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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

recipes

Whisk Acquires Avocando to Expand Shoppable Recipe Capabilities

Whisk, the UK-based AI food platform, announced today that it has acquired German startup, Avocando. The move augments Whisk’s shoppable recipe business by expanding the company’s footprint into continental Europe and adding some sizable appliance partners to the company’s partner roster.

As we’ve noted, the recipe is evolving from a static list of instructions and into a discovery and commerce platform. Whisk partners with publishers such as Pillsbury, the BBC and Food network to connect their recipes with retailers. So if you find a pancake recipe that you really like on Food Network, Whisk makes it easy to order all the necessary ingredients. In the U.S., Whisk works with Walmart and Peapod and recently added Amazon Fresh.

Avocando, which launched in 2015 and raised just €1m, has built a shoppable recipe platform that has found traction with publishers and appliance makers in Germany, Austria and France. According to the announcement, the company powers 600,000 shoppable recipes and reaches 20 million monthly shoppers across Germany and Europe.

By acquiring Avocando, Whisk picks up the startup’s user and customer base, which include food publisher Chefkoch and German appliance makers Miele and BSH Home Appliances. With two of Germany’s biggest appliance makers now in the fold, Whisk – who had its own integration with Samsung’s Family Hub – has started to tally an impressive list of hardware partners.

Terms of the acquisition weren’t made available, though Whisk CEO Nick Holzherr told The Spoon that they paid cash for the company out of revenue from continuing operations.  Whisk was founded in 2012, has 22 employees and raised $2 million in seed funding. The Avocando team will be joining Whisk.

Mucho Makes Shoppable Meal Planning More Dynamic & Efficient

“You do the cooking. We do the rest.” That’s the tagline of Mucho, a London-based startup which aims to create personalized, convenient meal plans that can be customized a whole slew of ways. And they really do take you pretty much ALLLLL the way through the meal journey.

Customers can use the Mucho app to select recipes based on dietary preferences (low sugar, vegetarian, etc.), budget, and how people they want to feed. The app then builds a customized shopping basket around the recipe(s), which users can either transfer into a printable shopping list or, if they’re in the U.K., they can also have their shopping list delivered through grocery delivery service Ocado. Users can also add on bits and pieces like cleaning products or snacks to their delivery list.

As of now, Mucho has over 1000 recipes in their database, culled from 40 online influencers and 20 brands — most of whom focus on healthy recipes. 

When I first heard of Mucho, I thought “Isn’t this just emeals, but British?” Both services offer personalized recipe selections, both create shopping lists, and both are linked up with grocery delivery companies so users can have their meals’ ingredients delivered straight to their door.

According to their cofounder Shanshan Xu, however, Mucho differs from emeals — and existing shoppable recipe services in general — quite a bit.

First of all, it’s more flexible. “We’ve found that people’s mood changes all the time,” said Xu. While emeals requires a subscription that locks users into a set number of dishes from the get-go, home cooks can use Mucho as much — or as little — as they’d like. They update their dietary profile and the number of people they’ll be cooking for every time they open up the app.

Emeals does allow their users switch between plans, but you can’t customize day-by-by. Which can be a hassle if you’re someone that, say, wants to eat vegan one week and flexitarian the next, or isn’t consistently dining with a partner or family. 

Mucho can also be cheaper — depending on how much you use it. Jenn Marsten reported for The Spoon that prices for emeals vary based on how long you choose to commit, but it costs $29.99 for three months or $59.99 for a full year, not including the cost of ingredients and grocery delivery. Mucho’s app is free to use, and if customers choose to have groceries delivered through the app they add a 5% fee to the final bill.

Do a little high school math, and we can determine that if you’re buying less than $1,200 in groceries per year, Mucho costs less than emeals. While $1,200 isn’t much at all to spend on groceries, especially for families, emeals also requires users to sign up for grocery delivery services (such as Amazon Prime or Instacart) separately, whereas Mucho builds Ocado delivery into the service. Xu told me that they’re hoping to soon shift the price burden away from the consumer and onto the grocery retailer.

To me, Mucho is a good option for people who want a more dynamic meal-planning service than emeals, but who need more hand-holding than is offered by shoppable recipes.

I’m betting the app will be popular with young, single folk (read: millennials) who want to cook more (and more adventurously), but also value the convenience of grocery delivery — and are willing to pay for it. Plus, Mucho’s bright, poppy graphics seem like they were made with this audience in mind.

Speaking of millennials, I tried the app myself; it was fun and easy to use, and while I couldn’t use the delivery capabilities (because I’m in the U.S.), I could definitely see myself incorporating Mucho into my grocery routine, especially when, as Xu reassured me, the delivery option comes over the pond.

