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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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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.

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.

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.

Electrolux & Innit Partner to Help Consumers Navigate the Cooking Journey

Today at the EuroCucina trade show in Milan, Italy, Electrolux announced a strategic partnership with smart kitchen platform provider Innit in which the two companies will work together to integrate Innit’s software with the Electrolux’s connected appliances to “help consumers throughout the cooking journey.”

The first Electrolux appliance to integrate with the Innit platform will be the camera-enabled steam oven introduced by the Swedish appliance giant last month. Starting in the first quarter of 2019, consumers will be able to use the Innit app to find recipes, plan their meal and send cooking instructions to the Combisteam Pro Smart oven from Electrolux. Over time, the two companies envision that users of Electrolux appliances will be able to use the Innit app as the main app to power the entire cooking process, from meal discovery to shopping to cooking.

For Innit, its partnership with the region’s biggest appliance maker marks a significant entry into a market that requires substantial understanding of country-by-country differences. Unlike the more homogeneous US market, products for the Europe market need to account for differences in consumer cooking preferences across different countries. While some countries tend to embrace surface cooking (induction, etc), others may be more inclined to cook the nightly meal in an oven. By partnering with Electrolux, Innit can tap into the appliance maker’s localization expertise and create an app tailored towards specific user requirements in each locale.

For Electrolux, its partnership with Innit is the first time the company will work with a third party application partner for its connected appliances. The company sees the partnership as a strategic move towards a common software and user experience across appliances. The two companies plan to expand to more cooking devices as well as other appliances such as refrigerators.

One benefit Electrolux sees in tapping into a software-powered cooking experience is the ability to help consumers unlock capabilities that for the most part go unused.

“Our appliances are extremely advanced and often the consumer only uses a small fragment of their capabilities,” Patrick Le Corre, Sr. VP of kitchen products at Electrolux EMEA, told me in a phone interview. “Steam cooking is the best way to cook, but their knowledge of steam cooking is limited. If you bridge the potential of our appliances with an app, we unlock the power for consumers and secure an enjoyable cooking experience.”

The deal comes at an important time as more appliance makers are honing in on strategic partners as the industry continues to transition towards software-enabled cooking. At CES, Whirlpool showed off its Yummly integration while LG announced partnerships with Innit and SideChef, and last month Kenwood launched a new multicooker powered by Drop as part of a longer-team development deal. And now with Electrolux, Innit has locked up Europe’s biggest appliance maker in what looks to be a significant potential long-term partnership.

Whirlpool Smart Kitchen Announcements Include Cooking Automation And Yummly 2.0

Whirlpool is kicking off CES with a slew of smart kitchen announcements, including an update to the Yummly personalized recipe app, voice integration with Google Assistant and scan-to-cook guided cooking technology.

Whirlpool made a huge effort at CES 2017 to move further into the smart kitchen space, showing off a suite of connected appliances. Then, in May of last year, the company acquired recipe app startup Yummly and gained an entire community of users and a host of food content.

Whirlpool spent the rest of 2017 working on taking full advantage of the Yummly acquisition and is introducing the results of its work today at CES 2018. Among the brand’s many kitchen-related announcements, Whirlpool is launching Yummly 2.0, a new version of the recipe and cooking resources app that includes image recognition, meal scheduling features and an enhanced guided cooking experience when using Whirlpool connected appliances to cook.

Ingredient Recognition 

The next-gen Yummly app will include built-in image recognition software powered by machine learning to recognize multiple foods in one picture and dole out recipe recommendations based on what foods are shown. With a large database of food images, Yummly will continue to get better at identifying the food that users have on hand, using machine learning to evolve and grow its knowledge base.

In the Whirlpool mobile app, the company is launching the new Scan-to-Cook technology, a feature that allows users to scan a UPC barcode on frozen food packages and an existing set of instructions including temperature and cooking time for that particular food will be sent to the appliance. Scan-to-Cook setting can be customized to individual preferences if a food is preferred more or less cooked than the standard settings.

