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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Smart Garden

Click & Grow’s Tabletop Smart Garden Is Insanely Popular on Kickstarter Right Now

It says something about the popularity of at-home indoor farms when a Kickstarter campaign for one meets its funding goal in 20 minutes. 

Such was the case recently with Click & Grow, an Estonian-born startup that cites NASA as the chief inspiration behind its smart garden systems. Click & Grow was one of the original wave of companies bringing the concept of at-home indoor farming to the masses. Thanks to the pandemic, food supply chain disruptions, and general concerns about health and wellness, the idea of growing produce on your own countertop has only become bigger over the last year or so.

Hence the company’s Kickstarter campaign for its Click & Grow 25 device reaching its $35,000 goal so darn quickly when it launched a few days ago.

The Click & Grow 25 is a tabletop farm that, in the company’s own words, “works like a Nespresso coffee machine, only instead of coffee pods, you use biodegradable Smart Soil plant pods to grow fresh greens all year round.” The Smart Soil is one of Click & Grow’s claims to fame. It’s a plant-based growth substrate that was developed in-house. When placed in pods that are then inserted into the garden, the Smart Soil releases a mixture of nutrients, oxygen, and water, with levels of each calculated for the specific seed type in each pod.

An accompanying mobile app provides timelines and grow tips for each plant, along with reminders and the ability to control the lighting settings on the actual device. It also offers recipe suggestions.

The device also features removable trays, so that one can be removed at harvest time and replaced with another full of fresh seeds, keeping the grow cycle constant. As of now, it can grow 25 plants simultaneously per module. Since the device is modular, grow units can be added based on the number of people in a household. Click & Grow recommends one unit for a single-person household, one to two for a couple, and two to three and above for families.

The campaign has already nabbed over $360,000 and has 22 days left. Those that pledge $499 or more get one Click & Grow 25 device that includes a three-month supply of grow pods. That’s a substantially lower price point than the $799 estimated retail price the device will carry when it is officially launched.

Click & Grow says devices will ship in February of 2022.  

  

GrowSquares Will Personalize Your Garden With Data Science, Microbiology, Feathers

“High-tech gardening” usually brings to mind the automated indoor vertical farming devices everyone from startups to major appliance makers are pushing these days. Those are great for time-strapped folks or those who tend to just kill plants. But for people who want to keep their hands in the soil, technology in the smart garden will need to play a different role — that of assisting the human rather than automating their entire process.

NYC-based GrowSquares has found a way to leave the human element in the gardening process while still taking advantage of tech to improve the grow process. 

“We’re the opposite of automated gardening,” GrowSquares CEO Zachary Witman said over the phone last week.

The company uses data science (advanced LIDAR and location data) as well as microbiology to determine the best plants for a specific user’s space as well as the most optimal elements to include in the soil. An accompanying app then helps the user monitor the plants, though watering and feeding them are still manual tasks.

“We look at sun, wind, taxonomy of the soil. We capture those things and then using a lot of data science we create a microenvironmental profile and say, ‘Based upon this, the attributes of your space, (time of year, etc.) these are the plants that will grow best,'” Witman explained.

Users see a scoring system where plants are rated Optimal, Good, Fair, and Poor based on location data. For example, in Nashville, TN, Basil grown at my address gets a score of 93 for this time of year, which means it’s an optimal plant for growing right now. Spinach, on the other hand, just scores 51, making it a bad fit for my backyard at the moment.

The system can actually get even more granular in terms of a users’s location than just their city. Using a customer’s geo-coordinates, the company then uses data science and machine learning models to determine which plants are best for that particular user’s garden. The recommendations may or may not be the same as the person two doors down.

“We break down each individual client’s soil. Fidelity of our data showcases the difference between you and your neighbor.”

Once a user has purchased the right plants, GrowSquares sends the necessary seeds along with optimal spacing and depth and a soil formulation for your individual garden. That might include green sand, coconut husks, feather, alfalfa, or other elements the company uses to formulate soil. Meanwhile, the app also sends notifications for when it’s time to water the plants and time to harvest them.

The actual squares in which the plants grow are made of palm leaf that naturally decomposes over time. Since it’s a modular system, users can add more squares over time, and the squares can be configured to fit different environments, balconies, backyards, and rooftops among them. Since the squares decompose, they actually replenish the soil. 