The app has over 10,000 downloads so far. The Mucho cofounders put together money themselves to create the beta version of their app, and their roughly 10-person team is working to perfect their product before raising their seed round.

Highlights From The Future of Recipes Food Tech Meetup

We had our first food tech meetup last night! And thanks to our sponsor ChefSteps, tech-brewed beer from PicoBrew, and our awesome venue Galvanize, it was a rollicking success. Plus we had a very cool panel: Alicia Cervini from Allrecipes, Cliff Sharples from Fexy Media, and Jess Voelker from Chefsteps had a great conversation with The Spoon’s Michael Wolf.

If you missed it, here are a few topics and points that really stood out to us. Prepare yourself: the future of recipes is very dynamic, very shoppable, and tastes good — every time.

P.S. Mark your calendars for our next meetup on the future of meat on May 24th! Register here to make sure you get a spot.

So what’s the future of recipes then?
All of our panelists agreed that in the future, recipes will be very responsive and dynamic:

Allrecipes’ Alicia Cervini said they are exploring completely customizable meal kits based on their recipes. They have a relationship with Chef’d to work on their vision of “making a dynamically generated meal kit on the fly,” pairing convenience with customization.

Fexy’s Cliff Sharples predicted that as people take a deeper interest in food (he said that 50% of millennials consider themselves “foodies”) recipe customization would become more and more popular. He also had an interesting app idea where users could plug in their dinner guests with all of their eating profiles and plan a menu.

ChefSteps’ Jess Voelker envisions a future where technology can help people become a better cook. She brought up the interesting concept of using AI to troubleshoot their recipes. So if your cake went flat or your food was too salty, ChefSteps could help you figure out where you went wrong. 

Voice interfaces alone are incomplete
All of our panelists agreed that, when it comes to cooking from a recipe, voice alone isn’t all that useful — cooking is just too visual. Sure, if the recipe instructions are short enough, you could cook an entire recipe just with a voice assistant. And, as Voelker pointed out, “it can solve some real problems just in time, like if you have chicken grease on your hand and need to know something.” But without a visual guide, like a connected screen, you often end up having to break down steps into even smaller steps, which takes more time than if you’d just read the recipe. 

So while voice assistants like Alexa may be a helpful tool if your hands are mucked up in the kitchen, as of now they’re most useful for playing news or podcasts while you cook. The panelists did, however, seem optimistic about the combination of video and voice. (Or maybe an all-in-one robot chef assistant?)

Are recipes just data?
During the meetup Sharples likened recipes to code, which is the driving force behind smart appliances, the shoppable recipe journey, and recipe search tools. If you’re a regular Spoon reader this might remind you of Jon Jenkin’s talk at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, where he made the claim that we are all eating software. 

Mike Wolf made the point that with recipe integration and connected appliances like the Joule, you could essentially have a celebrity chef cook your meal for you in your own kitchen. Sort of.

For example: you could select a steak recipe from kitchen gadget-loving chef Kenji Alt-Lopez on your connected app and your device would precisely follow his cooking instructions, giving you a consistent, high-quality result. It’s almost like having Kenji himself sous vide a steak for you, every time. (Which, for many food nerds, is a dream come true.)

Recipes are becoming more important, in different ways
All of our panelists agreed that the recipe is not the least bit dead. In fact, they argued that the recipe is becoming more important; it’s the core atomic unit of the rapidly evolving meal journey.

The hardest part, which isn’t surprising, is making recipes that tick all the boxes for such a wide variety of needs. But with apps like PlantJammer and Ckbk, plus the convenience of services like 2-hour grocery delivery and meal kits, it doesn’t seem like the recipe is going anywhere anytime soon.

 

Hearst Unveils Visual Guided Recipe Skill for Amazon Echo

Alexa, let’s have Pancetta Chicken for dinner.

Last month, publisher Hearst expanded its Amazon Echo- and Spot-enabled Good Housekeeping skill to include connected recipes. Dubbed Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen, the skill provides simple “meal ideas” that can be thrown together in 30 minutes or less. The recipes will be curated by Susan Westmoreland, food director of Good Housekeeping, and, in addition to being speedy, are said to be easy to execute.

Previously, the Good Housekeeping skill only included step-by-step advice to remove stains. (Don’t worry—it can still help you get out that wine spill from your carpet.)

With the Good Housekeeping skill, users can select a recipe based on a photo and short description (or tell Alexa to do it for them). The smart display then provides a step-by-step guide through the recipe. Users can swipe around to see more recipes, skip ahead in the steps, and reference the ingredients. They can also use voice commands like “Alexa, tell Good Housekeeping to continue” if they want to move forward in the recipe but don’t want to touch the screen with, say, raw chicken hands.

