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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

smart kitchen

Take Advantage of these Food Tech Black Friday Deals

It’s the most, wonderful time of the year… for getting a good deal on food tech gear! Black Friday is tomorrow, and we’re on the lookout for bargains to make your connected kitchen even better.

Let us do the work and make your life easier by plucking kitchen-related gear that’s being sold at great prices and list them here. Be sure to check back with us throughout today and Friday as we add more deals to the list! And if you know of any good holiday deals on food tech or smart kitchen gear, let us know in the comments.

ANOVA SOUS VIDE COOKERS
If you’ve ever wanted to try sous vide cooking, here’s your chance: Anova has discounted both its Anova Sous Vide Cooker with WiFi+Bluetooth ($199 $99) and the newer, smaller Anova nano ($99 $75). Anova makes solid sous vide wands (you can read our review of the Nano here), so if you haven’t dipped your toe into the warm water bath of sous vide yet, what are you waiting for?

CHEFSTEPS JOULE SOUS VIDE COOKER
Another excellent sous vide wand is the ChefSteps Joule, which is now 20 percent off at the ChefSteps store ($199 $159). Bonus, this wand features a magnetic bottom so it will stay put in your pot of water with no clips necessary.

HESTAN CUE
Why not give the gift of guided cooking? Now you can get the Hestan Cue for 40% ($499.95 $299.97)  off by using the discount code BLACKFRIDAY18 at checkout. This deal gets you the full Hestan Cue system, including both the smart pan as well as the induction burner.

INSTANT POT
When you purchase the insanely popular Instant Pot 6 quart ($99.95 $70) multicooker, you not only get a versatile countertop device, you also get a rabid online community that can help you get the most out of it.

SMART SPEAKER ASSISTANCE
Smart assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home are getting smarter, more useful in the kitchen, and thanks to Black Friday — more affordable. The Verge has a great breakdown of all the smart speakers from both Amazon and Google going on sale.

GREENPAN VENICE PRO
Like the idea of non-stick pans, but worry about the chemicals that might leech into your food? The GreenPan Venice Pro ($180 $69) might be for you . According to Food52, this ceramic pan “is made without PFAS, PFOA, lead, or cadmium, and is oven and broiler safe up to a whopping 600°F. It also won’t blister, peel or release toxic fumes even if it’s heated up to over 850°F (unlike most nonstick pans).”

BREWIE HOME BEER APPLIANCE
Brewie is knocking knocking $1,000 off the price of its Brewie+ home beer making machine (making the cost $1,500) when you subscribe to their mailing list.

PICOBREW’S HOME BEER (AND HOOCH!) MACHINE COMBO
Bored with just brewing beer and want to try the hard stuff? Aspiring moonshine makers can save bigtime on Black Friday by picking up a PicoBrew Pico C and PicoStill Combo for $300 off ($748 $499). If you already have a Pico C (which you need to use the PicoStill), you can pick up a PicoStill for $100 off($349 $249).

KITCHEN-AID COLD BREW
Cold brew coffee lovers can get their fix at home as Kitchen-Aid has discounted both of their Cold Brew Coffee Makers. Pick up the 28 oz version for ($129 $49) or the 38 oz version for ($169 $92).

WAGYU STEAKS
Wagyu beef is renown for its melt-in-your-mouth flavor, and Crowd Cow is running a sale where you can pick up authentic Japanese A5 Wagyu steaks for your very own. They still aren’t cheap ($192 $149 for one 1.125 lb ribeye), but if you’re looking for a way to indulge yourself and your taste buds, this is about as good as it gets. (Chris here, I’ve tried the CrowdCow Wagyu and it really is delicious!)

DOORDASH’S BLACK FRY-DAY
After all those fist fights for oversized TVs at Walmart, reward yourself with free food courtesy of DoorDash and a handful of major restaurant chains. This Friday, they’ll give an order of free fries to the first 15,000 customers to place a DoorDash order of $5 or more with one of the following: Wendy’s, Wingstop, Jack in the Box, Applebee’s, Burger King, Chick-fil-A, and Buffalo Wild Wings. The offer is limited to one order per customer, and applies to delivery orders only. You can use the code BLACKFRYDAY to get yours.

