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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

smart kitchen

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 along 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 uers 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. 

Kitchen Software Startup Drop Raises $13.3 Million To Help it Build The ‘Kitchen Operating System’

Today Drop, the San Francisco and Dublin based smart kitchen platform startup, announced that it had raised $13.3 million in Series A funding co-led by Alpha Edison and Morpheus Ventures.

The funding brings the company’s total funding to just over $20 million.

As with the company’s last funding round, Drop indicated they plan to use the funding to continue building out its core platform, but this time with a heavy focus developing the consumer experience.

“The kitchen is a mix of motors, heating elements and fragmented interfaces,” said Ben Harris, the CEO of Drop. “Someone walking into a new kitchen has to relearn all of those different pieces. We believe there is a need for a incredibly intuitive experience that pulls all of those together into one unified experience where you can go from your Thermomix to your GE oven, from your Instant Pot to your LG fridge.”

As part of the investment, the company also announced they will welcome two new members to their board: Steve Horowitz, partner at Alpha Edison, and Ray Musci, managing director at Morpheus Ventures.

Horowitz is a particularly interesting addition given his background as lead engineer for Android during its early days. Drop has long talked about building a kitchen OS (they actually own the domain kitchenos.com), something Horowitz clearly has experience in.

I asked Horowitz if he saw parallels between those early smartphone market and today’s kitchen space and he told me did.

With the iPhone and Android, phone makers saw “there is really a better way to do this,” said Horowitz. “I think Drop is in a very similar position.”

The funding news comes a week after Tovala announced a $20 million series B. The two funding announcements show that, despite a pandemic, investors see significant opportunity for innovation in the consumer kitchen.

I asked Harris about this and why interest in the digitization of the consumer kitchen is so strong today.

Appliance makers, grocers and other kitchen industries have seen their business “move from retail to online,” said Harris. “The importance of digital experiences has dramatically increased. That’s the only way that a brand can now have a touch point.”

Harris said he believes the COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the kitchen and cooking industry’s move online “by close to five years”.

Tovala’s David Rabie on How He Built a Loyal User Base For His Smart Kitchen & Food Delivery Startup

Despite the complexity of building two businesses at once and presenting them as one integrated whole, Tovala’s managed to build a highly loyal user base with what is arguably the highest lifetime user value in the connected kitchen space.

I decided to catch up with Tovala’s CEO David Rabie and ask him how he’s managed to find success while other companies have struggled. 

The interview is an exclusive offering for Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

Smart Oven & Food Delivery Startup Tovala Raises $20 Million Series B To Fund Growth

Tovala, the Chicago-based smart oven and meal-delivery startup, announced today it has raised a $20 million in Series B funding.

The round, led by agrifood venture capital firm Finistere Ventures, follows $9 million in Series A funding, bringing the company’s total funding close to $40 million.

It’s an interesting time for Tovala to raise such an impressive B round, coming during a pandemic where many venture firms have refocused their efforts on stabilizing existing portfolio investments and large corporate investment arms have either dialed back or outright eliminated venture initiatives.

But while the pandemic has chilled many industries, Tovala has only seen business accelerate the last few months in part due to its position at the intersection of two markets benefitting from quarantine-induced cooking: countertop home cooking appliances and home food delivery.

As we’ve noted here at the Spoon, the combination of stay-at-home orders and restaurant dine-in shutdowns led to an explosion in home cooking activity, which led to countertop home cooking equipment sales growth that was at multiples of normal industry volumes.

But according to Rabie, who I caught up with last week to discuss their latest funding, while Tovala has experienced strong growth during the pandemic, their business had actually started taking off in the second half of 2019.

“The business has been growing really fast for nearly a year now,” said Rabie. “The investors took comfort in the fact that this wasn’t a COVID trend where our business took off and might go away when normalcy returns, but actually the opposite. Business was booming pre-COVID, COVID accelerated that growth, and we believe it will accelerate adoption after COVID as people build new habits.”

Since Tovala started shipping a few years ago, I asked him why business took off last year. According to Rabie, the main difference is they changed how they talked about the product with their customers.

“We went through this exercise over the first half of 2019 to rebrand the company and better speak to our core customer,” said Rabie. “If you come to our website today versus a year ago, it looks like night and day, it’s different messaging, different photography, different videography, different user experience, same core product, just marketed differently.”