Hearst’s expansion into recipes isn’t exactly surprising. At the end of 2016, the media company took a big leap into the realms of AI and AR by establishing the Native and Emerging Technologies (NET) group, which focuses heavily on voice-activated experiences for virtual assistants and smartphones.

This new skill speaks (literally) towards the growing role of voice assistants in the connected household, and the kitchen in particular. “We’re raising the stakes from what a user can expect [in terms of] information and utility from these devices,” Chris Papaleo, executive director of emerging technology at Hearst, told AdWeek. Which is something we’ve predicted but haven’t seen developed in as big a way as we’d thought—yet.

Photo: AdWeek

It also brings us one step closer to the integration of recipes (and other food media) and AI-enabled voice technology.

We’ve seen a voice-enabled smart kitchen assistant before with Freshub, which lets users add items to their shopping carts using voice commands. Then, at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, Emma Persky, who runs point on the Google Assistant’s guided cooking team, talked about Google’s work combining recipe content with their voice-enabled AI platform by offering video aids for recipe steps (say, sautéeing an onion). And Amazon’s 2016 partnership with AllRecipes allowed users to access voice-guided cooking instructions of their 60,000-strong recipe database.

But by combining recipes on a visual display with voice-enabled controls—albeit simplistic ones like telling it to move to the next step—this new skill from Good Housekeeping is the first time that virtual assistants have really entered the hands-free recipes zone in a synched-up visual and auditory way. While the Google Assistant can show you a video of how to sauté an onion if you’re stuck, it doesn’t have a connected visual element that takes you through each step of the recipe, since it relies almost entirely on voice guidance. This is nice since you don’t have to add another piece of equipment to your virtual assistant lineup, but not as helpful when you’re wondering how small the recipe wants you to dice your pancetta.

With this new skill, Hearst is betting on more voice assistants expanding into smart displays and a corresponding need for more visual content in the sphere. As the number and popularity of voice assistants grow and become a more commonplace part of consumers’ homes, I imagine we’ll see a lot more skills aimed at facilitating the home cooking process, from expanded shoppable recipe applications to visual cooking aids.

As of now, the Test Kitchen skill doesn’t have a sponsor. But with so many large companies trying to carve out a space in the trending foodtech world, it seems only a matter of time before a big-name recipe site or even CPG brand (who have been trying to get into foodtech in any way they can) snags the title.

The success (or lack thereof) of this skill could indicate where we are in that process.

 

Services that Combine Flavor and AI Are a New Food Tech Trend

Artificial Intelligence is making its way into our food system in a big way. It’s on dairy farms monitoring milk quality, in restaurants powering food-running and burger-flipping robots, and even in the kitchen, walking you through a recipe in the guise of a voice assistant or chatbot.

Lately, we’ve noticed AI playing another role in what we eat: this time in flavor development. We’ve rounded up 5 startups merging AI and flavor to help restaurants and consumers create more sophisticated dishes, teach home cooks how to make dinner, and reduce friction for food R&D.

Foodpairing

Foodpairing is a platform which uses machine learning and data analysis to create a sensory map detailing which foods taste good together. Since roughly 80% of taste actually comes from smell, they base their findings on the aromas of each ingredient. The Foodpairing Inspire Tool allows their customers—mostly professional chefs and bartenders looking to create innovative, unexpected dishes no one has tasted before, but also home cooks—to discover pairings of the more than 2,500 ingredients in their database. It markets itself as having pretty wide applications, powering everything from smart kitchen apps, e-grocery, personalized recipe and drink recommenders, and mHealth.

PlantJammer

This app (which is currently available exclusively on their website) grew out of an ex-consultant’s desire to teach himself how to improvise in the kitchen. Using flavor mapping technology similar to Foodpairing’s—both are based around aromas and use machine learning—the platform allows users to select complimentary ingredients based on what they have in their kitchen. Once the selection is complete, the algorithm generates a custom recipe. The Copenhagen-based startup hopes to use their AI-driven platform to promote plant-based cooking and reduce food waste.

dishq

Self-described “food AI company” dishq uses customer data, machine learning, and food science research to predict consumer taste preferences. They translate their findings into APIs to help their clients, which range from food delivery platforms to corporate cafeterias, provide tailored food suggestions to their customers and outline emerging food trends. As co-founder Kishan Vasani told the Spoon, dishq offers “taste analytics as a service,” allowing companies to react quickly to food trends as they are happening.

FlavorWiki at work quantifying data to report on top food trends.

