US 4,649,810 · Granted 1987-03-17

The Robot Chef Patent That Wanted to Cook Your Dinner

Imagine a cooking machine that remembers recipes and does the work for you: you load ingredients into a carousel, punch in what you want to make, and the machine automatically adds ingredients, heats everything up, and even stirs—all on its own. This 1987 patent describes one of the earliest attempts to automate home cooking with a computer brain.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a fully automated cooking system controlled by a microcomputer that manages a carousel of ingredient compartments, automatically dispenses those ingredients into a cooking vessel on a programmed schedule, controls the heating of the vessel (covered or uncovered), and performs stirring operations—all triggered by stored recipe instructions. What's protected here is the integrated combination of carousel storage, automated ingredient release, heating control, and mechanical stirring, all coordinated by microcomputer logic.

Why it matters

In 1987, home cooking was entirely manual—you chopped, you heated, you stirred, you timed. This patent represents an early vision of a fully autonomous cooking appliance, decades before sous-vide circulators and smart ovens became commonplace. While this particular carousel-based approach never dominated consumer kitchens, it staked out intellectual territory for the idea that cooking could be automated and computerized, paving conceptual ground for later smart kitchen devices.

Real-world use

You'd encounter this technology if you owned an automated cooking machine with a carousel hopper and built-in recipe memory—similar in spirit to how modern multi-cookers store programmed cooking profiles, though this patent's mechanical carousel design was more ambitious.

Original USPTO abstract

A microcomputer-controlled, integrated cooking apparatus for automatically preparing culinary dishes. The constituent ingredients of a particular dish are loaded into a compartmentalized carousel, which is mounted on the cooking apparatus. The apparatus includes a memory for storing one or more recipe programs. The recipe program specifies schedules for dispensing the ingredients from the carousel into a cooking vessel, for heating the vessel (either covered or uncovered), and for stirring the contents of the vessel. These operations are performed automatically under control of the microcomputer.

Patent details

Publication number: US 4,649,810
Filing date: 1985-08-22
Grant date: 1987-03-17
Assignee: Wong Don M
Inventor(s): WONG; DON M.
CPC class: A47J36/32

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