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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

recipes

Discovery Announces Food Network Kitchen, a New Content, Recipe, and Grocery Platform

Have you ever watched Alton Brown or Ina Garten on Food Network and thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if these chefs were in my kitchen, walking me through the cooking process themselves, preferably over a glass of Chardonnay?”

You’re in luck, minus the Chardonnay. At today’s Amazon event in Seattle, Discovery, Inc., which owns Food Network, announced the impending launch of the Food Network Kitchen. The multi-faceted platform will offer 25 weekly live interactive cooking videos featuring celebrity Food Network chefs, as well as over 800 cooking classes and 3,000 instructional videos. It’s a separate, additional service from Food Network itself, which requires a cable subscription to watch.

Food Network Kitchen will launch in late October 2019 in select (unnamed) U.S. cities. The service will cost $7 per month. Subscribers will be able to access the content through voice control with Amazon Alexa and Echo devices, Amazon Fire TV, and iOS and Android mobile devices, with more device integrations to come in 2020. The platform also offers grocery delivery through Amazon Fresh.

In a press release sent to the Spoon, David Zaslav, President and CEO of Discover, Inc. called the Food Network Kitchen “not just another entertainment service” but something closer to “the ‘Peloton of Food.'” Like the fitness company’s streaming service, Food Network Kitchen will give users access not only to pre-recorded videos but also live instructional classes.

A lot of folks, myself included, watch Food Network not for actual cooking instruction but purely for entertainment. So I’m not sure how many people will want to cook along to Guy Fieri making chicken wings at 6 p.m. in their kitchen. However, the live aspect certainly has potential, especially if the Food Network includes a way for users to ask questions and have them answered via the chef in real time.

I’m also skeptical about whether kitchen purists who love watching chefs cook meals from scratch would also embrace next-gen technologies in the kitchen, like using Alexa to access recipes or ordering groceries online. Then again, kitchens are getting more and more connected as things like voice integration and grocery delivery grow more commonplace. As these connected tools become more frictionless, it’s likely that more traditionalist home chefs will embrace them, too.

Really though, this new platform demonstrates that Food Network is trying to evolve from just a television network and recipe hub to a more interactive, connected platform that meets consumers not on their couch but in their kitchen. Food Network Kitchen is the food and cooking brand’s first big push to go beyond the static screen and interact with consumers in this dynamic way — and I doubt it’ll be their last.

FoodNetwork.com’s Michelle Buffardi on Why Recipes (and Cooking) Won’t Be Obsolete

I can credit Food Network with kickstarting my obsession with food. When I was young I used to stay up and watch Emeril throwing his spices into pots with a “Bam!” and follow the fast-paced cooking challenges on Iron Chef. And of course cook along with all the recipes on FoodNetwork.com.

Back then, Food Network was one of the few players in the online recipe game. Now there’s a lot more competition, including new digital recipe sources like guided cooking apps and smart speakers. That’s why we’re so excited to have Michelle Buffardi, who oversees editorial and programming strategy for culinary content at FoodNetwork.com, Food.com and CookingChannelTV.com, speaking about the future of food media at the 2019 Smart Kitchen Summit next month.

Check out our Q&A with Buffardi below and get your tickets to see her in Seattle. Save 25 percent with code THESPOON25!

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

You oversee culinary content for FoodNetwork.com. What does a day in the life look like?
No two days ever look alike! A day could include brainstorms (those are the best meetings!) or greenlights for things like recipes for video or otherwise, holiday programming since we work several months in advance, new video series or chefs and hosts we want to work with for digital series. I also have many meetings with other teams, such as our product and tech teams, about site enhancements and other projects to make sure the content and tech come together for the best user experience.

When I’m not in meetings, I’m working on editorial calendars or plans for different platforms—my team works on content across our website and apps—researching trends and new talent. When I have time in my day, I stop by our test kitchen for a tasting, which is where our recipe developers present the recipes they’ve made that day for various digital needs and projects. We taste them and give feedback.

