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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Celcy

Celcy Opens Beta Testing Program For Its Combo Freezer & Oven Countertop Appliance

While new countertop cooking hardware concepts are few and far between nowadays, every now and then one emerges out of left field that does something new and different. And the Celcy, which combines freezing and automated cooking in a single-self-contained appliance, definitely qualifies as new and different.

Here’s how I described the Celcy when I first wrote about it in June:

The Celcy, which is currently in development, will store up to four meals in a freezer. Cooking can be rescheduled via an app or on-demand via request. When it’s time to cook, the meal is shuttled from the freezer compartment on the left side into the cooking compartment side on the right. A built-in elevator lifts and deposits the frozen meal in the top upper right cooking chamber where it is cooked for consumption.

Celcy - The Automated Nespresso of Food

And now there’s good news for adventurous types who want to get their hands on an early Celcy unit: The company is taking reservations to reserve an early beta unit.

The company is asking for a $150 down payment to apply for an early unit. That will get you access to an early unit and 15 meals (the company is operating a Tovala-ish model of hardware and meal subscriptions). The beta trial, which the company expects to start next spring, will last for three months, after which the user can pay the rest of the price ($150 will be applied) to the cost of the Celcy. While the company doesn’t mention the price of the finished unit (when I first wrote about Celcy in June, founder Max Wieder said the target price would be $549), the price for beta-testers will be 50% of the retail price.

If you want to get in line, you can head over to Celcy and reserve your spot.

Podcast: Electrolux’s Kitchen of the Future & Other Food Tech News of the Week

Can the design of your kitchen change how and what you eat? Electrolux thinks so.

In this week’s episode of the Spoon podcast’s food tech news wrapup, we discuss Electrolux’s new kitchen concept called GRO. Other stories discussed on the show include:

As always, you can click below to listen or subscribe to The Spoon on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Meet Celcy, a Countertop Oven With a Built-In Freezer That Will Cook Meals For You

Say you’re leaving for work and want to come home to a fully cooked meal? Or better yet, you want to line up a work week’s worth of meals and just want them prepared when you get home?

You might be a good candidate for the Celcy, an autonomous cooking appliance that combines a countertop oven with a freezer that stores the meals until ready for cooking.

The Celcy, which is currently in development, will store up to four meals in a freezer. Cooking can be rescheduled via an app or on-demand via request. When it’s time to cook, the meal is shuttled from the freezer compartment on the left side into the cooking compartment side on the right. A built-in elevator lifts and deposits the frozen meal in the top upper right cooking chamber where it is cooked for consumption.

You can see a proof of concept video of the Celcy below:

Celcy - The Automated Nespresso of Food

According to company CEO Max Wieder, one of the other differentiators for the Celcy – aside from being a combo freezer and oven – is its ability to accommodate a variety of cooking styles, allowing it to either cook from scratch or simply warm up and crisp pre-cooked meals.

“It’s basically a set of shutters and fans that, when move-in combination, create the different styles of cooking, Wieder told me via a Zoom interview. “So it allows everything to cook uncovered without burning it.”

The Celcy is the brainchild of Wieder and a couple of friends from Johns Hopkins University. According to Weider, Celcy CTO Eddie Holzinger, another friend, and he started discussing ovens on a Google chat. When their friend told Weider and Holzinger he was shopping for a smart oven, they started talking about all the kinds of features – like a freezer – that could potentially put into a smart oven. By the end of the day, the future cofounders realized they had stumbled onto something.

“We started doing due diligence. We found that nothing existed on the market,” Weider said. “We did some patent searches, got together that weekend and whiteboard of the entire design of how it would work. And within three months, we founded the company. Four months after that, we filed our provisional patent.” The founders were issued a patent for its cooking system in the last month.

The company is now working on its alpha units and allowing interested customers to “reserve” a unit by signing up for a waitlist on its website. The target price for the Celcy is $549, and the company hopes to ship in the fall of 2023. Like Tovala or Suvie, Celcy plans to offer prepared meals via subscription and is already working with a copacker to develop recipes and meals. The company has raised a small pre-seed round but is raising additional funds to fund development and manufacturing.

Celcy joins a small cohort of smart kitchen hardware makers working to build unattended cooking appliances. While some like Mellow have essentially shuttered, others like Suvie have been shipping for a couple of years. Others, like Oliver, Nymble, and GammaChef, can perform unattended cooking but don’t have any ability to refrigerate or freeze ingredients.

And it’s this combo of freezer storage and cook-upon-request (or schedule) that sets the Celcy apart. Although there are other smart countertop cookers like the Suvie that have refrigeration and enable time-delayed cooking, the Celcy is the only one I’ve seen with a built-in freezer and the ability to store multiple meals in the freezer chamber.

Of course, that’s if and when the company ships the product. It’s still early, and the company still has many steps to go, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for the Celcy and its combo freezer/oven automated cooking appliance sometime next year.