Speaker 1: The oven that heats up in seconds and cooks an
Speaker 1: entire meal in minutes.
Speaker 2: What's going on.
Speaker 3: I'm Rich Demiro.
Speaker 1: This is Rich on Tech, and I'm here at a
Speaker 1: restaurant in Westwood, California, where I'm getting a demo of
Speaker 1: a new type of high tech oven. It's called the
Speaker 1: Brava and this thing is really neat. It's kind of like,
Speaker 1: you know, one of my favorite scenes in a movie
Speaker 1: is that rehydrator scene and Back to the future too.
Speaker 1: That's what this reminds me of because it's kind of
Speaker 1: this new high tech way of cooking.
Speaker 2: But enough of me explaining it. John Pleasants is the CEO.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for joining me.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Rich. I love that analogy. I may, I may,
Speaker 3: I may plagiarize that. That's okay.
Speaker 2: Has anyone ever told you that the first one?
Speaker 1: That's literally when I got the pitch for this oven,
Speaker 1: that's what I thought of. It was like that little
Speaker 1: tiny pizza they put it in and seconds later it
Speaker 1: comes out.
Speaker 2: To that big pizza.
Speaker 3: Great image.
Speaker 2: Thank you so describe the Brava oven, like, what is
Speaker 2: this thing?
Speaker 3: Right? So it is a smart countertop oven, but.
Speaker 4: What makes it truly different is that it's cooking with
Speaker 4: infrared light. So think about cooking in the past, right,
Speaker 4: Convection is what an oven does. Means you heat up
Speaker 4: the air, you heat up the environment inside some type
Speaker 4: of oven going back hundreds of years.
Speaker 2: Doesn't sound very efficient anymore.
Speaker 3: Not very efficient and not very accurate. Right.
Speaker 4: The temperature fluctuates a lot in ovens, and also you
Speaker 4: can't target any one area of the oven. It just
Speaker 4: trying to get the entire thing into one sort of
Speaker 4: homogeneous temperature. Of course, people cook with conduction, which is
Speaker 4: anything over fire or stovetop, when you have something cold
Speaker 4: touching something.
Speaker 3: Hot and the heat transfers.
Speaker 4: The big invention after those two technologically was the microwave
Speaker 4: sixty years ago, and of course that changed everybody's life
Speaker 4: and it became ubiquitous in households. When they came out,
Speaker 4: they were super expensive, thousands and thousands of dollars, and now,
Speaker 4: of course you can get them incredibly cheaply at any
Speaker 4: mass merchant.
Speaker 2: Well Amazon just introduced one for sixty.
Speaker 4: Bucks, and they can be much cheaper than that if
Speaker 4: you got to like Walmart.
Speaker 3: But that one, of course has a Lexento, which is
Speaker 3: their main deal.
Speaker 4: But microwaves are really good for some things, and they're
Speaker 4: really not so good at other things. Right, they don't
Speaker 4: really cook food. Their reheating is very inconsistent. And I'm
Speaker 4: not here to slam microwaves. It's just that they have
Speaker 4: a sort of limited function.
Speaker 2: No one's ever thought of a microwave as cooking high
Speaker 2: quality food.
Speaker 3: It's just for heating things up.
Speaker 2: Can you never serve something from a microwave to a
Speaker 2: dinner party?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: And what's actually happening with the microwave, which I get,
Speaker 4: I suppose most many many people know of your audience,
Speaker 4: is it's simulating water molecules. So it's pretty good for
Speaker 4: doing a cup of coffee. Matter of fact, it's really
Speaker 4: great at that a heating liquids. Outside of that, when
Speaker 4: you get into foods, it really starts to become much
Speaker 4: less consistent. We have the fourth next big way of cooking,
Speaker 4: and it's worth using infrared light. And it is a
Speaker 4: little bit like cooking over an open campfire, which is
Speaker 4: if you know, if the hood's not down, if it's
Speaker 4: just a fire light is the main thing that's cooking.
Speaker 4: The heat is just going up into the atmosphere and
Speaker 4: dissipating into the air. An easy bake oven is a
Speaker 4: great example of this. It was cooking with infra red light.
