June’s smart oven is supposed to be capable of scanning, analyzing, and properly cooking whatever foods you throw in it, but today, it’s getting some more specific cooking options courtesy of Whole Foods. The oven will now include a Whole Foods button, which will let owners select specific Whole Foods products to cook. These will be prepackaged foods specific to the store, which may benefit from additional precision.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13241299/1.jpeg)
On one hand, maybe it starts to break the core concept of the June oven if you have to choose the specific meal you want to cook — right now, you just choose a dish, like “lamb chop” or “fries” — and the oven is supposed to more or less take it from there based on preprogrammed instructions. Adding in Whole Foods meals will likely mean better results, though it also means a more specific menu that owners will have to dig through.
The integration makes a lot of sense, though, and perhaps it was inevitable. Amazon, which owns Whole Foods, invested in June earlier this year, and this integration means June starts to more directly match what some competitor’s smart ovens do by supporting specific meals. Tovala, for instance, sells meal kits with instructions that are coded into the oven so it can cook them as intended. June says “more than 30” Whole Foods products will be supported at launch.
June may have been one of the first into the smart oven space, but it’s in a growing market with technology that’s likely to keep catching on. Traditional kitchen appliances are starting to add in similar scanning features, so we’re likely to see more and more of this as a way to make cooking prepackaged foods an even easier task.
This article is from The Verge