Consumers have a plethora of different platforms at their fingertips to discover recipes. How do you entice them to come to FoodNetwork.com?
Our fans come to us for two main reasons: our culinary credibility and our variety of chefs and hosts. We have recipes for anything anyone is looking for developed by the best chefs on the planet, such as chefs from linear shows or exclusive digital projects and chefs from our test kitchen who develop recipes, write how-tos and do product tests for us.

We work hard to make sure we have recipes and content for trends, special diets, every holiday and of course, weeknight dinner recipes specialized to popular appliances (like the InstantPot). No matter what people are looking for, we have it.

In addition to people coming to us from search, our amazing team is great at promoting all of our content on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter), often with original content developed for each platform, and our editors work to share the best content in our weekly and daily newsletters. In short, we ensure that we’re giving our fans access to the best content in all of the places they visit and connect with us.

Two years ago at SKS Tyler Florence made the bold claim that the recipe is dead. What do you think?
I don’t want to disagree with Tyler! However, I don’t think cooking is dead, so I don’t think the recipe is dead. There is a trend, especially as more people gain confidence in the kitchen, of cooking without a recipe. That is winging it with familiar ingredients and methods, or taking a known recipe, like that stir-fry you have memorized, and swapping in different proteins, vegetables, sauces or seasonings.

The bowl and composed-food trends also lend themselves to no-recipe cooking — just layering delicious homemade or store-bought elements like grains, raw or roasted vegetables, sauces and salsa, roasted chicken or a fried egg. Even so, there are new cooks every day who need a recipe to get them going. Plus, even for experienced cooks, whenever we want to make something new or unfamiliar, we need that blueprint.

In short, I say the recipe is not dead; long live the recipe!

How do you think that recipes will continue to adapt to meet shifting consumer demands in the age of digitization and convenience?
This is so interesting and exciting to me. Recipes used to be made for magazines and consumer packaging, so they had to fit a specific format and word count. That’s not the case anymore. The formula is the same — people will always need to have the ingredients, measurements and the cooking method listed — plus a photo is important, too.

However, [I predict that] formats will change: recipes will start to look different depending on the platform they’re intended for, or will be written differently so that they can be read by a voice-enabled device, for example. The ways people consume information and the devices they use are constantly changing which means we’ll keep evolving the ways in which we deliver that information. Including recipes.

Want to see Michelle Buffardi speak about the future of the recipe in the digital age live? Get your tickets to SKS in Seattle on October 7-8th. We’ll see you there!

Jumprope Raises $4.5M for Guided Cooking through GIFS

As a teen I was briefly obsessed with making a very complicated, cream puff-heavy pastry called a croquembouche. I tried to make it using text-heavy cookbooks and bad internet photos, but to no avail.

Maybe if guided cooking service Jumprope had been around I would have fared better. The startup creates how-to slideshow videos showing you how to do everything from makeup looks to crafting to cooking. It already has a mobile site and just launched its iOS app yesterday — at the same time it announced a $4.5 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (h/t Techcrunch).

Jumprope is pretty similar to most guided cooking apps. You can search for and select a recipe, after which you can see a visual ingredient list and click through the various recipe steps, each of which has a gif for reference.

Guided cooking has been gaining momentum over the past few years. There’s Innit and SideChef, Allrecipes, Yummly, and Project Foodie, to name a few. Companies like Amazon and Google are also making smart displays to bring guided cooking (and their smart speakers/devices) into the kitchen.

In fact, Jumprope, which was founded in 2017, is kind of late to the game (though admittedly they’re offering how-to’s for a lot more than cooking). But what could set Jumprope apart is its UX, which reminded me a lot of cooking how-to videos on Instagram from companies like Buzzfeed Tasty or Bon Appetit. Each how-to bit is illustrated with a short gif on a loop. It’s also super low-touch: no fancy paired induction cooktop or pan required — just a smartphone.

