Fresh Consulting makes the pieces work together

A restaurant kitchen is a useful place to discover whether a design works. Nobody has much patience for a beautiful interface that slows down lunch. When Middleby asked Fresh Consulting to bring consistency to its equipment interfaces, the assignment involved four flagship products, different screens, and workers with different levels of experience. Fresh reports that the redesign cut 22 seconds from the average completion time on one machine. A small number, until you imagine the queue.

The kitchen is the clue

Middleby had accumulated more than 60 brands. Its appliances differed, but many asked operators to perform similar actions. Recreating those interfaces separately meant paying repeatedly to solve related problems. Fresh researched common workflows, tried layouts on paper and whiteboards, and tested mockups with newcomers and experienced users. The deliverable included a shared design language and component library.

That is a good introduction to Fresh because the company’s range can otherwise sound implausibly broad. Websites, mobile applications, industrial design, embedded software, custom robotics: the list resembles several businesses accidentally printed on one business card. The kitchen explains the connection. Someone has to consider the machine, the screen, the worker, and the next product that will inherit today’s decisions.

The expensive part is finding out late

Consider another kitchen problem: getting a machine to prepare drinks. For Miso Robotics’ Autobev, nicknamed Sippy, Fresh divided the work into stations for separating cups, sealing, and filling. Engineers built manual and semi-automated prototypes before connecting the mechanisms. An ordinary stack of cups became an engineering assignment of its own.

Operator testing then changed the product requirements. A customer’s request also pushed the construction toward sheet metal. Cost was embedded in those choices: the brief called for economical components and a design suitable for volume manufacturing. The useful question was whether a mechanism could work reliably at an acceptable production cost.

The takeaway is practical. A convincing animation can postpone an awkward conversation about friction, tolerances, or a cup that refuses to separate. A physical prototype brings that conversation forward. For anyone managing a product budget, the sequence matters: spend enough to answer a narrow question before committing to the entire machine.

A workshop with more than one language

Jeff Dance and Steve Hulet founded Fresh in 2007. The original idea paired design with technology; hardware expanded the scope later. In a retrospective, Dance described adding a hardware company in 2018 after a decade spent building digital services. His explanation was straightforward: Fresh needed to evolve along with the products its customers wanted.

Project Moab makes that evolution tangible. Built with Microsoft, the small robot balances a ball on a moving plate. Behind the apparently modest trick sit computer vision, motion control, physical engineering, and models trained through Microsoft’s Project Bonsai. A simulation becomes a decision; the decision tilts a real surface. Gravity supplies immediate feedback.

The Microsoft air-hockey collaboration is more mischievous. A mechanism beneath the table moves a striker through magnetic coupling. The machine can play an opponent, while a controller port lets a person operate the robot. That detail expands access for players with limited mobility. It also illustrates how decisions about controls and physical construction can change who gets to play.

“Our versatility across hardware and software is what sets us apart.”

Reg Orton · Managing Director, Hardware

Fresh occupies the space between a design studio, a software contractor, and an engineering consultancy. Its argument for hiring one firm across those specialties is fewer gaps between decisions. The distinction becomes meaningful when the interface and the machinery must change together. For a self-contained assignment, a specialist may be the simpler purchase.

Aigen’s Element Gen 2 provides a less playful example. Aigen developed the agricultural robot’s weed-detecting vision system; Fresh helped redesign the surrounding physical product. Reflective surfaces could interfere with sensing, so the design reduced glare near critical areas. Wind stability, protective housing, and access for maintenance also shaped the work. Here, industrial design reaches into performance: the shape around a camera can affect what the camera sees. Giving the enclosure to one team and the sensing problem to another would still leave someone responsible for their interaction.

Buying the next set of skills

The commercial model follows the work. Fresh offers scoped project teams, longer-running product teams, and people embedded with a customer’s own staff. It sells development capacity and expertise. A client might need an application, an automation system, or help moving an existing product toward production.

Growth capital helped widen that capacity. Cynosure’s announcement, dated December 2021, said its investment would support new capabilities and acquisitions, with founders and executive management retaining majority control after the transaction. Fresh subsequently acquired Oktara in 2023 and Mexico-based Atomic32 in 2024. The latter brought a 130-person software and data-engineering team at the time of announcement.

In September 2026, Fresh announced the acquisition of Product Creation Studio’s assets, extending its healthcare development capabilities. The rationale is consistent with the workshop it has assembled: connected medical products require physical engineering, software, and regulatory knowledge to coexist. Fresh’s partners, including cloud platforms and test-technology company NI, add another layer of technical resources.

Start with the smallest stubborn thing

A prospective customer can borrow the method before hiring the company. Identify the task people struggle with. Measure it. Separate the uncertain pieces. Build something that exposes the weak assumption. Then let observations change the requirements. Fresh’s published design-led development approach grew out of the tension between fixed budgets and goals that shift as teams learn.

For buyers, that suggests a better brief than asking for innovation. Describe the recurring task, the person doing it, and the constraint that makes it difficult. Bring the software owner and the equipment owner into the same discussion. A shared test gives both sides something concrete to argue about.

There are conditions attached. An integrated team needs access to operators and room to revise decisions; without either, early testing loses much of its value. A prototype also leaves questions about maintenance, production, and operating economics to answer. Fresh is most interesting when those questions cross disciplines. Sometimes the next useful move is as small as making one cup drop cleanly.