time. Frozen meal kits make a lot of sense, from both a business and consumer perspective, and Presto Eats is one of several companies taking advantage of the frozen food renaissance. It could also mean more packaging waste (ice, cold packs, etc.), which is something Presto Eats should be conscious of.

While it’s a smart move to capitalize off of Instant Pot’s widespread and loyal fan base, there are a few potential drawbacks to Presto Eats’ offering. Firstly, some people get meal kits because they actually like cooking — just not the minutiae of, say, shopping for, peeling and grating a ginger root. To them, meal kits are a way to experiment with new meals that they might not otherwise be bold enough to try and cook. Dumping a bunch of ingredients into an Instant Pot and pressing a button means there’s significantly lower chance of failure, but there’s also not much of a cooking “experience.” And at $10 per serving, some people may want to shell out a few bucks more and order in delivery.

Secondly, the fact that all of Presto Eats’ meals are cooked in a pressure cooker limits their variety. Chong listed menu choices like salmon risotto with vegetables, lentil bolognese pasta, and Thai curry, all of which sound delicious but reside in the same sort of warm, soupy comfort meal category. You can’t make seared steak or crunch roasted cauliflower in an Instant Pot, after all.

Presto Eats is cashing in on yet another dining trend: local food. It will partner with local farmers and suppliers to source ingredients for their meal kits. Which may attract eco-conscious consumers, but also means they will no doubt have to pay more to stock their kits. In an industry where margins are razor-thin, this is a risk. Just Add Cooking also sourced local ingredients for their meal kits, and ended up folding because they couldn’t make the economics work. Chong told me that they will create rotating menus featuring farmers’ surplus food, which could help keep costs down — but it’s still probably more expensive than buying from a mega produce supplier.

As of now, Presto Eats has a team of three and is bootstrapped. They will partner with food delivery companies to get their meal kits to consumers, and Chong said that down the road they hope to partner with grocery chains to get on retail shelves. They plan to launch their meal kits at the end of January in Calgary, and soon after that in Vancouver.

There they’ll have to duke it out with several local competitors. Earlier this week Chris wrote about Fresh Prep, a Vancouver, Canada-based direct-to-consumer meal kit company which raised $3.3 million. And in October Hello Fresh, the biggest meal kit company in the U.S., acquired meal kit company Chefs Plate, which also has a fulfillment center in Vancouver.

By combining three consumer dining trends — frozen food, Instant Pot, and local ingredients — Presto Eats has developed a very appealing product. The question is whether those value-adds will help it attract enough customers to carve out a spot in the crowded meal kit space. I’m optimistic that they have a shot, mostly because of how much people love their Instant Pots. But first, they’ll have to nail down a supply chain and scale up: two things that plague even the biggest meal kit companies.

Happy 50th Birthday, Microwave. Here’s Why You Won’t Make It To 100

Happy 50th birthday, microwave oven.

This year, the ubiquitous cooking box born out of an accidental discovery by a Ratheon military researcher has reached the half century mark, and as the last new cooking appliance category to become indispensable in nearly every American home, it’s certainly a milestone worth celebrating.

However, there are signs that the fast-cook workhorse will soon be on the decline as newer, better technologies make their way to market. On this 50 year celebration of the microwave, let’s consider how pervasive they’ve become and the many reasons the microwave oven will not be around for its hundredth birthday.

Surpassing Oven and Ranges

Ever since Amana introduced the first countertop unit back in 1967, consumers have embraced the convenience of the microwave. They helped usher in an era of fast-cook food like microwave popcorn and pizza, and as the microwave became cheap and plentiful in the 70s, they were soon everywhere.

Eventually the microwave rivaled traditional ovens and ranges in adoption, and today there are more microwaves sold quarterly than gas ranges.

Microwave Unit Shipments 2005-2017. Source: Statista

Still, for all its success, the microwave’s future is in doubt.  Perhaps the biggest reason is that while the microwave is fast and efficient, it’s actually pretty poor at its job. Not only do microwaves cook and reheat food unevenly, they are not good at cooking multiple items simultaneously.

And it’s these shortcomings that have opened the door for newer technologies such as…

Here Comes RF Cooking

RF cooking, which utilizes solid state (semiconductor) technology in place of the microwave’s old school technology, cooks with a much higher degree of precision.

