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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

SideChef

SideChef’s Kevin Yu Eyes Next Phase of Growth After Raising a $6 Million Series B

I first encountered SideChef’s CEO Kevin Yu at a rooftop party during CES in March 2015. At the time, SideChef was in its early stages, having been founded just a couple of months prior, and I was beginning to explore kitchen technology. The first Smart Kitchen Summit would take place only eight months after our meeting.

In November, Yu traveled to Seattle to participate in the inaugural Summit and subsequently became a regular attendee at SKS events. After some time had passed since our last catch-up, I invited Yu onto the podcast to discuss his company’s recent funding and inquire about his vision for its future.

I first encountered SideChef’s CEO Kevin Yu at a rooftop party during CES in March 2015. At the time, SideChef was in its early stages, having been founded just a couple of months prior, and I was beginning to explore kitchen technology. The first Smart Kitchen Summit would take place only eight months after our meeting.

In November, Yu traveled to Seattle to participate in the inaugural Summit and subsequently became a regular attendee at SKS events. After some time had passed since our last catch-up, I invited Yu onto the podcast to discuss his company’s recent funding and inquire about his vision for its future.

Originally, SideChef was a recipe app designed to assist users with cooking. In those initial years, SideChef and similar companies like Innit and Drop/Fresco concentrated on connecting various appliances and developing a tech-driven guidance system for kitchen use.

“We started as just a recipe app to teach a person how to cook,” said Yu. “But then that grew out, and it was like, ‘Hey, wait for a second’, we can help you with not just how to cook, but we can also help you with meal planning, we can help you get your groceries, we can connect that into a smart kitchen device and make that automatic as well, too.”

As SideChef formed partnerships with appliance brands, retailers and CPG brands also expressed interest in connecting and digitizing the shopping experience. This interest intensified with the onset of the pandemic. Consequently, Yu and SideChef focused on shoppable recipes, as it was a more straightforward revenue generation method.

“I think shoppable recipes themselves are just the tip of the iceberg,” Yu commented. “We sent out over 3 million online orders to our retail partners last year through this experience.”

The company plans to use its new funding to leverage the infrastructure it has developed over the past decade. Image recognition technology is one area that could help them do this, as it has potential applications across the entire food ecosystem, from inventory management to automating cooking settings on smart kitchen appliances.

“We believe image recognition is a catalyst-type technology that we hope to continuously build upon the partnerships that we have,” Yu stated.

I’ve been somewhat down on the smart kitchen recently, as it seems companies—especially big brands—have not been innovative. When I asked Yu his thoughts about this, he acknowledged the issue but attributed it to a normal stage in market evolution.

“I think part of the plateau you’ve observed is because some companies, after taking their first swing, have felt that it’s not worth it to try again right now,” said Yu. “Maybe they don’t want to be the leader in this area. Or maybe they don’t have a confident route or sometimes even a confident group to be able to leave those charges internally.”

Despite the obstacles encountered by some players in the smart kitchen industry, Yu remains optimistic about the future of smart kitchen innovation.

“This is about unlocking the value and entering the next chapter, which is where most of this additional investment funding will be directed,” Yu said.

You can hear my full conversation with Yu below.

SideChef Now Offers Shoppable Recipes Through Walmart

Smart kitchen platform SideChef revealed to The Spoon this week that it is now offering shoppable recipe fulfillment through Walmart.

Consumers using SideChef’s app and website can now buy all the ingredients for a recipe with one click and choose from more than 3,300 Walmart stores across the U.S. for curbside pickup or delivery.

Right now, there are 150 shoppable recipes available on SideChef, but that number will bloom to more than 10,000 recipes later this month and in time for the holidays. In addition to shopping directly for recipe ingredients, customers will be able to adjust serving sizes, swap brands, and convert cooking units, as well as see the percentage of each product used so they know what leftovers they will have.

