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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

GE Appliances

FirstBuild’s Latest Funky Kitchen Gadget is a Device Which Feeds & Manages Your Sourdough Starter

In a world where many kitchen appliance brands have downsized or eliminated their innovation arms, FirstBuild, the device innovation and incubation for GE Appliances, is generating (and building) more ideas than ever.

The group, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, has developed 104 products and features, with 37 making their way into the GE Appliances portfolio. Along the way, it has raised over $5.2 million through crowdfunding and built a community of 245,000 builders who submit ideas, vote on projects, and occasionally back them financially.

Unlike traditional corporate R&D departments, FirstBuild invites its community of makers, engineers, and consumers to contribute ideas and test prototypes in its 35,000-square-foot makerspace at the University of Louisville. This approach has led to some viral hits, including the Opal Nugget Ice Maker, which launched on Indiegogo and raised $2.8 million before a prototype was even completed. FirstBuild was also the birthplace of the Arden indoor smoker, a CES 2024 hit that is rapidly gaining a fanbase in the grilling community.

Sourdough Sidekick - Design Reveal (UPDATE)

FirstBuild’s latest project is designed for home bakers who love sourdough but don’t want the hassle of maintaining a starter. Currently in prototype stage, the Sourdough Sidekick automates the feeding process, ensuring the starter stays healthy and ready without the daily commitment. While traditional methods require constant attention, FirstBuild claims the Sidekick can sustain a starter for up to seven days, adapting to the home baker’s schedule. The device features a built-in flour hopper, water tank, and a smart dispensing system that measures and delivers the right amounts to keep the starter thriving. It will also monitor ambient kitchen conditions, making adjustments as needed to optimize fermentation.

Of course, FirstBuild’s Sidekick isn’t the first smart sourdough manager on the market. Fred Benenson, former head of data for Kickstarter, created Breadwinner during the pandemic, a smart sourdough monitoring device that tracks a starter’s growth and notifies bakers when it reaches peak activity, ensuring optimal baking times. Priced at $50, Breadwinner features real-time monitoring and smart notifications, allowing bakers to receive alerts via email, pop-ups, or SMS.

The Sidekick, in contrast, is more of a full-fledged automated feeder and management appliance, offering a more hands-off approach. Given its more advanced functionality, it’s likely to come at a significantly higher price than Breadwinner’s affordable $50 price tag.

While the sourdough craze of the pandemic has certainly cooled, my guess is there are still far more home bakers today than there were five years ago and there’s a good chance rising food prices may even spark a new wave of would-be bread bakers looking to make fresh loaves at home. If that’s the case, FirstBuild’s Sourdough Sidekick could arrive at just the right time to offer enthusiasts an easy way to feed both their baking obsession and their hungry starters.

SCHOTT Debuts New Ceramic Cooktop Glass That Can Double as Full Color Video Display

Tired of boring black-glass cooktops?

How about a cooktop that provides video cooking guides, color images, and more? That’s the idea behind SCHOTT’s new CERAN Luminoir TFT (thin film transistor) display.

At last week’s IFA conference in Germany, SCHOTT announced a new TFT display technology that enabled a full-color touch screen to display high-fidelity video and images. This is a big deal for cooktop manufacturers, who, alongside their customers, typically embrace the sleek black aesthetics of glass-ceramic surfaces. However, using any integrated display would normally mean sacrificing the dark black display associated with high-end ceramic cooktops, as black glass tends to absorb light, making display integration challenging.

However, SCHOTT says they solved this issue by optimizing light and color transmission through the glass-ceramic substrate, enabling the integration of high-resolution TFT displays while maintaining a deep black appearance when the display is off. This allows for the “dead front” effect, which keeps the cooking surface looking clean and like a typical high-end cooktop when not in use, but enabling a multicolor display when activated.

You can see the SCHOTT CERAN Luminoir TFT on display in the video below:

SCHOTT CERAN Luminoir® TFT - “Ready for undiscovered possibilities?”