Guided Cooking Gets Better

For home chefs that have Whirlpool’s connected range or microwave, Yummly is now able to identify recipes that will work with those appliances and send cooking instructions to the device while following an interactive step-by-step tutorial in the app with images and video. While the user is instructed on what to chop, wash and prepare, the participating oven can be heating up and preparing a timer so it’s ready to go when they are. 

Starting in the spring of 2018, users will also be able to control their connected appliances straight through the Yummly app – a good sign that the brand plans to continue to invest in the platform as the center of their smart kitchen strategy in 2018.

Same Day Grocery Ordering 

Many smart appliances offer grocery list integrations, but Whirlpool takes it a step further in the Yummly app. The ingredients are categorized automatically in an attempt to make shopping easier (better than my Amazon Alexa grocery list which is just one giant list of things I may or may not have already bought) but even better – a new integration with Instacart means you can get the ingredients you need, delivered in about an hour.

Scheduling, Voice, Remote Start

The Yummly app lets users schedule their meals out for the week and let them know when it’s time to start cooking based on the scheduled desired eating time. And, like almost every other company at CES, Whirlpool is announcing integration with Google Assistant to be able to control connected appliances through voice command. Details on the integration weren’t provided but with Google pushing back at Amazon’s domination in voice assistants, it’s not surprising that they’re pursuing the kitchen as a space to gain mindshare. Additional features in the app lets families remotely start their appliances from outside the house to warm up the oven and get the kitchen ready for dinner.

For more #smartkitchen news at CES, follow @TheSpoonTech, @SmartKitchenCon and @michaelwolf for updates.

Baby Food Delivery Startup Raised Real Gets $5 Million Injection

When Santiago Merea spoke at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, he was Chief Revenue Officer of Yummly. Less than a year later, he’s heading up his own baby food startup called Raised Real and just raised $5 million from frozen food and food delivery giant Schwan’s Company.

The Spoon was the first to cover Merea’s transition to his new startup, which delivers flash frozen raw ingredients for baby food. Before Raised Real, Merea was an early entrant into the smart kitchen market with Orange Chef, a company that created a connected scale and app called the Prep Pad. The company eventually got acquired by Yummly, but Merea retained the rights to the Prep Pad, which he eventually sold to Perfect Company.

When parents sign up for a Raised Real subscription, they get a mixing machine that steams and blends the ingredients into fresh baby food. A subscription, which Raised Real calls a ‘Membership,’ costs $95 and ships every two weeks. Each box includes ingredients for 20 meals, translating to $4.75 per meal.

Raised Real ingredients and food mixer

The interest from Schwan’s came after Raised Real’s early success. According to Merea, the retention rate for customers is 80% after the initial box is shipped, and 90% after the second box is shipped, which translates to about a 72% retention rate after the first month. That is an impressively low churn compared with meal kit services such as Blue Apron, which retain only about half of their customers after the first month. That number drops to about a third of customers by month three.

Merea told The Spoon the company plans on using the $5 million to expand nationally. Today the company ships in five states in the western United States: California, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada.

Schwan’s is an interesting investor. The company, founded in 1952, is the $3 billion frozen food and delivery conglomerate behind such brands as Red Baron pizza and Mrs. Smith’s frozen pies. The company has its own food delivery business, which dates back to the company’s beginning when founder Marvin Schwan started delivering ice cream to homes in rural Minnesota. Schwan’s eventually expanded into other food types like frozen fish and pizza, launching their own brands like Red Baron along the way.

According to Merea, Raised Real has two days to get its food packs into a customer’s hands once it packs the flash frozen ingredients with dry ice. While this gives them access to most of the continental United States, access to Schwan’s vast delivery infrastructure could still be critical in a national rollout. Access to Schwan’s cold chain delivery expertise could be important as well, since cold food delivery is, generally, one the trickiest and most expensive types of food distribution.

There’s no doubt that going from Yummly to starting his own baby food company with a partner like Schwan’s is a big shift in just a year, but Merea explains that the idea for Raised Real came to him not long after his twins were born almost three years ago.

“I couldn’t wait for them to start eating,” said Merea, “but when I went to the grocery store all of the food was processed. I realized that all of these companies are speaking to the previous generations of parents. The current generation of parents doesn’t want processed food. They want fresh and organic.”

