Grace Choi was rocking her 5-month-old baby to sleep with Amazon’s Alexa sitting beside her, when she had an idea: Could voice activation change the way people learn to cook?
Five years and several business iterations later, the food expert and Cooking Channel alum is starting to raise a $1 million seed round for Larabee, her tech startup for cooking, baking and other processes that involve procedural knowledge — the understanding of how to do something like riding a bike or building Ikea furniture.
The capital, for which Choi is primarily targeting angel investors, would fund a few things for the beta-stage, pre-revenue company: developing the technology, marketing and hiring, initially for a product manager to add to the three-person team. Checking those boxes would position the company for an official launch in early 2022.
It’s all with an ambitious eye toward establishing Larabee’s engagement channel as the go-to source for how-to, step-by-step activities, Choi said. “We want to be the company that owns the knowledge category.”
Setting the table
Larabee bills itself as a tool to make processes easy and interactive, so its users walk away retaining what they’ve learned.
It does that, Choi said, through its approach. To learn to bake a cake with Larabee, for example, the user watches a video — no talking, just ambient sounds — displaying the demonstrator’s hands performing each step. It plays on a loop at a self-guided pace until the user says “Larabee, next step” or “Larabee, go back,” with a progress bar that runs along the screen. It “really demonstrates in a shoulder-to-shoulder way what something is supposed to look like,” she said.
It also has other layers, such as stories, tips and techniques, and written instructions that are optional to view. The team also plans to develop a social interactions space, where people can engage with each other; for instance, cooking alongside a friend who’s making the same recipe.
“The challenge for us is really taking this complicated procedure that has vast applications — baking, cocktails, sauces, different cuisines, all this stuff — and really whittling it down to a very elegant, simple method that’s highly scalable,” she said.
Larabee taps the Slow Food Movement, born out of Italy to encourage people to luxuriate in their meals, Choi said. “Larabee is to TikTok videos what slow food is to fast food. It’s the other side of the pendulum: You need snackable content but you also need ‘feastable’ content.”
Choi doesn’t see Larabee as another Masterclass, an online subscription platform renowned for its lectures and tutorials. It’s also not another YouTube, she said, because while there are informative videos on the internet, they’re not built for learning as you go, and require a lot of pausing, rewinding and restarting. And while certain elements of the experience are emerging — The New York Times recently released a video teaching users how to slice a tomato — Larabee aims to bring context to the table, “not only to enrich the experience of learning something or being guided through something, but also to retrieve it later on,” Choi said.
“So if you’re in the kitchen and you’re listening to a story that’s super evocative as you’re kneading dough, every time you knead dough, you remember that story; it replays in your mind, and you reenact that,” she said. “How powerful of a connection tool is that, especially between brands and organizations, and their audience members, to be able to allow for people to embody knowledge in a way that really sticks?”
Meal time
That’s why Choi is targeting brands and businesses that could benefit from getting in front of an audience and interacting with those people via its tech.
It could mean cutting machine maker Cricut using Larabee to demonstrate the crafting applications of its products, Blue Apron partnering with the platform to teach people how to cook with its recipes, or Taylor Swift making her famous chocolate chip cookies, she said.
That’s one part of the business model. Larabee will also provide a software-as-a-service platform, a toolkit anyone can use to create and upload content — just as Squarespace works for websites. It will also have sponsorship opportunities, so a company like Nestle could sponsor Taylor Swift’s cookie baking segment. That, Choi said, provides another revenue stream for the people and companies creating content through Larabee.
The startup is also talking with companies about using its technology for their internal training purposes, to teach a sales team about its customers or to help onboard new employees, among other potential uses.
Choi heads into 2021 aiming to create five enterprise partnerships, while also working to secure a National Science Foundation grant from America’s Seed Fund, and close the seed round. That’s after raising $75,000 to build the beta of Cookable, the initial business, before Choi realized its applications beyond the kitchen. Multiple versions and trademark issues later, it’s Larabee, a name pulled from Raffi’s “Willoughby Wallaby Woo,” a song her kids listen to, and the family featured in the 1954 film, “Sabrina.”
Choi, a D.C.-area native, graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2003 with an economics degree before attending culinary school in New York and working in restaurants in Italy. She returned to New York to work in food production, then had a five-year stint with the Food Network’s Cooking Channel, where she hosted “Cooking with Grace.” While pursuing her doctorate in food studies from New York University, which she earned in 2014, she worked for a private equity firm, which “helped me build up some savings that eventually led to being able to support my family while building Larabee,” she said.
