Allison interviews Todd Oliver from Chefman about three of their new Chef iQ cooking-related products.
Todd describes the iQ Cooker, a smart slow/pressure cooker that is WiFi-connected and can be controlled remotely through a mobile app. It has over 300 cooking presets and seven unique cooking functions. This multifunctional cooker has a 6-quart, nonstick cooking pot and a multicolored LCD display with capacitive touch buttons. It also has a built-in scale to provide weight measurements of your ingredients.
The iQ Sense thermometer is a wireless cooking probe that measures food temperatures up to 1,000°F. It is wirelessly connected to the Smart Hub, which operates as a charging station and a WiFi base station for the probe. This allows you to monitor your food’s cooking progress from anywhere WiFi is available. The hub connects with and charges up to four iQ Sense probes and it includes a speaker for real-time audible alerts.
Todd concludes by describing the iQ MiniOven, a powerful smart countertop oven. It features 11 cooking functions, dozens of presets, and works seamlessly with iQ Sense temperature probes. It has a 25-quart cooking capacity and can reach a cooking temperature of 500°F. You can control the iQ MiniOven using a multicolor LCD touch display or the iQ app, which allows you to control and monitor your cooks remotely.
Learn more at https://chefiq.com/
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Transcript of Interview:
Allison: Slow cookers are all the rage, but I’m here with Todd Oliver from Chef iQ, who’s got something much cooler than what you have at home. Tell us about it.
Todd: Sure. So this is our smart cooker, and this was Time Magazine’s appliance of the year, three years ago. And this is a multi-cooker, so it’s a pressure cooker, it’s a steamer, it’s a slow cooker, multiple functions. When you invest in this great solution for your kitchen, your smart cooker gets smarter over time as well. So for example, we did not start with a sous vide function. However, we did a free over-the-air update about a year and a half ago, so everybody free of charge now has that smarter sous vide function with that as well.
Allison: I’m going to describe this a little bit, because some people are audio only. This looks like a large pot with a handle on the top and a beautiful display on the front. And it’s got red stripes on it that make it look scary, because this is going to be a hot thing at some point.
Todd: Yeah, this is just some labeling that we have to ship it on, because it’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connected, so you can remove these labels at some point. However, it’s a large six-quart capacity.
Allison: Je just opened it up. It has a giant pot inside.
Todd: Non-stick pot. And then it also comes with a steaming rack and then a meat rack as well, so just your roast is elevated from the water that’s down below.
Allison: Perfect.
Todd: And then it also comes with a premium heat-resistant material here, and this can be used either as a trivet on your counter or you can use it as a lid as well.
Allison: Just to keep it warm?
Todd: Really for storage, if you’re putting something into the fridge.
Allison: Oh, okay, I got you.
Todd: Something like that.
Allison: Okay. So what problem are we trying to solve here by having this be so smart?
Todd: So a few different things. So a pressure cooker, a lot of people sort of remember to their mother’s pressure cooker of years past, a manual one, and one of the problems, one of the issues, is people do not like to release the steam. So a lot of people will take their wooden spoon and release the steam that way. With this unit here, you can automatically do it through the app, and you can release the steam in three different methods depending on the food type. So fast, if it was a pasta, pulsing or slow, and it will automatically–
Allison: I’m no cook, obviously. I don’t understand why there’s a thing about the steam.
Todd: Something like a pasta, you don’t want it to get saturated with the water that’s in there.
Allison: So you want to get it out quick?
Todd: You want to get it out quick.
Allison: Okay.
Todd: Yeah. And then it will automatically release it after giving you three beeps notice, and that way you don’t even have to–
Allison: And you’re not near it, so you don’t get steamed.
Todd: Exactly.
Allison: Okay.
Todd: Another thing is this has an integrated scale built into it.
Allison: No way!
Todd: So it will automatically adjust the cooking time and temperature based on the inputs that you give that, either manually through the screen or through your app. So if you were doing a roast, is it from fresh, is it from frozen, what is the weight, and then what is–
Allison: Wait, it’s supposed to figure out the weight.