Merea soon started experimenting with raw ingredients, mixing his own baby food at home. He wasn’t satisfied.

“The whole supply chain behind these ingredients still needed to be solved,” he explained.

He eventually started talking about the idea for a fresh baby food startup with his eventual cofounders, Michelle Davenport (a PhD in Nutrition and registered dietician), and Steve Kontz (whom Merea worked with at Orange Chef and Yummly) and, before long, Raised Real was born.

You can listen to an adapted version of this article below, or add the Daily Spoon Alexa Skill to get Spoon articles on your Echo device. 

The Tasty One Top And The Rise Of Content Powered Cooking

Back in 2008, Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington wrote a manifesto in which he announced plans to build a low-cost tablet computing device.

While the idea of a technology blog beating computing giants like Apple and Microsoft to market with a tablet seemed preposterous at the time, Arrington continued to pursue his crazy dream. Before long a team had been assembled, prototypes built, and eventually the Crunchpad got pretty darn close to becoming a reality before everything fell apart and instead we got something called the JooJoo.

The Crunchpad

The story of the Crunchpad seemed so improbable in part because of the difficulty of Arrington’s day job. When I went to work for one of Techcrunch’s biggest competitors (Gigaom) during this time, it made me even more fascinated with the story since I saw first hand just how hard it is to run a company tracking the fast-moving world of technology. The idea of actually building the technology in addition to writing about it seemed insane.

I also think part of what made the idea of the team behind a tech blog creating a piece of computing equipment so hard for me and others to wrap our minds around is most of us still view people – and companies – through a Richard Scarry lens on the world. In other words, content companies make content, hardware makers make hardware; food companies make food and so on. Sure, there are weird conglomerate mashups like when GE owned NBC, but often these types of weird combos were the result of merger and acquisition sprees in the 80s.

But if there’s anything we’ve learned from watching companies like Amazon or Google, the old rules don’t seem to apply anymore.  These companies have taught us that once you build a competency in one thing – whether e-commerce or transportation – that strength can often be leveraged to build a competency in an adjacent (or often non-adjacent) space.

Amazon started with books, eventually moved into web services, then to hardware, and now they’re on to grocery stores. Google started with search, moved onto mobile, then IoT and now all sorts of crazy ideas whether its VR, healthcare or balloon-based broadband.

And so while I was surprised when I learned last week Buzzfeed had launched its hardware device called the Tasty One Top, I also instantly knew this made sense at some level. We are, after all, living in the “throw the rules out” era of Amazon. And yes, the story of Crunchpad showed us that that occasionally a content company can break the Richard Scarry mold.

People – and companies – don’t live in a Richard Scarry world anymore.

But I also realized what I was witnessing with the Tasty One Top made sense because it was indicative of a trend I’ve been thinking about for some time, an idea that in the future cooking companies need to become content and community companies.  I’d witnessed it with the acquisition of Yummly by Whirlpool, and before that, I saw that ChefSteps had been building a large community around its content which it then leveraged into willing customer base for its cooking device called the Joule.

As I wrote when Whirlpool acquired Yummly, the deal “gives Whirlpool a massive infusion of cooking content and community. As newer companies in the connected kitchen like ChefSteps have shown, having strong recipe content and an associated community can create fertile soil upon which to launch new hardware products. With Yummly, Whirlpool now has a built-in community to tap into as it expands is smart kitchen product lineup in the coming years.”

I realized this is the same principle Buzzfeed was capitalizing on, the idea that they could tap into a large community built around compelling content to find a friendly and willing audience into which to tap.

But I also knew it was more than that. What the Tasty One Top further validated for me was the idea of content-powered cooking, where cooking content becomes more than just a dry recipe on a page or a simple YouTube video which we watch to learn a new skill. The idea of content powered cooking is central to guided cooking, something I first started writing about after I first saw the Hestan Cue. In short, guided cooking is where the cooking content not only acts as a helpful set of instructions for the cook but works with an app and sensor-powered appliance to become the guidance system for the entire cooking experience.

When I talked to Buzzfeed Labs’ Ben Kaufman last week about the One Top, he told me that they wanted to turn their Tasty cooking videos into a utility.  To do so, they went back and did the arduous work of breaking down each video into single steps, time-stamping and logging each, and then building an app that would work with the One Top itself.

