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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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In the World of Food Tech, The Big Guys Innovate Just Like Everyone Else. Sometimes

Two Stanford grads starting a Fortune 500 computer company in 1939 in their garages is a more than a twice-told tale. Same with a group of Harvard students coming up with a foundation to build Microsoft or Facebook. Less sexy, but equally important, are the innovations that happen at those same giant powerhouse organizations.

During the recent SKS Invent virtual conference, a pair of leaders from two such giants, Electrolux and BSH, spoke about the challenges and rewards that come with sparking innovation at a large, global brand. This post is a look back at my conversation and key insights gleaned from Tove Chevalley, Head of Electrolux Innovation Hub, and Lars Roessler, Head of Corporate Venturing for BSH Startup Kitchen.

What’s it like when a large, established organization pursues innovation? How does it happen? How does it start? Does it just kind of come to somebody in the shower?

Lars: No matter what type of innovation you’re talking about, it’s got to be consumer-centric, has to be customer-driven, customer focused. Suppose you innovate in a space where the consumer is not at the center of your thinking. You can do many things. But it won’t be successful.

Again, it starts with the consumer; we think about how we can improve quality of life, which is our old mantra, but how can we improve the consumer journey across the customer lifecycle? Of course, we are a big corporation and have resources and smart people. But in the end, you need to have the garage mentality is somehow getting inspiration from the outside world.

Tove: I don’t think it’s that different than what it is in the startup community. You know you need a good idea; you need an entrepreneurial spirit; you need to be a bit gutsy and be able to drive that forward.

Ensure you have availability for funding if you have ideas. We know which areas that we are interested in, in driving innovation. So we get to focus on everything that we do, which I think is critical for us when we crack that, that made a huge difference in our innovation funnel

What role does market research play?

Lars: Having market data is super important, but I think we all know typically, market research is kind of like backward-looking. Right? So, we know what happened in the past and what sales have been and what users might be thinking about. But you got to be more forward-looking as well. You could call it foresight management. Also, you can be more experimental, thinking about new needs.

Tove:  We also have a foresight team that helps us look at the biggest opportunity spaces in the future. Because I think that is key. What Lars is mentioning is, as a startup community, you need to look at the market right now as well. But it would help if you looked at other signals that are happening on and going on, you know, economically, politically, consumer, what’s happening around the world. And that gives us signals of where the future growth areas are.

Let’s talk about money. How are your projects and innovation financed? Or do you get kind of a budget? Is it a free flow of cash? Does it come with strings attached? And how do you set up goals and milestones?

Tove: We struggled with this setup because we started funding projects. That had a higher uncertainty. We realized quite quickly, of course, that that kills off ideas very quickly. What we did is we started looking at what the startup world looks like and venture capital. And how can we structure our funding, not only the funding we do with startups, but the funding that we do with their projects, in the same way, and looking at how you move through the funnel, you have different funding rounds. I think it takes a lot of training for leadership and how you look at projects, but also training for people internally and being comfortable in working that way. But that has given us risk mitigation and how we do risk in the company is a lot better.

Lars: When it comes to funding new innovation projects and startup collaborations, we run a very decentralized approach, meaning that money needs to come from business. So, we have had a learning curve on our end and many discussions. For projects, it depends, of course. How far out are you looking with the innovation you want to develop and a new business model you want to develop? But typically, if you don’t have a landing spot, how can you convince anyone within the company to fund, like the first couple of steps of an innovation project? How would you ever be able to convince them to do it by you when you got to be writing the really big checks?

What’s it like to pull the plug on a project?

Lars: No one likes to do it. When people work together, they form some bond. Right? But at some point in time, and that’s, I guess, also the role of units like ours, to be that mediator, buffer in between the startup, the external partner, and the internal innovation team. So I mean, in the end, it’s like a failed relationship, where hopefully, all come to the same conclusion. But in the end, it’s to the benefit of all parties to move

Tove: It’s about killing your darlings, and I think we all have the darlings we work with. I think for us, it’s a lot of building that culture internally and ensuring that we have, you know, mental security coming into these projects because you are working with a lot of uncertainty. And we want people to be comfortable being uncertain. And one of the most important things when you work with uncertainty, is to feel trust in each other and that you trust both the stakeholders that you work towards, but also the team that you work with, and trust that we all have the same goal in this and that we do this together. And I think for us, it’s a muscle that you need to train over and over again to ensure that you have this trust among yourselves, but also trust with your managers. So, we worked a lot on the kind of governance of projects and working with leadership to ensure that they provide that trust to the people who work with us. Also, looking into our, you know, Swedish heritage, we come from a culture where we do work as a team, and we don’t look and celebrate an individual accomplishment; we celebrate team efforts.