FlavorWiki

FlavorWiki uses analytics to measure consumer taste and dietary preferences. They aim to unlock new applications for taste data across the food system. While they market themselves to a wide audience—everyone from major food companies to moms with picky kids—their taste-profiling technology is chiefly aimed at retailers. By creating self-described “taste archetypes,” FoodWiki hopes to help clients like CPG companies cut down on R&D costs for new products, reducing the pricey trial and error stage. If you’re curious about how exactly the FlavorWiki system works—and where it hopes to go—give our podcast with their CEO and Head of Product Daniel Proz a listen.

Gastrograph

Gastrograph is another company using AI to help food & beverage producers streamline new product development. Their technology maps the flavor preferences of individual consumers and also predicts broader consumer reception to new taste profiles. Gastrograph hopes to help create only slam-dunk food products by using machine learning and predictive algorithms—no more costly duds. If you want to hear more about this AI-driven food tech company, check out our podcast with Gastrograph CEO Jason Cohen.

For food startups and CPG developers struggling to differentiate themselves from their competitors, services that use AI to predict and develop delicious, memorable foods would be a useful investment. If flavor/AI companies can deliver on their promises—to cut R&D costs, to help chefs and home cooks create tasty recipes, and to predict emerging food trends—they could be that extra something that spells success for emerging companies, or for big food giants whose current products are starting to feel stale. Flavor/AI technology could also play a huge role in predictive restaurant ordering or grocery delivery, both of which Amazon has in the pipeline.

The bottom line for food industry folks, if you don’t have a taste for AI, you’d better develop one—and soon.

P.S. The CEO’s of Dishq and Foodpairing will be speaking at SKS Europe in June! Register today to hear them talk about how AI will change the way we buy & eat food. 

PlantJammer Uses AI To Create Instant, Flavor-Mapped Recipes For Home Cooks

What are you going to have for dinner tonight? Maybe a big bowl of cheesy pasta (me), a reheated plate of leftovers, or, for the more ambitious, sous vide steak? Some people don’t need to put any pre-planning into their evening meals; they can just throw together whatever’s lingering in their pantry and crisper drawers, improvising with what’s on hand. For others who aren’t comfortable riffing in the kitchen or who don’t have time to grocery shop for a particular recipe, dinner is often something requiring little-to-no effort and decision making. That can mean meal delivery kits with pre-portioned ingredients, or, more likely, takeout.

Vegetarian recipe-generating app PlantJammer is out to help those with low kitchen confidence who want to cook healthy meals and reduce their food waste. The app creates custom recipes for users based off of whatever ingredients they have in their kitchen—then walks them through how to go from recipe to meal, step by step.

The app is able to do all of this thanks to AI, which maps out ingredients’ elements based on their aromas, creating a sort of flavor fingerprint. They then use the aromatic profiles to draw links between seemingly disparate ingredients, suggesting to the user which foods would go well together. In this way, PlantJammer hopes to gamify cooking with plant-based foods, making vegetarian cooking less of a chore and more of a convenient, efficient way to create a meal.

PlantJammer isn’t the only app using AI technology to suggest new flavor combinations. There’s Foodpairing, a tool which also finds and analyzes compatibility between different ingredients, which Haase turned to during his initial forays into cooking. However, while Foodpairing seems to aim its services at food industry professionals looking to create innovative and unexpected dishes, PlantJammer is a tool intended to help home cooks find their sea—er, kitchen—legs.

In fact, PlantJammer originally came about because the founder, Michael Haase, needed help throwing together plant-based meals for himself. Before founding the Copenhagen-based company in 2016, Haase worked consulting on sustainability and resource management at McKinsey and Danish biotech company Novasymes.

A few years ago Haase decided to work towards making his eating habits more sustainable by doing two things: stop wasting food, and eat less meat. He wanted to learn how to improvise in the kitchen, making use of any lingering produce before it went south—but he also didn’t want to spend 10,000 hours learning how to intuitively cobble together a delicious meal.

So what does an ex-consultant do? First, they collect data—lots of it.

“I decided to bootstrap that learning, so I turned to my background in econometrics,” Haase said. He took the neural network model, the workhorse of AI, and applied it to cooking. “I collected the intelligence of thousands of years of humans learning to cook and used that as a data set to create patterns and, ultimately, build a landscape of taste.” This analytical tool can look at big data and find patterns to determine which aromas—and thus, which flavors—will work well together.

As Haase describes, it, the neural network is a sort of color wheel for taste. At the center of the wheel is salt. On top of that the app must balance four components that, at least according to Haase, every good recipe needs: acidity, umami, crunchiness, and mouthfeel (oil). You can add balancing touches on top, like spiciness, too. This technology can lead to some surprising pair-ups. For example, Haase claims that bananas and zucchini are a match made in heaven—one I have yet to sample.

As of now, PlantJammer has a neural network of 3 million recipes and 1000 ingredients.

