Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

sous vide

Newsletter: Why Blue Bottle Coffee is Like the Tesla Cybertruck

This is the web version of our weekly newsletter. Sign up for it and get all the best food tech news delivered directly to your inbox each week!

The new Tesla Cybertruck is a polarizing vehicle. People seem to either really like or hate the triangle-shaped truck. (I’m squarely in the like side because I’ve always wanted a vehicle from Megaforce.) Tesla CEO Elon Musk is definitely a polarizing figure in his own right, but between electric cars, solar powered roof tiles, and hyperloops, Musk isn’t waiting patiently for the future to arrive. He’s shooting it full of harpoons and trying to drag it towards us right now.

I thought of Mr. Musk when I read about Blue Bottle Coffee’s big announcement last week that the coffee company was trying to make its locations have zero waste by the end of 2020. Not 2024 or 2022. But twelve months from now.

As my colleague Jenn Marston wrote, Blue Bottle is achieving this by having people bring in their own containers for coffee beans, their own reusable cups for coffee (or pay a “modest deposit” for one of Blue Bottles reusable cups), and packaging grab and go items in reusable containers.

This is a bold move that even Blue Bottle’s CEO concedes is risky. In a blog post last week announcing the change, Bryan Meehan wrote: “We are proud to announce an experiment that may not work, that may cost us money, and that may make your life a little more complicated.”

Good for him for not sugar-coating this experiment. Also kudos for pushing the plastic-free movement forward. Big companies have been doing little things to reduce their plastic waste output over the past year: Burger King phased out cheap toys in kids meals in the U.K., Live Nation banned single-use plastics at music festivals, and Ben & Jerry’s eliminated single-use plastic cups and spoons.

But Blue Bottle is going one step further and actually “inconveniencing” its customers by pulling them out of their normal routine. As Jenn wrote, the result could wind up being that busy people get pissed and take off for Starbucks. But I’m hopeful that people and other businesses will be inspired by Blue Bottle’s actions, and buy a Cybertruck-load of coffee from them.

Nomiku’s new RFID-scanning circulator

RIP Consumer Sous Vide?

Spoon Founder Mike Wolf broke the news last Friday that Nomiku, one of the early pioneers of the home sous vide movement, was shutting down all operations.

Last year Nomiku had pivoted from a hardware company to become a meal delivery service that used the company’s sous vide technology. But while growth in that sector was strong, it wasn’t enough.

As Mike pointed out, Nomiku’s demise isn’t an isolated incident:

The exit of Nomiku from the market marks the end of what has been a fairly rough of couple years for the first wave of startups in the connected cooking market. Sansaire, which started around the same time as Nomiku, shut down in February of 2018. Hestan Cue, maker of a guided cooking system, downsized its team in April, and just a few weeks later ChefSteps, another sous vide startup, had to layoff a significant portion of its team before it got acquired by Breville.

The bloom is definitely off the consumer sous vide rose at this point. The only question is whether the carnage will continue and expand into other parts of the connected cooking appliance market in 2020.

The Year in Kitchen Tech Crowdfunding

Speaking of hardware: If you are an entrepreneur looking to crowdfund an idea, may we suggest creating some gadget around beverages? I took a look back at our 2019 coverage of Kickstarter projects and there were five drink-related projects that crowdfunded more than $100,000 this year:

Mosi Tea mobile tea brewer – $458,200
uKeg Nitro cold brew coffee maker – $643,498
Stasis Glycol homebrew chiller – $184,369
Travel Decanter cocktail tumblers – $377,071
Ode coffee grinder – $609,094 (with 55 days to go in the campaign)

However, it hasn’t been all good news for the companies that made a bunch a moola on Kickstarter. Mosi Tea will miss its Dec. ship date, Stasis has encountered production issues, and some people who have received their Travel Decanters have complained about it leaking.

Crowdfunding food tech will surely continue through the next year. Hopefully those inspired by the Kickstarter successes will learn from the crowdfunding failures.

