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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

smart kitchen

Suvie Debuts Second Generation Countertop ‘Cooking Robot’

Suvie, a maker of smart automated cooking appliances for the home, has debuted its second generation appliance, the eponymous Suvie 2.0.

So what’s different about the first and second generation Suvie? A whole bunch.

First things first: Suvie 2 is a heck of a lot smaller. That’s mainly because the second generation appliance has reduced the Suvie from being a four-chamber cooking appliance to a two-chamber machine. This change is made possible because each cooking chamber is now multifunctional, which means instead of having chamber specifically for sauce, protein or veggies, each of the two chambers can broil, steam, sous vide, slow cook as well as roast and bake (these last two cooking modes are new to the Suvie 2).

And just like the first machine, the Suvie 2 has a built in compressor-based refrigerator that chills the food until is is ready to cook. This was one of the draws of the original Suvie — being able to store your food safely in the machine while you were out all day, until it was time to cook it.

While the Suvie 2 has a smaller countertop footprint, the cooking capacity per chamber has actually gone up. According to Suvie CEO Robin Liss, cooking pans are 21% larger than in the previous generation.

To help slim down the new appliance, Suvie also removed the “starch’ chamber and created a separate, optional Starch Cooker. The new add-on, which Liss affectionately called “starchie” (but insisted is not the official name), features the same “patented” autodrain capability and can cook rice, pasta, beans and other starchy foods.

The new Suvie will be available for a pre-order price of $399 for the main unit, and $300 for the starch cooking add-on. MSRP for the core unit will be $800. According to Suvie, the company will also offer a significant discount to customers of the first gen Suvie who want to upgrade.

Just as with the first gen appliance, the user will be able to cook Suvie-originated meals or their own food, but with the addition of quartz broiler heating elements (the same type of heating elements used by the popular Breville toaster ovens), which enables more consistent heating and allows for the user to bake and broil food.

To fund the rollout of the new Suvie, company Liss told The Spoon the company has raised a $11 million in seed funding (they previously has raised $725 thousand on Kickstarter). That funding will also help the company continue to expand its associated meal service.

The new funding and the debut of a second generation Suvie is a bright spot in a kitchen tech market that has seen some consolidation over the past few years. Since Electrolux’s acquisition of Anova for a quarter of a billion in 2017, the few exits for venture-funded kitchen tech startups have relatively quiet (like ChefSteps, Brava and June), while others -- like Nomiku and Sansaire -- have shut their doors.

Interestingly, the two startups still making a go of it in this space both eyed the pairing of cooking appliances with meal delivery, a business model that has the potential of long-term recurring revenue for companies also competing in what is a highly cost-competitive hardware market. For its part, Tovala announced a new $30 million funding round this month, less than a year after its previous round.

If you’d like to buy the new Suvie, you can pick it up now and, according to Liss, the product will begin shipping in twelve to fourteen weeks.

You can see the Suvie in action below.

Smart Oven and Meal Delivery Startup Tovala Raises Additional $30 Million

Tovala, a smart oven and meal delivery startup based in Chicago, announced today they have raised a $30 million series C funding round led by consumer-tech VC Left Lane Capital.

The funding round follows a $20 million series B Tovala raised last June.

So why did the company raise another huge round six months after the last one? The biggest reason, according to Tovala CEO David Rabie, was the company’s continued growth.

“The business has grown 10X over the past 18 months,” Rabie told me via Zoom this week. “A big chunk of that came pre-COVID, a big chunk came post COVID. COVID accelerated some things, but the business was already on pace to grow quickly.”

According to Rabie, the fit with Left Land Capital was another reason. Tovala felt their new lead investor, which focuses on consumer-focused Internet companies (some of the firm’s previous investments include Freshly, Farmer’s Dog and DeliveryHero), had the right expertise to help them scale.

“They have more depth of expertise in the consumer subscription space than almost anyone we’ve talked to, especially especially direct to consumer,” Rabie said. “They were really interested. At some point we were going to go raise another round, and we had gotten to know them pretty well over the course of last year, and felt like it was a great fit.”

So what is Tovala going do with its new growth capital? According to Rabie, the company plans to continue to invest in the product, by which he means everything on both the food and technology side.

“All of it, from you know the app to the packaging to the oven to the food within our walls, those are all products, and each of them are kind of an important part of the customer journey. And you know what we’ve built we think is really good, but we think it can get a lot better.”

A big chunk of the new investment will go to a new food production and packaging facility to serve the western half of the US. Currently Tovala services the entire US out of two facilities in Illinois, and so they plan to lease a new space and build out a new production, packaging and delivery facility “west of the Rockies” to serve the west and parts of the south.