Could this mean the cooktop surface itself has entered that chat as the preferred video display in the kitchen? Maybe, but it’s early. Over the past decade, various appliance and system manufacturers have jockeyed to position their preferred platform as the primary video display of choice in the kitchen. There was Amazon with its digital assistants, GE Appliances with its video-enabled built-in microwave oven, and Samsung pushing its Family Hub fridge with its large digital displays in the door. However, no one has really pushed the cooktop, mostly because the dark-black ceramic surfaces did not make for very good digital displays.

At least until now. We’ll keep an eye on this space to see if any cooktop makers move to integrate this technology and push their ceramic cooktops to become multimedia hubs. At the very least, expect some appliance brands to use this technology to offer visually rich touch-screen user interfaces, and most likely some of these will be on display by this time next year at IFA.

GE Appliances Debuts EcoBalance and Its Vision of the Kitchen as Integral Part of the Home’s Energy Management Network

This week at KBIS, Haier subsidiary GE Appliances focused much of its, um, energy on getting the message out about its new EcoBalance Home System, a new whole-home home systems energy management platform that it has been working on for much of the past decade.

The first announcement about EcoBalance was unveiled about two weeks before the big kitchen and bath show in Vegas, with the announcement of the company’s partnership with Savant. The deal, which brings Savant’s smart home and energy management expertise together with GE Appliance’s kitchen, bath, and other home products (as well as GE’s power management know-how), essentially set the table by previewing the central control interface for consumers.

But, as I saw yesterday at KBIS, news of that deal was only the beginning. It seemed that GE Appliances’s big focus at the show was introducing a flurry of products that tied together the smart home, kitchen, and cooking, as well as other key home activities, into a tighter and more coordinated relationship with both residential and grid power management.

To wit, here are just a few of the products the appliance company showed off this week at KBIS:

A couple of whole-home battery backup and appliance backup systems. The company showed off how its appliances can connect to a Savant home invertor and wall power battery and how the new integration can enable home systems’ power backup by connecting with an EV. GE Appliances has also partnered with Ford, and they were showing off how a Ford F-150 electric can provide backup power to the home through the EcoBalance system.

In addition to home power backup systems, the company also showed off a new battery backup system for refrigerators. Made in partnership with Savant, the fridge battery enables home users to keep their fridge powered and cold during a power outage, which allows users to open the refrigerator to access food without worrying about an out-of-power fridge losing its chill while powered down. According to the GE Appliances Shawn Stover (see our interview below), it will run the fridge for a few hours, and it also features plug-ins to allow owners to charge small electrics like phones.

GE Appliances Shows Off a Refrigerator Battery Backup at KBIS 2024

They also showed off a new GE Profile GeoSpring Smart Hybrid Heat Pump Water Heater, which uses a patented, electronic integrated mixing valve that can provide up to 60% more hot water versus comparable models and allows a 50-gallon tank to operate at the same effective capacity as an 80-gallon tank. The GeoSpring also includes the CTA-2045 Smart Home Solution that makes it demand response ready by communicating with utility companies and responding intelligently to power grid conditions.

A Pyramid Wall Mount Hood with indoor air quality sensing that can sense carbon monoxide and other air pollutants. When connected to the EcoBalance energy management system, the system will send you alerts and can be programmed to turn on the HVAC system when air pollutants are detected.

In addition to its partnership with Savant and GEA’s own line of new home systems that make up the EcoBalance system, the company also talked about its partnership with electric grid connectivity specialist Tantalus Systems. The two companies, along with Savant, announced that they would be integrating the Tantalus’ TRUSense Gateway into the EcoBalance system to enable GE Appliances to connect into grid and enable energy management at the appliance level through, say, running refrigerator defrost or ice cycles during off-peak hours, charging water heaters with energy for use later in the day, and adjusting HVAC systems can be adjusted a few degrees to save energy and reduce peak demand.

According to GE Appliances, the new EcoBalance system will be available across all the brand’s lines, and it will use several go-to-market touchpoints for GE Appliance customers to learn about it. This includes through the system integrator channel with Savant, the homebuilder channel, and retail at big box stores like Best Buy, where prospective customers can learn about the system and be connected to a Savant integrator to discuss potential ways to bring the technology into their homes.

Stepping back, making power management a key focus for its appliance product lineup is both a natural for a company like GE Appliances (which has, through its original parent company in GE, a long history of power system experience) and a timely move in terms of home design and custom awareness. A key focus for the homebuilding and remodeling industry is a move towards smarter energy efficiency, if not outright net-zero building. Tie that into a broader push towards electrification of kitchens and other home systems (and the slow-but-steady deemphasis of gas in homes), and GE Appliances looks to be making an early bid at being an energy-power leader among appliance brands by centering its future kitchen and home systems messaging around this increasingly resonant design focus for consumers.

GE Appliances Partners With Kroger for Shoppable Recipes on Wi-Fi Connected Ovens

This week, GE Appliances (GEA) announced it has released a new software update that enables customers with GEA’s Wi-Fi-connected stoves to add items to their Kroger shopping carts through featured shoppable recipes on their wall ovens and slide-in ranges.

According to the announcement, the new partnership, which was distributed via an over-the-air update to what GEA says is 150 thousand appliances (which is, interestingly, a smaller number given to us when the company announced its ‘turkey mode’ software update in 2021), will enable customers to find a select set of curated recipes (13 recipes at release) from Kroger and select CPG brands (including King Arthur Baking). Once a customer chooses a recipe, the recipes will suggest what GEA calls precision cooking modes, which track cooking progress, modify temperatures and adjust cook times.

In addition to the guided cooking features built into the recipes. they also allow for some clickable commerce. GE Appliance users can click to view the list of ingredients and instructions within the recipe and, with an additional click, add all the recipe’s ingredients to their Kroger cart. GEA says customers can connect their GE appliance app to their Kroger account via a QR code scan setup.

This announcement from GE Appliances comes after the company announced an integration with Google Cloud’s Vertex generative AI integration with their cooking app earlier this year, which the company calls Flavorly. According to GE Appliances spokesperson Shawn Stover, the Flavorly AI integration enables customers to input items in their refrigerator, and the app will generate three suggested recipes to build around the ingredients.

GE Appliances Debuts Voice-Controlled Smart Mixer That Detects Texture and Viscosity

GE Appliances just dropped an interesting new appliance: a smart stand mixer with built-in scale, app control for guided recipes, and voice control through Alexa and Google Home.

The Profile Smart Mixer is, as far as I can tell, the first Wi-Fi controlled smart mixer on the market, which is quite a feat in itself, given the sheer number of connected appliances that have debuted over the past decade.

The mixer has many interesting features, including a scale and voice control, but its the device’s ‘auto-sense’ technology that intrigues me the most. The auto-sense feature monitors changes in texture and viscosity through motor torque feedback optimizes performance, and will automatically shut off the mixer when it determines the mixing is complete.

GE Profile Smart Mixer with Auto Sense

The mixer has an app and utilizes guided recipes, enabling users to follow the instructions around ingredients and send mix commands from the app itself. For someone who often cooks using YouTube videos or new recipes discovered online, I’d appreciate the ability to send commands to my mixer from a phone. Unfortunately, I often find a device’s app recipe libraries lacking, so hopefully the new mixer will eventually enable the import of recipes found online (something companies like Fresco, a GE Appliances partner, enable through their platform).

The new appliance has built-in Wi-Fi, using the company’s Profile Connect+ software platform to enable connectivity to the cloud and field-deliverable software updates. GE Appliances has been perhaps the most active in promoting its field upgrades. I expect they’ll do the same with their new smart mixer by delivering new features or seasonal capabilities.

