Instant Brands

Today, Fresco announced the launch of its KitchenOS platform, a ground-up refresh of its smart kitchen software suite. As part of the announcement, the company revealed that Instant Brands, the maker of the popular Instant Pot smart pressure cooker, would be the first brand to launch the new KitchenOS with the Instant Pot Pro Plus.

The new KitchenOS, which includes new firmware, apps, and smart recipes, is the result of a two-year effort by the Dublin-based company designed to enable multi-appliance control and a new personalized user experience.

In an interview with The Spoon, Fresco CEO Ben Harris said the company realized in 2021 that in order to achieve a scalable approach to the smart kitchen, they would need to rebuild the platform from the ground up. They began to work on the new platform, accelerating their pace last year after a $20 million Series B investment.

“When we launched the Drop scale nine years ago, we received a lot of inbound interest from appliance manufacturers who saw the need for a neutral platform for the kitchen and the inevitability of one interface for the entire kitchen and their expectation that there would be one screen for orchestration,” said Harris. “They all want the back-end infrastructure, they all want the apps, they want the IoT branded for themselves, but customized with similar components under the hood.”

This led to numerous partnerships and many custom-built apps for appliance brands, but the problem, according to Harris, was that as the inbound requests started to multiply for custom-built customer-facing apps, it really began to slow the company’s ability to build products.

“We would tweak something on the platform over here, and it would cause problems over there,” said Harris.

According to Harris, the company faced three major problems around this time. First, they had to build new firmware for every single appliance, which meant it took nine months to launch a new product. Second, the company had to build a new UI for every appliance. And finally, they had to create new recipes for an appliance to work with the appliance firmware and app.

Limited cross-brand connectivity was another issue. Because each brand had a custom app and entirely unique firmware, a brand’s appliances could only communicate with another brand’s appliances through the Fresco app. Harris and the Fresco team knew that to achieve the promise of the smart kitchen, this would need to change.

It was around the same time they realized this approach was not scalable that Harris and the rest of the team started discussing the evolution of the Fresco platform with one of the company’s advisors, Steve Horowitz. Horowitz, who was added to the board when his firm invested in Fresco (then Drop), was with Google during the early days of Android and helped lead the engineering team that developed what would become one of the world’s dominant mobile operating systems.

In 2021, the company went back to the drawing board and started to rethink how they could build a more scalable platform that didn’t require building entirely new custom apps and delivered on the promise of true appliance-to-appliance interconnectivity. To achieve this, the company began working on what Harris described as a universal firmware and universal appliance UI that would work with all appliances connected to the Fresco platform.

According to Harris, getting there required a step back to examine the commonality across appliances and a reimagining by the company of how they view the universe of appliances in the kitchen.

“We used to build appliances by their category, like stand mixer, oven, blender,” said Harris. “But we actually realized that we needed a sort of universal communication layer between recipes and between appliances.”

Harris says this step-back enabled them to realize that there were 77 common cooking capabilities in the kitchen – such as bake, broil, steam, etc – and across these cooking capabilities, there were 8 ways to describe them such as time, temperature, and cooking speed.  

“Suddenly, we now had, architecturally, from a back end point of view and then from a customer UI point of view, this set of universal concepts that we can have to join recipes and appliances, and to have appliance control,” said Harris. “We rebuilt the consumer experience with this multi-brand appliance control that sits inside our appliance partner apps, to reflect this top-to-bottom experience that ultimately allows us to deliver on the vision of this universal appliance control that can orchestrate all of your appliances.”

This new approach would need buy-in from their partners. That’s because it would require each appliance to have a new firmware and a new app that included access to a common Fresco account alongside the appliance brand’s account. From a customer perspective, it’s this single Fresco account identification, that sits within the different brand apps, that would enable the cross-brand connectivity.

“When you set up an account and our partner apps, you agree to basically set up the dual account both with Instant Brands and Fresco at the same time,” said Harris. “And you agree to both the Instant Brands and the Fresco terms and conditions. And then that allows both the individual tenants for Instant Brands and each one of our partners, and then also the sort of interconnectedness that’s brought by Fresco.”

One obvious concern appliance brands may have with having a single Fresco account embedded within different apps to connect across brands is that customer data privacy is protected both for the customer and the individual brands. According to Harris, that privacy was their top priority in architecting their new platform.

“That’s a real, clear, hard-line,” said Harris. Harris said each brand would get its own “data warehouse for lack of a better term”, and they ensured that each set of data would adhere to all data privacy rules. Harris said that if a customer opts in, their data would be part of aggregate, anonymous data around usage to help appliance brands build better products. But, in the end, “nobody sees anyone else’s user data, and they only have their own appliances and their own users that they are interacting with.”

Beyond the new architecture to enable cross-device interactivity, Fresco also focused on redesigning the customer experience, implementing design tenets from the likes of Apple Watch and other Apple Carplay to help guide users during the cook. Unlike early guided cooking platforms, however, Fresco focused on making sure the user would have as much or as little assistance as they needed and made sure to clearly communicate information to customers in a way that ensure they were informed and had control.

In rethinking the customer experience, Harris gave a shout-out to Wired writer Joe Ray, whose review of the Drop/Fresco platform gave them clarity on what they needed to focus on. 

“Joe Ray did an amazing job of calling out the issues with the experience we’ve built. And that was obviously a catalyst in the process, in really assessing the underlying data, and for to ask ourselves if we are delivering on our promises.”

According to Harris, the complete rebuild of the code base was a long and difficult process, but it was a necessary one given the direction of the smart home and smart kitchen. He pointed to Matter (he says Fresco will integrate as devices become Matter-compliant), and how all the big smart home brands were aligning around the standard. However, kitchen products, he pointed out, were fundamentally different and needed a platform like Fresco.

“This is where the future is, this is what Matter is building,” said Harris. “All of these appliances starting to be able to work together in any location. We’re just accelerating that we’re delivering it today, instead of waiting years before that Matter becomes a reality.”