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This sous vide cooker gets a little help from a smart-home friend

The company that owns the Wink smart-home hub will help produce the Mellow, a sous vide machine that's been in development for more than two years.

Ashlee Clark Thompson Associate Editor
Ashlee spent time as a newspaper reporter, AmeriCorps VISTA and an employee at a healthcare company before she landed at CNET. She loves to eat, write and watch "Golden Girls" (preferably all three at the same time). The first two hobbies help her out as an appliance reviewer. The last one makes her an asset to trivia teams. Ashlee also created the blog, AshleeEats.com, where she writes about casual dining in Louisville, Kentucky.
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Ashlee Clark Thompson

It's been two years since we first learned about the Mellow, a Wi-Fi-enabled sous vide cooker that its designers said could keep food chilled, then cook it in a temperature-controlled water bath. Mellow has yet to be released, but a new partnership with a company in the smart-home world could help bring this cooker to market.

Mellow will work with Flextronics International, or Flex, to manufacture the Mellow and develop more products in the future, the companies announced in an email Tuesday. Flex is a supply-chain solutions company that owns the Wink smart-home platform (Wink's parent company, Quirky, filed for bankruptcy in 2015) and products like the Wink Relay touchscreen and the Wink Hub.

"We believe Mellow's connected appliance could be an integral part of the smart-home kitchen, and something consumers will want and enjoy," said Gerhard Zebe, Flex's president of Global Operations, Mechanical Technology Solutions, in the email.

Mellow has delayed shipping units to customers who preordered the cooker because they weren't ready for the initial demand for the product, Mellow's co-founder Zé Pinto Ferreira said. In response, the company had to raise more money, hire more people and figure out how to build Mellow for mass production.

"We thought we'd be building an almost craft product for a few hundred people, and we got well into the thousands in the first month of preorders," he said.

Ferreira declined to provide an exact date when Mellow will begin to ship to customers.