The result is a content-powered cooking experience, where what began as quick viral cooking videos ultimately become part of the cooking system and experience itself.

Together, the idea of a large community built around content coupled with a cooking product and associated experience powered by the product makes lots of sense. In many ways it’s indicative of what companies like ChefSteps and Hestan Smart Cooking were already building, only coupled with the world’s largest cooking video site in Tasty.

Kaufman told me last week that this is the only cooking appliance Buzzfeed plans on making, in large part because they built the Tasty One Top as a Swiss army knife type of sorts that can work with nearly any type of recipe. But he also said they had more products ideas in mind in which they can build around the “utility” they’ve created in the Tasty cooking videos and app.

I can hardly wait to see what type of Richard Scarry busting concept they dream up next.

Want to hear about the future of connected cooking? Make sure to not to miss the Smart Kitchen Summit. Just use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets. 

Whirlpool’s Dibkey: “We Think The Kitchen Is Headed For a Transformation”

Earlier this month, Whirlpool announced their intention to acquire Yummly.  It’s a fascinating deal to me in part because the idea of the country’s largest home appliance maker buying one of the Internet’s most popular recipe communities has so many potential strategic possibilities.

I wrote some of my thoughts about the deal here, but I also reached out to Brett Dibkey, the VP and GM of Integrated Business Units at Whirlpool to shed some further light on the deal and the company’s motivations. While Dibkey validated some of my early assumptions (Content integration with hardware is key for the smart kitchen) and told me where I missed the mark (the Orange Chef IP was not a motivation for the deal), the biggest takeaway from my Q&A with Dibkey was this one statement:

“We think the kitchen is headed for a transformation”

 

It’s a big statement, one which confirms much of my broader theory about the kitchen entering a new stage where new technologies such IoT, AI and precision heating methods combine with sweeping demographic and cultural shifts to set up a period of innovation and reinvention. Of course, it’s one thing for me to write it. It’s another for the guy who heads up Whirlpool’s appliance business to say it.

The good news is you’ll be able to see Dibkey speak about this change at the Smart Kitchen Summit in October where I’ll get to ask him on stage about this and other changes coming to the kitchen.

Here’s our interview:

In the press release, you described Yummly as a platform for you to build your ‘digital product offering’. Can you elaborate on what you mean by digital product offering?

Dibkey: We envision a number of digital products emerging in the kitchen that will help consumers remove steps and generally make their experience simpler and more enjoyable. Obviously, Yummly already provides an outstanding personalized recipe discovery experience – but we think that the convergence of digital and physical products can offer even more. While we’re not ready to talk specifics yet, we think the kitchen is headed for a transformation. Further, we believe that pairing Yummly with Whirlpool Corporation’s broad portfolio of brands (including Whirlpool, KitchenAid, Jenn-Air, and Maytag) will help fuel this transformation.

When Yummly acquired Orange Chef, at the time Orange Chef was working on a kitchen OS type ‘platform’ for appliance companies to build around. Is this IP part of the rationale for acquiring Yummly and do you plan to use what they started here for your products?

Dibkey: The Orange Chef IP was not part of the rationale for buying Yummly. Our interest in Yummly centered mainly around three things – their industry-leading meal discovery experience, the quality of their team, and the relationship they have with millions of engaged users.

One obvious synergy is taking the cooking automation features Whirlpool unveiled at CES this year and connecting to Yummly’s large database of recipes. Is this in the plans?

Dibkey: Unfortunately, we don’t comment on our future development pipeline. Stay tuned!

I have said that appliance companies need to become content company. As hardware becomes connected, it will begin to automatically tap into content like that of Yummly’s to help people learn to cook, discover food and take over manual tasks. Is this vision of becoming more of content company part of the reason for the acquisition?

Dibkey: Connecting great content to great physical products to deliver great results for consumers is undoubtedly going to be central to unlocking the promise of the “smart kitchen”. Yummly certainly helps us establish a key content presence that we previously didn’t have.

With Yummly, Whirlpool also gets a community and a social platform. How can Whirlpool tap into the community and social platform aspect of Yummly in a way that grows the community yet also provides return on investment?

