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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Can Augmented Reality Help You Order Food In Another Country?

Food and travel often go hand in hand as one of the best things about visiting new places is sampling the local cuisine. But when you’re abroad and unfamiliar with the native language, you might have trouble ordering your dinner and feeling confident in what you’re going to get.

Enter the new augmented reality app, Waygo. The concept is simple – Waygo doesn’t require an internet connection or anything fancy, just point your phone at a restaurant’s menu and the app will translate it for you into English. And it’s not just a translation app – as Tech.co points out, it actually shows you pictures of the dish you’re translating, in case the words on the page don’t give you a good enough idea of what you’re about to order.

The app is currently aimed at people traveling to countries where Japanese, Korean and Chinese is spoken but plans on expanding in the near future. According to the company blog, the app is powered by proprietary algorithms that create simple phrases from translations. When it is compared to a top commercial translation software, Waygo was found to be 5x faster and twice as accurate. With 4,000 images and 14,000 curated images, the app is likely to help most folks traveling in Asian countries pick the right thing off the menu.

Read more about Waygo at Tech.Co.

 

Food Delivery Startup Serves As A Platform For Social Change

Noobtsaa Philip Vang’s mother came to the U.S. from Laos after the Vietnam War. She worked multiple jobs to support their family and her economic struggles as an immigrant combined with her delicious home-cooked meals served as the inspiration for Foodhini.

Foodhini is one of the newest startups aimed at a crowded food delivery market, a 70 billion dollar industry with stiff competition from big names like GrubHub and Postmates. But Foodhini’s model is different – they call themselves a “for profit social enterprise” with a mission to build sustainable incomes for immigrants in the U.S. through a food commerce platform. But beyond the social good business model, the key differentiator for Foodhini lies in their delivery of local, ethnic cuisine crafted and served by authentic immigrant chefs.

The demand for food delivery is there – either in the form of hot meals ready to eat from nearby restaurants or a collection of ingredients with a recipe, designed to take the guesswork out of dinner prep. Foodhini plans to bring hot meals to your door, but with a twist. Instead of nearby restaurants cooking your dinner, it’s a local immigrant chef preparing authentic cuisine from their culture. Through a shared revenue model with each chef, Foodhini provides the operational infrastructure (a commercial kitchen and a commerce platform) and assumes the bulk of the risk while the chefs are tasked with preparing home-cooked ethnic cuisine that can be served for 2 or 4 people and ordered through the Foodhini online platform.

Vang, who previously led engineering projects for 3M, received his MBA in social enterprise from Georgetown. Having grown up as a first-generation Hmong-American, he recognized the challenges that immigrant communities faced and at the same time felt an appreciation for the unique foods and dishes served in those cultures. Vang used this background to create a platform to empower immigrant chefs and founded Foodhini in the summer of 2015.

“I believe Foodhini is a powerful force for change because we provide a scalable way to impact people’s lives,” said Vang. “Foodhini allows independent immigrant home chefs to leverage their existing culinary skill to create ready to eat authentic home cooked ethnic cuisines direct to consumer using on-demand delivery.”

Foodhini is currently part of the Union Kitchen food incubator based in Washington, D.C. and says that their market research shows around 41 million consumers, concentrated in urban regions, that have a desire for ethnic foods currently not available on restaurant menus. Currently, the startup’s website only shows one chef serving a menu of Laos cuisine, but the company plans to offer 10-12 different cuisines per day with between 1 to 2 meals per chef. The cost of each meal, between $11 and $14, is comparable to average takeout costs. According to Vang, for each meal sold on the platform, the home chef and Foodhini will each receive two and a half dollars of the revenue after costs. Their goal is to deliver 350 meals a day by 2017.

With a crowded food delivery field and the majority of food tech investment continuing to focus on delivery and food commerce startups, Foodhini will have to work hard to establish itself using a unique model. Focusing on social enterprise and the core mission to help immigrant communities might enable them to get some attention. But their ability to scale the platform to urban areas around the country will rely on the strength of consumer demand for locally produced ethnic food, delivered to their doorstep.