What the funding won’t necessarily be used for is building a new oven, in part because the current model is working pretty well for them.

“We’re still in the exploratory phase where we’re really trying to figure out if we are going to go pursue a gen three,” said Rabie. ” What does it need to do, because the gen two works quite well. Reviews are really strong customers love it. There are not people banging on our door saying ‘if only the gen two did x, we would buy more of them current price.'”

Regardless of how it plans to spend its new cash infusion, that there is strong investor interest sets the company apart from some of its peers in the consumer hardware space. While others like Zimmplistic and Chefsteps failed to find additional financing, investors have continued to knock on Tovala’s door.

I asked Rabie why they’ve succeeded where others have struggled.

“I think it’s a complex answer,” said Rabie. “Part of it was the problem we went about solving is kind of different from all the other players. For this to work, you have to be good at building physical product, you have to be good at managing food and a food supply chain, you have to be good at marketing, you have to be good at customer service. A lot of things have to go right for it to work.”

The only other countertop smart cooking appliance seeing similar traction is Anova, which continues to sell out of their new precision steam oven. I asked Rabie if this is a sign that steam ovens might be the next breakout category.

“To be totally frank, Anova will have more to do with that than us, because we have different customers,” said Rabie. “My guess is the customer that’s buying the Anova oven is interested in cooking hacks and cooking gadgets. Our customer is like, ‘I’m really busy. I want a high quality meal on a Tuesday night, and I don’t want to keep spending $60 on Doordash.'”

I’ll be interviewing David Rabie about their latest funding round on Clubhouse today at 10 AM PT. Join us to listen and ask questions.

Amazon Alexa Getting Better at Guessing Follow Up Requests

One big area where virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant fall short of real human assistants is their inability to contextualize and anticipate what you’ll want next.

Currently, requests made to virtual assistants are often siloed, and go something like this:

“Alexa, how long should I steep tea?”

Alexa answers, with something like “Five minutes,” and then:

“Alexa, set a timer for five minutes.”

In a corporate blog post today (hat tip Geekwire), Amazon announced that Alexa is now getting better at bundling those types of requests together. Amazon refers to this as figuring out your “latent goal,” and actually provides tea steeping as an example. Asking Alexa how long to steep tea could have Alexa guess that your latent goal is to make tea. This, in turn would trigger an immediate and automatic follow up response from Alexa like “Would you like me to set a five minute timer?”

While this seems straightforward, as with so many AI-related tasks, understanding what people want isn’t exactly easy. From Amazon’s blog post:

The first step is to decide whether to anticipate a latent goal at all. Our early experiments showed that not all dialogue contexts are well suited to latent-goal discovery. When a customer asked for “recipes for chicken”, for instance, one of our initial prototypes would incorrectly follow up by asking, “Do you want me to play chicken sounds?”

Beyond tea, it’s not hard to think of how identifying latent goals could be useful in a smart kitchen. In the case of asking for chicken recipes, Alexa could follow up with offers to pre-heat an oven, or, more relevant to Amazon, offer to order you the necessary groceries for delivery that day (preferably from an Amazon grocery store).

Amazon says this latent goal capability is available now in English in the U.S. And while it doesn’t require any additional work from developers to activate, they can make their skills more discoverable with the Name-Free Interaction Tool Kit.

FWIW, I tried asking Alexa the tea steeping question, and it did not follow up with a timer suggestion. So its latent goals capabilities seem to still be, well, latent.

A Quick Walkaround Tour of Smart Kitchen Summit Virtual

Here at the Spoon, we’ve been spending most of our days getting ready for Smart Kitchen Summit 2020, which takes place Oct. 13–15 and, this year, is completely virtual.

One thing that’s become clear over the past few weeks is that many folks haven’t attended, let alone spoke or exhibited at, a virtual summit before. Heck, for us, this is our first big one as well.

So I thought it would be worth while to give a quick guided tour of what our event will look like by giving a tour of Hopin, the virtual event platform where we are hosting SKS 2020.

One of the reasons we chose Hopin is that it includes all of the various “locations” you normally see when you attend in-person events: a Main stage, areas for breakout sessions, exhibit areas and, of course, networking space.

And we plan to take advantage of all of these different features to make for a great interactive three days of conversation, workshops, demos and networking.

Some of the things we have on tap:

  • A live demo of 3D printing plant-based meat from NovaMeat
  • A tour of Modernist Cuisine Kitchen
  • A debut of a new restaurant-scale pizza-making robot
  • Live sessions with Startup Showcase finalists demoing everything from cultured seafood labs to taste-altering cutlery to home cooking robots.