While the PlantJammer model gets really granular (mapping all 148 aromas in asparagus), they also generalize—quite a lot, in fact. “We say that, at the core, there are only 9 recipes in the world, and then there are infinite variations on those recipes which we can modularize,” said Haase. Judging from the PlantJammer app, these recipes include quiche, salad, pasta, and soup—a list that, as expected, generates some pushback for both what is included and what it doesn’t. But Haase isn’t one to adhere to tradition, especially in the kitchen. “Who says you can’t put curry in the risotto? That’s one learning of management consulting: just because people have been doing something one way, doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do it—or even the best way.”

I decided to put PlantJammer through the test and take a spin through its app (currently available only through their website).

A prototype of the PlantJammer app.

When you first open the app, you are met with a selection of suggested recipe templates ranging from Roasted & Toasted Soup to Asian Quiche to A Freestyle Pasta. If those templates aren’t for you, you can create your own recipe and just “Jam.” Never one to be pinned down, I decided to freestyle and was led to a new page by a tiny eggplant in shades playing the saxophone (his name is Eddie). From there, the app prompts you to select 1 to 3 ingredients from each of 4 categories: bulk (vegetables and plant proteins), splash (vinegar, citrus juice and oil), boost (chilis and aromatics), and topping (herbs, nuts, and other garnishes).

I selected chickpeas and broccoli from the bulk category, and the other columns immediately rearranged themselves, placing the AI-generated best pairings for my selections at the top. I selected tahini, harissa, and sunflower seeds, then threw in some yogurt for good measure. After I’d made my choices, I was led to a customized 6-step recipe that told me how to transform my selected ingredients into a finished dish: Chickpea Salad. The name itself was somewhat bland, but I was impressed with how detailed the recipe was; it gave clear cooking times for each ingredient and made each step seem simple yet doable. More importantly, it sounded like the end result would taste good. 

PlantJammer still has room for improvement, though, if it’s aiming for mainstream acceptance—especially within an American audience. Some of their ingredients are confusing to decipher (“soy bean sauce” and “artichoke hearths”), and then there’s the fact that users are limited by the ingredients options given. What if I have a can of lima beans, which isn’t on the PlantJammer list, but no chickpeas, which are? An experienced cook would know to go ahead and substitute one for the other, but the app is geared towards a more novice audience, who might not feel as comfortable with ingredient riffing.

Kinks in the system aren’t the only hurdles that PlantJammer is facing. Haase admitted that some potential angel investors decided to pass on the startup because the app purposefully doesn’t include meat in its ingredient list. And they never will. For Haase and his team the choice to bypass meat is crucial to the company mission to promote sustainable eating habits.

And they might have gotten lucky with their timing. Plant-based proteins are having a moment, racking up funding and huge social followings. While PlantJammer situates itself as separate from the processed, lab-made meat and meat alternatives of Silicon Valley, if it succeeds, it will probably be in part thanks to their efforts. By making plant-based diets and cultured meat not only acceptable but admirable and—dare we say it—cool, companies like Memphis Meats and Impossible Foods are paving the way for other startups in the meat-alternatives sphere. Though it’s an app, not a product, PlantJammer can only succeed if it has a hefty client base willing to eat vegetarian meals for at least for a few nights a month.

PlantJammer isn’t the only app bringing modular cooking—or cooking with dynamic recipe templates—to consumers. Connected cooking platform Innit (which celebrity chef Tyler Florence spoke about at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit) recently launched an app similarly creates recipes built on whatever users have in the fridge. However, while PlantJammer starts from scratch and shifts its suggested ingredients based on consumer inputs, Innit uses recipe templates which users can customize and tweak. It seems modular cooking is a trend we’ll be seeing more of. In today’s world of customization and AI leveraging in the kitchen, it might be the way we’re moving.

“We want to make cooking convenient, not a compromise. That way, we can hopefully make a lot of people change their habits,” said Haase. Banana and zucchini stir-fry it is, then.

Video: Will Software Change the Way We Cook? (Hint: Yes)

What do you think software tastes like?

According to Jon Jenkins, Director of Technology at Hestan Smart Labs (the company behind the Hestan Cue), it tastes like consistency. In this video from the Smart Kitchen Summit, Jenkins explains how software can revolutionize the way that home cooks use recipes, eliminating human error to help them achieve the same high-quality results every time—just like a restaurant.

Jenkins has a seasoned background in both hardware and software. He cut his teeth at Amazon and Pinterest building software around personalization before he “caught the hardware bug” in 2014. Shortly afterward, he joined the team at Hestan Smart Cooking, the company behind guided cooking system Hestan Cue.