You can watch the full season below.

Are Food Delivery Lockers the Next Must-Have Home Amenity?

Everywhere you look there are delivery lockers. Grocery stores, apartment buildings, office lobbies.

So why not at our home?

If you’re Jeremy High, the idea makes lots of sense. As a luxury home builder in the central California market of Monterey, High works closely with clients spec’ing out features customized around their lifestyles. A recurring ask he hears from his customers is they want a way to ensure that food delivered to their home is safe and kept at the right temperature.

The more he heard this, the more High wondered if a solution existed to help his customers. When he realized there wasn’t, he decided to build it himself.

High’s product, eventually called the Fresh Portal, is a food and package delivery locker built into the side of a home. It has temperature control zones for either hot or cold food and would be accessible both from the outside and inside. It would be managed by an app and integrated with third-party delivery service providers like UberEats or Amazon Fresh so they can access the outside of the locker and insert a delivery.

For High, who first thought of the idea in 2014 and filed for a patent a year later, the product needed to be installable both in new builds and retrofits. To make that possible, he designed the Fresh Portal to use an install concept similar to that of a retrofit window, where the installation process pierced the building envelope, and then the installed product is integrated with the home’s existing waterproofing.

“The design allows us to install this rapidly,” said High. “We can install this and not do any patchwork. No paint comes out. Nothing like that.”

High, who is raising money for his company, plans to have a shippable product by sometime in 2023. He estimates the pricing for the system will be $3,450 installed.

If this all sounds a little first-world problem-ish to you, it is. None of that should be surprising since High’s typical customer has enough wealth to buy a new multimillion-dollar home.

But the luxury home builder turned tech entrepreneur does have a plan to make his food delivery lockers more accessible through subsidization. One such scenario could include a Fresh Portal included as part of a food delivery subscription service. Another is one in which the Fresh Portal earns revenues from third-party delivery service providers.

“DoorDash can deliver to a First Portal versus your porch or knocking on the door and waiting,” said High. “Efficiency and the first time delivery success metric goes up because they’re delivering to a product.”

In exchange, High believes that the delivery companies would pay his company 1% of the sale if it’s delivered to a Fresh Portal. This is all in the idea stage at this point, as High has yet to strike any deals with third-party delivery companies, and I have to wonder if they’d willingly part ways with even a thin slice of their margin.

I think High has time to figure out his subsidization models later, mostly because I see the Fresh Portal as primarily a solution for new homes or remodels for the next few years. I can see the home delivery locker becoming a trendy new homebuilder amenity, where the product’s price is rolled into the monthly mortgage payment.

Longer-term – think a ten-year time horizon – I can see a future where home delivery lockers become commonplace. Like the milk box of a bygone era, only these boxes will be refrigerated, connected to the cloud, and – if you own a Fresh Portal – built into the side of your home.

CES 2022: Samsung & Others Launch Home Connectivity Alliance to Foster Appliance ‘Cloud to Cloud’ Interoperability

This week at CES, Samsung, Haier (and its subsidiary GE Appliances), Electrolux, and others announced the formation of the Home Connectivity Alliance, a group focused on fostering cloud-to-cloud interoperability across different home appliances.

The organization, which was incorporated in September 2021, is focused on solving a big problem for the smart home: incompatibility across different brands’ smart appliance products. Anyone with smart home appliances from different brands knows why this is a problem. Connected appliance product lines typically have their own proprietary app that only works with that brand. The end result is multiple apps and products that don’t talk to each other.

Here’s how the group’s website describes the benefits of interoperability: A consumer may purchase a connected washer and dryer from Brand A and benefit from features like notifications that alert the user when their wash or dry cycle is complete. Unfortunately, these notifications can only be enabled via Brand A’s platform. Interoperability enables consumers to purchase a washer from Brand A and a dryer from Brand B (or vice versa) and still receive the convenient wash or dry cycle completion notification either from Brand A’s platform or Brand B’s platform.

To achieve that type of cross-brand interoperability, the HCA’s focus is on making sure member companies’ data and service clouds connect. This focus on cloud-to-cloud interop makes sense in 2022, a time well into the smart home revolution where interoperability in the lower parts of the network stack – like physical layer communications (i.e. Wi-Fi, Zigbee, etc) – has largely been solved.

Since the HCA was founded only three months ago, it’s not surprising there are no technical details on how it will work (and by no details, I mean no details: The technical info page simply says “more info to come!”). One of the big unknowns will be how the group will work with other efforts to create cross-compatibility in the smart home, including the much-discussed Matter standard founded by Amazon, Apple and, yes, Samsung’s SmartThings Group.

In Samsung’s announcement about the group, they make no mention of Matter or other smart home interoperability standards (though they mention their own platform SmartThings), instead talking up the importance of interoperability across appliance brands.

“It is the support of global manufacturers like Samsung that makes HCA uniquely qualified to establish interoperability guidelines for long-life appliances and systems in the home, ultimately delivering safe, simple and elegant consumer experiences,” said Yoon Ho Choi, President of Home Connectivity Alliance (and Samsung employee).

While the group has an impressive initial roster of members, a few notable absences include BSH Appliances, Whirlpool, and LG Electronics. BSH is particularly interesting because the group has its own smart home interoperability standard it has been pushing for some time called Home Connect.

In many ways, it’s this absence of other big names that is the HCA’s (and really any interoperability effort’s) biggest challenge; any semblance of full cross-brand compatibility is, by definition, out of reach unless all of the industry’s biggest stakeholders buy in. Whether or not that happens for HCA is yet to be determined, but it’s still early days and the group is off to a good start. Let’s hope they can make it happen so we smart appliance owners can finally have products that reach their full potential.

Loch Electronics Launches Kickstarter Campaign for Its Handy Countertop Dishwasher

Depending on where you live, getting a dishwasher isn’t a given, hence the growing market for tiny dishwashers (like Tetra) that can live on a countertop and are also well-suited to smaller households.

The latest comes from Scottish consumer electronics startup Loch Electronics, which today launched a campaign for its Capsule dishwasher on Kickstarter. The project has already far exceeded its pledged goal of $99,254. As of this writing, more than 650 backers have pledged over $270,000. Which just goes to show you, there are still a lot of folks out there in need of dishwashers. 

Loch bills the Capsule as an “all-in-one solution.” First and foremost, the machine functions as a mini-dishwasher that, according to the company, can wash two meals worth of dishes in 15 minutes. The 22-pound device is meant to fit neatly on the average kitchen countertop and not take up too much space. It has a mode for washing fruits and veggies, and a UV light feature that be used to disinfect non-kitchen items, such as a phone case, keys, or a wallet.

Users can either plumb the Capsule into their kitchen or simply place the device near the sink, where it will drain when the wash cycle is finished. The device is also extremely portable — in theory, you could even take it camping if you really wanted to.

Those that pledge £283 (about $402 USD) will get a Capsule unit with all its accompanying accessories. The price tag is about 33 percent off what Capsule will retail for when it eventually hits the market. Those wanting more than one machine can pledge either £488 ($692) for two or £707 ($1,000) for three.

Capsule is expected to ship in February 2022 to anywhere in the world. 

“Alexa, Look Into My Eyes”: New Prototype Combines Human Gaze with Voice Control to Help You Cook

There’s no doubt that voice control interfaces like Alexa and Google have had a huge impact on the way we search for recipes, access our appliances and add things to our grocery lists.

But what if that voice assistant had a contextual understanding of where you where looking when you are cooking the evening meal?

That’s the big idea behind a new prototype from Synapse, a division of Cambridge Consultants. The new Hobgoblin technology concept utilizes machine vision to gather information about where a person is looking when issuing a voice command and applies that information to the cooking experience.

From the project page:

We have been exploring the use of computer-vision based sensing as context, and for this cooktop demonstration we augmented the VUI using gaze tracking to make what feels like a magical interaction. The cooktop infers which burner is being addressed in a voice command by using its camera tracking to know which burner you’re looking at. This way, when the system detects a person standing in front of it looking at a burner, commands can omit the burner designation, e.g. “turn that burner on,” or simply saying a level like “medium high.”

In the concept video, a user is cooking and says “Alexa, turn up the heat.” Using a camera that is built into the cooktop, Alexa is able to infer that the user is cooking because they are looking at the cooktop.

There’s no doubt that the ability to combine contextual understanding of what is happening in a room to power commands given to digital assistants like Alexa could create much more powerful potential “smart kitchen” user scenarios. One could easily imagine combining other information to create more contextually relevant experiences, including facial recognition to, for example, apply a personalized knowledge base that understands a person’s cooking capabilities or their favorite recipes.