MEAL KIT DEALS
If trying a meal kit service is on your bucket list, now would be the time to test one out, with some of the major meal kit companies offering deals in honor of Thanksgiving/Black Friday. HelloFresh has a sale going for $20 off the first four boxes for first-time subscribers, for a total of $80 off. That boils down to $8.99 $5.66 per serving for the Classic meal plan. Sunbasket is running a similar sale, also for $80 off.

ATLAS COFFEE CLUB SUBSCRIPTION
Atlas Coffee Club, who curates coffee from around the world and delvers it via subscription service, will offer $15 off the first shipment for new subscribers to the Coffee of the Month Club. The coffee subscription company is also offering up to $50 off for 12 month subscribers in a Black Friday sale that runs from November 23–25.

EMBER MUG BUNDLE
The expensive-but-worth-it temperature controlled coffee mug just got a little bit cheaper… when you buy two of them. Get a pair of ceramic Ember mugs for $149 (normally $159).

GOSUN SOLAR GRILLS
GoSun makes portable grills that harness solar energy to cook food. Perfect for the camper in your life that doesn’t want to bring fuel into the forest, or anyone looking to make outdoor cooking a little more clean, you can pick up the GoSun Sport ($249 $199), GoSun Grill ($699 $599) or the GoSun Portable ($139 $99).

GOURMIA AIR FRYER. Let’s face it, people either love or hate the air fryer. For some like Wired’s Joe Ray, the air fryer overpromises and underdelivers, while for others it’s hot crispy love from the get-go. If you’re looking to figure out where you stand on one of the day’s most heated (sorry) issues, you can pick up this Gourmia air fryer for $59 through Friday only.

FARMBOT
Forget cooking robots. It may just be time to get a robot to run your garden. You can now pick up the Farmbot Genesis XL garden robot for a full $600 off.  Of course, the deal doesn’t come with a backyard or labor to put it together (that’s for you Farmer Ted), but we can guarantee this will be a one of a kind gift for your home gardening loved one.

GROW DUO
If you’re looking to add some smarts to your garden but aren’t ready to fully outsource it to the robots, try out the Grow Duo, which is on sale for 50% off through Monday.  The Grow Duo comes with everything to start your back porch smart garden, including a smart planter, two grow kits and organic potting soil.

NOMIKU
Mike Wolf recently wrote about how Nomiku reinvented itself as a sous vide-powered food delivery business, offering meals ranging from Five-Spice Short Rib to Minestrone Soup, all ready in 30 minutes. If you want to sample some of that food delivery for yourself, now’s the time — you can take $25 off any order placed on Cyber Monday, and you’ll automatically get a $15 credit applied to December orders. Nomiku is also offering free shipping on all orders over $99.

LARQ
Despite your best cleaning efforts, reusable water bottles can start to get a bit, well, smelly. LARQ’s water bottles use UV-C light to kill bacteria which can cause bad odors, purifying your water at the same time. They’re also pretty stylish. LARQ’s bottles are 15% off today, so you can snag one for $80 (normally $95).

Silo Eclipses $1.4 Million On Way To Kickstarter Smart Kitchen Top Three

The “smart kitchen” category on Kickstarter has a new member of the top three.

Silo, the smart vacuum seal storage solution that debuted a little over a month ago at the Smart Kitchen Summit, just completed its successful Kickstarter campaign this week with over $1.4 million in backer pledges. This haul puts the product just behind PicoBrew and Anova as the crowdfunding site’s top smart kitchen campaigns.

Of course, it should be noted that Kickstarter doesn’t technically have a smart kitchen category, but that doesn’t keep us from segmenting campaigns that way. The reason to do so is the site’s food category – with everything from sous vide circulators to crickets – is massive, and so for our purposes it’s helpful to separate the more technology-forward offerings from the campaigns featuring products like barbecue sauce and bacon jerky (not that those aren’t delicious).

