Remote control cooking arrives

Appliances are supposed to work for us, right?
By Linda Hales
Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- It took a tough man to make a tender chicken, but it was a hungry father who devised a way to roast the bird while standing on a ball field waiting for his kids to finish practice.
David Mansbery, an Ohio entrepreneur with two sons, invented an Internet-linked oven to get a meal on the table sooner. His "intelligent" appliance refrigerates food until commanded to cook it, by phone, computer or PDA. It's not the only advance in kitchens these days, but it's the only one that qualifies as sci-fi come true.
After more than $10 million and 12 years in development at the TMIO company, the first 200ConnectIo Intelligent Ovens were shipped to distributors this past week from a Chattanooga, Tenn., factory. It's a cutting-edge product that hopes to jump-start that beleaguered rite of family life: mealtime.
"We all eat, we all have time problems," Mansbery says. "Appliances have not kept up with changes in our lifestyle."
The TMIO president and chief executive celebrated his first production run by hawking the oven to home builders at the International Builders' Show in Orlando. A demonstration model with brushed stainless steel front and dual-oven capacity was on display in a showcase called NextGen Home.
At the beginning
At $8,699, Internet-linked ovens will make their way into luxury developments long before the technology reaches Best Buy. But the central idea -- that supper should be ready when you are -- is so compelling that only a cavalier manufacturer would ignore its pursuit.
Over the cell phone he uses to start chicken roasting at home, Mansbery made remote-control cuisine sound as easy as punching "S" for souffle. There's no complex instruction manual. The oven uses "embedded Web technology" developed for space shuttles, but home chefs don't need degrees in rocket science. They simply prepare the food and put it in the refrigerator-oven to chill. After logging on to a Web site and giving a PIN code, they instruct the oven when to start and how long to cook.
They can also tap into recipes -- from the next room or a continent away. Messages can be left on an LCD screen on the oven door. The cooking circuits can be programmed for three days' worth of meals, a feature Mansbery calls Sabbath mode.
Mansbery was in the natural gas drilling and marketing business back in 1994, and developed an indoor baseball academy in Brecksville, Ohio, when he set his sights on an earlier, hassle-free meal.
"I was hungry," he said. "I wasn't getting dinner."
High-tech help
He was also motivated by an observation he attributes to Bill Gates: that kitchens had not progressed. His first prototype was a micro-refrigerator in a microwave. Command technology evolved with help from NASA and Sun Microsystems. In 1998 the oven was unveiled in public. It did not start a digital kitchen revolution.
"The world really was not ready yet," Mansbery says. "We needed other things to happen -- the Internet to develop, cell phones to become popular, wireless technology in the home."
The breakthrough came in 2002 at the annual tech-world convergence known as the Consumer Electronics Show. Techies got the point of the prototype, called Tonight's Menu Intelligent Oven (now shortened to TMIO), and immediately wanted to know where to buy one, Mansbery says. He pushed ahead with a premium dual-wall oven and won an award for innovation at the following year's show.
So far, so good. But in the $23 billion appliance business, advances can take decades to work their way into the mainstream. Sub-Zero developed a built-in refrigerator in the 1950s, based on work its founder did for Frank Lloyd Wright, but mass-market manufacturers have only recently slimmed down models to fit flush with standard cabinets. Highly efficient induction cooktops, in which an electric coil under glass agitates iron molecules in pots, are being offered by a host of elite makers. Westinghouse debuted an induction prototype 35 years ago.
On the small screen
LCD screens are proliferating. New from LG Electronics is a refrigerator with a cable-ready 15-inch screen for watching TV and DVDs as part of a digital command center on the door. Whirlpool put a screen on the front of a fantasy microwave, making it theoretically possible to click from TV to that exploding popcorn bag. A multimedia screen on an experimental ventilation hood by the Faber company was even more unexpected. The desirability of making phone calls, viewing movies and checking recipes on the hood over the stove is untested.
At last year's builders' show, exotica included a $1,400 oven from Sharp, which promised to steam the fat out of food. Hitachi offered nanotechnology to pummel particles off plates in the dishwasher.
This year, GE introduced its "Kitchen of the Future." Appliances are shown communicating with each other and, to a limited extent, with owners by phone. Sensors in the refrigerator report what's in stock and what a recipe requires. The oven cooks faster, with halogen lights and what GE calls Trivection -- a currently available combination of conventional, microwave and convection technology. The dishwasher has a soap reservoir that needs refilling only occasionally and automatically releases the right amount of detergent. Refrigerators can chill wine and thaw meat faster.
"Design is cumulative," says Marc Hottenroth, GE's industrial design leader. "As we learn new things and try new things, we can progress."
A GE video shows a couple after a party using voice commands to start the cooktop on self-clean, but that's one of the features designers have yet to develop. Mansbery approached some of the large appliance manufacturers as he proceeded with his cooling-cooking oven. He says one executive told him, "David, we just bend sheet metal, we don't make them smarter." Walking the aisles in Orlando, he says, he spotted touch screens, but no attempt to alter the purpose of existing machines.
"Basically, we've created a new appliance," Mansbery says.
The next application for the command-and-control technology will be outside the home, Mansbery says. He believes it could help deliver hot meals to troops, as well as allow doctors to monitor heart patients or even conduct long-distance surgery.
"There has to be a compelling reason to apply technology," he says. "What we try to do is to try for the betterment of mankind."