Dibkey: Above all else, we are going to empower the Yummly team and give them resources to continue providing content and features that inspire and engage their community of users. In our view, if we can do this successfully, a number of value creation opportunities will emerge. But for now, our primary focus will be on nurturing the Yummly community through continuing to provide engaging personalized content.

Podcast: Why Did Whirlpool Buy Yummly?


We’re back!

Yes, it’s been way tooo long since we’ve done one of these, but Ashley and I catch up on the top smart kitchen and foodtech news of the last few weeks, including:

You can download the episode here. Also, make sure to subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show in iTunes.

We also catch up on all the news coming out of the Smart Kitchen Summit. If you’d like to go to SKS, head on over to the Smart Kitchen Summit website and use the discount code PODCAST and get 20% off of tickets.

Whirlpool Buys Yummly In Effort To Bolster Smart Kitchen Strategy

This week Whirlpool announced their intention to acquire Yummly, one of the Internet’s biggest food and recipe sites.

The acquisition comes as part of Whirlpool’s effort to accelerate its development for the smart kitchen of the future. At CES this year, the company announced new cooking automation features for its lineup of smart appliances, including new Alexa skills, scan to cook and guided cooking. This just a year after the company showed off a number of connected kitchen efforts at CES 2016, including Amazon Dash integration.

The guided cooking feature announced in January is particularly interesting in light of the Yummly deal.  The new feature enables users of the Whirlpool Smart Kitchen Suite app to send a recipe directly to a Wi-Fi powered appliance such as an oven, which will then follow the cooking instructions. It’s easy to envision how this cooking automation capability could be coupled with Yummly’s massive database of recipes.

This Is About Smart Kitchen Self-Sufficiency

Making the deal more interesting is the fact that Whirlpool recently parted ways with Innit, a smart kitchen platform company that had started working with the company’s Jenn-Air division in 2016. As I wrote in March, the breakup was in part due to Whirlpool’s decision to start forging its own technology path as it saw the smart kitchen becoming a reality over the past year:

With 2017 rolling around and the company viewing the market for connected kitchen products as more viable, it decided to more actively develop and expand their own connected product technology.  As one source told me, “if a startup can do with a few million dollars, why can’t the world’s biggest kitchen brand do it?” 

In other words, Whirlpool had decided it wanted to determine its own technology destiny rather than relying too heavily on external partners to forge a path forward. What the Yummly deal shows is that the company will not hesitate to acquire others as part of its effort to realize smart kitchen self-sufficiency.

And this deal does just that by bringing Yummly’s smart kitchen technology platform in-house. As Brett Dibkey, Whirlpool’s vice president of Integrated Business Units, said: “Yummly brings an outstanding platform on which to begin building our digital product offering.”

A Year Of Change For Yummly

For Yummly, the acquisition by Whirlpool comes after a year of management change. In October of last year, the company’s Chief Revenue Officer Santiago Merea left to start a baby food startup, and then in November the company’s head of product, Ankit Brahmbhatt, left to become Innit’s head of product (yes, Innit, the company who parted ways with Whirlpool this year).  Yummly also saw its CEO David Feller step back and hand the reigns to Brian Witlin, who in a previous life was the cofounder of Shopwell, a company recently acquired by…you guessed it…Innit.

Both Merea and Brahmbhatt came to Yummly through Yummly’s acquisition of Orange Chef, a smart kitchen company who had built it’s own connected scale, and had started to build  smart kitchen operating system and platform for appliance companies. For whatever reason, Yummly never partnered with any appliance companies, which could in part explain the departure of Merea and Brahmbhatt last year. It looks as though the Yummly-powered connected kitchen will finally be built, only now as part of the world’s biggest appliance company.

Whirlpool Becomes A Content and Community Company With Yummly Deal

Lastly, one important aspect of this deal is that it gives Whirlpool a massive infusion of cooking content and community. As newer companies in the connected kitchen like ChefSteps have shown, having strong recipe content and an associated community can create fertile soil upon which to launch new hardware products. With Yummly, Whirlpool now has a built-in community to tap into as it expands is smart kitchen product lineup in the coming years.

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