After being dormant for a while, the shoppable recipe space is suddenly seeing a flurry of activity. In July Thermomix launched shoppable recipes through its Cookidoo platform. In August, Swedish shoppable recipe company Northfork (which also works with Walmart) raised $1.1 million. And just last month, Fexy Media sold off its Serious Eats and Simply Recipes to DotDash in order to focus more on its shoppable recipe platform.

Why are shoppable recipes suddenly so hot? Could be because that most of us are still stuck at home, thanks to the global pandemic. Online grocery shopping has shot through the roof, thanks to COVID and improved fulfillment systems from grocery retailers. In fact, the grocery e-commerce sector is expected to hit $250 billion in sales by 2025, so there is plenty of opportunity for shoppable recipe providers like SideChef to get in on the ground floor, as it were, to capitalize on this long-term growth.

Partnering with Walmart, and it’s massive retail footprint, could help push shoppable recipes more into the mainstream. With winter coming and more people stuck at home, there could be a greater need for recipe discovery to mix up any meal monotony that might have set in. Nearly 90 percent of U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Walmart, so shoppable recipes is sitting right in the middle of a Venn diagram of audience and immediate action.

For it’s part, SideChef hasn’t been a slouch itself over this past year. The company’s app landed on Facebook’s Portal smart assistant, and launched a premiums subscription service. To learn more about SideChef and shoppable recipes, check out this deep dive interview with the company’s founder, Kevin Yu, over at Spoon Plus (subscription required).

SideChef Launches Paid App With SideChef Premium

SideChef has gone premium.

The recipe app and smart kitchen platform startup announced last week they were launching a new premium subscription tier to go along with the company’s free app.

The new subscription offering is $49.99/year or $4.99/month. SideChef Premium includes 750 enhanced recipes that feature instructional guidance from the partner chefs, cooking techniques and tips, and voice-guided cooking.

The voice guidance appears to be one of the primary differentiators with the free SideChef app. While SideChef has been working to integrate with voice assistants like Alexa and Bixby for some time, much of the focus of these efforts have been centered around their smart kitchen integrations with bigger appliance brands.

In some ways, SideChef Premium is reminiscent of the Food Network Kitchen app, which made a big splash back when it launched last fall. At the time, the Food Network Kitchen app was positioned as something of a Peloton for the kitchen, but since launch it appears the company has dialed back the ambitions a bit on the live cooking classes and today primarily feature lots of archived video recipes and cooking how-to’s with Food Network cooking personalities.

For SideChef’s part, the company has assembled a group of partner chefs such as Chris Cosentino (a Bravo Top Chef Masters winner), Manon Lagrève (Great British Bake Off) and Logan Guleff, the wunderkid winner of the 2014 MasterChef Jr.

The company had previously worked with popular budget-focused chef Beth Moncel in creating a dedicated paid-app and, as of today, the app is still ranked in the top 10 for paid food and drink apps. Moncel is also one of the 11 launch chefs with the SideChef Premium app.

SideChef’s success at getting paid subscribers will likely depend heavily on prospective consumers wanting access to the more immersive content from collective of chefs the company has put together for the app. The success of the Budget Bytes app with Moncel could be an indication of how SideChef Premium could perform, especially if it gets its partner chefs to evangelize the app.

Today SideChef Premium is available through an app, but the company has indicated that this fall subscribers will be able to access through a browser on any computer at Sidechef.com.

Attention Nana and Pop-Pop: Facebook Portal Adds Recipe App SideChef

Over the past few years, the Amazon Echo Show has become extremely popular as a smart assistant for the kitchen, allowing consumers to quickly access recipes, watch videos, and connect to smart devices.

The Facebook Portal, on the other hand, has largely languished since its release in late 2018 as consumers resisted adding a video-enabled device to their homes from a company that has proven an unreliable steward of their privacy.

