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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

solar

Solar Cooking Startup GoSun Adds Water Filtration To The Product Lineup

GoSun, a company that makes everything but the kitchen sink when it comes to solar-powered kitchen gear, has added, well, a kitchen sink as part of a new solar water sanitation product called the GoSun Flow.

Announced last week, the GoSun Flow is a full solar or USB powered water sanitation system. Beyond the baseline product, which includes a pump, filter, water bank and solar panel, the Flow will have a number of upgrade options such as a sink and a shower that could make the Flow a complete away-from-home water station. The company will start taking orders in May for the Flow and prices for the baseline product will start at $139.

Adding water to the product mix makes sense for GoSun. The company was already providing cooking gear for campers and the off-the-grid crowd and had started to add other products to the lineup over the past year including reusable portable cutlery and portable chillers. With a solution for water, the company makes their solar kitchen pretty much self-sufficient and adds a bath (or at least a shower) to boot.

If there is a company well-positioned in the cooking space to take advantage of uncertain times, it’s GoSun. Just as people have started panic-buying 25 pound bags of flour and rice at Costco to hunker down for the long-haul, GoSun can help the neighborhood doomsday prepper actually cook their food while being fully off the grid.

The company seems to agree now is their time. In addition to launching new products like Flow, GoSun is equity crowdfunding its next round of capital through StartEngine. They’re already raised $637 thousand and is aiming for $1.07 million at a $14 million valuation. Last year the company sold $1.5 million in product, so that puts their valuation at a somewhat rich 9 times revenue, but like I said, a company like GoSun is one of the few companies in the space that could benefit from the uncertainty.

GoSun Debuts The ‘Solar Kitchen’ So You Can Cook (and Chill) Around The Clock

If you think solar powered cooking is something you can only do when the sun is out, think again.

That’s because GoSun, the company which got its start five years ago when it debuted its first solar oven on Kickstarter, has evolved its product line to what is essentially a fully self-contained “solar kitchen” that can cook (or chill) at any time of the day or night.

At the center of the company’s solar kitchen concept is the GoSun Fusion, a hybrid oven that can cook using solar power or electricity. With the Fusion, a user can cook a meal with solar power in about an hour. At night, the Fusion can cook a meal in the same amount of time by drawing power from the new lithium ion power bank product the company is debuting at CES. The power bank will receive its energy from an accompanying foldable solar panel, also being rolled out at CES.

While all this cooking is great, you and I both know a kitchen is not complete without something to keep your food (or beer) cold. GoSun now has that covered too. The company also unveiled the GoSun Chill, which the company calls a cooler but, according to GoSun CEO Patrick Sherwin, it’s actually a fully operable mini-fridge.

“It’s crazy how efficient this technology has gotten,” said Sherwin. The Chill (read fridge) has a “brushless DC compressor motor inside allows you to keep a couple cases of beer cold for entire day with this power bank.”

According to Sherwin, the Fusion will be shipping in a little over a month and the new power bank, solar panel and Chill cooler will be for sale in March via Indiegogo and will ship in the summer.

You can watch my full interview with Sherwin from CES Unveiled below:

GoSun Debuts The 'Solar Kitchen', Including a Solar Powered Mini-Fridge

Forget 3D Food Printers. The Future Will Have Home Food Reactors

If the idea of personalized food fabrication using bionsensors and 3D food printers isn’t enough to blow your mind, what about home food reactors that make food using only electricity, carbon dioxide and organisms from the air we breathe?

If researchers from Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland have any say in the matter, some day we may have just that.

That’s because the joint study group has successfully produced single cell protein in the lab using only water, electricity, carbon dioxide and small organisms obtained from the environment. The end result is a breakthrough that, if commercialized, could result in solar powered home food reactors that produce protein and carb-packed food.

The idea of creating food from essentially nothing is both mind-bending and potentially world-changing. And while I would love to have a food reactor in my home that could produce interesting food with practically zero inputs besides electricity and air, the biggest implications are clearly for those areas of the world facing significant resource challenges.

“In practice, all the raw materials are available from the air,”said Juha-Pekka Pitkänen, Principal Scientist at VTT. “In the future, the technology can be transported to, for instance, deserts and other areas facing famine.”

The process and the resulting protein could be used to produce food for both humans and livestock.

“Compared to traditional agriculture, the production method currently under development does not require a location with the conditions for agriculture, such as the right temperature, humidity or a certain soil type,” said Professor Jero Ahola of LUT. “This allows us to use a completely automatised process to produce the animal feed required in a shipping container facility built on the farm.”

Lab equipment used to create single cell protein from electricity, carbon dioxide and microbes. Image Credit: JAA TÄMÄ KUVA

The researchers plan to take what they’ve done in the lab and move it into pilot production that produces larger quantities of food products to enable testing. Once that is achieved, they believe the concept could be commercialized.

“The idea is to develop the concept into a mass product, with a price that drops as the technology becomes more common,” said Ahola.

And how soon until food reactors make their way into our homes?

“Maybe 10 years is a realistic timeframe for reaching commercial capacity, in terms of the necessary legislation and process technology,” said Pitkänen.