If you follow food Instagram or TikTok, chances are you’ve seen the touchscreen toaster from Revolution Cooking over the past couple of years. The company made a name for itself by creating the world’s most high-end, tech-enabled toaster, and just this past CES, it announced its second-generation toaster with Wi-Fi.
The CEO of Revolution, Tom Klaff, never thought he’d make toasters for a living. As a long-time tech entrepreneur, Klaff has spent his career building education software and telecom companies, but one day, his business partner Bruce Levenson told him about an idea for a new type of toaster, one with a new approach to heating the bread. Wanting to learn more about the toaster business, Klaff went to the housewares show in Chicago and saw that every bread crisper used the same type of heating element that’s been used for most of the past century.
When he returned from Chicago, he told Bruce he was in, but that he wanted to think bigger than just toasters. Tom thought that the heating technology, which combines infrared heating with algorithmic cooking optimization for specific types of food, could not only help create a new type of toaster but could also be applied to ovens. In other words, the heating technology could be a platform.
In this conversation with Tom, you can hear the entire story of Revolution, from those early days when they decided to add a touchscreen to his meeting with Oprah to this January’s launch of the company’s first non-toaster product, a countertop cookbox mashup of an appliance called the Macrowave.
Click play below to listen or hear our conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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