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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Whirlpool

The Food Tech News Show: Apple’s Building Home Robots!

Join us at 1 PM Pacific where we’ll be talking about the food tech stories of the week!

This week, we’ll be joined by Scott Heimendinger, former founder of Sansaire and current builder of the next big idea in home knives at Seattle Ultrasonics.

The live stream can be watched below.

We love robots - FTNS

Here are the stories we’ll be talking about:

Apple is working on robots for the home! – From Bloomberg: “The original concept for the robot was a device that could navigate entirely on its own without human intervention — like the car — and serve as a videoconferencing tool. One pie-in-the-sky idea within Apple was having it be able to handle chores, like cleaning dishes in a sink.

Google has used its latest AI to create a new tool that creates a fusion recipe between two culinary cultures. Lifehacker: “According to Google,  Food Mood can provide creative inspiration for your next meal. Select two countries and this fusion recipe generator will create one for you. You can choose whether you would like to cook a starter, a soup, a main course or a dessert. For example, why not try a unique blend of flavors from Sri Lanka and Uganda or mixing influences from Oman and Belgium? This experiment was created by artists Emmanuel Durgoni and Gaël Hugo, and uses Gemini 1.0 Pro via Vertex AI.”

Whirlpool has let the entire Yummly team go. Appliance giant Whirlpool has laid off its entire Yummly team. According to industry sources, the company recently laid off all the employees for the recipe and cooking app and website. These sources tell the Spoon that it’s unclear what the company plans to do with the property it acquired in 2017.

Amazon Pulling ‘Just Walk Out’ from Amazon Fresh Grocery Stores – According to a story published in The Information, Amazon is planning to pull its Just Walk Out cashierless technology from its large-format grocery store, Amazon Fresh.

One Robot Pizza Chain Operator Breaks Down the Cost Each Part of the Pizza-Making Process – For small operators (and big ones as well) in the pizza business, Andrew Simmons’s posts on Linkedin have become must-read material.

Whirlpool Lays Off Entire Team for Cooking and Recipe App Yummly

Appliance giant Whirlpool has let its entire Yummly team go. According to industry sources, the company recently laid off all the employees for the recipe and cooking app and website. These sources tell the Spoon that it’s unclear what the company plans to do with the property it acquired in 2017.

The news of the layoffs marks a significant de-emphasis on creating a connected cooking experience tailored around custom-designed recipes with step-by-step cooking.

“Every day, millions of consumers around the world use Whirlpool Corporation appliances to prepare meals for their families. The Yummly acquisition will allow these consumers to dramatically reduce the stress from meal planning by helping answer the age-old question, ‘What’s for dinner tonight?'” the company said at the time of the acquisition.

After Whirlpool acquired Yummly, it beefed up the content team and hired content creators to build a recipe catalog with cooking guidance. It also added features such as built-in food image recognition capabilities and put out a Yummly-connected thermometer (which is still available for purchase). The company announced an update with new features as recently as last fall.

The move to let the Yummly team go is indicative of appliance brands de-emphasizing apps with human-powered editorial-driven content, especially as some start to investigate how they can leverage generative AI to power new features and content. The Spoon has heard rumblings that other appliance brands are starting to build generative AI-powered content libraries and consumer-facing UI with mixed results. My guess is this trend will only continue, even as appliances begin to revisit their smart appliance strategies after lessons from the first wave of product build-out.

Can Whirlpool’s Deal to Use BORA’s Downdraft Ventilation Add Momentum to Induction in the US?

One of the more intriguing long-term technology trends in the kitchen industry has been the up-and-down market evolution of induction cooking. Though introduced almost a century ago at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, residential induction cooktops only became widely available in the early 2000s and have never really taken off here in the States due to, among other things, America’s love affair with gas cooking.

There are other factors – like the requirement for new cookware with induction cooking and the technology’s historically higher price point – but the bottom line is gas has long enjoyed pole position in American homes and on appliance show floors across the US.

However, induction cooking has slowly but surely been gaining ground over the past couple of years. Lower prices, health benefits, and local government building restrictions have given the technology momentum.

