From bread makers to air fryers — why we love kitchen gadgets

Priya Khanchandani often rises at her north London home to find a freshly baked loaf sitting in a bread maker. Her Dutch husband, who misses the local bread he used to eat growing up in a village near Maastricht, has used the appliance several times a week during lockdown. “We wake to the aroma of fresh bread. Who would have dreamt it?” she says.

Khanchandani, head of curatorial at the Design Museum in London, is part of a global trend. Sales of bread makers that mix, prove and bake dough have grown rapidly in the pandemic — US sales increased by 42 per cent in 2020, according to Euromonitor International.

More people have to feed themselves and the devices help. “Baking a sourdough loaf without a bread maker can be bloody hard work,” says Simon Grantham, UK managing director of Panasonic.

The bread maker is not the only fancy new hardware on kitchen counters. Air fryers, steam ovens, pressure cookers and multifunctional devices such as the Ninja Foodi (“Get creative with seven functions including Pressure Cook, Air Fry, Slow Cook, Steam, Bake/Roast, Sear/Sauté and Grill”) jostle with kettles and microwaves. Why roast a chicken when you could steam it to retain its juices, then air fry the skin to a perfect crisp?

For years, there has been talk of kitchens becoming smarter, with appliances controlled remotely by Bluetooth or WiFi, or fridges that could reorder ingredients when they ran out. Smart appliances have often featured at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. In practice, there has been a greater appetite for multi-ovens and air fryers than connected fridges: they bring more tangible benefits.

They also bring a thrill to those who like gadgets and working out the ideal method for steaming and grilling fish, or producing the perfect loaf of bread. The user can experiment with many settings and variations, as well as ingredients.

“There is a hobbyist aspect to it. I can buy a bread maker and pick carefully the 10 types of flour I will use in it,” Grantham says. Many people enjoy the psychology of mastering these machines.

The question is whether the multi-cooker and the air fryer will last. Previous fads for appliances from fondue makers to backyard grills have faded, and slow cookers that were once in constant use have been pushed to the back of cupboards as the novelty has worn off.

“I don’t know anyone who has stopped using the hob, but many appliances have been heavily marketed but shortlived. I wonder if these will be too,” says Khanchandani.

The new wave of kitchen gadgets started in 2010, when the Instant Pot, an electronic pressure cooker, first appeared in North America — it soon became a cult among “Pothead” owners. Philips introduced its Airfryer, which uses convection to fry with less oil than deep fryers, the same year.

Over the same period, there has been a rise in juicers and blenders such as the NutriBullet, encouraged by veganism and demand for organic food.

The pandemic has given kitchen technology added momentum. “Restaurants closed and people had to cook at home, which for some generations was a lost art. I think there’s something primal. You want to feed your family as healthily, quickly and easily as possible,” says Bill Wright, Tupperware’s executive vice-president for product innovation. Tupperware has itself benefited: its prospects looked bleak a year ago, but sales have risen sharply.

The shift has an echo of the postwar expansion of new kitchen appliances, including refrigerators and ovens. In Japan, Toshiba’s invention of the automatic electronic rice cooker in 1955 eased the drudgery of cooking rice in pots, and today’s generation of steam does so for complex dishes.

“People want to hit a button and walk away, and when they come back an hour later, their meal is ready,” says Neil Shah, chief commercial officer of SharkNinja, the maker of the Foodi.

Pressure cookers were reinvented because Robert Wang was laid off from his job as a computer engineer in Ottawa after emigrating to Canada from China in the 1990s.

Wang and his wife had two small children and wanted to cook cheaply and easily. He knew of electric cookers being used in China that had solved the danger of 1970s oven hob pressure cookers, which cooked fast but sometimes burst.

“I was always a cookware geek, but I never bought a pressure cooker because they terrified me,” says Chris Stevens, UK and European chief executive of Instant Brands, which makes the Instant Pot. “Everyone had a story about how their grandma had blown the lid of hers through the ceiling. The worst that can happen with this thing is that it turns itself off.”