Consumer Sous Vide Pioneer Nomiku is Shutting Down

Nomiku, a pioneering kitchen tech startup that helped bring sous vide to the consumer market, is shutting down operations effective immediately.

In an email sent to customers this morning, Lisa Fetterman, Nomiku founder and CEO, wrote that the company will be shutting down all operations, including both its sous vide appliance business and its sous vide ready meal business, Nomiku Meals.

In an interview with The Spoon, Fetterman said that while the company saw strong growth in their meal delivery business after the company pivoted one year ago – she said they doubled revenue since the launch of the food business – it just wasn’t enough.

“We just couldn’t get the company to a sustainable place,” said Fetterman.

Fetterman indicated that for long term survival, the company would need to raise capital and that that was going to be challenging in today’s environment. She said that while being a hardware company made it hard to raise additional capital, it was going to be even tougher as a “food tech” startup focused on food delivery.

The demise of meal kit companies “have put a chill on the market when it came to raising funds,” said Fetterman.

The exit of Nomiku from the market marks the end of what has been a fairly rough of couple years for the first wave of startups in the connected cooking market. Sansaire, which started around the same time as Nomiku, shut down in February of 2018. Hestan Cue, maker of a guided cooking system, downsized its team in April, and just a few weeks later ChefSteps, another sous vide startup, had to layoff a significant portion of its team before it got acquired by Breville.

According to Fetterman, the company has been in discussions with potential acquirers, and while she hasn’t ruled out a potential deal, nothing has evolved to the point where she could move in that direction yet.

So for now, at least, Nomiku is no more.

I asked her what that means for existing customers, both for owners of the Nomiku sous vide circulator and of the meal delivery service, and this is what she told me: For food delivery, anyone who has been charged will receive their food. For any new orders in the last week or so that haven’t been charged, those will be cancelled. For those with a circulator, they will continue to support those still under a year warranty “as long as supplies last.”

Fetterman said that those with the circulator can reach out via email to info@nomiku.com for updates and continuing support.

For me, the news of Nomiku’s demise is a real bummer. Fetterman has been one of the industry’s most outspoken and innovative entrepreneurs, and her absence will leave the space just a little less interesting.

For her part, Fetterman is still sorting through how to feel as she shuts down the company she spent the last ten years building with her husband, Abe Fetterman.

“I started the company when I was 22,” said Fetterman. “I’m 32 now. I’ve grown up as an entrepreneur and a person, publicly. It is very easy to feel a huge of sense of defeat failing publicly as well. That’s par for the course.”

When Fetterman started her company a decade ago, she was among the first to see the opportunity in bringing sous vide to the masses. Over time, others entered the market and the competition wasn’t always friendly. At times, the elbow throwing between Nomiku and competitors even spilled into public view.

“When I started Nomiku, I always knew the tremendous risk it held to invent a category and then fight against really cut throat competitors,” said Fetterman.

Despite the outcome, Fetterman said she’s still very proud of what she and the team have accomplished, including centering the company’s manufacturing in the US.

“There were things I couldn’t control, but I feel proud of the way we have run the company, that we always tried to do the right thing and not cut corners. I feel proud that we moved the manufacturing back to the States.”

Fetterman doesn’t know what’s next for her and is planning to take a little time off after ten years of running a startup. When I asked her if she plans on starting another company in the food space, she said it’s too soon to say, but she did think there is still lots of opportunity for innovation in cooking.

“People will always need a simple solution for dinner. That is obvious to everybody. I think the next great food tech company is out there, even in the next year, but it’s hard to say what that looks like right now.”

The Mellow Duo, a Sous Vide Appliance With Built-in Refrigeration, Surpasses Kickstarter Target

That Mellow Duo has had a good week.

The dual chamber sous vide appliance with integrated cooling started a Kickstarter campaign on Monday and by Tuesday had surpassed its $30 thousand crowdfunding its target. Three days later, the campaign stands at $67 thousand.

“We are super excited with how the campaign has started,” Zalmi Duchman, company CEO, told me via a Linkedin message. “While I knew we would hit our goal early I didn’t think we would surpass it within the first 24 hours.”

