Picture this: It’s 5pm on a weekday, you have another two hours of work and you are frantically googling recipes for a dinner party you’re throwing later that evening.
Now imagine this scenario: It’s 5pm on a weekday, you have another two hours of work but you don’t care because your robot chef has your dinner party handled.
It’s not dystopian if it’s already in your kitchen and has a name, Suvie.
When Robin Liss and Kevin Incorvia started working on Suvie, the kitchen robot, it required thinking inside the box — they realized that the home appliance market had a lot of different products that weren’t integrated into one. For example, you could not find a machine that’s a refrigerator and also an oven. And there began their quest of building a cooling-to-cooking machine that is now called Suvie.
“We asked ourselves, what’s the easiest way to go from cooling to cooking safely without moving the food but only changing the temperature,” Liss said, elaborating on how Suvie works.
The device has four different cooking zones, one each for protein, carbs, sauces and produce/vegetables — making a square meal for four. The ingredients come packed in (patent pending) water jackets that regulate the temperature of the food; Simply put, these water jackets do both cool and cook the food.
This method of cooking is not unusual -- Sous-vide (French for "under vaccum") is a method where food is contained in a plastic pouch or a glass jar and then placed under a water bath or steam environment for longer-than-usual cooking times (usually 1 to 7 hours) at a much lower than normal temperature used for cooking. This is done to ensure that the food is cooked evenly, without overcooking the outside to retain moisture.
Suvie uses this method to cook the protein, the vegetables are steamed and carbs like pasta are cooked and drained, al dente style. All ingredients come in pouches that have smart tags which communicate the cooking time and temperature to the device. Once in place, Suvie can prepare a meal under two hours.
"This is a non-trivial problem," said Liss. "Perfect cooking is important to people but it’s the prep and cleanup that stresses people out."
What's Liss' favorite Suvie meal? "New England cod paired with asparagus, Conchiglie pasta and topped with Alfredo sauce. Liss who started her first company at the age of 13 in Michigan has led a long entrepreneurial life. Her first venture was a camcorder reviewing site called Camcorderinfo.com, which later became reviewwed.com and got acquired by Gannett Media and USA Today in 2011.
While working at Gannett where she ran reviewed.com, a product review site for home appliances, Liss saw the opportunity to build a cool product rather than just review them. Liss and Incorvia built the first prototype of the device in the summer of 2015.
The company so far has raised $3.5 million in seed capital from angel investors and the founders' network of family and friends. But its Kickstarter campaign that went live in February met with roaring success raising $734,000 in the pre-order phase for 1300 units. The Cambridge-based company is partnering with meal-kit providers, food suppliers and fish packers -- intended to target the audience that does not want to source ingredients or have a recipe.
The smart kitchen market, although fragmented, is a fast-growing one. And it seems like Suvie is well-positioned. In 2017, the global market for such products was $897 million and is estimated to expand with a cumulative growth of 23.4% by 2025.
Suvie retails for $599 and will start shipping sometime early next year. For being a 'Keurig for dinner' as Liss put it, "the meals taste fantastic," she noted.
