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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Podcast: Why Did Whirlpool Buy Yummly?


We’re back!

Yes, it’s been way tooo long since we’ve done one of these, but Ashley and I catch up on the top smart kitchen and foodtech news of the last few weeks, including:

You can download the episode here. Also, make sure to subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show in iTunes.

We also catch up on all the news coming out of the Smart Kitchen Summit. If you’d like to go to SKS, head on over to the Smart Kitchen Summit website and use the discount code PODCAST and get 20% off of tickets.

Whirlpool Buys Yummly In Effort To Bolster Smart Kitchen Strategy

This week Whirlpool announced their intention to acquire Yummly, one of the Internet’s biggest food and recipe sites.

The acquisition comes as part of Whirlpool’s effort to accelerate its development for the smart kitchen of the future. At CES this year, the company announced new cooking automation features for its lineup of smart appliances, including new Alexa skills, scan to cook and guided cooking. This just a year after the company showed off a number of connected kitchen efforts at CES 2016, including Amazon Dash integration.

The guided cooking feature announced in January is particularly interesting in light of the Yummly deal.  The new feature enables users of the Whirlpool Smart Kitchen Suite app to send a recipe directly to a Wi-Fi powered appliance such as an oven, which will then follow the cooking instructions. It’s easy to envision how this cooking automation capability could be coupled with Yummly’s massive database of recipes.

This Is About Smart Kitchen Self-Sufficiency

Making the deal more interesting is the fact that Whirlpool recently parted ways with Innit, a smart kitchen platform company that had started working with the company’s Jenn-Air division in 2016. As I wrote in March, the breakup was in part due to Whirlpool’s decision to start forging its own technology path as it saw the smart kitchen becoming a reality over the past year:

With 2017 rolling around and the company viewing the market for connected kitchen products as more viable, it decided to more actively develop and expand their own connected product technology.  As one source told me, “if a startup can do with a few million dollars, why can’t the world’s biggest kitchen brand do it?” 

In other words, Whirlpool had decided it wanted to determine its own technology destiny rather than relying too heavily on external partners to forge a path forward. What the Yummly deal shows is that the company will not hesitate to acquire others as part of its effort to realize smart kitchen self-sufficiency.

And this deal does just that by bringing Yummly’s smart kitchen technology platform in-house. As Brett Dibkey, Whirlpool’s vice president of Integrated Business Units, said: “Yummly brings an outstanding platform on which to begin building our digital product offering.”

A Year Of Change For Yummly

For Yummly, the acquisition by Whirlpool comes after a year of management change. In October of last year, the company’s Chief Revenue Officer Santiago Merea left to start a baby food startup, and then in November the company’s head of product, Ankit Brahmbhatt, left to become Innit’s head of product (yes, Innit, the company who parted ways with Whirlpool this year).  Yummly also saw its CEO David Feller step back and hand the reigns to Brian Witlin, who in a previous life was the cofounder of Shopwell, a company recently acquired by…you guessed it…Innit.

Both Merea and Brahmbhatt came to Yummly through Yummly’s acquisition of Orange Chef, a smart kitchen company who had built it’s own connected scale, and had started to build  smart kitchen operating system and platform for appliance companies. For whatever reason, Yummly never partnered with any appliance companies, which could in part explain the departure of Merea and Brahmbhatt last year. It looks as though the Yummly-powered connected kitchen will finally be built, only now as part of the world’s biggest appliance company.

Whirlpool Becomes A Content and Community Company With Yummly Deal

Lastly, one important aspect of this deal is that it gives Whirlpool a massive infusion of cooking content and community. As newer companies in the connected kitchen like ChefSteps have shown, having strong recipe content and an associated community can create fertile soil upon which to launch new hardware products. With Yummly, Whirlpool now has a built-in community to tap into as it expands is smart kitchen product lineup in the coming years.

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Whirlpool Is Launching A Connected Microwave (And No, It Doesn’t Have A Camera)

This week, Kellyanne Conway had many people wondering if a microwave can actually spy on us. As WIRED writer Lily Hay Newman deftly explains, the answer is a definite no, unless of course the microwave has a camera or a microphone (which pretty much no microwaves do).

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t any innovation happening when it comes to this kitchen workhorse. In fact, as it turns out a new FCC document filing surfaced yesterday for a new Whirlpool microwave that shows the world’s biggest appliance maker has some ideas for giving the fast-cook appliance a high-tech upgrade.

Whirlpool’s WiFi microwave doesn’t spy on you, but you can control it with an app

According to the document – uncovered by IHS analyst Lee Ratliff – the new Whirlpool smart microwave will have Wi-Fi and allow the user to receive notifications when a cook is done. It will also have other interesting features such as ‘Sabbath Mode’.

The filing gives us more details on a product that Whirlpool hinted at at this year’s CES as part of an expanded smart kitchen suite. And while there isn’t any indication of a microphone on board the device, there’s a good chance you will be able to talk to this new model with an Alexa integration, which was also a key focus for the consumer appliance giant at this year’s CES.

So while Whirlpool’s microwave may not be able to spy on you, you can certainly keep tabs on it and even tell it to mind its own business through Amazon’s smart home virtual assistant.

Analysis: Why Did Whirlpool & Innit Call It Quits?

Last week, news broke that Whirlpool and Innit’s partnership to build connected kitchen products has come to an end.

While the news came as a surprise to some, the fact that Whirlpool made a big smart kitchen splash at CES this year without any mention of Innit had us wondering last January about the status of the relationship.

Based on conversations over the past two months, this is what we have learned:

Because Innit’s relationship with Whirlpool was initially exclusive, this essentially left the smart kitchen startup on the sidelines for much of 2016 as other smart kitchen OS players such as Drop were free to talk to any number of major appliance brands. For a platform startup like Innit, there are only so many big consumer-focused kitchen brands to target, so as Drop announced deals with Bosch and GE/Haier, this put pressure on the company to essentially pursue other relationships outside of Whirlpool.

The loss of world’s biggest appliance maker from their client list no doubt hurts, but now the company is free to pursue other brands. They also have plans to amplify their own brand this year by connecting directly with consumers, the first step in which was the company’s recent acquisition of ShopWell, a personalized nutrition and food shopping app that has been downloaded over 2.5 million times. The acquisition also extends the company’s reach into the grocery and food retail market and will allow them to integrate ShopWell’s packaged food data into their own kitchen offering.  Innit also has plans to create their own consumer-facing branded app that will work with a variety of connected products.

For Whirlpool’s part, their relationship with Innit was viewed as part and parcel of a more exploratory phase of the market. With 2017 rolling around and the company viewing the market for connected kitchen products as more viable, it decided to more actively develop and expand their own connected product technology.  As one source told me, “if a startup can do with a few million dollars, why can’t the world’s biggest kitchen brand do it?”

Bottom line, this news is an indication of just how fast-moving and competitive the platform battle for the connected kitchen has become. With Innit back in the dating pool, Drop locking up two big partners and others like SideChef pursuing big kitchen brands, the market for independent third party platforms likely will only get more competitive throughout 2017. One big unknown is how Whirlpool’s decision to largely focus on developing their own platform for Whirlpool branded products might influence other large kitchen brands who have yet to really develop connected kitchen strategies. It also is a sign that we might see some of the same fragmentation that plagued the smart home in recent years, a market which suffered as many big players pursued their own non-interoperable platform efforts.

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Projected Video Interfaces May Be The Future Of The Kitchen. Why Aren’t They Here Yet?

With all the talk about Alexa nowadays, you’d think the future has arrived and we have our interface: voice.

But before you give up all your iPads for Echo Dots, take a moment to consider how much you use touch interfaces on a daily basis. While voice will no doubt play a huge role in the future of the smart home, touch continues to proliferate. Not only are car makers adding interactive touch screens, restaurants and pretty much everywhere else we go is getting better touch interfaces, while products in our kitchen like refrigerators are getting better and better touch interfaces.

And now, touch is combining with gesture recognition in a new science-fiction spin on interfaces that is gaining favor among product designers. The ‘projected interface’ – where an image is projected onto a flat surface to make what is essentially an interactive touch screen through the use of machine vision – is a new product interface concept that has captured the imagination interface designers in the kitchen over the past few years.

Projected Interface Demos Are Everywhere

Below are a few high profile projected interface product demos rolled out over the past few years:

Whirlpool, the world’s largest appliance maker, started talking about their interactive cooktop three years ago at CES 2014. You can see in the video how the Whirlpool smart cook top utilizes projected video as an interface.