Youtube tutorials get billions of views teaching people how to do, well, everything. Jumprope is streamlining that process and chopping it up into little bite-sized gifs, so you can easily fast forward or rewind, even with greasy fingers. It also gets all its content from users, meaning it’s likely cheap to produce and easy to get a ton — though the quality of said content won’t necessarily be great.

I could see Jumprope integrating with an e-commerce service like Instacart or Amazon Fresh to make their recipes shoppable. That would mean users could decide to make meatballs, order all the ingredients for delivery that day (cause millennials love convenience), then cook them, all from one app.

It’s too soon to tell if Jumprope will be able to compete in the how-to cooking space with giants like Instagram or more established startups like SideChef and Innit. But I’m betting it will be a hit with millennials and especially Gen Z who are friendly with other gif-ified networks like Snapchat.

Here’s hoping they add a how-to gif guide for croquembouche…

Target (Finally) Enters the Shoppable Recipe Game with Cooklist

Yesterday Target announced that it was kicking off a partnership with shoppable recipe startup Cooklist (h/t Dallas News). The retail giant will launch the new service first in 47 Dallas-Fort Worth stores and Target’s delivery service Shipt.

The Dallas-based Cooklist is a mobile app that lets people search from the million-plus recipes in its database, select their favorite, then compare prices and order the ingredients for either pickup or same-day delivery from nearby participating grocery stores. The app also keeps track of what groceries you have in your house and helps remind you when food is about to expire.

As of now the app can generate shopping lists of goods from 81 national grocery chains, but only offers grocery delivery through Target.

Cooklist’s partnership with Target isn’t exactly surprising. Last July the startup announced that it had raised a $250,000 “pre-seed” round, half of which came from the Techstars Retail Accelerator in Minneapolis. As part of the membership, Cooklist got office space at the Target HQ.

This is Target’s second shoppable recipe partnership announcement in as many days. Earlier today, guided cooking platform Innit revealed new shoppable recipe capabilities that basically let users create their own individualized meal kits(ish) and pick them up or order them for delivery from more than 30 retailers, including Target.

However, “Tarjay” has some catching up to do: Walmart and Albertsons/Safeway have been working with shoppable recipe platform Myxx for months, and Amazon Fresh has a whole bevvy of shoppable recipe partnerships with Fexy Media, Whisk, and SideChef.

It’s no secret that grocery competition is heating up, with retailers big and small trying to find ways to get you your goods list faster, cheaper, and more conveniently. Compared to some of its competitors, Target’s recent dive into the deep end of shoppable recipes is definitely on the later side — but I don’t think that’s a dealbreaker. The entire space is pretty young with lots of room for growth. With two partnerships in two days, Target shows that it’s taking shoppable recipes seriously.

Video: Tyler Florence Advocates for “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” Cooking through Tech

Last year at the Smart Kitchen Summit, chef Tyler Florence made waves when he proclaimed that “the recipe is dead.”

This year he returned to the SKS stage for a fireside chat with Michael Wolf to discuss the evolving role of recipes — and the home cook — in the tech-enabled kitchen.

His new take is that recipes aren’t dead, they’re just like vinyl records or paper maps — nostalgic and practical, but antiquated. Down the road cooking will be all about personalization and “choose-your-own-adventure” food experiences, which will give us, according to Florence, “a higher creativity rate than we’ve ever had.”

Watch the video below to hear this celebrity chef’s vision for the future of cooking.

The Connected Chef

Groupe SEB Acquires Cooking Site 750g

Groupe SEB, which owns a portfolio of small appliance and cookware brands, announced this week that it has acquired French recipe site and digital media publisher 750g International. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Based in France, Groupe SEB operates in more than 150 countries around the world through its small appliance and household brands such as All-Clad, Tefal and Krupps. Products include cookware as well as air fryers, induction hobs, pressure cookers, countertop ovens and more.

750g claims it is the second largest cooking site in France, and according to the press announcement, the site holds 90,000 recipes and instructional videos, published in 5 languages and generates 10 million visits a month.

The press announcement is coming to us through rough translations, but it’s pretty easy to see SEB’s strategy here. Marrying 750g’s recipe content with SEB appliances and cookware, could create new guided cooking opportunities for the appliance maker. We saw a similar European move earlier this year when Zwilling took a 25 percent stake in fellow German guided cooking startup Cuciniale.

The acquisition of 750g moves SEB further up the stack. By having content operating under the same umbrellas as the hardware, it’s easier for SEB to integrate instructions and guided cooking operations directly into their appliances. Rather than just selling you one device one time, SEB can wrap an expansive, already built, recipe ecosystem that device that customers subscribe to.

Guided cooking is a trend we’re following here at The Spoon. Startups like Innit and SideChef are striking up partnerships around the world with appliance makers like LG and Electrolux, while Hestan is now integrated into GE appliances.

But in addition to going deeper up its existing cooking stack, having a content arm like 750g also allows SEB to broaden its stack. Having a digital cooking platform can open up new opportunities in discovery and e-commerce (a la shoppable recipes), or expand into digital cookbooks or perhaps even food delivery. Miele is doing something along these lines as it invested in shoppable recipe platform, KptnCook and partnered with MChef for food delivery for its Dialog ovens.

The recipe is not dead, and SEB’s acquisition of 750g shows that to navigate the future of cooking, hardware companies will need to develop content strategies as well.

Myxx Shoppable Recipes Now Available at Walmart and Alberstons/Safeway Stores

Myxx announced today that it has added big grocery chains such as Walmart, Albersons, Safeway and more to its shoppable recipes platform. This expands Myxx’s reach to 10,000 stores nationwide, up from 1,500 previously.

Through its website, Myxx allows users to discover recipes and instantly shop for the ingredients necessary to make them. Myxx identifies a shopper’s local stores on the platform and features real-time pricing, including any sales and promotions. Once the recipes and ingredients have been decided, Myxx sends the consumer to the selected store’s site to complete the purchase and schedule pickup or delivery.

Shoppable recipes are a trend we’re following closely at The Spoon. If you can be inspired by a recipe, order all the ingredients and have them delivered on the same day, that recipe transforms from inert set of instructions into a discovery and commerce platform that CPG companies, retailers and more can make money off of.

Myxx isn’t the only company in the shoppable recipe, err, mix. Both Fexy Media and Whisk (which acquired Avocando) have partnered with Amazon for their shoppable recipe platforms, and Chicory works with CPG brands to make their recipes shoppable as well.

Earlier this year, Myxx formed a partnership with Kroger, and today’s additon of Walmart, Albertsons, Safeway Jewel Osco, Vons, Randalls, Tom Thumb, and H-E-B across the country obviously opens up to more people (just in time for Thanksgiving!).

But the real question now is if and how these new chains will drive awareness of Myxx’s service. The masses can only use shoppable recipes if they know of their existence. Dede Houston, Cofounder and COO of Myxx, told me that because the space is so new, they are at the beginning stages of talking with retailers about generating interest.

Thanksgiving is actually a great time to test out shoppable recipes: You have to make lots of different dishes, which can be complicated, and grocery stores are pretty packed as the day draws closer, so getting ingredients delivered saves you some time. Will you be trying shoppable recipes this season? Leave us a comment and let us know.

MyFavorEats Lets You Customize Recipes to Your Likes and Your Kitchen

One of the biggest themes we hear about in the future of recipes is the ability to fully customize recipes to accommodate allergies, dietary needs, and plain old dislikes. (Sorry, olives!)

MyFavorEats, one of the 13 companies pitching at the Startup Showcase for the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) next week, is working to make recipes modular, so home cooks can easily swap out ingredients or customize them to their particular appliances. Read our Q&A with co-founder Orly Rapaport to learn a little more about how MyFavorEats is leveraging AI to transform the way we interact with recipes forever, then get your tickets to see her pitch live at SKS next week!

