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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

smart kitchen

Who Are The Leaders of the Food Tech Revolution?

We may be a little biased here at The Spoon, but we think food tech is the most exciting industry going.

Think about it: Food is what many of us – heck, most of us – spend a huge chunk of our day thinking about, craving, searching for, and consuming. Food is something everyone is passionate about.

It’s also an industry where some of the biggest advances in AI, biology, agriculture, design, chemistry, and many more fields are now manifesting themselves to create some of the most interesting and exciting changes we’ve ever seen in what, where, how, and why we feed ourselves.

And perhaps most importantly, food systems and their future will undeniably play an outsized role in determining what life on earth looks like here in 10, 20, or 100 years.

All of which is why we love covering this industry, and the biggest joy in all of it is talking to the people leading the food tech revolution. The innovation, the collective progress we make, the futuristic advances we see nearly every week, all of it is a direct result of the many inspiring voices pioneering in this space and trying to create a better world.

It’s an industry made up of thoughtful and brilliant people worthy of celebrating, which is why we’re launching the Food Tech Visionary Awards. To be presented at The Food Tech Leaders Forum in November, The Food Tech Visionary Awards will recognize those making the biggest impact and inspiring others to help lead the charge.

And because we know we’re not the only ones who are energized and inspired by the many leaders building the future of food, we want to ask our readers to tell us who they think deserves consideration. If you know someone who you think is creating something amazing and helping to catalyze the world of food tech, please let us know by filling out this nomination form.

The Food Tech Visionary awards will consider seven categories: Sustainability/Food Waste Reduction, Future Food, Future Kitchen, Restaurant Tech, Food Robotics & AI, Agriculture & Farm Tech, and Food Web3. You can find out more about what is considered under each category on the nomination page here.

We will be taking nominations until August 15th. Final selections will be chosen by the Spoon editorial team and an assembled panel of experts. Finalists will be notified and announced in the fall and the winners in each category will be named live at the Food Tech Leaders Forum on November 3rd (get tickets here).

Nominate someone who you think is a visionary helping to build the food tech revolution!

The Weekly Spoon: Electrolux’s Kitchen of the Future & Taco Bell’s Reimagined Restaurant

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Electrolux Launches GRO, a Kitchen System Designed to Encourage More Sustainable Eating

Can a kitchen’s design help us eat more sustainable, plant-forward diets?

Swedish appliance manufacturer Electrolux thinks the answer is yes and, to that end, has launched an ambitious new kitchen system concept to help us get there.

Called GRO, the new system is comprised of a collection of interconnected modules that utilize sensors and AI to provide personalized eating and nutrition recommendations. According to the company, the system was designed around insights derived from behavioral science research and is intended to help encourage more sustainable eating behavior based on recommendations from the EAT-Lancet report for planetary health. The company will debut the new system at this week’s EuroCucina conference.

“How can a thoughtful kitchen slowly nudge you to more sustainable choices,” asks Tove Chevally, the head of Electrolux Innovation Hub, in an intro video to the GRO system. “To make the most of what you have, to buy smarter, and eat more diverse?

To see a video of the new GRO and to read the full story, head here.

Do you have the next big idea for the future of food & cooking? Apply to tell your story at SKS INVENT!

Taco Bell’s Vision of the Future Includes High-Tech Dumbwaiters & Lots of Drive-Thru Lanes

I’ve always been fascinated with dumbwaiters. An elevator built specifically to deliver food between floors of a building, the dumbwaiter is an idea that is both ridiculous and fascinating.

And while I can’t be sure that someone like Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos doesn’t have dumbwaiters built into their homes (though Bezos would probably prefer robots and Trump manservants he could yell at), what I am sure of is the dumbwaiter has, for the most part, largely gone extinct as part of modern life.

Until now. That’s because Taco Bell sees them as a potentially integral part of their restaurant of the future. Called Taco Bell Defy, the taco chain’s new restaurant concept includes an elevated restaurant with multiple drive-thru lanes, food lifts, and a lot of digital integrations.

While I wouldn’t, unlike others, claim this new concept possibly “the most ambitious” prototype in restaurant history, I would say it makes a whole lot of sense for a restaurant chain that does most of its business through a drive-thru. While many chains have developed drive-thrus that have multiple order lines, the choke point always comes later when cars zip-up into a single line to get their food. By spreading out the hand-off of food to four lines, the choke point of a single window for food handover is eliminated.

You can read the full post here. 

Smart Kitchen

Meet Celcy, a Countertop Oven With a Built-In Freezer That Will Cook Meals For You

Say you’re leaving for work and want to come home to a fully cooked meal? Or better yet, you want to line up a work week’s worth of meals and just want them prepared when you get home?

You might be a good candidate for the Celcy, an autonomous cooking appliance that combines a countertop oven with a freezer that stores the meals until ready for cooking.

The Celcy, which is currently in development, will store up to four meals in a freezer. Cooking can be rescheduled via an app or on-demand via request. When it’s time to cook, the meal is shuttled from the freezer compartment on the left side into the cooking compartment side on the right. A built-in elevator lifts and deposits the frozen meal in the top upper right cooking chamber where it is cooked for consumption.

You can read the full post here. 

Food Retail Tech

Circle K Planning To Deploy Seven Thousand AI-Powered Self-Checkout Machines

Mashgin, a maker of computer-vision-based self-checkout machines, announced today it has signed a deal with Circle K parent company Couche-Tard to deploy seven thousand self-checkout machines at the convenience store chain over the next three years.

The move follows the initial deployment of Mashgin systems at nearly 500 Circle K stores across the United States and Sweden since 2020. The move by the second-largest convenience store chain in North America with almost seven thousand stores will represent one of the largest ever deployments of self-checkout systems to date.

For Mashgin, the deal represents its biggest customer win yet and is yet another sign of why the company was able to recently raise a $62.5M Series B round at an impressive $1.5 billion valuation. The move represents a 700% total increase in deployments over its current installed base.

The Mashgin self-checkout system is installed at the checkout counter and enables customer checkouts without scanning barcodes. As seen in the video interview from CES in January, customers can essentially toss their items onto the small checkout pad, and the system will automatically recognize and tabulate the products.

To read the full story, head here.

Future Food

Cocuus Raises €2.5M to Scale Industrial 3D Food Printing for Plant & Cell-Based Meat Analogs

According to a release sent to The Spoon, 3D food printing startup Cocuus has raised €2.5 Million in a Pre-Series A funding round to scale up its proprietary 3D printing technology platform for plant-based and cell-cultured meat analogs. The round was led by Big Idea Ventures, with participation by Cargill Ventures, Eatable Adventures, and Tech Transfer UPV.

Founded in 2017, the Spanish startup has developed a toolbox of different 3D printing technologies under its Mimethica platform to enable the printing of different types of foods. These include Softmimic, a technology targeted at hospitals and eldercare facilities that transforms purees into dishes that look like real food (think of a vegetable or meat puree shaped into a “steak”), LEVELUP, an inkjet printing technology that prints images on drinks like coffee or beer (like Ripples), and LASERGLOW, a laser printer platform that engraves imagery onto food.

Read the full post at here.

SCiFi Foods Raises $22M With Andreessen Horowitz’s First Investment in Cultivated Meat

SCiFi Foods, a Bay Area-based food tech startup, announced that it has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), making it a16z’s first investment in the growing cultivated meat market. The company, formerly known as Artemys Foods, also announced that it will be adding a new board member, Myra Pasek, the General Counsel of IronOx, who will be utilizing her expertise from Tesla and Impossible Foods to help SCiFi Foods bring its novel plant-based and cultivated meat hybrid through regulatory approval to the market. 

The new funding raises SCiFi Foods’ total funding to $29 million and will primarily be used to scale R&D efforts, build out the leadership team, and market the company. 

The Spoon sat down with CEO and co-founder, Joshua March, to learn more about SCiFi Foods’ new name, a hybrid meat product, and what it looks like to raise funding from one of the most famous venture capital firms during a recession.

Read the full interview with Joshua March here.

Food Robots

Xook Raises $1.3 Million to Roll Out Robotic ‘Food Courts in a Box’ in The US

If you’ve ever visited a cafeteria at a tech giant like Google or Facebook, you probably found that the food is just as tasty (or tastier) and often better for you than what you might order at a corner restaurant or make in your own kitchen.

But according to Xook CEO Raja Natarajan, this kind of access to an abundance of tasty, healthy, and free food is more the exception than the rule for US office workers. This is very different from countries like India, said Natarajan, where most corporate employers provide access to cafeterias stocked with food options for employees. This is why, after trialing a prototype for what he and cofounder Ratul Roy describe as a “food court in a box” in Bangalore, they are eyeing the US for the rollout of their robotic kiosk.

