Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Whisk

The Story of Samsung Food with Nick Holzherr

Nick Holzherr, founder of Whisk and head of Samsung Food, is this week’s guest on the Spoon Podcast.

Those in the smart kitchen industry know Nick, in part because his company helped pioneer the early tech behind shoppable recipes, but also because his acquisition by Samsung is the culmination of one of the true success stories in this market.

Today, the technology that Nick and Whisk built is what powers Samsung Food, the AI-powered food and recipe platform that the consumer electronics giant debuted at CES 2024.

Some of the things we talk about this latest episode of The Spoon Podcast include:

  • The story of how Whisk was the first recipe startup to explore how to use AI and apply it to recipes.
  • Nick’s experience going on the British version of The Apprentice and appearing before Lord Sugar (the British version of Donald Trump) to pitch the company. 
  • The growth of the company as Whisk started working with grocers in Europe and eventually appliance brands
  • Nick fielding calls from three companies who presented offer sheets to buy the company.
  • We talk about what Nick is excited about and how he sees technologies like AI being applied in the kitchen in the future.

You can read the full transcript of the conversation below and listen to the full interview by clicking play on the podcast player below or heading to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you’d like to connect with Nick in person, he will be at the Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4th. You can get your tickets here.

Conversation Transcript:

Michael Wolf: Nick just told me whatever I throw at him, he’s ready for, especially with that new microphone. You look great in that, in your little room there, the microphone.

Nick Holzherr: It’s brand new. It was three months old. I realized I needed to start upping my game when everyone’s podcasting now, right?

Michael Wolf: Everyone’s podcasting. So when’s the Nick Holzherr podcast start, by the way?

Nick Holzherr: I haven’t got my own podcast, but if anybody wants to invite me onto theirs, I’ve now got a good mic.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, well, Nick, I feel I’ve known you probably since 2016, 2017. I think Whisk was the first company I remember that was really talking up AI and recipes. That was one of your original stories, right?

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, I mean, we started with the problem that users want to use recipes anywhere, not just from one manufacturer or one publisher or one grocery company or one tech startup with a couple hundred recipes. And the only way to really make that happen is with AI. If you want a smart experience, that is. Use AI to parse all these recipes and make them smart. So we did that, but that was before deep learning, before it was accessible to startups. We were literally flying out on planes to America, buying the latest processors, latest chips, graphics cards, and using them with basically PhDs, ex-professors that we had hired to build these models. It was really early in AI, before TensorFlow, before these libraries. Of course, now it’s totally changed. Super early.

Michael Wolf: I was looking back in the history a little bit and I didn’t realize Whisk had started back in 2012. Back then, you were actually on a British TV show, British Apprentice on the BBC. Was it pitching Whisk at the time?

Nick Holzherr: Yep. It actually was. It’s called the Apprentice, and it’s the same thing as basically Donald Trump has in the US, right? And we have a different person running it called Lord Sugar. The guy in the UK is called Lord Sugar and he was an advisor or member of the Labour Party, which is the left side of the government. So it’s kind of a little bit the opposite of Donald Trump.

Michael Wolf: Lord Sugar. Way better name.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, he was originally Sir, I think, and then they made him a Lord. This is the British monarchy system, which is also hilarious. It was amazing fun. You do 12 weeks of tasks competing against other people. And then if you get to the final, you get to pitch your business plan. If you win, he gives you money and becomes a partner in your business. I got to the final and I didn’t win. But because it was such a popular TV show, and I got to pitch it to him and his advisors and therefore the UK, everyone wanted to invest in it, but not everyone, but enough people wanted to invest in it. Most people would take the meetings with me. So I got inbound from a lot of the grocery stores and publishers and stuff saying, hey, we’d love to work with you.

Michael Wolf: The Tescos the world came in with you say, hey, let’s meet. Was it immediate like the next day?

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, literally that night, my inbox, my LinkedIn and my inbox just filled up with loads of people who wanted to work, who said, ‘I love it. I know he (Lord Sugar) didn’t invest, but can I invest or can I work with you? And then the ones who hadn’t, when I messaged them months later and said, Hey, this is the idea, I pitched it to on the Apprentice, they would take the meeting, not necessarily because they’re interested, but just wanted to meet the guy who’s on TV.

Michael Wolf: There was a curiosity in meeting you, right?

Nick Holzherr: And for a salesperson, that’s what you need, right, a foot in the door.

Michael Wolf: I feel The Apprentice was the predecessor to Shark Tank, which is also Dragon’s Den in the UK. The value for you as an entrepreneur is it’s just a giant commercial. The value is in the millions of dollars in terms of free publicity.

Nick Holzherr: Exactly. It’s huge. And it’s also actually fun. It is really, really fun. It is also challenging because it’s not a show about business success. It’s about conflict, essentially, right? Of people conflicting and trying to make something work. It’s like a business assault course. They put you through psychometric tests and psychology interviews to basically choose people that they think will conflict with each other and create good TV. So that part is stressful, but you also get to do some really cool things on the show, like build products super quickly and pitch them to big people. So it’s really fun. But ultimately it was the platform I needed to get Whisk started.

Michael Wolf: And so you got Whisk started and I think I connected with you in around 2016, 2017. From those early days when you had the business plan, what you pitched on Apprentice BBC versus when I met you around 2016, what had changed? Obviously you’d started the company, went from business plan to actually starting this thing, but had the vision changed at all?