You can see the Hobgoblin demo in action below:

Hobgoblin Smart Appliance Interface | This New User-Interface Tech Isn't Just for the Kitchen

Innohome Strikes Deal With Electrolux To Bring Kitchen Fire Prevention Tech to US

Finnish startup Innohome, a maker of fire prevention technology for kitchens, has announced a supplier agreement with Electrolux to bring the company’s products to North America.

As I’ve written before, cooking equipment is the leading culprit when it comes to home fires. Nearly half (46%) of home fires in the US are started in the kitchen.

And the biggest cause of kitchen fires is unattended cooking, something many of us have done in this era of constant distractions.

Unlike the typical approach in the US that focuses on alerting us about a fire once its already started, InnoHome and similar products focus on preventing the fire before it starts by shutting off the stove when it senses a possible fire.

InnoHome has had significant success in Europe, particularly Finland, where the government encourages installation of fire prevention equipment. To date, the company has sold 400,000 of its fire prevention products into homes.

According to InnoHome’s head of North America, Eero Vartiainen, the first product Electrolux will bring has been optimized for the North American market.

“We have tested and tuned our products to meet the wide-ranging needs of the North American kitchen,” said Vartiainen, “and the first solution will be a smart sensor that alerts when the cooking surface gets too hot too fast or the temperature is unsafe.”

The product will likely be based on similar technology from InnoHome’s flagship product, the SKG5010, which includes a sensor and a control unit. The battery powered sensor is installed in the overhead in the cooker hood, and the control unit, which plugs into a home’s power supply, cuts off the power to the stove if a fire risk is detected.

Vartiainen also hinted that the Electrolux rollout will leverage smart home technology, which makes me wonder if we could eventually see some voice control or alerts through integration with Alexa or another voice assistant.

Back when I interviewed Vartianen in 2017, he hinted this type of integration was on their roadmap:

“Products like Amazon Echo and Google Home are giving every consumer an option to add other products, thus, making our homes more accessible through voice-controlled or other connected technology,” said Vartianen. “Fire prevention systems, such as Innohome’s StoveGuard, will integrate with these platforms and will allow customers to get real-time updates on the status of their cooking equipment.”

Hopefully we’ll know soon. Vartianen said the company will have more announcements in the near future.

Single? Samsung Launches Matchmaking Service Based Off What’s In Your Fridge

You know how they say that the best way to a man’s (or woman’s) heart is through their stomach? Well, Samsung is hoping that it’s actually through your fridge.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the technology giant is launching an online dating service called… wait for it… Refrigerdating. Users can upload a photo of their fridge (presumably after throwing away their moldy leftovers and Single Girl margarita mix) for free to the Refrigerdating website. After adding a short bio and a way to get in touch (phone number (!!!), email, etc), they’ll be given a string of other fridge shots and can either select “Not to My Taste” or “Let’s Get Cooking.” Matches will appear on the site and either party can reach out to connect to the human owner of the appliance that caught their eye. And who said romance is dead?

The app is meant to work in tandem with the Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator, which is outfitted with an Amazon Dash Button-enabled touchscreen on the door and an interior camera meant to let you track your fridge’s contents (and their expiration dates) from anywhere. But never fear: even those with plain old regular ‘fridges can still find love through Refrigerdating. As of now, there’s no mobile version of the app; it’s only accessible through a web browser.

According to CNET, the idea for Refrigerdating originated in Sweden, where there are apparently lots of single people and sexy fridges. Currently, the vast majority of users are in the Nordic region, but anyone in the world can try out the app. The release is clearly timed for Valentine’s Day, but there’s no word from Samsung on how long the service will last.

For Samsung, there’s an obvious payoff: getting a literal glimpse into your fridge, collecting data on what you’re buying and how you’re storing. From a romantic perspective, though, the idea may seem laughable at first (the cheesy name doesn’t help). But the more I thought about it, the more I decided there may actually be something to choosing your potential mate based on what they eat every day. After all, food is a huge part of life and can give good insight into individual values, lifestyle, and tastes — literally and figuratively.

If you know that someone likes organic yogurt, grass-fed beef, and natural wine, you’ll have a very different picture than if you know they subsist off of Gatorade and single-serve microwaveable meals. Of course, that’s assuming that no one tries to Refrigerdate catfish by hiding their Kraft singles behind their artisanal cheddar, the equivalent of posting a photo on a dating app of yourself ten years prior (when you still had hair).

