It’s been several months since appliance manufacturer Whirlpool acquired Yummly. The app lets users find recipes suited to their tastes and cooking talents, limiting results to those without a despised ingredient or that will take less than half an hour to make. Because Whirlpool is adding to its roster of smart appliances — at 2017’s Consumer Electronics Show, it announced nearly all its connected appliances would be voice-enabled) — it wants to expand on what home cooks can do with the technology once it’s in their kitchens. The latest version of the app, Yummly 2.0, will integrate with some Whirlpool smart ovens, the company announced at CES 2018.
The improvements to the app include image-recognition technology, so it can offer suggestions based on multiple ingredients you have on hand. It’s integrated with Instacart, so you can add missing items to your shopping cart and have them delivered. A scheduling feature will remind you when you need to start the lasagna to have it on the table by 7 p.m.
The Yummly app offers step-by-step tutorials and videos, but because it can communicate with smart ovens and microwaves, it can also send instructions to the appliances. That means Whirlpool and Yummly can work together to set the time and temperature, but the app and oven can also handle any changes that need to occur mid-recipe — if it calls for a quick sear with the broiler at the end, for example.
Whirlpool has had a Scan-to-Cook feature on its smart appliances for a while. Scan the bar code on a frozen meal, for example, and the microwave will adjust its own power level and set its timer to the recommended duration. The integration with Yummly is similar, only it now works with fresh food and homemade recipes. It’s similar to what we expected out of Whirlpool’s erstwhile partnership with Innit, a company hoping to “digitize” food by tracking it from its source to your home via apps and smart appliances that can help foolproof the cooking process.
Yummly 2.0 ‘s integration with Whirlpool is one piece of the connected kitchen, but it does show how fragmented things are at the moment. Your app may talk to your Whirlpool oven, but if your connected microwave is from another brand, they won’t have much to say to each other.
