It’s been a quiet summer in the world of kitchen tech, but over the past week, some interesting news has dropped. Here’s a roundup of the stories from this past week:
Suvie Rolls Out Suvie 3.0 Plus With Airfry
Suvie, the company behind the multi-zone kitchen cooking appliance with built-in refrigeration, announced today the launch of its Suvie 3.0 Plus. The 3.0 Plus adds air-frying capabilities to the appliance, powered by the addition of dual convection fans, one in each cooking zone. This means users of the new model can air fry in one zone while using any one of the other 15 cooking modes in the other zone.
According to CEO Robin Liss, the addition of air frying was in part due to feedback from the Suvie community. Liss says they’ve added other new features, including a new ‘ Mix & Match’ mode that allows users to to prepare different meals in each zone simultaneously.
“A lot of people like to have a Chinese takeout night,” Liss told The Spoon. They’ll buy orange chicken and maybe Mongolian beef, and you can cook the orange chicken in the top zone and the Mongolian beef in the bottom zone. Mix and Match mode lets you do that.”
The new Suvie 3.0 Plus will be priced at $429 with a meal subscription plan. The company will also continue to sell the Suvie 3.0 base model, which will remain at $299 with a meal plan. Liss says they hope to ship the new model to customers in late September.
Combustion Adds ‘MeatNet Cloud’ and SafeCook
Combustion, the maker of the Predictive Thermometer, announced this week that they have added two new features to the 8-sensor device: MeatNet Cloud connectivity and SafeCook.
If you’re wondering what the heck MeatNet is, it’s Combustion’s trademarked term for its ad hoc Bluetooth network that connects its thermometer, the Combustion display and the app on a smartphone. With the addition of MeatNet Cloud, Combustion thermometer users can now monitor a cook live and in real-time from anywhere.
To enable MeatNet Cloud, you have to jump through a few set-up hoops. You’ll have to enable a smartphone or table device as a bridge (the Combustion thermometer only has Bluetooth, it needs a Wi-Fi powered device to deliver the cooking data to the cloud), and once your bridge device is connected (and left at home when you leave), users can monitor the state of the cook with another mobile device while they are taking a run to the store to get some BBQ sauce or wood chips for their smoker.
Combustion also announced the addition of SafeCook, which the company says “uses “integrated” or cumulative bacterial destruction to determine food safety. It adds up the bacterial body count at every step in the cooking process.” This means that Combustion has essentially incorporated all the recommended USDA and FDA temperatures into the app for each type of meat needed to ensure that bacteria is effectively killed. Users who turn on the SafeCook feature will be alerted when the food is safe to eat.
Combustion CEO Chris Young often creates elaborate (and fun to watch) videos around specific topics his company is working on, and this mission to kill food bacteria is no exception. You can check out his new video about how to balance the fine line between making sure your food is cooked enough to kill any bacteria and not overly dry.
Nymble Offloads AI to Cloud and Adds New Features as It Inches Toward Manufactuing
Cooking robot startup Nymble sent out an update this week on new features and their plan to start shipping their cooking robot to customers later this month.
According to the update sent by company CEO Raghav Gupta, the company recently enabled the Nymble cooking robot to offload AI compute to the cloud. The company’s AI, which is fairly straightforward machine learning that enables the appliance to optimize cooking and understand specific routines and preferences of users, has up to this point run on a small model embedded in the appliance. Nymble now says that it AI computation can now be run in the cloud on its larger and faster AI model (which it dubs ‘Teacher’). In the case of slow connectivity, Nymble says that AI compute will run locally on the appliance in its scaled-down AI model (dubbed ‘Student’).
In addition to its addition of cloud AI compute, Nymble has also enabled users to find recipes based on dietary preferences and allergen restrictions and to skip instruction steps in a guided recipe (which, according to the company, was a top request among its beta testers).
These updates come as the company nears the ship date for its cooking robot. According to Gupta, the Nymble robot will start mass production later this month.