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Shark Tank

The Story of Chefee with Assaf Pashut

There’s been no shortage of cooking robot startups in the past few years, but most are focused on commercial kitchens. It’s for good reason: consumers tend to like appliances we’re familiar with, and the idea of having a robot make our food seems, well, like something out of a science fiction future.

But these hurdles didn’t scare away Assaf Pashut, who, after years of being a restauranteur, started to think about how robots could help us make better food at home. That ultimately led to Chefee, a home food robot that’s different from any before it. It’s not a countertop appliance or a system with big robotic arms attached to the wall. With Chefee, the robotics recede into the background.

In this conversation, Assaf discusses those early days and how he came up with the idea for Chefee, the choices he made around design, the story of pitching Chefee on Shark Tank, and his vision for the future.

You can listen to the podcast clicking play above or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. You can also watch the video of my interview with Assaf below.

Building a Home Food Robot With Chefee's Assaf Pashut

Assaf will be talking about Chefee at the Smart Kitchen Summit on June 5th. If you’d like to hear his story in person, you can get tickets here.

The transcript of our conversation is below.

Michael Wolf
All right, I’m excited to have Assaf Pashut here in the studio today to talk a little bit about what you’re building with Chefee Robotics. Chefee is a really interesting company in that it’s actually making a home cooking robot. That’s a tough category. We’re going to dive into that, but before we do, let’s hear a little bit about your background. Tell people, you know, your journey and how you got to where you are today.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I grew up on food since I was, I mean, my mom cooked for me and my brothers every single day growing up. Homemade foods. I grew up in Israel so food is just a huge part of our culture. And yeah, I ended up going to Berkeley, studied neuroscience, learned a little bit about engineering, some biology, some chemistry, some, a lot of different, a lot of different things. And then I ended up going into the obvious next step, which is open restaurants.

Michael Wolf
I thought you were going to say the obvious next step is making a food robot.

Assaf Pashut
That’s like 14 years later. I opened restaurants, and my parents were surprised, as you can imagine. And so was everyone else. But I just thought that the food industry was broken. I think now there are so many documentaries about that. But back then it was, most people didn’t understand really what was going. And yeah, I wanted to fix it. I wanted to create some healthier brand and sell and just kind of promote that. And really, my dream was to kind of tackle McDonald’s, to compete with McDonald’s. So yeah, pretty ambitious. And then I had that for many years, and did very well in Silicon Valley. And then during COVID, everything just nose dived.

I took a year off and went to live in Israel. My mom was there, a lot of cooking again. You can see a common theme. And then, at some point, I think I was looking at my kitchen and just thought, how freaking cool would it be if I could just talk to it and it can cook for me? That was the crazy epiphany.

Michael Wolf
Right. That was. That was epiphany, and you know, so interesting that you decided to head into the consumer kitchen because you spent so much of your career in restaurants, which, by the way, I think some of the most successful food robotics entrepreneurs have started restaurants and then done that. John Haw with Bear Robotics is a good example of where he created his little mobile waiter robot. But you decided to go into the consumer kitchen, not make a back of house restaurant chef robot. Why did you look at the consumer space?

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, so we actually started our V1 was a commercial kitchen. We built this entire commercial kitchen with a robotic arm on a rail. I’ll show you the video, but we basically we saw something that most people don’t see, which is everyone’s going in this direction. Commercial restaurants, fast food. And I hate fast food, personally. I just don’t think that’s something I want to contribute to or help. I don’t think it’s good for people, animals, the world in general. And so I don’t want to contribute my time there. And then, looking at the house, nobody’s touching it. Everybody knows there’s going to be robotics in the home. Everyone knows that.

Michael Wolf
It’s why you wanted to kill McDonald’s.

Assaf Pashut
But no one touched the home. And it’s a hard space, you’re right. It’s at what price point you come in, and there are so many different segments of consumers. But the appeal of one being the first, two, offering people this Jetsons kind of dream where you walk into your house, talk to your kitchen and it cooks for you. That was a sexy idea. That was something worth working for.

And I’ll tell you the first time that Chefee I ever talked to Chefee and it started cooking was just like a mind shift. It was weird. It was really, really cool. And that’s kind of when we knew that this is, this is happening. This is real.

Michael Wolf
No one’s broken into this space because it is, like you said, difficult. There have been some early temps like Moley, which started back in 2015, and the last couple of years, there have been a lot of countertop folks building essentially some level of automation within a self-contained countertop appliance. Your’s is different than what I’ve seen out there in that it’s not this big robotic arm. It’s not something that fits on the countertop. It looks like maybe some of the kind of robotic make lines I’ve seen in a sense for the commercial space, but not quite. Because it does fit into a granite countertop or whatever. It’s embedded essentially into the kitchen. Talk a little bit about that, why you decided to do what you did with your design.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, like I said, we started with a big robotic arm, right? And I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with it. And one, they’re expensive. Two, they’re difficult to maintain. Three, they’re dangerous. This thing, the first time we turned it on, we got it from China, and their safety setting was like the lowest possible safety. So it started grinding itself into the table on which it was standing. Dangerous stuff, man. And you don’t want that in your house with your kids and you’re in. Yeah.

Michael Wolf
That’s not good. o.

Assaf Pashut
And so, and then beyond that, the idea is that I think technology shouldn’t be in our face. It should be hidden, embedded in our walls, kind of like electricity. We have it, it’s the best thing ever. We don’t even realize it because it’s just in the walls, right? And then we use it when we want to use it. That’s kind of the vision.

Michael Wolf
It’s very on trend, by the way. We’re seeing that in the kitchen space. Like a lot of big appliance brands are thinking about this idea of the invisible kitchen, essentially where technology recedes into the background. You thought about it, but in a robotic context.

Assaf Pashut
Blend in. So instead of throwing some big thing at you, it’s more like, no, we’ll blend into your existing kitchen design, which people really, really spend a lot of time and thought into their kitchen designs. So we want to blend in.

Michael Wolf
When will I be able to buy this? When can I go out and say, hey, Chefee, come in and install this? And what does that involve? Does this involve a couple of folks showing up and installing it and tearing apart my kitchen a little bit?

Assaf Pashut
No, no, so not exactly. So, first of all, we’re already taking paid reservations. So there’s a bunch of people that already paid $250 to reserve their Chefee. Late next month, we’re going to be showcasing our Beta 2 model, which is basically what your Chefee would look like, stainless steel, so forth, the beautiful kind of vision. And at that point, we’ll be taking deposits. So 50% down, 50% upon delivery.

And when Chefee arrives at your door, yeah, we install it. But here’s the beauty. It doesn’t require any permanent damage to your kitchen. So the way we do it is we just remove the doors from your upper kitchen cabinet. That’s like four screws. And we slide Chefee in. And that’s it. Basically, within two hours, the whole installation takes two hours. And you have now an autonomous kitchen in your house.

Michael Wolf
What was it like going on Shark Tank? Obviously, going in front of the sharks is like a once in a lifetime experience. I know that some of them are notably robotic skeptical. Mark Cuban, probably being the most so. Tell us a little about that experience going on there and what happened.

Assaf Pashut
The experience, it’s hard to describe, man. It was the hardest day of my life. Most people, you know, a lot of companies, they come with this little app or a little gadget or whatever. We built a kitchen set ourselves. My team and I built the whole set. We’ve never done it before. We had to ship all of our equipment and Chefee to Los Angeles, stayed in our investor’s home, and built it in his backyard. It was wild.

I spent two months practicing the pitch over and over. We have a bunch of videos we’re going to release where I’m like doing push-ups and reciting the pitch. My friend is kicking me and like slapping me in the face literally to get ready for the pressure because you only have one chance. He went to the Israeli army. So he was like, he’s like, we’re going to do this. This is how we’re going to do it.

Michael Wolf
It was Shark Tank Bootcamp.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, the moment itself was so stressful. So many things could have gone wrong. We had to ship it from one, we have to move it from one set to another. And then once we were there, they tell you, you only have one shot. It’s the Eminem song, right? You got one shot, don’t blow it. And then like, what if the wifi or the Bluetooth doesn’t work? And everything worked smoothly. The sharks are really, really nice. I think Mark was in a bad mood.

I think he was, he was kind of in disbelief that we could have built something like this that’s actually has some IP in it without spending millions of dollars, which is most, most companies do. And I get it. I mean, I come from the restaurant industry. Who am I? I’m, you know, to him, I’m just like a restaurateur. I’m not an engineer. But yeah, we’ve been able to do it. So it was pretty exciting.

