Breville takes ChefSteps to expand smart kitchen options

Global kitchen appliance maker Breville Group has acquired Seattle-based food and technology company, ChefSteps. Founded in 2012, ChefSteps created its website ChefSteps.com, designed to inspire creativity and encourage experimentation in the kitchen through high-quality interactive content, techniques, tools, and resources. In 2015, ChefSteps expanded into smart kitchen hardware with its Joule product, said to be the world's smallest and sous vide immersion circulator controlled by a smartphone app.

ChefSteps' Joule system

Breville said the acquisition is expected to bring together two companies with an aligned mission to help home cooks achieve perfect results, while offering an opportunity to further invest in growth, original content and innovation for the benefit of consumers, retailers and the ChefSteps community. 

Breville's CEO, Jim Clayton, said: "ChefSteps has produced tremendous innovation in the content and connected hardware space, and we are excited at the scale we can achieve by combining their content and intellectual property with our current and future consumer products.  We also look forward to engaging with, and serving, the very active and enthusiastic community ChefSteps has built around its product and content. I am thrilled with the opportunity to leverage this extraordinary combination of assets while pursuing our shared mission."

Co-founder and CEO of ChefSteps, Chris Young, added: "Becoming part of Breville Group marks an incredibly exciting new chapter, opening up significant opportunities to help ChefSteps realize its full potential on a global stage."

Breville's acquisition of ChefSteps will enhance the long-term R&D capacity that brought the Joule product to market, allowing for continued and sustained focus on innovation, while increasing global commercial scale to further maximise the value of the ChefSteps content platform and portfolio of fast-growing connected Joule products. It also forms a natural consumer-focused extension to Breville's existing commercial sous vide range of products following its acquisition of the PolyScience Culinary division in 2014.  The brand is well known for its immersion circulators and temperature control technology and one of the commercial sous vide category leader revered by professional chefs.