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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

recipe

SKS Re-Heat: Tyler Florence has Written His Last Cookbook

With our Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle just a few weeks away (Ed. note: Ack! So much to do to get ready), we thought it would be a good idea to revisit a moment that lit up the stage last year.

During his fireside chat last year, celebrity chef Tyler Florence made news when he said he had written his last cookbook, and that he believed “recipes are dead.” In their place, Florence said, the future of home cooking would be more micro-content that you could mix and match based on what you have. You can watch his whole talk in the video below.

While we appreciate his bold, headline-making statement, we didn’t agree with Florence (neither did Milk Street’s Christopher Kimball), and if you read The Spoon regularly, you’ll know we think the recipe is more alive than ever, transforming into a robust discovery and e-commerce platform.

We’re happy to say that Tyler Florence is returning to the Smart Kitchen Summit stage this October. He’ll be talking with Mike Wolf about The Connected Chef and I’m sure Wolf will throw in a question or two about the role of recipes in the connected kitchen.

To get ready for Florence’s (as well as a ton of other great industry leaders‘) appearance at the Smart Kitchen Summit next month, watch his presentation from last year. Then get your tickets and see him for yourself in Seattle.

Tyler Florence and Amanda Gold at the Smart Kitchen Summit 2017 from The Spoon on Vimeo.

The Look Cook Book is Like the Airplane Safety Card of Recipes

I have this thing where I always read the safety card on airplanes. Hopefully I’ll never have to open the emergency door, but at least I won’t forget how, thanks to the clear design and wordless instruction.

The airplane safety card is actually a good way to think of the Look Cook Book, which recently launched a Kickstarter campaign. The Look Cook Book uses high design and “culturally neutral” iconography to create “universally readable” recipes almost without words that is easily readable from one to two meters away.

Recipes include “Fancy Scrambled Eggs,” “Red Lentil Dahl,” and “Apple Cinnamon and Nutmeg Crumble.” According to the campaign info, each recipe has been created so they can be made for $1.50 per portion. You can preview a PDF of the book here.

The book is also being turned into an interactive cookbook app that you can swipe through and will even include built-in tappable timers.

The campaign, which launched on September 4, is looking to raise $5,487. A pledge of £12 (~$16 USD) gets you a paperback version of the book, while a pledge of £15 (~$20) gets you the paperback and digital versions of the Look Cook Book.

With 55 days left in its campaign, we’ll just have to wait and see if the Look Cook Book will takeoff.

Podcast: Is The Recipe Dead?

At last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, celebrity chef Tyler Florence declared “the recipe is dead!”

There’s no doubt the recipe is changing with the arrival of new technologies, cooking methods and content formats, so we decided to have a conversation about this at Smart Kitchen Summit Europe. This episode of the Smart Kitchen Show features a panel conversation featuring the BBC’s LuLu Grimes, Hestan Cue’s Jon Jenkins and Dishq’s Kishan Vasani. The panel, which was moderated by YouTube star Katie Quinn, includes discussion about personalization, guided cooking, shoppable recipes and much more. It’s a great podcast so make sure to listen.

You can see hear more about the future of the recipe, food personalization, recipe commerce and much more at Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle. Use discount code PODCAST for 25% off tickets.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play above, download it using this link or subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show on Apple podcasts. For those who prefer to watch the panel, you can watch the video of the session from Smart Kitchen Summit Europe below.

SKS Europe: Personalized, Shoppable and Guided: Recipes Are Not Dead

Ckbk Launches Kickstarter to Become Spotify for Recipes

Ckbk, the digital platform that wants to be the Spotify for recipes, launched its Kickstarter campaign today.

We reported on ckbk back in April, explaining the impending service as:

“… an app which compiles a massive database of recipes from well-known and up-and-coming cookbooks. Matthew Cockerill, co-founder of 1000 Cookbooks, polled hundreds of food experts to get their picks for the best, most essential cookbooks ever written.”

Ckbk is looking to raise $25,000 as it continues to license recipe content and build out its app. People who pledge $59 or more can be a “Founder subscriber,” which includes pre-launch access to ckbk, as well as a year-long subscription after the official launch scheduled for October or November of this year. Early backers will also get early access to ckbk starting in September.

To Taste Lets You Remix Recipes

Everyone has a little tweak to make a recipe better. To give it a little something unique. My personal favorite recipe tweak is to mix in a cup of cottage cheese into my waffle batter.

The new recipe site, To Taste, celebrates and encourages these twists on dishes by letting users publish their own modifications. Fast Company first reported on Taste To, which is launching without any outside funding and is free to use.

