SideChef is having a busy year.
In April they announced their intention to move beyond a cooking app to create a smart kitchen software platform for hardware makers. Then came the hire of former DACOR President, Steve Joseph, as their Chief Product Officer. A month ago, the company announced a partnership with Chef’d to create a chef-curated meal delivery service.
Now? They’re getting directly into hardware themselves with their first announced product, the CHiP smart cookie oven.
They launched their Kickstarter campaign this week for CHiP, an intelligent oven that utilizes a patent-pending convection cooking technique to speed up the process to 10 minutes. They also will offer cookie pods that come in a variety of flavors and utilizes biodegradable parchment paper for easy insertion into the cookie oven.
The expansion into hardware itself is not altogether surprising. While the hiring of Joseph was a signal the company would be working to build deeper relationships with appliance makers, the unveiling of the CHiP cookie oven now shows that having a senior exec with hardware experience also meant creating their own hardware.
The CHiP is also a proof of concept for potential hardware partners that illustrates what they could do with the company’s software, which it has said can be a guided cooking system platform for third party hardware. It also features other interesting cooking concepts, including what is calling QuickConvect, a patent-pending technology which likely would work with other ovens, as well as an interesting social-cooking concept with the cookie-gram feature, which allows users of the CHiP to send messages to others.
The only question now is where SideChef decides to take its own hardware ambitions. While there’s no doubt the CHiP is a showcase for technologies they can bring to other partners, they have also indicated this may be just the first of other hardware products.
See the CHiP Kickstarter video below: