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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Shopwell

SKS18: Innit Updates Shopwell App, GE Partners with SideChef and Hestan

At the Smart Kitchen Summit today, guided-cooking platform Innit announced an upgrade to its Shopwell app, which helps users discover personalized food recommendations.

Michael Wolf wrote about Shopwell on the Spoon shortly after it launched in 2017:

“The app, which has been downloaded over 2.5 million times, scans packaged foods at retail and provides a score based on the user’s profile. The app’s patented algorithm helps to analyze packaged food and give real-time matching scores against a user’s personalized nutritional profile which factors in a user’s gender, age, allergies and dietary goals.

The deal extends Innit, which has developed a platform for appliance makers to create connected products for the kitchen, further into the nutritional and shopping portions of the food experience. ShopWell’s database of over 400 thousand packaged food items and consumer facing app allows Innit to touch the consumer’s food experience from the point of purchase to consumption.”

The new Shopwell app will double coverage to encompass over 800,000 items, and also adds more social sharing capability so users can make personalized shopping lists which they can share on social media. If the food doesn’t get a high score, Shopwell can recommend “trade-up” foods to better meet your nutrition goals.

GE cooktop with integrated Hestan smart cooking technology.

Across the Smart Kitchen Summit lobby, GE Appliances had an announcement of their own. Two, actually.

First off, the appliance giant announced they are partnering with mobile cooking platform SideChef. GE’s 2019 appliances will feature 5,000 recipes from chefs and bloggers, and will also have meal planning and guided cooking capabilities.

GE also announced it’s working with smart-cooking system Hestan Cue to create induction cooktops and ranges for their Café appliance line. Using Hestan technology, the cooktops can automatically adjust cooking temperature as users go through video-guided recipes.

Café is the first to offer induction ranges with built-in Hestan technology. Owners can download the Hestan Cue app, which will walk them through step-by-step recipe preparation and simultaneously control the temperature. There are also options that can heat pans to the ideal temperature for common dishes, such as seared scallops or scrambled eggs.

Keep checking in for more news from the Smart Kitchen Summit: new products, platforms, updates, and more! Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. 

Innit Acquires ShopWell In Effort To Create A ‘Food GPS’

Today Innit announced they have acquired ShopWell, a personal nutrition app company based in San Carlos, California. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

ShopWell, launched in 2010, was one of the first startups to explore personalized nutrition, an area which is starting to gain momentum in Silicon Valley in an increasingly crowded health and wellness app marketplace. The app, which has been downloaded over 2.5 million times, scans packaged foods at retail and provides a score based on the user’s profile. The app’s patented algorithm helps to analyze packaged food and give real-time matching scores against a user’s personalized nutritional profile which factors in a user’s gender, age, allergies and dietary goals.

The deal extends Innit, which has developed a platform for appliance makers to create connected products for the kitchen, further into the nutritional and shopping portions of the food experience. ShopWell’s database of over 400 thousand packaged food items and consumer facing app allows Innit to touch the consumer’s food experience from the point of purchase to consumption.

Kevin Brown, CEO of Innit, told the Spoon he feels the deal allows the combined company to provide something unique in the market.

“This puts us in a unique spot,” said Brown. “We now have what is the market’s leading personalized food platform and now can pair it with the work Innit has done to make it actionable in the kitchen.”

According to Brown, Innit has done extensive work on creating a raw food database as part of an effort to create recipe-driven instructions sets that enable appliances to recognize and perform cooking functions automatically. By combining this with ShopWell’s large database of packaged foods, Innit now has a new way to differentiate itself.

They will need it in an increasingly heated battle to become the kitchen and food “operating system”. Over the past year, other companies such as Drop and SideChef have joined Innit in chasing appliance makers to provide software to help make their devices more intelligent. Innit’s early push to create a kitchen OS led them to land Whirlpool’s Jenn-Air division last year, and over the past few months Drop has announced deals with Bosch and GE Appliances.

The deal also puts Innit in the middle of what some are calling the “Internet of Food”, a nascent effort to create a data ontology of the food universe. Unlike connected devices with radios, processors and operating systems built in, the food world is much more difficult to map. There are private university driven efforts such as those by IC-3, open source industry projects such as the Sage Project and Food Wiki, and government efforts such as the USDA food products database, which are joined by companies such as Shopwell/Innit and Edamam in expanding and standardizing the food data layer.

Innit’s Brown sees the combined company as providing this map as well as instructions on how to get from one place to other in the kitchen.

“Think of it as Waze,” said Brown. “We’re creating a GPS for food.”

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