The Spoon: First thing’s first: give us your 15-second elevator pitch.
MyFavorEats: We use AI to transform online linear text recipes into a machine-readable, easily customizable format. Users can easily swap ingredients and personalize meals to their particular dietary preferences, and adapt recipes to their new kitchen appliances.

What inspired you to create Myfavoreats?
I am a home cook and a software engineer. I like to cook and to experiment with innovative gadgets in the kitchen. I realized the need for a tool that would help me tweak recipes to meet various dietary needs and to easily adapt recipes to my new kitchen appliances.

What’s the most challenging part of getting a food tech startup off the ground?
Food and kitchen digitization opens up a new world of cooking experience. This is a new domain that is still under development, being pushed by startups as well as big enterprises. With various stakeholders’ involvement, it is quite clear that standardization and technological alignment are needed to ensure a holistic scalable user experience.

How will Myfavoreats change the day-to-day life of its users?
MyFavorEats will give home-cooks the flexibility to personalize their favorite recipes. It would help recipe publishers to automatically upgrade their linear text recipe sites into a smart, revenue-generating format. It would provide kitchen appliance manufacturers a tool for automated scalable recipe generator.

What’s next for Myfavoreats?
We are now focused on launching pilots together with recipe publishers and appliance manufacturers.

Thanks, Orly! See her pitch live onstage at the Smart Kitchen Summit next week — tickets still available. 

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

Cooklist Officially Launches to Connect Your Grocery Shopping with Recipes

Cooklist, a new mobile app that automatically keeps track of the groceries you buy and recommends recipes based on them, officially launched today. It also announced it has raised $250,000 “pre-seed” round, half of which will come from joining the TechStars Retail Accelerator in Minneapolis.

The Cooklist app connects with more than 80 grocers including Amazon, Walmart, Costco, and Kroger. Using those retail loyalty programs, Cooklist automatically keeps track of the groceries you purchase. Cooklist will then recommend one of 1.3 million recipes (and counting) based on the food you’ve bought and to help you avoid food waste, it will even alert you when products are going to expire.

I talked with Cooklist founders Daniel Vitiello and Brandon Warman, who explained that the expiration information isn’t precise. Instead, it uses general guidelines — like onions expiring in 1 – 2 months — to give people warnings about when items will go bad.

Cooklist 1min Walkthrough

Vitiello and Warman built the first prototype of Cooklist last September and started developing the app in earnest this past January. The company is just the two founders at this point. Along with the money, their TechStars membership will get them office space at Target HQ (with whom TechStars partners), which is a little ironic as the app does not work with Target groceries yet.

Cooklist is free right now and Vitiello and Warman said that they are looking at a premium model when they move to monetize. A premium version could be a monthly subscription that would generate a smart shopping list and push those purchases to your preferred grocer for delivery or pickup.

Cooklist is facing a lot of competition as there are a number of apps looking to make a more direct connection between the food you have and the food you can make. Chefling does a very similar thing to Cooklist in keeping track of what you buy, but requires manual input. Innit’s guided cooking app lets you automatically adjust recipes by swapping in ingredients already have on hand.

Further up the stack, companies like Fexy Media, Whisk and AllRecipes are making recipes directly shoppable, enabling you to assemble all the ingredients you need for any recipe that same day.

Fexy Media Launches Relish to Make (All) Recipes Scalable, Saveable and Shoppable

Today Fexy Media announced the launch of Relish Network, a web app that allows recipe publishers to add features like menu planning to their sites, as well as make their recipes saveable, scalable, and shoppable. The app premiered on Fexy-owned websites Simply Recipes and Serious Eats, and will roll out on other publishing platforms later this year.

Eventually, users will be able to aggregate recipes from all sites in the Relish Network to create custom menus and meal plans. With one click they can then turn those meal plans into grocery lists, which online grocery retailers will deliver or prepare for pickup (as long as the user lives in an area with those services). Right now, the list of participating names includes Amazon Fresh, Instacart and Kroger ClickList.