Todd: Well, yes, and then you can either input the weight or you can just say use the scale.
Allison: Okay. I like that use the scale lazy thing.
Todd: So it will automatically come up with the time and temperature based on the cooking method that you want to do, the weight and all of that, and then most likely it will ask you to add water to the recipe before it starts to slow cook or pressure cook or steam, whatever you’ve chosen. With that built-in scale, you don’t have to get out a measuring cup, another item to clean.
Allison: This is really one-stop shopping here.
Todd: Exactly, and I’m glad you mentioned that.
Allison: One-stop cooking.
Tod: So it also integrates to our free of charge app. It has over 1,000 recipes built into the app. It will give you the ingredients, the cooking time, the total cooking time, and with the recipes, with the ingredients, if you don’t have all of them at home, it’s actually integrated with Instacart.
Allison: Oh, nice. That’s genius. I like that.
Todd: What I love about the recipes is that I cannot read a recipe for the life of me.
Todd: I have got all kinds of wonderful cookbooks at home, and I can’t do anything out of them.
Allison: Just not in your DNA.
Todd: Every single recipe gives you step-by-step instructions, and it will show you in text, and then it will show you in a video as well. So I can duplicate a video. So I can create a lot of things that normally aren’t within my comfort zone as a home cook.
Allison: So, how much is Home iQ?
Todd: The Chef iQ Smart Cooker is–
Allison: Sorry, what did I just call it? Home iQ? Chef iQ.
Todd: Chef iQ is $199.
Allison: Oh, wow. I’m sorry. I was kind of going, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here comes a \$700 thing for my counter. $200. Wow.”
Todd: No, Chef iQ is all about value and ease of use. Value doesn’t necessarily mean the cheapest item out there. It just means that you’re getting a ton of features, great displays, meaningful innovation, not just paying extra so you can turn something on and off from your bed, meaningful innovation, and all at a great retail.
Allison: Now, you sure you don’t want to use AI in this at all? You want to see AI a couple times? I think it’s a law this week, right?
Todd: Yeah, we currently don’t use AI.
Allison: Okay, that’s fine. I’m just messing with you.
Todd: No problem.
Allison: Now, Steve just handed me another thing. It looks like some meat probes.
Todd: Yeah, these are our iQ Sense smart cooking thermometers. And we have them in a 1, a 2, a 3, and a 4 pack. They each come with their own recharging hub. So these are rechargeable batteries. It’s not AA batteries or anything like that. And then each recharging hub is actually a built-in speaker.
Allison: What?
Todd: Yeah, fantastic.
Allison: Like for music?
Todd: No, so–
Allison: I thought we were going to rock out to our tunes while we’re cooking.
Todd: So you can use the probes in a stove, a stove top, in an oven. You can use it on the barbecue, in an air fryer, a deep fryer, a roaster.
Allison: Can I use it in my Chef iQ?
Todd: You can use it in your Chef iQ as well.
Allison: So these temperature–
Todd: 1,000 degrees.
Allison: Holy bananas.
Todd: So that is way more than you need for most appliances that are out there or your stove.
Allison: Even the barbecue.
Todd: With the barbecue, though, you might get a flare-up.
Todd: So that’s where we have–
Allison: I think 1,000 is more than some of the other devices we have that do this.
Todd: Yeah.
Allison: So what’s your price point on, say, a three-pack of these?
Todd: So we go anywhere from \$89 to $199, so from a single pack to a four-pack.
Allison: I assume these are some sort of Bluetooth connectivity or something?
Todd: These are Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Allison: Oh, okay.
Allison: So are they tied into the Chef iQ?
Todd: They’re not tied into this.
Todd: However, they will be tied into our smart oven moving forward. These won a Global Innovation Award at the Houseware Show two years ago. We have a new iteration that comes with five sensors, so it’s phenomenally accurate. It’s the world’s thinnest thermometer. It’s the world’s most accurate thermometer. And it’s a greatly growing category.
Allison: So at this point, one of the advantages for people who are listening is that if you use these kind of probes that are over Wi-Fi, that means you don’t have to stand next to the oven or the cooktop, whatever it is, the barbecue, while these things are working.
