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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Midea

Midea Debuts First Countertop Appliances to Use Ki Wireless Power Standard

Seven years after the Wireless Power Consortium first started working on a standard for countertop kitchen appliances, Midea announced the first product that works with the Ki standard. According to a story in The Verge, Midea announced its Celestial Flex Series of products, which includes a blender, steamer, and kettle, at the IFA show in Berlin.

Midea, one of China’s largest appliance brands, hasn’t said when its Ki lineup will ship, pricing, or regions to which it will ship. It also has not indicated if they are working on a Ki-compliant cooktop, (though it wouldn’t matter much to customers since any Ki-compliant cooktop should work). However, they did announce a new all-in-one built-in oven called the Midea One that has a built-in air fryer and automated multi-step cooking function capabilities.

The announcement of the first products is a big milestone for any standard, and Ki is no exception. And while it’s good to see a major manufacturer commit to the standard, the better part of a decade is a pretty long time for a standard to finally make it to market, which is probably why—as we reported earlier this year—some companies have taken it upon themselves to build wireless power products that don’t use the standard.

It will be interesting to watch if Cloen or others who have attempted to build non-Ki-based wireless power kitchen products will now begin to embrace Ki. My guess is they will since proprietary technologies are an uphill battle, particularly when trying to convince retailers to jump on board.

Initial Ki products with integrated transmission coils are expected to be indication cooktops, but in the long term, WPC expects the technology to be installed under the counter on quartz, granite, and marble countertops.

Midea Patents AI-Powered Rice Cooker

Sure, it’s not a full-fledged robotic chef with hands and cooking moves modeled after Master Chef winners, but a smart rice cooker system patented by Midea looks like it will use some cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology to train itself to make a pretty good bowl of rice.

As described in the patent titled “Multi-Purpose Smart Rice Cookers,” the system is armed with a food-storage chamber with multiple compartments that can hold different types of rice and other ingredients like fruit, beans or nuts. Each compartment has a gate which can open and transfer food to the cooking chamber below in predetermined amounts. Above the top of the food storage chamber is a camera that identifies food and feeds information to the system’s machine learning feature.

The Machine Learning Model for Midea’s Smart Rice Cooker

Awarded on December 15, Midea’s patent also describes a multi-phased process to build the capabilities of the artificial intelligence over time to power the smart cooking. The first phase, training, would use image-based neural network systems like AlexNet or GoogleNet to train itself to understand the food.

The next phase in building out the AI smarts happens once the system is in the consumer home. Here, Midea’s rice cooker would get in-the-field updates to increase its understanding of food and cooking, but also learn and adapt its understanding of the process based on consumer cooking behavior.

Over time, the system would be able to personalize the food based on a user’s personal preferences and health and nutrition needs, as well as environmental factors such as season of the year or temperature. The system would also be able to understand optimal taste configurations of food based on ingredients.

Finally, the Midea smart rice cooker will connect to the home network, where it could be part of a smart kitchen system that incorporates profiles of different users as well as work in concert with other cooking appliances or home systems.

While patents are often just intellectual property land grabs to horde future potential product concepts and features and keep them from the competition, Midea’s huge market share — particularly with rice cookers (29 percent online and around 43 percent in brick and mortar) — makes it worth wondering if the company plans to roll out a cooker with this tech some time in the future . The company also announced in June it was working with Chinese tech (and AI) giant Baidu to codevelop AI-powered smart appliances, so it’s also conceivable this rice cooker concept shows up as part of a Baidu/Midea lineup of products at some point.

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.