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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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LG Integrates Innit and SideChef Guided Cooking At CES

LG, which showed off its ThinQ line of smart appliances at CES this week, announced it will integrate with SideChef and Innit guided cooking platforms, allowing them to operate LG appliances. So, when you’re following recipes from SideChef or Innit, those apps will talk to LG SmartThinQ ovens and ranges to automatically set heating temperatures, modes and cooking times.

SideChef and Innit are part of a wave of guided-cooking apps that use a combination of interactive elements such as timers, photos and video to help cooks of all levels prepare meals more easily. In partnering with LG, these guides now move off the screen and into the real world to do some of the actual work of cooking for you.

The guided cooking space heated up this week with with other major players making big announcements. Elsewhere at CES, Whirpool announced that its Yummly guided cooking app will be able to send instructions to its appliances. And over at the Kitchen and Bath Show in Orlando, Hestan announced that its guided cooking technology will move inside appliances, the first of which is a cooktop from a new residential line from Meyer called Hestan Indoor.

Notably absent from all the guided cooking news this week is Samsung. The company showed off its latest Family Hub fridge that could mirror your phone or Samsung TV, but there was no mention of any connections within a smarter kitchen.

Right now, the press announcement only mentions SideChef and Innit interacting with the hot side of cooking, though it’s easy to see that integration extending into the fridge. The new LG ThinQ refrigerator already recommends meals based on the food you already have. Presumably, SideChef and Innit will also get access to that same ingredient list, and customers could see a more valuable end-to-end solution by using their guided recipe app of choice.

And there is value in helping transform anyone into a decent cook by breaking down the silos between recipe and actual cooking. The instructions are no longer an inert list separate from the result, they are now actively involved in the result.

LG says it’s committed to an open strategy when it comes to creating the smart home. So you can expect more announcements like this to come out this year. Which is good, because partnerships like these also helps allay any fears of getting locked into an ecosystem when buying an expensive, connected appliance.

As these smart cooking platforms expand, partner up and open up, recipes talking to your appliances is something we’ll all be talking about.

BSH Acquires Controlling Interest in Kitchen Stories As Part Of ‘Connected Cooking’ Strategy

Late last month, BSH Home Appliances, the largest appliance manufacturer in Europe, announced it had acquired a controlling interest in Kitchen Stories, maker of video-rich cooking apps with step-by-step instructions and recipes.

The deal is yet another sign of how large appliance makers are moving quickly to transform themselves into content companies and connect their appliances to digital content platforms.

In the announcement, the two companies said they had plans to integrate Kitchen Stories content into BSH’s smart home connectivity app and platform, Home Connect. While initial integration will start with basic tasks like temperature setting for Bosch and Siemens appliances, more capabilities like guided cooking will be built into the app over time.

Kitchen Stories cofounder Verena Hubertz outlined the vision around integration with the Home Connect platforms:

“This investment will enable us to tap the connected kitchen market, and to help design the cooking of the future. We’ll develop solutions to help users in all aspects of the cooking process – from inspirations for recipes to added-value services. And we’ll be combining our own findings with those of BSH about what consumers want. That will enable us to reflect users’ expectations better, and to make Kitchen Stories even more attractive. Kitchen Stories will also soon be integrated into the Home Connect ecosystem, and will gradually be expanded with new applications.”

This deal is the latest in a string of moves by appliance companies to more deeply integrate their cooking hardware with cooking content as the kitchen becomes increasingly digital. Earlier this year Whirlpool acquired Yummly as the kitchen entered what Whirlpool exec Brett Dibkey described as a ‘transformation.’ A new crop of startups like Hestan Cue, ChefSteps, SideChef, and Innit have been busily creating a variety of products that create immersive guided cooking offerings that connect with cookware and appliances, and this summer the media startup Buzzfeed moved into guided cooking with the launch of its Tasty One Top.

The deal caps what has been a few years of fast growth for Kitchen Stories, an early entrant into the video-guided cooking app space alongside others like SideChef. According to the company, the Kitchen Stories app now has millions of users and has been released in 150 countries worldwide.

Another interesting aspect of the deal is it marks a successful exit for a women-led company.  Like many other tech segments, women have been under-represented in the smart kitchen, so hopefully the move is a sign of increasing momentum and encouragement for women-led startups in the space.

Lastly, the deal comes just over a month before CES, where big tech companies like Bosch often show off their latest products. I would expect to see the company at least showcasing Kitchen Stories early integration in Las Vegas.

You can see an interview with the two Kitchen Stories cofounders Verena Hubertz and Mengting Gao and BSH Chairman Karsten Ottenberg below:

Ten Questions for BSH and Kitchen Stories

If Cooking Utensils Were Game Controllers, Would Millennials Cook More?

We have a cooking crisis on our hands.

At least that’s if you believe those who suggest Millennials are not mastering basic physical world skills – like cooking – as they wile away the hours staring at screens.

While surveys, including our own, have shown that Millennials are in fact cooking, there’s no doubt they (and my fellow busy Gen-Xers) could benefit from mastering some basic cooking skills. Coming up with reasons for cooking skills education is easy – you can save money, impress friends, try new kinds of food – but perhaps the most convincing argument is there’s a growing body of research showing a correlation between cooking at home and better health outcomes over time.

So, if cooking is good for us and society at large, doesn’t it make sense to get young people cooking more? And if so, the question becomes how to do that?

One way is to bring cooking and food information to young people in a format they can appreciate. Buzzfeed and others racking up billions of views monthly by creating highly shareable content in the form of visually fun cooking videos. YouTube and Facebook are enabling the rise of independent content creators as well as food-focused multichannel networks like Tastemade which tap into a growing hunger for food-specific content.

Another idea is teaching kitchens, which have become fashionable in places like Japan. ABC Cooking School has 125 locations in Japan, and the primary customer for the schools are young Japanese women (9 out of 10 students are women) who want to learn basic cooking skills.

But as most of us in the tech world knows, maybe the most surefire way to create more engagement in an activity is to add a layer of gaming to it.

One way to do that is through gamification. Gamification is the concept of adding game dynamics to almost any online activity. Whether it’s in the form of virtual rewards for your bank or badges from that online class you’re taking, most of us have used some form of gamification, and now cooking apps like SideChef are using game dynamics to get consumers cooking.

Then there are actual video games created to increase interest in a given topic. There’s no shortage of basic video games that integrate some cooking concept, from Nintendo’s Cooking Mama series to Overcooked from Steam, but where these games fall short in that they don’t put cooking tools in your hands. While you may be chopping veggies insanely fast on Cooking Mama, this doesn’t directly translate since you can’t use a game controller to make dinner.

But what if we were to make game controllers out of actual cooking tools? In other words, what if the knives, spoons, spatulas, and pans we used to make dinner with became part of the video game itself?

I know it sounds crazy, but bear with me. If you look at other physical crafts like knitting, creators have already started to make the actual craft tool one in the same as the video game controller.

Take Loominary, an open source game where the video game controller is a tabletop loom. The game’s creators created a computer software game that takes inputs from RFID tags on the loom shuttles and then registers choices made by the user as they start weaving on the loom.

You can see Loominary in action below:

Loominary Prototype Demo

Loominary uses RFID tags embedded in loom shuttles, but there’s no reason cooking tools couldn’t also use other sensors much the way today’s smart footballs and basketballs pack in sensors like accelerometers to track performance, speed and technique. Add in things like machine vision – and there’s no shortage of efforts to layer machine vision with food – and you may have the makings of an interesting video game concept: making dinner.

Imagine being immersed in a video game where you are egged on by a virtual Top Chef panel of judges as you cook a meal. You can compete against yourself, someone in another city, or against a virtual Heston Blumenthal.

At the end of the game, you not only have a score, but you have a dinner to eat.

While the Tasty One Top isn’t a game platform, there’s no reason it couldn’t be. If the company mapped all those Tasty cooking videos to work with the cooktop, why couldn’t they eventually track behavior and even have competitions for the best rendition of Tasty meals made at home?

