The last time we checked in on Drop, the smart kitchen scale, it didn’t have any recipes for Brussels sprouts, but it did have one for a rosemary gin fizz. Since then, the company has added over 200 more recipes (still none for Brussels sprouts), but that’s not its big reveal at IFA 2016. Soon, those with Bosch ovens with Home Connect will be able to integrate their Drop scales with their appliance.
Drop has always wanted to have its app be the go-to place for cooks who want precision in their cooking but also easy-to-follow instructions. “That’s really the tip of the iceberg” Ben Harris, CEO Of Drop, told Digital Trends. With the Bosch partnership, Drop wants to be integrated into every part of the cooking process — not just weighing the ingredients.
“You can have this wonderful turn-by-turn recipe experience walking you through a full recipe while your kitchen is responding around you to where you are in the recipe,” says Harris. That means that when you’re weighing out the flour for your cookies, you could get a notification on the app that says “Preheat the oven.” Instead of you having to do it yourself, you could just hit a button on your phone and have your Bosch set itself to the proper temperature.
“We’ve reinvented the 1,000-year-old recipe format of a block of text, a list of ingredients, and an image into this step-by-step, turn-by-turn format that is not only incredibly easy for the user to understand but also has a machine-readable format at the back of it that means we can start relaying that to your appliances around the kitchen,” Harris explains. “We can actually adjust the recipes depending on the appliances that you have connected to the platform itself, and that’s really where we’re going.”
Though Bosch’s ovens are the first partners, Harris hints there are more in the pipeline. One day a connected food processor, with a built-in Drop scale, could adjust itself to the proper setting, per the recipe, once you’ve added the carrots and closed the lid.
After today’s announcement at IFA, Drop plans to start rolling out its updated app, with the new capabilities, in October. Consumers who have both a Bosch oven with Home Connect and a Drop scale don’t need to do anything beyond update the Drop app. “Up until a couple years ago, you buy a product, it gets worse as the months and the years go on,” says Harris. “Now with connected appliances, they get better.”
If it all sounds a little sci-fi to you, Harris assures us that Drop wants to be less like a kitchen robot, and more like your personal sous chef.