We spoke with Fexy co-CEO and co-founder Cliff Sharples earlier today, who said that Relish is “effectively a new iteration of shoppable recipes.” Relish also lets users change the number of servings for their recipe, keep favorite recipes in their “Relish box,” and substitute ingredients.

When I first poked around Simply Recipes to try out the Relish tool, I found . . . nothing. Sharples explained to me over the phone that the shoppable buttons are geotargeted. In other words, they won’t show up if you’re not in an area with Fexy-partnered grocery delivery services. Since I had an ad blocker on, apparently it didn’t sense me. However, once I turned my ad blocker off for Simply Recipes, I could see the button. This is definitely a UX issue that Fexy will have to address in the future, unless I’m an anomaly. (Let me know in the comments!)

My summery shopping list on Simply Recipes.

Interestingly, all recipe sites are welcome to join Relish — not just ones owned by Fexy.  And according to their press release, Relish technology can be implemented at “little to no cost” to food publishers.

“The ultimate goal with the Relish Network is to offer a set of very high quality recipe sites… even ones that are competitors, ultimately,” said Sharples. “Users have to have relatively unrestrained choice.”

This idea echoes back to Michael Wolf’s piece last week on DRM and locking in the consumer. Fexy is choosing not to force or limit consumer’s recipe behavior, which is a smart move; with the diversity and amount of recipe publications out there, no one is loyal to only one site.

“Relish will help us enable the next big sea change in how people think about groceries,” said Sharples. “It’s able to ultimately help with that daily question of ‘What’s for dinner tonight?'” It definitely has competition: companies like Innit, Whisk, and Mucho are already deep in the shoppable recipe space. We’ll see if Relish is different enough to make a splash in the highly competitive future of recipes.

 

Cookpad Launches OiCy to Connect Recipes and Appliances

Cookpad, the global recipe hosting site, today revealed OiCy, a new service that connects recipes with appliances to create a guided cooking system for smart kitchens.

OiCy (pronounced “oh-ee-shee”, which is a roughly translates to “おいしい,” the Japanese word for delicious), will take recipes uploaded to Cookpad’s site and turns them into a machine-readable format that connected appliances can understand.

So if you were trying to make a particular Cookpad spaghetti recipe, OiCy would pull data from the recipe, and “talk” to different connected appliances you might have in your kitchen and guide you each step of the way. Depending on the number and type of appliances you’d have, it would automatically boil your water, tell you when to add/remove pasta, dispense seasonings, etc..

But that type of full connected kitchen implementation is still a ways off. Right now, OiCy only works with a limited set of select recipes in Japanese, and the company has only just begun talking with appliance manufacturers in Japan about implementing the software into future versions of devices that wouldn’t come out until sometime next year.

You can see how OiCy works in this video showing off a prototype Japanese condiment dispenser that talks with a Cookpad recipe to create sauces necessary for that dish.

At the heart of the digital kitchen is the recipe, and Cookpad has 4.3 million of them from 68 countries and across 23 different languages. So translating that content into a machine readable format will give them a solid base for creating a wide ranging, global guided cooking system.

Translating recipes into a machine readable format, however, is no small task. Cookpad recipes are user generated, so there is no standardization around the way they are written, so data is all over the proverbial place. Cookpad is starting with Japanese recipes and the Japan appliance market because 55 million of it 90 million active user base is in Japan.

While Cookpad has the recipes, it’s playing catch up when it comes to appliance manufacturer relationships. Rival recipe sites such as Innit and SideChef have already formed relationships to integrate their guided cooking software into appliances from LG and Electrolux.

As it happens, I’ll be on-stage, moderating a panel with Miles Woodroffe, CTO of Cookpad at our Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe conference tomorrow. So I’ll be sure to ask him about OiCy’s roll out and role within Cookpad.