Speaker 4: But an easy bake oven is to Brava what a
Speaker 4: golf cart, which is an electric car is to a tesla.
Speaker 3: Right, it is people.
Speaker 4: This technology has been for around around for a long time.
Speaker 4: It's the primary you know, it's a primary part of
Speaker 4: physics of life.
Speaker 3: But we've just harnessed it with.
Speaker 4: Some very specific bulbs and then a ton of software
Speaker 4: feedback loop sensors, AI machine vision that controls these lamps.
Speaker 4: We have six lamps inside the oven and we're controlling
Speaker 4: them very specifically to deliver the perfect food result, hopefully
Speaker 4: every time.
Speaker 1: So you've got six lights. There's also a touch screen
Speaker 1: on the top. Yeah, tell me the function of that
Speaker 1: touch screen.
Speaker 4: That's your basic navigation. It's just like using an iPhone,
Speaker 4: if you will. You go to there and we have
Speaker 4: different sections. We have recipes, so our chefs have come
Speaker 4: up with what we think are fantastic recipes and we'll
Speaker 4: continue to add daily in perpetuity. And those tend to
Speaker 4: be multi ingredient items that could be a little trickier
Speaker 4: if someone didn't want to try to figure that out
Speaker 4: on their own. But you can also go into combos,
Speaker 4: which is simple two combinations. You can go into single ingredients,
Speaker 4: so to think of it as all sweet potatoes or
Speaker 4: all chicken breasts or all pork chops or whatever you
Speaker 4: may be cooking versus no, I want my steak and
Speaker 4: potatoes cooking at the same time, So we give you
Speaker 4: the ability to toggle between those as much as you want.
Speaker 4: There's also another function there where you can take control
Speaker 4: the lamps yourself, So if you want to cook something
Speaker 4: that we don't know, we allow some to take control
Speaker 4: of the lamps and basic build what they think is
Speaker 4: the perfect recipe. You can then save that and very
Speaker 4: soon coming to a theater near you, you will be
Speaker 4: able to share.
Speaker 3: These recipes out with the community.
Speaker 4: So everybody who's using Brava can basically be a chef
Speaker 4: and transfer their expertise to other people in the community.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the demo you showed me we took a
Speaker 1: piece of salmon, we put it in the tray is
Speaker 1: sort of specially made for your oven. It's divided into
Speaker 1: three kind of zones, so you put, you know, whatever
Speaker 1: you put in Zone one. Maybe it's a vegetable zone two,
Speaker 1: the salmon zone three. Whatever you put in there, you
Speaker 1: tell the oven what you put in there, so it
Speaker 1: adjusts those lights accordingly to kind of sear and to cook.
Speaker 2: And what is the result?
Speaker 1: I mean the salmon and I had tasted fantastic and
Speaker 1: it tasted like it was seared on the bottom but
Speaker 1: nicely cooked on the top.
Speaker 2: What's going on inside that oven?
Speaker 4: It's kind of exactly what you just said, like it. No,
Speaker 4: you were kind of painting by numbers. When you get
Speaker 4: into a complicated cook which is in this case, three
Speaker 4: different ingredients, one of them super sensitive, which is a
Speaker 4: cherry tomato broccolini which wanted to be seared, a salmon
Speaker 4: which you wanted to be very very gentle on the
Speaker 4: inside and see the heck out of the skin on
Speaker 4: the bottom to.
Speaker 3: Make it actually not only edible, but delicious.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you need to put it in the right zone
Speaker 4: and it will take care of itself.
Speaker 3: There's just some very few simple steps that you saw.
Speaker 4: There's a temperature sensor that goes into the proteins, You
Speaker 4: put it in the right zone, you pick the right recipe,
Speaker 4: and you're off and running. If you want to mess
Speaker 4: with it, and like not, you know, put the put
Speaker 4: food in the right zone or put the tray on
Speaker 4: the wrong thing, it can go off. I mean there
Speaker 4: is some agency each users. You have to do a
Speaker 4: little bit of something. But once you do that, the
Speaker 4: recipes kick in and then the AI on the machine
Speaker 4: vision and the temperature centers drive to cook so that
Speaker 4: it gets into the perfect temperatures in the perfect extra
Speaker 4: you know, seer levels and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: And the oven itself does not get hot on the outside.