Over a year later, people were wowed by the projected interface used by IKEA in its 2025 future kitchen concept video:

IKEA Concept Kitchen 2025

At this year’s CES, Bosch seemed to embrace the concept of the projected interface, incorporating it into not only a demo of its coffee making robot:

Spotted at #ces2017: coffee robot at the @Bosch booth.

A video posted by Michael Wolf (@michaelawolf) on

And high-end German consumer electronics manufacturer Grundig has been showing off its VUX projection interface concept for the past year and a half:

So, why all this interest in projected video interfaces and, more importantly, why haven’t any of these “visions of the future” made it to market yet?

Why Projected Video Interfaces Are Inevitable

It’s clear why projected video is a popular concept for demos: it looks cool. The very idea of turning any flat surface into an interactive interface is one that, at least for now, wows the user. Of course, that could change over time if these interfaces become more commonplace, but isn’t that true of every new technology? For now, projected interfaces could be used in a variety of interesting ways that consumers would love.

As for appliance makers, projected interfaces present an exciting new way to create consumer experiences. Think about it: Product designers used to working with tiny screens would find a much bigger pallet in projected interfaces, allowing them to create more compelling experiences that open doors to more education, instruction, and marketing content. Projected interfaces would also allow them to refresh their product interface regularly, rather than being stuck with the same small, mono-color screen for the life of the appliance.

If It’s So Cool To Demo, Why Aren’t Projected Video Interfaces In Market Yet?

If the projected video interface is such a crowd pleaser, why does it only seem to show up in concept videos and on trade show floors in “kitchen of the future” concept demos?

Here are a few possible reasons:

It’s still early, and projected interfaces are not quite ready for prime time. Most of the demos we see are all created for highly controlled demo experiences.  It may be that making projected video interfaces work in a mass-market environment in the consumer kitchen isn’t as easy as they’ve made it look in a demo video.

Implementing projected video requires a complicated setup. The IKEA 2025 kitchen concept utilizes a “smart light” concept which would require the consumer to have a specialized projector and an intelligent camera that can then read the gestures of the consumer installed above a table.  The other demos also have separate projection systems installed above the work surface. This type of set up would mean these systems are likely expensive and require a new installation method to which appliance makers and their channels are not accustomed.

Appliance Makers Move Slow. While all of these demos make clear that the projected interface is a promising concept, it’s important to remember appliance makers don’t introduce radical new concepts quickly.

Still, I’m hopeful that maybe Whirlpool, Bosch or IKEA will introduce an actual product at next year’s CES using projected video rather than just a concept demo. I do suspect that some, if not all, of the big appliance makers, are working on productizing projected interface enabled products. I also suspect disrupters may be working on something in this area.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if the world’s most disruptive company, Amazon, has something up their sleeves. After all, I keep hearing that the online giant has a bunch of crazy new products in store for us this year, so who knows, maybe the “kitchen computer” of the future is a social robot that has a projection video interface built in to go with Alexa.

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Smart Kitchen | Food Tech Wrap-Up From CES 2017

Is it fair to say we’re all collectively exhausted from CES news? The first few weeks of the year are just a deluge of tech press releases about all the things manufacturers plan to do, make, ship, partner with and promulgate during the rest of the year. And even though CES has yet to carve out a specific floor area for food and kitchen related tech items, we definitely saw an uptick in announcements in this emerging space.

We saw smart kitchen products and integrations from larger companies and startups alike across the connected home, appliances and wearables – here’s the rundown.

Alexa, has the smart kitchen arrived? (And have you seen Google?)

It seems no one is sick of Amazon Echo quite yet and we saw even more manufacturers outside of the traditional smart home adding Alexa integration to their product lines. The biggest announcement came from Whirlpool, who made a splash last year with Amazon Dash integration at the show and this year adds voice functionality to its Wi-Fi connected ovens, fridges and washing machines. Alexa, is my laundry done?

And now, if you own a Ford with the Sync 3 platform, you can ask Alexa to preheat the oven from your car.

LG announced a competitor to the Samsung Family Hub with its own smart fridge (more on that later) – with a gigantic touch screen that looks like you might need a step stool to reach the top of, the appliance also integrates with Amazon Echo. Alexa, can you reach that icon for me?