Like other consumer-grade smart garden companies, GrowSquares has seen an uptick in sales thanks to the pandemic. Witman told me the company started out servicing just three cities, Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles. Because of COVID-19, demand spiked and GrowSquares went national — a decision that’s temporary stressed the supply chain. Right now, new users must reserve their GrowSquares and wait, though Witman told me it would not be too long before things return to normal. 

He was also cautious to attribute too much of the product’s popularity to the pandemic. “I think everybody has their own reason for why they want to garden,” he said. The pandemic is one, but so is a desire to eat locally or the wish to avoid industrial-scale farming companies. And for some, going out to the balcony or backyard to grab some herbs is just easier than ordering them via Whole Foods or going to the store.

The Food Tech Show: Fake Nuggets & Real Goodbyes

It was a sad week at The Spoon as we said goodbye to Catherine Lamb.

Catherine is heading off to Chicago to get her MBA at Kellogg University. After that she’ll take over the world, or at least the world of food tech.

I met Catherine for the first time when she volunteered at the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2017. More than one person came up to me during the conference and told me I really needed to hire this person. I interviewed her a couple weeks later and did just that.

If you want to hear the audio version of me getting sappy, you’ll have to listen to the podcast. In addition to saying goodbye to Catherine, we also discuss the following stories:

To listen, just click play below, download the podcast direct to your device, or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Pico, the Mini Indoor Garden that Can Grow Herbs and Tomatoes, Busts Through Kickstarter Goal

With quarantine keeping us all at home, people are growing plants both for mental health and as a food source. But even if the enthusiasm is there, there are still plenty of pitfalls to accidentally kill your plant friends — overwatering, underwatering, not enough light, etc.

For those reasons, plus a growing (ha!) interest in food sovereignty, coronavirus could actually present a real market opportunity for smart gardens; automated indoor grow systems to manage the health of your plants. But, as Mike Wolf noted in his piece last month, one big hurdle standing in smart gardens’ way is their cost. The systems can range in price from hundreds to even thousands of dollars.

That’s where Pico, a new automated indoor garden currently making a splash on Kickstarter, could really distinguish itself. Early Backers can secure a Pico for only $32. The intended MSRP is $45.

When we say Pico made a splash on Kickstarter, we’re not exaggerating: at the time of writing the company has raised $1.3 million on Kickstarter (its initial goal was $10,000). The small self-contained grow system that can be affixed to walls and features an LED light mounted on an adjustable arm, which can be moved up as plants grow. It can also self-water, provided someone fills up its tank once a week.

Like most indoor garden systems, Pico is limited in terms of what plants can grow. The Kickstarter says it can be used for decorative plants, like succulents, as well as to grow herbs and leafy greens. It even claims it can grow cherry tomatoes and chili peppers, though its small size could limit the amount.

Photo: Pico’s grow system, by Altifarm

Pico may be extremely affordable, but it doesn’t have quite the same stramlined user experience as some of the pricier home gardens. For one, Pico has to be plugged in to work. It’s powered with a USB Type-C cable, so it can plug into a phone or computer charger. Pico comes with a 3-meter long cable with magnetic organizer loops to more easily route around kitchen appliances, so that helps. But it still seems like kind of a pain to set up. That said, Pico is small enough to fit pretty much anywhere, and can also be mounted on walls to position it closer to a wall outlet. You can also connect three Picos together at a time and power them with the same charging cable.

The Pico price only includes the device. Users have to add in their own soil and seeds. To be fair, that’s not a huge lift, but it does mean the Pico isn’t a straight plug-and-grow option, like Aerofarm or Click & Grow.

It also isn’t 100 percent automated. Users have to manually turn the LED light on and off to imitate the rise and fall of the sun. They can also purchase a timer to automate the process for an additional cost.

Altifarm, the company behind Pico, has some experience making automated grow systems. They’ve already launched Herbstation, an indoor farm that was also funded by Kickstarter. The company has just concluded fulfillment of Herbstation preorders after a self-admitted “share of delays, mixups, and drama.” Buyer beware.

Photo: Altifarm

As of now, Pico is slated to begin shipping in May/June, though a small disclaimer at the bottom of the campaign notes that that could be delayed due to stay at home orders. Buying a product off a crowdfunding site is always a risk — especially now, when COVID-19 is disrupting manufacturing supply chains across the globe. However, Altifarm states that since Pico is their third global product launch, they’ve learned how to efficiently get a hardware product to market.

