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Video

April 10, 2018

Video: CNET’s Ashlee Clark Thompson on Her Best Cooking Gadgets

We at The Spoon have long been fans of Ashlee Clark Thompson, Associate Editor at CNet and hilarious twitter poster. (You may have seen her on stage at last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit talking about the future of food.)

Like us, Thompson is fascinated by the smart kitchen market. “The kitchen has become the center of the home,” she said. “We’re seeing all these screens pop up everywhere. For me, as a person that loves to cook, that’s exciting. But it’s also a little scary, because I want products that will last.”

Chris Albrecht caught up with Thompson at this year’s Housewares Show Smart Home Pavillion to debrief about said products. Check out the video to see Albrecht and Clark Thompson discuss the best cooking gadgets to invest in, their hesitations about connected products, and how tech can make us better cooks.

CNET at the IHA Smart Talks Theater

Interested in hearing more about the Smart Kitchen Summit? Our first European event is coming up June 11-12th in Dublin, and we’ll be returning to Seattle for our fourth year in October.  

March 2, 2018

Video: Grove CEO Gabe Blanchet Has Big Plans for Home Farming

If you’re like me, right now you have a pot of thyme (or rosemary, or basil) clinging to life on your windowsill. No matter how much I water it or how carefully I place it in the sunshine, I cannot keep plants alive—even simple indoor ones like herbs.

This is a huge bummer because, while I love to cook with fresh herbs, they can be quite pricey at the grocery store, tend to wilt in the fridge within days, and aren’t always of the highest quality. But home growing systems like Grove are trying to help those without green thumbs (guilty) transform their kitchens, living rooms, and empty garages into mini indoor farms.

A model of how Grove’s indoor farming systems would function in the home.

Though they’re not the only ones leveraging IoT to make indoor growing kits, Grove is thinking big to bring home farming systems to wide swaths of consumers. In order to get consumers to install growing systems in their house, they’ve got to a) look nice, and b) deliver good, consistent results. Grove has teamed up with major appliance and furniture companies to check both of these boxes: Blanchet and his team will provide home ag software and seed pods, and their partners will create custom indoor farming hardware to match.

Grove showed off their initial hydroponic home farming system at the Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase in 2016. He returned in 2017 and sat down with SKS founder Mike Wolf to talk about the future of small-scale indoor farming and how he’s able to grow 30-40% of his own food, right at home.

Watch the video and then head over here to check out more videos from Smart Kitchen Summits of yore.

Got a food tech startup idea of your own? Apply for our Startup Showcase for SKS Europe, June 11-12th in Dublin, Ireland. 

February 9, 2018

Video: James Ehrlich Talks Food, Epiphanies, & the (Eco)Village of the Future

Take a second, right now, and picture the community of the future. Are there green roofs, lazily-turning windmills, and streetlights powered by solar energy? Maybe even a lawn-mowing robot or two?

James Ehrlich, CEO of ReGen Villages, has a pretty innovative vision for how neighborhoods of the future should look and function. After a career as a tech entrepreneur and television producer for The Hippy Gourmet, with a few epiphanies along the way, he came to the sobering realization that “the planet is, in fact, falling apart.”

In response, Ehrlich began sketching out plans for modern ecovillages with food “not as a sidebar or a flourish, but as the actual mechanism for how a neighborhood infrastructure is built.” ReGen Villages is currently in the midst of construction their first pilot community in Almere, Netherlands, with plans to expand.

After he wowed us with his optimistic vision for the future of homes, neighborhoods, and communities at the Smart Kitchen Summit last year, Ehrlich sat down with Allen Weiner of The Spoon chat with about epiphanies (and breakdowns), the concept behind ReGen Villages, and what’s on the horizon (hint: their ecovillages might be coming to a state near you!).

Psst—look out for videos from past Smart Kitchen Summits every Friday on The Spoon. And if you’re in Europe (or just want an excuse to EuroTrip), register for SKS Europe, coming to Dublin in June.

November 9, 2017

Oliver Aims To Take One Pot Cooking To The Next Level

The holy grail of convenience cooking has always been the one pot solution. Since the early 1970s, the CrockPot and other less famous brands of slow cooking machines dominated the kitchen as the solution for “set it and forget it” meals. Whether it was pork roasts, applesauce, stews or chili, the Crock Pot lets users combine (mostly) raw ingredients, turn the device on and come back later in the day to a fully cooked meal. In 2009, with the rise of the electric pressure cooker, the Instant Pot debuted and the debate began as to which technology was actually more useful.

The Instant Pot has a slow cooker feature, but the love of the device comes from its ability to produce cooked food in a much shorter amount of time through pressure cooking.

But whether you’re team Crock Pot or team Instant Pot, one thing remains true: one pot cooking tech hasn’t changed much in the last 40+ years. They still require users to dump a slew of ingredients all at once into a large bowl (or manually add different ingredients at different times) and hope it all cooks perfectly. But not every food item requires the same amount of time – or the same levels of heat – to cook.

This was the challenge Else Labs was trying to tackle with new one pot automated cooking machine Oliver. The technology and device design allows ingredients to be divided into dispensing canisters and then placed into the pot for cooking when the recipe-driven app tells it to.

Else Labs Founder & CEO Khalid Aboujassoum sat down with The Spoon’s Allen Weiner at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit.

“This technology takes slow cooking to a new level. You can taste every ingredient – they all have the right texture and right flavor because they were cooked correctly,” said Aboujassoum.

Oliver isn’t exactly a slow cooker; it mimics the way you’d cook on a stove top (saute onions first, add vegetables, cook meat around it, make the broth separate, etc) – but it enables automation and connectivity to take over and relieve the cook from standing over the stove for the entire process.

Oliver does what Crock Pot and Instant Pot can’t – understand the sequence and temperature of how each ingredient should be cooked and mimic those actions the way a human cook would. Oliver dispenses at the right time and heats to the right temperature with a robotic stirring arm built in to stir as needed.

“Tell Oliver ‘I need food by six’ and the machine will do the math for you in terms of when to start, stir, dispense and stop,” said Aboujassoum.

Another differentiator? Oliver records the work of pros so busy home cooks can replicate their work. According to Aboujassoum, the recipes generated from the Oliver app are all created with professional chefs. As the chefs make their recipes with Oliver, Oliver and the app capture all the actions, recording the sequence so it can be automated and replicated for Oliver users. Eventually, the plan is to let the Oliver user community contribute and add recipes using this same method to capture a more diverse range of content.

It took almost 40 years for the Crock Pot to have a serious competitor but it seems the Instant Pot may not enjoy the same length of time as a crowd favorite. Oliver is poised to launch in 2018.

 

October 5, 2017

SKS 2016 Flashback: The Cooking Automation Continuum

With Smart Kitchen Summit 2017 just days away, here at the Spoon, we thought we’d revisit some of our favorite session from last year.

This session, “The Cooking Automation Continuum: From Guided Cooking to The Cooking Robot,” was a fun panel moderated by your’s truly that explored the various ways innovators are looking to apply automation and robotics to food and cooking.

There’s no doubt that cooking automation is a continuum. We see basic automation in hugely popular cooking devices today such as the Instant Pot and Thermomix, while there are those exploring the outer boundaries of how to apply automation and robotics to create fully cooked meals.

We talk about all of this in this session.

The panelists for this session are Darren Vengroff, the (then) Chief Scientist of Hestan Smart Cooking, Timothy Chen, CEO of Sereneti Kitchen, and Ehsan Alipour, the CEO of Oliso.

We will be exploring cooking automation and robotics at this year’s Summit. If you’d like to see these sessions, talk to the innovators and become smarter about the future of cooking, you can still get tickets at the Smart Kitchen Summit website. Use the discount code SPOON for 25% off of tickets. 

September 10, 2017

Spoon Video Top 3: Blockchain’s Impact on Food System & Bosch’s Mykie Gets Smarter

This is our video recap of the top three trending stories from the past week.

In this recap, we look at the latest iteration of Bosch’s kitchen robot Mykie, the crazy flash-freezer/microwave combo which debuted at IFA, and the impact Blockchain will have on the food system.

September 3, 2017

The Spoon Top 3: Gates Invests In Meat Alternatives, Booze Delivery Heats Up & SideChef Gets Sharp

It’s the Spoon’s video top 3, recapping three trending stories about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen from the past week.

