It took 10 years to develop this $300 toaster. Bread may never be the same

FastCompany: After 10 years of design and development, the appliance maker Breville has just released a $300 toaster that the company believes will revolutionize the category. The Eye Q Auto Toaster, now hitting stores in the U.S., rethinks the core process behind making a piece of toast. Instead of applying heat for a set amount of time, Breville’s Eye Q toaster uses optical sensors and advanced algorithms to see when bread has been toasted just the right amount. For Breville , an Australia-based company that has been making kitchen appliances for almost a century, this proved to be an unexpectedly complicated paradigm change.

“We don’t mind a challenge, but if somebody had said to me it’s going to take 10 years to develop a toaster at the beginning of this project, I would have thought, you’re crazy, we shouldn’t do it,” says Tom Groundes-Peace, Breville’s senior global category manager and head of research. [Photo: Breville] But the company couldn’t stop thinking about the inherent shortcomings of traditional toasters. “Every toaster in the world up until this point has just used time as its proxy for toasting,” Groundes-Peace says. Timing a toast only works, however, if what you’re toasting is always the same.

According to Breville’s research, many homes toast multiple kinds of breads in a given week or day, from white to wheat to bagels to sourdough. “Different bread, different amounts of time,” Groundes-Peace says. The look test Toasting may be the bare minimum of culinary acts, but Breville’s product designers have been working for decades to make even this simplest of kitchen tasks easier for people. The company introduced the “ A bit more ” button in 2007, which puts undertoasted bread back in the heat for another 30 seconds. In 2016 it created a toast type selector , with preset toasting times for different breads.

[Photo: Breville] But even these advancements in toasting couldn’t match the ultimate test for toastedness. “How do you check that your toast is done? You look at it and you go, is that brown enough, or do I want to toast it a little bit more?” Groundes-Peace says. Breville wanted to bring that look test into the toaster itself. So, a decade ago, the company set out to create a toaster with its own set of eyes. How the Breville Eye Q toaster works The Eye Q toaster has two optical sensors built inside its shell.

Tucked between one side of the toaster and the heating element, two small sensors peek through tiny rectangular holes at the bread as it sits at the bottom of the toasting cavity. Green lights flash 10 times a second through those holes, bouncing light and infrared wavelengths off the bread and back to the sensors, which measure the rate of color change in the bread. The toaster has seven built-in darkness settings, and the sensor data feeds into specially developed algorithms that know when the amount of color change is enough.

Thousands of data points may seem like overkill for toast, but Groundes-Peace says the difference between a perfectly toasted slice of bread and a burnt one can be measured in moments. “If you don’t catch it quick enough, if you’re not reading the data quick enough, you miss the target and it burns,” he says. [Photo: Breville] Using a borrowed Eye Q Auto Toaster that Breville had mailed to me, I toasted a spectrum of breads and bagels, from a pale sourdough to a seeded multigrain to a grainy bagel. Trying the lightest, middle, and darkest settings, the various breads came out browned but not burnt.

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The article discusses a significant innovation in kitchen appliances that could influence brand strategies in consumer electronics, though its direct relevance to broader brand strategy professionals may be limited.