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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Suvie

Suvie Debuts Second Generation Countertop ‘Cooking Robot’

Suvie, a maker of smart automated cooking appliances for the home, has debuted its second generation appliance, the eponymous Suvie 2.0.

So what’s different about the first and second generation Suvie? A whole bunch.

First things first: Suvie 2 is a heck of a lot smaller. That’s mainly because the second generation appliance has reduced the Suvie from being a four-chamber cooking appliance to a two-chamber machine. This change is made possible because each cooking chamber is now multifunctional, which means instead of having chamber specifically for sauce, protein or veggies, each of the two chambers can broil, steam, sous vide, slow cook as well as roast and bake (these last two cooking modes are new to the Suvie 2).

And just like the first machine, the Suvie 2 has a built in compressor-based refrigerator that chills the food until is is ready to cook. This was one of the draws of the original Suvie — being able to store your food safely in the machine while you were out all day, until it was time to cook it.

While the Suvie 2 has a smaller countertop footprint, the cooking capacity per chamber has actually gone up. According to Liss, cooking pans are 21% larger than in the previous generation.

To help slim down the new appliance, Suvie also removed the “starch’ chamber and created a separate, optional Starch Cooker. The new add-on, which Liss affectionately called “starchie” (but insisted is not the official name), features the same “patented” autodrain capability and can cook rice, pasta, beans and other starchy foods.

The new Suvie will be available for a pre-order price of $399 for the main unit, and $300 for the starch cooking add-on. MSRP for the core unit will be $800. According to Suvie, the company will also offer a significant discount to customers of the first gen Suvie who want to upgrade.

Just as with the first gen appliance, the user will be able to cook Suvie-originated meals or their own food, but with the addition of quartz broiler heating elements (the same type of heating elements used by the popular Breville toaster ovens), which enables more consistent heating and allows for the user to bake and broil food.

To fund the rollout of the new Suvie, company CEO Robin Liss told The Spoon the company has raised a $11 million in seed funding (they previously has raised $725 thousand on Kickstarter). That funding will also help the company continue to expand its associated meal service.

The new funding and the debut of a second generation Suvie is a bright spot in a kitchen tech market that has seen some consolidation over the past few years. Since Electrolux’s acquisition of Anova for a quarter of a billion in 2017, the few exits for venture-funded kitchen tech startups have relatively quiet (like ChefSteps, Brava and June), while others -- like Nomiku and Sansaire -- have shut their doors.

Interestingly, the two startups still making a go of it in this space both eyed the pairing of cooking appliances with meal delivery, a business model that has the potential of long-term recurring revenue for companies also competing in what is a highly cost-competitive hardware market. For its part, Tovala announced a new $30 million funding round this month, less than a year after its previous round.

If you’d like to buy the new Suvie, you can pick it up now and, according to Liss, the product will begin shipping in twelve to fourteen weeks.

You can see the Suvie in action below.

Suvie’s Refrigerator + Connected Cooking Device Ships, but Retail Price Doubles

Suvie, the crowdfunded refrigerator + four-zone cooking appliance, announced today via email that the company shipped the first of its reward units to early backers. In a world where many Kickstarted projects never see the light of day, this is news in and of itself.

But what caught our eye about the announcement wasn’t just that Suvie is now shipping — it’s how much the device will cost at retail: $1,199. This is basically double the $599 the company originally said it would sell for. We aren’t sure exactly when the Suvie got more expensive, but its price point is important as it squares off against a raft of smart cooking devices that are already on the market, and in some cases, are already on their second generation.

To be fair, we thought $599 seemed remarkably low for what the Suvie does. Aimed at busy families, Suvie offers both an automated cooking appliance as well as a customized meal kit subscription. The hook for Suvie is that you scan the meal’s code, load it into the device before you leave for work and it will stay chilled at food safe temperatures until it is scheduled to cook. At which point, its four-zone heating simultaneously cooks each ingredient (starch, protein, vegetable) in separate compartments at different temperatures so the entire meal is ready when you get home.

But the leap to twelve hundred dollars is a steep one, and indicates either something didn’t go as planned or serious production issues arose along the way. We reached out to Suvie for clarification and will update when we hear back. (UPDATE: See the response from Suvie Co-Founder and CEO, Robin Liss below)

Regardless of why the price jumped, the point is Suvie is now the priciest of its cohort of countertop connected cooking devices. The Brava, which also does multi-zone cooking, is $995, the second-gen June is $599 and the second-gen Tovala is $349.