GE Appliances’ new mixer is an interesting addition to the mixer market, one that KitchenAid and Cuisinart currently dominate. However, while GE Appliances has had products in the market, they’ve been priced much lower than the new smart mixer (which retails for thousand bucks), often below $200. It will be interesting to see if Whirlpool/KitchenAid respond to GE Appliance’s new entrant by bringing their own smart mixer to market.

GE Appliances Sends a Turkey-Cooking Sous Chef to Half a Million Wi-Fi Connected Ovens

GE Appliances announced this week it had released an over-the-air software update that will assist half a million owners of GE Appliances’ Wi-Fi connected ovens cook their holiday turkey.

Called Turkey Mode, the new software update gives users step-by-step cooking instructions for their big holiday bird. The update also utilizes a software algorithm to estimate the cooking time needed to reach an optimal 170 degrees internal temperature for any size bird. Temperature measurement is done via a probe that comes standard with all GE Appliance’s connected oven models. Turkey Mode update works with most GE Appliances Wi-Fi connected oven models, 64 model families and 336 SKUs in all.

To see Turkey Mode in action, I jumped on a video call with GE Appliances’ food scientist Sabrinah Hannah and GE Appliances’ director of digital transformation, Taylor Dawson. Hannah told me that the company has been baking turkeys as a product development tool for decades, and they knew that turkeys are one of the biggest challenges home cooks face all year.

One of the lessons learned in the company’s testing was where to place the probe. The slowest heating part of the bird is deep in the breast, so part of the update on LCD-enabled models is a visual of where to place the probe. According to Hannah, if users follow Turkey Mode steps, they won’t need to baste the turkey or cover it with foil.

According to Dawson, the update went out to both LCD-equipped Wi-Fi ovens as well as Wi-Fi models without LCD screens. Users with LCD-equipped ovens can follow the step-by-step instructions on their ovens or the GE Appliances SmartHQ app, while users without LCDs can follow along on the app. For those who get the update on their LCD-enabled ovens, a button that says “Turkey Mode” will appear in the choice of cook mode on the screen. In addition to seeing the new cook mode, the user also gets a season-themed holiday background and a turkey “gobble” sound that plays when the turkey is finished cooking.

Turkey Mode is the second big update GE Appliances has sent over-the-air to their installed base of connected ovens this year. Earlier this year, the company sent an update that added an ‘air fryer’ cook mode to Wi-Fi-connected ovens in the field. While countertop smart ovens like the June have offered upgrades via over-the-air updates for a few years, the ability to send new cook modes and other updates to installed ovens is just beginning to take off as the installed base of connected built-ins reaches a critical mass. The ability to add new cooking features represents a potential business and customer support model opportunity for an industry where customers previously had a fixed set of product features that never changed once they walked out of the store.

Plants, Personalization & Precision Cooking: A Look at GE Appliances’ CES 2020 Lineup

Each year, it seems one appliance brand stands out at CES with an interesting new take on the kitchen that intrigues with the possibilities.

At CES 2019, it was Whirlpool, who shocked and awed with the sheer amount of new product concepts they rolled out, including an augmented reality-enabled smart oven.

This year’s CES standout in the kitchen was GE Appliances. Not because the appliance company had a whole bunch of cool products ready to roll out to market, but more because they showcased a bigger way of thinking around solving real-world issues. In other words, rather than create product demos designed as show-off vehicles for new technologies, GE illustrated how these technologies could be employed in a cohesive, systematic way to provide consumers answers to some of their biggest problems.

Here are the three demos I saw at the GE Appliances booth that caught my attention:

Home Grown

While intelligent home grow systems seemed to catch on at CES this year with big appliance brands for the first time, the most interesting conceptualization of an indoor, tech-powered gardening came from GE. The company’s Home Grown concept featured a mix of hydroponics, aeroponics and soil-based grow systems built into the design of the kitchen as part of a cohesive sustainable kitchen workflow.