Silo’s campaign puts the company just behind onetime belt holder Anova and current smart kitchen champ PicoBrew C. Both PicoBrew ($1.9 million) and Anova ($1.8 million) not only top our “smart kitchen” category, but they also lead the actual overall food category for Kickstarter.

I personally backed Silo’s campaign because, like so many, I struggle with food waste and found my old school plastic containers aren’t cutting it.  I also like the idea of a vacuum sealer that could extend the life of my food, especially if I can track that food in some way through an app.

The company is one of a new crop of startups focused on food preservation. Earlier this year Ovie also succeeded with a Kickstarter for its food tracking solution, while companies like Karma and Goodr are looking to push tech to tackle food waste further up the food chain.

Video: To Succeed in the Smart Kitchen, “You Have to Get Multi-Modal Fast”

Voice is becoming more and more present in consumer electronics. At the same time, appliances are also coming with a whole host of AI-powered, software-driven interfaces and interactions.

How do these components work together in the kitchen? In this video from the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, Stacey Higginbotham of the IoT Podcast moderates a panel with Shelby Bonnie of Pylon AI, Adnan “Boat” Agboatwalla of Samsung and Jason Clarke of Crank Software about the evolution of smart appliances and interfaces in the heart of the home.

There’s a lot to consider. As Clarke said, “there’s all these interfaces that I want to jump between depending on the task and the environment of the moment.” For example, if his daughter is being loud, he doesn’t want to rely on voice to turn on his oven; if his hands are dirty, vice versa.

In short: the smart kitchen can’t function just with video screens or voice, but both working together. “You have to get to multi-modal fast,” said Bonnie.

But for the ultimate user experience these appliances all have to work together, too. “There should be a platform that connects everything… multi-branded appliances should be able to talk and work together,” said Agboatwalla. Easy? Maybe not. But with conversations like these, we can pave the way to a more connected kitchen and a better cooking experience.

Watch the full video below.

Beyond The Dial: Exploring Voice and AI-Powered Interfaces For The Kitchen

Look out for more videos of the panels, solo talks, and fireside chats from SKS 2018! We’ll be bringing them to you hot and fresh out the (smart) kitchen over the next few weeks.

Video: Smart Kitchen Perspectives from Japan, Europe, and the U.S.

More so than a living room, dining room, or even bedroom, kitchens — and their appliance lineup — vary dramatically region to region. In our global economy, how do companies in the smart kitchen space serve consumers across diverse geographies?

In this panel discussion from our recent Smart Kitchen Summit, ConnectSense’s Adam Justice moderates a discussion between Robin Liss of Suvie, Erik Wallin of Northfork, and Masa Fukata of Panasonic on the challenges of designing smart kitchen products and services which appeal to differing regions.

Smart Kitchen Regional Perspectives

Look out for more videos of the panels, solo talks, and fireside chats from SKS 2018! We’ll be bringing them to you hot and fresh out the (smart) kitchen over the next few weeks.

Innit Partners With Tyson To Bring Packaged Food Giant Into The Smart Kitchen

By selling one in every five pounds of chicken, beef or pork in the US, it’s safe to say that Tyson Foods is responsible for a whole bunch of the food that goes onto consumer plates.

And now, if smart kitchen platform company Innit has its way, consumers will soon be cooking all that meat (and maybe eventually some of the lab-grown stuff) with the help of QR codes, Google smart displays and connected appliances.

That’s the vision anyway that will be on display this weekend in New York City as the company demos an integration developed by Tyson at the Food Loves Tech conference. According to Innit CEO Kevin Brown, the company will show off its integration with GE ovens and a Google smart display.

The demo will start “with a QR code on a package of Tyson protein, connecting via Google Assistant to Innit, and sending an expert cook program to a GE oven (that is) tailored to that SKU,” said Brown via email.

It makes sense that Innit, who has been busy partnering with big appliance brands like GE, LG and Electrolux over the past year, now has its sights set on packaged food brands. The company, which acquired Shopwell in 2017 and recently relaunched that platform at Smart Kitchen Summit, has a huge database of CPG information that it can tie directly to optimized recipes.