Despite the risks, Pico couldn’t be hitting the market at a more opportune time. With COVID nudging consumers to be more aware of where their food comes from — and people consequently gaining an interest in food sovereignty — home gardening is blooming (okay, last plant pun).

Pico’s stellar Kickstarter campaign illustrates just how enthusiastic consumers are about finding ways to easily grow their own food at home. Now we’ll have to see if they can follow through to make all those backers happy home gardeners.

The Food Tech Show: The People Are Growing Yeast and Plants at Home Episode

It’s a very specific cultural moment when a Twitter thread about deriving yeast at home from the skin of fruits goes viral, but here we are.

The Spoon editorial team got together this week to discuss said Twitter thread from a Ginkgo yeast geneticist Sudeep Agarwala. We also chatted about a few other stories, including:

As always, you can find the Food Tech Show in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can also download this episode to your device or just click play below.

If you’d like to join the Spoon editorial team next week when they record the podcast, our next live podcast recording on Crowdcast is next Tuesday at 10 AM PST. You can sign up here.

Audio Player

As Coronavirus Fuels Interest in Food Sovereignty, Will Smart Gardens Finally Have Their Moment?

As someone interested in consumer behavior, I have to admit a pandemic makes for a compelling case study in how people will react when our normally stable food system gets a shock.

The panic buying. The embrace of processed food. The baking of bread. It’s all fascinating and provides a small glimpse into how consumers could behave when they believe, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that the relative ease with which they’ve had access to food is threatened.

All of which brings to the forefront a larger conversation about food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is something governments and interest groups debate all the time, such as when island countries like Japan worry (rightly) about over-reliance on imports or a lack of native agricultural production.

Consumers, however, usually don’t speak in the language of food sovereignty. That might soon change.

As the coronavirus has forced all of us to think more about our food supply, some consumers have gone beyond just buying a little extra food to store away. Now they are thinking about how we could ensure access to food independent of breakdowns in the system.

While that doesn’t mean we’re all going to buy lots of land and start a farm, it does mean more people than ever are looking into how to grow their own food at home.

That could mean something like raising chickens. According to Google Trends, interest in the topic has shot to an all time high.

More likely though, the notion of food independence for most consumers will mean starting a garden. Interest in starting home gardens has, like raising chickens, jumped to unprecedented levels. Seed sellers across the country are telling new customers they can’t take new orders. Meanwhile, gardening classes are on the rise. One virtual Master Gardener series from Oregon Stage saw registrations jump 12,000 percent over the previous spring.

So while a Victory Garden-esque resurgence in home gardens may be sprouting across the country, unlike those World War II-era home gardeners, we have access to technology can help us grow food nowadays.

The question is will consumers choose to use it?

In pre-pandemic times, the answer of whether consumers embrace tech-powered gardening is mostly a no. Wi-Fi powered home watering systems for the backyard have largely flopped, while smart in-home grow systems have been around for a while but have had mixed success.

That could change with a pandemic.

I decided to check with both AeroGrow (maker of the AeroGarden) and Click & Grow, the two leading smart garden brands, to see how business is going since COVID-19 took hold.

According to AeroGrow CEO J. Michael Wolfe, there’s has been a surge in interest since mid-March across all of their sales channels.

“Inventories are running low,” Wolfe told me via email. “We have raced to spin up the supply chain in Asia (and they were relatively fast to get back up to capacity), but we have surged so much that the supply we had on hand was not able to keep up with demand.”

Click & Grow spokesperson Martin Laidla told me that the increase in demand has been “substantial.”

“So far, we’ve seen a staggering twofold increase in demand for our products in all markets,” said Laidla.

The AeroGarden Farm (Image Credit: AeroGrow)

Smaller smart garden manufacturers are also seeing surging interest. Ava Technologies, which began with a crowdfund campaign for its Byte herb garden, has accelerated a second batch of manufacturing to take advantage of increased interest. According to Ava CEO Valerie Song, visits to the company’s preorder page is up over 1,300 percent versus just a month ago.

The strong demand makes sense. After all, smart gardens take up a small footprint and can grow greens at a pretty fast clip due to a fine-tuned grow environment of high-intensity light, automated watering and nutrients.

But these high-tech indoor grow systems have a few drawbacks, the first of which is price. While low-end AeroGardens start roughly below $50, the bigger systems that can grow a substantial amount of produce start at around $240. The AeroGarden Farm, which allows for 24 “pods” of seeds to be planted simultaneously, start at close to $600.