Nick Holzherr: The core mission was to help people cook, make it more joyful as we talk about it today, and to help them in that process. That hadn’t changed. But what had changed was we started off with a consumer app and we couldn’t get it to what we thought was enough scale. So we pivoted from trying to build a consumer app to looking at all that tech we’d built. And you started off talking about AI. We’d built a lot of AI way back, 10, 12 years ago. And so we were really early in that. And businesses wanted to use that. We knew that because we had, when we built our consumer, we had built widgets that publishers could integrate on their sites. And through that, we had loads of conversations with big publishers, big retailers and big CPG brands. And a lot of them said, ‘we love this widget. Yes, we’ll integrate it, but can we also use some of the other tech?’

So, in2014, 2015, and into 2016, we couldn’t make the consumer app work. So we pivoted into a B2B platform, offered all the tech that we had built for anybody to use, built an API platform for people to use. We were powering half a billion monthly consumer interactions at one point, at the height of it, which was pretty impressive and we were powering it for a lot of the big players in the world like a lot of big CBG brands. If you made a list of the top players, maybe half of those were using our technology.

Michael Wolf: Were you on big publisher websites?

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, the biggest, right? Food Network, Allrecipes, BBC Good Food, About.com, the big, big sites with many tens of millions of hits a month, users, those were integrating us and we were sending them across to grocery retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Instacart, the UK ones like Tesco. And the big CPG brands wanted to be part of it because they wanted to have their products featured. So when it’s butter, they want it to be the Unilever butter, or when it’s stock, the Unilever stock, right? So they cared about that. And they also wanted to connect their own websites to commerce. Because we had those integrations, they then said, can you power more of our platform? We said ‘yes’. Then all the big IoT companies came along, the appliance manufacturers came along and said, ‘hey, can we use your platform as well?’ So we were powering a whole bunch of different IoT players. And that’s, I think, where you and I first started talking.

Michael Wolf: So just real quickly, you were with the publishers and you were essentially doing shoppable recipes. So, like Bisquick, Nestle wants their yogurt or whatever. You were one of the pioneers in the whole shoppable recipe concept. And that was around the 2013, 2014 time frame.

Nick Holzherr: That’s right. I mean, there was Constant Commerce (now Constant.co), which are no longer there, but Constant Commerce was there at the same kind of time as us, super, super early. But it was basically only Constant Commerce and us. And we took a different approach to them. They were more enterprise-y in their proposition. So some of the big enterprise players wanted them. And, but we were more like open and like, let’s integrate the whole market kind of sort of game. So someone wanted us and we had a bit more of a B2C to B2B2C kind of play where we integrated onto their sites and then they added to a shopping list. It would still be our shopping list and it users could save the recipe into our recipe box. Our consumer experience is always there, but it was integrated on other people’s sites and shops and brands.

Michael Wolf: And the appliance guys showed up around in the 2015, 2016 timeframe. And what were they asking you? ‘Hey, we want apps. We want people to have recipes.’ What were they showing up with, and what questions did they have?

Nick Holzherr: It was ‘we want to connect our appliances, so can you give us recipes in a structured way?’ Or can you make it work with our products?

Michael Wolf: It was the guided cooking recipe era.

Nick Holzherr: Exactly. But also shoppable recipes. I think everybody always thinks and starts in the early stages of developing an experience that thinks, ‘I want to make money. How do I make money? I make it by connecting to commerce. So, let me connect to commerce.’

So that was definitely part of the game as well. And then what happened was really at that point what we were offering was in its infancy. It was not a mainstream thing to do. And it was really around the 2016 and 2017 mark when suddenly the e-commerce market had grown. Penetration of e-commerce had doubled or tripled from what it was back in 2012. And so you suddenly have everyone wanting it. And it was kind of a crazy time where we had struggled as a business until 2016, 2017, and suddenly they were inundated with everyone saying, ‘hey, can we use your platform?’ And we suddenly became profitable. We went from five people to 30 people in a year, not from any investment, just revenue. We had no investment at that point. Everything was bootstrapped. We were making money, and the business was profitable. It was like, wow, this is really fun. What is it like to make money? A startup making money? What is this?

Michael Wolf: It’s nice to make money. And so how were you making money? You were doing these recipes, and were you kind of taking every recipe impression that went through, you got a little bit of money? Was there a big appliance company that wanted to pay you to do a custom integration?

Nick Holzherr: All of those. So, we had three revenue models. We had the license fee model, a monthly fee for the API. We had a grocery per click or per new customer fee, which was a small fee per transaction. But when you add it all up, it works out relatively well. And then we also had an ad model where you, as a CPG company, if you’re Nestle and you want to get your yogurt sold, you pay to have your yogurt featured. It doesn’t say Nestle yogurt in the recipe, but yes, Nestle yogurt the customer gets. And so they don’t pay on a per acquisition there, they pay on a per view because you are, you’re inspiring the customer. You’re not just selling the customer.

Michael Wolf: Okay, and so this thing’s going crazy. You had 30 employees and you’re making money. Life is good. And then, at some point, or probably I imagine around this time, you’re the kind of the apex of this ride, you get a call from Samsung?

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, I mean, there’s three companies, another one of the big appliance companies, and one of the world’s slash one of the world’s biggest technology companies all rang up at roughly the same time. Like in the six month period of time, we had three serious acquirers wanting to buy us and a bunch of other ones on the side saying, ‘maybe could we, would you be open to it?’ But three of them were kind of term sheet level interest, like real interest. Flying people into our offices saying, ‘hey, can we buy you?’ And it was a really good time; we were profitable, and we didn’t need to sell. And then, ultimately, we chose to go with Samsung.

Michael Wolf: And you’re looking and you’re just thinking in your head. “Lord sugar. You should have made a better offer’. So you had these three offers; a technology platform company, two big appliance companies, it sounds like. Were you inviting them in, or was their head of acquisitions calling you up?