Interestingly, the second generation Mellow is on roughly the same pace as the original Mellow, which crowdfunded through a self-hosted campaign on its site in 2014. As some readers know, that first generation product was ultimately late to market and had something of a rocky start. With the Mellow Duo, the company’s new ownership is hoping to turn the page.

With the exception of a radically different form factor and modern features like built-in refrigeration and connectivity, the Duo is something of a callback to the early days of the sous vide market, where water baths like the Sous Video Supreme were the only game in town. While most consumers nowadays go with svelte circulators that spend most of the time in the kitchen drawer, the Duo almost demands real estate on the kitchen counter, which may be just fine for a subset of sous vide diehards who want to cook every day with precision heating.

For Duchman’s part, he’s just hopeful the campaign’s early momentum will continue.

“Having almost 300 backers already shows the excitement around the new product but my real goal is at least 1000 backers and I’m confident we will hit that before the campaign ends”

Anova Launches New Smaller, Lighter Sous Vide Precision Cooker

Anova announced a new version of its Precision Cooker sous vide wand via a corporate blog post yesterday.

The new version of the Anova Precision Cooker is two inches smaller and 20 percent lighter than the older version and unlike the Anova Nano, it has wifi connectivity. The company also claims the device is more durable and provides better connectivity than the previous version. The new sous vide wand is available for pre-order right now for $129 (which the company says is $70 less than the retail price).

The first Anova Precision Cooker launched in 2014 and was among the initial wave of devices, along with ChefSteps and Nomiku, that kicked off a sous vide mini-boom. With the advent of a circulating wand that could attach to any pot of water and be controlled via mobile app, a full-fledged countertop sous vide machine was no longer necessary.

But this year that mini-boom has given way to turmoil. ChefSteps went through layoffs and product cancellations before finally being acquired by Breville. A spat between Nomiku CEO founder Lisa Fetterman and Anova CEO Steve Svajian over idea theft went public earlier this summer.

But Anova, which was bought by Electolux, carries on. In addition to new hardware, Anova also recently released a new version of its mobile app, which controls its devices.

With the introduction of the new Precision Cooker, Anova is no longer making the older version of its device. The blog post said that the company would still support it, but it was putting remaining inventory on a fire sale. But when we went to check out the price, the devices were already sold out.

Cinder Launches Chef Partnership Program

Cinder, the precision countertop grill that was saved from extinction by Desora, announced today that it is launching a new Chef Partnership Program, which will make Cinder-specific recipes available through the Cinder mobile app and website.

The Chef Partnership Program will feature recipes developed by Michelin starred chef John Critchley, who is Head Chef of Culinary Innovation at Chew (which Spoon readers might remember as the company that was going to — but then decided not to — take over the shuttered PilotWorks location in Brooklyn).

The Cinder is a unique device in the connected kitchen world that combines sous vide and conductive cooking. It’s a big machine that looks like a George Foreman grill on steroids that cooks food with precise temperate control. But unlike a typical sous vide circulator, the Cinder can also ratchet up the hot plates to sear as well.

According to the press announcement, the recipes “are meant to highlight Cinder’s unique Sous-Vide and grilling capabilities.” Critchley’s recipes have been designed exclusively for the Cinder grill, and users can expect a new recipe every week. The company will also be adding recipes from more chefs to the program throughout the year.

Access to these recipes will be free to all existing Cinder customers. Michel Maalouly, Co-Founder and CEO of Desora, told me via email that eventually the “recipes and resources” from the Chef Partnership Program will become a paid subscription service. All existing Cinder customers will be grandfathered into the program free of charge.

As part of today’s announcement, Desora also said that the company has released an all-new Android app for the Cinder that “now guides users through every step of the cooking process, from ingredient selection to food preparation.” An iOS update will arrive in the next few months.

Both Spoon founder Mike Wolf and I have tested the Cinder and found it to cook steaks perfectly. It’s bulky and heavy, and because it’s using precision cooking it’s not a fast way to prepare a protein, but the results are tasty. Now we’ll have to try the new recipes to see how easy they are to prepare.