And now, at least if you’re Whirlpool, induction cooktop may have another ace up its sleeve in the form of downdraft ventilation. That’s because the appliance giant announced today they’ve teamed up with downdraft ventilation specialist BORA to bring the German company’s technology to the US market. From an article I wrote for Forbes (ed note: where I’ve long been a contributor and the publication Whirlpool agreed to an exclusive):

By adding downdraft technology, Whirlpool hopes to capitalize on the growing popularity of a venting technology that does away with the traditional vent hood and puts additional wind at the back of induction cooking here in the US. Reviews for downdraft ventilation, which like induction has taken off faster in Europe, have been mixed, but gradual improvements in the technology have caused some to give it a second look.

For BORA, the deal marks the first time the company has agreed to license the technology to an external company.

“This is the first time since the beginning of BORA that I have given away the right for the technology,” Willi Bruckbauer, company founder, told me in an interview. “I founded the company in the year 2007. More and more people liked the idea, like the product, and now it’s ready to go from Europe to the US.”

For much of its life, reviews for downdraft technology have been pretty mixed. Clogged filters and an inability to capture all smoke and cooking smells have been top complaints. However, BORA’s patented technology has been earning rave reviews in the European market, so Whirlpool may just have locked up a deal that could help it create separation from other kitchen brands that already have downdraft technology for their gas cooktops and are planning rollouts of downdraft technology with induction cooktop models.

And let’s be honest: kitchen hoods, while effective, often obstruct views and seem out of place in kitchen islands. And, with kitchen islands making a comeback as more home designers and kitchen remodelers are opting for open designs lately, the timing for this partnership seems especially good for Whirlpool.

According to Whirlpool, they are slotting the rollout of the BORA-powered downdraft technology in its JennAir and KitchenAid brands in the second half of 2025. By combining what some see as the world’s leading downdraft technology exclusively with its induction cooktops, Whirlpool could set itself up for additional momentum for its induction models and help drive interest in the electrified cooking technology in the US market.

Yummly App Adds New Features, Reminding Us It’s Still Around Six Years After Whirlpool Deal

Today, recipe and guided cooking app Yummly announced a refreshed set of features, including what it describes as AI-powered recipe recommendations, an improved meal planner feature, and integration with an upgraded Yummly thermometer.

Since Whirlpool acquired Yummly, the recipe recommendation and cooking guidance app has largely flown below the radar while adding periodic incremental improvements over the years. And as far as I can tell, the announced improvements are par for the course.

This includes the new and improved “AI-powered recipe recommendations,” which sounds a lot like the things the company was promoting almost five years ago when they were touting “AI-powered personalization.” It’s not immediately clear how these AI-powered recommendations differ from previous AI-enabled recommendations, but we’ll have to take the company’s word for it.

The app’s improved meal planner function looks like it’s primarily focused on further building out a shoppable recipe function, something that has become relatively common in recent years for many recipe apps as a way to monetize through affiliate marketing commerce. The Yummly meal-planning shoppable recipe meal planning capability is a premium feature for users through a monthly subscription.

Whirlpool is hardly mentioned in the release (outside of the About Yummly boilerplate at the bottom), and the only real evidence of the company’s influence is the integration with an improved Yummly Thermometer, which is a product that Whirlpool has gone through pains to integrate with a number of their appliances. According to the announcement, the new Yummly thermometer now has three sensors, up from the two sensors in the previous generation.

While Whirlpool seems content to let Yummly operate mainly as a standalone app with its own brand, it seems a far cry from when the company acquired the app and saw it as driving the digital transformation of the appliance giant’s product lineup. Outside of a big splash at CES 2019, which the company described as a “roll-out across multiple Whirlpool brands,” the app hasn’t added all that much in terms of feature sets beyond what it had five years ago, and there’s been scant evidence of any further integration – thermometer notwithstanding – with the broader Whirlpool family.

