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Product development of the "keurig for baked goods," a countertop mini oven that will make you an individual cookie or muffin from a pod. Ground-up oven, pod, and production tooling design.
Product development of the "keurig for baked goods," a countertop mini oven that will make you an individual cookie or muffin from a pod. Ground-up oven, pod, and production tooling design.
We began by spending an afternoon testing different cooking methods to figure out which aspects we wanted to replicate in our own product.
After ordering the cheapest toaster oven money could buy off of Amazon, we rigged it up with a custom controller to begin testing temperatures and cook times at an appropriate scale. This also let us get a feel for radiative vs convective heat transfer and develop some methods for making sure everything was cooked throughout.
We took what we learned from the testing and dove straight in, producing our first fully functional, fully custom oven. The product was constructed of waterjet sheet metal bent to shape on a brake, laser cut acrylic, and borosilicate glass.
At this point we had also begun to manufacture the beginnings of our own pods, using a machined punch and die set to form thin waterjet aluminum discs into small cups in a hydraulic press. While these results were awesome, we thought we could do even better.
While visual changes were subtle, the second and final revision was a complete top to bottom redesign, with the heating elements being the only parts retained from the previous version. The oven now featured a lead screw that would feed the baking tray up and down like a 3D printer's Z axis. The new two-part fully enclosed pod design latches into the lid of the oven, and then special feet on the baking rack pull the pod apart as the tray descends to the center of the oven for cooking.