During his talk, Jenkins posed some interesting questions:

  • Why don’t recipes look exactly the same every time, no matter who cooks them?
  • How do we reduce variability and eliminate human error in the kitchen?
  • Why can’t home cooks have the same level of output consistency that you’d find at a Thomas Keller restaurant?

The answer to all of these queries, as you might have guessed, is software. Watch the video to see Jenkins make some bold assertions about the future of recipes, crack a few jokes, and explain how software will change the way the way we cook in the future.

Want to rub shoulders with innovators in the future of food and cooking? We – and Hestan Cue’s Jon Jenkins – will be in Dublin on June 11th-12th for our first Smart Kitchen Summit Europe. We hope to see you there!

KptnCook Hopes Curation will Help its Shoppable Recipes Stand Out

As companies come to the realization that recipes are not just a list of instructions, but rather a discovery and commerce platform, the competition to become your recipe provider of choice is heating up.

Services like Innit and SideChef are using recipes as a platform and integrating with appliances to become the “GPS” of your kitchen. Startups like Chefling are matching what food you have with recipes and shopping lists to fill in any gaps. Amazon is jumping into the shoppable recipe space with partnerships with Fexy Media and AllRecipes. While other apps like BigOven get rolled up in a defensive play against the potential Amazon juggernaut.

Which brings us to a small Berlin-based startup with a funny name. KptnCook provides daily recipes to your phone, bundles together a shopping based on those ingredients, and using your location, points you to a nearby store where you can get all the ingredients.

But KptnCook bucks the recipe app trends in two ways. First, while it creates shoppable recipes, it sends you to real world stores to actually roam the aisles and make your purchases. You can’t order online, and there is no in-store order fulfillment.

KptnCook has partnered with major retailers in Germany to get a general sense of the products they inventory. They can send you to a store knowing that it carries Bisquick, but there’s no guarantee that Bisquick will still be in stock when you arrive.

This may sound inconvenient to our give-it-to-me-now American ears, but Hoefer says that German cities have a high-density of stores, so there is usually one close by and getting to it is not an inconvenience. Additionally, only 1 percent of Germans buy groceries online, and most online grocery delivery services in Germany are still next-day, according to Hoefer.

The more interesting way KptnCook is going against the grain is through curation. Where lots of recipe apps today will offer thousands of recipes, KptnCook only delivers three recipe options to your phone per day. That’s it. Each of these three recipes only takes a half hour to make. This limitation may seem counterintuitive, but when you constantly offer people access to any recipe, option paralysis can sink in. Limiting a user’s options can free up decision making.

Hoefer wouldn’t reveal how many users KptnCook has, but claims that their app has higher retention and click through rates than comparable food apps.

The company generates money now by basically creating branded content. It could, for example, potentially work with a brand like Kikkoman’s, incorporate that soy sauce into a recipe and drive people to a nearby store to buy it among the other ingredients. KptnCook can also potentially work with retailers to push people to particular stores. Retailers can make use of an additional mobile channel, and KptnCook sends people to the store to buy a cart full of items, not just one or two.

KptnCook has ten employees, has received some angel funding, and has been through both the Plug and Play and TechStars accelerator programs. While the app is available in the U.S., the company is primarily focused on the German market right now.

If KptnCook wants to make a more concerted effort to enter the U.S. market, it certainly faces an uphill battle. The market is becoming increasingly competitive as companies big and small compete in the recipe platform space. Having said that, what I like about KptnCook is the curation aspect. It’s easy to get stuck on stupid when scrolling through a bunch of recipes and having a trusted source do some decision making for me is a welcome feature.

Chefling Raises $1 Million for its Inventory and Recipe Assistant

Chefling, a kitchen app that connects what food you have with recipes and shopping lists, has raised $1 million in funding. According to a report in VentureBeat, the money will be used to for to hire marketing people, data scientists and a chef.

With the Chefling app, users can scan barcodes or take a picture of their receipt to monitor what foods they have in their fridge and pantry (an keep tabs on when that food will expire). Based on your food inventory, Chefling’s smart cookbook will then recommend recipes you can make. If you are missing any ingredients, Chefling automatically creates a shopping list for you and as you check these items off this list, the app keeps track of the new food available for newer recipe recommendations. Chefling works with Alexa and Google Home so users can ask for recipes or add grocery items to the list just by talking.

Chefling was created by a group of Northwestern grad students, and they were part of our Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase last October. You can see their demo pitch on how Chefling works in this video:

Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase Pitch: Chefling from The Spoon on Vimeo.

The nexus of food on hand, recipes and shopping is fast becoming a hot market with a number of entrants. LG and Samsung showed off smart refrigerators at this past CES that let you keep track of food and offer up recipes. Recipe app Innit lets you alter recipes based on different ingredients you already have. Smart tag Ovie keeps track of when your food will go bad and makes meal recommendations. Additionally, Flexy and AllRecipes are making shoppable recipes a reality by integrating with Amazon.

