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Food and Beverage

Prepd Box is the lunchbox adults have waited for

It’s easy to understand the lure of eating out for lunch: it’s easy to do so and there is unparalleled variety to enjoy in dense, metropolitan areas. On the flip side, it can be unhealthy when all the ingredients aren’t exactly known, expensive to eat out every day, and generally pretty wasteful. Batch cooking is a great way to combat this but most containers simply aren’t up to snuff, made from suspect materials that leak and smell over the long term.

Prepd is reimagining the lunchbox to address this problem. Its Prepd Pack is an aesthetically pleasing, minimalist lunch box that uses modular containers for a better batch cooking experience.

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Connected Objects Food and Beverage

Auroma One offers a smart solution for waking up to aroma of fresh coffee

Many coffee machines do a pretty good of making it easy to brew some java each morning.

Auroma One, however, is a modern take on the coffee machine –- a smart, single-serve coffee maker that brews the beverage based on each user’s preferences. The device learns how users prefer their coffee based on feedback from the accompanying Android and iOS app for mobile devices. Auroma One provides control over the brewing process that includes how finely the coffee beans are chopped and the coffee’s exact temperature. It also informs users when coffee beans are running low. Any coffee beans can be used with the device, according to its Kickstarter campaign.

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Food and Beverage

Ice Jack rapid beverage chiller ends scourge of warm beer

What’s worse than coming home after a long day at work craving a beer and realizing there’s none there? Warm beer. Having only warm beer available is objectively worse.

Through some clever design, the team behind the Ice Jack is looking to end the practice of waiting far too long for beer to cool to an appropriately potable temperature.The product attaches to the tops of most beverages (but most importantly, beer), spinning it around while submerged in ice at a rapid rate to aid in cooling. The result is a beverage that is about 38° in just 2.5 minutes versus far longer without it.

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Food and Beverage

Ember cools off hot beverages as much as you’d like

There have been several mugs for keeping coffee hot touted on crowdsourcing sites in recent months. But Ember goes a couple of steps further than a device like the Nano Heated Wireless Mug, which promises to keep coffee hot for 45 minutes.

patent-claimedEmber is a temperature-controlled travel mug that quickly cools off coffee or tea that’s too hot. It then keeps the liquid at the temperature its user chooses for two hours when on the go or all day when used with the included, cordless charging coaster, according to its Indiegogo campaign. Its patented microprocessor-controlled heating system works with a network of sensors to accomplish that.

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Food and Beverage

The Sippy portable espresso maker offers a caffeine fix anywhere

The experience of enjoying a rich, creamy espresso is one usually regulated to the home or to the swanky cafe down the street, to the chagrin of anyone on the go. While powdered coffee solutions exist, they’re really no substitute for the real thing.

Fikra Design’s Sippy espresso maker was designed precisely for this reason. A lightweight, machine grade aluminium tube houses all the machinery necessary to make espressos anywhere, no battery necessary. By combining a CO2 cartridge with an espresso cartridge from Nespresso or Duck Coffee along with some hot water, a 25-35ml espresso can be made within a minute or two.

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Connected Objects Food and Beverage

Eazyshot dispenser keeps the good times simply flowing

Large and sophisticated robot bartenders have been featured on commercials for cruise ships, but simpler and less expensive models are making a pitch to be the next countertop appliance. Many of them seek to make a wide variety of drinks, even employing Keurig-like pods for cocktails.

Eazyshot, though, keeps it simple with a limited range of shots in its egg-like form. Liquors are filled up in its refillable tube-like reservoirs to make variations of “Mexicans” and “Bombers” from the tap of a companion app. The device can even function as a Bluetooth speaker to kep the party tunes accompanying the party. The Eazyshot is expected to retail for about  $495 but early bird rewards have started at about $345. The campaign is seeking $65,000 CAD (about $49,137) by September 24th.

The best part of Eazyshot is its portability, including the ability to run on battery power. Its smaller size means it can’t make the variety of drinks of other bartender bots, but — let’s face it — these are something of a novelty right now anyway.