Speaking of Samsung – the upped the ante this year with Family Hub 2.0, adding a bunch of new service integrations (GrubHub and Spotify, to name a few) but not much else. And LG jumped in the smart fridge game with giant touchscreen game with new Smart InstaView Model, boasting much of the same features as the Family Hub, including voice integration, cameras to see what’s inside your fridge when you’re away (or too lazy to open the door) and software to help run your house. LG’s model also has grocery ordering but theirs is Amazon-powered.

Google Home, the Echo’s main competitor, was announced in a few integrations. Conversation Actions, their equivalent to Alexa’s Skills, hasn’t shown us much that is kitchen or food related (with the exception of a Dominos pizza ordering action) as of yet, so Alexa is still your main sous chef for the kitchen. For now.

For their part, Whirlpool had a host of announcements around their “Smart Kitchen Suite”, including their first step into guided cooking. Their assisted cooking will guide users through three step recipes that will send instructions to the oven and program it for the cook. They also introduced “scan-to-cook” which will allow the user to scan barcodes to “send the right directions, temperature and cooking time settings straight to the appliance.”

The smart bar gets customized….and sees more competition

PicoBrew showed off its now-shipping Pico unit at CES and announced that it will offer customized PicoPaks, the pods used to make different types of beer with the device. Previously, PicoPaks were premade by the company’s professional brewers, making it more of a do-it-for-me experience. Now, you can create your own beer selecting flavors and ingredients on the platform with some guidance from the pros.

The area of smart beverages is one we’ve kept our eye on for a while, with device makers and beverage companies all vying for a piece of the pie. But The Spoon’s Allen Weiner found an interesting story NOT at CES, writing, “while companies such as Picobrew and Whirlpool’s Vessi were showcasing their high-tech methods for brewing beer at CES, two giants of the beverage industry confirmed a partnership.” Turns out that AB InBev, the world’s largest beer brewer and the makers of Keurig are teaming up to create a home-brewing system designed to deliver homemade beer and cocktails. Will it do for cocktails what the Keurig did for coffee? We’ll see.

Food waste prevention goes mainstream

The prevention of food waste has been an area I’ve been fascinated with for a while – especially as it relates to technology’s potential to really change our bad habits and help us stop bludgeoning our environment with trash. But so far, most of the solutions are niche or designed for commercial use. But -CES saw the introduction of some smart solutions that might actually change things.

First, there’s the Zera Food Recyler from Whirlpool – which is basically a fancy name for a tech-savvy composter that can live in your kitchen and turn food scraps into fertilizer with very little involvement from you. Composting is a cool idea, and the earth-friendly concept of it appeals to this generation of more health-conscious, organic-buying consumers, but is generally not pursued by the vast majority of us. Whirlpool smartly saw this as a way to use technology and create a one-button solution to this. Zera is on Indiegogo now for a little under $1k (fully funded and still taking backers as of this posting) and expected in stores later this year.

Also pretty cool – the GeniCan, a smart device you place on your trash can that scans items as you toss them in the bin and creates a grocery list from which you can reorder. You can also set it up to connect to Amazon Echo and have it automatically reorder items for you (from Amazon, of course). This might not prevent food waste in the traditional way, but it could stop you from ordering too much food and help you be more accurate with the stuff you need. If you scan everything you throw away first.

The robots are here, and they’re going to teach you how to cook

Robots at CES are not a new thing. For years, companies have been using them – sometimes in the form of product announcements, sometimes just as booth eye candy to lure traffic in – to make a splash. This year, the name of the robot game was giving arms and legs to Alexa – and making her dance, apparently.

But one appliance maker decided to create its own smart robotic assistant for the kitchen, bypassing the popular “put Alexa behind everything” trend. Bosch launched its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-connected appliances last year and this year introduced Mykie (my kitchen elf, shortened) which is basically an Amazon Echo voice device with a small touchscreen that helps you out in the kitchen. Need a recipe? Want to know what’s in the fridge? Want to listen to some music? Mykie’s got you covered. It seems odd that Bosch would want to compete with Amazon in this category, but Mykie does do some cool stuff that the Echo doesn’t, including project images onto a wall via the tiny projector in its rear, allowing you to blow up a recipe video you’re following. Mykie also offers virtual social cooking classes so you can learn to cook with an actual human instructor and the AI assistant. Is it enough to compete with the Echo? Time will tell.

