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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Tasty

Equal Parts Bundles Coaching With Cookware In Effort To Lure Millennials Into the Kitchen

For those new to cooking, it’s easy to feel lost the first few (or few dozen) times in the kitchen.

But what if you had a personal cooking coach to text with questions about techniques, meal suggestions or even dinner party tips? That’s the idea behind Equal Parts, a cookware brand from Millennial-focused direct-to-consumer startup Pattern Brands.

Here’s how Equal Parts coaching+cookware works:

When you buy a new cookware set from Equal Parts, you get an accompanying bundle of cooking guidance as part of the package. Guidance comes in the form of eight weeks of seven-days-a-week text messaging access to cooking coaches that provide advice on pretty much anything related to the meal journey, from teaching new cooking skills like sautéing to walking through a meal plan to grocery shopping guidance. Coaches are available each day from 4 PM ET to Midnight ET.

The cookware + coaching kits range in price from $65 for a utensil bundle all the way up to $499 for a 20 piece “Complete Kitchen” bundle that includes pans, knives, mixing bowls and more.

Once your eight weeks of text-based coaching is up, you’re ready to spread your wings and fly solo or, as the company puts it on their website, it’s time to “build your intuition in the kitchen” because, after a couple months, “you won’t need us anymore”.

Guided Cooking For The Millennial Generation?

In a way, Equal Parts offers guided cooking, only instead of using connected pans and software, the Millennial-focused brand offers up personalized guidance in a delivery format that is second nature to pretty much anyone in the under-35 crowd: texting.

Another difference with connected products is the temporal nature of the guidance. While products like the Hestan Cue offer the prospect of continuous guidance over the lifetime of product, the reality is most folks usually have a few go-to meals they cook, so the idea of weaning people off of their coaching makes sense. I also suspect giving a limited time window to use the coaching probably is enough to incentivize many to actually use it and not shove their pans in the drawer.

The company behind Equal Parts is a venture funded startup from Pattern Brands, a company founded by some of the marketing agency whizzes who helped launch direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker, Everlane and Bonobos.  While many of the early D2C success stories have been largely focused on fashion and lifestyle categories, the kitchen and other more “domesticated” brand concepts have come into focus the last few years as Millennials move both into parenthood and up the career ladder.

And while Equal Parts is a new take on cookware, it isn’t the first new take targeted at the under-35 set.  Great Jones is another buzzy cookware brand that launched in the last few years, and let’s not forget Buzzfeed Tasty’s cookware brand partnership with Walmart. Tasty has also tried its hand at guided cooking with the Tasty One Top, a product it seemed to lose some interest in over the past year as many of the core team behind the product like Ben Kaufman  (ed note: Buzzfeed emailed us to let us know that Ben Kaufman is still acting as company CMO through the end of this year even as he focuses on his new startup Camp) have moved on.

So will text-message powered coaching be the secret ingredient to establish Equal Parts as an up-and-coming cookware brand? Too soon to tell, but it’s definitely worth a shot.  While the Instant Pot may have become the first cooking gadget Millennials can call their own, the race to become the cookware brand for a generation is too big an opportunity to pass up.

BuzzFeed Tasty and Walmart Serve Up Shoppable Recipes

If you’ve ever been inspired by one of those seemingly simple, overhead cooking videos produced by BuzzFeed’s Tasty but then were crestfallen because you didn’t have all the ingredients, you’re in luck! Walmart announced today that it is bringing shoppable recipes to the Tasty platform, deepening the relationship between the two companies.

Right now, the shoppable recipes features works with the Tasty iOS app. Once a user finds a recipe they want to make they can view the list of ingredients and tap the “Add items to your grocery bag” button, which redirects them to either the Walmart Grocery app or online store.

The “shoppable” part of the recipes is being powered by Northfork‘s software, which provides a white label platform for grocery retailers. The app maps a user’s location to the nearest Walmart and is tied into that’s store’s inventory to ensure that customers can get all the ingredients necessary. The app even lets users swap out items based on quantity needed or dietary, nutritional or brand preferences. Once purchased, the groceries can be scheduled for delivery or pickup as early as that same day.