However, with the arrival of COVID-19, it seems like the Portal may finally be getting a little traction from its most reliable demographic (seniors) as many of the homebound silver-haired set looks for ways to connect with family during quarantine-times. And now, they can get in on some of that cooking action, too, as Portal added the SideChef smart recipe app to its store last week.

From the SideChef announcement:

SideChef’s signature “smart recipe” format ensures a seamless cooking experience for home cooks of all skill levels with its easy-to-follow guided video recipes, which has been adapted to also fit the screen size for Portal devices.

While the cooking guidance on a kitchen screen is a nice feature to have, I suspect it may be the integration with AmazonFresh that might be a bigger selling point for seniors. My own 70-something mom started using online grocery for the first time during the pandemic, and I’m sure she’d love to add items to her shopping list and order while working in the kitchen.

While the Portal does have Alexa built-in, I’m not sure if the Portal’s Alexa integration connects to Amazon’s delivery service via SideChef (SideChef does work with Alexa on native Amazon devices). If that is the case, it might just the recipe to sell my own Alexa-loving mom on putting a Portal in the kitchen.

For SideChef, Facebook is yet another partner in a long list of integrations for the guided cooking and smart kitchen app over the past few years including Samsung’s Bixby, Amazon Fresh (as mentioned), and GE/Haier to name a few.

According to SideChef, the app is available now for the Portal Mini, Portal, and Portal+.

SideChef Launches Guided Cooking Integration With Bixby, Samsung’s AI Assistant

This week, SideChef announced an integration with Samsung’s intelligent voice assistant Bixby. The partnership centers around the launch of a voice-activated guided cooking capsule (capsules are Samsung’s equivalent to Amazon Alexa skills) which will give users of Bixby-powered mobile phones access to approximately 15 thousand recipes, most with step-by-step video-powered cooking instructions.

From the news release:

“Users can hone in on the exact recipe they would like by adding natural language constraints, such as dietary restriction, cuisine type, and even specific ingredients. Once a recipe is selected, SideChef provides video instruction through Bixby to guide home cooks through the entire recipe preparation process, from start to finish.”

While Samsung’s voice assistant doesn’t quite have the same degree of loyal usership as, say, Google Assistant on mobile phones or Amazon Alexa in the home, it is installed on a whole lot of Samsung products. Last year Samsung CEO D.J. Koh declared that the company’s AI assistant could reach a total of 500 million devices if it were to be installed on every Samsung device.

Of course, to reach that massive audience, SideChef’s new capsule would then have to be installed by the consumer, who will be able to find it on the Bixby Marketplace (Samsung’s “app store” for Bixby Capsules). Samsung launched the marketplace in mid-2019, and the newness of the store may actually play to SideChef’s advantage as theirs is probably one of the few recipe-centric voice apps and most likely the only guided cooking capsule on the still relatively bare shelves of the Bixby marketplace.

This move comes a year after SideChef launched on Amazon’s video-enabled Alexa devices, the Alexa Echo Show and Echo Spot, and just a couple months after the smart kitchen software startup announced an integration with Haier’s smart fridges at IFA 2019. While it isn’t immediately clear if the Bixby integration will put SideChef on Samsung Family Hub refrigerators, I would expect that will happen sooner rather than later.

Finally, while SideChef continues to rack up appliance partnerships, the company is also beginning to explore partnerships with big CPG brands. Last month the startup partnered with Bacardi through its Alexa integration to enable step-by-step drink mixing.  This trend of food brands integrating with smart kitchen software platforms isn’t limited to SideChef, as SideChef competitor Innit announced a partnership in September with Mars through a Google Lens integration that will enable both guided cooking and personalized meal and nutrition recommendations.

SideChef Brings Guided Recipes to Haier Smart Fridge Lineup

Today at IFA in Berlin, SideChef and Haier announced a new partnership which will put SideChef’s guided recipes on all new Haier smart fridges released in the European market. The new feature will offer step-by-step cooking instructions and recommend recipes to owners of Haier smart fridges based on the current content of their fridge.

From the release:

Guided recipes are now at users’ fingertips, ensuring successful meal preparation every time. SideChef’s rich recipe content is curated from chefs and culinary professionals, unlocking unlimited meal potential while taking into consideration cuisine cravings, dietary restrictions, and general preferences.

This deal marks another step in the SideChef-Haier relationship, which has been growing steadily for over a year now. The two companies worked closely on development of the GE Kitchen Hub smart display and this past April they expanded their relationship by building an integration that enabled users to send cooking instructions and parameters to different GE appliances from within the SideChef app.

SideChef has in the past done deals with GE in the U.S. and Electrolux is Asia. Now, with the addition of Haier in Europe, SideChef will continue to expand its geographic-specific relationships in the appliance space as it helps Haier build a strong offering in localized language content (such as French and German).

“As Haier China expands its product line out further geographically, we are working with them to have products that are localized through content,” SideChef CEO Kevin Yu told me over the phone. “Recipes are a huge driver for them and others.”

The SideChef content will make its way to all of Haier Europe’s new smart fridges with displays later this year. While the initial version of these guided recipes won’t have the ability to drive and interact with other Haier appliances (such as with the GE implementation in the U.S.), Yu didn’t rule it out from future versions.

And while today’s news is based on the company’s new partnership with a major appliance brand, Yu told me that it’s not just hardware companies he’s talking to nowadays.  Meetings with big food and appliance brands are taking up as much or more of his calendar space as they all have gotten serious about digitization in the face of an ever-growing threat from Amazon. Yu said it started with the Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods and momentum has only grown since that time.

“We’re seeing a lot of urgency from the food guys,” he said.

Food Tech News: GE’s Latest Kitchen Hub, New Vegan IKEA Meatballs, and Meal Delivery Galore

Happy Saturday! This week was a big one for us at The Spoon — we kicked off our shiny new Future Food newsletter covering all things alternative protein, from plant-based meat to insects to cellular agriculture. Make sure to subscribe here.

But for now, let’s turn to this week’s food tech news. We have stories about IKEA’s new plant-based meatballs, GE’s latest smart kitchen hub, and a new frozen meal delivery service. Enjoy!

Mosaic, a new frozen meal delivery company, launches on East Coast
There’s a new D2C meal delivery service on the scene. This week Mosaic, a company which ships frozen, pre-cooked vegetarian bowls to consumers’ doorsteps within one day, began operations on the East Coast. The bowls range in price from $8.99 to $12.49 which is pretty pricey compared to what you’d find in the freezer section of the grocery store, but on par with traditional meal kits. Mosaic raised a seed round of funding in 2018 and is planning to launch in new cities soon.

Photo: GE

GE’s starts selling new kitchen hub, amps up SideChef partnership
The latest version of GE’s kitchen hub, which made its first appearance at CES this January, is now hitting store shelves (h/t CNET). Priced around $1,199, the hub has a built-in smart touchscreen which includes guided cooking capabilities from SideChef.

In fact, SideChef and GE have been ramping up their partnership lately. Sidechef’s app is now connected to a sizeable 74 GE ovens and ranges, allowing home cooks to set cook times, monitor temperature, and change up the cooking mode on their connected appliances.

Photo: IKEA

IKEA’s making a meatier version of their plant-based meatballs
Vegetarians who love Swedish meatballs, rejoice. The Daily Mail reports that IKEA is developing a new plant-based version of their famous meatballs which will look and taste more like the “real thing.” The Swedish furniture giant launched a vegan meatball made of chickpeas and vegetables back in 2015, but this new version will apparently be more in line with the more realistic offerings from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. IKEA plans to trial their new meatballs in early 2020.