Cooking tech heats up

Drop adds a second appliance manufacturer to its roster – announcing its recipe platform can now control GE Wi-Fi appliances (it announced Bosch integration in September last year.)

Panasonic showed off an entire smart kitchen with technology like a smart wine fridge with different temps for each shelf and a cool display, inductive heating built into countertops and tables to discretely heat and keep food warm and a machine learning / camera combo that lets appliances react to and adjust cooking based on the recipe you’re trying to follow.

The Smart Kitchen Show hits the CES floor

The Spoon’s Mike Wolf hit the CES floor in search of interesting conversations on food tech and smart kitchen – check out The Smart Kitchen Show’s newest podcasts.

Hear from the CEO of nutrition and food delivery startup Habit about their offerings and how they’re building the next generation of personalized nutrition.

Mike caught up with AppKettle’s founder Robert Hill to talk US shipping dates and what’s behind the company’s initial delay to bring the product to market.

Mike and I catch up on all that we saw at CES in our CES smart kitchen wrap-up.

Over the next few weeks we’ll continue to analyze what we saw in smart kitchen and future of food at CES. Stay tuned! If you want to get all our analysis in your inbox, make sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Podcast: The CES Smart Kitchen Wrapup Show

It’s the CES 2017 smart kitchen wrapup! Mike and Ashley talk about what they saw at this year’s big consumer tech confab in Vegas.

Some of the topics they cover:

  • Smart fridges
  • Smart appliances
  • Whirlpool assisted cooking
  • Bosch’s kitchen robot Mykie
  • Panasonic’s smart kitchen
  • Anova’s new lineup of sous vide circulators
  • AppKettle
  • Alexa

Plus a couple non-CES news items such as Daimler’s investment in Starship and the
AB Inbev and Keurig Partnership.

This episode can be downloaded by clicking here.

Enjoy!

Whirlpool Adds Alexa Voice Functionality To Fridges, Ovens & More

Alexa was the star of last year’s CES. It looks like we might have a repeat performance this year.

Today Whirlpool and Amazon announced a partnership that will bring Alexa functionality to a range of Whirlpool Wi-Fi enabled appliances including ovens, refrigerators, and washing machines. Today’s announcement builds upon the momentum gained by Amazon over the past year, which saw the company’s voice assistant adopted by everyone from GE to ChefSteps in the kitchen. With Whirpool, the company adds the world’s largest appliance manufacturer to their Alexa partner list.

This is not the first time Amazon and Whirlpool joined together to make CES news. Last year the appliance maker announced Amazon Dash integration with their dishwasher and washing machines.  The announcement was part of a broad set of connected home announcements that featured connectivity. However, this year’s partnership with Alexa could resonate more significantly than past years by tapping into the excitement around voice control and Amazon’s own connected virtual assistants. Amazon sold out of their voice assistant powered Echos over the holidays, a sign of growing interest around the products.

This news, alongside other announcements such as GE’s partnership with Nest Protect, shows how the smart home industry is evolving beyond one focused primarily on basic automation and security to ones becoming part of the fabric of the home and the home’s systems. In appliance makers, Amazon finds ready partners who want to add incremental value to their connected products while also finding ways to convince consumers to upgrade faster than the traditional 7-10 years.

Looking forward, it could be interesting to see how Whirlpool combines its effort with Amazon with other third party platform provider partners such as Innit. This summer the company announced that Innit would power a number of new products, starting with its high-end Jenn-Air brand. One can envision how more powerful sensor-powered ovens and fridges using Innit’s platform could become integrated with Alexa skills in the future.

The Year In Smart Bar

Ah, 2016, the year we all needed to take a big ol’ drink. Fortunately a flurry of innovation in gadgets, apps, and platforms has helped make that easier in more ways than one. Here are the most notable happenings and advancements in the past 12 months.

Make It From Scratch

People have been home-brewing for decades, but in the past few years it’s reached a fever pitch, with every wannabe hipster (sorry, Mike) fermenting in their basement. The Pico simplifies this process with a plug-and-play model, including ready-to-brew PicoPak ingredient kits and the ability to brew five liters of craft beer in about two hours. Meanwhile Hopsy premiered its HomeTap so you can enjoy the mouthfeel of a freshly poured pint out of a tap, even if you didn’t brew the beer yourself. And just in case there’s not enough foam, get yourself the Sonic beer foamer device to add the perfect amount.