It’s also interesting that Chefling is hiring an actual Chef. In the VentureBeat report, the company says the chef “will be hired to curate and improve upon tens of thousands of recipes Chefling draws from food bloggers.” This perhaps points to the limitations of relying solely on algorithms and scraping websites for recipe recommendations. Or, just as Innit hired celebrity chef Tyler Florence, maybe Chefling will bring on their own celebrity chef to boost its visibility in a crowded space.

Chefling’s investment was from Chicago-based XVVC LLC, and brings the total amount raised by the company to $1.2 million.

Ten Trends That Will Shape The Future of Cooking In 2018

With 2017 in the rearview mirror, it’s time to look forward and make some predictions about the next year in food and cooking. While I often wait until after CES to look into the crystal ball since there are always lots of announcements at the annual consumer tech mega-show, I think it’s safe to point to a few big trends we can expect over the next 12 months.

With that in mind, here are ten trends I think you’ll see the shape the future of the kitchen over the next twelve months (Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date on our coverage of all of these trends over the next year):

Digital Recipe At The Center Of Action

With apologies to Tyler Florence, the recipe is not dead. In fact, if anything the recipe is becoming increasingly important in the digital kitchen. It’s becoming our automated shopping list, the instruction set for our appliances, and the content is becoming dynamic, atomized and personalized depending on our personal preferences and the context of our current day, meal plan, and food inventory.

I expect all of this to continue in 2018 and even accelerate as recipes become shoppable, connected to cooking guidance systems and fuse with new interfaces such as voice assistants and chatbots to help with the cooking process.

New Cooking Boxes

While “cooking box” isn’t exactly a standard industry term, it’s an apt way to describe the wide variety of exciting products coming to market that allow consumers new ways to prepare food.

Last year we started to see new takes on steam ovens like the Tovala, the first consumer market RF cooking appliance announced in Miele’s Dialog, and even combo devices that combine fast-cooking with flash-freezing like the Frigondas. In 2018, I expect to see lots more innovation with built-in and counter top products as old-school appliance manufacturers and housewares brands realize there’s opportunity in deviating from the same-old cooking appliances and offering consumers new options when it comes to preparing food.

Smart Grow Systems Move Towards Mass Market

While home grow systems have been around for years, adoption has remained fairly narrow. That will start to change in 2018 as the idea of using technology to grow and create our food at home enters the mainstream consciousness. Driving this trend will be the ever-increasing consumer desire to source food more locally. After all, what’s more local than our own homes?

The great thing about this space is there’s already a wide gamut of interesting options available for consumers today. Whether it’s low-cost offerings like seed quilts, to the growing number of soil-less home grow systems like those from Aerogarden or Ava, to crazy backyard farm robots like those from Farmbot, I think we’ll see more innovative products – and greater consumer adoption – in 2018.

Home Fermentation

There’s no doubt one of the most interesting trends we’ve seen in consumer food over the past couple years is the embrace of interesting fermented products like kombucha, and I think this interest will start to generate more interest in consumers fermenting their food at home.

We’ve already seen companies like Panasonic show off fermented food cookers, and beer appliance startup PicoBrew is starting to offer Kombucha as an offering. With interest in fermented products likely to increase, I expect more innovators will look to make creating these products at home easier.

Desserts Meet Tech

Like most, I love myself a good dessert, and I expect we will see an increasing number of interesting ways to fuse technology with sweets in the coming year. Some of these innovations will focus on convenience (like the CHiP cookie maker), but some will enable consumers to create hard-to-make sweets like chocolate, ice cream and other types of desserts that are normally time and knowledge intensive.  Expect to see some interesting announcements in this space in the next 12 months.

Sensing Kitchen

When the Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman got on stage at the Smart Kitchen Summit with startups creators of digital food sensing tech and demoed live in front of a huge audience, you could hear the audience murmur as Wilson and crew smelled cheese with a digital nose or tried out the Scio infrared spectrometer. This technology that has long been gestating for commercial and supply chain applications is finally making its way into the home, and I expect that to continue in 2018, particularly as some find new ways to apply AI to better prediction and understanding around flavors and food characteristics.

Meal Services And Connected Hardware

One of the trends we’ve been watching for a while is the pairing of meal kits with connected hardware.  That trend accelerated in 2017 as Tovala shipped product, Nomiku created their sous vide ready meals and Innit hinted at new products powered by Chef’d as we ended the year.