ChefSteps Adds “Conversational Cooking” To Sous Vide With Echo Skill

We’ve talked a lot on The Spoon about the power of the Amazon Echo in the kitchen – as a virtual sous chef, a custom bartender, a unique component of guided cooking and just a helpful assistant (Alexa, set a timer for 5 minutes!) And the power of the Echo as a frictionless controller in the smart home is evident in the myriad of skills announced from virtually every top smart home manufacturer – lights, thermostats, even locks now have limited voice control functionality with Alexa.

So it’s no surprise when one of the big players in the smart kitchen space announces plans to deepen its Echo integration, beefing up Alexa’s power as an AI assistant. ChefSteps, the Seattle-based culinary startup discussed its Amazon Echo skill for Joule, a sous vide cooker and the company’s inaugural hardware device last week at the GeekWire conference.

We covered Joule’s launch extensively, detailing ChefSteps move to give back money to backers when initial demand far exceeded their expectations and production costs were lower than expected. As the emerging sous vide trend quickly grew thanks in no small part to Joule competitors like Anova and Sansaire, Joules began shipping to eager backers and the company began talking about voice control. In an initial post about Amazon Echo, ChefSteps explained,

“ask any chef who’s ever barked “Fire!” at her line while a packed house awaited their entrees: sometimes, a cook’s best tool is her voice. That’s where Alexa comes in.”

Initially, the ChefSteps Joule skill for Echo is limited to basic, albeit helpful, functionality. Users could ask Alexa to check the status of the temperature, or set the temperature in preparation for a particular recipe, or stop the device. But ChefSteps’ co-founder Chef Chris Young discussed plans to go much further with Echo, using a deeper well of knowledge to create a true AI helper for your sous vide cooking.

Dubbed “conversational cooking,” the new Echo skill will enable home chefs to get even more help, asking Alexa to “start cooking my steak medium rare.” Joule users can give Alexa basic information, like the size of the meat and the level of doneness they’d like and Alexa will set Joule to the correct temp and cook it for the amount of time needed to accommodate. Perhaps most interestingly, Alexa will act as a customized cookbook of sorts, remembering the instructions from past recipes and storing them for future use.

In the future, Young and his team expect even cooler Alexa features like contextual recipe and cooking instructions based on time constraints and in-app food purchasing. In other words – they are just getting started.

Cluck Is The Smart Kitchen Timer That Keeps Track Of Cooking So You Don’t Have To

When Arne Gaenz asked his wife the number one problem that she would like solved in the kitchen she responded – make boiling eggs easier. So he and partner Doon Malekzadeh got to work making prototypes of products that could help boil eggs in a way that wouldn’t under or over cook them and take the guesswork out for the consumer. The end result? Cluck – a smart kitchen timer that makes boiling eggs – and a lot of other foods – much more precise and simple.

cluck - the smart kitchen timer

Launched today on Indiegogo, Cluck by Seattle-based startup Orbsense Technologies is a new take on the kitchen timer, a staple in the kitchen that’s only been disrupted perhaps in recent years by the Amazon Echo and its addition of a voice-controllable timer. But the problem with Echo – and any kitchen timer, smart or dumb, is that it doesn’t exactly assist you with your cooking but rather delivers information. When prompted, it well tell you your food is done – or, the time you think it will take to cook your food has passed.

What it doesn’t account for is the actual cooking environment. Potato salad recipes (like the one Arne’s wife was trying to perfect) might give an estimated time to boil a dozen eggs, but it doesn’t know the precise settings of any one user’s stove and doesn’t have any clue how not to overcook the eggs. That’s where Cluck comes in. Designed with a nod to the product’s origins, the device resembles an egg with little feet and it can be dropped into any pot of water to monitor the cooking using its embedded temperature sensor. Connected to a smartphone app, Cluck gives the user a selection of foods it’s able to monitor and will send alerts when action is needed.

OrbSense founders Gaenz and Malekzadehsaid said their focus on the kitchen helped them hone their product idea to one that focused on a “micro-moment of utility.” With over 30 years of product design and development at big tech names like Samsung, Microsoft and T-Mobile, the pair sought to achieve the right combination of simplicity and usefulness – something they say the larger smart home industry has struggled with in the journey to mainstream adoption.

