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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Dialog

Miele Shipping the Dialog, Their Oven With Solid State Cooking Tech, to 20 Countries

In 2017, Miele had attendees at Germany’s big appliance fair, IFA, raving with a demo of a new appliance called the Dialog.

The appliance, which uses solid state cooking technology instead of the more antiquated technology featured in microwave ovens, was an exciting development because it was the first time a high end consumer appliance brand had introduced a product with the cutting edge technology.

However, after 2017 we heard little about the Dialog. Sure, at IFA 2018 the German company talked up a meal delivery service through a partnership with another German company MChef, but, other than that, details of when the Dialog would be available were few and far between.

So imagine my surprise when Miele told me this month that the Dialog is now shipping in 20 countries. According to Miele spokeswoman Julie Cink, the Dialog is currently available in European countries such as “Germany (of course), Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy or Great Britain.”

Cink said that in the second quarter of this year, the Dialog will be available in additional European countries such as France, Norway and Greece.

Still no word on when the Dialog will be available in the US. Miele’s executive director and namesake Markus Miele told me via email the holdup is because the required regulatory approval for the Dialog’s RF technology would require significant adaptations to the product.

“The regulations concerning the use of the frequencies are very different and so we have to modify the appliance (a lot),” wrote Miele.

The price tag on the Dialog is high, but in line with what you’d expect for a premium brand like Miele’s biggest product launch in years: 7,990 Euros.

MChef Meal Service Available Across Germany

I was also interested to find out that the meal delivery service we wrote about in 2018 is also available across Germany.

From Miele’s website:

“Customers can order individual dishes or three-course menus for the discerning from MChef, which are then shipped on elegant porcelain plates together with a matching wine to addresses throughout Germany.”

The meal service offers up to 20 different dishes which, according to Miele, are delivered via a “patented transport crate which guarantees freshness; used crockery is returned to the empty crate which is picked up and returned.”

Bottom line, the availability of the Dialog is a big deal and an overall win for solid state cooking. Most appliance companies I’ve talked to are working on developing their own RF cooking appliances, but have yet to push them to market because of the high price tag of the technology. With the Dialog now available, I expect that will put some pressure on other premium brands to look to accelerate their own pushes towards solid state cooking.

Podcast: Juicero is Dead

Over the past six months, there probably hasn’t been a company more roundly mocked in startup land than Juicero. The funmaking started after a Bloomberg article showed how one can squeeze the company’s juice packs by hand, essentially making superfluous the company’s $400 juicer.

When you raise $120 million, this is a PR problem, one the company seemingly never recovered from.

And so this week, the company announced it is shutting down.

But the company’s problems went beyond an expensive juicer. On today’s podcast, Ashley Daigneault and I discuss how the company had created a nearly impossible logistical and supply chain problem almost from the outset.

We also discuss Miele’s new RF solid state powered wall oven and Sharp’s deal with SideChef, as well as Mike’s trip to Tokyo for the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan.

Miele Introduces The Dialog, A High-End Oven Powered By RF Solid State Cooking Technology

Over the past few weeks, high-end appliance manufacturer Miele hinted at a forthcoming new product they said would reinvent cooking.  The luxury provider of ovens and other home appliances invited journalists from around the globe to join them in Berlin to get a first hand look at this miraculous new product they planned to unveil at IFA, Europe’s largest consumer electronics trade show.

And so this week at a splashy launch event complete with celebrity chefs and multi-course meals, Miele unveiled the Dialog, a new wall oven powered by RF solid state cooking technology.

RF solid state cooking uses radio frequency powered by semiconductor technology as a heat source, unlike traditional microwaves which use antiquated technology (by today’s standards) originally developed for radars used for military applications in World War 2. And unlike microwave technology, RF cooking allows for much higher precision cooking because the RF signals provide a feedback loop to help the oven understand and target specific zones within the cooking cavity.

An illustration of RF solid-state cooking utilizing closed-loop feedback to target heating

And while the introduction of the Dialog marks the first time a luxury home wall oven brand will incorporate RF solid state cooking technology into one of its products, Miele is not the first company to announce (nor ship) a solid state RF cooking product.  Two very different products were announced last year from Wayv Technologies and Midea. The Wayv Adventurer, which was originally expected to reach market this year, is a portable RF cooking device. Midea, a Chinese appliance manufacturer, announced they were working on a product called the ‘Semiconductor Heating Magic Cube’.

And while neither of those products have shipped, the IBEX One, a cooking appliance targeted for the professional kitchen, has. The IBEX One is a new product from commercial kitchen equipment conglomerate ITW, the company behind well known pro kitchen brands such as Vulcan and Hobart. The IBEX One, which has a MSRP of $18,000, is targeted at high-volume fast casual and lodging food establishments.

So while the Miele Dialog may not be the first product to have RF solid state cooking built in, there’s no doubt that the entry by a luxury brand will raise the awareness of the technology and spur other brands to accelerate plans to introduce their own RF cooking products into the consumer market. Companies like Whirlpool and Panasonic have already spent significant effort researching RF energy technology. Both are ‘promoter members’ of the RF Energy Alliance, an organization focused on creating awareness for RF energy applications like RF solid state cooking.  Both Midea and Miele are members of the group.

The Miele announcement is a big win for Goji Food Solutions, a company which has 147 issued patents in the area of solid stage RF heating. The company is a spin-out of Hobart Group, where Goji founder and chairman Shlomo Ben-Haim amassed hundreds of patents around the use of RF energy for medical applications. The Miele announcement is the first design win publicly announced utilizing Goji’s technology.

The early reviews of the Dialog are impressive as the company pulled out all the stops to showcase the unique power of RF cooking. At the launch event this week, the company wowed the audience by cooking fish enclosed within a block of ice, a clever way to demonstrate the high precision heat targeting capabilities of RF cooking. RF solid state cooking from Goji utilizes algorithms to interpret sensing data gathered from what is a feedback loop from signals used to heat the food, allowing the oven to target very precise cooking zones (including, as demonstrated, fish within ice).  This type of demonstration is a powerful way to showcase the differences between RF cooking and microwave technologies, and judging by the early reviews it certainly seemed to capture the imagination of journalists.

In addition to RF cooking, the Miele Dialog also incorporates cooking automation capabilities that mixes the capabilities of RF cooking and the other heating methods incorporated into the product such as convection and broiling.

The Miele Dialog is expected to ship next April and will have an MSRP of around $10 thousand.  The product will first be made available in Europe and is expected to eventually make it to the US market.

Want to learn more about RF solid-state cooking? Listen to my podcast with Goji Solutions President Yuval Ben-Haim and hear Ben-Haim and others talk about RF cooking at the Smart Kitchen Summit in October.