Michael Wolf
Yeah, I mean, he probably saw, I mean, if you look at the track record, right, like the Zumes of the world spent hundreds of millions of dollars from SoftBank, and you’ve seen others race, you know, tons of money to build these things and to they burn through it. So, you ultimately did get a deal with Kevin O’Leary. Talk about that.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, with Kevin. I mean, at the end of the day, he saw what we saw, which is there’s a high end market. So we’re starting at the high end as a high end product. Obviously, our goal is to be in millions and millions of homes. And that’s what’s going to happen, but we’re going to start like this because we don’t want to have thousands of orders right off the bat. We’re not going to be able to deliver, and we’re going to have recalls, and it’s a common mistake that many hardware companies make. Let’s go slow and steady and actually pay attention to each customer. And then as we ramp up production, we’ll lower the prices and so forth. And frankly, there are people lining up to have a Chefee at this price point.

Michael Wolf
It’s the early Tesla strategy.

Assaf Pashut
I mean, we’re actually very, very, very reasonable relative to, let’s say, Moley, for example. Or even just high-end premium appliances in the home. People are spending $50,000 on a range hood. They’re spending $100,000 sometimes on La Cornue, Wolf and Sub-Zero.

Michael Wolf
What will this future channel look like? One of the things I’m trying to conceptualize and think a lot about, as we look 10 years in the future is, ‘hey, I want this cool cooking robot. Maybe I can’t cook, or maybe I’m getting older, and it’s just harder for me. How do I get this thing in the kitchen? Is it a matter of saying, hey, there’s a home system integrator for food robotics? Is it like there’s an appliance, like maybe a GE Whirlpool ultimately acquires Chefee, or builds a competing line, or you become like the next Whirlpool? Does a customer go to a Best Buy, see it and then have someone come and install it? What does this channel look like in the future?

Assaf Pashut
I mean, honestly, we’ve designed it, like I said, to be installed in existing kitchens. We want this in tiny kitchens, large kitchens, large homes, and small luxury apartments in Manhattan. It doesn’t matter. We fit into existing standard kitchens. Where it’s going to go, I don’t know. I think, I think Chefee can maintain a very high quality of the product. That’s, that’s important to me. That quality is super important. Whether it’s going to be available at Home Depot or Best Buy in the future, only time will tell. But ultimately, it’s probably going to be built in, kind of like standard ovens in microwaves and fridges that you have in every kitchen. You walk into somebody’s home in 15 years, and if they don’t have a Chefee, it’s like they’re in the Stone Age. That’s how I see it.

Michael Wolf
Yeah, people walk into like a modern high-end kitchen today, they see Wolf appliances, they see Jenn Air or whatever. You think that new status symbol 15 years from now will be a Chefee. Is that what we’re talking about?

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s going to be ubiquitous. It just doesn’t make sense that it doesn’t. You have to experience it to kind of feel it. When we started cooking with Chefee, then I went to my mom’s house, and there’s like pans and pots and all these things and like a mess in the kitchen. I’m like, I don’t know, my mind has just shifted. Like this is the old way and now there’s a new way. Obviously there’s a nice hybrid middle ground there where you can still cook.

It’s not like you have to give Chefee every single meal to make. Cooking is fun, I love cooking. It’s just that I don’t have time every single day to do it in a good way, in a high quality way.

Michael Wolf
You said you are starting at the high end. As you guys grow – obviously this is your first product out there – if we look a couple years down the line, five years down the line, is there going to be a range? At some point you have a countertop thing that people would just buy and plop down or take with them? What does that look like?

Assaf Pashut
A lot of things are possible. We want to make sure one, we’re not spreading ourself thin, right? Once you spread yourself thin, quality goes down. And second, is we don’t want to go to the Vitamix, the, the, what are they called? All these little countertop, nimbals and stuff, right? We want to stay, the value proposition of Chefee is it’s restocked once a week and you walk away.

You go to the gym, you go to the office, you go hang out with your kids, you go watch Netflix. That’s it once a week. As soon as you dumb it down and you bring it down the volume and so forth, and now it’s just a countertop, then again, you have to restock every single meal. You have to think a lot more about every single thing, which is, it’s just, it defeats purpose. So, yeah.

Michael Wolf
Great. Hey, well, I’m looking forward to hearing you and connecting with you in Seattle in June at the SmartCat to Summit. And where can people find out more about what you’re doing at chefee.com?

Assaf Pashut
You too.

Chefee.com, yeah, yeah, we’re on Instagram, we’re on Facebook, we’re online.

Michael Wolf
That’s easy. And for those of you just listening, it’s chefee.com, right?

Assaf Pashut
That’s it. Thank you.