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Food and Beverage

Opal makes easily chewed crushed ice for when you chill out

Ice: the ingredients don’t vary much and neither does the recipe. It can be made into perfect spheres at home. However, those who frequent some of the finer concession sands may encounter  a form of crushed ice that’s easy on the teeth and soaks up the flavor of that which it cools.

That ice, as it turns out, is called “nugget ice” or “pellet ice” and a company called Scotsman claims to have invented it in 1981. Scotsman does make a home nugget ice maker, but it stands nearly three feet tall; most of the company’s focus is on large industrial systems. Enter the Opal, a countertop nugget ice maker that has the look of a modern stainless steel appliance and is almost a tenth of the price of the competition. Opal’s proposition is pretty straightforward. Pour in water and wait. The product makes up to a pound of ice per hour, which is faster than most freezers. its clear, LED-lit receptacle can store up to 3 lbs.

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Food and Beverage

iCup and iPlate offers a one-hand solution for juggling plates and cups

Barbecue and beer go together like summer and sunburn. But it’s sometimes tough to juggle both food and beverage while mingling .  A plate in one hand and a drink in the other doesn’t leave much for greeting guests at social gatherings and trying to balance the cup on top of the plate risks spillage.

The iCup and iPlate hope to slide in a solution to the issue of one-handed consumption  The cup attaches into grooves on the bottom of the plate so that it doubles as a handle. The plate also acts as a lid to keep the bugs out of the drink and the cup acts to stabilize the plate. If the food needs utensils, the iFork and iKnife snap into the sides of the plate for easy access. Finally, by helping guests keep their cup close at hand, the system helps address the issue of identifying whose cup belongs to whom. A starter set of four (dispsoable) cups, four plates, and four sets of utensils is only $15, with expected delivery of November 2015. The campaign hopes to raise $10,000 by August 13, 2015,

It would be nice to have a non-disposable option. And, of course, taking full advantage of the plasticware requires getting all the products from one source. Still, the plate and cup combo is an ingenious solution to an age-old problem that looks at the drink-balancing issue from the reverse perspective. It doesn’t make guests look silly even though they’ll probably have to be shown the sliding trick.

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Cell Phone Accessories Food and Beverage Tablet Accessories Travel

Airhook makes airline trays useful when they’re in the upright and locked position

Anyone who flies knows that the tray table is an uncomfortable evil that food and drinks often claim at the expense of tablet-resident entertainment or productivity.

Airhook is a compact, portable solution that works with the existing tray tables but makes them more useful. The simple design features a collapsible hook that gets widged between the tray and the seat into which it folds. The cupholder portion folds down, making a convenient storage place for a drink throughout the duration of the flight – including take-off and landing.  The Airhook also features a docking station for a variety of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, with a bungee cord that helps lock the device in place from the top.

The design is well-executed, and the designers are selling Airhook for $20 each, to raise $15,000 by July 26, 2015, expecting delivery by December 2015. However, frequent travelers may find that the elastic may stretch with continued use, making the device less stable as time goes on.

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Food and Beverage

Bartesian cocktail mixer is a Keurig that swears it doesn’t have a drinking problem

Mixing cocktails can be fun but it can also be time-consuming and expensive if you need to hire a bartender. And at a party, the host can get bogged down making drinks.

Bartesian hopes to solve the cocktail crisis. The idea piggybacks off of the popular single-serve coffee maker by Keurig. If that device is designed to wake one up, this one is here to help one party down. Essentially, the drinker provides the alcohol and the Bartesian uses recyclable pods to mix the drink with aplomb. Right now, Bartesian offers three well-known drinks and three signature drinks that include a margarita, cosmopolitan, and sex on the beach. Each Bartesian costs $299, and the campaign hopes to raise $100,000 by July 26th. The robot bartenders would be delivered by April 2016.

Bartesian’s main challenges will be whether its pod-enclosed drinks live up to freshly made ones as well as trying to develop a wide range of pods for the endless varieties of cocktails. As we learned in the coffee pod wars, only one or two can really survive. Bartesian is not only a far cry from those industrial bartenders promoted on luxury cruises, but comes on the heels of another crowdfunded cocktail maker in Somabar, which is $150 more.