“In countries with high labor costs and high food costs, it is very hard to offer this kind of experience unless it comes with automation,” Natarajan told The Spoon in a recent interview.

To read the full story, click here!

Meet Celcy, a Countertop Oven With a Built-In Freezer That Will Cook Meals For You

Say you’re leaving for work and want to come home to a fully cooked meal? Or better yet, you want to line up a work week’s worth of meals and just want them prepared when you get home?

You might be a good candidate for the Celcy, an autonomous cooking appliance that combines a countertop oven with a freezer that stores the meals until ready for cooking.

The Celcy, which is currently in development, will store up to four meals in a freezer. Cooking can be rescheduled via an app or on-demand via request. When it’s time to cook, the meal is shuttled from the freezer compartment on the left side into the cooking compartment side on the right. A built-in elevator lifts and deposits the frozen meal in the top upper right cooking chamber where it is cooked for consumption.

You can see a proof of concept video of the Celcy below:

Celcy - The Automated Nespresso of Food

According to company CEO Max Wieder, one of the other differentiators for the Celcy – aside from being a combo freezer and oven – is its ability to accommodate a variety of cooking styles, allowing it to either cook from scratch or simply warm up and crisp pre-cooked meals.

“It’s basically a set of shutters and fans that, when move-in combination, create the different styles of cooking, Wieder told me via a Zoom interview. “So it allows everything to cook uncovered without burning it.”

The Celcy is the brainchild of Wieder and a couple of friends from Johns Hopkins University. According to Weider, Celcy CTO Eddie Holzinger, another friend, and he started discussing ovens on a Google chat. When their friend told Weider and Holzinger he was shopping for a smart oven, they started talking about all the kinds of features – like a freezer – that could potentially put into a smart oven. By the end of the day, the future cofounders realized they had stumbled onto something.

“We started doing due diligence. We found that nothing existed on the market,” Weider said. “We did some patent searches, got together that weekend and whiteboard of the entire design of how it would work. And within three months, we founded the company. Four months after that, we filed our provisional patent.” The founders were issued a patent for its cooking system in the last month.

The company is now working on its alpha units and allowing interested customers to “reserve” a unit by signing up for a waitlist on its website. The target price for the Celcy is $549, and the company hopes to ship in the fall of 2023. Like Tovala or Suvie, Celcy plans to offer prepared meals via subscription and is already working with a copacker to develop recipes and meals. The company has raised a small pre-seed round but is raising additional funds to fund development and manufacturing.

Celcy joins a small cohort of smart kitchen hardware makers working to build unattended cooking appliances. While some like Mellow have essentially shuttered, others like Suvie have been shipping for a couple of years. Others, like Oliver, Nymble, and GammaChef, can perform unattended cooking but don’t have any ability to refrigerate or freeze ingredients.

And it’s this combo of freezer storage and cook-upon-request (or schedule) that sets the Celcy apart. Although there are other smart countertop cookers like the Suvie that have refrigeration and enable time-delayed cooking, the Celcy is the only one I’ve seen with a built-in freezer and the ability to store multiple meals in the freezer chamber.

Of course, that’s if and when the company ships the product. It’s still early, and the company still has many steps to go, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for the Celcy and its combo freezer/oven automated cooking appliance sometime next year.

Instant Brands and Vorwerk Invest $20 Million in Smart Kitchen Specialist Fresco

Smart kitchen startup Fresco announced today that it had raised $20 million in Series B funding from kitchen appliance mainstays Instant Brands and Vorwerk, the company behind Thermomix. According to the release, a third company has also participated in the funding round and will be identified later this year.

Fresco, which up until earlier this month was known as Drop, plans to use the funding to bring on additional talent and invest in product development. The company, which currently has a workforce of 50 employees, plans to double its headcount over the next two years.

In both Instant Brands and Vorwerk, Fresco is bringing on investors that are also customers. Fresco started working with Instant Brands, the company behind the popular Instant Pot pressure cooker, in 2019, and last year Fresco developed the Instant Brands Connect app to work with the company’s new premium pressure cooker, the Instant Pot Pro Plus. Vorwerk and Fresco first announced their partnership in 2019 at the Smart Kitchen Summit, a deal in which Fresco was to power device connectivity and online shopping for the Thermomix TM6.

