The Kitchen of The Future

Many refer to the kitchen as “the heart of the house” - it's the place where families reconnect around a good meal. It's a place of creativity, the place where we re-energize, discuss ideas, argue and share our stories. But have you ever thought about your kitchen as a mini factory as well? You should! 

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At its core your kitchen is composed of many comparable elements:  

• A regular incoming supply of products or resources: vegetables, meat, spices, drinks
• An assembly line with a variety of tools: your cutting board, oven, cookware, knives, sous-vide device, blender…
• Recipes: They are the software of the kitchen – they take your ingredients as input, provide the algorithm for a delicious meal made, using the assembly line and most likely your hands and "savoir-faire"
• Production of an output which hopefully is edible and delicious
• Production of waste and byproducts

 The kitchen is the only place in the home where this kind of transformative process occurs. It also is the place around the house, where we put in the most effort and work. There is a learning curve, failure, creativity, craftsmanship, mastery – all of these happen in your kitchen.

 Chaining automated solutions

It should come as a no surprise that the kitchen is rapidly becoming the most technology-driven part of your home. As automation is nowadays the norm in most factories, it’s also increasingly invading your countertop. For good reasons: cooking can benefit tremendously from automation. It decreases the time for meal preparation, reduces waste, and improves the quality of the meals.

More importantly, it’s all about consistency. How many times have you found yourself doing the same recipe with different results? Or how many times have you salivated on the picture of a recipe, and despite your best efforts in trying to reproduce every step as mentioned, you end up with a disappointing result? Humans are notoriously bad at being error-free when they try to execute a manual, multi-step process in which a lot of variabilities can occur. The temperature of the room or the characteristics of the ingredients as just a few examples. 

Most people’s first encounter with a robot is in a kitchen. From the first Kitchen Aid model in 1918, to the Thermomix from Vorwerk introduced in 1961, most of us have some kind of “cooking robot” in our kitchen. These exist to simplify some unpleasant and repetitive tasks with high variability. Want to bake a cake and need to beat the egg whites until stiff? Your kitchen robot is your best friend and will produce a very consistent result.

Now, you might ask, why do we need a “future” kitchen, and what exactly does that encompass? The concept of a future kitchen is to cover, not only one step of the assembly line, like with our traditional kitchen robot, but to cover the full process. From the supply of products to the final preparation. As with a traditional factory line, we’re going to witness an increasing automation of each step, but more importantly the integration between all the needed steps.

Why now?

The last few years have seen an exponential progress in key enabling technologies: network connectivity is now ubiquitous, AI is becoming mainstream, computer vision is a reality and sensors, which used to be very expensive, are now embedded everywhere.

In the following articles, we’ll go through the different components of the kitchen assembly line, one by one, analyzing the recent progress, and we’ll try to draw a picture of the kitchen of the future.

Have you started a company tackling the Future Kitchen or related to the future of home living? We'd love to hear from you and see how we can help. Visit the BSH Future Home Accelerator to get more insights and apply to our program!