And that’s just the beginning. Add in conversations and one-on-one networking with the leaders of companies in kitchen tech, future food, restaurant tech and more, and we are super excited about helping you come away from SKS with great ideas and the right connections to help you build your next business.

You’re probably thinking that’s great, but what exactly does a virtual event look like? Don’t worry. I did a quick walkthrough of Hopin to give you a better understanding of how it all works. Just click play below to take a quick tour.

Once your done, make sure to get your ticket to SKS because you will not want to miss out!

Meet the Startup Showcase Finalists for Smart Kitchen Summit 2020

While much of the food world has been impacted by the pandemic, there’s been no shortage of investors, inventors and innovators looking to reinvent the food system.

To me, this excitement about food tech is especially evident from the flood of interest in our sixth annual Startup Showcase, which takes place at this year’s (virtual) Smart Kitchen Summit. We were overwhelmed with applications from companies wanting to participate at our annual event that showcases the most interesting new startups building innovative new products for the future of food and cooking.

And so we’re excited today to announce the 10 finalists that will be showcasing at the Smart Kitchen Summit Oct. 13th-15th. These startups are innovating in everything from cultured meat to food waste to restaurant robotics to taste-altering utensils.

If you’d like to watch the founders of these companies pitch and go into a virtual session where they will show off their products and answer questions, get your ticket for the Smart Kitchen Summit today!

Minnow Technologies

Minnow Technologies is making an Amazon Locker for fresh takeout food. The connected food pickup pod can house takeout meals in an antimicrobial environment. Pods can be placed virtually anywhere and restaurants, food halls and other food businesses can leverage them to provide their customers and delivery providers with a safe and way to grab and go.

Cultured Decadence

Cultured Decadence is a cell-based tech startup creating a system that can produce seafood like crabs and lobsters sustainably. It does this using cell culture and tissue engineering techniques for the high-value portions of crabs and lobsters, producing no shells or wasteful organ pieces. It can also potentially eliminate the need for wild harvesting altogether and help create a more sustainable ocean ecosystem.

Satis.ai

Satis.ai is a full-stack operating system for restaurant kitchens. The system uses live camera feeds in kitchens to analyze cooking processes and provide actionable feedback to back-of-house staff in real time as well as give owners/managers business intelligence to help increase efficiency, inventory ordering and customer order accuracy.

Zymmo LLC

Zymmo’s platform is a meal marketplace and foodie social network that gives chefs a place to connect with local food lovers and potential customers. Zymmo allows chefs to publish their menus, promote their events and facilitate ordering and payments all in one app.

Bonbowl

Bonbowl is a small appliance startup making an induction-based heating cooktop along with patent-pending cookware that can be used to cook with and eat from safely. Their induction technology enables power efficient cooking that uses half the power of electric stoves of similar size. The Bonbowl pot doubles as a bowl that consumers can eat right out of, eliminating a longer cleanup process and additional hardware.

Nymble Labs

Nymble Labs makes Julia, a domestic cooking robot that helps consumers cook healthy meals for their families. The cooking robot only requires users to select a recipe, chop up or gather the ingredients for said recipe and insert them into the device. Users press a button and Julia does the rest: heating at the right temps, adding ingredients at the right time, stirring and simmering until the meal is done and ready to be served.

Taste Boosters

Taste Boosters is the startup behind SpoonTEK, the world’s first taste-altering utensil. Using taste buds, the human body’s sensors and their patent-pending ionic technology, SpoonTEK can alter and enhance taste and flavor of any food dish.

Vobil

Vobil is a startup that’s developed a voice-based e-commerce technology platform that links food ordering to connected car interfaces, allowing for entirely voice-based ordering, checkout and navigation to the store in real-time.

Kitche

Kitche is a free app for iOS and Android phones that helps users reduce food waste at home by helping change personal habits with what they buy and consume. The app uses a connection with an OCR (optical character recognition) engine and a food ontology database to help users know what they already have at home, even when they’re on the go. The app helps users understand how much money they waste every time they throw food out at home.

Piestro

Piestro is an automated pizzeria startup that has created a standalone, fully-integrated cooking system for artisanal pizzas. From start to finish, it takes three minutes to make a pizza. Piestro will be able to press pizza dough, spread sauce and shredded cheese, add up to six desired toppings, and calculate the perfect cooking time based on the ingredients and humidity. Orders can be placed either in person at a public location (e.g., shopping malls, college campuses, movie theaters, hospitals or airports) and cooked in front of the customer. Customers can also opt to get the pizza even closer to their door by ordering through an app for delivery.

