What do you think of, when you think of your kitchen? A place to cook, bake, laugh, share, eat, enjoy, be with my family and friends…? We think of the kitchen as a door to the digital future. Johannes Ochsner, Smart Cooking Lead Program Manager, shares this outlook of a new future.

Even though no kitchen looks exactly like another, the experiences people share inside the heart of the home are quite similar. Most of them happen around the so-called “culinary journey” – from inspiration and preparation, to purchase and storage of ingredients, eating and finally cleaning up. Nowadays, various technical assistants offer support along the culinary journey, including smart devices, shopping and recipe apps as well as kitchen machines and home appliances, each taking over small single tasks. 

What if all these helpers could work together seamlessly? Imagine the lucky owners of several connected home appliances from BSH, including an oven with sensors detecting when your food is ready, a Cookit kitchen machine with guided cooking functions, a fridge with an integrated camera, and an intelligent dishwasher, for example. For the sake of simplicity, let’s take a couple, Paul and Paula, as an example and picture them in their modern kitchen. They are busy people with a full schedule who love cooking with fresh foods. They often want to prepare a quick lunch while working from home during the week or precook a healthy dish for their two kids to heat up after school. On weekends, they like to invite friends and family over for fancy dinners. For all of these cooking occasions and habits Paul and Paula have individual needs, but they all occur along a standard culinary journey – ranging from inspiration and planning, over shopping and storing to preparation and cooking. 

Inspiration, planning and shopping

First, Paul and Paula need some inspiration for the best dishes suiting different tastes, dietary restrictions and occasions – starting with fast and on-the-go-meals and ending with very elaborate dishes. Thus, they might select well-known family recipes from the top of their mind, browse through a stack of cookbooks at home or search online. Once they have selected their favorite dishes for a meal, the couple will check if the necessary ingredients are in stock or put the missing items on the shopping list. Afterwards, they either take a short trip to the store or order everything online, before they can start meal preparation. So far, so good…

Already today, Paul and Paula can simplify some of these tasks with BSH’s Home Connect ecosystem: They can search for recipes in the Home Connect app and pin them to their personal Home Connect cookbooks. Afterwards, they can check the fridge’s contents on their smart device and send missing items to a shopping list. Once all ingredients are at hand, they can start the recipe preparation and send the settings straight to the connected oven, cooktop or Cookit. 

While Paul and Paula can check and control all of their connected appliances with one single app, the appliances themselves do not know about each other’s existence, yet. Let’s say the couple is making Quiche Lorraine, using the Cookit for preparing dough and filling, and the connected oven for baking. Wouldn’t it be great if the appliances in the kitchen were connected and perfectly in sync – like a “Sous Chef” who helps Paul and Paula to coordinate all their appliances with their perfect settings so they can focus on the creative side of cooking? Johannes Ochsner has a vision to take things further: “When we envision the future, we want to offer our consumers a seamless culinary journey, supporting them by orchestrating the entire kitchen by combining multiple integrated solutions leading to an outstanding experience in the kitchen”.  

One personalized & seamless experience

With the target to create a seamless culinary experience not only for Paul and Paula, but for all of our consumers, Ochsner invited experts from all of BSH’s culinary product families and digital teams to jointly define a way forward. All of them agreed, that it’s not only the single features and product innovations that will make a difference for BSH’s consumers: It’s the personalization of the culinary journey for different types of consumers all over the world. “Therefore, we want further integrate the strengths of our incomparably comprehensive appliance portfolio, with smart digital innovations and a broad range of partner solutions to build the seamless personalized experience for our consumers”, explains Ochsner. 

Integration at its best

The Bosch Cookit is an outstanding example of BSH’s successful integrated solution. Since its launch in 2019, the product team has focused on continuously delivering exciting new solutions for our consumers. To do so, they keep leveraging the heart of our electronic platform – the SystemMaster and our ecosystem platform Home Connect. “By actively listening and analyzing more than 7,000 social media posts, we figured out that the most desired functionality consumers wanted, was to create their own recipes”, explains Janine Grohmann, who drives digital solutions within the product family consumer products. 

Based on this insight, the cross-functional team prioritized and developed the respective feature in August 2021 – thanks to the software update ability through SystemMaster and the perfect collaboration between BSH’s electronic, product and app development teams. “Our users loved it so much that they created more recipes than we could have created internally over years within just a couple of days”, says Grohmann. By today, more than 11,000 recipes have been created and the number keeps growing. “The feedback on launching the ‘My Recipe’ feature was extraordinary and created a lot of buzz and positive reviews. We also learned from this new feedback, however, that users expect this integrated solution to develop further – users also want to share their own recipes with others”, adds Ochsner. This latest software update has been available since May 2022 to all users.

Synchronizing activities to meet every day needs 

While the Cookit is only one appliance within BSH’s broad product portfolio, recipes are also relevant for all other appliances that work along the culinary journey. “We have realized that we can make a more attractive offering to our consumers when we bundle and synchronize our activities around the culinary journey rather than having only single appliances in mind”, underlines Ochsner. Creating personal recipes and the opportunity to share them will in a next step, also be available to consumers who use other appliances like cooktops or ovens, for instance.  

Speaking of ovens, there is yet another field of exciting integrated solutions, BSH recently launched: the meat probe assistant. “Since our consumers are as diverse as our product and feature offering, preparing a steak that is ‘perfect’ for one consumer does not automatically mean that it’s perfect for everyone else. That’s basically 50 shades of bloodiness”, jokes Ochsner. Even though, the three-point meat probe has been helping consumers to cook different kinds of meat to the right core temperature for several years already, the new assistant will make cooking even easier. “In the past, we expected consumers to know the core temperature for a steak medium-rare by heart, check the user manual or search for it online.” That’s where integrated solutions can help consumers like Paul and Paula: The meat probe assistant supports them in getting their desired outcome more conveniently. They just select the type of meat and the desired level of doneness in the Home Connect app, and then send the right setting to the connected oven. 

What the future holds

According to Ochsner, these two integrated solutions are just the beginning. Further practical enhancements are already planned, like a better visualization and assistants for more dishes. However, Ochsner and his team are thinking way bigger: they work on integrating these assisting features not only in the Home Connect app, but directly into a wide range of partner recipes – no matter from which internet source or country they come. The recipes will “communicate” among each other, suggest alternative ingredients according to dietary restrictions and even synchronize with a smart inventory management for fridges and the pantries to directly add missing food items to the shopping list. “In order to make this vision come true, our BSH regions need strong recipe partners that can be integrated completely into Home Connect – that’s part of our three-year action plan”, declares Ochsner. 

This plan also includes that all connected appliances will be aware of each other, aligning recipe instructions and cooking times. “Imagine Paul and Paula getting step-by-step instructions across recipes and appliances, suggesting the easiest and fasted options for preparing different recipes based on their preferences at the same time with the appliances that they own”, visualizes Ochsner. “That’s our door into the digital future and we are going to storm it!”