Walmart’s relationship with Tasty goes back to December of 2017 when the two entered into an e-commerce agreement to sell the basic cookware and utensils needed to make Tasty dishes. In March of last year, that relationship expanded when the two partnered to sell an exclusive line of Tasty branded cookware. Shoppable recipes seemed like the logical next step in their relationship.

Tasty has been relatively quiet lately; the last we heard from them was in October of 2018 when Cuisinart launched a version of the Tasty OneTop cooktop. Adding to any mystery about what is going on with Tasty is the fact that it was announced last week that Ben Kaufman, who provided BuzzFeed’s quote for the Walmart press announcement, was stepping down from his role as BuzzFeed’s Chief Marketing Officer. As Variety reported at the time: “During [Kaufman’s] tenure at the digital-media company, he helped develop the Tasty line of products for Walmart and the Goodful brand at Macy’s.” Kaufman will now focus on the BuzzFeed Camp retail stores.

Regardless, the shoppable recipe sector continues apace. Samsung bought shoppable recipe site Whisk in March of this year, and just today, Mealthy announced it had equity crowdfunded $1.07 million for its full-stack consumer solution for shoppable recipes, guided cooking and kitchen appliances.

And it looks like Walmart and Tasty will have more announcements to come as today’s shoppable recipe press release says “This feature is the first of many upgrades to the Tasty app that will continue to deepen Tasty’s partnership with Walmart and sweeten the shopping experience for the Tasty audience.”

BuzzFeed and Walmart Launch Tasty Line of Cookware

BuzzFeed, maker of the wildly popular Tasty cooking video series, announced today that it is teaming up with Walmart to debut an exclusive line of Tasty cookware. The move is a delicious bit of vertical integration that extends revenue for BuzzFeed beyond ads, and lets Walmart capitalize on the enormous popularity of the ubiquitous overhead recipe show.

The Tasty cookware include more than 90 products, and is already available on Walmart’s website. According to the press release:

The Tasty cookware line features bright colors that pop in the kitchen, and includes all the tools necessary to prepare Tasty’s more than 2,700 recipes to date. The line features Non-stick Forged Aluminum Cookware in sets and open Stock, available in 4 colors. This includes 11pc Cookware Set at $99; Non-stick Metal Bakeware with silicone handle inserts, Silicone head utensils, soft grip gadgets and glass mixing bowls. The Tasty Kitchen line will be used in Tasty videos and was designed and developed with the Tasty fan in mind, as BuzzFeed research shows that 2 out of 3 Tasty fans have made a Tasty recipe.

Tasty cookware is the next logical step in the evolution of BuzzFeed and Walmart’s relationship. Amidst missing revenue targets in November of last year, BuzzFeed CEO, Jonah Peretti sent a memo to his company about the need to move beyond ads, saying “As our strategy evolves, we need to evolve our organization, too — particularly our Business team, which was built to support direct sold advertising but will need to bring in different, more diverse expertise to support these new lines of business.”

One of those new lines of business was the Tasty branded One Top, a countertop induction burner that syncs with Tasty videos in the new media publisher’s first foray into guided cooking. Then in December of last year, BuzzFeed and Walmart teamed up to sell equipment and groceries necessary for making Tasty recipes. So it makes sense for BuzzFeed to capture more of that revenue by hawking its own line of cookware in its videos. It also gives them another set of hardware beyond the One Top to extend their guided cooking app over time.

And it looks like this is just the beginning for the two companies. Today’s press release calls the Tasty cookware line the “cornerstone of a broader strategic partnership” and that we can look forward to collaboration across a “wide range of consumer products.”

While it will be interesting to watch how these two companies create further culinary synergy, it’s easy to see opportunities for more immediate vertical integration. Recipe videos like Tasty’s are a discovery and commerce platform. In addition to selling the hardware, incorporating instant shoppable recipes like those generated by Whisk (also a Walmart partner), means food inspiration can easily turn into a same day reality (and revenue).

The other benefit for Walmart is that the Tasty relationship is exclusive. This puts up a defensive wall around Tasty’s massive audience against Amazon and Target in the heated battle for food supremacy.

