Thermomix, the popular all-in-one multicooker with a high price tag (~$1500), has reached a new milestone: one million of the Thermomix cooking appliances have connected to the company’s online cooking platform, Cookidoo.
The milestone was reached this month when the one millionth TM5 -- the company’s latest generation cooking appliance -- connected to the Cookidoo platform using the Cook-Key, a Wi-Fi enabled recipe platform accessory that replaces the standard recipe cookbook “chip” that comes with a TM5.
As can be seen below, the Cook-Key started shipping last August and hit the one million milestone this month.
Cook-Key units connected. Source: Vorwerk
The Cook-Key and Cookidoo represent a significant new strategy and revenue opportunity for Thermomix. The Thermomix TM5 ships without built-in connectivity and the customer is limited to those recipes on a given recipe chip. With the Wi-Fi enabled Cook-Key, the customer can connect to the Cookidoo recipe portal and access thousands of recipes from other Thermomix users or through curated collections of recipes from Thermomix at $4 a pop. The Cook-Key itself is about $112 dollars and the customer subscribes the Cookidoo recipe platform for $39 a year. A back of the envelope estimate puts the Cook-Key and Cookidoo revenue today at approximately $150-$200 million a year.
And the company isn’t done. While there is no official word of how many TM5s are in the field today, one can assume that the company has sold anywhere between one and two million since the end of last year when they last updated their numbers. At the end of 2016, the company revealed that a total of 3 million TM5s are sitting in customers homes, and I would guess that number now sites between 4 and 5 million. Assuming a total of 5 million Thermomix TM5s, the company would only be at 20% adoption for its online recipe platform.
Those numbers could also grow as the company expands its reach into the potentially lucrative US Market. The Thermomix made it to the US this year, but it still remains to be seen if the company’s traditional direct sales model will translate to the US. As a hedge, the company has been trialing other sales channels such as Williams-Sonoma.
The company envisions the Thermomix Cookidoo platform as a shopping and recipe platform as well. You can see an illustration of this in the video below where a family utilizes the Cookidoo recipe service with a Thermomix app to manage their food shopping.
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