Peter Odum

The Summit features a wide central touchscreen with large numbers and type for managing computer-controlled gas burners, and a single dial for precise control. There are five button pads for raising/lowering the flames on individual burners.

The Summit is highly automated but supports full manual operation as well. It can be operated remotely once ignited, and helps users manage timers and precise doneness of items being grilled. It supports wireless probes and sends by-the-second data updates about food status.

Nikhil Bhogal, SVP of connected devices and a former iPhone designer, led the design process, supported by myself and two other designers. 

Other Weber smart grilling devices also feature food-aware automation. Built similarly to the June Oven but without internal cameras for food recognition, these devices are available as standalone devices (the Weber Connect Smart Grilling Hub) and built into various smart grills (Weber Summit, Searwood, Smokefire, Genesis and Spirit product lines).

Modern smart cooking redefines how people cook their food. It borrows liberally from test kitchens and molecular gastronomy.

Weber, the world’s leading barbecue grill brand, and June, pioneers of smart cooking technology, joined together to introduce the concept of smart grilling.

In Weber's smart grills we rely on temperature probes, machine learning algorithms, multimedia-rich user instructions, and adaptable multi-variable recipes to ensure optimal cooking results. 

Based on the smart recipe data programmed by culinary staff, a Weber Connect recipe is rendered flexibly into any supported medium, such as the Weber Connect App (designed by my team) for iOS and Android.

The same recipe is accessed by the grill hardware (for grills that support smart grilling automation) and the mobile app that connects to the grill.

Smart recipes are programmed using the internal tool I designed: Producer software for Mac and iPad.

This internal application was designed to be straightforward and easy to use while supporting all the complexity of multivariate smart recipes.

As the primary front end and repository for all smart/connected recipe content for Weber, Producer is the backbone of Weber's smart grilling recipe system.

A major innovation for Producer was the ability to support ‘Dimensions’ - the variables that can affect how a recipe will be executed on a smart cooking device. And one of the most complex early recipes for June Oven was bacon.

Bacon in the June Oven has multiple variables - or ‘dimensions’ - that drastically affect how the end product will taste:

- Foil on pan Y/N?
- Thick or thin cut Bacon?
- User’s texture preference: chewy or crispy?
- Number of strips to be cooked, from 1 up to 8

The combinatorics just from these dimensions result in a total of 96 different instruction sets, one for each possible value of each dimension.

For grilling, we needed to support dimension sets like those for bacon, adding a dimension for the various appliances that would do the grilling, since Weber supports many different grills and fuel types.

As shown here, the platforms of several grill platforms are added to the mix for a New York Strip Steak. 

The benefit of all this complexity? One recipe record contains information for all the ways Weber appliances can cook the substance.

This makes content creation and editing easier and means any recipe can have one unified set of string translations, easing localization. 

It also turns out Australia uses a different size for their tablespoons from the US, UK and the rest of the world. So our system needed to support variability in measurements in order to accurately reflect the intention of the recipe author.

Other variations exist from one country to another, from different measurement standards to different ingredients being available, or the same word being used for a physically different ingredient. 

Overall, there was a distinct need to be able to publish the same recipe in different countries at different times, or not to publish certain recipes in certain places. Producer therefore allows the author to publish a recipe for very specific given markets, without publishing it elsewhere.

I interviewed Culinary stakeholders to identify their needs and gain understanding of the goals to be served.

Then I wrote specification documents and test criteria detailing what I had learned from Culinary staff and getting their confirmation.

I created and presented user flows demonstrating how recipe content might appear in the final products, to ensure we knew how the back-end recipe work would affect the front end applications.

I created wireframes and visual designs for Producer, taking advantage of native elements and structures from the SwiftUI framework, coordinating with developers both before and during the design process, and adapting to developer requests for an efficient end product.

I wrote Gherkin-formatted test cases to ensure that resulting designs accurately met original design goals, and could be efficiently tested by QA staff.

I also trained culinary staff with the new tool, observing their struggles and adjusting the design to make the tool easier to use, and wrote documentation to further aid their work.

When the new Weber Connect software launched in April of 2023, it was entirely dependent on recipe structures imported to and built natively within Producer.

The launch of the software was smooth and stable, and it got glowing reviews from users (average 4.5 stars in the Apple store, 3.7 stars on Google Play, where reviews of the old app still factor in).

Producer’s interface and recipes enabled this simultaneous international launch, and allowed us to substantially increase the number of recipes available in the app vs. the previous Weber Connect app.

Producer software formed the backbone of Weber's smart grilling recipe system.

The Weber Connect 2.0 App is explosively popular, maintaining a 4.6 star rating on Apple Store. 

The Summit Smart Grill which depends upon both of these systems was Awarded Best of Show CES 2024 by CNET, and is available in stores now.

All of these efforts included deep engagements from myself and my team, and the results speak for themselves.