Photo: Wegmans

Wegmans teams up with DoorDash
This week East Coast supermarket chain Wegmans announced that it will partner DoorDash to launch its Wegmans Meals 2GO food delivery service. Hungry people can use the Wegmans Meals 2GO app to order from the Wegmans’ prepared food section, which includes pizza, salads, and sushi. Customers can opt for carry-out or curbside pickup, or can get delivery for orders of $20 or more if they live within a 5 mile radius. So far the service is available in two locations in Rochester, New York and one spot in Virginia, and Wegmans plans to roll out the service to 40 stores by the end of this year.

Did we miss anything? Tweet us @TheSpoonTech!

Electrolux Partners with SideChef to Connect Cooking Journey in Asian Market

Today Electrolux announced a new partnership with guided cooking company SideChef to create a smart kitchen platform for their Asian Pacific (APAC) market. SideChef’s tech will be used to provide guided cooking abilities (and more) via Electrolux’s consumer-facing app.

This announcement comes a few months after Electrolux partnered with Innit to integrate the company’s smart kitchen platform technology into their appliances in the European market. However, in Europe, users have to download the Innit app to use its software. Under the Asian partnership, the smart kitchen company’s tech will be integrated with the Electrolux app itself; In short, SideChef’s software will be the engine powering Electrolux’s Taste platform in the Asia market. (That is, everything Electrolux does related to cooking and the kitchen.)

“We are the first — and, I believe, only — company where SideChef’s tech is being integrated seamlessly inside our app,” Jaimohan Thampi, Head of Digital Transformation and IoT at Electrolux Asia Pacific, told us over the phone.

Since this partnership is in APAC, and not Europe or the U.S., Electrolux faces a few challenges. While Australia is similar to Europe or the US, many of Asia’s emerging economies like Vietnam or Thailand do not feature western-style cooking equipment beyond surface cooking (ranges/induction cooktops), which means the company is more limited in what it can do with connectivity. Because of this, the initial approach with the app will be on providing cooking guidance to any cook, no matter the kitchen set-up.

“We’re taking an approach of connected consumer first, then evolving into the connected appliance,” said Thampi, which he hopes will give APAC consumers the confidence to cook new, international dishes.

The app went live in Singapore yesterday and will gradually roll out in other APAC countries. Electrolux is targeting a release in Australia/New Zealand in August, the Philippines in September, and October on for the rest of the region. They’re starting first with English-speaking countries since it’ll, obviously, be a much bigger lift to translate app into new languages and cultures.

Taking a step back, Electrolux is playing the long game with the SideChef integration. By nurturing home cooks in APAC countries that not only want to prepare meals that go beyond basic cooktops but also have the confidence to do so thanks to SideChef’s app, means that they’re essentially creating a new consumer base for their kitchen appliances.

But they’re not stopping there. “We want to be the go-to player in everything around taste,” said Thampi. Especially in the digital realm. In addition to guided cooking, Electrolux is also looking into grocery delivery, meal planning, ingredient substitution, and social sharing, as well as post-meal cleanup and food waste reduction. To do that, they’ll have to rely pretty heavily on collaboration.

They’re not the only ones. SideChef dropped the news at the Smart Kitchen Summit Europe that they’d be providing the smart software behind Swiss company V-ZUG’s connected appliances. This comes after SideChef announced its partnership with Sharp (at the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan) and integrated with Amazon Fresh to provide shoppable recipes in the U.S. Kevin Yu, CEO of SideChef, hinted that they’ll be dropping more partnership announcements over the next few months. (Stay tuned.)

After making moves to partner with Innit in Europe a few months ago, Electrolux is taking large strides to differentiate itself from other appliance makers hoping to make it big with software-enabled cooking. LG has partnered with both Innit and SideChef, Kenwood launched a new multicooker powered by Drop, and Whirpool has its Yummly integration.

According to a job listing we found last month, Electrolux is also working away at something called the ‘Electrolux Connectivity Platform,’ which our own Michael Wolf predicted could be an IoT cloud and linked mobile platform to support future connected products for the company.