One reason the app has become something of an afterthought in Whirlpool might be that many of the original stakeholders have moved on. Yummly founder Dave Feller left soon after the deal was done, and Brian Whitlin, who drove much of the product innovation, left in 2021. Add in the fact that the acquisition’s primary champion within Whirlpool, Brett Dibkey – who drove much of Whirlpool’s digital transformation – left in 2020, and the company’s current caretaker mode makes sense.

Whirlpool Delivers Air Fry Upgrade To Line of Smart Appliances

Today Whirlpool announced today they are adding an air fry feature to a number of their connected appliances via an over-the-air software upgrade.

The new feature, delivered as an upgrade to five of their most up-to-date built-in appliances, will be added to the following products:

  • Whirlpool Smart Slide-in Gas Range with EZ-2-Lift Hinged Cast-Iron Grates (Models WEG750H0H and WEGA25H0H)
  • Whirlpool Smart Slide-in Electric Range with Scan-to-Cook Technology (Models WEE750H0H and WEEA25H0H)
  • Whirlpool Smart Single Wall Oven with True Convection Cooking (Models WOS72EC7H and WOS72EC0H)
  • Whirlpool Smart Double Wall Oven with True Convection Cooking (Models WOD77EC7H and WOD77EC0H)
  • Whirlpool Smart Combination Wall Oven with Touchscreen (Models WOC75EC0H and WOC75EC7H)

Whirlpool isn’t the only appliance brand delivering air fry over the air. GE Appliances started sending the software upgrade out in April of 2021 to 200 thousand or so connected oven customers.

What’s the reason for the air fry upgrade air assault? For one, it’s an easy upgrade from a hardware perspective for a connected convection oven, since air frying is really just using convection baking. Because of this, no additional hardware is needed (unless, of course, you want to buy an ‘air fry basket’), making the upgrade mostly a software upgrade that adds air fry-specific cooking logic and new user commands to the UI.

For Whirlpool, which isn’t officially exhibiting at CES this year, the news represents a fairly low-key set of new feature upgrades for the third year in a row. The company, which announced a big lineup of new products three years ago at CES 2019, hasn’t had a major overhaul of its smart appliance lineup since that time.

Maybe later this year or at CES 2023 Whirlpool will add some bigger upgrades. May I suggest a combi oven?

Food Tech Patent Watch: Patent Reveals Eatsa’s Robotic Meal-Assembly Machine

Remember Eatsa?

You know, the automat-like bowl food restaurant that was re-spun as a fast-growing (but more boring) restaurant marketing tech company called Brightloom?

I do, mainly because I loved the place. After I visited one in New York City, I wrote that the restaurant could be the future of fast-casual dining.

As it turns out, some – including maybe Eatsa’s investors – didn’t agree with me. I say that because starting in 2019, they phased out the cubbies, changed their name, took money from Starbucks, and, from the looks of it, dropped big plans for automating the back of house with meal assembly robots.

I say that because Eatsa (now Brightloom) holding company Keenwawa, Inc. was issued a patent last month for a meal-making robot. The patent, a continuation patent for one first issued to the company in 2019, shows a system that assembles meals by dispensing different ingredients stored in canisters into bowls and then shuttles the assembled meals off to the cubbies in the front of house.

Drawing of The Eatsa Meal Assembly Machine From Patent Filing

From the patent:

The automatic food preparation and serving apparatus may also comprise the food dispensing mechanism configured to dispense the ingredient from the plurality of food canisters into the bowl or food receptacle, under program control of the one or more processors.

The patent goes into excruciating detail about the system, complete with dozens of images outlining the canisters, the dispensing system, the conveyor belt, the bowls, and even the touchscreen user interface (which looks a lot like those deployed in the actual Eatsa restaurants for consumers to choose their bowls).

The list of inventors on the 60-page plus patent includes the former automation and engineering team for Eatsa, as well as Dave Friedberg, the one-time Climate Corp founder who incubated the company as part of what would eventually become The Production Board holding company.

I have to wonder if Eatsa-now-Brightloom’s owners are looking to license or sell the technology or even revive their ‘eatsa-inside’ strategy. After all, the recent news that Sweetgreen had acquired Spyce to help do exactly what Eatsa did – make food bowls – shows that some restaurants see a future in automated meal assembly.

Time will tell. For now, however, you can take a look back at the Eatsa ordering and cubby system below.

Food Tech Patent News Roundup

The First Patent Awarded to an AI System is in Food

While I thought that artificial intelligence systems will do most everything at some point, I assumed an AI being awarded a patent was one we could sleep on for a few years more.

I was wrong. In the July edition of the Patent Journal, an AI system named DABUS was awarded a patent for an innovation called “food container based on fractal geometry” for a system with interlocking food containers.

This Quartz Africa article describes DABUS’s creator:

DABUS (which stands for “device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience”) is an AI system created by Stephen Thaler, a pioneer in the field of AI and programming. The system simulates human brainstorming and creates new inventions. DABUS is a particular type of AI, often referred to as “creativity machines” because they are capable of independent and complex functioning. This differs from everyday AI like Siri, the “voice” of Apple’s iPhones.

DABUS’s inventor Thaler submitted the patent application listing DABUS as the inventor since the AI conceived and created the food storage system entirely. He submitted it to patent offices worldwide, including the US, which rejected him because, among other reasons, the US patent office only awards patents (for the time being) to human inventors. However, the South Africa patent office apparently had no such restrictions when it surprised many with an award of a patent.

In retrospect, it shouldn’t be that surprising AI are creating patentable ideas. AIs already write novels and movie scripts, so why not invent novel things like food containers and get them patented?

I’m looking forward to when we see AI start innovating on novel food. We’ve seen what an impact AI had in vaccine development, so it’s not too much of a stretch to see how it could start making a difference on the bioengineering front for foods.

A Patent Awarded for Many Container Within Container Scenarios For Food Storage, Cooking, and More

A fairly wide-ranging patent titled “Multi-function compact appliance and methods for a food or item in a container with a container storage technology” (US011104502) has been awarded to an Edward Espinosa from Spain for a system that enables a variety of container within container use-cases.

One example is a food container within a larger food storage appliance (i.e., a fridge) sending information on status such as freshness, etc. Another is the refrigerator with a microwave oven in one of the compartments.

The patent describes various technologies such as NFC, Bluetooth, voice control, machine vision via an internal camera, and more to enable the container systems to communicate with the appliance. In addition, the system describes the use of smart tags that communicate freshness data from within storage drawers.

I’ve long called for innovations in the core design of the fridge since they’ve largely been the same for the past 100 years, and it looks like Espinosa has definitely given the refrigerator a rethink.

Whirlpool’s Solid State Cooking Patent

Schematic for Cooking System With Directed RF Energy

It’s been a loosely held secret in the appliance industry that Whirlpool has been tinkering around in the solid-state cooking area for a while. This patent describing a system with multi-regional cooking via RF signals shows they are also trying to accumulate IP in the market. At this time, only Miele has commercialized a consumer solid-state cooking appliance, but hopefully, soon, we’ll see a next-generation microwave from a mass-market brand like Whirlpool.

Whirlpool’s W Labs Countertop Smart Oven is Now Selling for Half The Original Price

Did you know Whirlpool has a countertop smart oven?

Don’t worry, most people didn’t, in part because Whirlpool never talked much about it after it launched in early 2019.

But now that you do know about it, you might also be interested to know they’re selling it for just $399. That’s half the original sticker price for the smart oven from W Labs, Whirlpool’s innovation hub. From the looks of it, the price reduction looks permanent.

So why is W Labs selling its June clone which debuted in January 2019 so cheap? It might be because the group is looking to clear out the remaining inventory of a product which was, from the beginning, positioned as an experiment. They only made 2000 of them and they only sold the product online and not through traditional Whirlpool appliance showroom sales channels.

Still, the wind down makes me wonder if the big appliance manufacturer is making way for a more permanent replacement. Whirlpool tends to do big refreshes to its product lineup every two years, which means 2021 is a refresh year after a relatively quiet 2020 and a big 2019. As part of a larger refresh, I can see a countertop smart oven as a logical candidate for the lineup.

It also appears Whirlpool is closing out its scan-to-cook smart microwaves and is out of stock on many of its smart ovens or ranges. While some of this could be due to COVID-related supply chain disruptions, this could be another indication that the company might be starting to wind down its current lineup more broadly as it prepares for a new line of smart ovens for 2021.

Recipe Database Yummly Will Personalize “The Entire Digital Kitchen” to Help You Cook The Perfect Steak

If you’ve ever searched for a recipe online, odds are you’ve perused at least a few offerings on Yummly. This massive database started out with a focus on personalizing recipe discovery. Then, almost three years ago, appliance giant Whirlpool bought the company and the stakes changed. In the words of Greg Druck, Chief Data Scientist at Yummly, the company has now expanded from “personalizing recipe discovery to personalizing the entire digital kitchen.”

Curious? So were we, which is why we invited Druck to speak at Customize, our food personalization event happening next week in NYC. (Hot tip: There are still a few tickets left, and you can get 15 percent off with code SPOON15.)

To ramp up to the main event we asked Druck a few questions on what exactly a personalized kitchen might look like and what tools it’ll feature (hint: digital assistants and something called a “virtual pantry.”). And yes, the kitchen of the future should be able to perfectly cook a steak to your personal definition of doneness, every single time.

Check out the Q&A below. We’ll see you in New York!

Tell us a little bit about what Yummly does. 
Yummly is the most advanced AI-powered digital kitchen platform with over 25 million users. Yummly started out as a personalized platform for discovering online recipes. We are now expanding our offering to support the future of the kitchen. We want to help our users achieve their cooking-related goals with smart appliance integrations, premium guided recipes, and tools for meal planning and shopping.

Yummly places strong emphasis on personalized recommendations for the consumer. How do you optimize those suggestions? 
The Yummly recipe ingestion pipeline (pun intended) builds comprehensive representations of over 2 million recipes by inferring latent structure. Machine learning models parse the recipe and map it onto our food knowledge graph, inferring nutrition information, cuisine, techniques, difficulty, and more. This provides a foundation for content-based recommendation algorithms. 

Yummly also learns taste profiles for 25 million users by combining explicit and implicit feedback based on behavior and usage. Machine learning systems synthesize this data along with other contextual and ambient signals including day of the week, season, and location to create dynamic personalized feeds for each of our users. 

Has Yummly’s acquisition by Whirlpool changed its approach to personalization (by gathering data from home appliance usage, etc)?
Whirlpool’s acquisition of Yummly has allowed us to expand from personalizing recipe discovery to personalizing the entire digital kitchen. We believe personalization is the key to helping people achieve their goals, such as eating healthy, saving money, and reducing stress. Combining Whirlpool appliances as the hardware with Yummly software and machine learning systems allows us to personalize the experience to each home cook.

For example, Yummly will recommend personalized meal plans and shopping lists — in addition to individual recipes — based on a user’s tastes, goals, and appliances. We’ll keep track of the ingredients they have on hand and incorporate information from their “virtual pantry” into recommendations that will help them save money by reducing food waste.

Integrations with the Yummly Smart Thermometer and Whirlpool ovens will allow Yummly to adapt cooking algorithms to each user’s needs: for example, cooking a steak to a user’s personal definition of doneness. Combining these ideas into one seamless experience will substantially reduce friction in the kitchen. 

How do you envision recipes (and the recipe recommendation process) getting even more personalized over the next 5 years?
Conversational digital kitchen assistant AIs will help people create plans and recommend custom recipes that are much more personalized to specific needs and more useful for achieving goals in the kitchen. AI will guide you through the week, providing ongoing personalized advice, as well as gamifying and tracking progress against goals over time.

Your AI services will personalize a weekly meal plan and schedule for your household and then have the ingredients delivered to your home. Your plan may include a custom stir-fry recipe that uses up the carrots and chicken that were going bad (recognized using in-kitchen cameras) to save money and reduce food waste. It may avoid pasta or adjust ingredients according to your personalized nutrition plan to help you maintain a low-carb diet (because your assistant knows you’re not tracking well against your weight-loss goal). It might include a cheesy broccoli recipe to help you achieve your goal of getting the kids to eat more vegetables. It may even suggest cooking the chicken dish on Sunday to have an easy meal ready for Monday, reducing the stress of meal planning. Lastly AI may automatically adjust the bake time and temperature to make the dish extra crispy for you, and monitor cooking using a smart thermometer, notifying you when it is done.

This is just the tip of the iceberg — get your tickets to Customize to hear Druck’s fireside chat, where we’ll discuss how personalization will reshape the consumer kitchen. Get 15 percent off tickets with code SPOON15.

Whirlpool’s Yummly Introduces Wireless Smart Thermometer

Yummly, the digital recipe and cooking platform acquired by Whirlpool, announced the new Yummly Smart Thermometer at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) today.

The wireless thermometer keeps track of both internal food temperature and ambient cooking temperatures, and can be monitored via an accompanying app that sends alerts when the food is ready.

At first, this sounds a lot like the Meater smart thermometer. Smart thermometers can actually be pretty great because they allow you to remotely monitor your cooking without opening your oven and letting all the heat out.

But what differentiates Yummly’s Smart Thermometer from Meater and others is its ability to integrate with both the Whirlpool and Yummly ecosystems. So if a person is cooking from a Yummly recipe, the Yummly Thermometer will know what step the user is on and be able to communicate with a Whirlpool oven to adjust the temperature or switch from roasting to broiling automatically. According to the press release, this type of integration will be available in late 2020.

The Yummly Smart Thermometer also seems to be helping Yummly create something akin to a deconstructed June Oven. The Yummly mobile app can be used to recognized ingredients and suggest recipes. Those recipes can be communicated to a compatible Whirlpool oven and the thermometer can talk with the oven to create an automated cook program. While this requires a number of different pieces to create a smart oven, it also means you don’t have to take up countertop space with an additional cooking appliance.

The Yummly Smart Thermometer will be on display at CES this week, and available for purchase in early 2020 with an MSRP of $129.

Will KitchenAid’s SmartOven+ with Steam and Grill Cooking Win with Consumers at $3,199?

When is an oven like a stand mixer? When it’s KitchenAid’s SmartOven+. Much like the company’s iconic mixer, KitchenAid’s new connected built-in oven, which the announced the availability of yesterday, will feature a number of attachments that enable different types of cooking. The question now is whether people will pay a premium ($3,199) for that flexibility.

As of now, the SmartOven+ has three attachments, all of which are powered via a plug inside the oven. The SmartOven+ comes with a powered grilling attachment, which the company says offers “true grilling year-round, minimizing smoke and eliminating flares common in outdoor grills.” There is also an integrated baking stone attachment and a steam cooking attachment. Oddly, neither the steam nor the stone attachments ship with the SmartOven+, but must be requested after purchase and are shipped out to the customer at no additional cost.

In addition to different types of cooking, the SmartOven+ also has connected features such as remote control via KitchenAid’s mobile app, as well as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa integration for voice control. Through a Nest integration, you can also be alerted if you accidentally leave the oven on.

All of this versatility in the SmartOven+ ain’t cheap. The 30-inch single configuration will set you back $3,199 and the 30-inch double is $4,799. (You can get a “regular” KitchenAid single oven for $1,700 and a double for $2,700.)

When the SmartOven+ was announced at CES earlier this year, we were intrigued by the device’s modular cooking capabilities. The steam function was of particular interest to Spoon Founder, Mike Wolf, who wrote, “While I’m not sure I’m ready for a baking stone, after trying out a countertop steam oven, I’m sold on that method as a superior way to prepare many types of food. With this new KitchenAid oven, I can add it in.”

The KitchenAid stand mixers became a countertop (and wedding registry) staple because of its versatility. It’s safe to bet that KitchenAid won’t stop at these three attachments and like its mixer, more functionality will be on the way. Depending on how many attachments the company makes, $3,199 might wind up being a bargain.

Chop and Awe: Whirlpool Debuts A Bunch of Smart Kitchen Products at CES 2019

Big companies will sometimes debut one intriguing product at CES and call it a day. But this year, Whirlpool decided to drop about a half dozen.