As for Tyson, partnering with a company like Innit makes sense as well. Through Innit’s integration with Google Assistant, packaged food brands like Tyson can get recipes and integrated advertising onto what is a rapidly growing installed base of smart displays. This deal could also allow them to create cook instructions optimized for specific appliance brands (350 degrees in a GE oven might be slightly different than 350 degrees in LG or Whirlpool) and have them sent directly to the oven.

The news caps off a busy time for Innit. Not only did they launch their app into the UK this past week, they will also unveil the first fruits of their partnership with small appliance division of Philips. The company will show how a Phillips air fryer is discoverable within the My Appliances section of the Innit app and how a home cook has access to “appliance-aware modular meals with video guidance on how to use the appliance,” according to Brown.

Stepping back, the move to integrate packaged food providers into the connected kitchen marks a step forward in the space as companies like Innit try to tie together the various pieces of the cooking journey. At the Smart Kitchen Summit last month, one of the issues brought up on stage was the need for greater connections between the various platforms to enable more seamless digital-powered cooking experiences. While fragmentation isn’t going away anytime soon, the connection between food and appliance is an important one and it will be interesting to see if other big CPG brands get on board with the connected kitchen.

I Tried ChefStep’s JouleReady Bags: How a Sous Vide Virgin Became a Convert

I have a confession: I am a full-time writer about food technology and the smart kitchen, and I’ve never tried my hand at sous vide. Maybe it’s because I don’t eat much meat, or because I have a pint-sized kitchen, or because — gasp! — I actually gravitate towards old-fashioned cooking techniques. Half the time I don’t even use a recipe.

But a few weeks ago Mike and I went by ChefSteps HQ to learn about their new Joule Ready sauces, a line of sous-vide-ready bags filled with sauce, which CEO Chris Young told us they’d developed in part to “help first time sous vide users.” So I decided to shed my Luddite culinary ways and give the Joule a spin. Here’s how it stacked up:

ChefSteps launched the initial 12 flavors of Joule Ready with 8,000 of their community members this month, ranging from Sauce au Poivre to Roasted Red Pepper Walnut Muhammara. I decided to try Thai Green Curry, which I thought would go best with the salmon in my fridge.

For those who haven’t used the Joule app before, it’s a piece of cake. The app has tips and tricks for sous vide newbies, and also offers a myriad of recipes organized by protein type. My only qualm is that their “beginner guide” only has four options, all of which are meat. I’m a pescetarian, and I know that most people get sous vide to perfect their carnivorous cooking — but I’d appreciate at least one fish, egg, or vegetable dish on there.

When it comes to the Joule Ready, however, it’s even easier. You just scan the QR code on the bag and the app prompts you to select your protein, pick how done you like it, and note its thickness. You can also choose to follow the Featured Recipe for that particular sauce, which will show you how to make a full meal out of your protein. For the Thai Green Curry the featured recipe is chicken over rice with grilled eggplant and a sweet pepper and herb salad, but I went with salmon instead.

Once you’ve entered in your protein info the app then tells you to put the sous vide in your water vessel, plug it in (not the other way around!), and connect it via bluetooth so it can start heating the water to the exact specifications for perfect cooking. Once it reaches the right temperature, the Joule app alerts you that it’s time to put your protein into its saucy bath, pop it in your water, and start the timer. I didn’t even use a clip to affix the bag, and yet the salmon stayed perfectly submerged.

My sous vide setup.

After 40 minutes my app alerted me that my protein was ready, though I kept it in the water for a few minutes more while I finished my brown rice (doesn’t it always take longer than you think?) and sweet potatoes. One of the benefits of sous vide: your food will never dry out!

After I messily extracted my (perfectly cooked, perfectly tender) salmon from its saucy bath, I was left with the sticky problem of how to get the tasty green curry sauce out of the bag and onto my plate. ChefSteps is clear that the sauces are meant not only as a marinade/cooking accompaniment to your protein, but also as a finishing sauce.

