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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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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.

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.