Here’s what you can do with an RF cooking enabled oven:

  • Cook multiple foods at once within the same cooking chamber at different temperatures
  • Can sense when a food is done
  • Cook evenly across and through an entire piece of food rather than the uneven cooking results you get with a microwave

There are multiple companies with RF cooking technology products in development. One is Goji Food Solutions, which originally developed its RF cooking technology for medical applications as a way to heat tissue evenly. The company claims to have 147 issued patents in the area of RF solid state heating and another 76 pending. Other companies, such as NXP, have chip solutions that early system builders are bringing to market. Lastly, there is an industry consortium called the RF Energy Alliance that includes Whirlpool as a founding member that is working on standards for solid state RF technology.

Let’s Get Steamed

Tovala Oven

For many years, the combi oven has become the darling of chefs for its ability to combine multiple cooking modes (convection, steam, combination) into one and its ability to produce delicious food. However, despite its many advantages, the combi oven has been relegated mostly to the pro kitchen despite efforts by high end manufacturers such as Miele and Jenn-Air to bring to the home.

But that may change soon, as companies such as Anova and Tovala to bring low-cost counter top combi ovens to market for under $500.  The Tovala oven first sold to backers through a crowdfunding campaign and will be available for under $400 this year, while the Anova oven, which is expected to ship in mid-2018, will sell for under $500 when available.

The Instant Pot Generation: Slower Cooking Takes Hold

Lastly, while we may never see an end to prepackaged convenience food, it’s safe to say the heyday of the Hot Pocket is well past us. More and more Millennials are embracing slow cooking by using revamped old-school products with modern tech flourishes like the Instant Pot. This multifunction pressure cooker has become a phenomenon, garnering over 18 thousand reviews on Amazon to become the #1 overall product in the kitchen and dining category.

The Instant Pot

By adding multiple cooking types beyond just pressure cooking such as rice and yogurt mode as well as processor-driven programmable cook modes and automation, the Instant Pot has tapped into a generation of young cooks and wannabe cooks who love Swiss Army knife devices that can save space by combining multiple functions while also producing high quality results.  There are best-selling cookbooks, as well as dozens of websites and large and active Facebook and Reddit communities where enthusiastic Instant Pot users share recipes and cooking tips.

So, while it’s time to step back and wish the one of the most unlikely success stories of the modern kitchen a happy 50th birthday, it’s also a time to recognize that the microwave’s best days might be behind it. Newer and better technology technology, combined with changing consumer behavior, could mean we might be celebrating a new type of cooking appliance 50 years from now.

Make sure to subscribe to the Spoon newsletter to get it in your inbox. And don’t forget to check out Smart Kitchen Summit, the only event about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen.  

Let’s Talk About Flavor for a Second (VIDEO)

Lately when I talk to chefs and home cooks about the type of food they want to make, I keep hearing the words “like my grandma used to make.” It’s become shorthand for all-natural, healthy food with honest flavor, created using painstakingly slow processes.

I’m totally on board, except for that last part, about the analog attitude. There’s so much technology that can vastly improve the taste and flavor of your food, so that it’s like what your grandma used to make, but even better.

Take a device like the pressure cooker. “A pressure cooker can produce exceptionally tender results while maximizing the flavor extracted from the ingredients,” writes molecular gastronomy guru Heston Blumenthal in the foreword to the Fast Slow Pro brand manual. Sure, you could spend more than 12 hours making chicken stock — or you could get even richer flavors in 1 hour with a pressure cooker, especially one with a screen that gives you instructions and tells you when everything is finished cooking. I recently started using one and have been astounded at the flavor of the foods I make in it: creamy roasted potatoes, intense stock, tender octopus, you name it. Grandma may not have cooked this way, but her recipes would have been even better if she had.

There’s another reason the analog logic doesn’t quite make sense: Grandma (or maybe great-grandma) used to grow her own tomatoes or buy them from a farmstand down the street. Now we go to a megagrocery store to get those tomatoes. “Our food system is not designed for taste and flavor. It’s designed for travel,” said Jennifer Broutin Farah, the CEO of SproutsIO, at the recent Smart Home Summit (watch the video below). That means the food we eat tastes more like cardboard than carrots, cucumbers, or kale. No wonder no one wants to eat their vegetables.

SproutsIO’s connected system makes it easy for everyone (black thumbs included) to grow their own produce at home: The device helps you grow vegetables and fruit from seeds in its modular system, and its smartphone app gives you real-time data about how it’s going. Plus it learns from you to help you grow better. The idea is that if those vegetables and fruits were easy to grow and tasted better, everyone would want to eat them, improving their overall health.

And it’s only one of many kitchen gadgets and products designed to improve your experiences with food, whether that’s growing, cooking, or eating it, to change our diabetes- and obesity-laden country into a healthier one. After all, as Farah said, “small-scale solutions that have high leverage can create great impact.”