Spooning it out worked, but not without plenty of it getting all over my hands. I realized after the fact that I could have snipped one of the corners of the bag and squeezed the sauce out like I was piping icing — I’ll try that next time.

My completed Joule Ready meal of Thai Green Curry salmon with rice and kale.

A few thoughts:

  • Yes, yes, I’m a sous vide n00b — but I didn’t realize that you were supposed to sear your protein before putting it into the bag, lest it the sugars in the sauce burn. My Joule app didn’t instruct me to pre-sear after I scanned my Joule Ready. Luckily the salmon worked well tender and didn’t need a caramelized exterior, but for some proteins I imagine you’d really need that sear.
  • Eventually, it would be nice to have multiple recipes for each Joule Ready sauce. The more customizable the recipe, the more people would use it; after all, people want the sauce so that they have to think less about what to make for dinner, not brainstorm a whole extra side dish or starch just because they don’t eat/want the particular meat recommended by the recipe.

In the end, Joule Ready delivered on its promise: it made sous vide cooking simple, even for someone who’d never tried it before. Forty minutes isn’t a quick meal by any account — and it would take even longer with, say, steak — but with a little planning ahead it was simple to pop in some protein, put on a pot of rice, and have a way above-average meal for a Tuesday. Bonus: if you get distracted doing laundry or watching TV while you wait for your food to cook, you don’t have to worry about returning to a smoky kitchen and charred dinner.

I haven’t (yet) tried out other devices from Anova or Nomiku, but with Joule Ready, ChefSteps did the hard work of getting me — a sous vide skeptic — to actually give this kitchen technology a whirl. Plus, I love how the sauces are shelf-stable, so I can make a fancy-pants sous vide entrée anytime the mood strikes, without having to order pre-made meals ahead of time or plan out a recipe.

Good thing I have six more sauces in my cabinet to try out.

Tupperware is Fine and All, but A New Wave of Smart Food Storage is Here

Last week at the Smart Kitchen Summit, Israeli startup Silo unveiled its smart kitchen storage solution which combines vacuum seal tech with specialized plastic containers and Amazon Alexa. Check out the video below to see it in action.

This week, the company launched their Kickstarter, reaching their $80,000 goal in 22 hours. Early backers can get the Silo vacuum base plus four storage containers for $165, and prices increase based on container size and quantity. That’s not cheap, especially considering that you’ll need to buy all new containers to sync with the Silo. However, for families that shop in bulk at Costco and the like, Silo could definitely help them save money — and reduce their food waste. If all goes well in the manufacturing (and as we know, that’s a bit “if”), Silo will ship to its first batch of backers in July of 2019.

The fact that Silo reached their Kickstarter goal in less than a day illustrates a hungry market for kitchen storage systems. Because plastic containers are fine, but we’re living in the era of the smart kitchen — and food storage is one area where we’re seeing some serious innovation. Here are a few companies leading the charge:

 

Ovie
Ovie makes LED tags which you can affix to your food containers to monitor how long that particular item will last. A green tag means your food is good, yellow means it’s nearing expiration, and red means do not eat. The startup launched their own Kickstarter back in May, where it also surpassed its funding goal by over 50 percent.

Though it doesn’t actually facilitate food freshness, Ovie is like Silo in that both use voice to help you track the lifespan of your food. They originally tried to sync it with Alexa, but developers weren’t satisfied with the gadget skill. That means Ovie requires a separate wifi-enabled hub to facilitate voice interaction, though the startup is working to make their tags talk with smart assistants.

 

PantryChic
Dry goods storage company PantryChic pitched onstage at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase, where they captured our attention with their system of connected cannisters and dispensing unit. Together, the two can keep track of your dry goods inventory and portion out precise amounts of each ingredient (see video above for an example).

When Chris Albrecht caught up with the PantryChic team at the International Housewares show in March, they said they would be shipping in August. August has come and gone, and no word on PantryChic, despite multiple attempts to reach out. While that’s certainly worrisome, the enthusiasm around the product — including from our team — shows that there’s certainly a demand for smart dry goods storage.