Spoon Tank: The Spoon Team Watches and Gives Play-by-Play on RoboBurger’s Shark Tank Pitch

Like many, we’ve been long-time fans of Shark Tank, especially when the crew brings food-related products into the tank.

This year the sharks have seen quite a few food pitches, and it seems like there’s been a particular emphasis on food robots. Because we have lots of thoughts on these pitches, we thought we’d watch it Mystery Science Theater 3000 style and throw our commentary in from the peanut gallery.

You can watch the full video of our play-by-play below. Let us know if you like it and if there are any other pitches you’d like us to comment on.

Startup Showcase Alumni Incredible Eats Lands Investment on Shark Tank

Dinesh Tadepalli has landed his shark.

Tadepalli, the CEO of Incredible Eats, appeared on Shark Tank last night to pitch his company and ended up getting four offers from various sharks before walking away with an offer from Lori Greiner for 15% of the company. Watch:

Incredible Eats Has 4 Delicious Offers - Shark Tank

Regular Shark Tank watchers will know four offers are a lot, but it’s not all that surprising since Incredible Eats checks many shark boxes: an easy-to-understand product, proven success, and mission-driven.

That easy to understand product is edible cutlery that replaces disposable plastic spoons and forks. IncredibleEats’ edible spoons and sporks come in both sweet and savory versions – chocolate and vanilla for desserts, oregano chili and black pepper for soups and such – and in both large and small versions.

Here at The Spoon, we’re always excited to see food tech innovators on Shark Tank, but doubly so when they are alumni of our own startup pitch contest. Tadepalli pitched his idea for edible cutlery at the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2019, winning the Future Food portion of the pitch session. It was still early days for the company called Planeteer at the time, but the judges loved the idea of cutting down on plastic waste with an edible spoon or fork.

Tadepalli plans to use the money to hire more employees and ramp up production. He’ll need it. With what amounts to millions of dollars worth of free advertising in the form of a Shark Tank appearance and a consumer product expert like Greiner in his corner, there’s no doubt he’ll start selling lots of spoons and sporks through multiple channels very soon. And all that’s before they even get to food service – restaurants and cafeterias – which is likely be an even bigger opportunity than the consumer market.

If you’d like to watch Tadepalli’s award winning pitch at Smart Kitchen Summit 2019, click play below.

SKS 2019: Future Food pitches

If you want to predict who could be the next Incredible Eats, see our post on this year’s finalists for the Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase here.

BEERMKR Opens Up About its “Shark Tank” Experience

It’s important to remember that reality TV isn’t “real.” Even a show that’s pretty cut and dry like Shark Tank is edited down for broadcast. That’s why when I watched the guys at BEERMKR ptich their connected, all-in-one home beer brewing system to the Sharks last week, I wondered what was cut out. Thankfully, BEERMKR CEO Aaron Walls gave us a peek behind the curtain in a blog post this week, talking about their experience on the show.

SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t watched the episode and don’t want to know how it ended, stop here. If you do know or it doesn’t matter to you, then continue reading.

First off, it may surprise you to learn that BEERMKR actually filmed their episode back in September of 2020. And while they shot for an hour, fielding all types of questions from all of the Sharks, the segment was edited down to just eight minutes. As Walls wrote:

Since our aired segment was only 8 minutes long, the show producers had to cut roughly 90% of what we discussed to focus on the stuff that would make for a great TV show: beer and drama!

But the bigger issue for BEERMKR was the timing of their episode taping. After COVID-related productions delays (an issue for a lot of companies last year), BEERMKR still hadn’t shipped its product. When asked about units and revenue, the BEERMKR team had to admit there were only 24 of its machines out in the world. This was a huge stumbling block for the Sharks, and all but one passed on the deal. Kevin O’Leary (who seemed oddly fixated on the fact that the BEERMKR guys went to Cornell) was the only Shark who was interested.

If you want to know the specifics of his deal proposal, I suggest you go watch the episode segment (pay TV subscription required). Long story short, the BEERMKR guys didn’t like O’Leary’s numbers and passed. As Walls writes:

So did we miss an opportunity to partner with a Shark? Absolutely. The problem in my view was one of timing, and the deal we got was a direct result of us being in an awkward pre-shipping / pre-revenue stage when we filmed. There was nothing we could do about the Sony Entertainment / MGM / ABC’s production schedule, and there was nothing we could do about covid delaying us by 9+ months. If we had the choice, we would have chosen to pitch AFTER we had shipped product, had sales to prove our model, and had positive reviews from our early brewer base. Unfortunately, you don’t get to choose when to pitch on Shark Tank, and if you get the opportunity to pitch, you have to take it, so we went in with the valuation we believed in and stuck to it. We did succeed in introducing BEERMKR to millions of new people, so I consider that a success.

The story does have a happy ending. The same day its Shark Tank episode aired, BEERMKR had launched an equity crowdfunding campaign, which raised more than $250,000 of its $1 million goal in its first week. No Sharks needed.

BEERMKR Launches Equity Crowdfunding Campaign, Will Appear on “Shark Tank” Tonight

If I wasn’t such a professional, impartial journalist, I might shed a small tear of joy for BEERMKR. I’ve been writing about the company since 2018 when it launched on Kickstarter, and continued to follow them through trade shows, COVID-related production delays, and finally with a full product review last fall. And now the company has launched an equity crowdfunding campaign, but will also be pitching to the investors on Shark Tank tonight. Li’l BEERMKR is all grown up.

Unlike traditional home brewing, BEERMKR doesn’t require the mess and complications of buckets and bottles and hoses. Instead, it’s a connected, all-in-one countertop beer fermenting, brewing and dispensing system. The accompanying mobile app tells you when to add your ingredients, and the BEERMKR controls all the agitation, temperature control and resting. I had never brewed beer before in my life and was able to make a delicious stout on my very first try, which prompted me to add BEERMKR to our Spoon Holiday Gift Guide.

We obviously don’t know yet if the Sharks will bite upon hearing BEERMKR’s pitch, but the company is hoping everyday investors will. BEERMKR is looking to raise roughly $1 million through equity crowdfunding on the StartEngine platform, and as of this writing has already raised more than $122,000 in its first day. BEERMKR has a good track record when it comes to crowdfunding, having raised nearly $400,000 on Kickstarter to put the BEERMKR into production. (And unlike other beer-related crowdfunded hardware, it actually made it to market.)

Equity crowdfunding is becoming quite a trend in the food tech world. Companies like Piestro, Future Acres, Blendid and GoSun have all conducted equity crowdfunding campaigns. Raising capital from traditional VCs comes with the pressure to scale and deliver a return on the VC’s investment in a relatively timely manner. Startups that choose that equity crowdfunding route mitigate that scaling and time pressure. However, using equity crowdfunding also means companies don’t necessarily get access to the institutional knowledge and connections that could help them run their businesses more efficiently.

I reached out to BEERMKR CEO Aaron Walls this morning to ask him why they opted for equity crowdfunding, and this is what he emailed back:

We’ve done traditional financings and we’ve done kickstarters, but this is our first equity crowdfund. As we began investigating, it became evident that our company was uniquely positioned to execute an equity crowdfunding campaign. First, we have a large install base of happy customers, many of whom have reached out prior to this campaign and asked if they could invest in our company. Second, with as many kickstarters as we’ve done, we have the internal processes in place to work through the crowdfunding dynamics. Lastly, our category of alcoholic beverages does very well with crowdfunding. It’s a category that you don’t need an advanced degree to fully understand the full potential. From our standpoint we felt it was worth the effort to see how well it performs. The worst case scenario? We can always go back to raising capital the old fashioned way, but given the first day success, it looks like we won’t have to!

Walls also said that BEERMKR is only raising $1 million because that is a limit set by the SEC based on the makeup of the company.

I didn’t ask him whether Mark Cuban is now an investor, but I’ll be watching Shark Tank tonight and maybe there there will be one little happy tear for Walls and his team.

Stasher’s Silicone Storage Bags Snap Up $400,000 from Mark Cuban

Companies like ChefSteps and Anova have pushed home sous vide more into the mainstream. One drawback to sous vide, though, is the one-time use of either a vacuum-sealed or Ziplock bag. It just feels wasteful. Which is why I’m excited to try out Stasher‘s re-useable, re-sealable silicone bags that can be used for many things including storage or sous vide.

Stasher founder and CEO, Kat Nouri, dove into ABC’s Shark Tank earlier this month to pitch her wares. After some serious back and forth about product positioning, Mark Cuban bit, and put $400,000 into Stasher for 15 percent of the company as well as a $400,000 line of credit. You can watch Nouri’s episode here (Stasher’s pitch is at the 32-minute mark).