In the end, selecting someone based off of the contents of their fridge makes just about as much sense as selecting based off of a few photos and a one-sentence bio. So if you’re hungry for love this Valentine’s season, maybe it’s worth putting yourself — and your fridge — out there.

CES 2019 Video: SeedSheet Launching Sensor for Idiot-Proof Home Gardens

Much as I love the idea of home gardening and picking fresh herbs from my windowsill to sprinkle over a pasta dish, anything I try to grow at home usually ends up dying within a few weeks. I either forget to water my plants, or else they perish due to weeds or lack of sunlight.

Maybe I should give Seedsheet a go. We wrote about this startup, which makes sheets that have pods of seeds embedded in a weed-blocking fabric, back in 2017, just a month after they got half a million bucks from Shark Tank investor Lori Greiner. Basically, it’s an idiot-proof garden.

And soon it will become even more easy to manage: in June, Seedsheet will launch a bluetooth sensor which you can stick in your Seedsheet-covered pot to give real-time data about ambient light, soil moisture, and more.

We caught up with Seedsheet CEO Cameron MacKugler on the CES floor to talk about what’s next for his company and the home gardening space in general. Give it a watch below:

The Spoon Talks to Seedsheet At CES 2019

Cheers to the Future: Five Cool Beverage Startups at CES’ Eureka Park

Sure, the towering installations, self-driving cars, and elaborate smart home setups at CES are fun to see. But my favorite part of the show is wandering through Eureka Park, the gigantic open room filled with over 1,200 startups all hoping to make a name for themselves. Meandering up and down the aisles of this room is one of the best ways to discover companies that are hidden gems.

Interestingly, some of this year’s coolest startups involved beverages. From coffee alarm clocks to wine sensors, here are five that caught my eye amid the chaos of Eureka Park.

Capsulier
Making your morning espresso with a coffee pod is super convenient, but those plastic pods are a blight on the environment (unless you mail them back to Nespresso), not to mention, expensive. Atom Xquare Limited’s Capsulier device is out to free you from the pod with their countertop machine which lets you make your own custom coffee pods for Nespresso machines. Just put a scoopful ground coffee (or loose-leaf tea) in the top of the device, pop in the reusable stainless steel pod, and pull the lever to pack your own pod. You can use it in your Nespresso machine, then wash it out and then reuse.

There are already refillable Nespresso capsules on the market, but Capsulier promises to precisely measure and pack your coffee so there’s no mess or guestimating. As of now the Capsulier only makes pods that fit into Nespresso machines, so if you use a Keurig you’re out of luck. The device retails for $99 on Atom Xquare Limited’s website, and you can purchase additional pods for $36 each.

 

TeaRado
TeaRado Tech‘s smart, self-heating tea tumbler can brew up to two cups of tea on the go. To make the tea, fill the interior basket with loose leaf tea, pour room temperature water into the tumbler, and set the brew time and water temperature on the TeaRado app. In 12 to 15 minutes, the water will heat up to 170 °F and brew the tea via an automated French Press-like movement. You can either brew by setting the tumbler on a charging pod and plugging it into the wall, or attaching it to a battery pack to brew on the go.

TeaRado’s brewer will retail for $150, and users can also purchase tea through the connected app. TeaRado will launch on Kickstarter on April 15 and is expected to ship in December of this year.

 

Photo: Catherine Lamb

MyOeno Scan
Unless you’re a sommelier, figuring out the composition of wines — and which types you like — can be a daunting challenge. MyOeno Scan has a small device (roughly 4 inches long) which, when inserted into a glass of wine, will display a breakdown of its levels of tannins, acidity, and strength on the MyOeno app. Afterwards, you drink and rate the wine, so the app learns what type you like. Once you’ve established your taste profile, you can search for compatible wines on the MyOeno app and see where they’re available to purchase.

The device retails for €89 ($102 USD) and is available on the MyOeno website and through Amazon. Fun fact: MyOeno can also be used in milk to detect if it contains any water or detergent, a service which the team told me is mostly used in Asia.

 

Photo: Catherine Lamb

Barisieur
Dragging yourself out of bed in the morning is way easier if coffee is near. U.K. startup Barisieur‘s coffee brewer alarm clock brings the cup of joe to you while you’re still in bed. The night before, fill the drawer on the front of the device with ground coffee (or tea), then set your alarm and indicate whether you want your coffee to start brewing before, during, or after your alarm sounds. It takes 2 to 3 minutes for the water to boil, and a few more for the coffee to brew. There’s even a small chilled compartment where you can keep a wee container of milk or half-n-half.