 

Stasher
Outside of the (resealable) box, Stasher‘s reusable silicone bags make a great alternative to single-use plastic baggies. The company makes resealable bags that they claim are “safer, more flexible, and more sustainable than plastic.” They can be used for sous vide, or as storage to keep snacks, kids’ lunches, and perishable ingredients fresh. Stasher made waves earlier this year when the founder went on Shark Tank and walked away with $400,000 from investor Mark Cuban.

—

In researching companies for this piece, I was excited to see so many companies working to disrupt plastic containers, single-use plastic bag, vacuum sealer, and other food storage methods that are practically screaming for a reboot. Many of these new solutions, however, are just that: new. Most of them haven’t even shipped to their backers, which means we’ll have to wait and see if they can follow through on their promises — before they turn stale.

Mitte Raises $10.6 Million for its Countertop Mineral Water Machine

Mitte, the German startup behind a countertop appliance that turns plain water into mineral water, today announced it has secured $10.6 million in seed funding. The round was led by DanoneManifesto Ventures, the New York-based venture arm of Danone, VisVires New Protein Capital and Kärcher New Venture.

Mitte actually won the Startup Showcase at our Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe this past June. As we wrote back then:

Mitte’s sleek, eponymous countertop machine lets you create your own mineral water at home using a two-step process. First, water is purified using a patented distillation system that the company says is four times more efficient than other water distillers on the market. Once purified, Mitte then re-mineralizes the water using special cartridges, which will mineralize 400 liters of water.

You can even purchase specific types of mineral cartridges that add varying levels of different minerals (magnesium, potassium, zinc, and more), depending on what you want. The machine is connected to the Internet and can automatically re-order cartridges when its time.

Mitte had been taking pre-orders for the machine at €329, and was going to ship units to Kickstarter backers by the end of this year. As of now, the company is no longer taking pre-orders (you can only join the waitlist), and early backers have been informed that they will receive their units in June of 2019. Final retail pricing for the machine and the replacement cartridges has not been finalized. And retail units won’t be available until after backers get their machines first.

Mitte won a €5,000 prize from our Startup Showcase and had previously raised €272,781 in a Kickstarter campaign last fall. The company had also raised an undisclosed “small seed round” by that point and to date has raised roughly $12 million. According to the funding announcement, Mitte will use the new money to support expansion into the U.S. and elsewhere.

We spoke to Mitte CEO, Moritz Waldstein this morning by phone about the announcement, and he told us that the company’s go to market strategy will be selling direct to consumers. Mitte will focus on five cities, most likely in the U.S., the U.K., China and also in their home, Berlin. The company will open pop-up stores in these locations to educate consumers about the technology as well as get an on-the-ground view of what those markets want.

“What we want to do is make a beautiful experience to users,” said Waldstein.

While Mitte holds a number of European patents for its distillation, re-mineralization and cartridges, it sounds like Mitte is getting some strategic help from its investors, including water machine manufacturing and mineral lab expertise.

While the Mitte is currently a countertop machine, Waldstein told us that the company has much bigger plans to expand its mineralization technology. He said the company has had conversations with big appliance manufacturers like Whirlpool, LG and Samsung about incorporating Mitte’s tech into refrigerators, or building out units directly into kitchen sinks. Additionally, sees itself also expanding its hydration personalization, offering a variety of mineral cartridges customized for pregnant women, the elderly, and other demographics.

Announcing the Smart Kitchen Summit 2018 Program

Hard to believe, but we’re just six weeks away from the Smart Kitchen Summit, our flagship industry event that brings hundreds of executives, innovators, startups and media together in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall for two days to forge the future of food, cooking, and the kitchen.

It’s been three years since we held our first in an old cannery in 2015, and since that time we’ve become the hub across three continents for the world’s biggest brands in appliances, food, and tech to connect and discuss food tech.

And now, after lots of emails, planning meetings and Google sheet rejiggering, we’ve released our agenda for the Smart Kitchen Summit! We’ve got an incredible lineup with panels, TED-style talks and fireside chats featuring some of the most exciting people in the space. Check it out!