Fresco is among a group of technology platform players building software to power appliance inter-connectivity, cooking assistance, and meal planning for the kitchen. However, while many of the company’s peers have increasingly focused on powering online grocery shopping experiences (including Whisk, which ultimately helped Thermomix with its on-device shopping), Fresco has doubled down on guided cooking, meal planning and device interconnectivity.

I asked Fresco CEO Ben Harris why they decided to focus more on the cooking portion of the meal journey and not emphasize grocery commerce like its peers. According to Harris, it was a matter of focus.

“We absolutely see the value in plugging into grocery,” said Harris in an interview with The Spoon. “It’s a strategic decision to make sure that we build the best guided cooking experience.”

Fresco’s latest funding follows a $13.3 million Series A funding round led by Alpha Edison and Morpheus Ventures in 2020. At the time of their Series A, the company emphasized its intent to build the ‘kitchen operating system,’ a positioning that was not all that surprising given Alpha partner Steve Horowitz’s role as the lead developer for the Android operating system. With its latest investment, the company’s messaging is still essentially the same (with maybe a slightly less tech-forward framing) as it brings on popular consumer brands behind Instant Pot and Thermomix as investors.

“Instant Brands and Fresco are working together to develop innovative breakthroughs in the kitchen, and beyond,” said Ben Gadbois, CEO and President of Instant Brands, in the release. “This investment deepens our partnership further and supercharges these initiatives.”

As for those wondering who the third investor might be, while Fresco is keeping that quiet for now, Harris did offer a clue: Unlike Vorwerk and Instant Brands, Harris said the other investor is not a countertop appliance brand, but is instead a manufacturer of large appliances. The Fresco CEO said he expects more partners to invest in the future.

“We expect to announce more partners in the future investing in the platform and this is just really the first cohort.”

Smart Kitchen Platform Company Drop Changes Name to Fresco

Drop dropped Drop.

The startup that started with a connected scale eight years ago announced it has a new brand identity. The company is now called Fresco, a name which “(reflects) the company’s priority to connect dots in the kitchen between appliances, home cooks and recipes to make cooking effortless,” said the announcement.

Fresco CEO Ben Harris said that the company needed a new brand given its evolution beyond its hardware roots.

“Drop was a great name for a physical product, but we pivoted to become a smart kitchen platform, providing end-to-end solutions to make appliances connected, from firmware development to IoT expertise and an app that pulls all the appliances together,” Harris said. “As a result, we needed a brand that better represented this.”

Drop is part of a cohort of smart kitchen startups that offer software and connectivity solutions to power kitchen appliances and help consumers cook and plan meals. While some of its peers have increasingly focused on shoppable recipes and looked to help power online grocery integrations, Drop has doubled down on expanding its solutions and increasing its partner roster in the connected kitchen and guided cooking space.

The company emphasized the word neutral when describing itself in a new intro video: “What started with a shared love of food and technology has evolved to become the neutral, cross-brand platform that seamlessly brings appliances, home cooks, and recipes together.” That emphasis on neutrality may be a reference to other smart kitchen software platforms that have sold large stakes to appliance brands (Chefling) or others that have been acquired outright (Whisk/Samsung, Yummly/Whirlpool).

The move to change a brand identity nearly a decade into a company’s existence isn’t without risk. Many in the kitchen and consumer cooking technology space are familiar with the Drop name and its products. Now it’s up to Fresco to educate the market about its new identity. However, because Fresco is a B2B brand, the lift won’t be nearly as heavy a lift for the company since it doesn’t have to educate consumers.

Lomi, Unboxed: A First Look at The Lomi Smart Food Waste Composter

I find food tech fascinating – especially the products and solutions that have a shot at fixing a real problem in our food system. Tackling issues like food waste, food insecurity, nutrition, and accessibility, technology can give us the tools to change habits and systems.

But, I admit I haven’t always adopted tech in my own home that has made a huge change in our own food habits outside of our beloved sous vide, and nothing that stuck when it came to food waste. With growing kids, our grocery bills keep increasing, but I throw out more food on busy weeks than I’d ever like to admit.

Composting at home has never been an easy or…neat endeavor; we’ve tried several times, using smaller receptacles to collect food scraps to bring out to a larger pile. But no matter what, we abandoned our efforts for lack of time and patience. One year, we even subscribed to a service that would drop off nutrient-dense compost soil for us to use in our vegetable garden. We paid someone for THEIR broken-down food scraps — and it turns out, nutrient-rich, locally harvested, hand-delivered compost is not cheap.