“If your product is too complex or too hard to use, the value of the product will be overshadowed by its complexity and adoption will be a challenge.”

Malekzadeh told The Spoon that they believed their primary consumers will be tech-savvy and willing to use tech in the kitchen, but that the problem of distracted cooking that they are working to solve has broader appeal. “I don’t know how often I’ve talked to people about my forgotten pot of boiling water for pasta story and seen their eyes light up and hear them exclaim, ‘That happened to me just yesterday!'”

The focus on solving one problem and doing it well is a consistent theme in kitchen tech as we see new and legacy companies trying to create better ways to cook, shop and eat food at home and on the go. But as we saw at Smart Kitchen Summit 2016 last week, some of those products may have mainstream appeal but come with high initial offering prices, above what mainstream consumers typically spend. Malekzadeh is quick to point out that price and its retrofit nature is another differentiator for Cluck. “Since Cluck works with the pots and pans you already own, we can develop a product which provides basic “cookware connectivity” to address the needs of busy — and sometimes distracted — home cooks.”

Cluck is now available for pre-order on Indiegogo – early bird backers can nab the smart kitchen timer for $25, $10 below the planned retail price.

Disclosure: The Spoon founder Michael Wolf is an advisor to Cluck, mainly because the Cluck guys live in the same town and their kids go to the same school as Mike’s kids. Plus Arne and Doon promised to give Mike a “Mother Clucker” t-shirt.

2016 Smart Kitchen Summit: Day One Recap

A few people have mentioned to us how crazy it was to launch a brand new publication the same week we were hosting the second annual Smart Kitchen Summit. They were not wrong – but lucky for us, the reception for both has been great.

This year we added a pre-conference day to the Summit along with an opening reception and showcase of the newest startups in the space. The pre-conference workshops were a big hit – speakers like renowned kitchen designer talked the future of kitchen design and what it means to create an emotionally smart kitchen. Folks from Char-Broil, Dado Labs and Behmor talked about the work of building a product for the connected kitchen and Williams-Sonoma, b8ta and Anova dove into the challenges of taking products to retail.

pre-conf workshop

The workshop sessions ended with insight from the VC world about what’s compelling for funders and what they’re seeing in the smart kitchen / food tech startup space. Mark Valdez from Playground Global commented on the necessary elements for a winning product, saying:

“Change user behavior or adapt user behavior – these are the elements of category defining products.”

vc-panel

 

Startup Showcase

Welcoming the newest companies creating connected and smart food and kitchen devices, the SKS opening reception featured a Startup Showcase with fifteen finalists showing off their products. We saw Alchema, a unique home-brew cider maker alongside SproutsIO, a smart micro garden that allows a user to grow fresh produce conveniently right at home. From a cocktail maker, a temperature sensor and timer, a 3D food printer and a mobile gluten sensor, attendees were able to see some of the most exciting new products  in the kitchen ecosystem across cooking, beverages, health & wellness and other areas.

startup showcase

mikewolfopeningreception

Day Two of Smart Kitchen Summit starts today, with a full day of panels, workshops, keynotes and of course the Smart Kitchen Summit sponsor demo area where attendees will get to sample fresh juice from the folks at Juicero, enjoy yummy food from Hestan Cue’s smart cooking system and finish the day with PicoBrew’s best home brewed beer.

Stay tuned for the recap of Day Two!

Wanted: Robot Delivery Drivers

You’re sitting at home, enjoying a quiet Saturday when you hear a faint buzzing outside. You peer out the window to investigate, and the sound becomes more distinct, like the hum of a small motor. Suddenly, you hear a vague thud. You open the door and a box appears – your delivery has arrived. But there’s no delivery truck outside and no sign of any human being around. Chances are, you’ve just experienced your first robot delivery. Welcome to the future.

Robotic delivery – whether by land or air –  may be replacing your friendly UPS delivery driver, but it’s also creating its own unique set up jobs in the new economy. With big names like Amazon investing huge dollars and efforts into programs like Prime Air, the job of delivery truck driver might be cool again. Instead of driving around a large truck and walking door to door, robot delivery operators of the future will be sitting in a comfortable chair, miles away from the homes they’re delivering to, with a remote control and a set of complex maps and coordinates, creating routes for their robotic drivers – ground or air –  to complete.

Startups like Starship, an Estonia-based drone delivery organization created by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, were recently hiring for drone delivery drivers. From the job description, Starship was looking for people to oversee a fleet of largely autonomous robots, create navigation paths and troubleshoot when the drone runs into an issue only human intelligence can solve.

“We are creating 99% autonomous robots, which means we outsource the difficult decisions to humans who are able to solve different social and traffic situations.”

Starship has some unique features that set it apart from other robotic delivery methods such as drones. For one, the unmanned vehicles are said to produce zero carbon emissions, and operate on the ground only, delivering in five to thirty minutes from any given local store. Starship says this is ten to fifteen times faster than alternative last-mile delivery methods like unmanned air crafts. And the company touts its combination of advanced driving software with actual humans to ensure that any obstacle or challenge are overcome. From their launch press release, “…navigation and obstacle avoidance software enables the robots to drive autonomously, but they are also overseen by human operators who can step in to ensure safety at all times.”

Starship robots are driven on the ground and sidewalk based – giving the robot operators unique challenges in keeping the bot safe from human interaction while en route. One of the things that Starship doesn’t mention is what happens to these land-bound vehicles if they encounter humans who try to interfere? We all know that one guy whose first reaction to seeing a robot delivery pod is to try to get in its way or mess with it in some manner. So essentially the job of an operator is to make sure the robots don’t mess up – or that some jerk on Essex Street doesn’t kick the bot onto its back like a helpless turtle.

Starship is looking for people who have a keen interest in technology and have the ability to stay alert while staring at a computer screen for hours at a time. Does this unique skillset sound familiar to any one group of humans? Perhaps the drone and robot delivery economy is carving out new career opportunities for video game enthusiasts. Sitting in a darkened room, diligently watching computer screens and mapping out paths and routes in case something goes awry sounds a lot like what gamers do every day in a variety of strategy-based scenarios. According to Statista, the number of active gamers worldwide? A staggering 1.78 million. That’s quite the applicant pool to choose from.

Land-bound robotic delivery is interesting; historically, federal and international regulations have made commercial drone usage challenging due to FAA requirements that companies have an operator with a pilot’s license and keep each drone within line of sight. In the U.S. this made it expensive and challenging to hire operators and use drones for everyday things like grocery delivery. Recent changes have relaxed these rules a bit and made air delivery for drones more possible. As for Starship – they have a unique advantage – their robots don’t need to fly.

The company began just two years ago and have already started testing their 30 beta robots in big markets from London to Seattle. How have they gotten so much done in such little time? According to a NextMarket podcast interview, Heinla said because they’ve focused on “creating basic sidewalk delivery robots” that move at a walking pace and don’t rely on computers to make every single decision, it was easier to create and test sooner. If any automation on the robot traveling at approximately six km/hour fails, its human operator can step in and complete the delivery without incident.

While automation technologies, artificial intelligence and robots may replace jobs in certain sectors – like food service and restaurants along with manufacturing and white collar industries, they’re also bringing with them different kinds of jobs. They might be less focused on brute labor and more on visual, spatial and technological skills – but certainly a trend to watch for those who predict job trends in the future. Meanwhile, Starship proves that robot technology that relies to a degree on human intelligence might have a shot at being first to market and to scale, while opening up a new kind of job in an AI-powered economy.

Meet The Self-Cleaning Keurig For Smoothies

LivBlends was a perfect food startup for Silicon Valley – a no-mess, high tech, healthy snack solution that fit nicely into the cadre of employee perks offered by the area’s companies. A Y Combinator smoothie startup, LivBlends was founded in 2013 as a delivery-based business, selling containers of fresh smoothies to the chefs at popular tech companies like Twitter and Stripe. Some questioned the business model and overall sustainability of fresh smoothie delivery, but LivBlends was quietly working on a much bigger product – at the time, an unnamed device that made smoothies and cleaned itself.

Fast forward to 2016 – meet Replenish. The evolved, renamed company formerly known as LivBlends, Replenish is still a food startup, but instead of delivering smoothies, they’ve made a machine that blends them for you. The Replenish machine is a self-cleaning blender that takes prepackaged fruit and vegetable cups and produces ready-to-drink smoothies. Dubbed the “Keurig for smoothies,” the group is going after the commercial market and inviting businesses to place Replenish machines in their break rooms and cafeterias for free. Then, for a fee, customers can order pods in a variety of flavors and forms, including fruit, coffee, spice and vegetable based. According to TechCrunch, each pod costs between $3.50 and $5.00 depending on what’s in them.

In its early days, Replenish had to prove itself to the market and would set up pop up smoothie giveaways in office buildings. Eventually, the service got so popular, the company moved to subscription models with early clients like Uber. Now, Replenish hosts machines in some of the most popular tech employers in San Francisco and has set its sites on the broader B2B market in the U.S.

How big is the market for fresh, in-office smoothies? “Our first sweet spot is the small, medium size office of 10-100 people. There are about 1.1M offices in the U.S. in that range,” the company wrote in an early blog post. Using those numbers along with average cup revenue and daily penetration, Replenish estimates their market size at $8.2 billion. Beyond medium sized office-based companies, the startup hopes to go after other on-the-go places where the convenience of a smoothie is an easy sell, including gyms, hotels, malls and airports. The ingredients in the pods are healthy – the founders’ mission was to create a better alternative to the traditional office snack – and contain no added sugar and are often organic. The pods themselves are even good for the planet and 100% recyclable.

The creation of the Keurig has spawned all kinds of pod-based beverage companies, including food tech darling Juicero – or, the Keurig for fresh juice. Juicero has raised $70 million in startup funding so far, and unlike Replenish has gone after both the consumer and B2B market with a consumer kitchen model currently on sale. However, in an early blog post, the Replenish founders did add, “The second phase of the company is building a consumer machine that can sit on any kitchen counter.”

Replenish just completed a $3.8 million round of funding and is currently taking pre-orders from companies who want to be early adopters of the self-cleaning smoothie machines on their website.

Food Venture Firm Raises $42 Million To Advance A New Food System

PowerPlant Ventures, a year-old venture firm supporting plant-centric companies that deliver better and more sustainable nutrition announced the closing of a $42 million fund. Aimed at improving the global food system, the fund’s goal is to leverage the power of plants to support the next wave of better-for-you food companies and brands.

The firm was founded in 2015 by Mark Rampolla, founder of ZICO Coconut Water, which was acquired by Coca-Cola in 2013 along with Kevin Boylan and T.K. Pillan, co-founders of the largest vegetarian restaurant chain in the U.S. and Dan Beldy, former Managing Director of Steamboat Ventures, Disney’s VC arm. Powerplant Ventures plans to advance a portfolio of emerging companies across the intersection of food and technology and work with companies that are focused on impacting the global food system with transparency and sustainability.

Our Take: The food business right now is an investor’s dream: a multi-trillion dollar industry in the middle of some major disruptions. From food shortages and unsustainable food production methods to major innovation happening around food science and technology to generational demand for healthier foods to eat and easier and faster ways to eat them – there’s opportunity at every turn. PowerPlant Ventures wants to invest in companies that are tackling several of these core problems using plant-centric solutions.

Why plants? “Plant-based food companies are changing the world by providing better nutrition delivered in more sustainable and ethical ways,” commented Mark Rampolla, Co-Founder of Powerplant Ventures. The firm and its startup fund will look to tap into the demand created by millennials and younger generations for healthier, more transparent food sources and look for companies crafting efficient solutions that could help solve growing global food shortages. The fund’s initial investments include companies in both those categories, including organic online grocer Thrive Market and cold-press juicer startup Juicero. Food delivery might currently be netting the biggest slice of the food tech investment pie, but healthy and sustainable food investment is catching up.