Breville Acquires ChefSteps, Maker of the Joule Sous Vide

Kitchen appliance giant Breville announced today that it has acquired ChefSteps, maker of the Joule connected sous vide wand. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

From the press release:

Breville’s acquisition of ChefSteps will enhance the long-term R&D capacity that brought the Joule product to market, allowing for continued and sustained focus on innovation, while increasing global commercial scale to further maximize the value of the ChefSteps content platform and portfolio of fast-growing connected Joule products. It also forms a natural consumer-focused extension to Breville’s existing commercial sous vide range of products following its acquisition of the PolyScience Culinary division in 2014.

The privately funded ChefSteps started out as an online culinary community and recipe site and went on to become an early pioneer in the sous vide space through the company’s well regarded (and well designed) Joule.

In April, ChefSteps laid off a significant number of its staff. At that time Spoon Founder Mike Wolf wrote:

There are still not many details beyond what’s been reported, so it’s hard to tell exactly what happened and why ChefSteps was forced to downsize. I can only speculate that sales of the Joule (or their related Joule Ready sauce business) wasn’t substantial enough to fund the ongoing business and that they had exhausted funding provided by early backer Gabe Newell.

Newell, a billionaire who made his money in the video game business as the founder of Valve, had given the company a low-interest loan early on. While Young had described Newell’s support as giving the company the financial flexibility to push in new directions (such as with the Joule), it looks like Newell’s generosity has its limits. It’s unclear if ChefSteps had sought funding from other outside sources (or is still seeking funding).

Less than a week after that ChefSteps shut down its premium content offerings and shuttered its relatively nascent sauce-selling business. At that time, ChefSteps CEO, Chris Young posted to Facebook:

As you’ve heard, there have been some changes at ChefSteps in the past week. Our funding situation unexpectedly changed (emphasis mine) and we’ve had to make the incredibly difficult decision to let a significant fraction of our amazing team go. This truly sucks.

Following these closings, Mike Wolf followed up with another story, writing:

While it was always assumed ChefSteps was in a good financial place because of the backing of billionaire Gabe Newell, it’s apparent now that wasn’t necessarily the case. Most interestingly, it looks like the sudden change in the health of the company’s balance sheet was not anticipated, making me wonder if either Newell called in the loan or had changed his position somehow and didn’t want to extend more credit to the company. There’s also the possibility ChefSteps had been seeking other financing and had something fall through at the last minute.

ChefSteps will be integrated into the Breville Group business and will continue to operate out of its Seattle office.

The acquisition by Breville is good news for Joule fans everywhere, but given the tight times the company was in and the fact that terms were not disclosed, it probably wasn’t the exit the company was hoping for when they started.

We will continue to follow this story as it develops.

First Chop Pivots from Consumer Sous Vide to Prepared B2B Meal Service

Famed Silicon Valley entrepreneur and advisor Steve Blank has said that “a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” That’s why it’s not uncommon for a startup to pivot during its lifetime as it searches for that repeatable model.

So I wasn’t too surprised when I saw that First Chop, a company that started out selling protein-only consumer meal kits complete with their own sous vide circulators, had pivoted and moved towards selling more complete meals to businesses.

I originally covered First Chop back in November of 2017, writing:

FirstChop is looking to stand out in the competitive meal shipping space in few ways. First, it only does meal proteins: chicken, beef, lamb, etc.; no vegetables, no starches. Second, all those proteins are cooked, and then frozen and vacuum sealed, so you can eat them on your own schedule. And third, the Bay Area-based company is basically giving away a sous-vide wand so all customers have to do is put the frozen bag of meat in hot water to prepare it.

Turns out that “all customers have to do” was actually big ask.

I talked with First Chop Co-Founder and CEO, Ajay Narain, today who said that there were two big issues with his company’s original plan. First was that customer acquisition costs got too high and it unsustainable to go directly after consumers. The other big issue was that the sous vide element proved too much for most customers.

“Sous vide was too steep a hill to climb.” Narain said, “[Customers] had to understand the benefit of sous vide and buy into the premise that the food would come out better and pay a bunch of money to try it out.”