Nick Holzherr: The latter. They were ringing in us. And this was kind of what’s crazy about it because initially I was even saying no to them, not to the acquisition teams, but to the initial integrations. I was like, why do you want to integrate to an appliance? Are we going to get any users from this? I was in the user’s head and thinking I’m not going to make any transactions. How many fridges have you got live? How many users are going to click on it? Am I going to make enough money on this to make it worthwhile while visiting your office? Because often they’re these large enterprises, their request is, can you visit our office to pitch this certain person? And I was apprehensive. I was like, is it wasting my time?

Michael Wolf: You’re busy. You have 30 employees.

Nick Holzherr: We’re busy. And the funny thing is, of course, those conversations ended up with the M&A team suddenly getting interested. Because they’re looking at it going, ‘hang on, how many people in the market are using it? Our competitors are using it. They’re thinking, ;who’s going to end up owning this?’ They probably knew that M&A stuff was happening because the people in the industry know each other quite well. So they probably all started worrying about what happens if the other person wins it? And that’s a great place to be as a startup. It was literally the perfect time. I could probably have gotten a better price for it if I’d held on another few years. It’s impossible to price it. It’s impossible to get the right time, and it was certainly a good time and I’m happy with what worked out.

Michael Wolf: I think it was a good time, and Samsung is an interesting company. Did you have to fly out to Seoul to pitch?

Nick Holzherr: No, I had phone out to Seoul multiple times after we had a partnership with them, because we started powering loads of stuff for them, right? It became a really good partnership where we were powering way more than initially was requested. We were building, even building some new features based on their budgets and based on their requests and their needs. It was being used across lots of appliances. And I had a vision to being used by lots of other divisions as well, which is what ultimately ended up happening, of course. But that we couldn’t predict that at the time. But then I did fly a bunch to San Francisco because the acquisition team was called Samsung Next. It was an innovation arm of Samsung. And basically HQ, because it’s quite hard for the Korean team to buy stuff because of how something is structured, they asked the innovation arm, hey, can you guys take a look at this? And they did, and they did the acquisitions. So actually, our bosses, if you like, or our acquirers was the San Francisco entity of Samsung.

Michael Wolf: And so that deal comes through, you accept it. I think I remember being in Chicago at the Housewares show. I think when I interviewed you about that deal, I think is right. So there must have been around the March timeframe, it was at Housewares, it was 2018, 2019, one of those years. And it’s been an interesting ride.

Nick Holzherr: Yep.

Michael Wolf: A lot’s probably happened. So maybe talk about you get acquired by Samsung. What’s that like initially kind of absorbing you into this giant Borg, which is it’s a massive company, even though it’s like the next company like the San Francisco companies, but it’s still Samsung.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, it is. Actually, what I would say is, what I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by is how much autonomy they’ve given us and how much they’ve let us keep parts of the culture that matter. We were always a distributed team and they’ve let us keep that. And that was a massive advantage during COVID when it was so difficult if you were not a distributed team, but it also allowed us to kind of operate, I think, quite effectively. And keep some of the culture we have, like we go on annual offsites where we fly everyone to one place in the world. Like that’s not a normal thing in an enterprise to explain to your HQ that, hey, we’re going to fly the whole team to Greece or something. And they support that. So that’s been awesome.

Michael Wolf: You go to Greece for your offsights? What the heck?

Nick Holzherr: Well, we have to fly somewhere and actually Greece ends up being quite, we actually haven’t actually, Greece is our next one. We actually haven’t been to Greece yet, but like the previous one, Cyprus, we did actually do one in Korea. That was the most expensive one we did. We did Lisbon, Madrid, Budapest. And these places are actually, if you look at them on spreadsheet, the cheapest places to fly everyone, but it is also nice. It’s also fun to actually spend a week together and meet people in person, especially if you’re working in a distributed environment. So we spend a lot of time building a distributed culture.

Michael Wolf: Nice!

Nick Holzherr: and making sure that we, people felt valued and motivated and knew what they’re doing. And Samsung let us keep that. So I’m really grateful and respect Samsung for that. What was crazy was some of the enterprise ways of managing a business, right? That definitely added a layer of complexity and that’s inevitable with any enterprise. And then I think the other thing that was crazy was scaling. So they wanted us to scale our team from 30 people to 120, and they asked me to do it.

in ASAP, I did it in nine months. So going from 30 to 120 in nine months is an experience that I’m not, maybe I’ll do it again, but it was intense. The amount of interviews you have to do, the amount of like how to integrate that at the same time as integrating your company to a large enterprise like Samsung. So all of that in one go was probably the most intensive six months of work that I’ve ever done. Massive learning curve again, hard work, but I learned a bunch and I’m grateful for the experience.

Michael Wolf: Were you in on almost every one of those interviews and decisions? You were pretty hands-on, it sounds like. That is crazy. That’s crazy. Okay, so you grow to 120, that’s impressive. And I think the company over time, I saw more and more getting integrated. And I think the culmination of that was this past CES, when I think it essentially transformed from Whisk to Samsung food. So Samsung food was a big announcement for Samsung at CES 2024 in January.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah.