After Rabie and Tovala spent time talking to their key customers who used the Tovala multiple times per week, they realized the company’s value was in helping to solve the problem of weeknight dinner. They also realized they weren’t an oven company so much as a service company.

“The oven is the vehicle to access that food but most of our customers are not really in the market for an oven. It was kind of a lightbulb moment.”

After the rebrand, the company has seen an increase in annualized revenue of 300 percent since September of last year. In some ways, Tovala has been the little smart kitchen company that could, continuing to grow and raising more funding as other, more high profile companies, have struggled.

I asked Rabie why Tovala has succeeded when others haven’t.

“A lot of companies haven’t made it and I think there’s a lot of reasons why,” said Rabie. “The first reason is (you need to be) super clear on the problem you’re solving and making sure it’s a real problem.”

He also said that while he thinks a recurring revenue business is necessary nowadays, it can’t just be an afterthought.

“Whatever that subscription component is, it has to be inherent to the product and it has to make a lot of sense.”

Tovala plans to use the new funding round to increase staff, expand production capabilities and fuel growth. And while Rabie indicated they will build on top of their current technology, he made it clear the funding won’t largely be sunk into developing a next-generation oven.

Makes sense for an oven company that isn’t really an oven company.

If you’re a Spoon Plus subscriber, you can see my full interview with David Rabie discussing his latest funding round here.

The Zega is A Pot That Keeps Cooking Even After You Turn Off the Stove

Do we really need another cooking pot for our food?

If you had asked me a week ago, I would have said we’re good. After all, there’s the Instant Pot, which has become my weeknight workhorse during the pandemic for cooking everything from stew to rice to dumplings. Then there’s the hero of the potluck, the slow cooker, still making us happy with meatballs and party dips after all these years.

But then I saw the Zega on Indiegogo and it had me wondering if I could fit another cooking pot into my life. Zega makes what it terms “walkaway cookware,” which is pretty much just what it describes: cookware you can start a meal in and leave it (or even take it with you).

The Zega uses a design similar to that of a Yeti mug or a Thermos — double-walled thermal insulation — which allows it to maintain a high temperature for a long period of time even after you take the device off the stove. You put your food in, heat it up, turn off the heat, and the food continues to cook.

Hence the “walkaway” label.

While my Instant Pot and crockpots cover me for pretty much any pot-based meal I want to cook, I was considering adding the Zega to the repertoire for a couple of reasons. First, it saves energy. Not having to have an appliance plugged in for a few hours while I cook just seems more efficient.

I also like the walkaway aspect. Whether you’re an adult with young kids or you just want to run errands while the evening meal is cooking, this idea makes sense to me.

The Zega comes in two styles: connected and analog. The actual Zega pot is the same cookware, and it’s the knob that determines if you have a connected or analog version. You can see how each looks below.

The Zega app asks you whether you have a connected or analog version and gives you specific instructions tailored for each. If you have an analog version, you’re instructed to cook food to a certain temperature using the analog knob (“cook over high heat until the temperature gauge reaches the red zone”). The connected version remotely monitors the cooking and will send you notifications when a meal is done.

Now of course, this is a product that is available via Indiegogo and, as with any crowdfund campaign, deserves all the usual caveats. But from what I can see, the product seems well on its way towards shipping.

Before they had sent the product to Indiegogo, the team raised $550,000 on equity crowdfunding platform Venturecrowd. In my view, raising money from investors to build out manufacturing capabilities and funding the initial production run is the right order of things. Hardware campaigns often go wrong when founders raise funds from backers who want a product and then realize they don’t have enough money to actually build out their manufacturing line.

The company’s Indiegogo campaign, which has raised $69,000 as of this writing, says the products will be manufactured in July and delivered to backers in August, all of which sounds right if you assume the company used its equity funding to lock in manufacturing and has it ready to go.

Will “walkaway cookware” become its own new category? Too soon to tell, but the founders hope so. In their investment prospectus on Venturecrowd, the company forecasts the Zega could hit $3 million in sales this year and $12 million by 2022.

We’ll see. For now, I just hope they ship since I ended up backing the product, which is saying a lot from a guy who’s gotten pretty jaded at this point with hardware crowdfunding (hello, Spinn).

You can watch the Zega intro reel below:

Zega Intelligent Cookware