The Cambridge startup spent a decade turning a four-zone, $1,200 contraption into a smaller two-zone system sold from $149 with a meal commitment. Its useful lesson is less about robots than about finding the one household job automation can actually own: making dinner wait for you.
A smart oven, a weekly box of meals, and one deceptively simple idea: let a barcode do the cooking. Here is how a University of Chicago class project shipped 40 million dinners.