Todd: Exactly.
Allison: So for something like if you were putting this into a smoker, that’s something that you’re smoking for the full day or something?
Todd: You really don’t want to stand there.
Allison: You don’t want to stand there.
Todd: You can run to the grocery store.
Todd: You’ve got unlimited range with the Wi-Fi.
Allison: So the box/charger that I’m holding in my hand, is that what’s connected to Wi-Fi?
Todd: This connects both to Bluetooth and to Wi-Fi.
Allison: Okay, but not the probes themselves.
Allison: The probes probably talk Bluetooth to this?
Todd: Bluetooth to that, and then the hub is Wi-Fi.
Allison: Okay, and I assume we plug this in somehow.
Todd: Yeah, this comes with a charging port.
Allison: There it is.
Todd: USB.
Allison: There’s our USB-C. That’s what I’m looking for.
Todd: USB-C.
Allison: You’ve got a green light on it. You’ve got to love that.
Todd: A hinge lid.
Allison: There you go.
Todd: When you have more than one probe, they come both numbered and then different colors as well.
Allison: That’s excellent.
Todd: That way you can program this one to be a chicken, this one to be a steak medium rare, and this one to be a steak well done.
Allison: There you go.
Todd: So color coding.
Allison: That’s beautiful.
Todd: And then it will tell you on the app, you know, it’s almost ready to flip or your meal is done.
Allison: Is it one item a year?
Todd: It’ll also give you an audible as well.
Allison: I love it. I love it.
Todd: So especially for, you know, if you’re hearing impaired, you can see it on your phone.
Allison: Perfect.
Todd: But if you like that audible, you know, sound and notification, you can be sitting outside by the barbecue and it will tell you time to remove your steak.
Allison: Very good. Now, we’re almost out of time here, but did you need to say anything about the iQ mini oven?
Todd: Yeah.
Allison: We have just a picture of this. This is coming soon?
Todd: This is coming soon, next month. We have our samples over at the show. This is also integrated with our app. It has over a thousand recipes as well that you can do guided cooking through the screen.
Allison: So what kind of oven would this replace? The big oven?
Todd: It really could replace the big oven. It has 11 different functions today. Over time, we’ll add functions with free of charge, over the air updates.
Allison: And now we trust you to do it because you did the sous vide over on the Chef iQ. See, we trust you.
Todd: It’s full edge-to-edge glass. It has a premium extended rack, so you can extend the rack out without any loss of stability.
Allison: I want that everywhere.
Todd: It will have three different lights for the three different rack positions, so it will guide you and say if you’re broiling, the top rack will be lit up. If you are doing something like a chocolate chip cookie, it will probably be the bottom rack.
Allison: I will be doing the chocolate chip cookie.
Todd: Very good.
Allison: So this is, when is this iQ mini oven coming out?
Todd: This will be out in March.
Allison: Do you have any idea how much that’s going to cost yet?
Todd: That will be about $399.
Allison: Again, that’s a really good price.
Todd: Great price. It does 11 different functions today. And one of the things that I’m most excited about with this is you can use it as a standard toaster oven. So time and temperature, 375 for 40 minutes. Once you bring your Chef iQ smart cooking thermometer close by, it will give you the option, because it will pick up that recognition that the thermometer is close, it will give you the option to switch from time and temperature to choosing a doneness level.
Allison: Even for chocolate chip cookies?
Todd: You could use it for chocolate chip cookies, but more likely for a steak or a roast.
Allison: Okay. All right. Fine.
Todd: So instead of just having it in there for an hour, you can insert the probe.
Allison: I can’t stand there for eight minutes and watch the cookies. I’m sorry, Todd. I don’t have that kind of time.
Todd: No problem. And yeah, great screen. It also has the speaker on that as well.
Allison: Very cool. So if people want to learn more about these products, where would they go?
Todd: chefiq.com.
Allison: Very good. Thank you so much.
Todd: Thank you so much.
Allison: Thank you, Todd.
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