Barisieur retails for $445 (zoinks!), and is available online and in several large department stores in the U.K. and U.S.

 

DrinkShift
No one likes running out of beer. And while keeping track of your bottle count isn’t exactly rocket science, the new smart beer fridge from Tokyo-based DrinkShift manages your stock for you. The fridge’s server monitors your drinking pace and uses an algorithm to figure out when to re-order more brewskies so you never run out. You can customize beer packages to indicate which ones you want, and they’re delivered to your door via a third party retailer.

DrinkShift debuted their fridge this April; it was immediately bought by Panasonic. It’s not on the market yet, and also doesn’t yet have a retail price — but one of the booth workers told me it will first roll out in Japan.

Eureka Park is huge and I am but one person — did I miss any cool, under-the-radar startups? Let us know in the comments or tweet us @TheSpoonTech!

Here Are Our Smart Kitchen Predictions for 2019

I used to think making predictions about consumer technology in the run-up to CES was a fool’s errand. After all, all it takes is one or two surprise announcements from a big player or ambitious startup to throw all of your assumptions for the coming year into question.

But my thinking about this has changed.  After the past couple CES’s, I’ve come to the conclusion that anything that comes out of the big consumer tech show almost invariably underscores trends we’ve already been observing rather than surprise us with entirely new ones.

So here, a week before the big show, are my smart kitchen predictions for 2019.

Big appliance Makers Get Into the Smart Oven Game

One of the big plans in my home for 2019 is a kitchen remodel.  Not surprisingly, I can’t wait to replace our old Amana oven from the 90s with a smart oven. The only problem? My wife wants a built-in oven and pretty much all the latest cutting-edge consumer ovens like the June and Brava are countertop appliances*.

The good news is that will soon change. Big appliance brands have all been investing in R&D to create new technology to power their next generation of appliances, and 2019 will be the year we’ll finally see built-in cooking appliances integrate smart features beyond just Wi-Fi. And it’s not just ovens. GE’s integration of the Hestan Cue technology is a sign surface cooking will get better and smarter too in 2019.

Now if I can only get my wife to hold off on the remodel for a few more months.

Microwaves Get Smart

In the world of kitchen tech, no appliance gets picked on more than the microwave. That’s because, for all its ubiquity, microwaves use tech developed during World War II to create results that are often less than perfect.

But the microwave as we know it is transforming, and it goes way beyond Amazon getting into the game. Startups like Markov are using AI to essentially create intelligent microwaves that can better steer their energy to heat with better precision, and big appliance brands like BSH are investigating microwaves with internal cameras to monitor cooking and adjust heating in realtime during a cooking session. Meanwhile, food companies like Conagra are also researching ways to create tailored heating algorithms for different frozen food product SKUs. Finally, I expect 2019 will be the year other big brands will join Miele in building home appliances with next-generation RF cooking technology that could essentially do away with traditional microwaves altogether.

Next-Gen Interfaces Are More Than Just Voice

At some point over the past year, voice assistants crossed the chasm from being “the future” to the everyday and commonplace.  And while the mainstreaming of voice assistants from Amazon and Google has meant hundreds of millions of devices installed in the field, I still think the future of consumer interfaces isn’t all spoken word.

So if every single interaction in the kitchen won’t start with a conversation with Alexa or Google, what will that mean?  As I’ve written before, projected touch screen interfaces are potential game-changers, and finally last year we saw a big appliance maker in BSH that seemed serious about bringing their projection interface (called PAI) to market.

Finally, while we’ve seen some plateauing of interest in chatbots as a control layer, I still think we’ll continue to see social and messenger integrations create interesting conversational interfaces in coming years, especially as Gen Z comes into their own as a consumer force.

The Kitchen Computer Isn’t Coming. It’s Already Here

A few years ago, word got out about a secret Amazon project called Kabinet in which the Seattle e-commerce giant was supposedly building a ‘kitchen computer’.  While the company never released a product called they referred to as an “kitchen computer”, my assumption has always been that the Echo Show was the result of this secret effort and could have easily have been called just that.

Now just a couple years later, the voice-enabled smart display has become one of tech’s biggest battlegrounds as Amazon, Google and even Facebook jockey for a space on our kitchen counters.  Because these devices are trojan horses for commerce and services sold into the home, these companies see the kitchen – the home’s central hub for most families – as the most desirable landing spot for these devices. In 2019, I expect these companies to continue investing into food and cooking-centric applications and to beef up their partner rosters (like Google’s hookup with Innit) in order to build these capabilities out further.

The Emergence of the Sentient Kitchen

Last month, I uncovered a Whirlpool patent for a computer vision system that would use machine learning to help it better understand behaviors within the kitchen and react to them. It was a fairly expansive and ambitious patent, one which told me Whirlpool sees AI as one of the key battlegrounds for the future of their space.

And the appliance giant isn’t alone.  Amazon has been working on anticipatory food delivery while startups like Icebox are building AI-powered systems that make sure you never run out of eggs. Add in some interesting research in areas like synthetic sensors and we’re seeing the foundations for the sentient kitchen being built before our eyes, where the kitchen and underlying systems become able to anticipate and react to the consumer’s needs.

Food-Driven Revenue Models Come Further Into Focus

While the appliance business has historically focused on selling metal boxes, 2019 will be the year many appliance brands adapt their business models to include recurring revenue through food sales (subscription and otherwise). Tovala and Nomiku have been working on home food delivery for a couple years, and over the past six months they were joined by the likes of Brava, June and ChefSteps. 2019 will also see big appliance brands move in this direction as well, and an early sign of this is LG’s Home Brew appliance, a home beer brew system with an accompanying subscription ingredient business.

2019 will see also see grocery and delivery platform players making focused efforts to partner with appliance brands. In broadband parlance, cooking appliances are essentially the “last mile” when it comes to food decisions, meaning those who control the cooking and food storage control, in many ways, consumer food spending.  Amazon knew this years ago (hence the “kitchen computer”) and others are just now waking up to the strategic importance of the connected kitchen.

There are my predictions for the smart kitchen in 2019, now let’s see what happens at CES next week to reinforce those thoughts (or blow them up).

If you’ll be at CES showing off some cool kitchen or foodtech, direct message via Twitter. We’ll have the entire Spoon team there reporting from the show. 

*The lone exception was the June built-in oven, but the startup essentially end-of-lifed that appliance when they launched the gen 2 June.

Would you Buy an Amazon House?

As I look around my house and see the number of Echo devices plugged in, look at the empty cardboard boxes piled up in my garage and finish watching season one of Forever on Prime Video, it doesn’t feel like much of a stretch to see how dependent I am on Amazon. At this point, maybe I should just say well, I’ve gone this far, it’s probably easier to just buy an Amazon house.

The idea of living in an Amazon house just got a little less crazy. Amazon announced today that its Alexa Fund has invested in Plant Prefab, a company that makes prefabricated houses. According to the Plant Prefab website, the company is:

“…the first home factory in the nation dedicated to sustainable construction, materials, processes, and operations. We believe homes can and should be built in ways that minimize their negative impact on energy, water, resources — and the health of the people who live in our homes and who build them.”

The CEO of Plant Prefab told Fast Company in an email:

“We will work with Amazon to integrate Alexa and other smart home technology they have into our standard home platforms… We’ll be working with them to create better integrated Alexa and other smart home technology solutions to help improve the quality of life and utility of people who live in the homes we build.”

Hooking up with a prefab home manufacturer does provide Amazon with an additional sales channel, and the company has been making moves to embed itself more deeply into the bones of our houses. Amazon purchased connected camera company Blink last December and followed that up with the purchase smart doorbell maker Ring in March. The company launched Key delivery, which uses a combination of smart locks and connected cameras to allow in-home delivery of packages while you’re out.

If that weren’t enough, at last week’s media event, Amazon unveiled its own brand of microwave, as well as new Echo devices which include a new Guard mode to listen for the sound of broken glass or a smoke alarm. It also announced a $25 smart plug to turn any appliance into a connected device. And if that weren’t enough, Amazon launched Connect Kit, which makes it easier for companies to create smart home devices.

But Plant Prefab doesn’t operate at the scale Amazon normally operates. It seems like there is, like always, a data side to this deal. Getting in with builders allows Amazon to understand on a neighborhood level where these types of new homes are being built, and small things like what different building codes are in various municipalities, and how new building materials perform. It could also give the company architectural know how to better integrate things like secure delivery boxes, or temperature controlled ones that require electricity for food delivery, directly into homes.

Or perhaps, Bezos can take this prefab building knowledge and put it to use as part of his recent philanthropy to help fight homelessness.

Whatever the reason, it’s clear Amazon isn’t just interested in our house, it wants to re-create our world. Smart technology will become a standard part of modern houses, whether that’s having the smarts built in or creating the space and modularity for easy wiring and installation of future technology.

