At last year’s IFA, German appliance maker Miele made news by announcing the first consumer oven to incorporate solid state cooking in the Dialog.
Their follow up act? Getting into food delivery business.
According to a preview announcement released by Miele, the company is partnering up with a German startup called MChef to deliver meals to customers with the Dialog oven.
Orders received online by 12.30 h will be delivered the next day, 365 days a year. Up to six dishes can be prepared in a dialog oven simultaneously. The programme with the correct settings is launched direct from the MChef app. The average cooking time is 20 minutes.
It’s an interesting move for the German kitchen giant. While other smaller connected kitchen startups like Tovala, Suvie and Nomiku have jumped into the food delivery business to add a recurring revenue stream on top of their hardware products, established appliance makers have been slower to move into food delivery.
Part of the reason for the lack of offerings from bigger players is likely very simple: food delivery is hard. The week’s news about Chef’d shutting down is not only a testament to this fact, but it also shows the perils of partnering with third parties. One of the major fallouts of the Chef’d shut-down was that it left companies like Nestle, Innit and Brava scrambling to figure out their food delivery strategies with the closure of the white label meal kit startup.
While the details of Miele’s partnership with MChef are still vague, it sounds like the appliance maker is investing resources in the the food delivery startup to help it with the broader rollout of the offering:
Now, a startup called MChef, supported by Miele, is set to deliver the matching haute cuisine to homes around the country. Exquisite plated dishes or entire three-course menus wait to be ordered. When they arrive on the customer’s doorstep, the ingredients are already appealingly arranged on elegant porcelain plates – ready to be cooked to perfection in a dialog oven.
The service, which will formally be announced at IFA, will first roll out in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany in September and will be rolled out nationwide early next year.