And who’s to say you couldn’t combine cooking with virtual reality experiences. I’m sure Apple has thought about how the iPhone X’s augmented reality could be applied in the kitchen.

So maybe cookware companies aren’t gaming companies. But, with increasing investment in software and sensors, the arrival of machine vision and augmented reality, I’m betting some companies will look to create a tasty combination of cooking and gaming to get millennials to put on the cooking apron.

Podcast: Juicero is Dead

Over the past six months, there probably hasn’t been a company more roundly mocked in startup land than Juicero. The funmaking started after a Bloomberg article showed how one can squeeze the company’s juice packs by hand, essentially making superfluous the company’s $400 juicer.

When you raise $120 million, this is a PR problem, one the company seemingly never recovered from.

And so this week, the company announced it is shutting down.

But the company’s problems went beyond an expensive juicer. On today’s podcast, Ashley Daigneault and I discuss how the company had created a nearly impossible logistical and supply chain problem almost from the outset.

We also discuss Miele’s new RF solid state powered wall oven and Sharp’s deal with SideChef, as well as Mike’s trip to Tokyo for the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan.

SideChef Plans To Be The Engine Behind Sharp’s Smart Kitchen Appliances

SideChef began in 2013 with a mission to make cooking easy and fun and to take the guesswork and heavy reading out of recipes. Over time, the recipe app startup has evolved to think of itself as a platform for the connected kitchen and today announced a partnership with electronics and appliance giant Sharp at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Japan.

SideChef will now be the smart software behind Sharp’s connected appliance lineup, powering the mobile app and recipe content to provide guided cooking tools when using the brand’s products. The first internet-enabled appliance from Sharp that will include SideChef’s intelligence is the Sharp SuperSteam+ Convection Oven, an oven that includes a new way to grill, brown and even roast foods using super heated steam.

This announcement builds out SideChef’s vision of being the de facto smart kitchen platform, giving manufacturers software that can bridge the experience and control of different kitchen devices and engage users to go beyond basic connectivity. The Sharp “powered by SideChef” app will include over 5000 machine ready recipes with built-in control for the integrated appliances. The recipes give users a guided cooking experience, automatically setting timers, playing educational videos or suggesting helpful tips based on the ingredients, time of day, season or location.

SideChef’s CEO and founder Kevin Yu says that the company will also help Sharp build an engaged user community and drive relevant content – which is a core strength of SideChef’s business. But Yu hopes to help manufacturers think differently about their IoT strategies and move past connectivity as the end goal.

“We’re not just here to connect things or teach people how to cook. That’s a great goal, but that’s 1.0. We want to help manufacturers see how they can create real engagement and monetization from these platforms,” commented Yu in an interview with The Spoon.

It’s not a surprise that SideChef is thinking beyond the intelligence inside the app to the user experience and engagement. Yu’s background is in game design and development, so he’s often thinking about the gameification of activities in the kitchen.

“The goal is to get the user engaged and willing to spend more money in micro transactions. This is what we think of as modern monetization for the smart kitchen,” he adds.

Sharp is one of a handful of appliance manufacturers looking at third party companies to connect and serve as the content partner behind their connected appliances. Earlier this year smart kitchen startup Drop announced an integration partnership with GE and later Bosch and Innit, a kitchen platform and data company also explored work with Whirlpool in the past.

“Sharp was looking for ways to combine convenience with perfect cooking results from our next generation of smart connected home appliances,” Jim Sanduski, President of Sharp Home Electronics Company of America said in a prepared statement.  “SideChef already offers an award winning mobile culinary platform so partnering with them to integrate cooking operation and control was an easy decision.”

The company plans to roll out its internet-connected line of products starting with the SuperSteam wall oven along with the Sharp app powered by SideChef in fall 2018.

SideChef and Sharp announced their partnership at the first-ever Smart Kitchen Summit in Japan. To see Kevin Yu and others speak at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle in October, use code SPOON for 25% off tickets.