You can see a full walkthrough of the Home Grown concept below:

CES 2020: A Tour of 'Home Grown', the GE Appliances Garden Kitchen Concept

One thing that struck me about the Home Grown concept is it commanded a lot of space. I have to wonder how many consumers would be willing to give up such a large part of their kitchen counter real estate to growing food, and I can see how brown thumbs like myself would be worried they’d soon have dead plants spread across their entire kitchen.

That said, Home Grown is largely conceptual at this point, so the company shouldn’t be penalized by more practical concerns like the sheer size of the demo. Once (and if) the products gets closer to market, GE can make adjustments with different size gardens to fit specific needs.

Shift

GE’s ‘Shift’ proof of concept showed how the company saw itself at the center a fully intelligent – and personalized – physical kitchen space.

So what is Shift? In the simplest terms, it’s an adaptable (or shiftable) physical kitchen space that personalizes itself towards the needs of each user.

The concept video below was put together by GE to illustrate how Shift could help a wheelchair-bound user:

CES 2020: The GE Appliances "Shift" Kitchen Concept Reel for Special Needs User with Wheelchair

In an era where everything is becoming more personalized, the idea of a personalized physical space based on the specific needs of the person makes lots of sense. Much like we have the ability to adjust our car seat to fit our own height or buy shoes that fit our feet, there’s no reason why in an era of lower cost robotics, IoT and smart sensors we shouldn’t think about adapting the space around us to fit our needs.

Kitchen Hub 2020

Finally, at CES 2020 GE rolled out the second edition of its Kitchen Hub , its kitchen screen/home command center.

You can see a walkthrough of the product shot at the GE Appliances booth below:

CES 2020: A Look at the GE Kitchen Hub 2

The most obvious difference with the new version is GE made the video touch screen the front door of a usable microwave oven. They also added an additional camera over the counter prep station as an option as well as improved food image recognition. Tying the experience together for food recognition and guided cooking is the Freshly app (powered by SideChef), which will recognize food, suggest recipes, and provide cooking guidance.

Also cool: The improved machine vision allows the system to recognize progress within a cook session. Below the Kitchen Hub camera captures a picture of a steak on the grill and let’s the user know that it has reached the desired doneness.

What struck me most about this version of the Kitchen Hub compared to the 2018 first edition is how the latest version just seems more practical. As a useable front screen for the microwave, Kitchen Hub is simply more useful and less awkward than as a standalone TV screen sitting atop your cooking range.

It’s also seems to fit more organically as a natural part of a next-generation kitchen. By coordinating the various cooking systems and, eventually, what’s in the fridge (SideChef is powering Haier smart fridges ), it seems GE is working towards building a platform that delivers valuable cooking assistance, inventory management and smart home control without being overly forced.

I left GE’s booth thinking that while much of what they showed off is still a few years away, I appreciate the moonshot thinking of the Home Grown, Shift and the practical advances they’ve made with their Kitchen Hub platform.

GE Appliances Unveils New Version of its Kitchen Hub Screen and New Cooking AI

GE Appliances, a division of Haier, today announced the newest version of its Kitchen Hub smart kitchen and ventilation system as well as new artificial intelligence (AI) technology to assist with meal planning and cooking.

The new Kitchen Hub still sports a giant 27-inch touchscreen and fan that’s mounted over your cooktop range, but now also features a built-in microwave and three different cameras: one looking down on the cooktop, one looking straight out for video chatting, and one inside the oven so you can monitor cooking either on the Kitchen Hub screen or via the accompanying mobile app.

Other features of the Kitchen Hub include built-in Google Assistant, SideChef for recipes and guided cooking, Netflix and Spotify, smart home monitoring and control and live video chat.

Those cameras built into the Kitchen Hub aren’t just for video chats and sharing photos of your homemade pho. Cameras that are built into a number of different GE Appliances will use computer vision and AI to identify food and recommend meals based on ingredients on hand (presumably with a camera built into a fridge), help detect doneness of food and even raise or lower oven temperature.

The battle for the “Kitchen Screen” has been going on for a couple of years now as appliance manufacturers look to leverage the kitchen being the center of a home as a means of making their smart ecosystems more enticing for consumers. And it looks as though in addition to big screens, having an AI solution for your cooking is the new table stakes. Yesterday, both LG and Samsung announced their new smart refrigerators, each sporting a big touchscreen and AI to help with meal planning and grocery shopping.

With its big, horizontal screen, GE Appliances’ Kitchen Hub certainly fits in with how people currently watch movies and TV on their home screens (moreso than on the narrow, vertical screen that are typically built into fridges). The addition of the microwave and ventilation to the Kitchen Hub could give it the versatility to attract consumers and become the center of the smart kitchen.

We’ll have to wait until later this year to find out. Both the Kitchen Hub and GE Appliances’ AI come out in late 2020.

Video: Can You Sell Things in the Smart Kitchen Without Being Annoying?

Most of us have heard the adage that the kitchen is the heart of the home. But it’s also a space that’s ripe for commerce, especially with all the new appliances, software, and services rolling out as the kitchen gets smarter.

In this video from the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, Richard Gunther of Digital Media Zone speaks with Iri Zohar of Freshub, Benton Richardson, of Amazon Dash, and Shawn Stover of GE Appliances about the future of in-kitchen commerce models: be that automated grocery replenishment, personalized suggestions, or shoppable recipes.

But how do you sell things to people in their kitchen in a way that, as Gunther put it, “isn’t annoying?”

Watch the full video below to find out.

Kitchen Counter Point of Sale: Analyzing In-Kitchen Commerce Models

Look out for more videos of the panels, solo talks, and fireside chats from SKS 2018! We’ll be bringing them to you hot and fresh out the (smart) kitchen over the next few weeks.

Hestan to Announce its Smart Cooktop Solution at Smart Kitchen Summit Next Week

Hestan Smart Cooking will publicly announce the availability of its guided cooking system for appliance manufacturers at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) in Seattle next week.

Until this year, using the Hestan Cue guided cooking system required a standalone induction burner with accompanying sensor-embedded smart pans. With this move, Hestan Cue’s smart cooking technology to be built directly into cooktops from other companies.

Christoph Milz, Managing Director of Hestan Smart Cooking said during an interview with The Spoon that the Hestan Cue smart cooking system requires appliance makers to integrate a smart board into their cooktop, and will require the consumer to use Hestan Cue smart cookware as well as the accompanying app. At first, Hestan Cue’s technology will work with induction cooktops, with other modalities (gas, etc.) available later on.

The Hestan Cue system’s three parts work in harmony to help guide cooks through the cooking process. For example, if you want to cook salmon with a nice sear on the outside, but medium rare on the inside, the pan “talks” to the cooktop to say when it reaches the right temperature, and as the person goes through each step of the recipe, the app “tells” the smart board to adjust the heat accordingly, and so on.

Earlier this year, Hestan’s sister company (Hestan Residential), debuted a Cue-powered smart cooktop at the Kitchen and Bath Show in Miami. Hestan Smart Cooking has also signed on GE Appliances in the U.S. and Oranier in Germany as Cue cooktop partners. Hestan’s smart cooking technology will be available in GE’s Cafe line of appliances and will ship before the end of the year. Oranier’s Cue-enabled cooktops will ship in Germany in 2019.

Strategically, this is a smart move for parent company, Hestan Smart Cooking and its Cue platform. If the company can make its technology easy enough to implement without coming at too much of a price premium, Hestan sets itself up as a full-stack guided cooking solution. Because it will be in both the appliance and the cookware, it can offer more precise guidance than competitors offering integration into just the appliance side.

In addition to the cooktop news, Milz said that Hestan Smart Cooking would also be API integrations for smart ovens and be releasing oven recipes this fall.

If you want to see a Hestan Cue-powered cooktop in person, grab your ticket for our Smart Kicthen Summit, which is mere days away.

GE Appliances and Electrolux Expand Google Assistant Capabilities

The big IFA show is set start over in Berlin, and like CES earlier this year, Google is making a big push there for its Google Assistant, working overtime to get its voice assistant embedded into, well, everything. News about Google integrations are rolling in as both GE Appliances and Electrolux today both announced expanded capabilities with Google Assistant.

First up, GE Appliances, a Haier company, said today that its suite of appliances will work directly with Google Assistant. Previously, GE Appliances required the use of Geneva Home Action in order to talk to Google, so you’d have to say “Google, ask Geneva Home to preheat the oven.” With the new, deeper integration, users can skip the Geneva step and just say “Google, preheat the oven.”

Elsewhere, Swedish appliance giant, Electrolux announced it is expanding its Google Assistant integration. Elextrolux will be adding Google Assistant voice control to its kitchen products in Europe, starting with a smart oven in 2019. Previously, Electrolux had added Google Assitant integration in the U.S. under its Fridgedaire and Anova lines.

Google is currently locked in a battle with Amazon and its Alexa assistant for dominance in the emerging voice control market. While Alexa had a head start and lined up numerous appliance integrations early on, Google has been making headway over the past year. Earlier this year LG announced that its SmartThinq line of connected appliances would work with both smart assistant platforms.

Google’s expanded presence is good because it gives consumers more flexibility when shopping for a new appliance. People shouldn’t have their choice of smart assistant determine what refrigerator they buy.

Kitchen Tech Must Balance Longevity With Extensibility According To Appliance Execs (VIDEO)

One of the biggest challenges in bringing new kitchen technology to market is ensuring that appliances like smart ovens last a really long time.

How long?  Up to 20 years, according to Paul Bristow, Sr. Product Manager at GE Appliances, who along with other appliance execs spoke recently at the Smart Kitchen Summit on a panel entitled ‘The Self Driving Oven’.

The reason for such longevity is simple: Because that’s the expected lifespan of an appliance like a wall oven in a traditional home. That’s a tall order for appliance makers, particularly as they start to transition product development cycles to more closely resemble those dictated by the technology industry, where it’s not unheard of for a product like a smartphone to become obsolete in just a couple of years.

But according to Steve Brown, head of Whirlpool’s Jenn-Air business unit, adding new technology features such as Wi-Fi may allow appliance makers to future-proof their products through remote software upgrades.

“The exciting thing about having the oven connected is it will stay more relevant over time,” said Brown. “When we launched our connected oven last December, it didn’t have any integration with Nest and now it does. We will be adding voice recognition very shortly.”

But ensuring longevity goes beyond simply adding connectivity like Wi-Fi. According to June CTO Nikhil Bhogal, it also means making sure the hardware can grow over time as new features come to market, which means taking a more forward-looking approach than many of today’s consumer electronics.

“If you look at today’s consumer electronics, they’re built to today’s OS (operating system) stack,” said Bhogal. “Within 2 years when the OS starts adding additional functionality, the OS starts adding new functionality, it slows down and it becomes obsolete in 3 years.”

According to Bhogal, this often means over-building the hardware capability to ensure that it can take on new features over time.

“Part of the approach should be building with headroom to grow,” said Bhogal, who went on to detail how June has utilized powerful components such as the Nvidia K1, a processor that powers some of today’s high-end mobile gaming devices, when building the June Oven.

David Kender, the VP of Editorial for USA Today’s Reviewed.com, asked the panel if appliance makers are starting to shift their product planning approach to factor in newer, more cutting edge technologies.

The answer is yes, according to Jenn-Air’s Brown. “There’s been a change in the sense of urgency in the last 15 months.”

When Kender asked why things have shifted in the last 15 months, Brown pointed to the reduction in cost of components and the realization among appliance makers that the kitchen has fell behind other parts of the home.

“The kitchen is one of the least connected parts of the home today, oddly enough, because its one of the most important parts,” said Brown. “When people ask ‘why would you connect them’, I would flip around and ask them ‘do you really think these expensive electronics will be the only things in our whole house that are not connected?'”