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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Yomee

Lecker Labs Raised $400,000, Pushed Yomee Yogurt Maker to 2019

There’s good news/bad news for those awaiting the Yomee connected countertop automatic yogurt maker (we count ourselves among them). The good news? Lecker Labs, the company behind Yomee, closed a $400,000 round of funding last month! The bad news? If you’re one of the more than one thousand people who crowdfunded the project, you won’t get your Yomee until next year. Maybe.

The funding news flew under our radar, and we came across it when checking in on Yomee’s progress on Indiegogo. An update there posted on September 16, 2018 from the company read:

We have finally closed a funding round of $400,000 to get Yomee into manufacturing! Since most of the funds came from our existing investors, so [sic.] please join Yomee team to thank our investors for their continued support. Of course, we also genuinely appreciate all the efforts and patience from all of you amidst manufacturing and shipping delays, we are expressing our greatest gratitude to your everlasting support and understanding!

In October of last year, Lecker Labs Founder Ashok Jaiswal told us he had already raised $350,000 in angel funding (Crunchbase says Lecker has raised $325,000). Jaiswal had also launched a Kickstarter campaign towards the end of 2017 to, as we wrote at the time, raise additional money needed for tooling production parts and as a test to gauge market interest. Yomee actually ran both Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, raising an additional $186,109.

Adding those numbers up, it looks like more than $930,000 in total has been poured into the Yomee. Raising a lot of money, however, does not guarantee a hardware product will ever reach market. And it looks like Yomee has gotten tangled up in the production issues that snag so many crowdfunding projects.

Kickstarter backers could pledge $99 for a Yomee kit with an initial ship date of April 2018. The ship date on Indiegogo was listed as August 2018. In an update dated July 8, 2018, Lecker said it was pushing delivery into next year, writing:

As per our original commitment to you, we were expecting to start shipping in August. However we found some critical issues in testing pre-production units, mainly how cool can we keep the yogurt. Our goal is to achieve cooling to as low as 12-15 deg Celsius (53-59 deg Fahrenheit). We have discovered in testing with production materials that we may not reach these low temperatures under certain ambient conditions. The performance of Yomee right now is ‘good enough’ for an MVP but we expect to do better and ship a product we can be proud of. Another cycle of iteration in refining the design and testing is unfortunately going to delay shipping. Our engineers and factory partners expect this process to be complete by end of the year and shipping in first quarter of 2019. We will be strongly focussed on this for the rest of the year and will send monthly updates on our progress.

We are fans of the concept of Yomee here at The Spoon. The idea of a small countertop machine that makes and chills our own customizeable yogurt is enticing, and hopefully delicious. We even selected Lecker as one of our startup showcase companies at our Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe this past June. But all the hope in the world can’t overcome production and manufacturing issues (See: the Cinder smart grill, HOPii, Smart Plate, iGulu, BrewBot).

Ideally, this new round of funding will power the company through whatever troubles they might be having so it can fulfill its promise to backers and get its product into the world. But we’ll have to wait and see. We reached out to Jaswail for comment and clarification and will update this post as we hear back.

COO of Lecker Labs, Makers of Yomee, Talks Crowdfunding Success

Since we announced the 8 finalists in our SKS Europe Startup Showcase last week, we’ve launched a series of Q&A’s to introduce this year’s talented crop of food innovators. Next up is Anindya Roy, COO of Lecker Labs, producer of Yomee.

Lecker Labs got their start at the food tech accelerator program FoodX and before launching a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign for Yomee, a countertop appliance which combines milk (and milk alternatives) with branded probiotic pods to create chilled yogurt in 6 hours.

Head to the SKS Europe blog to read our Q&A with Roy and learn more about the inspiration behind Yomee, the startup’s biggest challenges, and the secret to their crowdfunding success.

If you want to meet Anindya and more of the Yomee team in person and see them demo their countertop yogurt maker, register for SKS Europe in Dublin on June 11-12th!

 

Home Yogurt Machine Yomee Blows Past its Kickstarter Goal

I am addicted to Ellenos greek yogurt. It’s thick, rich and delicious and I would eat it for every meal if… it wasn’t sold out all the time. But after speaking with Ashok Jaiswal, Co-Founder and CEO of Yomee, I’m hoping that soon I can just make it at home. We’ve written before about Yomee, the countertop device that does all the work of making yogurt. Now the company has surpassed its Kickstarter goal, raising an additional $62,500 on the crowdfunding platform, bringing its yogurt machine for the masses one step closer to reality.

Yomee had already raised $350,000 in angel funding and was using Kickstarter both to raise additional money needed for tooling production parts and as a test market to gauge market interest.

Given the response, there is a market. In fact, Jaiswal said people wanted Yomee to make more than just yogurt, they wanted to make Kefir and other fermented products at home. To sate those appetites, the company announced an expert mode for its device last week.

But blowing past a Kickstarter goal is one thing. Meeting the harsh realities of hardware production and delivering actual products to market has been… difficult for many Kickstarter projects. The platform is littered with dashed hopes and broken promises of failed gadgets and gizmos. Jaswail believes he can avoid a similar fate because he is based in Hong Kong, closer to where the manufacturing will take place. This proximity makes it much easier to address any issues that come up in production.

