SEATTLE _ I have seen the kitchen of the future, and we're all going to need a lot more counter space.
The Smart Kitchen Summit convened in Seattle recently. The lanyarded crowd swarmed in and out of plenary sessions on topics such as "I, Chef-Bot: Applying AI to the World of Food & Cooking," and talks like "You Are Eating Software." The average attendee: white, male, mid-30s, upscale business-casual. The guys wearing suits looked a little quaint. Networking was rampant.
Around the semicircular mezzanine, up in the air, the gleaming future of the kitchen was arrayed, with different companies presenting the ways they seek to disrupt the food space. (It's "space" now, not "market," and disruption, in case you haven't heard, is a good thing. More vocabulary: "full stack," "blockchain" and "democratization," which seems pretty completely divorced from its original meaning.)
If you are hoping for an anthropomorphic kitchen bot that glides around on its wheel-leg, possibly wearing a frilly apron, doing all the things you used to do while you drink a glass of wine and, I don't know, shop online, I am sorry to disabuse you of your vision. While it seems to be in vogue to refer to them as "robots," the future of the kitchen looks more like large-ish countertop appliances, and you're going to need more than one to get everything done.
The Summit atmosphere had a touch of the infomercial about it _ with some of the future still in the prototype phase, the scent of venture capital was in the air. I spoke with one entrepreneur, who proved to be from Croatia, about his robot, the GammaChef. "Like homemade meals? Let me cook for you!" the GammaChef's banner read. The GammaChef has a place for a pot and a stirring attachment; along the top of the machine are embedded Tupperware-esque containers, some refrigerated, to be filled with the ingredients for what the GammaChef is going to cook for you. You still have to prep and chop, though part of the vision is to partner with a meal-kit service to take care of that; the recipe is dictated to the GammaChef via an app. The GammaChef's human likened it to a self-driving car. "I believe in the future, something like this will be in every home," he said, not overly evangelically. I said something haltingly about actually liking cooking. "I like to cook!" he replied affably. "But I don't like to cook every day."
"My wife used to love to bake," the overseer of another robot, the PantryChic, told me. Apparently, all the measuring finally got to her _ with the PantryChic, you store your dry goods in Tupperware-like SmartCanisters; use an app to choose a recipe; then place the canisters for the recipe, in turn, atop it; and it allots each ingredient out by weight with the push of a button. No more messy measuring cups! And the SmartCanisters can be programmed to let you know when, say, your baking powder is going to expire, or when you need to get more flour. "So your wife loves baking again?" I asked, in an effort to bring it back around. "Yes!" he enthused.
There was all this and much, much more. The GammaChef had a competitor in Oliver, another robot-cooker with a more space-age shape, kind of like an oversized Champagne bucket with clear ingredient-cylinders poking out of the top. The PantryChic could hook up with June, "the world's only intelligent convection oven," though their apps might not be compatible. In the beverage space, among other countertop-taker-uppers, there was a unit that reproduces different craft beers for you, obviating those troublesome trips to bars; a Bluetooth-enabled electric pour-over kettle; and an also-Bluetooth-enabled Keurig-style chai-maker.
I spoke with a fellow demo'ing a refrigerator equipped with a video screen that showed me standing there, looking at it, although it also could look within. He showed me how we could take a Heineken out, and the fridge, smartly, would know so, registering the loss on its display. Then, in the bright future, it would be not only capable of recognizing you as the one who always takes the last beer, but capable of ordering more to prevent that. "Neat!" I said somewhat weakly.
Have you seen the episode of "Silicon Valley" with the smart fridge? Its video screen shows what's inside _ just like, the character Gilfoyle notes derisively, the nearby fridge with a glass door (or, you know, opening the fridge). It has an app, "So you can actually watch the food on your phone," Dinesh marvels. All it needs to do, Gilfoyle says with his signature deadpan hostility, taking a bottle from the door, is keep his beer cold. "Mmm! You're running low on beer!" the fridge's disembodied voice chirps, unctuously casual. Objecting to the machine's verbal tics and to this turn of progress as a whole, Gilfoyle says, "Humans are (expletive). This thing is addressing problems that don't exist. It's solutionism at its worst." In an act of revenge, he hacks the fridge, which later uploads his hack to all its fridge-brethren everywhere. Cut to an appliance store with a line of fridges, each with a Gilfoyle-selected video of a mime mimicking a sex act running on its screen.
