Cooks get a taste of tech
Orange Chef branches out with smart food scale
When Nest Labs announced in January its $3.2 billion sale to Google, at least one other CEO besides its own celebrated.
Orange Chef CEO and founder Santiago Merea has spent the last year developing a smart food scale called the Prep Pad that’s hitting the shelves of WilliamsSonoma stores and becoming available for sale online.
Merea is betting that more people will want to know what is in their food, just as they’re curious about the steps they walk and calories they burn, and the energy and cost savings from monitoring their home’s temperature, the insight Nest’s smart thermostats provide. In fact, he’s so bullish on smart “connected devices,” that his goal is to turn basic functional kitchen tools into smart ones. He wants Orange Chef to become the brand of the smart kitchen.
It’s an ambitious vision, considering most consumers don’t own food scales or weigh their food before they eat it. But Merea looks to Nest — which attracted Google with about a million units sold — as validation of the adage, “If you build it, they will come.”
“The customer is beginning to understand that all of these hardware and software (products) make better sense, and companies are designing these products to empower them to make better decisions,” Merea says.
Orange Chef had a much humbler beginning. In 2011, Merea designed a plastic sleeve to protect his wife’s iPad while she cooked, and got the attention of
The New York Times and Oprah Winfrey for its function and design and his commitment to man-
“Companies are designing these products to empower them to make better decisions.”
Santiago Merea, Orange Chef CEO and founder
ufacturing in the USA. He eventually added an iPad stand and a stand with a cutting board.
Today, 100,000 of those products are in homes around the world, giving Orange Chef brand recognition for the Prep Pad. But much more strategic planning went into that product’s development. Merea and his team spent months visiting customers in their homes, watching them cook and learning about their challenges in the kitchen.
The Prep Pad does more than weigh an item, just as Nest provides more than cost and energy savings. The Bluetooth-enabled device is designed to work with Orange Chef ’s iPad app, Countertop, to help consumers make sense of data about food.
A user places ingredients on the scale and describes them to the iPad (Typing say, two zucchinis or a teaspoon of cinnamon), and it mines a database of 250,000 foods to provide details of its nutrients and calories.
At the same time, the product collects data about how people consume food.
That’s information major food companies, such as Unilever, are desperate to know, says Londonbased Frank Meehan, whose firm SparkLabs Global Capital co-led a $1.2 million seed investment in Orange Chef with Google Ventures last November.
“I like things that generate data every day,” he says. “This is that kind of product. It requires behavioral changes, but if it catches on, it could be really cool.”