Michael Wolf: But the heart of that, the beating heart of that was really the Whisk acquisition, right? It’s almost a rebranding of Whisk.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, that’s right. And there are two sides to that, whether it was a good idea or a bad idea. So I built the Whisk brand, right? I own a bunch of Whisk. I’m drinking out of a Whisk flask right now. So like, hey, kill Whisk as a brand. And some users felt that too. But ultimately, there is a thing with any enterprise probably. If you’re trying to build an app that comes across as not from here, you’re going to struggle getting integration into the different hardware units and you’re going to struggle integrating into the Samsung ecosystem. And ultimately, if you’re building a consumer experience, you have to leverage the distribution of a platform like Samsung. Samsung has one of the most devices in the world of any company. I think it probably has the most devices of any company if you add all the different units, because it’s so broad in what it does in TVs and mobiles and kitchen appliances, watches and now rings, everything. So we had to use that distribution. And the most effective way of doing that was to call ourselves Samsung Foods. And actually that has worked, in terms of the integrations we have planned and the ones we’ve achieved, but ones we’ve now have on the table that are going to happen over the next six, 12 months. I think it’s part of what I’m actually most excited about in where we’re going. It’s especially with the health, because food and health are so closely coupled with obesity and diabetes and other things. Yet, no one has really solved that. Actually people have worked on it, but no one’s really solved it. And I think Samsung has got an important part to play because they have health and food appliances. And I think if we do that, that’s actually a really important thing in the world that we’re doing. Something I feel proud of and passionate about. And that I find awesome. So that is, Samsung food as a brand, I know people are split on the opinion. I think it’s a good name and there’s lots of advantages of the name. If you’re looking at 10 food apps or 20 food apps in your…

Michael Wolf: Yeah, you’re going to see Samsung food. Yeah.

Nick Holzherr: you’ll notice it and you’ll probably try it. Your propensity to try out the app is higher. But of course, Samsung hasn’t got a huge plethora of successful apps. So that’s part of also what we’re helping Samsung with.

Michael Wolf: I always have an 8:30 call, so I’m going to tell them to be a couple minutes late.

Michael Wolf: and late. I’m like, I wanted to go for an hour and then all of a sudden.

Nick Holzherr: We can do part two later, a different day if you want.

Michael Wolf: Yeah, I’ll edit that part out. So, I think that when I think of Samsung food or Samsung with your appliances, you have the wearables, you have what you built in Whisk. There’s a lot of different parts of the puzzle there. And I think you’re almost on a collision course with some of the other folks who are just coming at it from the precision nutrition side. Like I look at January AI, which is a pretty cool app. They do like take a photo of food and you can predict blood sugar. It seems like makes sense that ultimately that type of function would be built into what Samsung has because you guys have so many other parts of the puzzle. So I see you guys have a great foundation. A lot of it’s built on the appliance and the wearables and then that and the app side.

Nick Holzherr: Yeah, I think that’s what’s exciting about the sensors, right? If you’ve got access to sensors and distribution through the hardware and the brand, that gives you some good starting Lego bricks. It’s not the whole solution. It’s such a big problem in the world. A big proportion of the world is going to suffer from the health challenges of not eating healthily. Of course there’s going to be thousands of companies. I hope a lot of them are successful alongside us.

Michael Wolf: I mean, I think a lot of people are just thinking, hey, now we can just take a pill and I will no longer be at risk for type two diabetes. I’ll be always 50 pounds. But I think that’s not realistic. You can’t have half the world’s population at risk for type two taking medication or a shot. I think what you guys are building could be really interesting. It’ll be a few years though, a lot of these different things need to come together. That sounds like what that’s driving you. What else is driving you as you look forward towards five years down the line, 10 years down the line in this space? What is really exciting for you?

Nick Holzherr: I think the advances in AI are exciting for everyone in the space, including us. We tried to do stuff like vision AI, use your camera to detect items, food, two, three years ago and failed. It wasn’t good enough. That was not despite having good engineers on it, it was hard to do. Yet now you come along and use an open source library by open AI and boom, it works. Sure, it needs tuning, it needs some work, it doesn’t maybe it takes a little bit of work to get it to production level, but it’s so easy. Stuff that we spent 10 years building, you can now use the OpenAI API for it and get a good way there. Which is so scary for people who’ve invested a whole bunch of time and effort into building really, really advanced technology that so much of it’s now easier than ever to do, which means it’s open to anybody. The scary part is, how do you win if everyone can do it? The fun thing from a consumer side is it’s going to be possible to build some of the stuff that we all hoped would be there five years ago. Now it will finally get to a point where it’ll be better and usable and actually add starting value. The smart kitchen, there’s always the question is how far off a truly smart kitchen that actually adds value to the user are we. When will it stop being a gimmick and when will it start being smart and useful? We’re getting closer and closer to that being true. Of course it’s true in some ways already, some devices are fantastic in adding value. But on a macro level where I can talk to my mom and say, do you want a smart kitchen? And she goes, yes, I do because it adds loads of value.

Michael Wolf: It’s not just turning things on and off with an app and making things more difficult by adding more processes in the way and kind of app friction, it’s actually making it more useful. So going from those early days where you’re buying GPUs and trying to figure out to build AI and going on TV and then ultimately to where you are today, it’s been quite a ride. It’s been fun talking to you, Nick, about hearing and hearing about all this. Thanks for spending some time with us.

Nick Holzherr: Thank you, I look forward to seeing you in Seattle.

Michael Wolf: You were seeing Seattle at Smart Kitchen Summit. Everyone who wants to see Nick in person, famous TV star, Apprentice star. I’m just embarrassing him. You can see him in Seattle. All right, Nick. Thank you, man. Don’t hang up yet. Don’t hang up yet.

Nick Holzherr: Thank you, thanks Mike, bye bye.

With the Launch of Samsung Food, Samsung Hypes AI & Consolidates Food Features Acquired Over the Years

Over the years, Samsung has acquired and launched several products in an effort to become the king of the tech-powered kitchen.

First, there was the launch of the Family Hub refrigerator, the company’s attempt to create a smart fridge built around the company’s own operating system and packed with technology like fridge cams to identify food and help you with your shopping.