Wang set to work to design his own pressure cooker, using $350,000 in savings on development. His device had sensors to monitor the internal temperature and pressure and stop the food inside from burning. He launched the Instant Pot in 2010 on Amazon and steadily attracted a devoted following of Potheads. They evangelised for the product and swapped recipes on Facebook for its multiple settings, from braising to yoghurt-making.

Wang tapped into a pent-up demand among families to be able to eat healthily and cut down on processed food and takeaways. “There is the guilt trip of two working parents seeing all the additives in food, not happy with what their children are eating, but facing a time crunch at the end of the day. It was a lightbulb moment. Instead of ordering another pizza, they could cook quickly,” says Stevens.

As Wang tinkered with his Instant Pot, Fred van der Weij, a Dutch engineer, was working on another appliance — the air fryer. Like the Instant Pot, the air fryer was safer than traditional deep fat fryers and made healthier food. It also had the attraction of being a push-button device that controlled itself and was quiet and odourless with its lid down.

Van der Weij took his invention to Philips with a partner and it was launched at a Berlin consumer electronics fair in 2010. Other makers produced their own and air fryers became as popular as pressure cookers. The logical next step was to combine them in one: SharkNinja, a maker of appliances including Shark vacuum cleaners, did this in 2018 with the Ninja Foodi. It was one of the UK’s top-selling small appliances last year.

“A lot of appliances only do one thing, and if you want to do something else, you have to buy another,” says Shah of SharkNinja. “We found that consumers were pressure-cooking their meat and putting it in an oven to finish it, so they gave up the benefit.”

The Foodi still requires wrangling — it has different lids and containers for the twin functions — but combining appliances curbs the tendency for machines to multiply.

Ovens that can steam as well as microwave and grill are similarly in vogue — Panasonic launched its £520 Combi Steam Oven in the UK last summer, making play of its Asian heritage (it followed Toshiba in producing an electronic rice cooker in Japan in 1956 under its original name, Matsushita). The biggest group of buyers of Panasonic’s device at launch were parents aged 25-35, many living in small apartments.

Being in a confined space makes it important to get the most out of a device. That is one appeal of the rice cooker in Japan, where apartments are often small and not always fitted with ovens.

It also harks back to the philosophy of Dieter Rams, head of design at Braun, the German electronics group, from 1961 to 1995. Rams abhorred waste and designed product “systems” such as food mixers with multiple attachments.

Rams’s sleek designs spread widely, and owners of his products were happy to keep them on display, rather than putting them away in cupboards after use. Many Japanese appliances, such as Muji’s round-cornered rice cooker, are also soothing.

“A lot of attention is paid to detail and appearance in Japan. [Panasonic’s new oven] is a nice, flat glass product. It has to look good if you are paying £500,” Grantham says.

Other multi-cookers, such as the Instant Pot and the Foodi, are cheaper and display their functions more openly with buttons and display panels. “From a design perspective, I think they are slightly monstrous forms, not objects you would want to cohabit with. I suppose it shows high performance, but I’m not sure the Instant Pot needs to look like it’s about to take off,” says Khanchandani.

It is hard to argue with success. Whatever its looks, the multi-cooker conforms to core principles of industrial design: simplicity, versatility and safety. While many companies believed smart appliances would be the next big thing, the Instant Pot proved more useful.

“I am sure there is a benefit to the consumer somewhere [in smart devices] but I struggle to see it,” says Stevens of Instant Brands.

Bread makers are the latest to occupy pride of place in kitchens, and there will be others: it is appealing to put your ingredients in a machine and let it take over. In a few years’ time, we will discover how many of these new appliances are still in use. The traditional set-up of an oven and hob, along with a microwave, has remained in homes for decades without being superseded. Will the same be said of the Foodi?

John Gapper is FT Weekend’s business columnist

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