Philips’ healthy, high-tech home kitchen

We Filipinos love to eat out. A lot. I mean, how can you resist when there’s a hot new restaurant opening every week?

Only trouble is, eating out tends to expand the waistline. A lot. Restaurants pamper us with huge portions, lots of butter and oils. No wonder obesity is a worldwide problem, even in the Philippines.

At the Philips Innovation Centre in Klagenfurt, Austria, I learned that we Pinoys are not alone in our eating habits. Asians in general frequently dine out (40 percent of Malaysians eat out once a week or more), and increasingly, that’s not a choice — not just a chance to snap photos of beautiful food and post it on social media — but a necessity.

“Asia will see the fastest urban population growth in the next 40 years — growing from 1.9 billion to 3.3 billion,” says Luka Wu, senior marketing manager for kitchen appliances in Philips’ ASEAN Consumer Lifestyle division. “This has led to dual-income families, lack of time, maids, eating out more often, smaller homes and space constraints.”

It’s also led to a rise in obesity and chronic health problems. When you can’t control how much salt, sugar, fat or MSG a restaurant puts on its food to make it taste good, the only sure way to eat healthy is to prepare your food yourself.

“If people cook at home, the level of obesity is much less,” observes Andreas Loibnegger, Philips’ global head of innovation. “It starts with the ingredients and preparation, and eating healthier, tastier food.”

“Societal trends are clearly stepping into healthier, homemade food,” agrees Marjolein Oyen-Driesens, Philips Consumer Lifestyle’s senior director of consumer marketing for kitchen appliances. “Obesity has more than doubled in children, tripled in teens in the past 30 years.”

Philips, which is driven by consumer insights and thorough market research, found that the common hurdles to eating healthier at home are a lack of knowledge, money (fresh produce is more expensive), time (cooking from scratch every day takes time and a lot of love), willpower, and fear of underwhelming taste.

Food scares like mad cow disease, bacteria and melamine in milk have also undermined consumers’ confidence in food products.

When we want to eat healthy but are faced with such hurdles, what’s a busy homemaker to do?

In Klagenfurt, we saw how Philips comes up with innovative appliances to ease the home cook’s job of preparing healthier, tastier meals for the family.

“The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity,” Oyen observes. “Cooking at home puts you back in control.”

KITCHEN ESSENTIALS & JAMIE OLIVER

Philips found that Koreans couldn’t live without their fried chicken, that Middle Easterners love their samosas, and that Brazilians are fond of fries, empanadas and croquetas.

Their solution? The revolutionary Airfryer, which can fry, bake, grill and roast foods with the ultimate no-calorie ingredient — air — resulting in food with 80 percent less fat.

Or how about the brand’s line of juicers? Philips is currently the No. 1 brand in juice extractors, but, thanks to consumer demand, the Innovation Centre has developed a new QuickClean model that yields 10 percent more juice and less pulp, not to mention a design that makes it super-easy to maintain in between juicings.

Last year the brand also collaborated with celebrity chef Jamie Oliver on a line of “kitchen essentials.” In addition to a state-of-the-art blender, steamer and food processor, Oliver, whose mission has been getting school kids to eat healthier, developed a HomeCooker that allows you to prepare entire meals in one vessel — “easy-peasy,” as Oliver himself would say.

“We had a very good internal dialogue about who could provide healthier, tasty homemade food, and Jamie is an excellent partner for us with all the programs that he’s doing,” Loibnegger says. “He tested and fine-tuned all the products himself — ‘Can we do this, can we do that?’ He’s a very, very detailed person that really loves the products and pointed out, ‘Guys, can we do this differently?’”

With these new gadgets, Philips is developing healthier, tastier, more efficient ways to cook, and the innovation never stops. On our first day in Klagenfurt, Philips unveiled more multi-tasking machines designed to do all the chopping, kneading, blending mixing and cooking for you.

COOKING SOUP IN A BLENDER

First, in-house chef Mario Pichler blew my mind by cooking tom yum soup in a blender. Yup, you read that right. He threw the ingredients in, processed them, added soup stock, and twisted a dial that controls a heating element under the blender. After 20 minutes of cooking time, we had fresh tom yum soup to eat. This new gadget is called a Cooking Blender, natch.

But that wasn’t all. Philips found that, next to rice, noodles are the second most important staple for Asians, so they’ve devised a noodle maker that’s so convenient it should be a hit with home cooks and restaurant chefs alike. Just pour in your dry and wet ingredients — we used healthy flavorings like spinach and beetroot — and the noodle maker takes care of the rest. A few minutes later it started extruding perfectly formed green and red soba (though it comes with four molds that let you create different kinds of pasta and the thin, round yellow noodles Asians prefer), which Pichler then added to our soup. It was al dente and delicious.

MULTI-TASKING MACHINES

Philips’ staff also demonstrated their Kitchen Machine, a mixer/blender/food processor that produces professional-quality bread and pizza dough, not to mention every other kind of batter or crust a baker might want.

They’ve also tweaked their hand blenders to a level of performance that leaves their competitors in the dust. I tried chopping a cup of almonds with their latest model versus a competing brand, and, within a minute, the whole cup was chopped evenly, while the other blender left half the almonds un-chopped in the same amount of time.

Lastly they showed us a salad maker that produces salads and vegetable sticks in seconds. Stainless-steel disk inserts allow you to slice, julienne or grate ingredients straight into the salad bowl or cooking pot; you can even cut French fries with it.

IMPROVING LIVES THROUGH INNOVATION

Philips’ goal is to improve three billion lives by 2025, and they plan to do this through “meaningful innovation.”

We met inventor Roland Waldner, who converts consumer needs into innovation that matters. “I get paid for having dreams,” he says. 

First, they locate the markets in need. Then they contact and visit consumers in their homes to understand what they use and how they behave, from the moment they unpack the appliance to actually using it. “Everyone wants the best BMW at the lowest price,” Waldner observes. With the juicer, for example, customers wanted maximum performance and that it be easy to clean. Philips went through 3,500 patents just to get their juicer to its current, QuickClean state.

“We need about 3,000 ideas for one success,” Waldner says.

Once an idea has reached fruition the appliance undergoes rigorous testing at the Innovation Centre, where it’s subjected to stresses like heat as well as consumer opinion. The Consumer Testing center even has a room with a one-way mirror so that a customer’s modes of interaction with a particular appliance can be observed and recorded.

A LONG HERITAGE IN KITCHEN APPLIANCES

Philips’ Consumer Lifestyle segment encompasses personal care (beauty and skincare, male grooming), health and wellness (Avent baby bottles, Sonicare toothbrushes), and domestic appliances (garment care, coffee machines, air purifiers, floor and kitchen appliances).

In our tour we discovered that Philips’ Klagenfurt Innovation Centre specializes in making components for personal-care appliances like epilators and shavers.

According to innovation and supply site manager Ferdinand Sereinig, Philips works on some 25 consumer-lifestyle products a year. “We’ve put in 240 patent applications in the last 20 years,” he says.

The Dutch company has an especially long heritage in kitchen appliances. According to David Ong, Philips Consumer Lifestyle’s PR director for APAC, “Their first gadget ever was an ice-cream maker, produced in the Netherlands and Indonesia.”

Philips, which started in 1891 in Amsterdam, has grown from a company that manufactured ice cream makers, grinders and mixers to a $9.8-billion multinational whose three major businesses are healthcare, consumer lifestyle and lighting. In their ceaseless pursuit of innovation, they invested eight percent of their sales in research and development in 2012.

Collaborating with Italian design company Alessi in the ’90s set the stage for Philips’ modern, Red Dot Award-winning design, and that, together with their skill at distilling trends and “strong understanding of consumer wants and obsession with quality and performance,” says Ong, has made them the global No. 1 in low-fat fryers, juice extractors, food processors and blenders.

Perhaps in the not-too-far-off future, you won’t even need to lift a finger to prepare healthy, homemade food. You just need to show up and your Philips kitchen will do all the cooking for you.

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Philips kitchen appliances are available at leading appliance stores. To inquire about the new products call the customer hotline at 667-9000 or 1-800-10-744-5477 outside Metro Manila.