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by packet_nerd 1728 days ago
I want an appliance that combines the functions of refrigerator, pantry, stove, oven, dishwasher, and that has manipulators inside capable of picking the ingredients, cleaning, peeling, chopping, and otherwise preparing them, cooking the entire meal, cleaning up, and spiting out the meal on serving dishes. :-)

It should be able to cook good tasting homemade meals from real ingredients (even fresh from the garden if you have a garden), not just plastic wrapped junk food. You load food items through hopper or door in one side, then a manipulator arm picks them up, reads or otherwise identifies what they are, and stores them in the inbuilt pantry or refrigerator.

It should keep an inventory of the refrigerator and panty and be able to suggest recipes that use what you have on hand while optimizing for cost, nutrition, and minimizing wasted food from spoilage. It should be able to produce shopping lists for you based on foods you use frequently or recipes you want to cook in the future. (It could even auto order foods and have them delivered, although I like the idea of just getting a shopping list and buying it myself better.)

It should be able to help you avoid wasting leftover foods by reaccepting leftovers, storing them, displaying the leftovers as a suggestion for the next meals so you don't forget, and know the optimal way to reheat or re-prepare them.

It should be controlled through an app on your phone, over the local network, and definitely not dependent on some cloud service. You should be able to still get a nice hot supper if the Internet goes down.

The app should show you a list of recipes that can be made with the ingredients on hand, you pick one or a couple, it tells you how long it's going to take to prepare. You tap go, and 45min later you have a perfect homecooked supper!

1 comments

that's pretty fantastical
Maybe so.. but technology wise I don't think there's anything here that doesn't exist yet or that is even exceptionally advanced. It's just a matter of putting it all together and writing the code.
I'm skeptical--this market would be so incredibly huge that I cannot fathom everyone overlooking it.

Literally everyone would get this. It would make the world so much healthier--enable everyone to easily diet, let people subscribe to healthy meal plans, etc.

It would pay for itself even at astronomical prices, via health benefits, no need to go out for dinner, and reduced food prices via making things from scratch.

Buying in bulk would be more common and much easier. So much comes from grain, sugar, salt and yeast. Much less food would be wasted--no need to batch cook anything and ignore the leftovers. The robot would be baking your bread, making donuts and croissants, tortillas, tortilla chips, mayonnaise, yogurt, sauerkraut, pickles. Things we never consider making on our own, that are generally considered the base components to make other things. I think it could easily offset $300-$1k in monthly expenses for just about everyone.

My assumptions are that it can be tailored to follow a recipe, of which many widely-published recipes are created/curated by chefs and experts, and once that is done the robot rarely, if ever, fails to produce the very best version of the dish.

If the only hindrance is just sitting down and writing the code, someone ought to get busy, because this is about as impactful of a development for the planet as any could be.