CES 2026 Kitchen Tools and Tech You Must See | Gear Heads

Is AI taking over the kitchen? Will robots cook you dinner? We're here to find out. I'm at CES, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Let's go check out the trends in technology. It's gear and loathing in Las Vegas. So LG is showing this robot, they're calling it Cloid, and it's supposed to do basically that whole Jetsons thing where the robot takes over. It can put food in the oven, it can get some milk for you at the table, it can do your laundry, it can fold your laundry, it can put it in the washer and the dryer. They're not saying when it's gonna be coming out, this is a prototype, but someday you might have a robot like this doing your cooking. I don't know what I think about a robot that anticipates what I need. Sometimes I change my mind, so I don't know if that's gonna be annoying or helpful, but I guess if you're on your way home and you wanted to put the casserole in the oven, it can do that for you. It may even think of that itself. We have tested indoor plant growing systems in the past. This one has some nice innovations, it's from Instafarm, and it uses a little robot and smart technology to water them and grow them for you. It's grown in soil in these little compostable trays or organic seeds. They claim that that makes better flavor and it keeps all the nutrients in the plants. All you need to do is fill this tank, which is attached magnetically, so you just pull it out, fill it with water, plain water, nothing in it, and it just waters itself. This is retailing now for about $300, they say. The little compostable organic seed trays with soil already prepared and ready to go are about $2 to $3. While the robots were really cool and kind of fun and I kind of enjoyed seeing them, I felt like I was in, you know, Star Wars, some of them were really not ready for prime time. We saw a robot called Galbot that's being used in China right now, they say, in convenience stores and in pharmacies. This robot couldn't pick up anything. It was just knocking stuff down. It brought something to the counter and then dropped it right before it reached the counter. This one's working. Those two are kind of tired down there. They're on strike. I'm not sure if they're dead or just resting. Okay, I don't know. This dancing robot looks like a dork. What can I say? Hi, I'm here with Mike Wolf. He's the founder of The Spoon, which is a site that follows food tech and innovation. What are some of the biggest trends that you're seeing? Well, there's no doubt that we're seeing a whole bunch of AI and robotics across every specific industry, whether that's in the kitchen, whether that's on the farm or in our work lives, and I think we're gonna see more and more of that in the future. What we're seeing here at CES is the connected kitchen where all of your appliances talk to each other and so your microwave, your stove, your oven, your dishwasher, your laundry, everything is connected. It's supposed to make your life easier and that's kind of interesting. That seems like where we're going in the future of the home. Here at CES, we're looking at a lot of things that are coming. They're not necessarily here yet. So here in the Bosch booth, they're talking about AI coming into their appliances a little bit later this year. They have a stove that uses sensors and AI to help you cook, let's say, the perfect steak. So as the kitchen has evolved over thousands, maybe millions of years, you know, it's gonna take another step forward in the next year or two and that's gonna be exciting to see. Now, a common buzzword that we heard a lot was agentic AI where AI literally acts as your agent, performing tasks like ordering and buying groceries for you and having them delivered. So the big question is, why do we need AI in this device? This is a grill. It's kind of basic, right? Well, actually the AI, the case that they're making is that it can do a lot of the chore for you. So it can help you find a recipe that meets your dietary needs or your health goals. It can order the groceries for you. It can set all the settings to make that recipe come out and that's all controlled by the app that operates this grill. There's also a countertop oven and a smoker that work very much the same way and they can work together. It sounds complicated to me and I would love to see it in action. This is coming out a little bit later this year. We'd love to get our hands on some of these products and actually test them out and see how they work. So I'm here at Hisense in their booth where they're trying to AI your home, including the kitchen. They have an app called Connect Life and that's also an AI agent. So for instance, here's the refrigerator which has a smart screen built in. We've seen that before, but this time it actually uses AI to track what's going on in your fridge. You can put your receipts in so it scans all the groceries you bought and suggests recipes. It has entertainment, including YouTube where you can watch GearHeads. Like and subscribe to GearHeads. So we're seeing an example of AI in a common household appliance here. This is a countertop oven. It's by Juan AI Chef. This is the Ultra model. So what does an AI oven do? This one can recognize up to 400 foods and automatically cook them. You can put the food in there and let it go. So here's some food that has just finished cooking. We put it in a little dish of beef and pineapple. It recognized it, it cooked it. It tells you the cooking is completed. It took eight and a half minutes. I'm gonna open it and we'll see. That beef was nice and tender and it was well cooked. It's available now in China. It's coming to the US and it's gonna be about $4,000. So it's pretty expensive, but there it is. So clearly all these brands are pretty excited about AI in the kitchen. And it might be a little bit different. We might love it. We're gonna test it when it comes around and we'll be right there with you to find out how good it is and how you can use it. That's what we do. Is AI gonna take over our kitchen? Are you gonna be my AI dog? So one trend that we're seeing here at CES is appliances that work together. So sometimes it's AI that's designed to be connecting them and make them work together. Other times it's an app. Sometimes it can be simple as combining two appliances you already have, like a refrigerator and a SodaStream. I'm at Dream and they're showing a refrigerator that has pretty much a built-in carbonator. It's good and it sure is handy not having to go to a different appliance to have it come right out of my fridge. The Wireless Power Consortium is promising that the kitchen of the future means that you don't need an individual plug and cord for every appliance. They have a transmitter that they can build into a base like this or right under your countertop so that any appliance that has the receiver built in will be able to be placed right on that countertop and run without any