“I just want a Keurig machine….but instead of K-cups, you put all your food scraps in and that’s it!” I complained to my family.

Cut to me coming across an article last summer on the new Lomi food composter – made by sustainable tech company Pela and pre-ordering one. Several months later, this showed up on my doorstep:

The Lomi is meant to be a smart kitchen countertop device, and it takes up a bit less space than a KitchenAid mixer, so we’ve made room for it on the counter above our trash and recycling. It is designed to be a mostly “set it and forget it” appliance, not requiring hand stirring like traditional home compost piles. Reviews rave about how quiet the machine is as it churns waste into nutrient-rich fertilizer in less than a day (and regular dirt in just 3 hours.)

The machine also ships with LomiPods, small bioorganic tabs that Lomi recommends using as an accelerator, especially if the compost will be used as a soil enhancer in a garden or landscaping. The pods are placed right on top before a cycle is run with 50 mL of water.

With seemingly easy instructions for regular operation and daily use only involves learning what can and can not be tossed in for composting, we plan to have our nine and four-year-old kids learn alongside us. We’re expanding our vegetable garden this spring and summer, too, so they’ll be able to see how the food we eat can be used to grow even more food.

One aspect of the Lomi I’m excited about is it’s the first traditional compost or dehydrator appliance to accept some bioplastics, including compostable plates and bioplastic utensils (a full list of approved items can be found here.) This is a cool feature and gives us another reason to stick to a composting habit. I also think this feature may encourage Lomi households to purchase more biodegradable household goods now that they have a more direct method to discard the materials.

We are already using our Lomi and will have a full review up with videos in a few weeks – stay tuned.

The Kitchen 2030: How Food & Cooking Will Change in the Future (Video)

If you’ve been following The Spoon since the early days of 2015, you might remember that our flagship event that started it all was the Smart Kitchen Summit. Dedicated to the quiet revolution that was happening in the consumer kitchen, SKS became the event to examine the tech disruption upending business models and changing the way we source, cook and eat our food forever.

So it was fitting that our opening panel at the first CES Food Tech Conference was “The Kitchen 2030: How Food & Cooking Will Change in the Future,” featuring some of the leading companies in the kitchen and appliance industries. The panel discussion was hosted by Michael Wolf, CEO and founder of The Spoon and included Khalid Aboujassoum, Founder & CEO of Else Labs, Dochul Choi, Senior Vice President at Samsung, Robin Liss, CEO at Suvie and Kai Schaeffner, executive at Vorwerk (Thermomix).

The panel talked about where and how cooking, storing and even shopping for foods has shifted in the last several years; with more transparency and information about the foods we eat, the digitization of the recipe, guided cooking features and a whole new wave of kitchen appliances that may change the entire layout and function of the consumer kitchen.

“The Kitchen 2030” panel can be viewed in its entirety below — leave a comment with your predictions for the next decade of innovation in the connected kitchen.

Versaware is Building a Smart Kitchen System to Help You Stick to Healthy Eating

If you’ve ever tried to closely monitor the calories and nutrients of what you’re eating, you know it requires a lot of work. Once you’re done reading labels, estimating portion sizes (often incorrectly), weighing ingredients, and then adding things together, you may need an extra helping to replenish all the energy you’ve expended.

And sure, there are meal-logging apps like MyFitnessPal, but often you still have to use best guesses as to portion sizes and manually enter lots of data.

The creators behind Versaware want to make the whole process less messy and more precise with a smart kitchen system that can estimate the total calorie and macronutrient makeup of a meal as you make it.

How does it work? The system centers around two connected kitchen products – a bowl and a scale – and the Versaware app. As a user makes their meal, they scan the ingredient barcode (for packaged food) or query for the item (for fresh produce), then drop it in the bowl or onto the scale. The app takes the weight of the added ingredient and calculates the incremental calorie count and macronutrients (protein, carbs, fat) as you build your meal.

Company cofounders Jacob Lindberg and Creed McKinnon decided to build their smart kitchen nutrition system after finding existing solutions to monitor calorie and nutrient intake disjointed and cumbersome to use.

“We said, ‘why don’t we consolidate all of this data collection and these tools needed to understand what you’re eating and bring them into one device?'” Lindberg said on a Zoom call with The Spoon. “And we realized that if you tethered the data corresponding to an ingredient’s weight straight to the phone, and just prompted the mobile application for the query of what that ingredient was, then you would solve the entire solution around building a meal from the ground up.”

