In a post-Juicero world, the bar has been set excessive for any piece of good kitchen that solely makes one sort of meals. Enter Yomee, which payments itself because the Keurig of contemporary yogurt and is now elevating funds on Kickstarter. Lecker Labs, the startup behind Yomee, hopes that its comparatively low worth (every unit will retail for $99) and cost-savings will let it succeed the place Juicero failed.
It additionally helps that culturing yogurt is extra difficult than squeezing a baggie of milk together with your fingers. Just a few missteps and also you would possibly find yourself with milk that by no means gels or an inedible lumpy goo. Yomee simplifies that course of with a pod containing dwell cultures that customers insert into the machine, which is in regards to the dimension of a small espresso maker, earlier than pouring in milk. After selecting what sort of yogurt they need on Yomee’s app, they depart it alone for six hours. During that point, Yomee boils and stirs the milk and lets it set into yogurt earlier than cooling it all the way down to 50 levels Fahrenheit.
Loading a pod with dwell cultures into Yomee
To make certain, there are already many yogurt makers available on the market, together with a number of fashions that value beneath $30 on Amazon.com. But Yomee requires much less supervision, which can assist make it extra engaging to people who find themselves busy, lazy or simply actually love yogurt (energy customers may even ship calorie info straight from Yomee’s app to Apple Health or Google Fit).
While rising up in Delhi, Lecker Labs founder Ashok Jaiswal watched his mom make yogurt on daily basis to eat plain or use in recipes. After transferring abroad 15 years in the past, nonetheless, he began shopping for all his yogurt from supermarkets. Then he had a daughter and have become pickier about what sort of yogurt he fed her. So he tried to recreate his mom’s recipe from reminiscence.
“I wanted to make yogurt like my mom’s yogurt, but it didn’t turn out. I was like ‘huh?’,” Jaiswal tells TechCrunch.
He referred to as his mom for assist and the 2 of them discovered that the cooler local weather in Hong Kong, the place he at present lives, meant he needed to modify her recipe. Looking for a better possibility, Jaiswal went on-line to purchase a yogurt maker, however most nonetheless required him to boil milk and calculate fermentation occasions.
The last straw got here when Jaiswal found that the majority of his pals had no thought yogurt may even be made at dwelling. He offered his stake in EzeeCube, his final startup, and launched Lecker Labs, which was accepted by accelerator program Food-X, to create Yomee.
Jaiswal says Yomee’s worth proposition is without doubt one of the issues that units it aside from Juicero. Pods value $four for a pack of 5 and every one cultures about 10 ounces of yogurt. In comparability, plain Greek yogurt offered in supermarkets ranges from about 12 cents to 30 cents an ounces, relying on model. Pods are additionally open-source so different firms can market their very own branded variations (Jaiswal says two main dairy firms are already onboard with the concept). Yomee may also promote pods for vegan yogurts created from soy, almond, coconut or rice milk.
“Juicero had its own team and they had their own vision,” says Jaiswal. “What we’re focusing on is a product that is reasonably priced and pods that are reasonably priced. The machine will not only work with our pods, but also a third-party network of pods. So our yogurt is cheaper than supermarket yogurt and the value and convenience we provide is very high.”
Lecker Labs is at present working with factories in Hong Kong and Taiwan to get the Yomee able to ship proper after the Lunar New Year, which takes place in the midst of February subsequent 12 months. After all Kickstarter models have shipped, Jaiswal says Lecker Labs’ aim is to launch Yomee on Amazon by the tip of 2018 and get it into retail shops by 2019.
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