The second problem, which is directly related to price of the system, is yield. While lower-priced smaller systems from Click & Grow and AeroGarden look good on a kitchen counter and can pump out herbs, that’s mainly it. To actually grow veggies in enough volume to feed you let alone a family, you have to look a higher-end system like the AeroGarden Farm.

But despite the higher price tags of higher yield systems, consumers still seem interested. AeroGarden’s higher yield systems like the Bounty and the Farm are sold out on Amazon and Home Depot, and the AeroGarden has even stopped selling the Farm on their own site as they’ve run out of inventory.

“The Farm sold out in early March,” said AeroGrow’s Wolfe. “We won’t have replenishment for a few more weeks. I expect that we’ll sell out of the replenishment inventory that arrives in a matter of days — and then more will arrive in June.”

So while smart garden systems might not be for everyone, it appears that the arrival of a pandemic might actually push these systems more into the mainstream.

One thing I’m curious about is how this increased demand plays out in the longer term. I could envision a post-pandemic world where, in a more normalized economic situation, new homes come with an option for a home grow system built into the kitchen. Some master planned communities could make vertical farming a big part of the sales pitch.

At CES and KBIS, I counted four major appliance brands who had smart garden grow systems in development, and I could see those plans accelerating and even more brands jumping into the grow system fray.

As for now, if you want your own high-yield smart farm system, you’ll need to get in line. Of course, if you have a yard and you’re the adventurous type, you can always buy a robotic farm for the back yard.

Meet the Natufia Kitchen Garden, the $13,000 Home Garden System from Estonia

After spending almost an entire week in Las Vegas earlier this month for CES, I reluctantly returned to the desert on Monday for the Kitchen and Bath Show.

And just like I did at the big consumer tech show, I found an oasis inside the convention center in the form of an indoor gardening system. Only this time the leafy greens were not featured as part of a proof-of-concept from the likes of GE, LG or Samsung, but instead inside of a product already on the market from a scrappy startup out of Estonia.

The company is Natufia Labs, a venture backed startup, and the product is the Natufia Kitchen Garden, a $13 thousand home garden that has been shipping in Europe for a year and has just landed in the U.S.

I stopped by Natufia’s booth at KBIS where the company’s CEO Gregory Lu gave me a quick video tour of the Kitchen Garden. As you can see in the video, the product is a self-contained cabinet that creates an optimal recipe of water, lighting and nutrients to help grow, according to Lu, enough output to product “one to two salads per day.”

Water and nutrients are dispensed automatically through the central monitoring system that is controlled via a touchscreen display in the bottom cabinet. Alongside the control system in the lower cabinet is a seedling chamber where the user puts seeds for 10 days in a small seedpod unit to allow them to germinate. From there, the seedlings are transferred into one of the ceramic looking pots in the upper glass chamber where they will grow and eventually be harvested.

Like the Samsung BeSpoke system, I liked the look and idea of a fully contained standup cabinet gardening system with the Natufia. It looked good and I could envision this type of garden system finding a home within my kitchen some day.

However, I have to admit the $13,000 price tag gave me pause. I wondered if I’d be willing to pay that much to add a home grow system, particularly one that — like most of these systems — is largely restricted to growing leafy greens and for the most part does not produce non-leafy green vegetables like cucumbers or ground vegetables like potatoes or onions.

In the end, these types of systems are a lifestyle and design choice that will be made by the home owner. If you’re buying a new house or committing $80,000 or more to a kitchen remodel, adding in one of these systems makes sense if you love the idea of shortening the distance between farm and fork to just a few meters, even if it’s for only a partial list of the items that go in your salad.

There’s also no doubt that these systems make a visual statement, standing out from the usual wall of metal or wood typically found in high-end kitchens.

The Natufia Kitchen Garden is available in the U.S. through select resellers. You can see the guided tour of the Natufia Kitchen Garden below in the video.

A Look at the Natufia Home Kitchen Garden

Smart Garden Startup Click & Grow Raises $11 Million To Fuel Expansion

Estonian smart-garden startup Click & Grow announced this week it has raised $11 million to help accelerate growth for its hyperlocal grow systems into new markets.

Investors in this round include two strategic corporate investors in Swedish holding company Ingka Group (which owns and operates the majority of IKEA stores) and French conglomerate Groupe SEB, as well as Y Combinator and Shanghai-based Yunqi VC. The round brings the total invested in the nearly 10 year old company to $17.9 million.

Investor interest in one of hottest indoor-gardening startups is not surprising given the strong growth in the home-grow space as of late. Demand for smart-grow systems has surged as consumers embrace the healthy aspects of indoor farming and — let’s be honest — start their own mini ganja farms as cannabis becomes legal in parts of the US and other countries like Canada.

While Click & Grow was one of the first of a wave of startups bringing technology to indoor gardening for the home, there is no shortage of competition in the space. New entrants like AVA, Verdical and SproutsIO are working to to bring their products to market, while Natufia, another Estonian smart garden startup, just raised $1.2 million in funding. Even long-time market leader AeroGrow (over 1.4 million units shipped as of 2016) has also seen a resurgence as majority owner MiracleGrow freshens up the product lineup.

IKEA’s involvement is intriguing for a couple reasons. For one, there’s no doubt the home furnishings giant has increasingly embraced smart home technology in recent years and the Click & Grow investment will strengthen extend this tech push into the garden. The deal is also interesting because IKEA had already launched a home grow system a couple years ago, which they are apparently still selling.

Either way, the Swedish company sees lots of potential in its new partnership:

“We see this as another step forward in our journey to serve IKEA customers and our co-worker’s healthier and more nutritious food, and it opens up new opportunities for IKEA Retail markets to become more self-sufficient by growing fresh local produce,” explained Krister Mattsson, Head of Investments, Ingka Group.

The Estonian startup, which has sold 450 thousand total systems and 2.1 million plant pods since launch, said it plans to use the funding to expand into new markets.

One Year Later: We Check in with Verdical, Winner of the SKS2017 Startup Showcase

Last year indoor grow system Verdical beat our 14 other food innovation companies and took home the trophy at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) Startup Showcase. CEO Andrew Deitz pitched onstage about how Verdical’s indoor platform for hydroponic gardening would allow restaurants, hotels, cafeterias, and more to grow greens and herbs in their own kitchen, making fresh produce more accessible year-round while reducing food travel and waste.

When we left them last year, Verdical had just won a $10,000 cash prize and was gearing up to “revolutionize kitchens across the nation.” This week I checked in with Deitz to see where the startup is, one year on.

A Verdical grow system inside Jardiniere.

Customers
Verdical now has four customers, all in the Bay Area: Michelin-starred restaurant Jardiniere, 25-store pizza chain Pizza My Heart, the Marin Country Day School, and Berkeley dining spot Saha. All in all, there are 17 Verdical units currently in the field (so to speak).

Though he wouldn’t give details, Deitz also said that Verdical would soon be expanding outside the Bay Area with national — and even global — customers.

Like most other indoor grow systems on the market, Verdical currently offers just herbs and microgreens. This certainly limits what they can provide, but they’re experimenting within the boundaries. For example, at Jardiniere Verdical isn’t just growing garden-variety (ha) basil. Instead, they developed seed pods for things like gem marigold, wasabi mustard, and blue Ethiopian mustard. “We’re providing unique, highly-differentiated stuff that they couldn’t get other places, but can grow right here,” said Deitz.

Starting at $200 per month, customers get the Verdical hardware unit, all the plants they can grow, and access to the Verdical App that controls the growing platform, manages inventory, and provides education about new ingredients. According to Deitz, the price is cost neutral to the current herb and microgreen spend of their customers. Since Verdical works with everyone from a school to a Michelin-starred restaurant, I would imagine their monthly spend on microgreens and herbs varies pretty wildly, but Deitz said it’s actually surprisingly consistent.

Funding
This year Tabard VC, a food and agtech venture capital firm, invested an undisclosed amount in Verdical. Several angel investors have also funded the startup, though Deitz wouldn’t disclose details.

Partners
Verdical has teamed up with TE Connectivity, using the tech company’s sensors to monitor humidity, moisture, external temperature, water level, and water quality in their grow units. The two connected at the SKS last year and have been building a partnership together ever since. Verdical started using TE sensors in their early prototypes six months ago. “We helped them figure out how to better partner with startups,” said Deitz. “And they’re helping us figure out how to connect from the field all the way into somebody’s stomach.”

Verdical CEO Andrew Dietz with the TE Connectivity team at SKS 2018.

Competition

Since last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, quite a few companies have made strides to bring indoor grow systems to restaurants. Farmery also installs indoor hydroponic grow units in restaurants. Farmshelf recently put one of their hydroponic mini-farms in a New York Oath Pizza location. On a slightly larger scale, but Freight Farms installs and manages indoor farms in shipping containers for use in corporate cafeterias and more. And that’s not even taking into account companies working on residential or large-scale indoor farms.

While he wasn’t sure about the growing mechanics of other indoor farming systems, Deitz was confident that Verdical would distinguish itself from the pack with its agtech. “We’re innovative because we’re growing with a soil-based medium,” he explained. By harnessing the water purifying and nutrient delivery powers of soil, he claims they can grow produce more efficiently. He also told me that using soil is a safer bet than going with hydro or aquaponics: that way, even if there’s a power outage, the plants can still get what they need to survive.

Deitz, however, doesn’t think that on-site indoor farming is zero-sum game. “The market is so big, it’ll take us a while to bump into each other,” he said, referring to Verdical’s competitors.

What’s next?
According to Deitz, Verdical will soon be announcing new customers and expanded partnerships (we’ll keep you updated). But as they grow, the company will continue to focus on its original goal: connecting people to their food source. “That’s where you can see a shift in consciousness,” he said. Until then, if you’re in the Bay Area, drop in on one of Verdical’s restaurant customers and taste fresh-picked some exotic microgreens.

AVA Technologies Raises $2.6M for Its Countertop Gardening System

AVA Technologies, maker of the AVA Byte countertop smart gardening system, has raised a $2.6 million seed round (no pun intended) led by Vanedge Capital, according to BetaKit.

The AVA Byte is an all-in-one connected gardening appliance that uses a combination of soil-less seed pods, smart sensors, artificial intelligence and a smartphone app to guide you through the process of growing herbs, mushrooms and even tomatoes indoors. AVA CEO Valerie Song pitched her company as a Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase finalist last year. You can see her presentation here:

This looks to be the first institutional round of funding for AVA, which has raised more than $130,000 on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. To date, the company has raised $2.9 million.

An update from Song on the AVA Indiegogo page says that to celebrate the funding, AVA is giving away a free HD camera for their growing systems to all of their backers. She went on to say that the AVA Byte will start shipping this October.

The indoor smart garden space is certainly sprouting (Ed. note: Sorry). SproutsIO offers much of the same functionality as AVA and is supposed to ship this summer. Then there’s AeroGarden, which is available now.

Review: Setting Up A Smart Indoor Grow System

I am not a person who keeps plants alive. Two dogs and a human, I can manage but for some reason, remembering to water an indoor plant is not something that makes it into my daily routine. So when my mother-in-law got me a “Smart Garden 3” from Click and Grow, I was slightly skeptical that I would not be successful at growing lovely herbs in my kitchen.

But once I read a little more, I realized that the entire smart indoor growing system was designed to be idiot-proof setup and equipped with enough technology to barely need any human involvement or interaction at all. (This are the kinds of tech I am here for: devices that make up for my shortcomings. I’m one personal trainer robot away from living my best life.) Click and Grow is the Keurig of indoor gardens and took the idea of putting coffee in pods and instead, put a combination of seeds and nutrient-rich soil inside “plant capsules.”

The unboxing of my indoor smart herb garden

In addition to the three basil capsules that came with my Smart Garden 3 (you can get bigger gardens and therefore, grow more capsules at one time), Click and Grow allows users to order different herbs, flowers, fruits and vegetables from their site or on Amazon. It even has a subscription program where you can sign up to receive regular deliveries of pods.

The device itself was a little smaller than I expected – but also taller, and the shelf I planned to put it on was too narrow. The bottom of the garden has a holding tank for the water as well as three circular spots for each seed pod.

The overhanging handle at the top is the grow light – a completely automated light I might add that rotates when the light is on and the intensity of light based on best grow practices for the plant you are growing.

On the top of each pod is a QR code – this is where the “smart” part of the name comes in. The garden comes out of the box just like this, so the first step in the instructions is to download the Click and Grow app.

The app is easy to navigate and once you open it, it prompts you to choose what indoor garden device you have and then you’re able to add plants to your garden. The QR code on the top of each plant capsule is scannable in the app, and the above screen appears with the plant’s “birthday” and details. You can also rename them to help you remember which plant is which – helpful especially if you are planting three of the same kind. (They also give you the old fashioned garden tags you can write on that stick up from each capsule.)