Even big players like Whirlpool entered this space in 2016: In July its crowdfunding project reached over 220 percent of its goal, and soon you’ll be able to buy the Vessi beer fermentor and dispenser for $1,800. (In other words, crowdfunding is finally legit, with Wired even profiling one of the first companies to run a successful crowdfunding campaign — for 3D-printed cocktail ice.) And foodie inventor Dave Arnold launched a crowdfunding campaign for his Spinzall, a small centrifuge designed for restaurant and home use for under $1,000.

Robotic Bartenders

The ready-to-drink (RTD) market is somewhere around $3 billion, and the hottest thing in the smart bar this year was clearly robotic bartenders. There are a spate of different companies vying for space: Bartesian raised an undisclosed sum, reportedly in the “millions”; Somabar raised $1.5 million; and Monsieur raised $1.2 million. In less professional news, the Open Bar robot was submitted to the 2016 Hackaday Prize contest and is actually open source, so all you eager coders can help perfect it.

Expect the playing field to become even more crowded in the next year with lookalike companies proving our eternal interest in robots.

Pour Yourself the Perfect Drink

Apps for the perfect cocktail, beer, and so on abounded this year. Competing with the Perfect Drink smart bartending platform, the Bernooli device and app make it easy to make a balanced drink, and even Alexa can help you figure out how to make a cocktail or give you wine recommendations. And Spanish chemists have created an app that will tell you if your beer is, for lack of a better word, skunked.

Meanwhile Hooch doesn’t want you to drink at home, alone: The company raised $1.5 million to expand its subscription platform that gives you one drink for free at bars all over New York and Los Angeles.

Totally Unnecessary Technology

What kind of year would it be without some totally ridiculous, over-the-top technology that we don’t need? A boring one, that’s what.

Enter the data cocktail machine that makes cocktails from tweets. Yes, the Arduino-powered robot pulls the latest five tweets from around the world that mention ingredients and then mashes them into a cocktail. Surprisingly, there aren’t any plans to commercialize the machine.

But who knows: 2017 is a whole new year.

Could Appliance-as-a Service Mean The Emergence Of The “Managed Kitchen”?

Why own something when you can just pay for usage?

That increasingly seems to be the attitude across a whole host of product categories, as consumers forego ownership of everything from software to music to even clothing and instead choose to pay monthly fees based on a usage model called “x-as-a-service”.

As I wrote in an in-depth analysis this morning over at the NextMarket Report, what started in the enterprise is now everywhere as monthly service models also take hold across a variety of consumer markets: “Enterprise software has moved almost entirely to the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, as have Internet infrastructure like servers (IaaS). The X as a Service model is also gaining traction in consumer markets, whether it’s cars, furniture or clothing.”

But what about kitchen appliances?

Seems weird to think about, but the reality is that one of the biggest changes resulting from technology like the Internet of Things is the rise of new business models, and I expect that appliances are not immune to this as they increasingly become connected.

But the question for many is why now? Is there something unique about connectivity that enables this transition?

In short, yes:

“The biggest reason (for now, with IoT) is there’s an implied guarantee of uptime that would simply be impossible to keep if a service provider could not proactively manage and monitor a device. By being able to do so, the appliance maker can guarantee near 100% uptime, avoid costly defects, and ensure higher satisfaction through feature enhancements over the life of the device.”

The kitchen itself seems one of the first places where this new model could take hold. After all, it’s where some of the home’s biggest and most expensive appliances reside, and with appliance makers like Whirlpool and Samsung embracing the smart kitchen in their big appliance divisions, it wouldn’t surprise me if these manufacturers weren’t at least considering this model as a future option.

As for just how widely we would see the service model take hold, I expect to see if first and mainly in big appliances. I mean, who wants to subscribe to each and every small appliance in the kitchen?

Unless of course…

Maybe a consumer could subscribe to everything under one subscription fee in what I’ll call a “managed kitchen” concept.