According to Stasher’s FAQ, it’s bags are made from sand (silica), oxygen and “natural resources” that the company claims make it “safer, more flexible and more sustainable than plastic.” The Stasher FAQ goes on to say that “there are no fillers or petroleum-based products” in its bags as well as no BPA, BPS, lead, latex or phthalates.

I’m not enough of scientist to confirm the claims, and it looks like the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t studied silicone since 1979. But the Canadian government says “There are no known health hazards associated with use of silicone cookware”

Providing a safer sous vide experience is definitely a selling point. I’m not thrilled with the idea of wrapping my steak in a cheap plastic bag and bathing it in 130-degree water for an hour. Plus, the Stasher bag is re-usable, so there’s less waste, and dishwasher safe, so its easy to clean. And, of course, when not being used to cook, the bags would be a great alternative for general food storage and packing kids’ lunches.

All those benefits don’t come cheap, though. Stashers range in price and from $9.99 for a snack size, to $11.99 for a sandwich bag and $19.99 for a half gallon. On Shark Tank, Nouri said that Stasher did $1.6 million in sales last year.

With a shark like Mark on board, it will be interesting to see if Stasher can now move the needle and people off of plastic and into a new silicone-based solution for sous vide and storage.

Seedsheet Takes to QVC to Sell Simple Home-Gardening Kits

As momentum grows among innovators in the home/indoor gardening space, the focus has been on all-in-one home-grow kits. Such companies as NutriTower, Sprouts IO and Aerogarden are taking an approach in which their product’s value proposition is based on simplicity. The common formula of these visionaries includes hydroponic, tech-infused pot, built-in LED lights, seeds, and water. The goal is a home gardening solution without getting and dirt under your fingernails.

Vermont-based Seedsheet seems to believe that gardening, without touching the soil, takes the soul out of the experience. The company’s kit includes a weed-blocking fabric with pockets of non-GMO seeds (from High Mowing Seed Company) embedded in a growing medium, a cloth bag which acts as the planter, and stakes to hold the sheet in place. The process is simple enough to entice even the laziest gardeners, yet just tactile enough to appeal to traditionalists.

Featured on the April 7 episode of Shark Tank, Seedsheet grew out of a successful Kickstarter campaign which led to the product being available at Home Depot. The concept is the brainchild of Vermont’s Cam MacKugler, an architect with a passion for sustainable design. According to a company press release, the idea took root when he was housesitting for a co-worker and was allowed to tinker in the garden.

“I was spending my days in AutoCAD designing buildings, and one evening while harvesting dinner I noticed the spacing of the garden, the relationships between plants, and I saw a blueprint. I wondered why we weren’t approaching agriculture with the same precision as architecture,” MacKluger says.

“Food transparency and availability are critical issues in the country, and the world, right now. People want to know the story behind their food, whether pesticides and herbicides were used on the plants, and want to feel confident that they’re feeding themselves and their family safe and healthy food. Our goal is to make it ridiculously easy to grow your own, so you know exactly where your food comes from.”

With the able assistance of $500,000 from the “Queen of QVC,” Lori Greiner, MacKugler’s idea grew in new directions. As demonstrated in his first appearance on QVC, not only did Seedsheet provide its original sheet, it branched out to offer a fully equipped kit that included a seedsheet and cloth growing bag. Going beyond herbs and veggies, the company now has packages for those wanting to add flowers to their home or garden. Just add soil, and you are good to go.

Grow Your Own Garden Kit Seed Sheet by Lori Greiner on QVC

Seedsheet’s marketing approach differs from competitors in the home-grow space as the product is sold based on the vision of what consumers can do with the end results of their labor. Kits are cleverly designed with eye-catching packaging for creating herbs, salads, and Caprese (although cheese is not included). Each kit sold for $24.96 on QVC in early April.

The indoor gardening/desk gardening/home grow space is simultaneously moving in many directions. While Seedsheet’s concept is novel, the idea is more about packaging than a market disruptor. The internet is loaded with companies such as Bloomin’ who make “seed sheets” that can be put in a planter or a readily available cloth bag similar to the one with Seedsheet. In fact, inexperienced home gardeners can plant herbs or microgreens in a folded-over paper towel and achieve the same results as Seedsheet.

The vast range of startups hoping to dominate this interesting opportunity hopes to take advantage of millennials who want a food experience that focuses on healthy eating and convenience. The million-dollar (or more) question is whether the young post-digital, short-attention-span literati want to make the effort—as slight as it is—to tend to their techy gardens on a regular basis. What we will learn over the next year or so is whether this is a breakthrough idea or a solution in search of a market.