An interview with Kevin Yu, founder of SideChef, one of Forward Fooding’s top 500 Food Tech startups.

Kevin Yu, founder of SideChef

It’s time to put a face to the name…

We asked our FoodTech 500 top-runners to give us a bit of insight into how they started out as a company and their thoughts on the role of technology in Food innovation. Meet Kevin, the mastermind behind SideChef, an all-in-one home cooking platform that provides over 16,000 interactive smart recipes with recipe guidance featuring hands-free voice commands, step-by-step photos, how-to videos and built-in timers. Let’s see what the founder had to say.

So tell us a little bit more about you! Where did the idea for your FoodTech company come from?

Kevin: The idea around SideChef’s step-by-step guided cooking came from my own real-world Valentine’s Day cooking disaster, where it was my first time cooking something more than fried eggs, and decided to do a full 3-course meal. Long story short, every dish came out pretty terrible. I had struggled to navigate through these recipes, and realized many of the mistakes made were relatively simple mistakes. I overcooked the meat. Forgot to add a couple ingredients. Added incorrect proportions of sauces.

So, I thought, what if cooking could be done like GPS navigation, where it would guide you step-by-step through the cooking process. So we created SideChef! Our signature step-by-step format that features a photo or video for each step solved the ‘how-to’ of cooking. Our next goal was to create features that made SideChef the all-in-one home cooking solution. Already, we have delivered features such as grocery delivery, meal planning, and even smart kitchen connectivity.

How is tech central to your business?

Kevin: Our technology started by the drive to make the cooking process easier, and we did that by breaking down a recipe into the simplest components: ingredients, steps, timers, techniques. From there, we furthered the idea of breaking a recipe into structured data, which then could connect out to IoT devices, grocery delivery services, and ultimately be restructured into completely new cooking experiences. Our smart recipe format is both the innovation and the innovation catalyst to create new experiences for users.

Why do you think it’s important to see the food industry embrace tech?

Kevin: In the last decade, tech has catalyzed huge leaps in convenience (aka ‘on-demand’) in almost every industry, from shopping, calling a car, to enjoying entertainment. Even getting take out has seen similar disruption. Home cooking, however, has largely been untouched, mostly because the cooking journey is incredibly fragmented. Utilizing the power of technology in our smart recipes, we are able standardize how a recipe can guide users through cooking, place an order for your needed groceries, and even instruct your kitchen appliances when to start preheating that oven.

 

 

Want to know more? Check out SideChef’s full profile here.

Congratulations again to SideChef for ranking 4th in the “Consumer Apps & Services” category of the Foodtech 500 list.

To find out who else made it into the FoodTech 500; the top Food Tech companies in the world, click here.

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