Think about it: what if you could have a cutting edge kitchen with a new smart fridge, an Innit powered oven, a Juicero, a new Nespresso coffee maker, and a Thermomix? Sounds like smart kitchen nirvana, but it might cost a lot of money unless you can, well, subscribe to a service that provides all of these up front.

In other words, what if these new gadgets were essentially there from day one as part of a managed kitchen service? Instead of paying anywhere from a few grand all the way up to ten thousand or more for the futuristic kitchen of your dreams, how about starting off with a kitchen full of appliances for a hundred to two hundred per month?

Ok, so the managed kitchen isn’t a concept I’ve heard anyone talk about – in other words, it’s just an idea at this point – but I expect some company will eventually bite.  It may not happen for a few years as most appliance makers are just getting their minds wrapped around the connected kitchen concept, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t they try to capture the entire kitchen of a consumer if they’re going to be going to the appliance-as-a-service model?

There may be very few appliance makers – with the exception of someone like Whirlpool/KitchenAid – could do this by themselves, but I expect that appliance makers could partner with others or that we will see the emergence of “managed kitchen” service providers that work with appliance makers to install and provide customer support.

Will the managed kitchen take hold? Too soon to tell, but I’m guessing someone somewhere is writing the business plan for such a concept right now.

Why Whirlpool and GE Make “Sabbath Mode” Appliances

“Let there be light” might be an important part of the Old Testament, but for Orthodox Jews, it can be a burden on the Sabbath.

The traditional day of rest, which starts at sundown on Friday and ends at sundown on Saturday, forbids any work, including turning on lights, ovens, blenders, whathaveyou. That’s why dozens of major appliance brands like KitchenAid, GE, LG, and Whirlpool consult with Jonah Ottensoser at kosher-certification company Star-K to offer appliances with something called “Sabbath Mode.”

The Sabbath Mode

The short version? The Sabbath mode keeps lights off in your refrigerator, automatically ends timers, and so on, so Orthodox Jews don’t have to interact with their appliances.

The long version? Well, in 1997 Whirlpool reached out to Star-K to help the company make Sabbath-compliant ovens. Whirlpool actually patented its Sabbath Mode in 1988, and over time other companies have followed suit, developing software and even special models specifically for this small subset of people (Ottensoser estimates about 100,000 families in the United States).

Here are a few of the specifications:

Ovens

Regular ovens shut off automatically after 12 hours; Sabbath-compliant ones keep on heating, so people can cook throughout the day. According to Star-K, “no lights, digits, solenoids, fans, icons, tones or displays will be activated/modified in the normal operation of the oven.” There’s even a built-in delay “between the request for temperature change and its actual implementation,” so you can’t ever be accused of working to change the temperature. Many also have a “timed bake” option, where the timer shuts off after a certain time rather than requiring you to turn it off.

Refrigerators

Lights, digits, icons, tones, alarms, and fans won’t be activated or deactivated when you open or close a refrigerator door in Sabbath mode. Ice and coldwater systems are also turned off, “since they invariably use electrical solenoids and motors to operate.”

A former engineer, Ottensoser works closely with major companies on these alterations, and he has thousands of Orthodox testers double-checking his work.

Why Companies Play Along

These models aren’t only sold to the Orthodox Jewish community; you can find them at Jewish-focused stores in Brooklyn as well as Sears in Iowa. “That’s the beauty,” said Ottensoser. “They program it into their model universally.”

Yet clearly these companies are spending a significant amount of time and energy pleasing a small group of consumers. Foodtech expert Brian Frank says there’s a reason for that: Appliance companies “want to build products that don’t exclude people, because that means they exclude a market opportunity or some innovation.”

He sees Sabbath Mode as a perfect example of the power of the connected kitchen. One piece of hardware can be programmed a variety of different ways to appeal to different groups of people. In the future, you’ll be able to upgrade your software or even download certain programs in order to expand and change the capabilities on your oven or refrigerator (like we all do with our smartphones, tablets, and computers). So instead of buying oven model GBS309P from Whirlpool as your only Sabbath-Mode option, you’d simply be able to download an app for timed bake, for example.

Frank believes we’ll even have commercial and consumer software options, where the same oven or microwave or refrigerator hardware is used in both environments, simply with different software, thus closing up a longstanding divide in the kitchen world.

In other words, this kind of technology gives “let there be light” a whole different meaning.