All this is to say that Electrolux is trying to get out in front of the connected cooking market and own the at-home meal journey, and they’re trying to do it all over the world. SideChef, for its part, wants to become the go-to “engine” powering the smart kitchen revolution. This move is an important test case for connected appliances and guided cooking apps in the APAC market, but also for the two companies’ partnership overall. Because if it works out, I’m betting they’ll vie for global (smart kitchen appliance) domination.

SideChef Announces New Partnership with Appliance Company V-ZUG

Today, SideChef announced at Smart Kitchen Summit Europe that they will be launching a partnership with Swiss appliance company V-ZUG. They will provide smart software behind V-ZUG’s connected appliance lineup, providing cooking tools integrated into the brand’s products.

“We chose to work with V-ZUG because they have so much advanced, cutting-edge technology on the market, as well as unique products (like their connected oven),” said SideChef Founder and CEO Kevin Yu.

Director of Business Development for V-ZUG Manuel Faeh told us that they were excited for the SideChef partnership, which will add a smart digital layer to their products. “Devices are constantly adapting and changing,” he said. They hope that the partnership with SideChef will help them to do that.

“One unique part of this integration is the fact that we’re launching in China,” Yu said. Though the majority of SideChef’s staff is based in Shanghai, this will be their first product partnership to launch in Asia. And it’s just the beginning. “5000 of our 10k+ recipes are fully orderable through Amazon Fresh in the U.S.,” said Yu. “And we eventually want to build that out in China as well.”

SideChef is also integrated with smart devices from appliance companies LG and Sharp. In fact, they announced their partnership with appliance company Sharp at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit Japan.

Want to be in the front row for more food technology and innovation announcements? Join us at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle, October 9-10th. 

SideChef Integrates with Amazon Fresh for Shoppable Recipes

Guided cooking startup, SideChef, announced today that it will soon be facilitating shoppable recipes through a collaboration with Amazon Fresh.

Starting this August, SideChef users who are also Amazon Prime members and subscribe to Amazon Fresh will be able to get same-day or next-day delivery of ingredients from more than 5,000 recipes available in the SideChef app. This integration will be available to “major cities” across the U.S..

A SideChef spokesperson told me that when a user finds a recipe that they want to make, there will be a one-button experience to add all the ingredients to a shopping list in Amazon Fresh. From Amazon Fresh, users can edit the list if they already have certain ingredients and proceed with the checkout.

From the language used in the announcement, this doesn’t appear to be an official partnership between SideChef and Amazon. Instead they are referring to it as an “integrated collaboration.” Amazon Fresh has turned into a go-to vehicle to enable shoppable recipes. Fexy, AllRecipes and Whisk have all integrated similar ingredient purchasing options through Amazon in the past year. Perhaps Amazon’s patent for recipe-driven commerce has something to do with it.

We’ve been saying that the recipe is more important than ever and will become the center of the kitchen as it evolves to become a discovery and commerce platform. As Amazon, Walmart, Target and Albertsons all ramp up same-day delivery efforts, recipe providers like SideChef will be able to turn meal inspiration into (relatively) immediate action. Expect more shopping options to pop up on SideChef’s platform to enable customers to shop from their own favorite grocery brand.

This isn’t SideChef’s first foray into commerce, it has an existing collaboration with Chef’d to deliver meal kits based on hundreds of recipes in the SideChef app. SideChef has also been ramping up activity on the guided cooking side, integrating its software platform into LG and Sharp appliances.

If you’re curious about the future of shoppable recipes, you can learn all about them at our Smart Kitchen Summit in Dublin Ireland in June.

Smart Kitchen Startup SideChef Plucks Execs From Anova & Vitamix

SideChef, a smart kitchen app and software platform startup, is growing its executive ranks.

I learned this week that the company is adding execs from both Anova and Vitamix in an expansion of its core team. The company, which is based in Shanghai, China, recently added Anova’s former head of retail, Michael Tankenoff, as head of a new west coast US office focused on business development and strategic partnerships. The company has also hired Ken Zhang, an engineer that had previously worked on Vitamix’s smart kitchen initiatives, to help lead its product management efforts.