Speaker 1: It's a small kind of a table all right, I
Speaker 1: guess not tabletop.
Speaker 2: Countertop is what we call it. You countertop kind of
Speaker 2: bigger than a standard toaster oven.
Speaker 4: Slightly bigger than a radiotoaster of and I think it's
Speaker 4: twelve by thirteen by fourteen in terms of a cubic space.
Speaker 1: Got kind of a rubber top which you can almost
Speaker 1: you can set like a hot plate on absolutely so.
Speaker 2: Once you take the tray out, you can put it
Speaker 2: on there.
Speaker 4: And as an illumining case, you know, we wanted to
Speaker 4: make it designed to look kind of high tech and cool,
Speaker 4: and that aluminum casing also is protecting for temperature, so
Speaker 4: that the oven itself that you touched.
Speaker 1: Doesn't get too hot, and the camera inside. Yeah, tell
Speaker 1: me about the functionality because there's no window on the door. Correct,
Speaker 1: probably for cooking reasons. I'm guessing the way you're cooking.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the camera.
Speaker 3: The camera has two main functions.
Speaker 4: The first is is that as you as you point out,
Speaker 4: you can actually see what's going on inside the oven,
Speaker 4: and we send it to your phone, so you can
Speaker 4: see what's going on when you're in the living room,
Speaker 4: not in the kitchen, to see where it where's my
Speaker 4: cook and we'll show you the time, the temperature, where
Speaker 4: everything is, as well as the view of the oven.
Speaker 1: So wait, that's perfect because I do this thing when
Speaker 1: I broil salmon where I'm checking it every one minute,
Speaker 1: I'm pulling out the salmon to see.
Speaker 4: And the heat's coming on and then you might have
Speaker 4: to take it out and see it later in the
Speaker 4: top I mean all that stuff, right, So you basically
Speaker 4: can can watch all that.
Speaker 3: So that's the I'm gonna call it.
Speaker 4: The UXX part of the experience. The more complicated thing
Speaker 4: is using it for a machine vision. So we'll use
Speaker 4: the example of toast where you say, okay, I like
Speaker 4: my toast a certain shade of brown. Well that's out
Speaker 4: of a continual of you know, an infinite number of
Speaker 4: shades of brown, right, you get very very specific there.
Speaker 4: So we're using the camera to do things like look
Speaker 4: at the specific piece of toast and monitor its color.
Speaker 4: But it even gets more complicated because obviously different different
Speaker 4: pieces of bread can start.
Speaker 3: At different color levels, so you have.
Speaker 4: To be able to watch the differentiation in the texture
Speaker 4: of the toast. And this is a lot of algorithms
Speaker 4: and machine vision going on. It's basically a neural network
Speaker 4: where we've pumped in tens of thousands of different photographs
Speaker 4: of what's going on with toast, so that it is
Speaker 4: learning from that consistently and watching what's happening in the
Speaker 4: pock marks of the toast so they can deliver you
Speaker 4: the perfect toast. That's where the thing gets pretty complicated.
Speaker 4: It starts to feel more like self driving car than
Speaker 4: it does just a countertop of it.
Speaker 1: It sounds great and we tried it. It's the food
Speaker 1: tasted fantastic. I'm really impressed. But the reality is it's
Speaker 1: an expensive device.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: It's one thousand dollars yep. And to some people that
Speaker 1: may be fine. I mean, we're spending one thousand dollars
Speaker 1: on a cell phone now, yep. And then of in
Speaker 1: is something this can actually save you money, I believe
Speaker 1: over the term of a couple of years, or even
Speaker 1: maybe in the first year by not eating out as much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if yeah, if we have it.
Speaker 4: Is nine ninety five, we have a finance plan that
Speaker 4: can be as low as thirty two dollars a month.
Speaker 4: And if you just use that number or it'll exaggerated
Speaker 4: up to fifty.
