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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Tetra

Sadly, the Shabosh Countertop Hybrid Dishwasher May Be The Closest We Get to The Tetra

A countertop dishwasher called Shabosh is attracting lots of backers on Kickstarter, having raised over $55 thousand from 535 backers.

At first glance, the dishwasher looks a lot like an awful lot like another small countertop dishwasher that garnered a whole lot of buzz five years ago at CES. But while the Shabosh is visually reminiscent of the Tetra, which promised to run a cycle in ten minutes with just a half gallon of water, it’s a far cry functionally from the little wonder that had many of us lusting for something as pedestrian as a dishwasher.

Before we get to the differences, we must look at what happened to Tetra. Unfortunately, for those of us who have been patiently waiting for the little guy, we may never get to put it through its paces since Heatworks, the company behind the Tetra, shut its doors and put its assets up for auction last fall.

The news that the company had put its assets up for auction surfaced last fall when an IP acquisition firm named Hilco Streambank announced it would bid on Heatworks assets. The company was ultimately successful, stating on its website that it had “contacted more than 300 potential targets and brought 16 of those parties to the table through advanced discussions and negotiations. The process culminated in a public auction, and a sale closed in December, 2022.”

The first signs of trouble for the Tetra were the seemingly endless delays and on-again, off-again promises of a ship date. Along the way, Heatworks struck up deals with companies like BASF to create the detergent modules, but it looks like they may have run out of capital before it could build the machine and ship it.

So while there may be an outside chance that we see something resembling a Tetra, it won’t be from Heatworks.

Which brings us back to Shabosh. While the tiny dishwasher looks a lot like the Tetra, the way it works is very different. Unlike the Tetra, which was designed to run a fully automatic washing cycle within its closed glass enclosure, the Shabosh has an open top that allows the machine’s user to spray dishes with its water spout. That’s right, washing dishes with the Shabosh is not that different than hand-washing dishes in a sink, only you get to do it in a cool-looking glass enclosure.

But hey, that’s probably why the Shabosh’s full retail price is targeted to be $200, which is about 40% of what the Tetra was targeted to sell for. And who knows, unlike the Tetra, we may actually see the Kabosh make it to consumer homes sometime soon.

The Spoon Weekly: An OnlyFans for Foodies, Bear Ships 5K Robots, The Mini-Dishwasher Golden Age

This is the Spoon Weekly, a collection of some of the most interesting stories from the past week. Make sure to subscribe to get the top food tech news delivered straight to your inbox.

Can Food-Centric Streaming Platform Kittch Succeed Where Others Have Failed?

In 2016 I got a pitch about a hugely successful entrepreneur who was launching a streaming site dedicated to foodies.

Steve Chen, the co-founder of Youtube, was combining a love of food with his proven experience building online video to launch a new site that would “allow anyone to direct, produce, and host their own food show.” Called Nom, the site debuted at SXSW on March 9, 2016, and went live to the general public a few days later.

Two years and $4.7 million in funding later, Nom shut down.

There have been other sites with similar pitches since 2016, including YesChef, an “online education platform dedicated to cooking” complete with James Beard award-winning chefs like Nancy Silverton to teach cooking techniques and recipes. Or World Chef, a “platform for foodies; a place where truly special Chefs can share their extraordinary food experiences directly with their fans.”

And then was Fanwide’s hot-minute pivot to a chef platform in the middle of the pandemic, or GE’s attempt to create a video streaming platform for chefs called Chibo that has since shuttered.

So you’ll have to forgive me when my first reaction upon hearing the pitch for Kittch, a site that Vanity Fair calls Onlyfans for Chefs, is one of skepticism.

You can read the full story here.

Consumer Kitchen

The Golden Age of Tiny Dishwashers? Bob and Tetra Begin Making Their Way to a Countertop Near You

Ever since we first stumbled upon the diminutive dishwasher named Bob in the basement of the Sands convention center at CES 2019, we’ve been wondering when the little guy would arrive stateside.

The answer is this year. Daan Technology, the French startup behind the Bob, started shipping the small footprint dishwasher in Europe in 2020 and had originally slated the Bob to arrive in the US the same year. While that model Bob stayed in Europe, an updated global version is finally set to start shipping this year.

The company started a Kickstarter campaign this month and has bundles featuring Bob starting at $379 with an expected ship date of September 2022. For those who don’t want to buy through Kickstarter, my guess is the company will begin up selling Bob on its own website later this year.

Order options include a hose to connect the dishwasher to a faucet (Bob also has a one-gallon water reservoir that can be filled manually) and a range of colorful faceplates. The Bob Premium also includes an interesting UV-C ultraviolet option that allows the user to disinfect items (like phones) that can’t get wet.

You can read the full post here. 

Web3/Crypto

This Farmer’s Market Vendor Has Accepted Bitcoin for 5 Years. Here’s How Things Have Changed.

Back in 2017, before much of the general public had given cryptocurrency a second thought, Alessandro Stortini started accepting bitcoin as a form of payment at his local farmer’s market stand, La Pasta.

Since that time, virtual currencies have become mainstream as everyone from grandmas to pro athletes have jumped into the world of crypto. In fact, from 2017 to 2022, the number of crypto wallets went from under 12 million to over 81 million by January of 2022.

If you’re like me, you’d figure with almost seven times as many cryptocurrency wallets out there, the number of people looking to spend their virtual currency to buy pasta at their local farmer’s market would have gone up. Not so, according to Stortini.

“We got way more customers paying with bitcoin in 2017,” Stortini said.

Stortini told me the reason for that is because back in those early days, crypto owners were more willing to use it as a form of payment.

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Emily Elyse Miller Wants to Reinvent Breakfast Cereal. That Means Vegan Ingredients, Edgy Mascots, and (Of Course) NFTs

Emily Elyse Miller knows a thing or two about breakfast.

Not only has the one-time journalist and fashion trends forecaster written a book on the topic (complete with 380 recipes from 80 countries), but she’d also run a consulting company that helped world-renowned chefs like Enrique Olvera develop breakfast events.

But after years of writing and teaching about first-meal, Miller realized that cereal, the centerpiece of the American breakfast for generations of kids and adults, had gone stale. So she decided to start a cereal company of her own to reinvent the category.

Called OffLimits, Miller’s company created a line of irreverent brands like Dash and Zombie, each with its own ‘moody mascot’ and a clean ingredient list.

The funky mascots were important for Miller, because while she loved the rainbow-colored pop culture she grew up with in the cereal aisle, she felt it was time for something new.

“Tony the Tiger is not cool,” said Miller. “Cereal is one of the only products that carry culture in this unique way, and that culture has not been updated in decades.”

Read the full post at The Spoon.

Alternative Protein

SuperMeat Partners With Japanese Food Giant Ajinomoto To Scale Cultivated Meat Production

SuperMeat, a cell-cultured meat company based in Israel, and Ajinomoto, a large Japanese food and biotechnology conglomerate, announced today the formation of a strategic partnership to “to establish a commercially viable supply chain platform for the cultivated meat industry.”

According to the announcement, the partnership, which will include an investment by Ajinomoto in SuperMeat, will combine SuperMeat’s expertise in cultivated meat with Ajinomoto’s R&D technology and expertise in biotech and fermentation capabilities.

One of the main focuses of the new partnership will be in the development of cell-cultured growth media, the broth which contains the nutrients needed for animal cell growth, which remains one of the biggest overall cost drivers in the creation of cultivated meat. According to a study by the Good Food Institute conducted in 2020 of cultivated meat producers, 72% of respondents indicated that cell growth media represented over 50% of their operating costs, and 38% said growth media represented 80% or more of operating costs. By combining SuperMeat’s technology advancements in cultivated meat with Anjinomoto’s biomanufacturing expertise, the two companies hope to drive down costs while increasing the supply of food-grade growth factors.

You can read the full story at The Spoon.

Food Robots

Meet Don Roverto, X’s Robotic Rover on the Hunt for The Next Magic Bean to Feed a Hungry Planet

When you spend thirty years looking for a magic bean, you’re open to a helping hand when trying to find the next one. For the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, that help has arrived in the form of a crop-roving robot nicknamed Don Roverto.

The farmbot is part of Project Mineral, an endeavor from X – Google’s famous R&D subsidiary that researches challenging problems and searches for moonshots – to scale sustainable agriculture. In a blog post published today, project head Elliott Grant describes how Mineral has been assisting the Alliance for Biodiversity and CIAT to accelerate their work to understand and uncover hidden crop traits within the world’s largest bean collection.

From the post:

The Alliance’s team has been using Mineral’s technologies at their newly opened Future Seeds genebank in Colombia, which contains over 36,000 varieties of beans. The hope is that what the Alliance discovers with Mineral’s tools can be used to grow better beans for the world, faster.

According to Andy Jarvis, the Associate Director-General with the Alliance, the organization has spent decades building and analyzing its bean collection. Finally, after thirty years of searching, they found a “magic” bean with intrinsic drought-resistant characteristics. With tools like Don Roverto, the organization can process its discoveries at lightning speed and find the next game-changing bean faster than ever before.

To read the full story, click here!

With 5 Thousand Robots Shipped, Bear Robotics Raises $81 Million Series B to Accelerate Growth and Expand into New Markets

Today restaurant robotics startup Bear Robotics announced they have raised an $81 million Series B. The round was led by IMM, with participation by Cleveland Avenue. The new funding brings the company’s total venture investment to $117 million.

Bear, co-founded by former ex-Googler and restauranteur John Ha, makes server robots that help hospitality businesses do everything from delivering food to tables to bussing tables. A few years ago, the company started trialing its first robot, Penny, in Ha’s restaurant, the Kang Nam Tofu House in Milpitas, CA. Since those early days, the company has shipped 5000 robots, with much of the volume coming last year.

The company has been on a roll lately, winning contracts with big names like Denny’s to Chili’s and a sports stadium or two. Bear’s biggest markets today are in South Korea and Japan, with the US quickly catching up. With their new funding, the company plans to expand further across the US, Europe, and additional countries in southeast Asia

According to Bear COO and cofounder Juan Higueros, the volume they’ve experienced over the past couple of years is the result of a concerted effort to ramp up mass production in 2020.

“It took us all of 2020 to get it done,” Higueros told me via Zoom. “We really started ramping in Q1 of 2020 in the US. It’s been growing at a nice steady pace ever since and we anticipate the US market will continue to grow.”

You can read full post here.

The Golden Age of Tiny Dishwashers? Bob and Tetra Begin Making Their Way to a Countertop Near You

Ever since we first stumbled upon the diminutive dishwasher named Bob in the basement of the Sands convention center at CES 2019, we’ve been wondering when the little guy would arrive stateside.

The answer is this year. Daan Technology, the French startup behind the Bob, started shipping the small footprint dishwasher in Europe in 2020 and had originally slated the Bob to arrive in the US the same year. While that model Bob stayed in Europe, an updated global version is finally set to start shipping this year.

The company started a Kickstarter campaign this month and has bundles featuring Bob starting at $379 with an expected ship date of September 2022. For those who don’t want to buy through Kickstarter, my guess is the company will begin up selling Bob on its own website later this year.

Order options include a hose to connect the dishwasher to a faucet (Bob also has a one-gallon water reservoir that can be filled manually) and a range of colorful faceplates. The Bob Premium also includes an interesting UV-C ultraviolet option that allows the user to disinfect items (like phones) that can’t get wet.

While Bob’s Kickstarter backers get a starter pack of the company’s proprietary detergent cartridges (called cassettes), they’ll also want to order extras. Like the Tetra dishwasher, Bob’s small size necessitates special detergent cartridges to get the dosing right.

Speaking of Tetra, when we caught up with the dishwasher’s manufacturer Heatworks late last summer, they had just opened up preorder with a target ship date of May 22nd of this year. The company made the rounds at CES in January (see my interview with Heatworks founder Jerry Callahan here) and is still on track to ship this year.

While countertop dishwashers have been around for years, this new generation that includes the Bob and Tetra features smaller footprint sizes (both in terms of countertop size and resources) and puts a greater emphasis on aesthetics, with design touches like Bob’s colored faceplates or Tetra’s Frog studio driven design.

So if you’re in a small apartment, RV, or a cabin in the woods and would like to ditch the sponge, you’re time has arrived as we seem to be entering a new golden age for tiny dishwashers.

The Food Tech Show: Mystery Food Boxes, A Tiny Dishwasher and Restaurant Tech

Need something to listen to on your Monday morning commute?

Good news: The Spoon gang got together after a little summer podcast break to talk about some of the top food tech stories of the week.

The stories discussed on this weekly food tech wrapup include:

Click play to listen to the podcast or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

You Can Now (Finally) Preorder The Tetra Countertop Dishwasher

Tetra, the small countertop dishwasher that made a big splash when it debuted almost four years ago at CES 2018, is finally ready to ship take preorders.

Heatworks, the maker of Tetra, said that dishwasher will be available for a pre-order price of $399 ($499 MSRP) and will ship the product on May 18th, 2022, which apparently is No Dirty Dishes Day.

So what took a dishwasher originally expected to ship in mid-2019 an extra three years to get to market?

According to CEO Jerry Callahan, it had to do with a couple things, both related to getting the detergent just right for the small dishwasher.

The first was dosing.

“What we find out early on was that the dosing of its detergent was really critical,” Callahan told me in a phone interview this week. “We use a little bit of water, so if you overdosed it, the cleaning process wasn’t as good. If you underdosed the cleaning process wasn’t as good.”

Add in that each type of detergent brand has its own potency and efficacy, Callahan soon realized things would get out of hand if they tried to tell the consumer how much of each soap to use when running a load.

“I woke up in the middle night thinking about this matrix that we’d have to give everybody so that they put the right amount of detergent in. I said ‘guys that we can’t do that to people.'”

Another reason the Tetra took a while was the company wanted to make sure the cleaning detergent chemistry was just right. Typical dishwashing detergents have a mix of building agents, enzymes and surfactants, and while the varying composition and age of these different components may be fine in traditional dishwashing detergent, the cleaning cocktail needed to be pretty precise for a small machine that makes economic use of water like the Tetra.

This effort to get the dosing and chemistry right led them to a partnership with BASF. In a partnership announcement made last year, the two companies announced they would work on developing a detergent cartridge system for the Tetra. According to the announcement, each cartridge will be good for about 20 washes. Callahan told me that each wash would be an equivalent cost to a good detergent at a grocery store, or “about 35 cents a wash.” That puts cartridge pricing at around $7 per unit (pricing for cartridges were not announced in the release), but Callahan said each Tetra comes with a cartridge and preorders get an extra one thrown in.

Looking at the Tetra, I couldn’t help but notice that while the close-to-final product looks pretty close to the original design, there were a few differences.

Tetra in 2018
Tetra in 2021

One is the Tetra just looks like it has a bigger footprint. This is not surprising since the while original’s tiny design looked cool, the super small prototype didn’t seem all that practical with room for only two place settings (that’s if you didn’t have a silverware basket). The bigger Tetra of 2021 changes that with room for up to three place settings.

The current Tetra also is taller, which makes sense since, at some point, the self-contained washing system needed to make room for the dishwashing machinery as well as have a clear water chamber, a grey water tank and the cartridge system.

While big brands like Midea have been building countertop dishwashers for years, the Tetra – and those that followed like the Bob and the Capsule – are more self-contained and put a greater emphasis on sexy design. The Tetra still stands out compared to both the Bob (which is currently shipping) and the Capsule (expected to ship next year), in large part due to the all-glass top.

And it’s because of this unique design I think there will be some pent up demand for the Tetra, even three years after its debut. Callahan thinks so too, in part because of the 25 thousand or so who have signed up to be notified when the product is ready to ship.

Hopefully we should know by next year. In the meantime, you can check out what the Tetra 2021 looks like in action below.

The Tetra Dishwasher 2021

Heatworks Partners With BASF to Bring the Tiny Tetra Dishwasher To Market in 2021

When Heatworks introduced the Tetra at CES 2018, I imagine they were just as surprised as anyone when it became one of the most buzzed about new products at the annual tech show.

The tiny countertop dishwasher, which promised to clean a few settings of dishes with just half a gallon of water in 10 minutes, appeared on dozens of top of CES lists and the product’s small form factor, sexy design and estimated price point ($299 at the time) had many of us signing up to be notified when it was available.

All of that buzz was probably new for a company that had focused on making tankless water heaters to that point, which probably added a bit of pressure when the original ship date of end of 2018 slipped by.

When I asked them about it last year, Heatworks said the reason for the delay was they were primarily focused on bringing their latest generation water heater, the Model 3, to market. It turns out they also had another reason, which is they would ultimately need a partner to build the sophisticated detergent dispensing system required for such a small form factor device.

That partnership, announced today, is with German conglomerate BASF.

According to the release, the Tetra cartridge system “will be designed to deliver custom solutions and dosing, dependent on the selected wash cycle, ensuring each cleaning cycle is optimized. Tetra’s cartridges will last for multiple loads and consumers will be able to sign up for a subscription, so that cartridges are shipped to them automatically.”

Obviously a subscription based detergent system is a new wrinkle for the Tetra, one that might be a cause for reconsideration for those still waiting for a Tetra. Another potential concern might be the slightly higher price tag ($399) for the new device.

Still, unlike many of the other countertop dishwashers on the market, the Tetra doesn’t require plumbing or hoses and uses less than half of the water. Because of this self-sufficiency and the product’s attractive design, I imagine the 25,000 or so customers the company says have signed up expressing interest in the Tetra might still pull the trigger.

Hopefully soon they’ll have a chance: According to Heatworks and BASF, the Tetra will be available in the second half of 2021.

Editor Roundtable Podcast: We Have Opinions on Tiny Dishwashers & Beyond Burgers

In case you didn’t already know, The Spoon team has lots of opinions. As you might guess, those opinions are especially pronounced when it comes to food and kitchen gadgets.

And so we decided to get together and get some things off our chest on this Editor Roundtable edition of the Food Tech Show.

Here’s what we talked about:

In addition to lots of opinions, we also share sound effects (or at least I do).

As always, please subscribe, play (and rate!) the podcast in Apple podcasts (or your favorite pod player), download direct or just click play below.

Tetra, the Tiny Countertop Dishwasher Everyone Fell in Love with, Now Won’t Ship Until 2020

Exactly no one predicted that a dishwasher would steal the show at CES, but that’s what happened in Vegas in January of 2018.

Originally expected to be available for purchase at the end of 2018, the Tetra dishwasher from Heatworks had attendees saying “take our money” with its promise of a ten minute wash cycle, miserly water usage and a futuristic design that made many of us (including me) weirdly ok with the idea of putting a dishwasher on our already crowded countertops.

Now, however, those of us ready to plop down $299 for the Tetra can hold onto our money for another year: the countertop dishwasher now isn’t expected to ship until some time in 2020.

Why the slipping ship dates? According to company spokesperson Melissa Verzwyvelt, the issue had to do more with straightening out contract manufacturing issues with the company’s latest generation water heater, the Model 3, which took focus and resources away from the company’s newest product line.

“With Tetra, we have had to push our dates back twice now because we have had a few production issues with our MODEL 3 Water Heater that have been out of our control,” Verzwyvelt told me via email. “So instead of finalizing Tetra’s specifications and distribution channels as we had anticipated, our team’s focus and resources have gone to resolving MODEL 3 contract manufacturer problems.”

That’s a bummer for those of us eager to buy the Tetra, but an even bigger one for Heatworks. After all, the company had lots of buzz coming out of CES two years in a row for its new product line. You have to think some folks will possibly move on by the time it finally ships, or even consider another entrant (say hi, Bob).

On the other hand, the company’s core business has been water heaters (it’s where the patented water heating technology in the Tetra comes from), so it makes sense to get that ironed out first.

Some of you may be wondering about the status of the DUO, the new portable water heating carafe the company debuted at CES this year. According to Verzwyvelt, with the Model 3 manufacturing issues behind them, the company is also busy working on getting the DUO to market as well, which means hopefully they’ll meet the 2020 ship date I predicted in January of this year.

You can get a look at the Tetra in the video below.

Meet the DUO, The Portable Carafe With Precision Temperature Control

At last year’s CES, one of my favorite new products was the Tetra, a small countertop dishwasher that cleans the equivalent of two place settings of dishes in about 15 minutes with a single gallon of water.

The product was introduced by Heatworks, a company I had never heard of before, mostly because I was not in the business of writing about water heaters.

Maybe I should have been paying more attention because, as it turns out, the technology that powers their water heaters can be used in a variety of devices, including the company’s latest, a portable water carafe with precision temperature control called the DUO.

The DUO, which the company is introducing at CES 2019, is a battery powered portable carafe that holds up to a liter of water. The DUO can heat water to within 1° of a desired setpoint and also also includes a water filtration system.

I caught up with Heatworks CEO, Jerry Callahan, at CES Unveiled, who told me that they made the DUO because they realized how important precise water temperature was to making anything from a good cup of coffee to green tea to baby formula.

“We started with the premise that people really wanted to get the exact right temperature,” said Callahan.

I could see myself using a DUO when I’m in a hotel room (does anyone else get grossed out by hotel coffee machines? Thought so) or when I’m camping. I can also see using it for filtering drinking water on the road since I never know how good the drinking water is in any city I might be in.

When I asked Callahan when the DUO might ship, he said they were hoping that it would be available by end of the year. My assumption is that probably means first half 2020, in large part because the company missed its original promised ship date for the Tetra (which they are now promising out by Q1), and at this point the DUO is still largely in prototype stage.

You can hear my full conversation with Callahan from the show floor below.

Meet the Duo, a portable water carafe with precision temperature control

Podcast: The CES 2018 Smart Kitchen & Foodtech Wrapup Show

CES 2018 is in the books. It was a hectic week packed with smart kitchen news and showcases. Mike was on the floor in Las Vegas and reveals the big trends (voice activation everywhere!), the cool news stuff (guided cooking!), and the countertop dishwasher he calls “sexy.”

Take a listen for all the in-depth analysis you need. You can also subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show in Apple Podcasts or download it here.

Meet Tetra, A $299 Countertop Dishwasher That Finishes A Wash Cycle In Ten Minutes

The reason why the dishwasher is one of those everyday conveniences most of us don’t think about is because we don’t have to; after all, today’s dishwashers pretty much all come in the same size, use roughly the same amount of water, and all take about an hour or more to run through a wash cycle.

But here’s the problem with one-sized fits all machines: not every task – or dish load – is the same size. So, when I ran across a demo of the Tetra countertop dishwasher at CES Unveiled, I was intrigued.

The Tetra is small as dishwashers go. The total counter space it takes up is roughly equivalent to that of a toaster oven. It’s also, if I might say, pretty cool looking for a dishwasher. You can see what it looks like in the video below:

Why would one want a small form factor dishwasher? For one, traditional dishwashers are pretty wasteful. With the Tetra, the user simply pours in half a gallon of water inside and that is all it needs for a full wash cycle.

It’s also quick. My old KitchenAid usually takes an hour or more to rumble through a cycle, but the Tetra finishes a cycle in 10 minutes.

And to top it all off, the device also will act as a sous vide appliance.

One reason I like the idea of the Tetra is I often find my usage of certain dishes is out of sync with how we use our dishwasher.  Because it often takes my family a day and half to dirty up enough dishes run a load, I often find myself handwashing my favorite mug or Nutribullet glass when it’s time to make a smoothie. The Tetra is perfect for these type of quick wash cycles for go-to dishes. And for someone like a parent with a newborn who is constantly washing baby bottles, it would make even more sense.

The Tetra is from a company called Heatworks, which you may have heard of for their tankless electric water heaters. The company is announcing its third generation water heater at CES (available in February), and the Tetra is the company’s first home appliance.

And in case you’re wondering – you don’t need a Heatworks water heater to heat your water for the Tetra – it has a mini one built inside.

The Tetra is expected to ship by the end of this year.