Spoiler: they didn’t.

It wasn’t just educating them on sous vide, Narain said. Even if they used the wand perfectly, customers still had issues with the cooking method. Sous vide cooking takes a long time. You have to heat the water to the right temperature, then slowly heat the protein, which, in the case of First Chop’s food, took even longer because it was frozen. All in, customers were looking at more than an hour before they got to eat a First Chop meal.

Plus, Narain said, while sous vide heats food to a precise temperature, that temperature often isn’t as hot as people want when they eat. “The food comes out the perfect temperature, but for most people it’s not hot enough. It’s 140 degrees, but you’re used to piping hot food in your mouth.”

Facing all these challenges, Narain and co. decided to pivot this past January, shifting from a direct-to-consumer model towards a B2B model. With the revamped meal service, the sous vide wand is out and carbohydrates are in. First Chop now still fully prepares, cooks and assembles chef-prepared meals, but they are now in two pouches that you re-heat in the microwave. Instead of an hour, meals take two minutes.

First Chop is now aiming to sell to food service companies like Aramark, but before they can do that, the company first has to show some ground level interest. As such, First Chop piloted its new service with an unnamed Bay Area company earlier this year. The company is preparing for a more full launch in the next few months, but Narain said that during its first business trial, First Chop sold as much product than it sold in its first year as a consumer play.

While that kind of initial return is definitely good news for the privately funded First Chop, the company is venturing into a crowded market. There are lots of companies looking to sell into offices through various innovative means. Byte Technologies licenses out smart fridges. Markov pairs its high-tech microwave with a meal kit solution. And the just-launched-in-the-U.S. Genie is a one-touch machine that cooks and stirs freeze-dried meals in a cup. Not to mention all of the office catering startups.

With its pivot complete, now we’ll have to see if First Chop’s pivot has paid off and whether it’s found its repeatable, scalable business model.

Newly Downsized ChefSteps Dropping Sauce and Paid Content Businesses

Last week, news broke that ChefSteps had laid off a significant percentage of its staff. At the time,  it was unclear what the future held for the company other than an assurance from company CEO Chris Young that the Seattle startup and its flagship hardware product, the Joule sous vide appliance, would live on.

Now, thanks to a Facebook post from Young, we have a clearer picture of what a downsized ChefSteps will look like. Young’s note, which he wrote to the Cooking With Joule Facebook group, reiterated that ChefSteps and the Joule would live to see another day.

However, as I speculated last week, it looks like the company is getting out of the sauce business.

From the post:

I appreciate your understanding that in the coming days our focus will be on supporting our affected friends and that we may be a bit slower to respond than usual.

This also means that we will be discontinuing certain lines of business, including Joule Ready and any additional content being added to ChefSteps Premium.

I liked the Joule Ready sauce concept, even if the pricing for sauces ($4-$7 depending on the sauce) was a little high. Still, the idea of creating an easy sous vide meal without having to worry about getting the necessary ingredients to make a sauce like Thai curry or or tikka masala made life a little easier, even if it meant supplying your own protein.

From the looks of it, not enough people agreed with me. I have a feeling if the company was turning a profit or saw strong growth ahead for Joule Ready, they wouldn’t have killed the business after only half a year.

The company is also axing its paid content business. ChefSteps Premium, which offered video-centric cooking classes, in-depth how-to’s and exclusive recipes, cost subscribers a one-time fee of $39.  While it’s not clear how successful Premium was, the business clearly either didn’t have enough subscribers to justify the investment of putting new content behind the paywall or the company simply couldn’t afford to keep the team on. I do think the company made a strategic error early on by choosing to not ask its ChefSteps Premium customers to renew access annually (it was a pay-once, permanent subscription product), which negated any revenue growth opportunities as the company grew its subscriber base.

Finally, while Young didn’t go into too many details about how they ran into a cash crunch, he did drop one interesting clue:

As you’ve heard, there have been some changes at ChefSteps in the past week. Our funding situation unexpectedly changed (emphasis mine) and we’ve had to make the incredibly difficult decision to let a significant fraction of our amazing team go. This truly sucks.

While it was always assumed ChefSteps was in a good financial place because of the backing of billionaire Gabe Newell, it’s apparent now that wasn’t necessarily the case. Most interestingly, it looks like the sudden change in the health of the company’s balance sheet was not anticipated, making me wonder if either Newell called in the loan or had changed his position somehow and didn’t want to extend more credit to the company. There’s also the possibility ChefSteps had been seeking other financing and had something fall through at the last minute.

Either way, it looks like the company’s runway was suddenly shortened, which meant the startup no longer had the luxury of experimenting in new lines of business such as food delivery and premium content.

I also wonder if this means ChefSteps will permanently shelve its ongoing development of other hardware products. While the company never disclosed publicly what their next product would be, they’d been signaling for some time that new products were on the horizon.

With last week’s news, chances are any new products (one of which was speculated to be a steam oven) likely won’t see the light of day anytime soon.

Welcome to the Era of Cooking Convergence (aka Why Sous Vide is Going the Way of DVR)

It may be hard to remember in a world with Hulu, Netflix, and Apple TV  Apple TV+, but back in the early 2000s one of the coolest new technologies was this thing called the digital video recorder (DVR).

Better known by the brand name TiVo (“Hey, did you TiVo Sopranos last night?”), these “magic” boxes completely changed how we watch TV. Instead of being at the mercy of some broadcast or cable network’s schedule, you could watch a show when it was convenient for you, pause it to go to the bathroom or rewind to see an amazing scene over again.

While the cable and satellite TV companies initially resisted DVR technology, they eventually realized this revolutionary technology wasn’t going away, and today practically everyone with pay TV has show recording built into their set-top box. In other words, what started as an amazing new product category – the DVR – eventually just became another feature of a more established product category (the pay-TV set-top box).

Integrating what was once a standalone product into a multi-feature device is called digital convergence, and it’s long been common in the world of technology. Now, as food and cooking become more digital, we’ll likely see a lot more of it in our kitchens.

Take sous vide, a cooking technology with many similarities to the DVR circa 2004:

  • Once people try it, they have a hard time going back to a world without it
  • For consumers, it’s early on in the technology’s adoption cycle.
  • Most consumers who do it use specialized equipment (sous vide immersion circulators).

Perhaps most importantly, it’s something that could easily become a feature on a more general purpose appliance. In fact, it already is: The new Thermomix TM6 has sous vide as a feature, and new Instant Pot-like multicookers are feature-izing sous vide with a sous vide button, making it one of the 10 or 12 functions on a multifunction device. And Electrolux, which has offered sous vide in their high-end combi-ovens for a few years, introduced a smart oven with integrated sous vide last year.

Of course, all this begs the question: will standalone sous vide immersion circulators eventually go away? Probably. It may take a while, but there’s a high chance that a decade from now most people will sous vide using a countertop multicooker or built-in oven rather than a standalone circulator.

But this trend is not just about sous vide; slow-motion digital convergence has been quietly underway for the past few years in the kitchen. It’s what brought us the reinvention of the pressure cooker in the Instant Pot, new multifunction appliances like those announced by Whirlpool at CES and even some new crazy cooking robots. It’s also why beer brewing appliances are starting to make coffee and smart ovens can add new features in software like a routine for cooking plant-based meat.

So does digital cooking convergence mean everything in the kitchen will eventually become a Swiss Army knife with 10 built-in features? No. Tools are still tools, and there’s great staying power for simplicity. A great chef’s knife will always be a great chef’s knife.

But those for products or features that require specialized equipment today that could easily be integrated into another appliance, there’s a good chance it will in the long term. And like the DVR, it’s that kind of integration that eventually brings new features to a wider audience and give them permanent staying power.

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.

With Joule Ready, ChefSteps Establishes Sous Vide Food Delivery Business

This week Mike and I got invited to the ChefSteps headquarters for that most elusive meal: a free lunch. What we got was free lunches, plural, plus a sneak peek at the newest product from ChefSteps. No, it’s not a new update on the Joule, their sous vide machine. It’s much saucier.

Joule Ready is a line of sous vide-ready bags pre-filled with sauces in flavors like Thai Green Curry, Salsa Chamoy and Roasted Red Pepper Walnut Muhammara. Here’s how it works:

You can scan the code on the Joule Ready packaging through the ChefSteps app, which will give you the option to select your protein: chicken, fish, tofu, etc. Once you make your choice and add your meat (or veg) to the Joule Ready bag, the app will automatically start your Joule and instruct you on how to cook the rest of the dish, which may include pan-searing or grilling to finish. (Joule Ready can be used with other sous vide appliances, though obviously the app won’t be able to start and stop cook-time in the same way.) Each sauce also comes with one featured recipe — basically a complete meal of protein + side + garnish — which you can access by scanning the Joule Ready code in the ChefSteps app.

Joule ready meals

Joule Ready has been in beta since the beginning of 2018, and will launch with 8,000 ChefSteps community members later this month. After that, they’ll aim to hit a 15% week over week growth rate.

The bags are all shelf stable without refrigeration for one year, and each one feeds 2 – 4 people. A key appeal of the Joule Ready packs is their variety of flavors — no cooking ennui here. ChefSteps CEO Chris Young told us that they’ll offer 12 initial Joule Ready flavors at launch, and already have 12 more queued up and ready to go. Options will change weekly: sauces that perform well will stay, while those that don’t, go.

ChefSteps hopes that Joule Ready’s constantly rotating lineup of sauce flavors will push consumers to use their Joule more frequently, and with less forethought. “Customers would get into a rut,” explained Young. They would master sous vide-ing steaks or pork chops, but they would get bored of the same preparation every time. The premade sauces also help save time and energy, so home cooks don’t have to do anything more than plop in some protein and make a side of rice. “We want to help people actually cook on a busy Wednesday night,” he said.

Joule Ready featured recipe with Salsa Chamoy.

For ChefSteps, the beauty of this undertaking — as well as their decision to bring everything but printing and laminating the sous vide bags in-house — is its agility. Young told us that they could produce a new sauce within 3 – 5 weeks. That means they can easily capitalize off of new trends on cooking sites or social media, upcoming holidays, as well as feedback from their consumers.

There are three reasons ChefSteps can do this so quickly. The first is size: by making, say, 500 bags of Truffle Jus Gras instead of 500,000, which are the type of numbers in which Big Food has to deal with, the company can be flexible and take risks with their sauces. It also means they can make holiday or limited-time Joule Ready bags without being stuck with a ton of leftover inventory.

The second reason is their manufacturing practice: namely, that it’s almost all in-house. Everything but printing and laminating the sous vide bags is done by ChefSteps, from recipe testing to production to packaging design. The company ultimately built their own facility in order to build a filling machine that would work at their comparatively low volume. That gives the ability to pivot and develop new sauces super-quickly, and have complete control from end-to-end.

Lastly, there’s ChefSteps’ not-so-secret weapon: its data. Whenever any of its community cook with a Joule Ready bag, the company registers it and can ask them through the app how their experience went. ChefSteps can then leverage all this data to see how their users are liking each sauce, and make adjustments accordingly. “We’re 100% connected to our customers,” said Young.

Though they’re still testing prices, Young said that the Joule Ready bags wouldn’t have across-the-board pricing. For example, a truffle one might be cost in the double-digits, while most other bags would set you back around $6.95. If you buy a four-pack, the price would go down to around $4.95, and the company will eventually add a Subscribe & Save feature.

Young said that Joule Ready would be in retail stores by 2019. However, he was very clear that retail is more of a customer acquisition channel than the end goal — their focus will be on direct sales through the ChefSteps site. Which makes sense: the company can ship sauces cheaply, since the pack flat and don’t require ice or other refrigeration. That gives them a big advantage over direct-ship full and pre-cooked meals.

ChefSteps has been working to diversify into food sales since 2014. Last year the company beta-tested a new line of business selling locally raised meat and fish to Joule users (a move not that different from other Seattle food tech startup Crowd Cow). A few months later, also dabbled with frozen pre-cooked meals and teamed up with PostMates to enable delivery.

While neither of those products were rolled out beyond their initial beta test phase, Young said the company learned a lot from both efforts which they incorporated when creating the Joule Ready lineup. One obvious lesson was that by focusing on long-shelf life sauces where the consumer adds their own protein, the company is able to sidestep all the logistical expense and complications that go along with shipping meat across the country.

ChefSteps is not the only smart kitchen company getting into the food business. Tovala made food delivery a core part of their offering, paired with their countertop smart cooking device, and First Chop ships frozen proteins in various sauces pre-packed in sous vide bags. Sous vide pioneer Nomiku has also expanded pretty aggressively into food delivery.

Michael Wolf wrote about this phenomenon for the Spoon: Eventually, Fetterman decided to recreate the entire experience for her consumers,  one which included not only a sous vide circulator, but the food itself. She had decided that Nomiku would make the act of creating a meal easier by offering pre-packaged, pre-portioned, and pre-cooked sous vide meals. All the consumer would need to do is scan the RFID tag on each component of a meal – usually a main course and a couple of sides — and drop them into the water. In thirty minutes, food is ready to eat.

Neither Nomiku nor ChefSteps is immune to the challenges of growing an audience for a smart kitchen “luxury” gadget. According to Young, there are three main challenges that face widespread consumer acceptance of sous vide. The first, price, is already being solved with the $99 sous vide wand. The second, convenience, is solved by the Joule Ready sauces. The third, time, has thus been elusive — but Young hinted that it could be solvable with AI.

With a glint in his eye, he said that ChefSteps would be unveiling tech by the end of the year that would enable Joule Ready meals to cook in 30 minutes, making them competitive with Nomiku’s pre-cooked meals — only customizable. “These sauces are meant to help first-time sous vide users,” said Young.

Soon, we’ll put it to the test. Keep an eye out for later this week, when a sous vide virgin (me!) tries her hand at making a Joule Ready meal for the very first time, with her very first sous vide wand. Will it be a tasty success? Tune in to find out.

If you want to hear ChefSteps CEO Chris Young talk about why the company created Joule Ready, make sure to come to the Smart Kitchen Summit where he’ll be discussing new business models in the era of the connected kitchen. 

Whirlpool Patents Induction-Powered Sous Vide Cooking Appliance

Whirlpool has been awarded a patent for a new sous vide appliance that utilizes an induction system to both heat and power a cooking vessel with an internal water circulator. The system described in the patent also has Wi-Fi and a microcontroller to control the cook.

While the description of the system is very detailed (you can read it in all its glory here), below is a brief summary of how it works:

The system includes an induction heating surface that both heats water as well as powers an internal circulator within the vessel. The larger vessel, which sits atop the induction surface, has an internal vessel within it. There is a gap in between the two vessels where water circulates and is heated. The heating system is powered by a magnetic coupling  of two plates.  The internal stirring plate rotates and has heated blades on it, which help circulate and heat the water.

You can see a diagram of the blade-system below:

An internal plate with blades circulates and heats water within the vessel gap

The whole system, which is controlled through a user interface on the induction hob/surface, has a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth temperature probe that sends water temperature information back to the induction surface. The system can also be controlled via Wi-Fi and an embedded microcontroller.

With this patent, it looks like Whirlpool has created an interesting induction-based sous vide system that is differentiated from the sous vide circulators from the likes of Anova and Nomiku and the water bath systems that started appearing over a dozen years ago.

As with all patents, there’s no guarantee that Whirlpool will actually productize their innovation. The company filed the patent in late 2015 and it doesn’t appear at this point that the company has brought the system to market. Personally, I think an induction cooktop with a turnkey sous vide cooking vessel is an intriguing new product, so I’ll be keeping an eye out to see what the appliance giant does with this patent.

How will sous vide fit into into the kitchen of the future? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit to find out.