Cooking up convenience
Ropot is a Canadian-designed robotic appliance
When Lu Ying finishes work and returns home each night, she invariably cooks using two table-top appliances — one that you’ve likely heard of and another that you almost certainly have not.
The much better-known one is an Instant Pot, the developed-inCanada, next-generation pressure cooker that in recent years has built up an enthusiastic global following and is now supported by third-party cookbooks and recipe bloggers galore.
Yang’s other go-to is one of the world’s few Ropots — “an intelligent robot cooker,” its makers say. The Ropot, manufactured in China as per the specifications of a small Ottawa company, automates stirfrying, pan-frying and more.
For Yang, both pots are essential. “I use both devices daily,” she says. “I love both.”
By day, Yang is a chemist with the National Research Council in Ottawa. But she’s also a passionate home cook and food blogger who has received more than 38 million views at her bilingual (Chinese and English) recipe blog, MaomaoMom Kitchen, found at maomaomom.com. Among the scores of recipes on her blog are dozens each for the Instant Pot and now the Ropot.
“I don’t like to follow recipes by other people,” she says. “I like to create my own.”
Yang agreed to try one of the first Ropots in early 2016. “I only want to try high-quality products,” she says. She was given a unit by SimLife Inc., the small company led by Bin Chen, who was also a co-founder of Double Insight, the firm that launched the Instant Pot. (He is no longer involved in Double Insight.)
The idea for the Ropot, Chen and his colleagues explain, came to them in 2008. They dreamed up the basic concept and then searched the internet for companies that were working on something similar and promising. Seven years later, they found their partner company in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang, which had built a similar product for the Chinese market.
It took more than a year for Chen and his associates to work with the Chinese company to create the Ropot, as it would be branded for the North American market. Critically, the new product would have to work with a 110-volt electricity supply (its Chinese equivalent is a 220-volt machine) and meet safety standards to gain Underwriter Laboratories certification.
So far, relying on word of mouth and social media, the company has sold almost 1,500 Ropots from ropots.com, where they are priced at US$279 (about $350) each. Some customers have been referred from Yang ’s website. Those customers receive a discount, and Yang receives a small commission. Chen hopes to sell Ropots in stores one day.
Cooking occurs inside the Ropot’s removable 4.2-L non-stick, Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)-free pot that’s outfitted with a rotating paddle at its centre. Users program the Ropot through its touchscreen, and the unit cooks food with not just its bottom element, but also an infrared element built into its lid. Meanwhile, sensors in the machine keep its temperature stable and below the smoking point of common cooking oils. The lid and the sensors allow the company to tout a major selling point — that the machine contains smoke, smells and oily messes far better than its stove-top equivalents.
“My range hood is super-clean now,” Yang says.
The unit’s primary function is stir-frying, but it also pan-fries, sautés, braises, steams, roasts, and deep-fries. Once the unit warms up, each function comes with a preprogrammed heat, which is usually 220 C (425 F). For each function, there is a default time period so that, for example, the unit will stirfry for three minutes unless a user keys in more or less time.
For an interviewer, Chen quickly turned out a succession of deadsimple, two-or-three-ingredient, tasty dishes — a thick, properly pan-fried steak, stir-fried asparagus with oyster sauce, juicy chicken wings, pecans roasted with maple syrup. He stressed convenience, speed and ease of use when demonstrating his machine.
“Kitchen appliances are trending in the smart and healthy direction and this is exactly what Ropot is engineered for,” says Chen’s colleague, Norman Wu.