Today Suvie, a Boston-based kitchen appliance and food delivery startup, announced its third-generation cooking appliance.
The Suvie 3, which comes just a year and a half after its second generation cooking robot, features four major upgrades according to company CEO Robin Liss:
Smaller footprint. The Suvie 3 is 10% smaller than the previous generation. With its shorter stature, Liss says the Suvie 3 can now fit under most any kitchen cabinet.
Improved aesthetic design. The Suvie 3 features a lot of stainless steel and, compared to previous generations, looks more like a traditional countertop cooking appliance.
Increased cooking capacity. Even with a smaller exterior, Suvie squeezed in more cooking capacity. According to Liss, the new appliance has 36% more cooking volume than the previous generation.
“This means you can comfortably feed four plus adults with one meal cooked in the Suvie,” Liss said.
Cool to Cook is now available on all cooking modes. With previous generations, Suvie users could only schedule cooks with lower-temperature cook modes (sous vide, steam, etc). With the gen 2, the user needed to push a cook button on the appliance itself to initiate a higher temperature cooking mode (bake, broil, etc.). With the third-generation Suvie, users can remotely initiate cooking across all cooking modes.
Liss admits announcing a new generation cooking appliance less than a year and a half after they started shipping the current generation is a short turnaround. According to Liss, one reason is that hardware development cycles take a long time, and they felt they needed to start building the ‘what’s-next’ as soon as the new model ships.
“We knew people wanted a smaller device, and we knew customers wanted cool to cook in all modes, but we knew it was gonna take us some time to get those features designed and optimized.”
Liss and the Suvie team felt enabling cool to cook across all cooking modes would take some time to get the approval of industry safety watchers, so the company spent much of the past year and a half involved working closely with UL to make sure all-mode cool to cook got greenlighted.
And so now, the first batch of Suvie 3s will leave the factory in China next week. According to Suvie, those who order immediately should get their units within 5-8 weeks.
To start, the company will sell a bundled package that includes both the Suvie 3 main unit and the accompanying starch cooker for $799 (there was no re-design on the starch cooker). The company plans to eventually sell the Suvie 3 on its own for $399 with a subscription to Suvie’s meal delivery service. The company will also offer discounts on the latest model for past Suvie customers.
According to Liss, an “overwhelming majority” of Suvie users subscribe to the company’s meal delivery service. She says the company has sold over 15 thousand second-generation Suvies and the typical customer profile is a dual-income family with kids who are too busy to cook. While Liss wouldn’t disclose exact revenue splits, she told me that the company’s revenue is “roughly” half and half between its hardware and food business.
“We think that it’s good to have a balanced business with a strong appliance business and a strong meal business,” Liss said. “We do that because we think that to deliver some cutting edge technology, we need to have the customer interest to do these advanced features.”
Suvie’s focus on the continuous development of new hardware contrasts with Tovala, another cooking appliance/food delivery startup. While Tovala has done some minor modifications its current generation cooking appliance, the Chicago-based startup is essentially still selling the same oven it introduced four years ago. In about the same time span, Suvie has introduced three different models.
According to Liss, Suvie’s fast pace of hardware development is an essential part of its mission as a company.
“That’s the company we’ve built, which is different than a lot of hardware startups,” Liss said. “A lot of hardware startups at their core are really taking an existing product and maybe changing the design and adding some software to it. We decided that we wanted to change the way dinner was made. So we invented countertop, ‘cool to cook’ multizone appliances.”
It remains to be seen how existing Suvie customers will react to the announcement of a new generation appliance so soon after they received their gen 2 models, many of them over the past few months. Liss says the company will give discounts to existing customers who want to upgrade to the new Suvie model.