The minimalist Taste To site hosts a number of “original” recipes. If you want to make a change, hit the “Tweak” button and you can alter the ingredients or amounts or provide other special instructions. The site keeps the original version of the recipe and adds the new version with your name on it. Scroll down below the original recipe to see what modifications others have made.

There aren’t a ton of recipes on on To Taste quite yet, but it’s exciting to see a recipe site embrace our human desire to make things our own. And at the same time, it points to yet another way the recipe is no longer immutable and becoming the heart of the digital kitchen.

We talk a lot about the recipe evolving into a discovery and commerce platform, and if To Taste catches on, it’s in a good spot to capitalize on both of those aspects. Other companies like Whisk, Fexy and AllRecipes are making recipes actionable and shoppable, while services like Amazon and Instacart are able to deliver those ingredients same day. So you can be inspired by a recipe in the morning and be making it that night.

To Taste extends this inspiration along a different, more social vector. With services like To Taste, you don’t need to fish through the comment section of an online recipe or join a Facebook group to find a recipe tweak you might like. It’s presented to you as an equally relevant option. Additionally, you can share your own alterations and perhaps inspire others.

Perhaps you’re inspired to add a bunch of cottage cheese to your next batch of waffles. (I promise, it’s delicious!)

The Recipe Isn’t Dead. In Fact, It’s Becoming The Center of Action In The Digital Kitchen

At last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, celebrity chef Tyler Florence said: “the recipe is dead.”

Needless to say, it’s a bold statement. There’s no doubt that Florence is right to suggest that things are changing quickly in the age of Tasty cooking videos and that the time-worn practice of looking up recipes in cookbooks is something people are doing less every day.

But if today’s news about another Amazon integration with a popular online recipe site is any indication, I’d suggest the recipe is far from dead. In fact, it looks more and more like the recipe is becoming the center of action in the digital-powered kitchen.

And it’s not just Amazon that likes the idea of shoppable recipes. Companies like Northfork have integrated with the some of Europe’s biggest grocers to enable recipe-driven shopping, while big players like Google are building guided cooking recipe capabilities into their virtual assistant platforms.

Then there are AI-centric startups looking to take the recipe and add extra intelligence to it to make things more personalized and interactive. Companies like Wellio, Chefling and Pylon.AI are doing interesting work here.

Then there’s the recipe itself becoming fused with connected cooking hardware. Everyone from one of the world’s largest cookware companies in Hestan to the world’s biggest appliance maker in Whirlpool to cookbook disruptor Tasty are creating recipe-guided hardware.

And finally, if technology-driven integrations and one columnist’s opinion aren’t enough to convince you, there’s always old-school chefs like Christopher Kimball (check out our podcast!) who think the recipe has a long life ahead of it.

So no, the recipe is not so much dead as evolving. Instead, as our recipes become digitized and more connected, they’re becoming the center of action in the connected kitchen.

As Jon Jenkins suggested at last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, software isn’t only eating the world, but we are eating software. That software includes whatever the recipe is becoming which, in short, is probably just better, more evolved version of the recipe.

Amazon Teams With Fexy To Create Shoppable Recipes

Who says the recipe is dead?

Definitely not Amazon. Last week the tech giant teamed with Fexy Media, a food media company that owns such brands as Simply Recipes and Serious Eats, to integrate one-click shopping into recipes. According to a report in Progressive Grocer, Prime members will be able to click a buy button within the recipe that allows them to instantly add the ingredients to a shopping cart, which will then be delivered within hours by Amazon’s same-day delivery service, Prime Now. According to the post, the new shop-by-recipe service is available across “tens of thousands of items” on Prime Now.

It’s an intriguing move for Amazon, who as I wrote last week, first started looking at shop-by-recipe technology as early as 2011. That’s when the company first filed a patent application entitled “Automatic item selection and ordering based on recipe.” Amazon was eventually issued patent in 2015. Not surprisingly, when you compare the mockup in the patent to the implementation with Fexy, they pretty much look the same:

This isn’t the first effort to connect the recipe to a virtual grocery shopping cart. Swedish startup Northfork is working with the largest grocery store in Sweden in Coop as well as the country’s largest retailer ICA to offer one-click grocery cart integration with recipes as well as personalized meal kits. According to Northfork, recipe driven sales now account for one in five orders online for Coop.

Seattle-based Fexy is an interesting partner for Amazon. The company, co-CEO’d by the husband and wife team of Cliff and Lisa Sharples, has been rolling up established food sites over the last few years such as Serious Eats (and Kenji Lopez’s Food Lab), Road Food and Simply Recipes. The Sharples have a long history in Internet commerce: Lisa Sharples is the former President of Allrecipes.com, and the two got their start early in e-commerce back in the original dot-com boom, taking gardening site Garden.com public back in 1999.