It makes sense. Recurring revenue has long been the mantra of venture capitalists (just ask Tovala, which just got a $9.2 million series A), and in the connected cooking space, the way to get recurring revenue is offer food.  I also expect meal kit companies to also increasingly look for ways to partner with kitchen tech innovators (much like Chef’d has with Innit) as they look for ways to raise adoption and retention for consumers.

Speaking of food delivery…

Automated, Smart Grocery Delivery

With the acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, Amazon stopped dabbling around the edges with lab experiments like Amazon Go, Amazon Dash and Amazon Fresh made its intentions clear: it wants to take a big bite out of the $700 billion grocery business in the US.  And while the company has had mixed success with efforts like its Fresh delivery business, these long-gestating experiments have given them a potentially huge advantage as they start to set up central hubs and physical points of presence for the grocery business post-Whole Foods.

And now, Amazon and others see the opportunity to fuse home delivery with smart home access control and automatically deliver groceries all the way to the fridge. Combine that with the ability of fridges to actually tell us when food needs a refresh, and you can unlock some interesting scenarios.

New Interfaces

While this past year saw the continued march forward towards of popular voice interfaces like Alexa, I think we’re only at the beginning of a large-scale change in the control layer for how we buy, prepare and cook our food.  Sure, we’ll see more and more Alexa skills for cooking gadgets in 2018, but also expect more manufacturers embrace chatbots and projection interfaces as ways to interact with our cooking equipment this year.

Cooking Robots

We cover cooking robots here at The Spoon a bunch, and while many are fun and likely never to see wide adoption over the next decade, there are a variety of interesting cooking bots we’ve seen that might have real applications for specific use cases.  Some are simple food automation devices. Others are more social robots. And, in some cases, companies are working on human-like robots that could be intriguing additions to the kitchen of the future.

Needless to say with CES less than a week away, we’ll likely see many of these trends reinforced with news.  I’ll be at CES catching up on many of these announcements myself, so if you hear of any or want me to know about your product, DM me on Twitter.

Allrecipes Embeds AmazonFresh Shopping Directly Into Recipes

Today Allrecipes announced they have embedded AmazonFresh shopping capability into their top recipes.

The new integration allows home cooks to purchase ingredients from within the recipe and have them delivered same day via AmazonFresh. The “buy this recipe now” button can be seen in the screenshot of the Allrecipes app below:

Allrecipes recipe with a “buy this recipe now” button

To pull this off, AmazonFresh created a custom API that allows Allrecipes to access the online grocer’s ASIN number database. ASINs are alphanumeric 10 digit code Amazon assigns each product it sells. For each recipe, Allrecipes maps a list of suggested ingredients by ASIN utilizing Allrecipes Groceryserver technology and send that list back to AmazonFresh to create a customized, recipe-specific landing page.

Allrecipes has offered shoppable recipes through its Groceryserver technology – which it acquired in 2015 – for over three years. However, the partnership with AmazonFresh marks the first time the recipe publisher has integrated with an e-commerce provider for direct home delivery.

For Amazon, this continues a trend of the company pushing deeper into the consumer buying decision by embedding themselves directly in the recipe. Last week another publisher, food media company Fexy, announced they had integrated Amazon Prime Now into the recipes of their publications such as SeriousEats. The deal with Allrecipes now allows Amazon customers to access customized recipe driven ingredient delivery from the e-commerce company’s home grocery delivery service.

Meal Kits Go Custom

The push into the recipe by Amazon isn’t surprising since the company first showed signs it was investigating the idea in 2011 when it filed for a patent for shoppable recipes. The patent was awarded to the company in 2015.

By embedding itself directly into recipes, Amazon is, in essence, offering consumers the ability to create customized meal kits on demand. The idea of real-time meal kit creation is probably a frightening one for Blue Apron and other meal kit companies who rely on a model where the consumer must pick from a limited number of predefined meal kits a week or so in advance. Through this partnership and same day delivery, Amazon is allowing consumers to create meal kits around their recipes rather than telling the consumer what recipe they should make.

Solution For ‘Center Of The Store’ Problem?

For Allrecipes, the deal gives potential food brand partners strong incentive to work with the company since the recipe site can now directly influence what goes into a consumer’s shopping basket on AmazonFresh. For example, if a consumer is making chocolate chip cookies, the AmazonFresh landing page may have Gold Medal Flour and Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chips specifically because those brands have done deals with Allrecipes. While the consumer will be given the option to edit their shopping list, chances are most consumers will go with the prescribed suggestions.

For big food brands, the idea of direct integration into e-commerce purchase flow sounds pretty good given their difficult climate. The struggles of brands who live at the “center of the store” have been a widely discussed topic in recent years, and 2017 has been particularly difficult. With e-commerce expected to drive the majority of the growth going forward, CPG companies likely see their future growth dependent on deals like this.