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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Video: Grove CEO Gabe Blanchet Has Big Plans for Home Farming

If you’re like me, right now you have a pot of thyme (or rosemary, or basil) clinging to life on your windowsill. No matter how much I water it or how carefully I place it in the sunshine, I cannot keep plants alive—even simple indoor ones like herbs.

This is a huge bummer because, while I love to cook with fresh herbs, they can be quite pricey at the grocery store, tend to wilt in the fridge within days, and aren’t always of the highest quality. But home growing systems like Grove are trying to help those without green thumbs (guilty) transform their kitchens, living rooms, and empty garages into mini indoor farms.

A model of how Grove’s indoor farming systems would function in the home.

Though they’re not the only ones leveraging IoT to make indoor growing kits, Grove is thinking big to bring home farming systems to wide swaths of consumers. In order to get consumers to install growing systems in their house, they’ve got to a) look nice, and b) deliver good, consistent results. Grove has teamed up with major appliance and furniture companies to check both of these boxes: Blanchet and his team will provide home ag software and seed pods, and their partners will create custom indoor farming hardware to match.

Grove showed off their initial hydroponic home farming system at the Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase in 2016. He returned in 2017 and sat down with SKS founder Mike Wolf to talk about the future of small-scale indoor farming and how he’s able to grow 30-40% of his own food, right at home.

Watch the video and then head over here to check out more videos from Smart Kitchen Summits of yore.

Got a food tech startup idea of your own? Apply for our Startup Showcase for SKS Europe, June 11-12th in Dublin, Ireland. 

Video: Will Software Change the Way We Cook? (Hint: Yes)

What do you think software tastes like?

According to Jon Jenkins, Director of Technology at Hestan Smart Labs (the company behind the Hestan Cue), it tastes like consistency. In this video from the Smart Kitchen Summit, Jenkins explains how software can revolutionize the way that home cooks use recipes, eliminating human error to help them achieve the same high-quality results every time—just like a restaurant.

Jenkins has a seasoned background in both hardware and software. He cut his teeth at Amazon and Pinterest building software around personalization before he “caught the hardware bug” in 2014. Shortly afterward, he joined the team at Hestan Smart Cooking, the company behind guided cooking system Hestan Cue.

During his talk, Jenkins posed some interesting questions:

  • Why don’t recipes look exactly the same every time, no matter who cooks them?
  • How do we reduce variability and eliminate human error in the kitchen?
  • Why can’t home cooks have the same level of output consistency that you’d find at a Thomas Keller restaurant?

The answer to all of these queries, as you might have guessed, is software. Watch the video to see Jenkins make some bold assertions about the future of recipes, crack a few jokes, and explain how software will change the way the way we cook in the future.

Want to rub shoulders with innovators in the future of food and cooking? We – and Hestan Cue’s Jon Jenkins – will be in Dublin on June 11th-12th for our first Smart Kitchen Summit Europe. We hope to see you there!

Video: James Ehrlich Talks Food, Epiphanies, & the (Eco)Village of the Future

Take a second, right now, and picture the community of the future. Are there green roofs, lazily-turning windmills, and streetlights powered by solar energy? Maybe even a lawn-mowing robot or two?

James Ehrlich, CEO of ReGen Villages, has a pretty innovative vision for how neighborhoods of the future should look and function. After a career as a tech entrepreneur and television producer for The Hippy Gourmet, with a few epiphanies along the way, he came to the sobering realization that “the planet is, in fact, falling apart.”

In response, Ehrlich began sketching out plans for modern ecovillages with food “not as a sidebar or a flourish, but as the actual mechanism for how a neighborhood infrastructure is built.” ReGen Villages is currently in the midst of construction their first pilot community in Almere, Netherlands, with plans to expand.

After he wowed us with his optimistic vision for the future of homes, neighborhoods, and communities at the Smart Kitchen Summit last year, Ehrlich sat down with Allen Weiner of The Spoon chat with about epiphanies (and breakdowns), the concept behind ReGen Villages, and what’s on the horizon (hint: their ecovillages might be coming to a state near you!).

Psst—look out for videos from past Smart Kitchen Summits every Friday on The Spoon. And if you’re in Europe (or just want an excuse to EuroTrip), register for SKS Europe, coming to Dublin in June.

Smart Kitchen Appliances: What If “Smart” Means Superior Instead Of Connected?

One of the core discussions around the smart kitchen at SKS over the past three years has been the function and usability of smart devices in the kitchen. What devices will actually help us cook better food more easily and what are just silly attempts at connectivity for connectivity’s sake?

Breville has a different take on what makes an appliance smart, and it goes well beyond the ability to connect to its devices via a smart app. The new Breville Smart Oven Air has unique technology that allows for incredibly precise temperature control and can actually change how the heat is distributed. In other words, depending on the requirements of the specific dish you’re cooking, you can make the oven hotter at the front, top, bottom, or back of the chamber.

Allen Weiner of The Spoon sat down with Scott Brady, General Manager of Global Marketing at Breville at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit to talk about how Breville’s smart oven makes life easier in the kitchen. According to Brady, “this precise heat distribution lets you complete a lot of simple cooking tasks a lot better.”

For example, if you’re baking a cake, you’ll want the heat focused on the bottom of the oven to prevent it from cracking; whereas, for a pizza, you’ll want the heat evenly distributed throughout. Both are possibilities with the Breville oven, so that you can get the perfect finish no matter what you’re cooking. And the guesswork of how to heat and at what temperature isn’t left up to the user – the oven will course correct and heat to perfection no matter what the dish.

Another trend in kitchen appliances seems to be more all-in-one functionality. The future kitchen will likely not have a slow cooker, an oven, a toaster, a microwave and a sous vide machine but rather one or two devices that does most of that with ease. Breville is trying to pull that off with the Smart Oven Air. For one, it’s bringing in air-frying, which is a much healthier way to prepare your favorite fried foods. Instead of using hot oil, the oven uses fast-moving convection heat to mimic the effect of a traditional deep-fryer. Precise temperature control and regulated air movement mean that this oven can also dehydrate fruit, as well as act as a slow-cooker.

The question is: The Breville oven may be smart, but where does the company stand on connectivity?

For Breville, Brady says, “We don’t want to be connected for connected’s sake.” Instead, their goal is to create products that offer unique, new technology that’s truly helpful—not cumbersome. The future of smart kitchen devices is creative technology that actually makes culinary tasks easier for the user when combined with the convenience of an app, a built-in recipe database and intelligence baked into the device itself.

Brady says Breville is working on products that meet this promise, and you can expect them in 2018.

Oliver Aims To Take One Pot Cooking To The Next Level

The holy grail of convenience cooking has always been the one pot solution. Since the early 1970s, the CrockPot and other less famous brands of slow cooking machines dominated the kitchen as the solution for “set it and forget it” meals. Whether it was pork roasts, applesauce, stews or chili, the Crock Pot lets users combine (mostly) raw ingredients, turn the device on and come back later in the day to a fully cooked meal. In 2009, with the rise of the electric pressure cooker, the Instant Pot debuted and the debate began as to which technology was actually more useful.

The Instant Pot has a slow cooker feature, but the love of the device comes from its ability to produce cooked food in a much shorter amount of time through pressure cooking.

But whether you’re team Crock Pot or team Instant Pot, one thing remains true: one pot cooking tech hasn’t changed much in the last 40+ years. They still require users to dump a slew of ingredients all at once into a large bowl (or manually add different ingredients at different times) and hope it all cooks perfectly. But not every food item requires the same amount of time – or the same levels of heat – to cook.

This was the challenge Else Labs was trying to tackle with new one pot automated cooking machine Oliver. The technology and device design allows ingredients to be divided into dispensing canisters and then placed into the pot for cooking when the recipe-driven app tells it to.

Else Labs Founder & CEO Khalid Aboujassoum sat down with The Spoon’s Allen Weiner at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit.

“This technology takes slow cooking to a new level. You can taste every ingredient – they all have the right texture and right flavor because they were cooked correctly,” said Aboujassoum.

Oliver isn’t exactly a slow cooker; it mimics the way you’d cook on a stove top (saute onions first, add vegetables, cook meat around it, make the broth separate, etc) – but it enables automation and connectivity to take over and relieve the cook from standing over the stove for the entire process.

Oliver does what Crock Pot and Instant Pot can’t – understand the sequence and temperature of how each ingredient should be cooked and mimic those actions the way a human cook would. Oliver dispenses at the right time and heats to the right temperature with a robotic stirring arm built in to stir as needed.

“Tell Oliver ‘I need food by six’ and the machine will do the math for you in terms of when to start, stir, dispense and stop,” said Aboujassoum.

Another differentiator? Oliver records the work of pros so busy home cooks can replicate their work. According to Aboujassoum, the recipes generated from the Oliver app are all created with professional chefs. As the chefs make their recipes with Oliver, Oliver and the app capture all the actions, recording the sequence so it can be automated and replicated for Oliver users. Eventually, the plan is to let the Oliver user community contribute and add recipes using this same method to capture a more diverse range of content.

It took almost 40 years for the Crock Pot to have a serious competitor but it seems the Instant Pot may not enjoy the same length of time as a crowd favorite. Oliver is poised to launch in 2018.

 

The Recipe For Kitchen Tech Starts & Ends With The Consumer In Mind (VIDEO)

Jane Freiman spends much of her time in the Campbell’s Soup Test Kitchen diving into the minds of consumers in their own kitchens. “We go shopping with them, we go into their home, we watch them cook, we eat with them, we talk to them about food,” she explained to an audience at the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit.

The head of the test kitchen, Freiman explains their mantra – one that they had written on the kitchen walls that speak to this deep commitment to staying true to what their customers want and need.

“It starts and ends with the consumer in mind.”

After all, Freiman asks, “Who wants to develop a product that no one wants?”

The team at the Campbell’s Soup Test Kitchen look across generations to find commonalities and trends, even as technology and the sharing economy change old behaviors and patterns. And they’ve found interesting generational patterns; millennials and empty nesters, for example, have a lot in common in terms of what they’re looking for in the kitchen.

They’re both likely cooking for one or two people and struggling with how to do that easily. The empty nester is thinking – I only know how to cook these bigger meals for my family, how can I reduce waste and cook the right amount whereas younger cooks are unsure about how to get started and how to meal plan. Both generations include cooks that have passion for food, but the Millenials are the ones fueling the sharing economy. Where sharing recipes used to be between family and friends, it is now done through apps and online. It’s now possible to share recipes between strangers, across cultures and continents.

By studying trends in cooking and eating, companies can better understand not only if their product is serving the right need for the right audience, also find out if it’s the right time. Freiman emphasizes the importance of this in her work.

“As a test kitchen of a major brand – we have to look, watch and know – when is the right time for us to act? When is the right time for us to use that new technology?”

And Freiman is quick to point out that just because a consumer is tech savvy doesn’t just mean they’re necessarily younger. The explosion of Wi-Fi/Bluetooth enabled cooking instruments and the use of your smartphone to get recipes wherever you are is transforming consumer behavior across demographics.

“Our survey of consumers 18-65 showed that everything from the high-tech (connected devices) – to low-tech (spiralizers, microwave friendly pasta cooker) are considered kitchen tech. They don’t differentiate.”

The test kitchen survey also found the key things consumers are looking for in a tech product for the kitchen, including:

  • The equipment should assist them with accuracy in their cooking; i.e. tell me when the food is done, tell me how I can cook perfectly every time and make it quicker so I can spend more time elsewhere.
  • The devices should enable them to find ways to cook healthier; whether through methods, ingredients or recipe discovery, tech should focus on helping consumers source healthier meals.
  • The gadget should be sturdy and easy to clean – and of course, easy to use.

Freiman cautioned the crowd not to deliver connectivity for its own sake, or to be too gimmicky with innovation. She stressed the importance for food tech and smart kitchen companies to be grounded in consumer insights and focus on what type of person they’re looking to assist in the kitchen.

“Know what tools they use, what they read, where they shop and where do they find recipes…” and make sure your product finds a path to making one or more of those easier and better.