How Smart Solves the Everyday Challenges of Home Cooks: Insights From Our Users
In today's fast-paced world, where convenience often takes precedence and balancing life's daily tasks can be overwhelming, the art of home cooking is losing its value. However, rediscovering its benefits can profoundly impact our health, well-being, and the environment. Furthermore, home cooking catalyzes social connections and strengthens family bonds.
Philip Pantelides, Fresco's VP of Product, Consumer, shares the valuable insights that Fresco has gathered through extensive user research and testing on the biggest challenges faced by home cooks and how organizations like Fresco are building products to solve them and strengthen the love of cooking.
Home Cook Challenges:
To ensure the best possible solution, we conducted extensive user testing and research with home cooks from diverse backgrounds and regions, gaining invaluable insights into their needs and pain points. Our research revealed many everyday struggles:
Time Constraints: Research showed that home cooks struggle to dedicate sufficient time to creating healthy and nutritious meals while balancing work and family life, leading them to choose more convenient options like Uber Eats or ready meals. Consequently, they actively seek effective strategies and solutions to solve this challenge.
Fresco has built several new features to address this when cooking with smart appliances. For example, appliance monitoring and notifications allow home cooks to stay informed about their cooking progress, freeing them to focus on other tasks without compromising the quality of their meals. In addition, our one-tap appliance control feature enables home cooks to conveniently and efficiently manage the cooking process with just a single tap. These enhancements aim to make cooking more convenient and efficient for our users, ensuring they can enjoy nutritious meals while effectively managing their time.
Lack of Inspiration: Home cooks often need help finding inspiration for new meals and breaking away from their usual repertoire.
The key to overcoming this hurdle is enabling home cooks to easily and intuitively discover new dishes that align with their preferences. This could be through tailored content, personalized recipe feeds or promotions. We inspire home cooks by introducing personalized content tailored to their appliances on the KitchenOS platform. This makes it easier for them to explore and uncover exciting recipes that resonate with their unique tastes.
Low Cooking Confidence: For many home cooks, the fear of failure can greatly diminish cooking confidence, making them hesitant to explore new recipes or experiment with different ingredients. Creating an experience that offers clear guidance and helpful tips that helps alleviate the anxiety associated with cooking should be the goal.
We’ve taken steps to do this through guided cooking which provides confidence and control through easy-to-follow recipes that deliver consistently great results. In addition, we created an in-app dashboard with universal appliance monitoring and notifications that enable users to focus on other priorities, knowing that everything is under control in the kitchen.
Home Cook Values
Through our research and analysis of the home cook experience, three core values emerged as the most important when it comes to preparing meals.
Confidence: They seek confidence in the results that they'll achieve when following a recipe. This confidence enables them to explore new recipes and techniques, fostering a sense of accomplishment.
Clarity: Home cooks appreciate clear and concise guidance throughout the cooking process, ensuring they understand what they and the appliance must do at each step. They value step-by-step instructions that provide clarity from start to finish.
Control: Home cooks value time-saving solutions and user-friendly interfaces that simplify their cooking experience, giving them control over the process.
Appliance brands can create products and experiences that resonate with home cooks by catering to the three values of confidence, clarity, and control. As a result, regardless of their culinary skills, anyone using these appliances can effortlessly contribute to meal preparation and experience the joy of creating delicious meals.
How Smart Kitchen Technology Supports Home Cooks
With the growth of smart cooking, a concept that combines culinary skills with cutting-edge technology, we have unlimited opportunities to make cooking easier. By leveraging the power of smart kitchen appliances, mobile apps, and world-class content, smart cooking can revolutionize how home cooks and professional chefs approach food preparation.
In 2022, Fresco partnered with MetaLab to create a seamless user experience that could bring new value to consumers worldwide. After months of research, we identified the most common barriers for home cooks and developed a system to solve them. The new KitchenOS platform can be integrated into apps and websites, offering everything from appliance control with compatible devices to guided cooking with smart recipes and engagement tools.
Our customer-centric approach ensures that every aspect of our product is designed to enhance the cooking process and provide a seamless experience to your users. If you’re interested in learning how Fresco can help solve your customer's pain points, please get in touch.