Want to go deeper? Here are the stories in this week’s recap:

Bill Gates invests in post-livestock meat company, Memphis Meats

Home booze delivery marketplace heats up

SideChef announces first platform win with Sharp to power the consumer appliance company brands smart kitchen efforts. 

August 27, 2017

The Spoon Video Top Three: Food Truck Tech, Robo-delivery and Instant Aging For Wine

It’s the Spoon’s video top 3, recaping three trending stories about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen from the past week.

This week’s we take a look at Bistro Planets’s food truck tech, DoorDash’s pilot program with Marble for delivery robots and whether or not instant aging is the newest trend in wine.

Enjoy!

August 18, 2017

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:

  • Startups like Wim and Yomee Yogurt are bringing us technology to make yogurt (fresh and frozen) in the home
  • Breville‘s new coffee robot
  • The folks behind the Qi Wireless power standard are working on a wireless kitchen of the future.

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

August 14, 2017

The Spoon’s Video Top Three: Designer Biohacking, VR in the Bar, Smart Coasters

Welcome to the Spoon’s first video review of the three of the most interesting stories from the past week about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen.

This week we’ve got stories about the intersection of design and biohacking, how virtual reality could be used to enhance your experience at the local watering hole, and how bars and restaurants are deploying smart coasters to engage with customers and better understand what they’re up to (I think I’ve got the answer: drinking).

P.S. Let us know what you think of this new format!

June 30, 2017

HAMAMA’s Seed Quilts May Be Easiest Way To Become A Home Gardener Yet

There’s no shortage of new approaches to tech-powered home gardening nowadays, but HAMAMA’s Seed Quilts might be the easiest I’ve seen.

I had a chance to talk to HAMAMA CEO Daniel Goodman at the FOOD IT event put on by the Mixing Bowl this past week, who walked me through how the Seed Quilt works.

I’ll be testing out some Seed Quilts myself shortly and have a formal review later (stay tuned), but the initial impression is that Seed Quilts seems remarkably approachable in an almost smart-garden-meets-Chia-Pet kind of way.

When you sign up for a Seed Quilt subscription, you get a Grow Kit to start and three Seed Quilts. You simply put the Seed Quilt in the Microgrow Kit and water it, and in 7 days you should have some greens on their way.

According to Goodman, the Seed Quilts work with ambient light and don’t need any special lighting.

The idea of the Seed Quilt came to Goodman and his partner Camille Richman after they left MIT Media Lab where they had worked on controlled environment agriculture research. While at MIT, the two were excited about the possibilities of combining automation and agriculture but realized much of the fruits (or greens) of their labor would take some time to commercialize given the complexity of the technology. They wanted to make something more consumer accessible, and the Seed Quilt concept was born.

A subscription to Seed Quilts $14 a month all in, which gets you three Seed Quilts per month. You’ll have to buy the Grow Kit to start, which also costs $14 ($12 plus $2 shipping and handling).

You can see Dan talk about the Seed Quilt in the video above.

June 28, 2017

Watch Sally The Robot Make My Salad

Yesterday at the FOODIT event in Mountain View, I had salad for lunch.

Why I am telling you this? Because unlike any salad I’ve had before, this one was custom built for me by a robot named Sally.

We’ve written about Sally before at the Spoon, but this is the first time I got to taste a Sally-crafted salad.  On hand to give me a tour and tell us about Sally was Chowbotics CEO Deepak Sekar.

You can watch the video of Sally making a salad above, but here are a few takeaways from my conversation with Sekar and Chef Kelly Olazar:

  • Sally allows the user to choose “chef salad” mixes or build their own using the twenty types of ingredients.  Users can also use an app to do greater customization of the salad.
  • The list price on a Sally is $30 thousand, but the company does offer discounts
  • Sally herself weighs in at 400 pounds
  • The product is targeted towards office cafeterias, universities and restaurants
  • Sally can make about 40-50 salads before she has to be refilled. Yesterday at the FOODIT event, they had to once and served 90 salads. Chef Kelly Olazar told me people were coming back for second salads later in the day (cheapsters).

Overall, I like the salad and was impressed with how quick Sally worked. While the robot’s price seems high, I figured that if could replace a worker and generate $500-$1000 a day in a busy cafeteria, the product makes sense financially in a high-volume food service location.

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