Speaker 3: Dollars a month. For a second, if you're eating out, you.
Speaker 4: Know, I don't know, eight, ten, twelve, fifteen times a
Speaker 4: month because it's sort of your go to.
Speaker 3: If you just knocked one of those nights off.
Speaker 4: You basically would be paying for the oven in real
Speaker 4: time because you'd be saving fifty dollars a month, right,
Speaker 4: and it's also healthier and so and then again, what's
Speaker 4: your time worth? Like, you know, if you're saving how
Speaker 4: long did it take you to go out to get
Speaker 4: to get a meal when you could have been ten
Speaker 4: minutes been eating something you have better quality with, less
Speaker 4: healthier and healthier. Right, So when you start to think
Speaker 4: about all those things, what's my time worth? What's my
Speaker 4: health worth? What's actually me doing things that I enjoy
Speaker 4: doing more?
Speaker 3: And I'm not eating out, I'm not spending that money.
Speaker 4: When you think about it in that context, I would
Speaker 4: argue it is not cheap, and it is nine hundred
Speaker 4: ninety five dollars, But boyd is it if it really
Speaker 4: if you really bring in your life, it can change
Speaker 4: it and I feel like it can pay itself back
Speaker 4: in matters of months, not years.
Speaker 1: Okay, do you think you're going to change the kitchen
Speaker 1: with this? I mean the microwave was kind of like
Speaker 1: the last revolution in the kitchen. We've had assorted gadgets
Speaker 1: come and go. Is this the next big wave in cooking?
Speaker 3: I think yes.
Speaker 4: So this way of cooking within thread light is more precise,
Speaker 4: more energy efficient, makes better tasting and healthier food. So
Speaker 4: when I say that and stand by that comment, I
Speaker 4: think that I'm making this up now. Twenty five percent
Speaker 4: of all ovens worldwide and fifteen or years will have
Speaker 4: this technology in it. I mean, it is a better
Speaker 4: it is a it is a step function change in
Speaker 4: the way people can cook. I hope Proves continues to
Speaker 4: be a company that can capitalize on it. We certainly
Speaker 4: intend on being a company that can go out and
Speaker 4: continue to build more skews, and we have different applications
Speaker 4: we're thinking about. But even if we were for some
Speaker 4: reason not to be successful, I think that the core
Speaker 4: technology is going to be proven to be Wow. I
Speaker 4: like eating with that that mechanism. As for Brava, I
Speaker 4: think that we're in our V one product that we're
Speaker 4: coming out of. I think we will integrate into people's lives.
Speaker 4: I mean, we really have a philosophy. We want to
Speaker 4: meet people where they are, which is why it's so
Speaker 4: important that we can do toast or a twelve inch pizza.
Speaker 1: And you said pizza. I mentioned the pizza at the
Speaker 1: beginning with Back to the Future. Yeah, so you can
Speaker 1: just stick I mean, clearly, we're gonna hope people make
Speaker 1: nice you know, flaming Yon's and salmon and you know,
Speaker 1: lamb in this thing.
Speaker 2: But the reality is a lot of people are going
Speaker 2: to stick a pizza in there.
Speaker 3: It's great, It's perfect because you want pizza really hot.
Speaker 4: You want that bottom stone that it sits on in
Speaker 4: this case, on our on our trays. You want that
Speaker 4: thing to get up to you know, you want that
Speaker 4: oven at eight hundred degrees or whatever. Right, so you
Speaker 4: need intense power and that's, you know, thankfully what we
Speaker 4: have in this thing.
Speaker 1: John Pleasant, CEO of Brava, the oven that is trying
Speaker 1: to change the way we cook in the kitchen.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining me, Rich, Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thanks for a good meal too, all right.
Speaker 1: Man, And if you want to learn more about the
Speaker 1: Brava Oven, you can look in the show notes or
Speaker 1: go to my website rich on tech dot tv to
Speaker 1: see some pictures and.
Speaker 2: Video, and you can also see the meal that I
Speaker 2: ate from it. Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 1: I'm Rich Termiro.
Speaker 3: I'll talk to you real soon.