Allrecipes And Others Leveraging Amazon For Guided Cooking Efforts

Allrecipes, one of the web’s original food and recipe pioneers, is making yet another move into the smart kitchen.

And not surprisingly, the nearly twenty-year-old company has once again partnered up with crosstown online commerce giant and newly minted grocery store chain operator Amazon to do so.

This week Allrecipes announced it is one of the first companies to launch a video skill for cooking. The company’s new Alexa video skill fuses video and photos with step-by-step instructions to make their recipes fully immersive cooking guides.

Meredith (owner of Allrecipes) President Stan Pavlovsky highlights how the addition of voice and video transitions a simple recipe into an interactive experience: “Voice-led experiences are playing a rapidly growing role in helping home cooks discover and prepare recipes with ease. Adding visual guidance to that experience is the next step. With this skill, Allrecipes turns the cooking show of the past into an interactive and fully customizable experience that has more than 60,000 paths to choose.”

As recipes become more interactive and increasingly connected to cooking hardware through software, a new battleground is opening up to become the guided cooking software platform for the kitchen. While the new Alexa video skill no doubt creates new partnership opportunities for Allrecipes to work with cookware and appliance manufacturers, it also puts them more directly in competition with other players creating cooking guidance systems centered around recipe information.

Just this past month, cooking app maker SideChef launched its first app from a new publishing platform designed to create personality-centric guided cooking apps. The Budget Bytes app, created in cooperation with well-known food blogger Beth Moncel (the author behind the popular Budget Byes blog), combines photos, Alexa voice guidance with step-by-step instructions for the user.

This move follows efforts by companies like Drop and Innit to create guided cooking software platforms that connect directly with third party appliances and cookware through IoT technology.  Others, like ChefSteps and Hestan Cue, have created fully integrated systems that fuse recipe driven visual instruction apps with sensor-enabled cooking devices.

At the center of much of this activity is Amazon, acting as an IoT and AI “arms dealer” with Alexa and its hardware platforms to help power companies in the kitchen space to create new products and accelerate transitions to new business models. The new SideChef app integrates with Alexa, as does ChefSteps for its Joule connected cooking appliance. And while we have yet to see any significant move by these companies to utilize Amazon’s image recognition APIs, it’s just a matter of time before one of these companies incorporates the company’s computer vision technology as part of a guided cooking system.

Of course, Amazon partners always have to wonder which parts of the business the Seattle giant will ultimately decide to enter themselves. As we saw with Nucleus, Amazon often will partner with companies and then create specific products that look similar to those products. And, as Geekwire points out, with Whole Foods Amazon now has access to a large cache of recipe information. Chances are they will eventually look to that data more closely with the Alexa and Dash platforms to power their own devices and create opportunities for direct commerce.

But for now, Allrecipes and others are happy to work with Amazon to help transition the recipe from a simple list of ingredients to interactive guidance platform.

Analysis: Why Did Whirlpool & Innit Call It Quits?

Last week, news broke that Whirlpool and Innit’s partnership to build connected kitchen products has come to an end.

While the news came as a surprise to some, the fact that Whirlpool made a big smart kitchen splash at CES this year without any mention of Innit had us wondering last January about the status of the relationship.

Based on conversations over the past two months, this is what we have learned:

Because Innit’s relationship with Whirlpool was initially exclusive, this essentially left the smart kitchen startup on the sidelines for much of 2016 as other smart kitchen OS players such as Drop were free to talk to any number of major appliance brands. For a platform startup like Innit, there are only so many big consumer-focused kitchen brands to target, so as Drop announced deals with Bosch and GE/Haier, this put pressure on the company to essentially pursue other relationships outside of Whirlpool.

The loss of world’s biggest appliance maker from their client list no doubt hurts, but now the company is free to pursue other brands. They also have plans to amplify their own brand this year by connecting directly with consumers, the first step in which was the company’s recent acquisition of ShopWell, a personalized nutrition and food shopping app that has been downloaded over 2.5 million times. The acquisition also extends the company’s reach into the grocery and food retail market and will allow them to integrate ShopWell’s packaged food data into their own kitchen offering.  Innit also has plans to create their own consumer-facing branded app that will work with a variety of connected products.

