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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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New On Tap: Coasters That Interact With You

With thousands of craft beers inundating the market, how does a brewer go about getting noticed? At Coronado Brewing Co., which is one of San Diego County’s oldest craft beer makers, the answer lies in sensor-based coasters that engage the brewer’s consumers with the simple tap of a smartphone.

Coronado Brewing’s smart coasters are based on Thinfilm’s technology, which embeds NFC sensing in packaging, labels and many other kinds of items. Consumers tap NFC-based products with their smartphones and then see a customized landing page, video or other digital asset provided by the brand. The brand can, in turn, see a customer’s data inputs in real-time.

“Any physical product can be turned into a channel at any point in time,” said Davor Sutija, Thinfilm CEO. “Thinfilm’s integrated mobile marketing solution empowers brands to own and manage the communication no matter where the consumer is, whether in the store, at the bar, or in the home.” Thinfilm also has a downloadable case study on its work with Coronado Brewing and the coasters’ impact on online conversions:  “Innovative Coasters Help Brewery Boost Website Conversions”

By deploying the coasters, Coronado Brewing Co. reportedly saw a significant increase in consumer engagement, particularly compared to click-through rates of 0.2% for its existing advertising. In fact, the coasters produced a 13 – 17.5X increase in website conversions, as measured by visits to the website resulting from consumer-initiated taps. Overall, Thinfilm has driven an estimated 92% lift in mobile traffic to the CoastWise landing page.

The smart coasters have been tested with CoastWise Session IPA, a new craft beer introduced by Coronado, brewed in collaboration with Surfrider Foundation, an environmental group. Coronado donates part of its revenues to Surfrider.

“Competing for the attention of craft beer drinkers is intense,” said Brandon Richards, COO, Coronado Brewing Co. “Getting people to hear your brand story without interference is even harder. The Thinfilm team made everything a snap. And our customers really enjoyed the interactive experience.”

Coronado Brewing Co. plans to have its remaining coasters direct consumers to its ecommerce page. The company is also considering using Thinfilm technology for additional point-of-sale opportunities.

Sensor and infrared technologies are also having an impact on managing bars. For example, we’ve covered Nectar Labs’ Getnectar, an IoT-based inventory management system. It uses sensor and infrared technology baked into bottle stoppers to track volumes left in each bottle at a bar. The system produces a dashboard of data that shows amount poured versus estimates and connects to an app to alert the manager when a given bottle is finished. The technology connects to ordering system to keep inventory topped up.

Meanwhile, Thinfilm is expanding its use of NFC sensing and tags within the beer industry. You can find a related set of case studies here.

Image credit: Flickr user John Kannenberg under creative commons license. 

Want to learn about the use of connected commerce in restaurants? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit. Use discount code SPOON for 25% off of tickets.

Plum Raises $9 Million To Create An AI-Powered Keg For Wine

One of the worst things about opening a bottle of wine and not finishing it – aside from the lack of drunkenness – is the shortened shelf-life that bottle now has. Once air hits the wine, oxidation kicks in and at first may allow the beverage to open up but will eventually cause the wine to go bad.

That is the main problem driving wine startup Plum, a company that’s created and patented a smart wine serving appliance (aka a fancy keg for wine) that preserves a bottle of wine for 90 days, allowing single serving pours for up to three months. Plum has just raised a Series A round of $9 million and plans to ship pre-ordered systems this fall. Similar attempts have been made to create devices to make serving beer more enjoyable and close to an “on-tap” experience but Plum claims to have the first appliance that “automatically preserves, chills and serves wine by the glass” in the home market.

Plum has several unique features and requires very little of the consumer to get started. Place a 750 mL bottle of wine into the appliance’s chamber and close the door. The machine’s specialized (and patent-pending) needle will pierce whatever material surrounds the bottle’s opening and extract wine while also injecting argon gas to prevent oxidation.

The appliance is pretty high-tech too: with built-in cameras along with a cloud database of over 6 million wines, Plum will read the wine label and identify on the touchscreen what bottle is inside. The company claims the device is able to accurately identify wine’s 95% of the time. Plum is a good example of the growth in the use of cameras inside cooking and storage appliances paired with cloud intelligence to enhance the consumer experience with food and beverages.

The machine also chills the wine based on the varietal but can be manually adjusted by the user. And the life of the argon gas chamber is up to 200 bottles (refills are $29) so Plum’s initial longevity can be pretty long, depending on your individual drinking habits. The price of Plum’s smart wine appliance isn’t cheap – one system will set you back $1499 and the company is still taking preorders with plans to ship in “fall 2017.”

The $9 million investment, led by Khosla Ventures (Hampton Creek, InstaCart, Consumer Physics) and Las Olas Venture Capital along with other angel investors from the tech, wine and hospitality markets. The company says the investment will be used to take the smart appliance to the hospitality industry, allowing hotels to put Plum in guest rooms to deliver a better “mini-bar” experience and adding another in-room revenue source. Plum has already inked deals with big hotel chains including Four Seasons, Hilton, Marriott and the Hyatt among others.

Sous Vide Cocktails? Yes Please.

The French technique of cooking food slowly in a warm water bath is not new. In fact, sous vide has been around since the early 18th century. For a long time, it was reserved for exclusive and high-end cooking and remained relatively unknown in the consumer world.

In the last few years, however, it’s gone from being a well-known cooking technique in the hobbyist and professional chef communities to a being a food tech darling. Startups like ChefSteps, Anova and Nomiku have all worked to bring sous vide to the masses at affordable prices with recipes that feel accessible.

But whenever you hear about sous vide, whether in an online review or story or on a panel, you hear people talking about cooking steak. Fish. Chicken. Sometimes vegetables. But cocktails? Preparing the newest libation isn’t synonymous with a sous vide machine, but Tasting Table is profiling some chefs that are using the warm water bath technique to create some delicious concoctions.

So how do they do it – and why? A good cocktail has an array of vibrant flavors – from fruits to herbs and spices to fragrances, there’s a lot that goes into crafting the perfect drink. Sous vide can be an excellent way, it turns out, to infuse several flavors into a liquid in preparation for turning it into a cocktail later on.

One restaurant in Santa Monica, California that’s known for its beverage menu uses sous vide in several ways to create delicious liquid flavors to include in their drinks. Tasting Table explains the process,

“For his Rome with a View, he sous-vides a mixture of blood orange peels, blood orange juice, sugar and black pepper pods at 150 degrees for two hours; the sugar and the juice slowly draw oil out of the peel, which in turn infuse with the black pepper.”

The slow infusion of flavors into the liquid is what gives these bartenders the edge; it would be impossible to recreate that type of complexity just with muddling or shaking. Another bar in Brooklyn is using a variety of lemon flavors via a sous vide infusion to recreate a cocktail that probably comes with a stigma in hipster bars – the Cosmo.

Sous vide clearly isn’t going anywhere, and the creative ways to use the machine will only attract more curious home chefs who want to recreate delicious meals and drinks in their own kitchens.

To read about the rest of the delicious cocktails being cooked up with sous vide, check out the Tasting Table piece.

Beer And Tech Get Cozy As Future Of Drink Heats Up

This morning I opened my email to see a new Product Hunt post from angel investor and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis about a new “Inside” newsletter he’s launching called Inside Beer. Calacanis has founded a couple of tech and startup based pubs, including Engadget and “This Week In Startups” along with LAUNCH but also started “Inside,” a series of industry-based vertical newsletters.

To date, Inside has tackled issues like security, San Francisco, venture capital, VR and AR so covering the latest news around beer feels a little off-brand. That is, unless you’re paying attention to what’s happening between tech and the beverage industry.

Says Calacanis,

“This may seem like a “fun” vertical for an Inside newsletter, but the reality is that beer is multi-billion dollar industry and many people – from restaurant folks to brewers to distributors – have a pressing, professional need to stay up on this news. Inside Beer provides it, in one email.”

Considering the emerging startups in the space and the partnerships between Big Beverage and tech to bring things like home brewing and the smart bar to the mainstream, we’re pretty sure 2017 is the year that tech starts to play a major role in the future creation and consumption of beer, wine and spirits. We’ll be watching the Inside Beer newsletter and the future of drink space closely.

Smart Kitchen | Food Tech Wrap-Up From CES 2017

Is it fair to say we’re all collectively exhausted from CES news? The first few weeks of the year are just a deluge of tech press releases about all the things manufacturers plan to do, make, ship, partner with and promulgate during the rest of the year. And even though CES has yet to carve out a specific floor area for food and kitchen related tech items, we definitely saw an uptick in announcements in this emerging space.

We saw smart kitchen products and integrations from larger companies and startups alike across the connected home, appliances and wearables – here’s the rundown.

Alexa, has the smart kitchen arrived? (And have you seen Google?)

It seems no one is sick of Amazon Echo quite yet and we saw even more manufacturers outside of the traditional smart home adding Alexa integration to their product lines. The biggest announcement came from Whirlpool, who made a splash last year with Amazon Dash integration at the show and this year adds voice functionality to its Wi-Fi connected ovens, fridges and washing machines. Alexa, is my laundry done?

And now, if you own a Ford with the Sync 3 platform, you can ask Alexa to preheat the oven from your car.

LG announced a competitor to the Samsung Family Hub with its own smart fridge (more on that later) – with a gigantic touch screen that looks like you might need a step stool to reach the top of, the appliance also integrates with Amazon Echo. Alexa, can you reach that icon for me?

Speaking of Samsung – the upped the ante this year with Family Hub 2.0, adding a bunch of new service integrations (GrubHub and Spotify, to name a few) but not much else. And LG jumped in the smart fridge game with giant touchscreen game with new Smart InstaView Model, boasting much of the same features as the Family Hub, including voice integration, cameras to see what’s inside your fridge when you’re away (or too lazy to open the door) and software to help run your house. LG’s model also has grocery ordering but theirs is Amazon-powered.

Google Home, the Echo’s main competitor, was announced in a few integrations. Conversation Actions, their equivalent to Alexa’s Skills, hasn’t shown us much that is kitchen or food related (with the exception of a Dominos pizza ordering action) as of yet, so Alexa is still your main sous chef for the kitchen. For now.

For their part, Whirlpool had a host of announcements around their “Smart Kitchen Suite”, including their first step into guided cooking. Their assisted cooking will guide users through three step recipes that will send instructions to the oven and program it for the cook. They also introduced “scan-to-cook” which will allow the user to scan barcodes to “send the right directions, temperature and cooking time settings straight to the appliance.”

The smart bar gets customized….and sees more competition

PicoBrew showed off its now-shipping Pico unit at CES and announced that it will offer customized PicoPaks, the pods used to make different types of beer with the device. Previously, PicoPaks were premade by the company’s professional brewers, making it more of a do-it-for-me experience. Now, you can create your own beer selecting flavors and ingredients on the platform with some guidance from the pros.

The area of smart beverages is one we’ve kept our eye on for a while, with device makers and beverage companies all vying for a piece of the pie. But The Spoon’s Allen Weiner found an interesting story NOT at CES, writing, “while companies such as Picobrew and Whirlpool’s Vessi were showcasing their high-tech methods for brewing beer at CES, two giants of the beverage industry confirmed a partnership.” Turns out that AB InBev, the world’s largest beer brewer and the makers of Keurig are teaming up to create a home-brewing system designed to deliver homemade beer and cocktails. Will it do for cocktails what the Keurig did for coffee? We’ll see.

Food waste prevention goes mainstream

The prevention of food waste has been an area I’ve been fascinated with for a while – especially as it relates to technology’s potential to really change our bad habits and help us stop bludgeoning our environment with trash. But so far, most of the solutions are niche or designed for commercial use. But -CES saw the introduction of some smart solutions that might actually change things.

First, there’s the Zera Food Recyler from Whirlpool – which is basically a fancy name for a tech-savvy composter that can live in your kitchen and turn food scraps into fertilizer with very little involvement from you. Composting is a cool idea, and the earth-friendly concept of it appeals to this generation of more health-conscious, organic-buying consumers, but is generally not pursued by the vast majority of us. Whirlpool smartly saw this as a way to use technology and create a one-button solution to this. Zera is on Indiegogo now for a little under $1k (fully funded and still taking backers as of this posting) and expected in stores later this year.

Also pretty cool – the GeniCan, a smart device you place on your trash can that scans items as you toss them in the bin and creates a grocery list from which you can reorder. You can also set it up to connect to Amazon Echo and have it automatically reorder items for you (from Amazon, of course). This might not prevent food waste in the traditional way, but it could stop you from ordering too much food and help you be more accurate with the stuff you need. If you scan everything you throw away first.

The robots are here, and they’re going to teach you how to cook

Robots at CES are not a new thing. For years, companies have been using them – sometimes in the form of product announcements, sometimes just as booth eye candy to lure traffic in – to make a splash. This year, the name of the robot game was giving arms and legs to Alexa – and making her dance, apparently.

But one appliance maker decided to create its own smart robotic assistant for the kitchen, bypassing the popular “put Alexa behind everything” trend. Bosch launched its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-connected appliances last year and this year introduced Mykie (my kitchen elf, shortened) which is basically an Amazon Echo voice device with a small touchscreen that helps you out in the kitchen. Need a recipe? Want to know what’s in the fridge? Want to listen to some music? Mykie’s got you covered. It seems odd that Bosch would want to compete with Amazon in this category, but Mykie does do some cool stuff that the Echo doesn’t, including project images onto a wall via the tiny projector in its rear, allowing you to blow up a recipe video you’re following. Mykie also offers virtual social cooking classes so you can learn to cook with an actual human instructor and the AI assistant. Is it enough to compete with the Echo? Time will tell.

Cooking tech heats up

Drop adds a second appliance manufacturer to its roster – announcing its recipe platform can now control GE Wi-Fi appliances (it announced Bosch integration in September last year.)

Panasonic showed off an entire smart kitchen with technology like a smart wine fridge with different temps for each shelf and a cool display, inductive heating built into countertops and tables to discretely heat and keep food warm and a machine learning / camera combo that lets appliances react to and adjust cooking based on the recipe you’re trying to follow.

The Smart Kitchen Show hits the CES floor

The Spoon’s Mike Wolf hit the CES floor in search of interesting conversations on food tech and smart kitchen – check out The Smart Kitchen Show’s newest podcasts.

Hear from the CEO of nutrition and food delivery startup Habit about their offerings and how they’re building the next generation of personalized nutrition.

Mike caught up with AppKettle’s founder Robert Hill to talk US shipping dates and what’s behind the company’s initial delay to bring the product to market.

Mike and I catch up on all that we saw at CES in our CES smart kitchen wrap-up.

Over the next few weeks we’ll continue to analyze what we saw in smart kitchen and future of food at CES. Stay tuned! If you want to get all our analysis in your inbox, make sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

IoT-Led Disruption Powers the Future of the Bar Business

Fans of the Spike TV show, Bar Rescue, are more than aware of the challenges of being a barkeep in a highly competitive market. Issues that include employees pilfering from the till and drinking while on duty are one thing, but over pouring and giving away free drinks are a recipe for disaster—not to mention bankruptcy—for bar owners charged with daily multitasking.

Inventory control systems are crucial to a bar’s success and have been in place for decades. Moving from a pen and paper operation, such processes evolved into the 20th century with tracking spreadsheets and early use of RFID technology. Prime for disruption, though, the hospitality industry has been the focus of IoT investments that offer tighter control over bar inventory management, with some options replicating Amazon’s Dash button. Using web-based technology, the Dash button facilitates replenishment when stocks reach a predetermined level by directly contacting the supplier.

Palo Alto-based Nectar is in the development phase of its product which automates Amazon’s Dash button by automatically reordering spirits when their volume reaches a set threshold. Armed with $4.55 million of fresh financing, Nectar hopes to build a solution which can eventually create a cache of data that can be used for predictive analysis to understand patterns which can help in business development. For example, knowing seasonality trends of various cocktails can allow pre-ordering in bulk which can save a bar owner considerable money. In addition, such advanced inventory control systems can track the habits of individual bartenders by giving them individual IDs that tie to the business’ Point of Sale system. That way, such costly behavior over pouring or an abundance of free drinks can be spotted and remedied.

In addition to Nectar, Bar Fly from a company called Local Libations offers a smart-device-based keg monitoring system. Using geotags attached to the individual kegs, a smartphone app or computer can track the beer volume and provide automatic reordering. Much like Nectar, Bar Fly can compile data used for predictive analysis related such areas as customer drinking patterns and busiest hours for staffing purposes.

Following the success of single-server coffee brewer, Keurig, innovators in the IoT space are racing to take the lead in the home bar market. The current state of the home mixology world consists of a mix of startups, with products approaching the market via crowd funding, and those with “cocktail robots” available at retail. These auto-bartenders come in two flavors—closed loop systems which require the consumer to buy premixed drink pods from the device manufacturer and open-loop systems which allow the home drink master to use his own booze and mixers. In both cases, these countertop marvels connect to a smart device via Wi-Fi and allow the user to select from a myriad of various cocktail choices. The machine, such as Burlingame, Calif.,-based Bernooli, then precisely measures the libations to build the perfect Martini, Bloody Mary, Rob Roy or something more exotic, like a Blue Lagoon or Bahama Mama.

Bernooli uses a smart spout system which, when paired with its proprietary app, uses Bluetooth to light up the bottles required for a given adult beverage. The spout allows precise pouring amounts are for the home user. Others in the race to become the Keurig of the cocktail set include Somabar, Monsieur, and Bartesian.

With so many options in the development pipeline, clearly IoT and the “robot cocktail” space is headed in some interesting directions. Additional market contenders include Picobrew, which uses smart technology to turn consumers into home beer brewmasters.  With another twist to attract the wine connoisseur, D-Vine offers mini tubes of wine correctly cooled and aerated for proper serving.

 

(Video) Are Cocktails An Art Form Or Something You Can Delegate To Robots? Both.

Is cocktail making an art form or something you want to let the bots do?

If you’re Ryan Close, the cofounder of Bartesian, the answer is both.

At last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, Close talked about how some people initially resented the idea of letting a robotic drink mixer do the work.

“Early on we had some people at CES thumb their nose at the idea of (automated) cocktails,” said Close. He would tell them that he wasn’t there to tell them how to make a cocktail, and yes, it is an art form, but then suggested that they’re not competing with bartenders or self-styled mixologists, but instead the huge market for ready-to-drink (RTD) cocktails, a $3 billion market market growing at almost 7% a year.

RTDs are “high fructose, high sugar,” said Close. Not only that, he said, but bartenderbots make fresher cocktails since they are still local mixology while a mass-produced cocktail is not. RTDs are “batch made; you can’t offer variety to your guests. There is not anything visceral to it, it’s twisting a cap off, whereas the art of mixology is still happening in our machine, you can see the liquor coming in, everything is being reconstituted, so it’s incredibly fresh.”

He also pointed out how bartenders themselves like the idea of using their recipe-driven drink capsules, since it allowed them to do something they’ve never done before: Extend their reach beyond the bar.

“Some of these bartenders who are very proud of what they created, they can only offer it in the restaurant,” said Close. Now, “they can create mixology, and we can put it into our capsules, and they can brand a ‘Nobu Malibu’ line of capsules.’

This recipe licensing model is similar to the one PicoBrew if offering, only instead they license recipes from master brewers at craft breweries from around the world such as Rogue’s Dead Guy Ale.

This allows novices “stand on the should of giants, great brewers, and great recipes,” said Bill Mitchell, PicoBrew CEO, who appeared alongside Close in a panel moderated by Digital Trends Jenny McGrath.

Check out the video above to hear the full session.