Then, there was the acquisition of Whisk, an intelligent food and shopping app that helped pioneer the shoppable recipe space. Whisk had not only amassed an extensive food database, which would ultimately become a foundation for some of Family Hub’s (now Bespoke Family Hub) shopping and recipe capabilities, but it also served up the foundational ‘Food AI’ that is now being pushed to the forefront by Samsung.

Then, there were various attempts to use AI through automation in the kitchen, as the company announced (and never released commercially) different cooking and kitchen-task robots at CES.

And we can’t forget that Samsung also took some of the smart home technology from its SmartThings smart home group (another Samsung acquisition) and paired it with Whisk’s recipe intelligence to create SmartThings Cooking, a guided cooking app.

This leads us to this week, in which Samsung announced what amounts to packaging up this collected knowledge and technology – save for (at least for now) the robotics – into a newly expanded app and platform called Samsung Food. Samsung Food, which the company describes as “a personalized, AI-powered food and recipe platform,” looks like a significant step forward for the company’s efforts to build a centralized digital food management app. It also is a logical move to consolidate much of the collected efforts under the Samsung brand after the company had collected a variety of platforms that served as a foundation for what we see today.

Let’s take a look at precisely what the company unveiled. In the announcement, Samsung detailed four primary areas of activity for Samsung Food: Recipe Exploration and Personalization, AI-Enhanced Meal Planning, Kitchen Connectivity, and Social Sharing.

For recipe exploration, Samsung looks like it’s essentially using what was an already somewhat evolved feature set in Whisk. Samsung says that it can save recipes to a user’s digital recipe box anytime and from anywhere, create shopping lists based on their ingredients, and is accessible via Family Hub. In addition to mobile devices, users can access Samsung Food with their Bespoke Family Hub fridges, which will provide recipe recommendations based on a list of available food items managed by the user and shoppable recipe capabilities.

With the Personalize Recipe function, Samsung Food looks like it builds on the personalization engine created by Whisk and plans to take it further through integration with Samsung Health. According to the announcement, by the end of this year, Samsung plans to integrate with Samsung Health to power suggestions for diet management. This integration will factor in info such as a user’s body mass index (BMI), body composition, and calorie consumption in pursuit of their health goals and efforts to maintain a balanced diet.

The AI-Enhanced meal planning feature looks like a longer-view planning feature that consolidates personalized recipe recommendations, and it will no doubt similarly benefit from the integration of Samsung Health.

With Connected Cooking, Samsung has rebranded and extended the features of the SmartThings Cooking app, adding new devices like the BeSpoke oven and incorporating some of the same guided cooking features.

And, of course, a consolidated food-related platform from Samsung wouldn’t be complete without a social media component. My guess is the Social Sharing feature – which will allow users to share with their community – is the least necessary addition to the app and will ultimately not be all that successful, as consumers will continue to use mainline social apps (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook) for their food-related social sharing.

The company also teased expanded computer vision capabilities in 2024 in the announcement. The company’s Vision AI technology “will enable Samsung Food to recognize food items and meals photographed through the camera and provide details about them, including nutrition information.”

Overall, I’m impressed with the overall cohesiveness and trajectory of what I see in Samsung Food. I think it’s a sign that Samsung – despite having the occasional misstep and strategic vagueness around their food vision – looks like they remain committed to becoming the leader of the future kitchen, something that they started way back in 2016 with the launch of the Family Hub line.

Recipe Sharing App Whisk an Early Test Partner for TikTok’s New Jump Program

This week TikTok officially launched its Jump program, a new feature which allows third party apps to integrate with the hugely popular social video app. The new integration allows someone watching a TikTok video to click on a button to access features of apps directly from inside TikTok

Recipe sharing app Whisk is an early integration partner with TikTok, which makes sense since cooking is one of TikTok’s most popular genres. The partnership, which Techcrunch wrote about in February, started as part of an “alpha testing” trial with a small group of TikTok creators that Whisk helped identify. With today’s announcement, the feature is being rolled out to wider group of creators (though not all). TikTok said it will roll out the feature more widely after some testing.

The TikTok-Whisk integration, which you can see in action above, works like this: TikTok users who are watching a cooking video can tap a Save to Whisk button that will allow them to view the recipe in Whisk. Users can also add the recipe to a collection or a meal plan, or have the recipe converted to a shopping list they could have delivered via one of Whisk’s grocery delivery partners (e.g., Walmart, Instacart).

For Whisk’s part, the integration is a no-brainer and could be a huge source of potential traffic for the recipe app. Whisk, which is now part of Samsung, was already growing pretty quickly; connecting its app with TikTok’s hugely popular cooking content will only accelerate that growth.

Looking forward, chances are other food and recipe apps will follow Whisk’s lead as TikTok opens up its program more widely for integration. Social media is where many consumers look for their next meal idea, and the social video app has become a viral recipe kingmaker. With Jump, recipe app makers now can monetize that viral interest in baked feta pasta by converting social video watchers to customers through shoppable recipes.

CES 2021: Samsung’s SmartThings App Adding Shoppable Recipe and Guided Cooking

Samsung announced today that it will be adding shoppable recipes, guided cooking and more such functionality to its SmartThings Cooking mobile app.

The added functionality is powered by Whisk’s Food AI (Samsung NEXT acquired Whisk in March of 2019), some of which has been available as part of the Family Hub software found in Samsung appliances.

With today’s news, smartphone users with the SmartThings Cooking app will be able to:

  • Get personalized recipe recommendations based on taste, preferences as well as what is immediately available.
  • Shop for ingredients and other food through the Whisk network of retailers including Walmart, Kroger, Instacart and Amazon Fresh.
  • Guided cooking instructions along with automatic temperature controls sent out to synced Samsung cooking appliances.