In what amounted to essentially a shock and awe campaign of smart-kitchen product debuts, the company announced a whole bunch of products that piqued my interest. We’ll be stopping by the Whirlpool booth when the show floor opens tomorrow to capture some of these items on video. For now, here’s an overview of what the company is unveiling in Las Vegas:

Connected Hub Wall Oven With Augmented Reality

This oven kind of blew my mind when Whirlpool told me about it, primarily because of the transparent front display: besides allowing a user to see inside the oven, it also acts as a video screen for displaying pretty much everything from video-cooking instructions to shopping lists to family calendars.

As Spoon readers know, I’ve felt for a long time now that the kitchen screen is a big opportunity, one that only a handful of companies (cough Amazon, cough Samsung) have tried to seize. With this new oven, Whirlpool is staking territory for this largely unclaimed terrain with an integrated screen that can power all sorts of video-centric applications in the kitchen.

KitchenAid Smart Oven+

This one was intriguing to me because not only does it offer smart-oven capabilities such as voice control and an LCD screen for recipe selection, it’s also modular and allows the user to add steam, grill or baking stone attachments. While I’m not sure I’m ready for a baking stone, after trying out a countertop steam oven, I’m sold on that method as a superior way to prepare many types of food. With this new KitchenAid oven, I can add it in.

The Smart Countertop Oven from WLabs

This oven is basically Whirlpool’s answer to the June smart oven. The countertop device has food identification capability, which means it can recognize a variety of food types and set cooking temperature and time accordingly. It also has a scan-to-cook feature and voice-control integration with Alexa. The smart countertop oven is from Whirpool’s incubation unit, W Labs, which essentially means it’s a limited availability product that is not – as of yet at least – part of the permanent Whirlpool lineup. The product will be available soon for preorders for $799 at the WLabs website.

KitchenAid Combination Cook Processor

While not as tech-forward as the other products, the KitchenAid Cook Processor may just be the most useful product debuted by Whirlpool/KitchenAid at CES this year. This multifunction cooking appliance can cut, stir, steam, and, just like a Thermomix, has an internal scale that enables step-by-step recipe guidance. The device has Wi-Fi on board, allowing it to connect to the Internet to download recipes and software updates.

I’ve long been waiting for one of the big appliance makers to offer up a Thermomix-like offering for the U.S. market, and it looks like KitchenAid finally has done just that.

KitchenAid Smart Display

I mentioned above my belief that kitchen screen is going to be a big deal, and so it makes sense that KitchenAid would offer up their own smart display with Google Assistant. Google’s been on a tear lately, hoovering up integration partners, and with KitchenAid, they’ve gotten a blue-chip partner into which they can plug their voice assistant and smart home platform. The KitchenAid Smart Display will work with Yummly, including a new Pro version of Whirlpool’s cooking guidance app that features celebrity chefs like Richard Blais.

Believe it or not, this isn’t even all of the announcements Whirlpool/KitchenAid will be making this week. We’ll be sure to post updates once we’ve visited the Whirlpool booth here at CES.

Video: Rethinking Business Models in the Era of FoodTech

There was a time when Whirlpool was an appliance company, pure and simple. Nestlé focused exclusively on packaged goods. ChefSteps started as an online content community. But in the past few years, Whirlpool bought recipe content platform Yummly, Nestlé has added digital services, and Chefsteps has diversified into hardware and prepared food.

In the technology age, are the traditional roles of food companies breaking down?

Michael Wolf asked this question to Chris Young of ChefSteps, Stephanie Naegeli of Nestlé and Brett Dibkey of Whirlpool on the Smart Kitchen Summit stage. Watch the video below to see the panelists discuss how food companies are taking new, sometimes risky approaches in order to stay viable in the shifting smart kitchen ecosystem for years to come.

Rethinking Business Models In The Era of FoodTech

Look out for more videos of the panels, solo talks, and fireside chats from SKS 2018! We’ll be bringing them to you hot and fresh out the (smart) kitchen over the next few weeks.