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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Weber

Weber Announces New Smart Gas Grills Using the June OS

Weber announced it is adding new smart grills to its Genesis and Spirit lines of gas grills. The new smart grills feature the Weber Connect technology, which is powered by the June OS, and will provide precision and guided cooking to backyard barbecuers.

The new line of Weber smart grills feature WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, temperature probes and a built-in LED display. Using either the accompanying mobile app or the LED display, grillers can monitor the temperature of the grill as well as the doneness of what’s being grilled. The app will also alert grillers when it’s time to flip and serve their food.

What the grill won’t do, however, is automate your grilling. So, unlike a June oven, which automatically changes the type of heat (bake, broil, etc.) and temperature to cook your food, the Weber smart grill requires manual temperature controls. This is a bit of a bummer, but probably understandable given that the grill would have to regulate the flow of gas rather than electric current to adjust temperatures.

Today’s announcement comes a little less than a month after Weber acquired smart oven maker, June. June’s technology was used in the SmokeFire wood pellet grill back in 2019, and and two developed the Connect Hub, a small device that added smart cooking features to conventional grills.

Innovation in the outdoor grill space has certainly, errr, heated up over the past few years. Traeger has its own line of connected smart pellet smokers, German brand, Otto has a line of connected and modular grill components, and Spark launched its line of precision charcoal grills.

The new smart grills from Weber are all listed as “Coming Soon” on the company’s website. Prices range anywhere from $799 to $1,299.

What Does Weber Acquiring June Say About the Smart Oven Market?

When Weber announced this week that it was acquiring smart oven maker, June, my first thought was — phew.

There was relief in knowing that June, the company, wasn’t going under any time soon, so my family will continue to enjoy June, the oven, for the foreseeable future. Instead of being a scrappy startup and dealing with issues like funding, scaling and exits, June now enjoys the deep pockets and vast sales network of grilling giant, Weber. In other words, June lives on and my smart oven won’t get bricked.

At least I hope not.

Acquisitions can get weird and who knows what Weber has in store for June, or how those plans will change. An old saw in business acquisitions is that companies don’t fully realize what they’ve bought until six months after the deal is closed.

Anyway, after the initial wave of relief, my thoughts turned to the countertop smart oven market in general, a category that still quite young. After all, June launched its first gen oven in December of 2016, which isn’t that long ago. But Weber buying June is the second major acquisition in the space since then. Brava, which started shipping its oven that cooks with light in November of 2018, was acquired by Middleby in November of 2019. Even Anova, which only launched its first smart oven last year, is owned by Electrolux.

That pretty much just leaves Tovala and Suvie as the remaining independents in the countertop smart oven space. But how long with they last?

Suvie positions itself more as a kitchen robot, in part because it doesn’t just re-heat food, it also keeps it cold and times the cooking to fit your schedule. Tovala raised $20 million and saw its business accelerate last year, thanks in part to the pandemic keeping people at home. It also doesn’t hurt that the company has has a low price point ($300) for its oven.

Anova is certainly pushing its steam-sous vide cooking as a differentiator rather than any “smart” capabilities as it enters the market. At $599 it’s not cheap per se, but Anova is promising more professional grade cooking than it is high-tech, connected bells and whistles.

A couple of years back, I wondered which companies would survive the kitchen countertopocalypse. There were so many multi-purpose (June) and single-purpose (Rotimatic) smart countertop devices coming to market that the average kitchen just doesn’t have the space to support them all. The field would winnow down, especially because some of these countertop ovens are big and take up a lot of space.

At the same time the countertop oven space is consolidating, we’re starting to see key smart features being added to traditional built-in ovens from the big players. At CES 2019, Whirlpool showed off its KitchenAid Smart Oven+, which featured automated cook programs. LG debuted an oven at CES this year that featured an Air Sous Vide setting.

The countertop smart oven space won’t disappear completely. The smaller size and cooking cavity can make preparing meals easier than firing up the gigantic built-in oven. And because they are cheaper than built-ins and don’t require installation, countertop ovens can be fertile territory for innovation. So the field is ripe for a new wave of startups to create and launch new cooking technology on a smaller scale. If that tech catches on with consumers, a bigger appliance company will acquire that startup and the cycle continues. And the industry as a whole can find relief in that.

Weber Acquires Smart Oven Maker June

Grill giant Weber announced today that it has acquired smart oven maker June. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. June had raised a total of $29.5 million in funding.

According to the press announcement, “Weber has acquired 100 percent of June, including its proprietary software, technology, intellectual property, and the June Oven line of products and accessories.”

The two companies had worked together previously on the Weber Connect, a connected temperature monitor and guided cooking device that helped grillers monitor and cook meats, and the SmokeFire pellet grill.

June is best known as being one company in the first cohort of smart-oven makers that included Tovala, Brava and Suvie. The June oven features a camera that can identify foods placed inside and automated cook programs for a wide range of foods. The company launched its third-gen June oven in October of last year.

According to today’s press release, the acquisition of June will equip Weber with technology that can “revolutionize the outdoor cooking experience.” So it’s not hard to guess that we’ll be seeing fancier, more high-tech grills coming to market soon.

On the other side of the equation, June will now have access to Weber’s gigantic sales network, infrastructure and resources to increase its sales and further develop its connected cooking platform.

June is the second connected, “smart” countertop oven makers to get acquired. In November of 2019, Middleby acquired Brava, which used special light technology to cook dishes.

FWIW, I have a second-gen June and my family uses it daily. Personally, I like June being acquired by a big company like Weber because it (hopefully) means that I don’t have to worry about June going out of business and support for my oven disappearing.

New Weber Connect Hub Turns any Grill into a Smart Grill

Barbeque brand Weber and June, maker of the June smart oven, today introduced the Weber Connect Smart Grilling Hub, a connected device that allows users to bring smart functionality to the grill they already have.

The Hub is a small device that sits outside any grill. There are four inputs on the Hub which you can use for food probes and to monitor the internal temperature of what you’re cooking. There’s also an external thermometer to measure the ambient cooking temperature inside the grill.

The Hub wirelessly displays these readings and communicates them back to the Weber Connect mobile app, powered by the June OS, which provides guidance on grill set up, when to flip food and when to take it off the grill.

This is the second public product collaboration between Weber and June. Back in November the two companies announced the SmokeFire connected wood pellet grill that also uses the Weber Connect app to guide your grilling. The Smokefire costs roughly a thousand bucks and ships early this year.

If it works as advertised, the Weber Smart Grilling Hub will be able to turn your existing grill into a smart one for $130 when it comes out in “early 2020.” While that’s less expensive than a Smokefire grill, the Hub won’t be able to do all the things the Smokefire does, like automatically adjusting the temperature or keeping itself at a precise temperature.

I’ve been using the Traeger WiFi connected Pro pellet grill over the holidays and I can say firsthand that having the ability to monitor and control the grill remotely from a phone is a game-changer for novice grillers like myself. The one thing lacking in the Traeger, however, is the app design, which can be a bit clunky. As a happy June Oven owner, I’m excited to see what kind of design sensibilities June will bring to Weber’s grilling experience.

Newsletter: Will E-Bikes Take Charge? Plus, Precise Heating Comes Home

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Delivery robots like those from Starship and self-driving vehicles like Nuro‘s grab a lot of headlines when it comes to the future of food and meal delivery. And it’s easy to understand why–robots are cool, man! But I have one bit of advice when it comes to the business of food delivery as we head into 2020:

Don’t sleep on electric bikes. They could be a huge platform in cities.

This is a prediction I’ve made before, when Uber bought e-bike rental company Jump last year. But yesterday’s announcement that Australian company Bolt Bikes launched its e-bikes for delivery service in the U.S. and U.K. got me thinking about a potential bicycle boom in food delivery.

TechCrunch reports that Bolt rents out bikes for commercial use on a two-week contract for $39. As TechCrunch writes, “The Bolt Bikes platform includes the electric bike, fleet management software, financing and servicing. Subscribers get 24-hour access to the bike. A battery charger, phone holder, phone USB port, secure U-Lock and safety induction is included.” Postmates has reportedly been piloting Bolt Bikes in SF since June.

E-bikes are actually great for city environments. They are fast, nimble on traffic-choked streets and take (most of) the work out of going uphill. Plus they have human drivers, so you don’t have to worry about the potential human/robot issues that come with even small autonomous delivery vehicles.

Though they aren’t as well suited for longer distances, e-bikes could also work in some suburban areas with tightly packed homes (think: housing developments), especially as part of a hub-and-spoke model. Next summer, Uber Eats is testing drone delivery of food to centralized drop off points where delivery people pick orders up and drive them the last mile. Instead of cars rolling around the suburbs, an e-bike could make that last mile more economical, faster (no need to park) and more welcome for neighborhoods that don’t want a lot more delivery cars driving around.

Bicycles already have already enjoyed a place in food delivery, especially in more dense urban areas, but the advent of affordable e-bikes could really charge up their use for getting you fed.

Precision Temperatures

I’m going to steal from WIRED here for a moment, but:

TIRED: Heat
WIRED: Precise heat control to the exact temperature you want

We covered two different technologies this week deliver granular control to the way you heat either a beverage or your BBQ.

First up we took Ember’s new Travel Mug<sup>2</sup> out for a spin. The Tesla of travel coffee mugs runs a whopping $180 and keeps your coffee at a constant hot temperature of your choosing. This second-generation Ember mug features great design and clever controls, but sadly the promised three-hour battery life diminished pretty quickly in real world circumstances. Check out our full review.

On a much larger scale, the just-announced Weber SmokeFire grill features the connected cooking smarts of a June Oven. The two companies announced that the JuneOS will power the Weber Connect app that controls the SmokeFire. You can also get step-by-step instructions to become a master griller and dial in a constant temperature for those long brisket smoking sessions.

The Ember Travel Mug <sup>2</sup> is available now if you’re looking for a pricey stocking stuffer, and while the SmokeFire ($999) won’t be out until 2020, you can pre-order it on Cyber Monday.

The New Spoon Logo

A New Spoon

If you’ve been to our website this week, then you’ll notice an entirely new look and a new logo.

As Spoon founder Mike Wolf noted when introducing the new site yesterday:

We launched the Spoon in October 2016. At the time, we didn’t know what it would become, all we knew is that we wanted to tell the stories of the people and companies shaping the future of food and cooking.

He went on, saying:

With thousands of stories published and hundreds of thousands of readers per month, The Spoon is a big part of what we do and we figured it was time the site got a fresh coat of paint and maybe even a new beam or two.

The Spoon will remain the best place for all the food tech news and analysis you need to know, it’s just going to be easier to read and navigate. G’head and click through it and tell us what you think!

Speaking of our new logo, you’ll be able to see it on display in Vegas during CES at our second annual FoodTech Live. Last year we had over forty companies showing their stuff, so if you have new kitchen or food tech product and want to show off your wares, make sure to check out our event page!