For Whirlpool’s part, their relationship with Innit was viewed as part and parcel of a more exploratory phase of the market. With 2017 rolling around and the company viewing the market for connected kitchen products as more viable, it decided to more actively develop and expand their own connected product technology.  As one source told me, “if a startup can do with a few million dollars, why can’t the world’s biggest kitchen brand do it?”

Bottom line, this news is an indication of just how fast-moving and competitive the platform battle for the connected kitchen has become. With Innit back in the dating pool, Drop locking up two big partners and others like SideChef pursuing big kitchen brands, the market for independent third party platforms likely will only get more competitive throughout 2017. One big unknown is how Whirlpool’s decision to largely focus on developing their own platform for Whirlpool branded products might influence other large kitchen brands who have yet to really develop connected kitchen strategies. It also is a sign that we might see some of the same fragmentation that plagued the smart home in recent years, a market which suffered as many big players pursued their own non-interoperable platform efforts.

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The Subscription Kitchen: Connected Kitchen and Home Delivery (VIDEO)

How do subscription models and the smart kitchen fit together?

That’s what Brita Rosenheim, the founder of Rosenheim Advisors, wanted to find out at last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit on the panel entitled, “The Subscription Kitchen: Connected Kitchen and Home Delivery”.

Joining her on the panel were:

Daniel Rausch – head of Amazon Dash, Amazon’s auto-replenishment platform

Kevin Yu – CEO of SideChef, a connected kitchen platform company working with Chef’d on a mealkit subscription service

David Rabie – CEO of Tovala, a company creating smart oven with a mealkit delivery subscription service.

Podcast: The New Food Network – Food Media & Discovery in Age of Buzzfeed

This episode features a conversation from the stage of Benaroya Hall in Seattle at SKS16. Included in the conversation are:

Ashlee Clark-Thompson, CNET; Tiffany Lo, Buzzfeed/Tasty; Kevin Yu, SideChef; Esmée Williams, AllRecipes

The panel description from this session is as follows: The number one video publisher in the world today is Buzzfeed’s Tasty, which had almost 2 billion views in the month of May for its short how-to cooking videos made for the Millennial generation. In the age of apps and online video, cooking discovery and education is changing rapidly and this panel will explore what the Cooking Channel of tomorrow will look like.

The News Show: Smart Cookie Ovens & Malibu Bay Breeze (Podcast)

Mike and Ashley are back talking about the latest in the world of the connected kitchen and foodtech.

To subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show in iTunes, go here. To download this episode, click here.

Stories discussed on the show include:

Appliance as a service 
Juicero’s new CEO
SideChef’s smart easy bake oven for cooking
Teforia’s $12 million infusion
Ashley’s experience with the Nima gluten sensor
Jenn-Air’s Nest integration
Ashley explains why Rhode Islanders are still drinking the Malibu Bay Breeze
A discussion of whether George Foreman actually invented a grill
Smart Kitchen Summit pictures are out!
SKS17 pre-registration has begun!

Enjoy!

SideChef Continues Expansion Efforts With CHiP Cookie Oven

SideChef is having a busy year.

In April they announced their intention to move beyond a cooking app to create a smart kitchen software platform for hardware makers. Then came the hire of former DACOR President, Steve Joseph, as their Chief Product Officer. A month ago, the company announced a partnership with Chef’d to create a chef-curated meal delivery service.

Now? They’re getting directly into hardware themselves with their first announced product, the CHiP smart cookie oven.

They launched their Kickstarter campaign this week for CHiP, an intelligent oven that utilizes a patent-pending convection cooking technique to speed up the process to 10 minutes. They also will offer cookie pods that come in a variety of flavors and utilizes biodegradable parchment paper for easy insertion into the cookie oven.

The expansion into hardware itself is not altogether surprising. While the hiring of Joseph was a signal the company would be working to build deeper relationships with appliance makers, the unveiling of the CHiP cookie oven now shows that having a senior exec with hardware experience also meant creating their own hardware.

The CHiP is also a proof of concept for potential hardware partners that illustrates what they could do with the company’s software, which it has said can be a guided cooking system platform for third party hardware.  It also features other interesting cooking concepts, including what is calling QuickConvect, a patent-pending technology which likely would work with other ovens, as well as an interesting social-cooking concept with the cookie-gram feature, which allows users of the CHiP to send messages to others.

The only question now is where SideChef decides to take its own hardware ambitions. While there’s no doubt the CHiP is a showcase for technologies they can bring to other partners, they have also indicated this may be just the first of other hardware products.

See the CHiP Kickstarter video below:

Raised In Era Of Frozen Meals, Millennials Go Online To Learn How To Cook (VIDEO)

Back when Esmée Williams started working at Allrecipes in the late nineties, search inquiries on the massively popular recipe discovery site were, to say the least, a little basic.

“The top search term (in 1999) was ‘recipes’,” said Williams at the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle.

Nowadays things are a little different.

“Today the search terms are so much more granular,” said Williams, now VP of consumer and brand strategy at the site which brought in 46 million seekers last November. “It’s like pork chops, gluten free, paleo, ready in 15 minutes, no garlic. The cooks have become so much more sophisticated.”

Williams joined other panelists to discuss how social media and digital platforms are changing the way consumers discover recipes and teach themselves to cook. Alongside Williams was Tiffany Lo, producer for Buzzfeed’s Tasty, Kevin Yu, CEO of SideChef, and the session was moderated by CNET journalist Ashlee Clark-Thompson.

One big focus of the 30-minute conversation (which you can watch below) was how Millennials are changing food and cooking discovery.

Kevin Yu pointed out that food and social media are tightly intertwined for Millennials.

“There’s two most shared photos on the Internet,” said Yu. “The first is the selfie. The second is food. It really starts with food discovery, food passion. Millennials are incredibly passionate about food.”

Williams pointed to the upbringing of many Millennials to explain their hunger for cooking information online.

One hurdle for Millennials wanting to cook is “not having that right skill set,” said Williams.

“A lot of folks have grown up in homes where both parents worked, in the eighties and nineties there were a lot of frozen meals that hit the mainstream. Maybe they didn’t get the skills they might need. Certainly, video plays a huge role in helping them obtaining those skills.”

This hunger to learn no doubt helped fuel the rise of Buzzfeed’s Tasty, which has used its quick-play first-person perspective recipe videos to fuel its growth on the way to becoming biggest video publisher worldwide in early 2016. According to Lo, the idea started as something fairly simple.

“When we started out, we were focusing on YouTube before Tasty,” said Lo. “Then our editorial team started uploading single recipe videoes with their iPhone. A little over a year later, decided to make a team and page dedicated to food videos.” The results surprised even her.

“No one on the team expected it to grow as fast as it did,” she said.

When Clark-Thompson asked about the importance of community, Allrecipes’ Williams said she is continually amazed at how communal the act of cooking can be.

“It has amazed me at how willing people are to share their food experiences. On some recipes, we have ten thousand reviews. It always surprises me, what does that ten-thousandth person feel like they had to say that was so different than all the people before? They just want to say ‘hey, I made this too!'”

Yu said the combination of new hardware and software in the kitchen will create entirely new experiences in coming years, not unlike how it’s recreating the automobile industry today.

“When you have Tesla and you have made an incremental technological jump like adding an electric engine, that’s great for cars, but when you add the software piece, you have a driverless car,” said Yu.

“What is this new driverless car of the smart kitchen space?” he asked.

While the panelists didn’t have the answer for what the driverless car of the smart kitchen would be, Buzzfeed’s Lo did offer some guidance for product makers: follow the Tasty video model.

“Make it approachable and simple,” she said.

Watch video below: