I went to Thermomix’s new Melbourne home expecting great food and a closer look at the TM7. I came away thinking about something else entirely: what happens when you trust people with the tools to succeed, then get out of their way.
Estimated reading time: 11–12 minutes
Editorial disclosure: Digital Reviews Network attended this event as a guest of Thermomix Australia. Delicious food and beverages were provided. In accordance with DRN’s editorial guidelines, Thermomix had no editorial input into this article and did not review it before publication.
Original reporting: This editorial is based on Digital Reviews Network’s firsthand attendance at the opening of Thermomix’s new Melbourne space, including an intimate dinner hosted by chef Darren Robertson and food writer Magdalena Roze, demonstrations of the Thermomix TM7, and conversations with Thermomix Australia and New Zealand General Manager Philipp Grundler.
IN THIS EDITORIAL
I first came across Thermomix 12 years ago, when the TM5 was the new kid on the block.
A friend was hosting a demonstration at home and I was there to make up the numbers. And definitely for the free feed.
I wasn’t planning to buy one. I wasn’t particularly interested in buying one. I was another body around the dining table.
Then the demonstration started.
I watched this one machine work its way from dinner to dessert without missing a beat. It chopped, cooked, mixed and kneaded. Things that normally required another appliance — or another saucepan, another utensil and another thing to wash — just happened in the same stainless-steel bowl.
It was impressive.
But strangely, one of the things that stuck with me wasn’t what the Thermomix could make. It was what it could stop you throwing away.
Buy ordinary white sugar and you don’t necessarily need a bag of icing sugar sitting in the pantry. The Thermomix can turn one into the other.
Need dough? Make it.
Those vegetable scraps that would normally make their way from the chopping board to the bin? Collect them. Freeze them. When you’ve got enough, turn them into stock.
There was something appealingly practical about it.
Not look at all the things this machine can do, but look at all the things you might no longer need.
Twelve years later, I found myself standing in Thermomix’s new Southbank space in Melbourne thinking about much the same thing.
Only this time, it wasn’t waste that caught my attention.
It was consistency.
Thermomix’s new Southbank space is designed as more than a showroom, bringing consultants, customers and the wider Thermomix community together.
The sauce problem
There is a point in making a good sauce where you really can’t do anything else.
You can’t wander off. You can’t answer an email. You probably shouldn’t even become too invested in the conversation happening on the other side of the kitchen.
You stir.
Get the heat wrong, stop paying attention or mistime something and the sauce that worked beautifully last Tuesday may decide that tonight it has other plans.
It’s one reason Thermomix has found a place in professional kitchens.
I was at Thermomix’s new Southbank space for an intimate dinner hosted by acclaimed chef Darren Robertson and food writer Magdalena Roze. The idea was to showcase Robertson’s produce-led cooking through a menu built around seasonal ingredients, while giving us a chance to see the latest Thermomix TM7 at work.
There was plenty to eat. Plenty to drink. And, naturally, plenty of Thermomix.
Robertson is hardly someone who needs a machine to tell him how to cook. He’s been using Thermomix in professional kitchens for years.
It turns out Robertson and I have at least one thing in common as cooks — and admittedly, the list may end here.
We were both introduced to Thermomix through a demonstration and came away surprised by what we’d just watched.
Robertson recalled seeing one demonstrated years ago in a professional kitchen surrounded by more than 20 chefs. He was blown away. He’s had Thermomix machines in his kitchens ever since.
The attraction isn’t that the machine can cook something he can’t.
It’s that it does it again.
And again.
And again.
Give it the same ingredients and instructions and tomorrow’s result should resemble today’s. Meanwhile, the chef who would otherwise be standing there stirring can get on with something else.
And that’s when something about Thermomix clicked for me.
The machine I remembered from 12 years ago was designed to take variables away.
One ingredient instead of three versions of it in the pantry. Scraps turned into stock instead of waste. One appliance doing jobs previously spread across several.
Now, watching a professional chef use one, the same philosophy was there in a different form.
Reduce the variables.
Make the result repeatable.
But don’t necessarily make the result the same.
You can’t stuff it up
Robertson had been talking about Cookidoo, Thermomix’s guided recipe platform.
This created an amusing contradiction.
Professional chefs, Robertson explained, aren’t necessarily great fans of following someone else’s recipes. Give them ingredients and they’ll improvise, adjust and make something their own.
Yet that’s almost exactly the opposite of what Cookidoo is designed to do.
Choose a recipe and the Thermomix walks you through it. Add this. Weigh that. Press next. Set the temperature. Wait.
Robertson’s assessment was considerably more succinct: “You can’t stuff it up.”
That’s easy to interpret as cooking with the training wheels permanently attached.
And it raised a question for me.
If you remove enough of the variables, are you actually teaching someone to cook?
Or are you teaching them to use a Thermomix?
I learnt to cook from scratch, usually badly. You learn what happens when the pan is too hot, what dough should feel like and, occasionally, what dinner looks like when you’ve completely stuffed it up.
Failure becomes part of the skill.
Thermomix Australia and New Zealand General Manager Philipp Grundler spoke with DRN about cooking skills, consultants, trust and why the company switched off a functioning direct online sales channel.
I happened to be seated next to Philipp Grundler, General Manager of Thermomix Australia and New Zealand, so I asked whether making cooking this easy risks taking some of that learning away.
His answer was that Thermomix can occupy both ends of the spectrum.
For someone young or someone who has never learnt to cook, guided recipes provide a way in. For an experienced cook — and clearly for chefs like Robertson — it’s less a teacher than a support tool.
Roze offered a neat example later in the evening when she talked about their children using the Thermomix. They can actually make a recipe themselves without a parent having to worry quite so much about knives, chopping or a hot stove.
Perhaps that’s where “you can’t stuff it up” becomes more interesting.
Removing failure isn’t necessarily the same thing as removing learning.
Someone might not emerge knowing how to rescue a split hollandaise with a whisk.
But they might emerge believing they can cook.
And confidence, after all, is a skill too.
Following the recipe. Sort of.
Robertson demonstrated the other end of that spectrum with dessert.
He was making a whole-orange cake, except it wasn’t quite the recipe as written.
Blood oranges were in season, so those went in. He’d changed some of the flour. There was a miso cream and a syrup involving fennel, passionfruit and blood orange.
In other words, he was doing exactly what cooks do.
Messing with the recipe.
Yet underneath that creativity was a predictable process.
Ingredients went in. The machine chopped. It mixed. Twenty seconds here, another instruction there, then into the cake tin and eventually the oven.
The machine supplied the consistency.
Robertson supplied everything that made the dish his.
And that distinction had actually been playing out throughout dinner.
For the Murray cod, Robertson steamed the fish above the bowl while its natural juices fell into the liquid below, becoming part of the sauce.
Twelve years after someone showed me how vegetable scraps could become stock, here was the considerably fancier version of much the same idea.
Use what you’ve got.
Waste less of it.
And make the process do more than one job.
Consistency, it turns out, doesn’t have to mean sameness.
Sometimes it’s simply a reliable foundation from which you can do something different.
Cookidoo guides users through recipes step by step — useful for beginners, while experienced cooks can use the same framework as a starting point.
The second pair of hands
That’s arguably more important in a restaurant than it is at home.
A customer doesn’t particularly care who is working the kitchen tonight. If they loved a dish last week, they’re expecting that it tastes just as good this week.
Sauces are a particularly good example.
Making some sauces conventionally demands almost continuous attention. An experienced chef can do it, of course, but that chef can’t simultaneously be doing three other things.
A Thermomix can.
Robertson described the machine as a practical labour-saving tool — effectively another pair of hands in kitchens where there are always more jobs than hands available.
And there’s a wonderfully unromantic appeal to that.
Which perhaps wasn’t the best choice of words on this particular evening.
Roze had already joked that the setup was remarkably similar to life at home: Darren does most of the cooking while she handles the hosting and talking.
It’s also roughly how they met. Twelve years ago, Roze was a Channel 10 presenter competing on Ready Steady Cook and was paired with Robertson. She remembers him appearing to casually swan around the kitchen while she did essentially nothing. Twenty minutes later he’d produced three dishes.
Roze put some parsley on a plate.
They won.
And, somewhere along the way, apparently decided to keep cooking together.
The Thermomix offers a rather less romantic version of the partnership: it doesn’t mind doing the repetitive jobs while you get on with something else.
Kitchen technology is often sold to us on what it makes possible. More functions. More techniques. More elaborate dishes.
But there’s enormous value in simply making something repeatable.
The hollandaise works this time.
And next time.
And when someone else makes it.
That isn’t terribly sexy marketing.
It’s incredibly useful.