If you click the water icon, you can record when you watered your plant, therefore giving the app the ability to remind you when it’s time to water again. But because the water tank underneath holds more water than each plant needs daily and doles it out according to the plant’s needs, you don’t have to water daily. Or even weekly. Every 13-14 days, you have to fill the tank back up, but the device itself has a visual cue in addition to the app.

(The app has additional functionality like an album where you can upload pictures of the plant as it grows and a grow icon where you can put in measurements. I…am not that involved in my basil’s growth. I know, neglectful. My son is the one who checks on it daily.)

Once you scan each plant into your app, you remove the tops to each capsule which reveals another white cover, this time with a hole in the middle. This is where the plant will inevitably emerge as it grows. The kit also comes with three plastic domes and the instructions say to take each dome and place it on the top of each capsule to create a greenhouse-like environment for the seeds and soil. Once you start to see greenery and the plants begin to grow, you can remove the domes.

The next step was to add water. There is a rectangular spot on the top of the garden next to the capsule spots and the indicator inside rises as you add water. I counted the number of cups it took to fill the tank and it was around seven cups for the model of indoor garden I am using (Smart Garden 3).

The final step of setup is to plug in the garden. The instructions do warn you that the light basically rotates – 18 hours on, 6 hours off – so if you don’t want your device to go on in the middle of the night, you should plug it in for the first time in the morning. I guess that would matter more if you were keeping your indoor garden near your bedroom or you lived in a small apartment. Ours is on the kitchen counter, far from our beds and not where anyone is usually in the middle of the night, so I plugged it in the afternoon. Sure enough, ours cycles off as I’m waking up for the day. The light is pretty bright though, it’s almost as strong as the overhead light above our kitchen sink.

RESULTS: We are only a little over two weeks in, but so far, it’s been one of the easiest plant-growing experiences I have ever had. I’ve watered it a total of one time and the plants are finally started to grow little basil leaves. They look incredibly green and healthy and my four-year-old son is fascinated by them.

Click and Grow says it can take 4-6 weeks to have fully matured plants but they can last for a while, and you’re encouraged to trim them in a way that promotes regeneration.

I’m looking forward to having fresh basil right from my own kitchen and I’m already trying to decide what to grow next – lettuce or strawberries or flowers?! Too many to choose from. I can definitely see the appeal of systems like these – they are budget friendly (the startup kit was $50 for the device and the basil capsules) at least to start – and they give you the option to have fresh produce in any season with little effort.

If you read some of the Amazon reviews, many people point out that the refills themselves are pricey – up to $20 for rosemary and tomatoes. Given that plant seeds are a dollar or two at any garden shop, that price might prove unsustainable. However, there seem to be plenty of online guides on how to take the pods and make your own capsules to work with the system.

I’ll post an update when we have fully grown plants and we taste our first harvest.

Ten Trends That Will Shape The Future of Cooking In 2018

With 2017 in the rearview mirror, it’s time to look forward and make some predictions about the next year in food and cooking. While I often wait until after CES to look into the crystal ball since there are always lots of announcements at the annual consumer tech mega-show, I think it’s safe to point to a few big trends we can expect over the next 12 months.

With that in mind, here are ten trends I think you’ll see the shape the future of the kitchen over the next twelve months (Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date on our coverage of all of these trends over the next year):

Digital Recipe At The Center Of Action

With apologies to Tyler Florence, the recipe is not dead. In fact, if anything the recipe is becoming increasingly important in the digital kitchen. It’s becoming our automated shopping list, the instruction set for our appliances, and the content is becoming dynamic, atomized and personalized depending on our personal preferences and the context of our current day, meal plan, and food inventory.

I expect all of this to continue in 2018 and even accelerate as recipes become shoppable, connected to cooking guidance systems and fuse with new interfaces such as voice assistants and chatbots to help with the cooking process.

New Cooking Boxes

While “cooking box” isn’t exactly a standard industry term, it’s an apt way to describe the wide variety of exciting products coming to market that allow consumers new ways to prepare food.

Last year we started to see new takes on steam ovens like the Tovala, the first consumer market RF cooking appliance announced in Miele’s Dialog, and even combo devices that combine fast-cooking with flash-freezing like the Frigondas. In 2018, I expect to see lots more innovation with built-in and counter top products as old-school appliance manufacturers and housewares brands realize there’s opportunity in deviating from the same-old cooking appliances and offering consumers new options when it comes to preparing food.

Smart Grow Systems Move Towards Mass Market

While home grow systems have been around for years, adoption has remained fairly narrow. That will start to change in 2018 as the idea of using technology to grow and create our food at home enters the mainstream consciousness. Driving this trend will be the ever-increasing consumer desire to source food more locally. After all, what’s more local than our own homes?

The great thing about this space is there’s already a wide gamut of interesting options available for consumers today. Whether it’s low-cost offerings like seed quilts, to the growing number of soil-less home grow systems like those from Aerogarden or Ava, to crazy backyard farm robots like those from Farmbot, I think we’ll see more innovative products – and greater consumer adoption – in 2018.

Home Fermentation

There’s no doubt one of the most interesting trends we’ve seen in consumer food over the past couple years is the embrace of interesting fermented products like kombucha, and I think this interest will start to generate more interest in consumers fermenting their food at home.

We’ve already seen companies like Panasonic show off fermented food cookers, and beer appliance startup PicoBrew is starting to offer Kombucha as an offering. With interest in fermented products likely to increase, I expect more innovators will look to make creating these products at home easier.

Desserts Meet Tech

Like most, I love myself a good dessert, and I expect we will see an increasing number of interesting ways to fuse technology with sweets in the coming year. Some of these innovations will focus on convenience (like the CHiP cookie maker), but some will enable consumers to create hard-to-make sweets like chocolate, ice cream and other types of desserts that are normally time and knowledge intensive.  Expect to see some interesting announcements in this space in the next 12 months.

Sensing Kitchen

When the Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman got on stage at the Smart Kitchen Summit with startups creators of digital food sensing tech and demoed live in front of a huge audience, you could hear the audience murmur as Wilson and crew smelled cheese with a digital nose or tried out the Scio infrared spectrometer. This technology that has long been gestating for commercial and supply chain applications is finally making its way into the home, and I expect that to continue in 2018, particularly as some find new ways to apply AI to better prediction and understanding around flavors and food characteristics.

Meal Services And Connected Hardware

One of the trends we’ve been watching for a while is the pairing of meal kits with connected hardware.  That trend accelerated in 2017 as Tovala shipped product, Nomiku created their sous vide ready meals and Innit hinted at new products powered by Chef’d as we ended the year.

It makes sense. Recurring revenue has long been the mantra of venture capitalists (just ask Tovala, which just got a $9.2 million series A), and in the connected cooking space, the way to get recurring revenue is offer food.  I also expect meal kit companies to also increasingly look for ways to partner with kitchen tech innovators (much like Chef’d has with Innit) as they look for ways to raise adoption and retention for consumers.

Speaking of food delivery…

Automated, Smart Grocery Delivery

With the acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, Amazon stopped dabbling around the edges with lab experiments like Amazon Go, Amazon Dash and Amazon Fresh made its intentions clear: it wants to take a big bite out of the $700 billion grocery business in the US.  And while the company has had mixed success with efforts like its Fresh delivery business, these long-gestating experiments have given them a potentially huge advantage as they start to set up central hubs and physical points of presence for the grocery business post-Whole Foods.

And now, Amazon and others see the opportunity to fuse home delivery with smart home access control and automatically deliver groceries all the way to the fridge. Combine that with the ability of fridges to actually tell us when food needs a refresh, and you can unlock some interesting scenarios.

New Interfaces

While this past year saw the continued march forward towards of popular voice interfaces like Alexa, I think we’re only at the beginning of a large-scale change in the control layer for how we buy, prepare and cook our food.  Sure, we’ll see more and more Alexa skills for cooking gadgets in 2018, but also expect more manufacturers embrace chatbots and projection interfaces as ways to interact with our cooking equipment this year.

Cooking Robots

We cover cooking robots here at The Spoon a bunch, and while many are fun and likely never to see wide adoption over the next decade, there are a variety of interesting cooking bots we’ve seen that might have real applications for specific use cases.  Some are simple food automation devices. Others are more social robots. And, in some cases, companies are working on human-like robots that could be intriguing additions to the kitchen of the future.

Needless to say with CES less than a week away, we’ll likely see many of these trends reinforced with news.  I’ll be at CES catching up on many of these announcements myself, so if you hear of any or want me to know about your product, DM me on Twitter.