This could be the year where shoppable recipes and appliance integration take off. We are coming off a record year of online grocery shopping, thanks to the pandemic, so more people than ever are accustomed to buying groceries, including perishables, online. So the logical next step is tying together all of the threads in the meal journey: discovery, selection, access and instruction.

Samsung’s integrating functionality does all that and extends it now to the mobile phone. Of course, taking advantage of all of these new features means that you have to buy into the Samsung ecosystem and get all your appliances from the same maker.

As CES is kicking off this week, there will be a slew of kitchen appliance related announcements. Given how much online grocery shopping took off last year, and its projected growth over the coming years, I wonder how much more shopping integration we’ll see.

Whisk Creates Slack App to Help You Shop For Groceries At Work

Like many, I use Slack for a good chunk of the day as a way to communicate and collaborate with coworkers.

But now thanks to Whisk, I can start using the ubiquitous work communication platform as a way to manage grocery shopping lists and access recipes.

Announced via a blog post by Samsung NEXT (the company which acquired Whisk last year) head of product Travis Bogard, the Whisk app is available to anyone with Slack.

Interestingly, while there are plenty of food-related apps available to use on Slack, most of them are for things like ordering from food trucks or managing a work-group catering order. The Whisk app, from what I can tell, is the first one for recipe sharing or grocery lists.

This lack of personal meal journey management apps for Slack probably shouldn’t be surprising since it is, after all, a work tool. That said, the line between work and personal time has become blurry in these work-from-home pandemic times, and nowadays many of us are seamlessly switching back and forth between work projects and personal stuff like meal planning or grocery shopping.

So why not do it in Slack?

I decided to try the app out and added Whisk to our workplace Slack.

For anyone not familiar with Slack apps, using them means typing in command prompts reminiscent of DOS or, for anyone under 40, like those you might tap into an app like Terminal to run scripts or basic web prompts.

Once I had the app running, I used the register prompt to log into Whisk and authorize it to work with Slack. I then used the add item command to add a couple things to my grocery list. I then hopped over to my Whisk browser tab and there were the milk and eggs I had just added to the list.

I also used Whisk Slack app commands to bring up recipes and check out the items on my shopping list.

Would I use it in the future? Maybe. Since I use Slack all day, I like how easily accessible it is. That said, I’ve always found Slack apps a little annoying since every app has a different set of commands and I usually have to look them up when I use them. I also use voice assistants like Alexa to add items to my list (Whisk also has an Alexa integration), so I’m not sure this would replace that.

But if you are a Slack or Whisk user, you can try it out for yourself.

Whisk Launches B2B Content Management Tool to Structure and Organize Recipe Data

Samsung subsidiary Whisk today announced the launch of its new artificial intelligence-powered recipe content management platform for CPG companies and retailers.

In a nutshell, Whisk’s new tool allows companies to unify and organize recipe data that may be scattered across multiple platforms. For instance, a retailer could have recipes that exist in a website, as downloadable PDFs or even in spreadsheets. Whisk’s tool hoovers up all of that disparate data, gives it structure and unifies it so all the legacy recipes are unified into a new, single platform.

In addition to pulling in all of the pre-existing data, Whisk’s new platform also tags that data and automatically provides enhanced nutritional information, and continues to do so as new recipes are added. Since Whisk does that data work on the back-end, all a retailer or CPG company needs to do is build out the front-end for a web or mobile app and plug it into the Whisk platform.

Because all of the data is tagged and nutritional information added, end users can then easily search and filter results (e.g., if someone is diabetic or hates mushrooms) for a more customized experience.

In addition to recipe discovery, any company building a new recipe experience with this content tool can also add a commerce option using Whisk’s shoppable recipe technology.

Finally, the Whisk content tool also lets companies publish their recipes on the Samsung platform, which means those recipes are discoverable on the screens of Samsung appliances like the Family Hub smart fridge.

Whisk’s content platform arrives at a time when more people are buying food online (thank you, pandemic) and also during a period where food brands are launching their own D2C channels. If Whisk’s tool works as promised, its ability to re-surface, re-purpose and enhance legacy recipes into a new digital experience could help create a new level of customer engagement for retailers and brands alike.

Whisk’s recipe content management tool is available today, and uses a SaaS model, charging a monthly fee that depends on the usage.

Thermomix Users Can Now Order Ingredients With Launch of Shoppable Recipes on Cookidoo

Thermomix announced today they have launched ingredient shopping on the Cookidoo, the Thermomix multicooker’s digital recipe and meal planning platform.

The new capability allows Thermomix users to add a recipe’s ingredients to a digital shopping list and order them through the Cookidoo app. Fulfillment of the order (delivery or pickup) is done through a third-party grocery retail partner of the shopper’s choosing.

The new shoppable recipe feature will be available to users of any Cookidoo-compatible Thermomix model (TM5, TM6 and TM31) in the U.S., Germany and the United Kingdom.

You can watch how it works on the video below:

Those using the TM6 can add ingredients from any of the 50,000 or so recipes available through the Cookidoo interface by simply clicking on the “Add to Shopping List” option directly on the appliance’s touchscreen. From there, they head over to the Cookidoo mobile app or website to review the list, remove items they may already have, and add additional items to the list. They can then select a grocery retailer or online grocery service provider like Instacart to fulfill the order.

According to Thermomix’s head of consumer experience, Ramona Wehlig, bringing ingredient shopping and delivery to the users of the Thermomix completes the meal journey for their users.

“We had the weekly planner and curated shopping lists,” Wehlig said by phone, “but we never closed the gap in the meal journey until the ingredients were delivered.”