Kickstarter backers are scheduled to receive their Yomee units in April of next year. The rest of us will have to wait until the end of 2018. Jaswail said the Yomee will be available for $149 at select retailers and through its web site. Until then, I guess I’ll be stocking up on Ellenos whenever I can get it.

The Spoon Video Top 3: Yogurt Tech, Breville’s Coffee Robot & The Cordless Kitchen

It’s our weekly video recap of the top three trending stories from over the past week on The Spoon. Our recap includes these stories:

Make sure to follow us on Facebook to get our weekly video wrapup of the top trending stories first.

Fresh Or Frozen, These Startups Aim To Create A Keurig For Home Yogurt

With everyone nowadays seemingly trying to get their daily fill of probiotics, yogurt has become a go-to for a daily snack, tasty dessert or healthy way to start the day. For most of us, that means buying it at the store or heading out to get a sugar-filled frozen yogurt at the local froyo stand.

And while some are adventurous enough to create at home using one of the many home yogurt makers on the market, none of these devices offer make-at-home yogurt with Keurig like simplicity.

Until now. That’s because two new startups are coming to market with pod-based yogurt systems. And the good news for yogurt eaters? They will have our choice of fresh or frozen.

Yomee 

If you like fresh yogurt and want to make it at home, you will be interested in the Yomee from Food-X alumni, Lecker Labs. The original concept for a pod-based yogurt maker came to the company CEO Ashok Jaiswal when he and his wife started feeding their young daughter yogurt and were looking for an easy way to make it at home.

“When we found out that she loves yogurt, we wanted to buy good ones for her, but almost all yogurts sold in Hong Kong are expensive,” Jaiswal told the Loop. “They’re also often imported and therefore not fresh, and can contain lots of sugar and other ingredients.

When his wife asked him if he could make a device to make yogurt, he started researching the idea.

“I thought that there must have been so many in the market already, but when I Googled and checked on Amazon, I found that there were no fully automatic yogurt makers in the market.”

Jaiswal teamed up with cofounder Tu-Hien Le and soon raised $325 thousand in seed funding. The two were accepted into Food-X, a well-known food startup accelerator based in New York, and from there they went on to create Yomee.

To make yogurt with the Yomee, you put in milk and a Yomee pod (which will make approximately two servings of yogurt). The Yomee hardware stirs the milk, heats it to 185 degrees Fahrenheit and adds the cultures from the Yomee pod. Six hours later the yogurt, chilled to 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

According to my conversation with Tu-Hien Le at June’s Food IT event in Silicon Valley, the device will be for sale initially via Kickstarter at the end of August starting at $99, which is significantly lower than $800 to $1,200 retail price range that the two founders told the Loop  (ed note: Tu-Hien Le clarified via email that the price quoted to The Loop was in Hong Kong dollars).  According to Hien Le, the company will offer a subscription for its pods for $15 a month.

Yogurt for Dessert? Meet Wim

If you fancy a froyo instead, you’re in luck. The Wim, announced this week, makes single-serve frozen yogurt in about 10 minutes.

The product is the brainchild of Google alum Bart Stein. Stein, who sold his first startup Stamped to Yahoo in 2012, came up with the idea for a frozen yogurt maker while on vacation in the Catskills in 2014.

“There was an appliance for everything from coffee, to waffles, to soda,” Stein told Bloomberg. “We realized there was no appliance for frozen dessert.”

How To Frozen Your Yogurt

Stein went on to secure funding, build a team and over the next two years create a system that includes the Wim appliance and yogurt bowls. The system makes frozen yogurt when the user adds milk into the Wim bowl and presses a button on the Wim appliance. The Wim appliance stirs and chills the mixture of milk and ingredients to negative 10 Celsius (about 14 degrees Fahrenheit) in about 90 seconds.

The Wim bowls, which include a powder that activates when mixed with the milk, cost about $3 a bowl in bulk. Currently, the company offers ten flavors, ranging from strawberry to ‘brownie batter’ to ‘banana bread’. The Wim appliance will set you back $299.

Unlike the Yomee, the Wim is available today.

Bloomberg’s Kate Krader tested out the Wim and liked what she tasted. “So what does it taste like? The dessert is luxuriously creamy and airy, with a tangy bite,” she wrote.

Are We Ready For Keurig For Yogurt?

Will pod-based yogurt take a bite out of store bought or the traditional home yogurt makers on the market?

Maybe. There is an obvious advantage to having long-shelf life dry yogurt pods that you can mix fresh on demand.  For those who want fresh yogurt daily, something like the Yomee may make sense, particularly if the product is in the lower end of the price range.

Of course, the Yomee will need to compete with older, less smart yogurt makers on the market. One such product is the Euro Cuisine, which costs about $30 and makes yogurt using yogurt starters.  But systems like this require more cleaning and the user to put yogurt into jars.

The Wim will face competition from both the local froyo stand and devices like the Cuisinart ICE-21, a popular home frozen yogurt maker that sells for about $50, but takes anywhere from 16 hours to 24 hours to make a batch of froyo.

For both potential users of the Yomee and Wim, the clear advantage is increased convenience and rapid-serve small portions.  If the companies can get the price right while perfecting pod systems to work well, I think will be a subset of consumers who find the convenience of Keurig-like simplicity, speed and clean up the right mix for their yogurt fix.