A few highlights:

  • The Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman will sit down with the person who ran product on both the Amazon Echo and the Juicero –  Malachy Moynihan – to ask why kitchen products succeed or fail.
  • Dr. Karsten Ottenberg, the CEO of one of the world’s biggest appliance manufacturers, BSH Appliances, will talk about how his company is building its future around services.
  • Executives from Cafe X, Chowbotics and Zimplistic will talk about the future of food robotics
  • Walmart’s VP of Food Safety Frank Yiannas will speak on a panel with Raja Ramachandran of Ripe.io and Jasmine Crowe of Goodr about the potential for blockchain to increase transparency and reduce waste throughout the food system.
  • The CEOs of June, Brava, Tovala, and Suvie will talk about how cooking appliances will change over the next decade.
  • We’ll find out why Eli Holzman, the creator of Project Runway & Project Greenlight, has made the intersection of technology and cooking his next big project.
  • Tom Mastrobuoni of Tyson Ventures, Carmen Palafox of Make in L.A., and Brian Frank of FTW ventures will explore strategies for food tech investment, from hardware to CPG and beyond.

That’s just the start. We have sessions on personalized food, the future of restaurants, AI & food, cooking robots, food & cooking data, blockchain & food, IoT security in the smart kitchen, reinvention of the grocery store and much more.

Peppered throughout the day we’ll also have 12 new startups (companies to be announced soon!) pitching their companies before a panel of investors and executives. Our panel of judges will vote on the winner, who will get a $10,000 cash prize! You can view the new full conference schedule here.

Our last shows have all sold out, so make sure you grab your tickets now, and we’ll see you in October!

AEG Rolling Out Smart Induction Cooktop and Wireless Sensor Probe At IFA

Electrolux’s AEG brand is rolling out a new smart cooking system in the form of a new induction cooktop (hob) with a wireless sensor probe at IFA next week.

The new AEG SenseCook system, which was first uncovered by design site Yanko, features what the company claims to be the first wireless and battery-less sensor probe for an induction cooktop. The SenseCook induction cooktop gets realtime temperature reading from the sensor probe and automatically adjusts temperature of the heating surface.

It’s an interesting move by Electrolux in that it’s the first time the European appliance giant is getting into smart surface cooking. The company’s early smart kitchen efforts (such as its partnership with Innit) have centered around cavity/oven cooking, but this marks the first effort to integrate smart cooking technology into the company’s induction cooktops.

The Electrolux/AEG news follows an announcement by Hestan Cue’s parent company, Meyer, in January at the Kitchen and Bath show of a new appliance range with built-in smart surface cooking. The Hestan smart appliance line and the AEG SenseCook system are a natural evolution from first generation smart cooking systems like that of the Hestan Cue, FirstBuild’s Paragon and the Cucianale that feature portable countertop induction burners. Longer term, I expect most appliance brands will build smart cooking intelligence into their larger cooktop appliances and AEG and Hestan are early indicators of that trend.

With IFA next week, I expect we’ll see a flurry of smart cooking news over the next few days, so stay tuned to the Spoon as we’ll be tracking all of it.

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

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

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

This interview has been edited for clarity and grammar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SKS Japan: Excitement, Growth & a Rapidly Maturing Food Tech Ecosystem

Last week I was in Tokyo for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan. It was the second edition of our Japanese event, and while it’s only been twelve short months since that first gathering, the amount of progress I witnessed in the Japan food tech scene over the course of the two days in Tokyo was amazing.

Here are some of the trends, products and innovators that stood out to me last week:

In Japan, Much of the Innovation Comes From Big Companies

For those familiar with Japan, you’ll know it’s not surprising that much of the innovation comes from within established companies. These “intreprenuers” often work in R&D or as part of new business units specifically to innovate new product concepts.

One of these innovation units is Panasonic’s GameChanger Catapult. We’ve written about Catapult as they’ve been showing off innovative product concepts like a food softener for the elderly or home fermentation system.  As it turns out, the innovation unit from Panasonic is still working on those ideas as well as a few new ones.

One of Catapult’s product concepts is Tottemeal, which first showed up at SXSW in Austin in March 2017 as a product concept called Bento@YourOffice. It was comprised of an IoT-powered smart fridge and app system, which is similar in concept to Byte Fridge in that both offer fresh food for sale. Since SXSW last year the company has approached partners and refined the concept to work with any fridge.  The company is now testing out the service in Panasonic’s event/innovation hub, Kura-Think, in Tokyo.

Another large company that’s been busy working on future-forward food tech concepts since last year’s SKS Japan is CookPad. The digital cooking site, which boasts 100 million users worldwide, introduced a smart kitchen platform a couple months ago called OiCy that connects their recipes with appliances to create a guided cooking platform. At SKS Japan, the company outlined the future vision for OiCy in the form of a six-level roadmap for the smart kitchen platform. They also announced an updated partner list which includes hardware manufacturers such as Sharp and Hitachi.

Japan’s Startup Ecosystem Is Gaining Momentum

While much of Japan’s innovation comes from within large organizations, there are also signs of a rapidly maturing food tech startup ecosystem.  Part of the growth is being driven by Japan’s bigger companies like Kirin (who launched their own accelerator). However, there were also a number of young and innovative entrepreneurs that spoke at SKS Japan such as Integriculture’s Yuki Hanyu and Open Meals’ Ryosuke Sakaki.

We’ve written about both companies before in the Spoon. Chris Albrecht was the first to write about Integriculture’s impending $2.7 million funding round when he covered Shojinmeat, the open source project from Hanyu. As Northeast Asia’s only lab-grown meat startup, CEO Hanyu has big plans to jumpstart alternative meat production in the Asia market, and discussed his plans for doing just that.

Open Meals made a big splash this March at SXSW with their sushi teleportation demo. While true food teleportation may be a ways off, the Open Meals vision of creating a food digitization and printing framework is pretty fascinating. Company CEO Sasaki presented an ambitious 100-year look into the future for the idea around food digitization that spanned from digitized food restaurants in Tokyo in just two years and eventually sees space colonies where we’re sharing food experiences in real time with people on earth.

Dinner time in space

Japan’s Smart Kitchen Community Embraces Ideas From US & Europe

The Japan smart kitchen/food tech community is also really interested in innovation happening from the West. One of the speakers at SKS Japan this year was Jon Jenkins, the head of product for the guided cooking group within Meyer, Hestan Cue. Jenkins, who goes by JJ, gave a talk about the role of technology and software in the kitchen and later gave a hands-on demo of the product to a capacity crowd:

It wasn’t just cooking demos. A highly engaged audience packed the room to hear conversations with innovators from the US and Europe such as Jason Cohen of Analytical Flavor Systems talk about the impact on AI on food personalization and flavor. They also heard from Suvie’s Robin Liss as she discuss her company’s four-chamber cooking robot and how today’s appliance companies need to start innovating around food services. The Future Food Institute’s Sara Roversi talked about taking her food innovation platform, which she started in Europe, across the globe. They also listened to Amar Krishna of Chefling and Kevin Yu of SideChef discuss the differences between the smart kitchen platform market in the US with CookPad’s Tad Yoshioka.

Collaboration, Innovation & Community

The biggest takeaway for me from this year’s SKS Japan was there a growing sense of collaboration, innovation, and community in Japan’s food tech market.  Part of it was the hard work of our partners for SKS Japan, SigmaXYZ, who have done a great job over the past year fostering the SKS community. But, just as with the US and Europe, it’s clear now that the Japanese market was ready for an event to catalyze innovation and to bring it together, and I couldn’t be more thrilled that event is SKS.

I’m excited to see how our event in Japan has just done that and has become the go-to food tech event in the Japan market and for much of Asia and I can’t wait to go back next year. I hope I’ll see you there.

If you’re interested in being a part of our global community, don’t miss SKS in Seattle in less than two months!  Robin Liss, Jon Jenkins, Jason Cohen and many more will be there, so you will not want to miss out. You can check it out here and don’t forget to use discount code SPOON for 25% off tickets!