BuzzFeed’s Tasty Expands E-Commerce Capabilities with Walmart Agreement

BuzzFeed’s cooking site, Tasty, along with Walmart and Jet.com announced a partnership today that allows consumers to purchase equipment necessary for making certain recipes directly from the Tasty app. The move continues the trend of vertical integration we’ve seen elsewhere in the food world, and sets up BuzzFeed to expand its e-commerce ambitions.

Starting today, Tasty recipes will include direct links to Walmart/Jet.com to buy the tools needed for that dish. Right now, users can only buy hardware items such as a slow cooker, or skillet or measuring cups. The company says it plans to include the purchase of groceries “beginning next year.”

For Walmart, the partnership gives the retailer access to the enormously popular Tasty base, which has generated more than 65 billion video views and has more than 90 million followers on Facebook. Tasty has already shown that it can move units. As The Spoon’s Mike Wolf wrote last month:

“Last year, the company worked with Oster to run a sponsored cooking video that included the Oster grill. Within a day, the Oster grill had completely sold out on Amazon, despite the fact the cooking video didn’t have a link to the Oster grill Amazon page.”

Recipes are becoming more than a set of instructions, they are becoming more direct commerce vehicles. AllRecipes launched shoppable recipe lists through AmazonFresh earlier this year. And as same day delivery companies like Instacart expand, recipes are no longer constrained by what people have in the kitchen. With instant gratification increasingly available, inspiring recipes can inspire people to pay for the tools and ingredients immediately.

But this also sets the stage for BuzzFeed to expand it’s own hardware ambitions. As the company missed revenue targets, it is expanding its Product Labs, which created the Tasty One Top induction cooking device. From a memo BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti sent out to employees:

“Finally, we are expanding our Product Labs business, which exceeded our expectations in its first full year of operations, into BuzzFeed Commerce which has a strong lineup of new licensing and commerce partnerships, and new products for 2018. BuzzFeed Commerce will work closely with our new BuzzFeed Media Brands team to create new opportunities for our brands in the way it has with Tasty.”

Partnering with Walmart lets BuzzFeed use Tasty as a way to convert the eyeballs of its massive audience into consumers who buy the $149 One Top, or whatever BuzzFeed-branded cooking implement the company wants to create.

BuzzFeed has proven adept at navigating rapidly changing technology trends and fickle attention spans. This deal with Walmart is another great example of the company’s nimbleness by expanding the utility of Tasty in a way that is organic to the experience and potentially adding to the bottom line.

BSH Acquires Controlling Interest in Kitchen Stories As Part Of ‘Connected Cooking’ Strategy

Late last month, BSH Home Appliances, the largest appliance manufacturer in Europe, announced it had acquired a controlling interest in Kitchen Stories, maker of video-rich cooking apps with step-by-step instructions and recipes.

The deal is yet another sign of how large appliance makers are moving quickly to transform themselves into content companies and connect their appliances to digital content platforms.

In the announcement, the two companies said they had plans to integrate Kitchen Stories content into BSH’s smart home connectivity app and platform, Home Connect. While initial integration will start with basic tasks like temperature setting for Bosch and Siemens appliances, more capabilities like guided cooking will be built into the app over time.

Kitchen Stories cofounder Verena Hubertz outlined the vision around integration with the Home Connect platforms:

“This investment will enable us to tap the connected kitchen market, and to help design the cooking of the future. We’ll develop solutions to help users in all aspects of the cooking process – from inspirations for recipes to added-value services. And we’ll be combining our own findings with those of BSH about what consumers want. That will enable us to reflect users’ expectations better, and to make Kitchen Stories even more attractive. Kitchen Stories will also soon be integrated into the Home Connect ecosystem, and will gradually be expanded with new applications.”

This deal is the latest in a string of moves by appliance companies to more deeply integrate their cooking hardware with cooking content as the kitchen becomes increasingly digital. Earlier this year Whirlpool acquired Yummly as the kitchen entered what Whirlpool exec Brett Dibkey described as a ‘transformation.’ A new crop of startups like Hestan Cue, ChefSteps, SideChef, and Innit have been busily creating a variety of products that create immersive guided cooking offerings that connect with cookware and appliances, and this summer the media startup Buzzfeed moved into guided cooking with the launch of its Tasty One Top.

The deal caps what has been a few years of fast growth for Kitchen Stories, an early entrant into the video-guided cooking app space alongside others like SideChef. According to the company, the Kitchen Stories app now has millions of users and has been released in 150 countries worldwide.

Another interesting aspect of the deal is it marks a successful exit for a women-led company.  Like many other tech segments, women have been under-represented in the smart kitchen, so hopefully the move is a sign of increasing momentum and encouragement for women-led startups in the space.

Lastly, the deal comes just over a month before CES, where big tech companies like Bosch often show off their latest products. I would expect to see the company at least showcasing Kitchen Stories early integration in Las Vegas.

You can see an interview with the two Kitchen Stories cofounders Verena Hubertz and Mengting Gao and BSH Chairman Karsten Ottenberg below:

Ten Questions for BSH and Kitchen Stories

Is The Tasty One Top The Future Of Buzzfeed As It Scales Back Its Ad Business?

It appears Buzzfeed may have lost its buzz.

At the very least the fat content startup founded by media mad scientist Jonah Peretti has certainly had its share of bad news of late. First, there was word the company missed its revenue targets, and now the company is laying off 100 – or 6% – of its 1,700 person global workforce.

For many of us, it’s a surprise to hear about Buzzfeed’s struggles given Peretti’s nearly unbroken string of success over the past dozen years. As the creative genius behind the early days of Huffington Post, and later turning Buzzfeed into one of the fastest growing and influential digital media publishers of the past decade, it seemed for a long time that anything Peretti touched turned to gold.

But in today’s world where no publisher is spared the winds of change from platform monopolies like Facebook and Google, Buzzfeed has realized the limitations of late of having what is primarily an ad-supported business model.

In an internal memo to employees, Peretti outlined how Buzzfeed’s ad-driven business model has started to miss a cylinder or two:

“As our strategy evolves, we need to evolve our organization, too — particularly our Business team, which was built to support direct sold advertising but will need to bring in different, more diverse expertise to support these new lines of business.”

So what does a company that built a hugely popular website monetized primarily through advertising do when revenue growth starts to slow?

As it turns out, we may already have the answer.

Over the past year, the company has slowly rolled out a new line of physical products online. Tapping into the impressive success of its lifestyle publications like Tasty, Buzzfeed first started with a cookbook and more recently debuted its own cooking appliance in the Tasty One Top. And last month, the company recently rolled out its first card game, Social Sabotage.

And in his memo today to employees outlining changes, it looks like the company is doubling down on the early success of its products:

“Finally, we are expanding our Product Labs business, which exceeded our expectations in its first full year of operations, into BuzzFeed Commerce which has a strong lineup of new licensing and commerce partnerships, and new products for 2018. BuzzFeed Commerce will work closely with our new BuzzFeed Media Brands team to create new opportunities for our brands in the way it has with Tasty.”

While it’s too soon to say how many Tasty One Tops and card sets the company has sold, my guess is probably a lot. Last year, the company worked with Oster to run a sponsored cooking video that included the Oster grill. Within a day, the Oster grill had completely sold out on Amazon, despite the fact the cooking video didn’t have a link to the Oster grill Amazon page.

Now imagine what happens when the company starts featuring its own grill repeatedly in its cooking videos and asks its readers to buy it?

Perhaps it’s not all that surprising that Buzzfeed is trying to convert its community into paying customers. Companies like ChefSteps and Instant Pot have been able to build successful hardware businesses on a much smaller scale through tapping into their own enthusiastic communities, and with hundreds of millions of video viewers of its cooking videos every month, it seems like it would be a huge missed opportunity if Buzzfeed didn’t try.

So, will sales of cooktops, card games and who-knows-what-else rejuvenate growth for company that rose to prominence with listicles, weird quizzes and publishing the occasional spy dossier?

Maybe, maybe not. But either way, I am certainly excited to see them try.

You can watch my conversation from the Smart Kitchen Summit with Talia Halperin, GM of Tasty Commerce and Claire King, head of Culinary for Tasty below:

CONTENT AS COOKING FUEL: THE STORY OF TASTY’S ONE TOP from The Spoon on Vimeo.

The Recipe Isn’t Dead. In Fact, It’s Becoming The Center of Action In The Digital Kitchen

At last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, celebrity chef Tyler Florence said: “the recipe is dead.”

Needless to say, it’s a bold statement. There’s no doubt that Florence is right to suggest that things are changing quickly in the age of Tasty cooking videos and that the time-worn practice of looking up recipes in cookbooks is something people are doing less every day.

But if today’s news about another Amazon integration with a popular online recipe site is any indication, I’d suggest the recipe is far from dead. In fact, it looks more and more like the recipe is becoming the center of action in the digital-powered kitchen.

And it’s not just Amazon that likes the idea of shoppable recipes. Companies like Northfork have integrated with the some of Europe’s biggest grocers to enable recipe-driven shopping, while big players like Google are building guided cooking recipe capabilities into their virtual assistant platforms.

Then there are AI-centric startups looking to take the recipe and add extra intelligence to it to make things more personalized and interactive. Companies like Wellio, Chefling and Pylon.AI are doing interesting work here.

Then there’s the recipe itself becoming fused with connected cooking hardware. Everyone from one of the world’s largest cookware companies in Hestan to the world’s biggest appliance maker in Whirlpool to cookbook disruptor Tasty are creating recipe-guided hardware.

And finally, if technology-driven integrations and one columnist’s opinion aren’t enough to convince you, there’s always old-school chefs like Christopher Kimball (check out our podcast!) who think the recipe has a long life ahead of it.

So no, the recipe is not so much dead as evolving. Instead, as our recipes become digitized and more connected, they’re becoming the center of action in the connected kitchen.

As Jon Jenkins suggested at last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, software isn’t only eating the world, but we are eating software. That software includes whatever the recipe is becoming which, in short, is probably just better, more evolved version of the recipe.

FirstBuild Wants to Crowdsource A Next-Gen Drink Machine For Your Sink

FirstBuild, the idea incubator and microfactory from GE Appliances, and the company behind the popular Opal Nugget Ice Maker, is hoping to crowdsource a drink machine that could go directly in your sink. The company is teaming up with cloud-based CAD software company OnShape in what they are calling the Drink Sink Challenge, a contest where makers will submit their CAD-based concepts to a panel of judges and the top three winners will be awarded cash prizes.

The contest follows a recent hackathon by FirstBuild in which the winner was a group that proposed the idea of integrating a drink dispenser directly into a sink. From the contest starter kit:

Last month, GE Appliances’ FirstBuild hosted a hackathon where the winning team developed an idea for a drink dispenser combined with a kitchen sink. With the growth of pod-based beverage centers for both coffee and cold beverages, this totally makes sense: Users are looking for more streamlined experiences, especially when precious kitchen countertop space is at stake.

The thing is, this does totally make sense. The great unspoken problem in the digital kitchen revolution is a lack of counter space for all these cool new products, so I really like the idea of building more stuff into the actual counters. And besides, who wouldn’t want a next-gen drink machine built into the sink the dispenses hot, cold and fizzy drinks?

According to the contest rules, any design must dispense one or more of the following:

• Ice
• Hot water served at 170° F or higher
• Single-serving coffee using a Keurig or
similar beverage pod
• Chilled water served at 40° F or lower
• Chilled carbonated water
• Chilled flavored beverages

Making things even more interesting is the contest is cosponsored by Lowe’s and Delta Faucet.  While early FirstBuild products like the Opal Ice Maker and the Paragon have been innovative, they’ve yet to really become mass market products. I’m intrigued to see if whether working with a large retailer and faucet company in these types of competitions could ultimately lead to productization of some cool ideas that reach wider audiences.

Another interesting angle to the competition is it looks like it’s one of the first big competitions for the new Giddy platform from GE Appliances and the folks that created FirstBuild. The platform is primarily an app that enables designers and creators to enter contests that range from ones with cash prizes (like the Drink Sink) to smaller ones like the Napkin Sketch Challenge for reimagining the future of the spice rack. This paper napkin sketch concept is really cool since folks are actually turning in what looks like sketches on napkins. One of my favorites is this Spice Jar Table RFID Reader.

An RFID Spice rack. Source: Giddy creator AaronMcD.

Giddy is somewhat reminiscent of Quirky, the crowdsourced creation company that was closely tied to FirstBuild in its early days.  Quirky, which just debuted a new version of itself under its new owners, had raised $30 million from GE in 2013 to design and build connected home products. Quirky was founded by Ben Kaufman. In a sign that old collaborations never die but are just reinvented, Kaufman’s Buzzfeed Labs teamed up with FirstBuild this summer to help build the Tasty One Top.

The Tasty One Top And The Rise Of Content Powered Cooking

Back in 2008, Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington wrote a manifesto in which he announced plans to build a low-cost tablet computing device.

While the idea of a technology blog beating computing giants like Apple and Microsoft to market with a tablet seemed preposterous at the time, Arrington continued to pursue his crazy dream. Before long a team had been assembled, prototypes built, and eventually the Crunchpad got pretty darn close to becoming a reality before everything fell apart and instead we got something called the JooJoo.

The Crunchpad

The story of the Crunchpad seemed so improbable in part because of the difficulty of Arrington’s day job. When I went to work for one of Techcrunch’s biggest competitors (Gigaom) during this time, it made me even more fascinated with the story since I saw first hand just how hard it is to run a company tracking the fast-moving world of technology. The idea of actually building the technology in addition to writing about it seemed insane.

I also think part of what made the idea of the team behind a tech blog creating a piece of computing equipment so hard for me and others to wrap our minds around is most of us still view people – and companies – through a Richard Scarry lens on the world. In other words, content companies make content, hardware makers make hardware; food companies make food and so on. Sure, there are weird conglomerate mashups like when GE owned NBC, but often these types of weird combos were the result of merger and acquisition sprees in the 80s.

But if there’s anything we’ve learned from watching companies like Amazon or Google, the old rules don’t seem to apply anymore.  These companies have taught us that once you build a competency in one thing – whether e-commerce or transportation – that strength can often be leveraged to build a competency in an adjacent (or often non-adjacent) space.

Amazon started with books, eventually moved into web services, then to hardware, and now they’re on to grocery stores. Google started with search, moved onto mobile, then IoT and now all sorts of crazy ideas whether its VR, healthcare or balloon-based broadband.

And so while I was surprised when I learned last week Buzzfeed had launched its hardware device called the Tasty One Top, I also instantly knew this made sense at some level. We are, after all, living in the “throw the rules out” era of Amazon. And yes, the story of Crunchpad showed us that that occasionally a content company can break the Richard Scarry mold.

People – and companies – don’t live in a Richard Scarry world anymore.

But I also realized what I was witnessing with the Tasty One Top made sense because it was indicative of a trend I’ve been thinking about for some time, an idea that in the future cooking companies need to become content and community companies.  I’d witnessed it with the acquisition of Yummly by Whirlpool, and before that, I saw that ChefSteps had been building a large community around its content which it then leveraged into willing customer base for its cooking device called the Joule.

As I wrote when Whirlpool acquired Yummly, the deal “gives Whirlpool a massive infusion of cooking content and community. As newer companies in the connected kitchen like ChefSteps have shown, having strong recipe content and an associated community can create fertile soil upon which to launch new hardware products. With Yummly, Whirlpool now has a built-in community to tap into as it expands is smart kitchen product lineup in the coming years.”

I realized this is the same principle Buzzfeed was capitalizing on, the idea that they could tap into a large community built around compelling content to find a friendly and willing audience into which to tap.

But I also knew it was more than that. What the Tasty One Top further validated for me was the idea of content-powered cooking, where cooking content becomes more than just a dry recipe on a page or a simple YouTube video which we watch to learn a new skill. The idea of content powered cooking is central to guided cooking, something I first started writing about after I first saw the Hestan Cue. In short, guided cooking is where the cooking content not only acts as a helpful set of instructions for the cook but works with an app and sensor-powered appliance to become the guidance system for the entire cooking experience.

When I talked to Buzzfeed Labs’ Ben Kaufman last week about the One Top, he told me that they wanted to turn their Tasty cooking videos into a utility.  To do so, they went back and did the arduous work of breaking down each video into single steps, time-stamping and logging each, and then building an app that would work with the One Top itself.

The result is a content-powered cooking experience, where what began as quick viral cooking videos ultimately become part of the cooking system and experience itself.

Together, the idea of a large community built around content coupled with a cooking product and associated experience powered by the product makes lots of sense. In many ways it’s indicative of what companies like ChefSteps and Hestan Smart Cooking were already building, only coupled with the world’s largest cooking video site in Tasty.

Kaufman told me last week that this is the only cooking appliance Buzzfeed plans on making, in large part because they built the Tasty One Top as a Swiss army knife type of sorts that can work with nearly any type of recipe. But he also said they had more products ideas in mind in which they can build around the “utility” they’ve created in the Tasty cooking videos and app.

I can hardly wait to see what type of Richard Scarry busting concept they dream up next.

Want to hear about the future of connected cooking? Make sure to not to miss the Smart Kitchen Summit. Just use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets. 

Meet The One Top, A Cooking System From Buzzfeed’s Tasty

In just two years, Tasty has become a sensation in the world of food with its quirky cooking videos that have changed how millions of people discover recipes and make meals.  With over a billion video views a month, Buzzfeed’s food brand is usually at the top of the list of video publishers worldwide.

Now, the fast growing media company is looking to tap into the runaway success of Tasty with the launch of One Top, a $149 induction cooktop and temperature probe that combines with Tasty’s cooking video-powered app to provide a guided cooking system.

One Top’s  development was headed up by Ben Kaufman, the head of Buzzfeed Product Labs.  Some will remember Kaufman from his tenure as CEO of Quirky, the innovative product incubator which created such concepts as connected egg trays. While Quirky ultimately hit rough waters, it seems the left field thinking that defined Kaufman’s tenure at his former company might great fit for a company like Buzzfeed.

And let’s be honest: a piece of cooking hardware from a media brand like Buzzfeed is, if anything, left field thinking.

Making Tasty A Utility

Kaufman and his team spent much of the past year working on the One Top. But first, they had to go back and turn Tasty’s library of videos into something that could be used for a guided cooking system.

“Before we even committed to building an appliance, we were committing to make Tasty more of a utility,” Kaufman told The Spoon in a phone interview. To do that, “we went through every Tasty video of all time and time coded each step of the process so the video can loop in the app until you’re ready to go onto the next step. We were thinking, how can we boil this down in a way to make it more of a utility?”

In helping build the One Top, Kaufman was also able to tap into his connections at FirstBuild, the product-lab/microfactory owned by GE which he worked with closely during his time at Quirky.  FirstBuild has spent the past couple years creating their own kitchen-centric product concepts like the Paragon, an induction cooktop that looks at first blush like the One Top.

I asked Kaufman if they were able to leverage the work FirstBuild did with the Paragon in developing the One Top.

“The Paragon is a great device,” said Kaufman. “I had one and used one and would be lying if I didn’t say it was a major source of inspiration for this project.”

But Kaufman said they spent a lot of time improving on what the Paragon team did, including moving beyond a simple probe-based temperature sensor to make the cooktop itself able to sense surface cooking temperature.

“We really looked to differentiate the product from the Paragon with temperature tracking at both the surface level and the probe level,” said Kaufman. “We have that dual sensor technology which will allow us to hold the temperature on the bottom the pan, which is great for searing, slow cooking and a variety of other cooking applications.”

Another major difference is they built the product to scale a much wider audience. Unlike the Paragon which is built in the FirstBuilt Louisville Kentucky based microfactory, the One Top’s manufacturing will be overseen by GE Appliance in China, which will give Tasty access to the appliance company’s highly-scalable manufacturing facilities which are, in large part, responsible for the low $149 presale and $175 suggested retail price points.

By tapping into Tasty’s massive audience, the company may have a recipe for hardware success. One of the biggest challenges for any hardware startup is simply getting the word out. By surfacing the One Top to the 420 million monthly Tasty viewers, the company could have a successful hardware business even if a small number of those viewers actually become One Top owners.

Podcast: The New Food Network – Food Media & Discovery in Age of Buzzfeed

This episode features a conversation from the stage of Benaroya Hall in Seattle at SKS16. Included in the conversation are:

Ashlee Clark-Thompson, CNET; Tiffany Lo, Buzzfeed/Tasty; Kevin Yu, SideChef; Esmée Williams, AllRecipes

The panel description from this session is as follows: The number one video publisher in the world today is Buzzfeed’s Tasty, which had almost 2 billion views in the month of May for its short how-to cooking videos made for the Millennial generation. In the age of apps and online video, cooking discovery and education is changing rapidly and this panel will explore what the Cooking Channel of tomorrow will look like.

Raised In Era Of Frozen Meals, Millennials Go Online To Learn How To Cook (VIDEO)

Back when Esmée Williams started working at Allrecipes in the late nineties, search inquiries on the massively popular recipe discovery site were, to say the least, a little basic.

“The top search term (in 1999) was ‘recipes’,” said Williams at the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle.

Nowadays things are a little different.

“Today the search terms are so much more granular,” said Williams, now VP of consumer and brand strategy at the site which brought in 46 million seekers last November. “It’s like pork chops, gluten free, paleo, ready in 15 minutes, no garlic. The cooks have become so much more sophisticated.”

Williams joined other panelists to discuss how social media and digital platforms are changing the way consumers discover recipes and teach themselves to cook. Alongside Williams was Tiffany Lo, producer for Buzzfeed’s Tasty, Kevin Yu, CEO of SideChef, and the session was moderated by CNET journalist Ashlee Clark-Thompson.

One big focus of the 30-minute conversation (which you can watch below) was how Millennials are changing food and cooking discovery.

Kevin Yu pointed out that food and social media are tightly intertwined for Millennials.

“There’s two most shared photos on the Internet,” said Yu. “The first is the selfie. The second is food. It really starts with food discovery, food passion. Millennials are incredibly passionate about food.”

Williams pointed to the upbringing of many Millennials to explain their hunger for cooking information online.

One hurdle for Millennials wanting to cook is “not having that right skill set,” said Williams.

“A lot of folks have grown up in homes where both parents worked, in the eighties and nineties there were a lot of frozen meals that hit the mainstream. Maybe they didn’t get the skills they might need. Certainly, video plays a huge role in helping them obtaining those skills.”

This hunger to learn no doubt helped fuel the rise of Buzzfeed’s Tasty, which has used its quick-play first-person perspective recipe videos to fuel its growth on the way to becoming biggest video publisher worldwide in early 2016. According to Lo, the idea started as something fairly simple.

“When we started out, we were focusing on YouTube before Tasty,” said Lo. “Then our editorial team started uploading single recipe videoes with their iPhone. A little over a year later, decided to make a team and page dedicated to food videos.” The results surprised even her.

“No one on the team expected it to grow as fast as it did,” she said.

When Clark-Thompson asked about the importance of community, Allrecipes’ Williams said she is continually amazed at how communal the act of cooking can be.

“It has amazed me at how willing people are to share their food experiences. On some recipes, we have ten thousand reviews. It always surprises me, what does that ten-thousandth person feel like they had to say that was so different than all the people before? They just want to say ‘hey, I made this too!'”

Yu said the combination of new hardware and software in the kitchen will create entirely new experiences in coming years, not unlike how it’s recreating the automobile industry today.

“When you have Tesla and you have made an incremental technological jump like adding an electric engine, that’s great for cars, but when you add the software piece, you have a driverless car,” said Yu.

“What is this new driverless car of the smart kitchen space?” he asked.

While the panelists didn’t have the answer for what the driverless car of the smart kitchen would be, Buzzfeed’s Lo did offer some guidance for product makers: follow the Tasty video model.

“Make it approachable and simple,” she said.

Watch video below: