In a post-Juicero world[1], the bar has been set high for any piece of smart kitchen hardware that only makes one type of food. Enter Yomee[2], which bills itself as the Keurig of fresh yogurt and is now raising funds on Kickstarter[3]. Lecker Labs, the startup behind Yomee, hopes that its relatively low price (each unit will retail for $99) and cost-savings will let it succeed where Juicero failed.
It also helps that culturing yogurt is more complicated than squeezing a baggie of milk with your hands. A few missteps and you might end up with milk that never gels or an inedible lumpy goo. Yomee simplifies that process with a pod containing live cultures that users insert into the machine, which is about the size of a small coffee maker, before pouring in milk. After picking what kind of yogurt they want on Yomee’s app, they leave it alone for six hours. During that time, Yomee boils and stirs the milk and lets it set into yogurt before cooling it down to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
Loading a pod with live cultures into Yomee
To be sure, there are already many yogurt makers on the market, including several models that cost under $30 on Amazon.com[4]. But Yomee requires less supervision, which may help make it more attractive to people who are busy, lazy or just really love yogurt (power users can even send calorie information directly from Yomee’s app to Apple Health or Google Fit).
While growing up in Delhi, Lecker Labs founder Ashok Jaiswal watched his mother make yogurt every day to eat plain or use in recipes. After moving overseas 15 years ago, however, he...