Technology is more present in our day to day lives than ever before, but one important space has been slow to adopt the apps and devices that have so transformed modern life: the kitchen. Just a few years ago, chefs would have balked at the idea of introducing technology to the kitchen. The art of cooking was meant to be hard earned. Now we see professional chefs and home cooks alike using immersion circulators, induction burners and “smart” devices as comfortably as they do knives and spatulas. All of these devices supposedly make cooking easier, but only if you have a foundational knowledge of culinary techniques.
Hestan Cue set out with the mission to demystify cooking, to harness technological innovations to help people cook better food more often. But rather than merely designing a technological solution, we wanted to craft an educational experience. We wanted to fuse the fields of progressive tech and traditional cooking to create a guided cooking system that was a tool, not a shortcut, and this meant bringing together a diverse group of experts: chefs and software engineers, designers and developers.
To kick off a blog series that will explore the people behind the scenes, we asked a few members of the team what’s so special about the Hestan Cue?
Chef Philip Tessier, Director of Culinary & Media:
“One thing I love most about being a chef is the constant opportunity to teach others. I joined Hestan Cue because I saw the potential to help people cook at home and give them compelling tools that could, if built correctly, inform the way they cook and build their confidence in the kitchen. The ability to mentor cooks across America, and perhaps the world, through the combination of technology and cooking is thrilling.”
Lorin Peters, Culinary Media & Marketing Manager: “To me, Hestan Cue is the perfect marriage of the culinary world that I love, and the ever-progressive tech world that can solve real hurdles in the kitchen of a home cook. To create a product in a space that most home cooks need and want is exciting and fulfilling. However, the main reason I love the company is because of the people I work with: we’re a young culinary/tech company that is hard at work, on a beautiful vineyard, and we are all obsessed with food. Sounds like the perfect set-up to me!”
Jon Jenkins, Head of Engineering: “There is tremendous opportunity to solve problems in the kitchen through the application of technology: from getting the exact doneness you want on a steak to precisely controlling temperature to develop flavor. It’s exciting to transform this seemingly abstract process into algorithms that can be adjusted to improve the end result.”
Mark Baumback, Director of Software Engineering:
“I’m not a very experienced cook. Over the past years I often found myself eating out instead of making something at home simply because the food that I made at home often turned out poorly. I joined Hestan Cue because I wanted to experiment with ways to use technology to improve how people cook while teaching valuable skills.”
The Hestan Cue is not Star Trek’s replicator, materializing food and eliminating the craft of cooking. It’s more akin to GPS: a guided cooking system that gives any home cook the tools to learn skills that previously took years of training, and succeed. In the words of our Managing Director Christophe Milz, “It’s not about adding technology for technology’s sake: it’s about adding support and augmenting the experience that makes you a better cook — empowering you to try new things that you didn’t dare to cook before.”