And that’s just the hardware. Suvie’s meal plans run $10 – $12 per serving. That means the cost to feed a family can get pretty expensive pretty quick. Suvie can make non-meal plan recipes, but they don’t appear to offer the same everything-is-done-at-the-same-time convenience after this article published Liss told me that non-meal plan recipes still finish at the same time. While Brava has meal plans, it cooks ingredients you buy at the store just as easily, and Tovala is expanding beyond its meal plan and becoming more of a platform.

Again, the Suvie does both cooling and cooking, so it’s a bit of a different value proposition. But as we’ve noted before, there is limited space on a kitchen counter. If people have already purchased one of these other devices (plus meal plan), will they pony up to purchase another cooking appliance, especially one built for its own meal subscription?

Update from Suvie Co-Founder and CEO, Robin Liss:

We’re starting to ship Kickstarter units, that’s what the announcement is about, we’re still taking pre-orders for later deliveries. We have amazing Kickstarter backers who have been incredibly supportive, and we’re going to continue to gather their feedback and refine the meals and online experience even more. Since demand has been much larger than we could have ever anticipated, there’s still a pretty long wait time to get a Suvie if you’re not a Kickstarter backer or an early website pre-order customer. However, you can pre-order now and get them before they go on sale in retail.

As for the pricing: We’re a new appliance company, and, throughout the development process, quite a few components and technologies turned out to be more expensive than we anticipated – that’s just the honest bottom line. We were probably too optimistic on the price, and, I’m sorry if it’s disappointed people. This advanced technology has been a bit more costly to produce than we initially anticipated. The Suvie kitchen robot has the components of both a refrigerator, a steamer, a slow cooker, sous vide device and an oven all in one. There’s nothing else like it on the market. The upside of this development process has been that we’ve also rolled out many new features, including a Slow Cook mode that really expands the types of meals Suvie can make. We think the Suvie we’re shipping can do a lot more than the original vision we set out 16 months ago – so we hope our consumers see that benefit as well.

Suvie Refrigerator+Four-Zone Cooker Makes Public Debut at Food Tech Live

Suvie, the connected countertop appliance that refrigerates your food and uses four-zone cooking to automatically have it ready for you when you want it, made its first official debut to the public this evening at The Spoon’s first ever Food Tech Live event in Las Vegas.

We’ve been following Suvie ever since it blasted through its Kickstarter goal last year, and were excited to see what will be a production machine. Check out this video with Suvie Co-Founder and CEO Robin Liss as she shows off the device and walks us through how it works.

Suvie Debuts at Food Tech Live in Las Vegas

Brava Comes Out of Stealth, Introduces Oven That Cooks With Light

Today Brava, a smart kitchen startup based in Redwood City, California, announced their first product.

Called the Brava, the eponymously named oven can reach temperatures of 500 degrees within seconds and is supposed to use less energy during a cook session than a typical oven uses during preheating, all by cooking with high-intensity light technology that had previously been used in industrial applications like heating metal and semiconductors.

The Brava oven, the company says, is “the future of cooking.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the beginning of the story.

Cooking For Mom

The company had its origins six years ago when one of the cofounders, Dan Yue, was having a holiday dinner with his parents and watched as his mom spent most of her time preparing the meal in the kitchen.

At the time, Yue was transitioning from away from the social gaming industry, where he was the founding CEO of a company called Playdom.  Yue’s company was acquired by Disney and Yue had some time on his hands, so he started thinking about a new kind of oven that could help someone like his mom spend more time with her family and not have to bounce back and forth to the kitchen.

It was pretty early, and so the idea of a smart oven was new, but even back then Yue knew the oven should be more than smart. He thought it should also be better than traditional ovens by making cooking more convenient and approachable.

The idea stuck with Yue, but he soon became preoccupied with another new company he had started in the food space (meal kit company Green Chef), and it wasn’t long before he put the idea for a new oven on the back burner.

It would be a few years later before the idea got new momentum, which would come in the form of Yue’s former high school classmate Thomas Cheng. When Yue told Cheng about his idea, what became Brava almost seemed preordained since Cheng had been investigating new heating technologies. Before that, Cheng had also been working with smart home startup August helping to develop the company’s smart lock technology but was looking for a new challenge.

Yue was still busy with Green Chef, so it would be Cheng who would spend almost the entire next year in a garage working on developing early prototypes of what would become the Brava oven, experimenting with high-intensity lights, which up to that point had largely been used to heat metal.

It wasn’t long before these experiments led Cheng and Yue believe they were onto something. They thought they could build a “different kind of oven.”

A New Kind Of Oven

Back in the fall of 2016, Brava had just reeled in a $12 million funding round and boasted an all-start founder team that included August’s former head of hardware (Cheng), the founding CEO of Playdom (Yue) and an ex-Samsung/Disney executive named John Pleasants, who would become the company’s CEO.

But Brava was in stealth and that would pretty much be all the news the company revealed for the next two years. So when the company invited me down to visit their lab and see the top-secret project they’d been working on for the past couple years, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

I’d already known a few things going in:

Of course, I also knew Brava isn’t the first company interested in recreating cooking. It’d been an interesting few years in the world of food tech, and we’ve seen a variety of new and interesting approaches to rethinking the oven.

First, there was June, who made a smart oven with machine vision and software to create more precise cooking sessions. Then there was Tovala, who paired a smart steam oven with a food delivery service. Last fall Miele introduced the first consumer oven to use RF solid state technology, while this year I discovered a company called Markov had been issued a few patents to essentially make a smarter microwave. This year we also learned about Suvie, a four-chamber cooking robot that utilized a unique water routing technology to apply heat and steam food.

The lobby at Brava

So when I arrived at Brava’s nondescript office in Redwood City, I was eager to learn more about exactly how the company had developed an entirely new way to cook. I checked in the lobby and was soon greeted by company CEO John Pleasants, who led me into a large room where about a dozen or so busy workers, not surprisingly, looked like they were preparing to launch a new product in a couple of weeks.

We made our way into a conference room, and we started to talk about the product.

Pleasants told me about his early days with the company and how they’d started out working in a house (“it was very much like the show Silicon Valley”) until they moved into this office building. He gave me a presentation which featured an overview of the new oven, and he talked about who he thought was the target market (he sees two main groups to start: tech-forward consumers who love food and anyone who doesn’t think cooking at home is a viable option). We even ate some food cooked in the oven (crisped cheese) that was tasty.

Before long, we got up to look at the oven.

Brava prototypes

Here’s where I was introduced to Thomas Cheng, now the company’s CTO.

During those early days in the garage, Cheng worked on prototype after prototype, most of which I saw when he took me over to a wall where they had lined all of them up on a table.  There were probably ten or so prototypes, progressing from the first that looked something like a college science project to the final version that was pretty close to the final production version.

Cheng talked about those days working in the garage and how he experimented with the light-heating technology to figure out how to use it. The intensity of heat was so high (“I remember trying to simulate frying, and I blackened my fries in like two seconds”), so it would take some work to figure out how to apply it in a consumer oven.

Part of the answer would be advanced sensors.

“Heaters are kinda useless by themselves,” explained Cheng. He walked me over to another table with a variety of sensor probes on it, and he picked one up.

Brava probe sensor prototypes

“This sensor probe is made of platinum, manufactured in Switzerland and mounted in gold alloy,” said Cheng. “It’s kinda pricey, but it has the performance.”

Cheng explained that the oven needed this pricey probe in the final production model because the company’s heating technology needed a guidance system to apply the heat.

The sensor probe, combined with the oven’s internal camera, send information to the oven’s computational engine, which then guides how the heat should be applied in near real time.

“Part of the magic of Pure Light cooking is we can move from pan searing to direct energy transfer to bake within three seconds,” said Cheng. “It’s almost like having an oven, an induction skillet and a special light cooking device with a robot mediating between these things.”

It sounded neat, but I was still curious about how the light heating technology actually worked. This was when Cheng showed me his whiteboard.

Brava’s technology explained (kinda)

The whiteboard had a hand-drawn version of what is the visible spectrum. Cheng described how the Brava used different wavelengths along this spectrum from the Brava’s light bulbs to apply heat either indirectly to the food for baking emulation using longer wavelengths (“that’s how we do baking emulation like a toaster oven”) to smaller wavelengths where the photons hit the heating tray directly (“this is how we emulated induction skillet heating”).

Needless to say, it’s complicated. I asked Cheng if they’d written a white paper on the technology to explain it, and they said their patent applications went in depth into the tech (feel free to dive in).

Just as my brain reached the midway point between fried and scrambled as I tried to understand the explanation for manipulating light wavelengths for the purposes of cooking food, Cheng and Pleasants asked if I’d like to try some food. I quickly said yes.

Cooking With Light

They took me into the company’s test kitchen where I was introduced to the culinary team. They were standing a row of long metal tables that had Bravas on top and trays of food ready to go into the oven.

Cooking with the Brava

Pleasants explained the culinary team spends its days preparing different types of foods and concocting recipes that the Brava oven can use. Because the technology is completely different from traditional ovens, the culinary team had to with the hardware and software teams to create cooking parameters for each type of food and specific guided cooking recipes to help guide the users of the oven.

In short, I was now in the place where the company honed the raw power of light-powered cooking into a polished user experience.

Lindsay West, a chef by training who had previously worked with Sur La Table and now part of Brava’s culinary team, walked me through the features of the Brava and explained their development process. Another culinary member showed me how to start a cook and make sure the food is correctly placed on the tray.

The Brava user interface was fairly straightforward, a small color touchscreen display that allowed you to program a cook, as well as instructional videos to show you specifics for each recipe. In short, the Brava user interface is heavy on guided cooking.

You can see us walking through the interface and inserting food into the Brava in the video below:

Then they fed me.

The food was good. It included salmon (moist), steak (tasted like sous vide cooked) and even ice cream (it was at this moment I was ready to declare the Brava a miracle machine, at least until West told me they’d only roasted the strawberry topping for the ice cream).

A Brava cooked meal

Of course, any demo prepared with a chef in a room is going to be good, but from what I could tell the Brava cooked all the meals, did it quickly and they tasted delicious.

Building A Brand

By now we were near the end of my visit. We discussed things like business models and talked about the food delivery service they’ll be offering (with Chef’d) and how all their food will be locally sourced and high quality.

As we talked, I thought about how the company seemed like it had the potential to create a new type of cooking appliance. But at the same time, I knew that developing new companies in mature hardware markets is really difficult. Not only do you have to compete with bigger, more deep-pocketed incumbents, but you have to face other startups trying to do that same thing. Sonos, which most would agree reinvented how we think about home audio – is currently struggling to get an IPO off the ground after being beaten to a pulp by the Amazon Echo over the past couple years.

I asked Pleasants about why they thought they could be different and why they don’t just license their technology to a big appliance maker.

“We think we have something special and we think we can build a brand,” he said.

Maybe I was just still under the influence of a tasty lunch, but as Pleasants said it, it didn’t seem all that ridiculous. After all, microwave ovens sit in pretty much every home nowadays, something that wasn’t the case in the 1960s.  It had been a long time since the dawn of the microwave era and, at some point, new innovations will come along and get adopted.

Will that next-generation heating technology be cooking with light? Too soon to say.  I do think that at some point the company should license the technology to established brands like a Whirlpool or Electrolux and Pleasants seemed open to it … in time. But first, he thinks the company can build a brand.

“I think everyone in this company believes we can be a multi-billion dollar company that is changing the way we cook and eat at home,” he said.

If you want to hear Brava CEO John Pleasants tell the story of Brava, make sure to be at the Smart Kitchen Summit. 

Video: Regional Perspectives on the Connected Kitchen Market

At Smart Kitchen Summit Europe last month, a topic on everyone’s mind was the future of the connected kitchen market.

In fact, we had a whole panel devoted to analyzing the regional perspectives of the smart kitchen marketplace: Chris Albrecht of The Spoon moderated the conversation between Holger Henke of Cuicinale, Robin Liss of Suvie, and Miles Woodroffe of Cookpad, Ltd.

The speakers explored the evolving role of voice assistants, regional perspectives across Europe, Asia and North America on the smart kitchen, and what the consumer really wants (to save time and money).

Watch the full video of the panel below.

If you want to hear more deep-dive analysis on the connected kitchen from people in the business, join us at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle this October!

Smart Kitchen News Roundup: Mellow Updates, Pico(Cold)Brews, Spinn Spins

There’s been a bunch of news about smart kitchen products lately, so I thought I’d do a quick roundup:

Mellow Updates Software To Address Cooling Concerns

Mellow, a sous vide appliance that utilizes an internal refrigeration unit to cool food until a user is ready to cook, has updated its software to address concerns about the product’s ability to cool food quickly enough. In a January review for Wired, food writer Joe Ray gave the Mellow a brutal 1/10 review because he said the Mellow couldn’t bring the food’s temperature below a USDA recommended 40 degrees Fahrenheit in two hours, meaning the product was a potential food poisoning risk. It appears Mellow was paying attention because the company just released a software update that prompts the user to add ice if it detects if the water in the reservoir is not cool enough. The company will release another update later in March that adds a pre-cool mode to help cooks start cooking the chamber earlier to keep their food out the “danger zone.”

PicoBrew Z Series Adds Cold Brew Coffee To Repertoire

A few weeks ago, PicoBrew announced their latest generation pro-grade brewing appliance, the PicoBrew Z. Not content with just brewing beer, the company announced that their new modular brewing system would also be able to brew cold brew coffee too.

According to the announcement, a standard Z will be able to brew up to two gallons of cold brew coffee or coffee concentrate in two hours, faster than traditional methods (although there seem to be lots of fast-brew methods for cold brew coffee coming to market lately). While I’m not sure it’s the most cost-effective way to make cold brew coffee (commercial systems that make up to 15 gallons cost around $450), it might be a good option for a brewpub looking add another item to the menu.

Spinn Spins Another Update

Like others who’ve backed the Spinn centrifugal coffee machine, I’ve gotten a bit restless as the company has fallen further behind its original ship date. But with the company’s management doing a good job updating backers, I’ve decided to stick it out and wait for my Spinn.

And according to the latest update, it looks like my patience may pay off. For the last few updates, the company has pointed a March ship date for first products, and the latest update indicates they’re sticking to it (but barely).

From the update:

“After Chinese New Year we’ll be assembling the machines and shipping the first units by the end of March. From there on, we’ll be ramping up production throughout the following months. This is a critical step towards bringing our machine into mass production and our teams in the U.S., Europe and China will be working around the clock to guarantee a great coffee machine that we’ll start to ship at a smaller scale at first, increasing the numbers with every batch.

Like I said, barely. For a product that could be described the Tesla of coffeemakers, it’s not all that surprising the company is taking a Tesla-like approach in its slow ramp it getting the product out the door.

Could Suvie Hit a Cool Million?

Suvie, the multizone cooker from the founder of Reviewed.com is trucking along with its Kickstarter. With just over a day and a half to go, the product has raised over $700 thousand.

With most successful Kickstarters going through the same three basic phases –  1) initial burst providing validation 2) a long stretch of yeoman’s work to keep story and interest alive, and 3) a final burst of folks who want in on project – they often look like this:

If Suvie’s campaign holds true to how most successful campaigns go, I would expect a last minute surge in backers and wouldn’t be surprised to see Suvie to see a get close to a million dollars.

Anova Nano On Track For May Ship

Last fall, Anova let customers know that the company’s new smaller (and cheaper) sous vide appliance – the Nano – would not be under tree come Christmas time and would instead ship in May. In an update from mid-February, Anova CEO Steve Svajian has indicated that they are holding to the May shipping window.

No official word from the company on when their Anova precision oven will ship other than a landing page on the Anova website that says “Summer 2018”. The product was unveiled at the Smart Kitchen Summit in October 2016.

Suvie Blows Past Kickstarter Goal, Sells out of First Tier Offering

It took less than half a day for Suvie, the multi-zone, connected cooking appliance, to zoom past its initial goal of raising $100,000 on Kickstarter. As of 5:00 p.m. Pacific time, Suvie had raised $323,943 and sold out of its first tier rewards which offered a discounted machine for $429.

As Mike wrote last week, Suvie is part of a new wave of startups that aim to take almost all of the work out of cooking by connecting a smart appliance with a pre-packaged meal service.

The Suvie device itself crams four different cooking methods into one box, including a broiler, steamer, rice maker and sous vide. It will even keep your food cold in the device until your ready to cook.

In addition to the device itself, Suvie will offer a meal kit service that will automatically know how to cook each ingredient at the right temperature and for the right amount of time, so everything is done at the same time.

Elsewhere today, Tovala, a different connected oven-plus-meal service already available, announced that it received an undisclosed investment from food giant Tyson. (Insert your own “this space is heating up” joke here.)

Those interested in Suvie can still pick one up for a reduced rate of $479 with an estimated delivery of December 2018. Once Suvie hits the retail shelves, it will sell for $599.

Tyson Bets On Home Food Delivery & Smart Kitchen With Investment In Tovala

Today Tyson Foods announced they have invested an undisclosed amount in Tovala, maker of smart steam ovens that pair with ready-to-cook home delivered meals. The investment comes on the heels of a $9.2 million series A announced in December. As part of the deal, Tyson will add an observer to Tovala’s board in Tyson Ventures managing director Reese Schroeder.

According to Tovala CEO David Rabie, the deal made sense for them as they started to look toward expanding the Tovala platform beyond their own meals.

“Over time, we will have other brands on the platform where we can automate the cooking, similar to how it works with Tovala meals,” said Rabie in an interview with The Spoon. “This (Tyson) is the first brand and harbinger of what’s to come.”

The move comes at an interesting time for big food companies like Tyson. Consumer packaged good providers are continuing to look for ways to reach the consumer as Amazon continues to wreak havoc on the retail landscape and consumers are increasingly exploring fresh food choices. Home food delivery is seen a potentially interesting – if still yet somewhat unproven – route to the consumer. The move by Tyson follows investments by other big food companies like Nestle, Unilever and Campbell into the home food delivery space.

What’s different about the Tyson’s investment is that with Tovala, they are also moving into the connected kitchen space. Tovala, an alum of the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase, is part of a growing trend of startups looking to pair food delivery with a smart cooking appliance.  Sous vide circulator startups like Nomiku and ChefSteps have both ventured into food delivery, and just this week Suvie, a new startup from the founder of Reviewed.com, is kicking off a Kickstarter campaign for a cooking robot that pairs with the company’s own meal kit delivery. Smart kitchen operating system startup Innit has hinted they will be working with white-label meal kit company Chef’d later this year.

It will be interesting to see where this trend combining automated, assisted cooking combined with meal delivery goes. For companies like Tovala and Suvie, meal delivery provides a form of recurring revenue that more hardware-specific startups like June struggle with. On the other hand, the logistical challenges of building out meal delivery services add more complexity to creating a company. Long term, all of these companies are chasing the idea of creating greater convenience for the consumer. It will no doubt be interesting to see which companies get the combination right and begin to see traction in 2018 and beyond.

Suvie, The Four-Zone Cooking Robot, To Sell For $599

I’m usually pretty good at guessing prices for new products, so when I wrote about the forthcoming Suvie last week, I expected the four-zone cooking appliance to come in around a thousand bucks. After all, the cooking box from the founder of Reviewed.com combines a whole bunch of functionality into a single box, including a steam oven, broiler, sous vide device and pasta/rice cooker. To top it all off, the uber-box will have a built in refrigeration compressor to keep food cool.

Based on what I’d learned, my internal price guesstimator pegged the Suvie at between $800-$1000 retail. Certainly high or a countertop cooking appliance, but I didn’t think it was crazy for a first-gen product with lots of functionality. So color me surprised when the price, announced yesterday, will be $599 retail.

If I had to guess, this likely means the pricing for the Kickstarter (Robin Liss, company CEO, indicated the Kickstarter will kick off on Tuesday, February 6th) is probably going to come in around $399-$499. Don’t bank on that though since, as we now know, my internal price guesstimator appears to be on the fritz.

Like another next-gen cooking appliance, Tovala, Suvie likely expects to increase their margins by selling food subscriptions for the box. The Tovala announced recently they will offer a discount of $100 off the full $399 retail for new consumers who commit to four meals, and will price their appliance at $199 for new customers who buy 24 meals.

The June Oven – one of the first smart cooking appliances to ship and a product that does not come with accompanying meal kits – is still priced fairly high at $1,495. If Tovala and Suvie are any indication, it appears companies pairing food delivery with hardware have an opportunity to be more aggressive with pricing since they can make some of it up on the back end.

Want to talk about this story and other foodtech news? Join our foodtech Slack community and jump into the conversation.

The Founder of Reviewed.com Wants To Reinvent Cooking With This Robot Cooking Appliance

A hypothetical question: What do you do for a second act after spending a good chunk of your teens and twenties building one of the leading product review sites in the US?

You start a company to reinvent one of those product categories you used to review.

At least that’s what you do if you’re Robin Liss, cofounder of Suvie, a Boston based startup that is creating a next-gen cooking appliance. Liss, who started what would become Reviewed.com in her basement at the tender age of 13, sold her company to USA Today in 2011 and managed and grow the site as part of Gannett until she left in 2015.

While she didn’t leave Reviewed with plans to create a cooking appliance startup, it didn’t take long before Liss and her cofounder, Kevin Incorvia, conceived of what eventually became Suvie.

Robin Liss and Kevin Incorvia, cofounders of Suvie

“When I was leaving Reviewed.com, I thought I was going to enjoy my time on the beach,” said Liss when I sat down with her this week to talk about her new company. “But when I was at Reviewed I was really into sous vide cooking, and I thought how can I take this to the next level?”

That next-level cooking idea rolling around Liss’s head eventually crystallized into the Suvie, an ambitious new take at a countertop cooking appliance that includes multiple zones for each staple of a typical dinner: proteins, vegetables, starch, and sauces. Put simply, the Suvie cooks each staple separately using optimized processes for each (sous vide for the protein, steam for veggies, a water dispenser/chamber for starches) but syncs the process across the different cooking chambers so they are finished at the same time.

To top it off, Liss and Incorvia insisted on creating an appliance that enabled “cool to cook”, which means the Suvie would keep food chilled all day and initiate a cook remotely via an app. To do that, they started looking into adding refrigeration.

After looking at a variety of cooling methods like thermoelectric cooling (the cooling technology used in wine coolers and, somewhat notoriously after this Wired review, the Mellow), they decided the Suvie would use a compressor. Compressors are standard in most refrigerators, but the problem was they couldn’t find a compressor small enough for their countertop cooking appliance.

Eventually, they worked with a large appliance maker to have a custom compressor made for the Suvie.

“We have a custom, small compressor, which is one of the key parts that make this work,” said Liss.

But unlike a fridge, which cools by forcing coolant into coils and absorbing heat, the Suvie team decided to use water to cool the food. They came up with a novel water-routing concept that takes cold water from a water chamber and distributes it to water jackets in each of the four zones and chills the food until its ready to cook.

When Liss started thinking about her new company, there were a few underlying trends she felt made it the right time to try and reinvent cooking. One was the ubiquity of mobile phones. She saw mobile was becoming more important in people’s lives as a way to not only discover food but would also become they way control their cooking appliances.

She also saw the growth of precision cooking techniques like sous vide and connected appliances as a signal that things would change drastically in the consumer kitchen in coming years.

The last trend she focused on was the rise of meal kits, as she watched the emergence of first generation meal kit companies like Blue Apron and started to think about how they could incorporate meal delivery into their offering.

And it was this last trend that led to her other big idea. Unlike meal kit providers like Blue Apron that have their own warehouses and pack food for shipment, Liss wanted to create a product that they could open to a variety of food packers and distributors as a way to sell their products as part of a meal kit. In short, she saw the beginning of what could become a new distribution platform.

“[Meal kits] are the first step of what will eventually become a platform,” said Liss. “What we’re trying to do is build an appliance that can bridge the technology gap between existing food suppliers and the appliance that can cook it intelligently.”

This early focus on using a variety of food packers and distributors forced the company to make an open approach integral to the design of the Suvie appliance.

“There were some restrictive rules I put on our engineering team at the beginning,” said Liss. “One was we don’t want us packing our own food. The reason we did that is we wanted to make sure the existing food supply chain could easily pack for their device using the equipment on their floors.”

In a way, Suvie is emblematic of a new trend in the smart kitchen space where startups are looking to pair recurring meal subscriptions with smart cooking hardware. Tovala, Nomiku, and ChefSteps are other examples of companies going down this route but, according to Liss, Suvie has a bigger vision.

“That’s really important when you think about the business and platform because that way if new food brands want to pack for Suvie, they don’t have to build new cooking methods, they don’t have to precook stuff. The raw veggie guys don’t have to think about how long it takes to cook the chicken. They can just pack their raw vegetables like their doing now because of this platform.”

To assemble the final meal kits, Suvie has partnered with a local mission-driven organization in the Dorchester area of Boston that employs economically disadvantaged workers.

Liss said the company plans to launch a Kickstarter in February and plan to ship the product by the end of this year. If successful, the campaign will add to already $3.75 million in seed funding that the company has raised. Pricing for the Suvie will be announced next week when they unveil the Kickstarter campaign.

After more than two years working in stealth, Liss is excited to get what she unabashedly calls her “robot multizone cooking appliance” into the world.

“It’s so exciting and so much fun,” she said. “I do wish we got as much attention as the robot cars. I think it’s just as important a category as self-driving cars.”

You can listen to my full conversation with Robin Liss, founder of Suvie, below (or through Apple podcasts).