According to Lindberg, showing the calories and nutrients in a meal in real-time allows the user to easily adjust as they build a meal.

“You can alter the portions of each ingredient that goes into your meal by visually seeing the macronutrient composition of that entire meal,” said Lindberg. “You can, for example, add more flour or reduce the amount of sugar based on however many calories, grams of fat, or grams of protein you want to ingest.”

The current product prototype can scan barcodes and has access to a database with 10s of thousands of products via an open API. Lindberg says they will continue to add features over time, including computer vision capabilities that will scan a food item and estimate its nutritional makeup.

Last week the company started taking preorders on its website and had already sold over $50 thousand in presales. To help gear up for manufacturing, the company’s founders have been working closely with the Centropolis accelerator and plan to start raising seed capital in March. The company plans to start shipping to early backers by the fall of this year.

While many early smart scale products have had mixed success, Versaware hopes to set itself apart by focusing the system and app on a health and fitness use-case. We’ll be watching to see if this will help the company succeed where others haven’t.

If you’d like to pre-order a Versaware bowl and cutting board, you can do so here.

You can watch the Versaware intro video below.

Introducing VersaWare - Nutritionally Driven Meal Creation

At Long Last, Mitte Begins to Ship Countertop Mineral Water Machine

Mitte, a maker of countertop mineral water machines, announced this week that they would begin shipping their first product, the Mitte Home, this month. The Berlin-based company will ship first to new customers and Kickstarter backers in Germany and plans to begin selling the water-mineralizer in the US in the spring of 2022.

The Mitte Home, which sells for €350, filters and mineralizes the water using a two-step process. The water is filtered using activated charcoal. After filtration, the water seeps through calcite and magnesite rocks to add calcium and magnesium. After mineralizing, the system adds CO₂ and dispenses. The system uses a cartridge system for filtration and mineralization, with each cartridge good for 250 liters. The machine also uses replaceable CO₂ cylinders to add the fizz.

The Mitte Home can be controlled by an app, which allows users to track consumption. The app also allows users order new cartridges and CO₂ cylinders.

The original Mitte product offered via the company’s Kickstarter campaign included water distillation, but this version only provides filtration. According to the company’s update on Kickstarter, a premium model called the Mitte Home Plus will include distillation and will ship in 2-3 years. The company is offering backers the option get a Mitte Home, wait for the Mitte Home Plus, or get a full refund.

While the Mitte comes to market over three years late, backers of the Kickstarter can take comfort in the product actually shipping. Hardware-based crowdfunding campaigns are notoriously high-risk, many products never ship, and those that do are usually late. The company’s ability to persist was no doubt in part due to a $10.6 million funding round in 2018. That round, led by DanonevManifesto Ventures, the New York-based venture arm of Danone, was significantly more than the $317 thousand raised as part of its crowdfunding campaign.

If you live in Germany and would like to order a Mitte, you can do so today at mitte.co, while those who live outside of Germany can add themselves to the waitlist.

Instant Brands Launches Instant Pot Pro Plus and Drop-Powered Connected App

Instant Brands, the company behind the popular Instant Pot line of multicookers, announced today it has launched a new connected multicooker, the Instant Pot Pro Plus, and an all-new Instant Brands Connect app.

The new app was developed in partnership with smart kitchen software company Drop. The two companies began working together with the launch of a guided recipes app in 2019, but that first app was strictly a recipe app with no control features. The new app allows the user to select recipes and initiate cooks, customize recipes, monitor cooking progress, get notifications, delay cooking start, and change steam venting methods. Users of the new Connect app will have access to 1500 recipes to start.

The plan is for the Instant Brands Connect app to allow cooks to eventually connect multiple Instant Brands products. Today customers can download it and will be able to pair the new Instant Pot Pro Plus. Instant has indicated it has a number of other smart products planned in the pipeline, which means we’ll see more Instant Pots, air fryers, and maybe even a coffee maker or two connected to the app. And while the app currently does not have a shoppable recipe feature, I can imagine that functionality in potential future versions.

For Drop, the new app is a strong validation for the Dublin-based startup’s smart kitchen OS. Instant Brands had previously built an app for its Instant Pot Smart Wifi pressure cooker, but with this launch, the multicooker giant is standardizing its connected device strategy around Drop’s smart kitchen platform. Instant Brands sits alongside other big kitchen brands such as Bosch, Electrolux and Thermomix on Drop’s smart kitchen OS partner roster.

The new Instant Pro Plus is available today for $169.99 and the app can be downloaded today in the app store.

Innit Teams Up With Google Cloud To Power Personalized Shopping

Smart kitchen and personalized shopping software startup Innit announced today they have partnered with Google Cloud. The new strategic partnership will help “grocery retailers to deliver personalized services across the entire meal journey, spanning online, in-store, and at home.”

This isn’t the first time the two companies have worked together. Innit was part of Google’s CES Demo in 2018, complete with a Tyler Florence cooking demo , and in 2019 the two announced a partnership with contract manufacturer Flex. Today’s news is an expansion of their collaboration into digitizing the grocery shopping experience.

Google “has been working with us to put together a solution targeting grocery retail,” said Innit CEO Kevin Brown via a Zoom interview this week. “Innit is a vertical market expert in food and recipes and nutrition and how it all comes together. AWe essentially combined the Innit capabilities with the Google capabilities to power grocery stores to have a much better digital experience with our consumers.”

At an execution level, Google Cloud will leverage Innit’s food and shopper data to help grocery stores to deliver more personalized experiences such as custom shopping lists built around recipes or dietary preferences. This could mean personalized recommendations for a shopper or building a custom meal kit around a recipe.

The partnership is part of a multiyear move by Innit into grocery shopping digitization which began with the company’s acquisition of Shopwell. Shopwell helped to round out Innit’s platform, which was initially focused on guided cooking and the in-kitchen consumer experience, and put them into conversation with grocers. The move paid off for Innit and help them snag a deal with Carrefour last year to power the large European grocery retailer’s personalized nutrition score initiative.

It also was one of the first moves by a smart kitchen software player to create digital grocery platforms.

I asked Brown why many of the smart kitchen players have focused on grocery in recent years.

“We’re excited about the future of that (connected kitchen), but it happens that sort of hardware speed,” said Brown.

“We see that as one of the anchor pieces over time, but right now, there’s a huge focus on the front end of that. Of how do I deal with all the wellness and health issues? How do I find the right products? How do I shop? And so that’s where we basically put all of the building blocks together of the past several years to finally be able to embed that into the shopping experience itself and carry people all the way through.”

It’s the second move by the Google Cloud team into the consumer cooking and meal journey experience over the past couple of weeks. On August 19th, the company had announced a partnership with GE Appliances to build next-gen smart home appliances. One has to wonder if the flurry of digital food and kitchen deals is part of a broader effort by the cloud giant to grow its market share in the consumer food and lifestyle vertical in the coming years by focusing on next-gen digital and AI powered solutions.

Recipe Sharing App Whisk an Early Test Partner for TikTok’s New Jump Program

This week TikTok officially launched its Jump program, a new feature which allows third party apps to integrate with the hugely popular social video app. The new integration allows someone watching a TikTok video to click on a button to access features of apps directly from inside TikTok

Recipe sharing app Whisk is an early integration partner with TikTok, which makes sense since cooking is one of TikTok’s most popular genres. The partnership, which Techcrunch wrote about in February, started as part of an “alpha testing” trial with a small group of TikTok creators that Whisk helped identify. With today’s announcement, the feature is being rolled out to wider group of creators (though not all). TikTok said it will roll out the feature more widely after some testing.

The TikTok-Whisk integration, which you can see in action above, works like this: TikTok users who are watching a cooking video can tap a Save to Whisk button that will allow them to view the recipe in Whisk. Users can also add the recipe to a collection or a meal plan, or have the recipe converted to a shopping list they could have delivered via one of Whisk’s grocery delivery partners (e.g., Walmart, Instacart).

For Whisk’s part, the integration is a no-brainer and could be a huge source of potential traffic for the recipe app. Whisk, which is now part of Samsung, was already growing pretty quickly; connecting its app with TikTok’s hugely popular cooking content will only accelerate that growth.

Looking forward, chances are other food and recipe apps will follow Whisk’s lead as TikTok opens up its program more widely for integration. Social media is where many consumers look for their next meal idea, and the social video app has become a viral recipe kingmaker. With Jump, recipe app makers now can monetize that viral interest in baked feta pasta by converting social video watchers to customers through shoppable recipes.