Wehlig said the company has been developing shoppable recipe functionality for the past year and a half. The company started trialing an early version capability through pilots in Germany. These initial pilots, which used technology developed by Thermomix, helped the company to understand the digital grocery shopping process and to fine-tune the ability to do things such as ingredient matching.

However, as the company pushed to accelerate its shoppable recipes efforts, it started looking for a partner to help them scale. This brought them to Whisk, a shoppable recipe and digital food platform startup acquired by Samsung Next last year. Whisk powers a number of grocery commerce capabilities in the connected kitchen, including (not surprisingly) on the Samsung Family Hub fridges.

“The core aim [of working with Whisk] was to scale faster,” said Wehlig. “This allows us to connect our users with more grocery stores in a shorter time frame.”

For Whisk, the addition of Thermomix helps cement an already strong position as one of the primary shoppable recipe platforms. While I haven’t seen updated numbers for a while, back in 2018 Whisk told me its platform touched 20 million users each month. With the addition of Thermomix — first in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S., later globally — the company will get millions more.

For Thermomix, the integration of shopping capabilities from the Cookidoo digital recipe platforms opens up potential new revenue streams through various forms of partnerships with CPG brands and any commissions passed on from the third party grocery platforms. For users, it adds another nice feature and could entrench the Cookidoo recipe platform as their primary digital shopping list manager.

Whisk Launches Consumer Facing App That Makes Any Recipe Shoppable

Today Whisk, maker of a B2B food and cooking commerce platform that was acquired earlier this year by Samsung NEXT, announced it was launching its first consumer-facing app on both iOS and Android. The app allows consumers to take any recipe they discover online and make it into a shopping list that they can use to buy food online or take with them on a trip to the corner grocery store.

The new app includes integrations with voice assistants like Alexa and Bixby, allowing users to add ingredients or items to a shopping list with their voice. It also includes a browser extension so users can clip recipes they find on the web and turn them into shopping lists and push into online shopping carts.

Once a user converts the recipe into something shoppable, they can then choose from one of the 32 grocery commerce partners that Whisk has integrated into the app. Online grocery partners for Whisk include Walmart among others.

While there are plenty of shopping list apps out there, the ability to clip and import any recipe discovered on the web and convert it into a shopping list seems pretty useful. Add in the social/family sharing capability, and it’s like a Pinterest meets Pocket for food making.

Previously a user would use Whisk as part of the experience on a Samsung or BSH Appliances fridge or through the website of a publisher partner, but really didn’t connect directly to the brand itself. That all changes with this rollout, as Whisk becomes a consumer facing platform for the first time.

“In the past, a user would have to use Whisk through one of our publisher partners,” said Whisk founder Nick Holzherr in an interview with The Spoon. “Today, anyone can use Whisk anywhere – regardless of whether it’s a user’s own recipe or something they’ve imported from the web.”

Interestingly, while Whisk was acquired by Samsung back in March, the consumer technology giant stayed decidedly low-key when it comes to pushing its brand as part of this new consumer app push. Outside of the new app’s integration with Samsung’s Bixby, a user would be hard pressed to see any real connection to Samsung in the new Whisk offering.

Despite Samsung’s hands-off approach, I imagine Whisk will look to tap its parent company’s resources as it endeavors to get the new app into the hands of consumers. Having consumers download an app is a much bigger ask than having them use a well-know online recipe platform such as Allrecipes (one of Whisk’s publishing partners), so creating trust and enabling discovery will take work. And, once a consumer installs an app, the biggest challenge is making sure they use it.

If you’d like to try out the new Whisk app, you can find it in the following locations: iOS and Android app stores, on the web, Chrome extension, Bixby, Alexa, & Google voice assistants.

The Food Tech 25: Twenty Five Companies Changing the Way We Eat

Here at The Spoon, we spend most days writing and thinking about those who are transforming what we eat. No matter whether a startup, big company, inventor, or a cook working on new approaches in the kitchen, we love learning the stories of people changing the future of food. So much so, in fact, that we wanted to share those companies that most excite us with our readers.

And so here it is, The Spoon’s Food Tech 25: Twenty Five Companies Changing the Way We Eat

What exactly is the Food Tech 25? In short, it’s our list of the twenty five companies we think are doing the most interesting things changing the way we create, buy, store, cook and think about food.

As with any list, there are bound to be a few questions about how we got here and why we chose the companies we did. Here are some answers:

How did we create this list?

The editors of the Spoon — myself, Chris Albrecht, Catherine Lamb and Jenn Marston — got together in a room, poured some kombucha (ed note: except for Chris), and listed all the companies we thought were doing interesting and important work in changing food and cooking. From there, we had numerous calls, face-to-face meetings and more glasses of kombucha until we narrowed the list down to those you see here.

Is this an annual list?

No, this is a list of the companies we think are the most interesting people and companies right now, in mid-2018. Things could definitely look different six months from now.

Is this list in a particular order or are the companies ranked?

No, the list is in no particular order and we did not rank the 25 companies.

Why isn’t company X on the list?

If this was your list, company X or Y would most likely be on the list (and that’s ok with us). But this is the Spoon’s list and we’re sticking to it (for now – see above).

And of course, making this list wasn’t easy. There are lots of companies doing interesting things in this space. If we had enough room to create runners-up or honorable mentions, we would. But we don’t (and you don’t have enough time to read a list like that).

So, without further ado, here is the Spoon’s Food Tech 25. If you’re the type that likes your lists all on one page, click here.


EMBER
Ember bills itself as “the world’s first temperature control mug,” which basically means you can dictate a specific temperature for your brew via the corresponding app and keep your coffee (or tea or whatever) hot for as long as you need to. The significance here isn’t so much about coffee as it is about where else we could implement the technology and relatively simple concept powering the Ember mug. The company currently has patents out on other kinds of heated or cooled dishware, and Ember has cited baby bottles and medicine as two areas in which it might apply its technology. And yes, it allows you to finally stop microwaving all that leftover morning coffee.

 


INSTANT POT
The Instant Pot is not the highest-tech gadget around, but its affordability, versatility, and speed have made this new take on the pressure cooker a countertop cooking phenomenon. It also has a large and fanatical community, where enthusiastic users share and reshare their favorite Instant Pot recipes across Facebook groups and online forums. By becoming the first new breakout appliance category of the millennial generation, the Instant Pot has achieved that highly desirable (and rare) position of having its brand synonymous with the name of the category; people don’t go looking for pressure cookers, they go looking for an Instant Pot.

 


DELIVEROO
We chose Deliveroo out of the myriad of food delivery services because of their Editions project, which uses customer data to curate restaurant hubs in areas which have unfulfilled demands for certain chain establishments or cuisine types. This model allows food establishments to set up locations with zero start-up costs, and also gives customers in more restaurant-dry areas a wide variety of delivery food options. Essentially, it’s cloud kitchens meets a food hall, with some heavy analysis to help determine which restaurants or cuisines customers want, and where. These “Rooboxes” (hubs of shipping containers in which the food is prepared) show that Deliveroo is a pioneer in the dark kitchen space, and are doing serious work to shake up the food delivery market.

 

AMAZON GO
There are any number of ways that Amazon could have been included in this list, but its Amazon Go stores are what we think will be the real game changer. The cashierless corner store uses a high-tech combination of cameras and computing power, allowing you to walk in grab what you want — and leave. That’s it. At its first location in Seattle, we were struck by how seamless the experience was. As the locations broaden, this type of quick convenience has the potential to change the way we shop for snacks, (some) groceries and even prepared meal kits.

 


INGEST.AI
Restaurants have more pieces of software to deal with than ever. In addition to all the delivery platforms they are now plugged into, there have to deal with payments systems, HR software, and inventory management software. And right now, none of those applications talk to each other. Created by a former IBM Watson engineer, Ingest.ai promises to extract and connect the data from ALL of those disparate software pieces and tie them together to give restaurant owners a holistic, data-powered view of their business. It also helps them have more precise control over their business and automate tasks like food ordering and staff scheduling.

Want to meet the innovators from the FoodTech 25? Make sure to connect with them at North America’s leading foodtech summit, SKS 2019, on Oct 7-8th in Seattle.

NEXT

Whisk Acquires Avocando to Expand Shoppable Recipe Capabilities

Whisk, the UK-based AI food platform, announced today that it has acquired German startup, Avocando. The move augments Whisk’s shoppable recipe business by expanding the company’s footprint into continental Europe and adding some sizable appliance partners to the company’s partner roster.

As we’ve noted, the recipe is evolving from a static list of instructions and into a discovery and commerce platform. Whisk partners with publishers such as Pillsbury, the BBC and Food network to connect their recipes with retailers. So if you find a pancake recipe that you really like on Food Network, Whisk makes it easy to order all the necessary ingredients. In the U.S., Whisk works with Walmart and Peapod and recently added Amazon Fresh.

Avocando, which launched in 2015 and raised just €1m, has built a shoppable recipe platform that has found traction with publishers and appliance makers in Germany, Austria and France. According to the announcement, the company powers 600,000 shoppable recipes and reaches 20 million monthly shoppers across Germany and Europe.

By acquiring Avocando, Whisk picks up the startup’s user and customer base, which include food publisher Chefkoch and German appliance makers Miele and BSH Home Appliances. With two of Germany’s biggest appliance makers now in the fold, Whisk – who had its own integration with Samsung’s Family Hub – has started to tally an impressive list of hardware partners.

Terms of the acquisition weren’t made available, though Whisk CEO Nick Holzherr told The Spoon that they paid cash for the company out of revenue from continuing operations.  Whisk was founded in 2012, has 22 employees and raised $2 million in seed funding. The Avocando team will be joining Whisk.

Whisk Partners with Amazon to Expand its Shoppable Recipe Reach

In a move that will bolster the trend of recipes becoming center for discovery and commerce, Amazon has partnered with AI food platform Whisk to create shoppable recipes from more than 20 publishers.

Whisk partners with major food brands such as Pillsbury and General Mills and publishers like BBC Good Food and Food Network to connect their recipes with retailers. So, for example, if you like Pillsbury’s recipe for Blueberry Biscuits with Sweet Lemon Glaze, Whisk’s platform lets you automatically order all the necessary ingredients for delivery with just a few clicks.

In the United States, Whisk has been working with Walmart and Peapod for ingredient purchases and with today’s announcement adds Amazon Fresh as another partner. Whisk’s partnership will extend to Amazon UK starting on March 1.

For Amazon, Whisk joins AllRecipes and Fexy Media as another channel for shoppable recipes sales. We pegged shoppable recipes as a trend to watch this year as it has the power to transform the way we think about meal preparation.

Recipes used to be a source of both inspiration and frustration when the contents of our pantries fell short of the ideal meal. With same day delivery, retailers like Amazon, Albertsons, Walmart can now monetize that inspiration with (somewhat) instant gratification. Shoppable recipes make cooking almost any meal more frictionless.

Amazon’s continued expansion into the shoppable recipe space is sure to set in motion more defensive moves from other grocers. Last month, Aisle Ahead bought BigOven to offer shoppable recipes services for grocers. Additionally, Kroger partnered with Myxx to bring shoppable recipes to its stores.