Kenwood Partners With Drop to Add Scale Function to the Cooking Chef Stand Mixer

You have your smart ovens, coffee makers and fridges, but what about a smart stand mixer?

Now’s your chance.

Last week, Drop announced they’d partnered with Kenwood to build in the Drop Smart Kitchen OS platform into the latest model of the Kenwood Cooking Chef mixer, one of the older stand mixer brands in the world.

Originally invented almost 70 years ago by the company’s namesake, Ken Wood, the Kenwood Chef was an instant hit and over the past few decades the modern version of the multi-function stand mixer has continued to be Kenwood’s biggest seller.

The Kenwood Chef eventually became the Kenwood Cooking Chef with the addition of a built-in induction heating element almost a decade ago, and the modern version has a variety of attachments like pasta cutters and coffee grinders. With the Drop partnership, the focus is on the integration of the Drop scale and guided cooking functionality.

In the video below, the two companies tout the product as “Your Chef that Weighs and Cooks” (emphasis mine):

By adding a scale to a mixer that already has built-in cooking capabilities and variety of attachments, the Cooking Chef puts itself into a growing category of multi-function products that act as the cooking version of a Swiss Army knife. Products like the Thermomix and ChefIQ weigh, cook, and steam food, all things that the Cooking Chef XL can now do as well.

This isn’t the first time that Drop has partnered with Kenwood, a subsidiary of De’Longhi. Last year, the two companies launched the CookEasy+ multicooker, a product the two had started working on in early 2018.

With the addition of the Kenwood Cooking Chef XL, Drop continues to rack up impressive partnerships with some of the biggest players in countertop cooking. The company has been working with Thermomix (announced last year at the Smart Kitchen Summit) and also is working with pressure cooking giant Instant Pot.

“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

This Startup Is Making A Food Container That Detects How Much Time is Left Before Your Food Spoils

What if food labels could tell you in real time if your food has gone bad?

That’s the vision of a UK-based startup that has developed a set of smart food labels to determine food freshness. The labels do this via an embedded sensor that detects the ammonia levels being produced by the food.

As described by packaging trade publication Packaging World, the smart labeling developed by BlakBear has “two electrodes printed on it as well as an embedded RFID chip.” As food spoils, ammonia is released and the gas is “absorbed into the paper’s cellulose fibers and then dissociates into ions. The electrodes sense and measure the ionic conductivity present in the layer of water that is already naturally present in the paper’s fibers to determine the shelf life of the product.”

Most of us can detect food spoilage by smelling the ammonia emitted as food decomposes, but by the time that happens, it’s usually too late to save the item. According to one of the company’s founders, BlakBear’s sensors are up to 100 times more sensitive than the human nose when it comes to detecting spoilage.

Smart labeling that can detect food freshness is not new. I wrote about a group of researchers from China’s Nanjing University and the University of Texas at Austin in 2018 that were developing a similar technology that would detect biogenic amines (BAs) and communicate spoilage using an embedded NFC chip.

Amazon has also been looking at technology that could detect food spoilage. Back in 2017, I wrote about a patent the company had filed for similar technology that could go into refrigerators and detect the gas emitted as food decomposed.

BlakBear is also interested in bringing this type of technology into the home, only instead of building into an appliance, they are working on a smart food container. The company is creating a system called HoneyBox that incorporates the freshness sensor and then communicates with an app via Bluetooth. The device will send reminders and act as a countdown clock on long the food will be edible.

While BlakBear isn’t saying when the product will be into market, the company is currently evaluating consumer attitudes around potential features and pricing for HoneyBox.

And from the looks of it, HoneyBox isn’t the only product the company has in the works. According to BlakBear’s CEO Max Grell, the company is also working on another bear-themed piece of hardware called BearCub that they are trialing with retailers. BearCub, according to Grell, would also be available to use in consumer homes.

Hopefully, both will be available soon, as I think there’s a huge opportunity for better food management systems that can help us reduce food waste. I’ve long wondered why home food storage has been stuck in time and why the incumbents don’t bring those cheap plastic containers into the future (not that they aren’t trying). Sure, there’s been some small progress by some startups (I’m still waiting for my Silo), but not nearly as much as there should be.

Thermomix Users Can Now Order Ingredients With Launch of Shoppable Recipes on Cookidoo

Thermomix announced today they have launched ingredient shopping on the Cookidoo, the Thermomix multicooker’s digital recipe and meal planning platform.

The new capability allows Thermomix users to add a recipe’s ingredients to a digital shopping list and order them through the Cookidoo app. Fulfillment of the order (delivery or pickup) is done through a third-party grocery retail partner of the shopper’s choosing.