cord, any plug-in necessary. So all that will be part of the past. And if you've ever been annoyed by trying to find a plug behind the toaster or run your blender or anything like that, that will be a thing of the past. It also powers up to 2.2 kilowatts. So the appliances can be very powerful. It's not a weak power system. This standard was just approved last summer and we may start to see this come along to your kitchen in the next couple of years. We're here at Drio and this is an air fryer that has AI in it. There's an app, it also has a probe so it can monitor the temperature of the food. It has a little water tank on top so you can add steam to keep things juicy and not dry out. We have said that you can put a little water in the bottom of your regular air fryer. It also works the same way. So basically it does a lot of the monitoring of the food and giving you a more reliable outcome. So the chef here at the Drio booth is cooking a steak for us to try. We're seeing a lot of appliances that are everyday appliances like air fryers, including some AI. How do you see that taking over the kitchen or do you see it taking over the kitchen? Well, I think there's always gonna be a human component, right? So I did the seasoning. So that's what's gonna make it taste good, at least in part. So it's a partner, it's not taking over for the chef. The machines will not take my job. We saw a technology that promises to come to our aid in the kitchen with assistive or adaptive applications. So we're at Emerson today where they're showing a range of home appliances, countertop appliances like pizza ovens, air fryers, slow cookers. Then the twist is you don't have to talk to Alexa or Google Home or anybody else. You can talk directly to that appliance, turn it on, adjust it, or do anything. And the nice part is you can also do the controls right on the front like a normal appliance. But being able to talk to it is great when your hands are full and maybe you wanna add an hour to your slow cooker time. Seems like a good idea and there's nothing between you and that appliance except your voice. Hey, air fryer. Set temperature to 400. So it's pretty cool. It's not using Alexa, it doesn't use an app, there's no Wi-Fi. You just talk to this thing directly and it does what you want. So another reason you might want an appliance you can talk to is maybe for someone with mobility issues or needing some assistive technology where you don't have to be there. You maybe don't have use of your hands or the precision of hitting those little buttons. It's really nice to be able to just talk to it. The number one cause of fires in the home is unattended cooking. And that's according to the National Fire Protection Association. iGuard Home is using technology to combat that problem. The iGuard Home is this device. And what it does is uses radar because it's very accurate and it bounces off to see if someone is standing in front of the stove. If it doesn't detect someone within 20 minutes, it shuts down the stove. It can also be set so that it won't go off if you're simmering something for a period of time like two hours. So this device is designed to work with both gas and electric stoves. Depending on what you have, you can get the proper attachment. And it will keep an eye on the stove even if you're not. As someone who has a childhood food allergies, I'm really sensitive to allergens in food, in restaurants and other places. And this promises to use technology to help detect allergens. How does it work? So it's a technology that we developed for 10 years. It's a derivative from a technology that we use to detect bacterias and viruses. And we miniaturize it and put it in a device, compact size, something that you can put in your bag. And in two minutes, it's gonna detect the top nine allergens. We're covering 90% of allergic people with like wheat, gluten, milk, soy, egg, fish, shellfish, sesame, tree nuts and nuts in general. So you can actually bring it to a restaurant? You can bring it to a restaurant or if you're getting a food delivery, you can use it there. If you have any doubts about the food you have in your plate, you can use it. So that's gonna help a lot of people who love food but maybe have some allergies. I'm here with Caitlin from Seattle Ultrasonics and she's gonna show me something that may be the future of chef knives in the kitchen. This is the C200 from Seattle Ultrasonics. It is the world's first ultrasonic chef knife made specifically for home cooks. It is battery powered, completely cordless. And when you press this button, it makes the knife behave sharper than it actually is with ultrasonic technology that makes the metal of the blade constrict and contract over 30,000 times a second. Electric knives, they're basically two blades and they're going- They're moving back and forth. And this is actually like waving instead of- Inside the metal. Inside the metal. The metal itself is like waving. Nice little charge up sound. It sounds like, I don't know, R2D2. First, I'm gonna cut without it. I'm just gonna cut a little slice off this lemon. Very nice. It feels good. Let's see if it makes a difference with my power. It's so weird. It doesn't feel like anything happened except that I'm pushing a button. I don't feel a huge difference. I guess I pictured something a lot more like super light savory. Like it light savory? And like what if I put the knife in the wrong place and cut off my finger? So if you were gonna be like just chopping this into- Oh, wow. Okay. I'm feeling it now. I'm feeling the power of that just going through like nothing. The potatoes. Yeah, when I'm chopping, it's really just, I felt no effort. No effort. It wasn't crunch, crunch, crunch. It was just going right through. So that was kind of fun. I don't really notice a huge difference in the middle of the knife blade, but I definitely noticed, especially at the tip. It definitely does help a little bit. I'd love to test it more in the way that we do our full knife testing at some point in the future, but this is so fun to get my hands on it and to see kind of where knives are going in the future. And maybe this is the e-bike of knives, who knows? So like a lot of you, we're skeptical about some of this technology. Is it gonna make things better, just more complicated? But you know, we're sort of hopeful because sometimes you have to bumble a little till you get it right. You have to really struggle and learn. And some of these things are reaching and they're gonna get us somewhere maybe that's gonna be really helpful. We especially love it with adaptive and assistive technology. You know, giving people ability that lets them do more for themselves. And that's kind of awesome. We love that. So as these technologies continue to evolve for the kitchen, we'll be there searching, seeking and testing to make sure they're really gonna work for you. So until then, like and subscribe and we'll see you next time on GearHeads.