I caught up with Tankenoff and SideChef CEO Kevin Yu this week. They explained that the executive expansion is part of a bigger push by SideChef to position the company as a smart kitchen platform and compete with the likes of Innit and Drop.

“I will be focused on continuing to build out [SideChef’s] portfolio of hardware, content, and other partners — as well as help build and scale the marketing arm of the organization,” said Tankenoff. “This comes in conjunction with opening up an office here in San Francisco, which will be the hub for all business development and marketing moving forward.”

These types of moves in a nascent market like the smart kitchen platform space — where everyone knows everyone — are hardly unusual. We saw it with Orange Chef, Whirlpool and Innit, and now we’re seeing with SideChef. While Tankenoff’s departure from Anova is not surprising given the company was acquired last year by Electrolux, the move by Zhang is a bit more intriguing. Zhang worked on the smart kitchen initiative that was led by Vitamix COO Tony Ciepiele, who I also recently learned has left Vitamix as of March to become CEO of toy company Step2 Discovery.

The executive shuffle also comes at a time of increased competition between software startups like SideChef and Innit to provide foundational software platforms for appliance makers to create connected kitchen products, as well as increased focus by big players like Google and Amazon to hook their natural language smart home platforms into the appliance market.

Should be an interesting rest of 2018 in the smart kitchen market.

Electrolux & Innit Partner to Help Consumers Navigate the Cooking Journey

Today at the EuroCucina trade show in Milan, Italy, Electrolux announced a strategic partnership with smart kitchen platform provider Innit in which the two companies will work together to integrate Innit’s software with the Electrolux’s connected appliances to “help consumers throughout the cooking journey.”

The first Electrolux appliance to integrate with the Innit platform will be the camera-enabled steam oven introduced by the Swedish appliance giant last month. Starting in the first quarter of 2019, consumers will be able to use the Innit app to find recipes, plan their meal and send cooking instructions to the Combisteam Pro Smart oven from Electrolux. Over time, the two companies envision that users of Electrolux appliances will be able to use the Innit app as the main app to power the entire cooking process, from meal discovery to shopping to cooking.

For Innit, its partnership with the region’s biggest appliance maker marks a significant entry into a market that requires substantial understanding of country-by-country differences. Unlike the more homogeneous US market, products for the Europe market need to account for differences in consumer cooking preferences across different countries. While some countries tend to embrace surface cooking (induction, etc), others may be more inclined to cook the nightly meal in an oven. By partnering with Electrolux, Innit can tap into the appliance maker’s localization expertise and create an app tailored towards specific user requirements in each locale.

For Electrolux, its partnership with Innit is the first time the company will work with a third party application partner for its connected appliances. The company sees the partnership as a strategic move towards a common software and user experience across appliances. The two companies plan to expand to more cooking devices as well as other appliances such as refrigerators.

One benefit Electrolux sees in tapping into a software-powered cooking experience is the ability to help consumers unlock capabilities that for the most part go unused.

“Our appliances are extremely advanced and often the consumer only uses a small fragment of their capabilities,” Patrick Le Corre, Sr. VP of kitchen products at Electrolux EMEA, told me in a phone interview. “Steam cooking is the best way to cook, but their knowledge of steam cooking is limited. If you bridge the potential of our appliances with an app, we unlock the power for consumers and secure an enjoyable cooking experience.”

The deal comes at an important time as more appliance makers are honing in on strategic partners as the industry continues to transition towards software-enabled cooking. At CES, Whirlpool showed off its Yummly integration while LG announced partnerships with Innit and SideChef, and last month Kenwood launched a new multicooker powered by Drop as part of a longer-team development deal. And now with Electrolux, Innit has locked up Europe’s biggest appliance maker in what looks to be a significant potential long-term partnership.