June Intelligent Oven will automatically cook dishes from Whole Foods
The oven will also go on sale at some Whole Foods stores in California.
The June Intelligent Oven, the Wi-Fi-connected countertop cooker with a built-in camera that recognizes your food, will add cook settings for select dishes from Whole Foods, the companies announced Tuesday at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle.
The integration comes in the form of a software update June just rolled out to its first- and second-generation ovens. More than 30 of Whole Foods' 365 Everyday Value products and other foods at the Amazon-owned grocery store will have automatic cook programs in the June's control menu. That means you won't have to manually set cook times and temperatures if the Whole Foods item you want to cook is on the June -- you just find the food on the control panel and press the button, and the oven will cook it for you.
The Whole Foods-June collaboration will also impact the oven's availability. In October, select Whole Foods stores in California will begin to sell the June and an accessories package for $799. And June expects to begin selling its second-generation oven on Amazon in early 2019.
The June Intelligent Oven first came out in 2016 as the high-tech descendent of the toaster oven. Along with completing basic cooking jobs like convection baking and broiling, the oven is most notable for its built-in camera and facial recognition technology. When you place one of a couple dozen foods in the oven, it gives you two options of what it thinks the food is. You select the option that is correct, and the oven accesses cooking instructions from the cloud and begins to prepare your food. The camera also lets you watch your food cook through the June's iOS or Android app.
This year, the June's creators released a second generation of the oven that, at $599 without an accessories add-on, is much cheaper than the original version, which cost $1,495. The most noticeable differences are expanded cook settings and a larger catalog of food items that the June could recognize. (Folks with the original June still get software updates, so they have the same capabilities as the new version.)
Much of the innovation that's happening in the kitchen is taking place in the form of countertop cookers. These products take new approaches to try to take some of the work off your plate when it comes to cooking full meals. For example, the Tovala Smart Oven pairs with a meal kit subscription that involves using a built-in scanner on the Tovala to read bar codes on the packaged meals to access the appropriate cook settings. The Suvie Kitchen Robot, which also involves a meal kit, uses water to cook four-part meals automatically.
