Smart Kitchens: Whirlpool’s new team-up disrupts traditional cooking

By Ann Jacob

Whirlpool (WHR) and food tech startup Innit are aiming to disrupt the traditional kitchen experience by making it smarter. The home appliance maker is the latest company to join the smart home trend, following the likes of Amazon, which has voice command device Echo, and Google’s Nest and recently announced Assistant.

A 2016 report says the smart home market is expected to more than double from $47 billion to nearly $122 billion by 2022.

Whirlpool, whose appliance brands include Maytag and KitchenAid, is pairing its luxury appliance brand Jenn-Air with Innit, which calls itself a “connected food company.” Jenn-Air’s ovens are the first product to be combined with Innit’s technology.

Jenn-Air has already partnered with Nest, which makes Wi-Fi-enabled home appliances like thermostats and security systems. Connecting Jenn-Air and Nest, for instance, helps home cooks cool down their home while cooking by controlling the oven fans with their phone. The partnership with Innit, which was founded in 2013, will feature cooking instructions, recipes and more aimed at getting people cooking.

According to Brett Dibkey, vice president of Integrated Business Units at Whirlpool, the “first step that will certainly evolve, in large part, giving consumers more confidence to cook more meals at home than perhaps they do today.”

Innit’s cameras and sensors detect weight, temperature and type of food. Using that information, Innit has inserted hundreds of recipes and cooking instructions to make the make the “experience seamless in the kitchen,” according to Innit CEO and co-founder, Kevin Brown.

While the technology may help cooks not burn their food, it doesn’t come cheap. The cost of a Jenn-Air oven ranges from $3,100 to $5,000. However, if you already have the compliant Jenn-Air oven, making it smarter with Innit won’t cost you a penny.

“The capability we’re talking about is an add-on to an oven that we’re already selling so we’re not planning a price increase on the ovens to reflect that,” says Jenn-Air general manager Steve Brown. “If you’ve already purchased your oven, you’ll get it and if you purchase a new one at the same price, you’ll get it.”

The price is steep, but Brown says the target consumer is “very open” to these types of new technologies.

Consumers and Jenn-Air oven owners can get the add-on in the first half of 2017. An app to control the tech simultaneously will be released in late 2016. Innit’s Brown says the app will be limited until late 2017, when the the number of recipes will expand significantly.

Innit’s cameras will cost $20 to $30, but the company hasn’t made plans to sell them separately. Dibkey says that while Whirlpool is focused on the success of Jenn-Air and Innit right now, he sees this kind of smart tech extending to other Whirlpool brands.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Innit’s cameras and sensors can be bought separately.