Breakfast, and lunch, and dinner, might never be the same.
The June — a new countertop oven that costs nearly $1,500 and uses artificial intelligence and a number of sensors to cook up food — has hit the market.
Place a tray of bacon inside the June, which looks like a very large toaster oven, and the machine automatically scans the food visually with an HD camera to determine what it is and how it should be cooked.
The oven “really does take the guesswork out of cooking,” says co-founder and CEO Matt Van Horn, 32, who lives in San Francisco and previously worked in marketing at Apple and business development at Digg.
The June can identify about 25 foods, including bacon, salmon and steak, and more are being added. Once a food is identified, the June offers two temperature options to choose from — for example, rare and well-done — and starts cooking. The oven has its own thermometer probe that lowers into food automatically as it’s cooking to take the internal temperature. A smartphone app allows you to control the oven remotely or watch a live feed of your meal as it cooks.
The technology is impressive, though some kinks are still being worked out. Place your strips of bacon too close together, and the oven might think it is a steak.
The June has been in development since 2013, under Van Horn and co-founder Nikhil Bhogal, 36, a former software engineer for Apple who worked on the iPhone camera. The food-obsessed techies say they’ve built 3,714 prototypes to perfect the technology. Last March, the company raised $22.5 million in venture capital.
At one point, the oven, which started shipping in late December, was set to retail for $3,000, but June was eventually able to trim costs to a somewhat more reasonable $1,495. The company won’t comment on how many it has sold thus far, but they say those who have made the big purchase love it.
“When we started to develop June, it was almost shocking to realize how out-of-date appliances had become,” says Bhogal. “[June] owners are cooking in a completely new and better way.”