The new shoppable recipe feature will be available to users of any Cookidoo-compatible Thermomix model (TM5, TM6 and TM31) in the U.S., Germany and the United Kingdom.

You can watch how it works on the video below:

Those using the TM6 can add ingredients from any of the 50,000 or so recipes available through the Cookidoo interface by simply clicking on the “Add to Shopping List” option directly on the appliance’s touchscreen. From there, they head over to the Cookidoo mobile app or website to review the list, remove items they may already have, and add additional items to the list. They can then select a grocery retailer or online grocery service provider like Instacart to fulfill the order.

According to Thermomix’s head of consumer experience, Ramona Wehlig, bringing ingredient shopping and delivery to the users of the Thermomix completes the meal journey for their users.

“We had the weekly planner and curated shopping lists,” Wehlig said by phone, “but we never closed the gap in the meal journey until the ingredients were delivered.”

Wehlig said the company has been developing shoppable recipe functionality for the past year and a half. The company started trialing an early version capability through pilots in Germany. These initial pilots, which used technology developed by Thermomix, helped the company to understand the digital grocery shopping process and to fine-tune the ability to do things such as ingredient matching.

However, as the company pushed to accelerate its shoppable recipes efforts, it started looking for a partner to help them scale. This brought them to Whisk, a shoppable recipe and digital food platform startup acquired by Samsung Next last year. Whisk powers a number of grocery commerce capabilities in the connected kitchen, including (not surprisingly) on the Samsung Family Hub fridges.

“The core aim [of working with Whisk] was to scale faster,” said Wehlig. “This allows us to connect our users with more grocery stores in a shorter time frame.”

For Whisk, the addition of Thermomix helps cement an already strong position as one of the primary shoppable recipe platforms. While I haven’t seen updated numbers for a while, back in 2018 Whisk told me its platform touched 20 million users each month. With the addition of Thermomix — first in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S., later globally — the company will get millions more.

For Thermomix, the integration of shopping capabilities from the Cookidoo digital recipe platforms opens up potential new revenue streams through various forms of partnerships with CPG brands and any commissions passed on from the third party grocery platforms. For users, it adds another nice feature and could entrench the Cookidoo recipe platform as their primary digital shopping list manager.

Thermomix and Hestan Cue Connect Up With ‘Smart Cooking Bundle’ and Jointly Developed Recipes

Sometimes the smart kitchen doesn’t feel all that connected, especially when it comes to pairing tech-forward cooking systems from different brands. It doesn’t make much sense if you think about it since the beauty of a connected home is, well, connecting things.

Thermomix and Hestan Cue are trying to change that – at least for Father’s Day – by creating what they’re calling the “Smart Cooking Bundle” and “Smart Cooking” recipe collection.

The bundle part includes a pairing of the two systems at a discount – the TM6 multicooker and the Hestan Cue system (pan and induction burner) for $150 off ($1,749) – but the more interesting part to me is the recipe collection the two companies jointly developed.

The Smart Cooking recipe collection features recipes specifically designed to use both with the Thermomix and Hestan Cue systems. Examples include eggplant with seared tomato sauce or pan seared scallops, where the TM6 is used for prep steps like chopping and steaming, and the Cue is used to finish off the meal by frying, searing or braising.

The recipes will be accessible on both the Thermomix Cookidoo recipe platform on the Thermomix TM6 touchscreen and through the Hestan Cue app.

This isn’t the first outside integration for Thermomix, which announced a partnership with Drop last year. With the Hestan pairing, one can see how Thermomix is positioning the TM6 as a sort of central command cooking hub where they orchestrate cooking with other appliances. While Drop isn’t powering the Hestan integration, I can see the Drop’s “kitchen OS” approach helping the TM6 unify multisystem cooking experiences down the road.

If you’d like to try out the new recipe collection, you can get the Smart Cooking bundle through Father’s day.

FoodTech Intelligence Brief: Evaluating Permanency of COVID Related Behavior Change

And now, with most countries trying to reboot their economies, food-related companies have the challenge of determining which behavioral changes were temporary and permanent. 

Many of the temporary surge behaviors were related to the worries among the population around shortages, causing many people to go out and buy things.

A good example is rice. Rice is shelf-stable, cheap food, something people might horde during uncertain times. 

Here’s a Google Trends graph for the search term “Buy Rice”: 

It’s probably safe to say that rice buying was driven by consumers who wanted cheap, easy to make, shelf-stable food during an uncertain time. Chances are, many consumers will not buy as much rice in the future.

This Food Tech Intelligence Brief is available to Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.