Projects

The pop-up toaster has seen various aesthetic design changes over the years but the underlying heating technology has remained mostly the same. We worked with Revolution Cooking to design, build, test and manufacture a ground-breaking toaster powered by their proprietary heating technology and a 7” touch screen user interface. The Revolution toaster browns toast faster than standard toasters so the bread stays moist on the inside and browns evenly on the outside in less time. Its attractive touch screen and automatic toast lift add unexpected joy to the toasting experience. The toaster is currently for sale to consumers through major retail outlets.

Primaira engineered the technology and algorithms that deliver repeatably fast and evenly cooked toast, and successfully managed the manufacture of those innovative designs overseas. At the heart of the development effort were two main challenges. First, because the toaster was being designed to toast faster than any consumer product on the market, there was a conflict between delivering cooking speed and ensuring the safety of the device. We developed software algorithms and electronic hardware to keep the device in compliance with safety standards while achieving very short toast times.

The second challenge was making an innovative, speed cooking technology manufacturable and toast reliably well. We met this challenge on two fronts: the heater card design and the toasting algorithms. We developed quantitative metrics to specify the heater cards so they could be reliably manufactured overseas within acceptable tolerances. To achieve repeatable and even toasting performance, we invented novel sensor based toasting algorithms tailored to the wide range of bread products intended for the toaster.

Airflow and temperature modeling of the toaster using computation fluid dynamics (CFD) with heat transfer analysis. Modeling helped inform design changes to speed up development.

Manufacturing the toaster in China

In addition to developing technology, Primaira worked hand in hand with Revolution’s management team to guide and define engineering, manufacturing and hiring of technical team members. A member of Primaira’s management served as Vice President of Engineering for Revolution to manage much of the technical product development process.

The Revolution toaster program required engineering creativity (mechanical, electrical and software), manufacturing knowhow and thoughtful communication between all of the program’s stakeholders including marketing, manufacturing, management and engineering. We helped make Revolution’s first product a reality, from design through production.

For more product information visit: https://www.revcook.com/