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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Ztove

Ztove Starts Shipping Smart Cooking System In Europe

Back in 2016, I received a short message from an inventor in Denmark asking if he could make me pancakes.

While it’s not every day someone reaches out and asks to make pancakes, it wasn’t all that surprising given the inventor, Peter Favrholdt, had created a prototype for a smart cooking system and I was one of the few people writing about the technology at the time.

Ztove founder and me in 2016

As it turned out, Favrholdt had learned we were holding a meetup in San Francisco and decided to travel from Denmark to attend the event.  While I didn’t get to taste Favrholdt’s pancakes on that trip, I got a chance to hear his story and encouraged him to apply for the Smart Kitchen Summit’s startup showcase.

Long story short: he did, and he won. His system, which features a Bluetooth connected pan, an induction cooktop, and an app to orchestrate the cooking process was picked by a panel of experts and Favrholdt and Ztove were crowned the winner of the 2016 Startup Showcase alongside 3D food printer nufood (in 2016 we had a tie).

Longer story short? A week ago I saw on Linkedin that Ztove had started shipping its smart cooking system to customers.

When I asked Favrholdt for more details, he told me the Ztove was now available in Denmark through the company’s website and would soon be available in physical retail.  He also told me they’d managed to create a product line that included two intelligent pans and a large saucepan, as well as three different cooktops.

“On the smart cooktop side we offer a table top dual burner called “DUO,” which sells as a bundle including a frying pan and a saucepan (USD 1599),” said Favrholdt in an email.

More intriguing is that two of the cooktops are built-ins.

“For home use, most people want built-in smart induction cooktops,” he wrote. “Ztove currently has two models – a “normal” 24 inches (USD 1049) and a “wide” 31 inches model (USD 1599) both with four cooking zones but having different width and arrangement of the burners.”

When I asked Favrholdt about how he was able to fund development of the product, he pointed to winning the Startup Showcase at SKS.

“Bringing home the SKS trophy also had a significance,” he said. “Ztove won a couple of grants in Denmark, and in 2017 we were enrolled in the Odense Robotics Startup Hub – an accelerator program for early startups in the field of robotics. In 2018 we got a small investment allowing us to increase the pace and building the company bringing the Ztove products to market.”

With their funding, they were able to find manufacturers for the components of the Ztove systems and start a small factory in Denmark where the final units are assembled by hand.

Favrholdt and the Hestan Cue team at SKS 2016

By finally shipping, Ztove joins Hestan as one of the few companies delivering smart cooking systems that focus on surface cooking, including intelligent cookware, cooktops, and an app. But that’s not the only connection between these two companies; As it turns out, Favrholdt connected with the Hestan team back on that 2016 trip to San Francisco.

“I brought Ztove’s first prototype and was thrilled to get to meet the Hestan Cue team,” said Favrholdt. “It was terrific talking to someone as passionate about smart cooking as myself.”

Hestan Cue Available For Preorder As New Generation of Guided Cooking Systems Come To Market

Last March at the Housewares show in Chicago, I had scheduled a meeting to swing by housewares giant Meyer’s booth to check out a demo of a new product they were calling the Hestan Cue.

All I knew about the product was it had morphed out of work done by Meld, a startup founded in 2014 to create a retrofit smart knob to add some aftermarket automation and control to existing stove tops. After a successful Kickstarter, Meld was stealthily acquired by Meyer and for the next six months no one heard from the connected cooking startup.

So when I got invited to see what had become of Meld, I was naturally intrigued. I had no idea what I was going to see at the Meyer booth, but I suspected it might be something similar to the retrofit knob Meld had built.

I quickly realized after I had arrived was they had scrapped that idea entirely and created something much cooler: a guided cooking system.

The next hour was eye opening, as chef Philip Tessier, Hestan’s in-house culinary director (and soon-to-be gold medal winner at what is essentially the culinary Olympics), asked me to cook salmon for him. Naturally, I was a bit nervous cooking for an award winning chef, but ultimately had no problem making some tasty fish using the guidance provided by the Hestan Cue app.

As I wrote at the time:

“It was this combination of the pan, burner and app and the guidance system they had built that led me to see the possibilities around this new category. I am not a great cook by any stretch of the imagination, but I cooked one of the tastiest pieces of salmon I’ve ever had in about 20 minutes. The experience was enabled by technology, but the technology didn’t take me out of the experience of cooking. Further, I can see as I gain more confidence using a system like this, I can choose to “dial down” the guidance needed from the system to the point I am largely doing most of the cooking by myself (though I don’t know if I’d ever get rid of the automated temperature control, mostly because I’m lazy and it gives me instant “chef intuition).”

It’s been almost a year since I first used the Hestan Cue, and in that time new products have started to emerge on the guided cooking front. ChefSteps has created a cool cooking guidance system for their sous vide circulator, the Joule, while new features in Pantelligent‘s software has made this smart pan into a guided cooking system. Danish startup Ztove is creating a system similar to the Hestan Cue, while Cuciniale is selling what it calls ‘intelligent cooking systems’ that feature an induction heating surface and a variety of cookwares with a sensor probe. Lastly, multicooker leader Thermomix continues to evolve their fifth generation product into what is essentially a guided cooking system powered by a 12-in-1 cooking tool.

And now, the Hestan Cue is available for preorder on the Williams-Sonoma website and will begin shipping in March.

The product’s price carries an MSRP of $699 but is available for $499 online.  The price is a bit higher than other products like the Joule, so the choice of high-end retailer Williams-Sonoma makes sense. I expect Williams-Sonoma will have in-store demos for the Hestan Cue, something needed to convey the concept of guided cooking.

No matter which way you slice it, it looks like we can expect more guided cooking systems on the menu in 2017.