The other question is, how will big will Amazon’s influence get in the home building space and how will that impact other players and professionals in the home electronics installation space, like those in CEDIA.

Whether or not Amazon becomes dominant in this space, or becomes another Sears Kit House remains to be seen. But building smart homes from the ground up is sure to be a topic we continually revisit. In fact, we’ll be holding a conversation with Bruce Thompson, CEO of Urbaneer about “Designing the Kitchen Ecosystem of the Future” at our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit in a couple weeks. Get your ticket today to be a part of the conversation.

No More Lukewarm Coffee: How Heating Tech will Disrupt the Kitchen

The ability to apply precision heat to food and drinks is a quick-evolving — and pretty darn exciting — area of the digital kitchen innovation. And no one is pushing more boundaries in this space than Clay Alexander. He’s the founder and CEO of Ember, a company which makes smart mugs which can exactly control and maintain the temperature of your tea or coffee. And that’s just the beginning; he’s applying his precision heating tech to everything from kitchen plates to baby bottles to medical supplies.

We’ve been fans of Ember for a while and can’t wait to have Alexander speak at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) in Seattle this October! To pique your interest, we asked him a few questions about the future of heating technology in the kitchen — and for Ember.

This interview has been edited for clarity and grammar.

You have an impressive background in entrepreneurship and innovation, specifically in lighting. What inspired you to pivot to heating and create the Ember mug?
I had just sold my LED light bulb to GE which was a major career milestone for me. I was sitting in the kitchen with my wife having breakfast, thinking of what I wanted to do next. I still had my lighting company Radiance (which I still own today) but my wife and I were contemplating if we should take some time off and travel or stay in Los Angeles. It was then that, as usual, my scrambled eggs got cold. I’m a talker and can rarely finish a meal while it’s still warm. I had a spark and wondered why, in this day and age, my plate could not keep my food warm, and my cup could not keep my coffee hot.

It was my ‘ah ha’ moment if you will, and I decided to start developing a prototype to see if I could solve this problem. As an inventor, the drive to always be creating is very strong. It’s innate. So, we put the vacation on hold and I got to work. Seven years later, we launched our first product and Ember was born.

How are you leveraging technology to improve your product?
As a serial inventor, I’m always exploring how we can improve our product. A couple ways we do this is by listening to our customers and reviewing our app data. For example, we heard that many customers wanted a longer battery life on our Travel Mug, so we listened, and we are working on that for the next version, so people can enjoy their tea or coffee even longer.

What’s next for Ember? Are you applying your heating tech to anything beyond mugs?
Absolutely. With temperature control, the possibilities are endless. We’re exploring numerous categories where we can apply our technology across several verticals. Currently we’re developing the world’s first self-heated baby bottle, which we think will be a massive game-changer for new parents.

What advice do you have for food tech entrepreneurs who are just starting out?
This is advice I give all entrepreneurs: If you have an idea for a product, you should first create a prototype and start testing it. Even if you make it from used parts found in your garage and duct tape, you need to get a working model built and start using it. That’s how I started Ember. I built a prototype in my house and tested it over and over again to see how I could improve it. You can’t just read or talk about something, you need to take action. Build, test, improve, rebuild, repeat.

Food and beverage heating is an area that’s spurring a lot of innovation lately. Where do you see the future of heating, as it fits into the realm of food and drink?
This is really an exciting time for innovation in the home and kitchen space. I think we are just scratching the surface as people become more comfortable with technology in the food and beverage area. At Ember, we envision a day in the near future where all your dishware will keep your food at the perfect serving temperature: bowls, plates, serving ware, and so on. Through heating and cooling technology, we want consumers to be able to control the precise temperature for everything they eat and drink. Eventually, it will become second nature.

What’s the biggest thing (be it a trend, piece of technology, idea, consumer behavior, etc.) you see disrupting the future of food and cooking?
I think one of the biggest trends is how technology is disrupting the entire food chain in the home. Whether preparing food or enjoying it, we are going to see a lot more digital tools working to bring more joy and ease into your daily routine in the kitchen. A couple current examples of this are the June oven and the Jura coffee machine. These products take the complications and labor out of food prep: you can press a button and go. Ember does the final step, letting you enjoy your food and drinks without needing to get up and constantly re-heat them. In the kitchen, we’ll have more appliances that just do things for you and enhance your life.

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Thanks, Clay! If you want to see him speak more about how heating and cooling tech will come to shape the way we cook, eat, and enjoy our food (and beverages), snag your tickets to the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th in Seattle.