How ‘smart’ is the 21st Century Indian kitchen?

The kitchens of tomorrow will also leverage 5G, to help a smart home be more secure while consuming considerably less power. Seen as a disadvantage, most smart homes in India use a variety of connections such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and more. But companies that manufacture chips for smart devices like our crockpots and refrigerators want a more safe (given the fear that the connected home is hackable) and harmonising connection. However, in India, 5G adoption is slow, so we may have to wait and see.

Also Read | Does 5G have potential to be a harmonising technology layer in the connected home?

But there is optimism. “Indian kitchens have evolved greatly to keep up with the times. Integrated kitchens that give a more compact experience are catching on in India, especially among NRIs who are investing in property in the country,” says Anto Thomas, commercial manager of home interior designer company, D Life.

Gadgetry, galore

You could even have a GPS to guide you around your own kitchen. Saakshi Jain and Rakesh Edavalath in Bengaluru founded a kitchen assistant app Zelish, which offered assistance for everything from searching for recipes to sourcing ingredients, tracking groceries and automating shopping lists. The app even takes the user’s nutritional needs and preferences into account.

The app was recently acquired by Canada-based Tiny Chef, an AI-integrated voice-first platform that merges technology with daily kitchen needs such as planning, shopping and cooking. Launched in India in 2019 with chef Sanjeev Kapoor joining in, it has over 1,20,000 monthly users in India now, according to its spokesperson.

“Most often, it is not the cooking that people find difficult, but the planning around it,” says Saakshi, who is now the global chief marketing officer of Tiny Chef. “Almost everyone who has handled a kitchen at some point would have had to deal with the problem of over-ordering groceries that seemed to disappear into a black hole. At least 6.4 million worth of groceries go to waste in India,” she adds.

When tech entrepreneur Bahubali Shete and his wife Asha Shete launched Tiny Chef in Canada in 2017, the idea was to revolutionise the kitchen experience by making recipes accessible on Alexa devices and Google Home. Connecting the app to smart speakers, one would not have to look at the phone while cooking. The user could ask to be assisted through every step of a dish. If he or she ran out of an ingredient, Alexa could be asked to add it to the shopping cart. The response from the Indian market has been extremely encouraging, they say.

One of its features include an option where one can record a family member’s voice. A treasured family recipe is thus digitally documented and gets added to a user’s private collection, which can be further shared with other users. This would be recommended by Alexa to those users who have been given access to that recipe.

One could even prepare restaurant-style grilled foods at home with the smart tandoor, which unlike the bulky traditional tandoor, is compact, light-weight and fits into the scheme of a smart kitchen. Wellberg’s smart tandoor comes with an auto-timer and auto-temperature control options where as Wonderchef’s ‘gas oven tandoor’ works as a tandoor as well as an oven and can make anything from cakes to kebabs.

Smart appliances such as kitchen robot, Thermomix, which does everything from blending to cooking, chopping and kneading has found more takers since its launch in India in 2017. While in the initial days, the enquiries came from professional chefs and hotels, now there are more enquiries from households across the country, says Yogesh Mathur, the marketing manager of Pocket Kitchen LLP, Bengaluru, the dealers of Thermomix in India.

Old with the new

It is not only the young that are making their kitchens smart, says Chennai-based cookbook author, social worker and food researcher Sabita Radhakrishna. “For the elderly living alone, technology has been a game changer. I am a traditionalist when it comes to cooking. I still have 100-year-old kadais and kalchattis that are perfectly functional, handed down to me by my mother. But I also embrace technology. I have now moved my office to the dining table, so my soundless electric cooker does make things a lot easier for me,” she says.

Wi-fi-enabled crockpot