Time, health, environment and money
Grundler later described four motivations Thermomix sees among customers: time, health, environment and money — THEM.
I hadn’t heard the acronym 12 years ago, but apparently I’d already understood the pitch: icing sugar made from white sugar, scraps becoming stock, dough made instead of bought.
It isn’t necessarily about making something impossible possible. It’s about removing enough friction that you’re more likely to do it.
And that’s where the evening took a turn I hadn’t expected.
Because Thermomix applies much the same thinking to people.
Thermomix remains deeply committed to direct selling and its network of independent consultants.
That model isn’t for everyone, just as a premium kitchen appliance costing thousands of dollars isn’t for everyone.
And because consultants are independent contractors, income isn’t guaranteed. They carry the responsibility of finding customers and making sales themselves.
But the scale surprised me.
Grundler told me Thermomix Australia generated almost $170 million in revenue last year and had, at its peak, around 5,500 consultants.
Predominantly women, but otherwise remarkably diverse in background and motivation.
He described people coming into the business looking for extra income, recognition, friendship, community or simply an opportunity to turn an enthusiasm for food into something more.
The company provides training around selling, bookings and social media, among other things.
Here’s the training.
Here are the tools.
What you make of them is up to you.
It struck me that I’d heard something similar already that evening.
Here’s the recipe.
Here are the tools.
What you make of them is up to you.
For a novice cook, structure can get them started. Robertson can confidently deviate from it.
The parallel with Thermomix’s consultants isn’t exact, but there is something interesting in a company that puts so much faith in structured systems also leaving so much of the outcome to individuals.
The sale Thermomix didn’t want
Then Grundler told me something I found considerably more interesting.
Thermomix had experimented with allowing customers to buy online without a consultant being involved.
On the surface, that makes perfect sense.
We’re accustomed to seeing something we like, pulling out a phone and buying it. Removing friction from a transaction is practically a commandment of modern ecommerce.
According to Grundler, those direct online purchases grew to around 10 to 15 per cent of sales.
Then he switched them off.
His reasoning was surprisingly simple.
Imagine a consultant spends several hours arranging a demonstration, showing someone the machine, cooking with them and following up afterwards.
The customer decides they like it.
Then they go home, order one online and the consultant receives nothing.
Grundler thought that was unfair.
His team pointed out the obvious: they could potentially lose around 10 per cent of revenue.
Grundler’s response was essentially that the consultants had invested their time in Thermomix. The company needed to trust them in return.
So they did it.
There is, of course, another way to look at that decision.
Thermomix’s consultants are independent contractors, and direct selling puts much of the work of finding customers and making sales onto them. Protecting those consultants also protects a sales network the company itself depends upon.
Trust and commercial self-interest aren’t mutually exclusive.
But that’s partly why I found the decision interesting. Whatever the motivation, Thermomix was prepared to turn off a functioning sales channel rather than have it compete with the people doing the selling.
There’s always a temptation at company events to talk about culture in big, polished terms.
Trust. Community. Opportunity. People first.
Those words are easy.
Turning off a working sales channel is harder to fake.
When the CV doesn’t fit
Grundler’s own career provides another perspective on what he means by opportunity.
He has a master’s degree in journalism and communication.
Naturally, he joined Vorwerk in Germany as an internal auditor.
From there came roles through finance and other parts of the company before he was eventually offered the opportunity to lead Thermomix Australia and New Zealand.
Grundler attributes some of that to Vorwerk remaining family owned after more than 140 years. His argument is that its owners can think beyond the next quarterly result — and beyond what’s written on someone’s CV.
Prove yourself and earn people’s trust, he says, and opportunities follow.
More than a showroom
There’s a reason the physical space matters here too.
Thermomix doesn’t describe it as a retail store. Grundler was quite explicit about that.
It’s somewhere consultants, customers and potential customers can gather, cook, smell, taste, learn and — importantly — spend time with other people.
There was something slightly old-fashioned about the idea in a world obsessed with shifting every possible interaction online.
Perhaps that’s the point.
Thermomix can put more than 100,000 recipes onto a screen and guide someone through dinner step by step.
Its business still depends heavily on one person standing in a kitchen with another.
Technology provides the consistency.
People provide everything else.
Thermomix sees its new physical space as somewhere people can cook, learn and connect — an intentionally human element in an increasingly digital business.
Maybe it really is about the sauce
Late in the evening, we were back to talking about restaurants and sauces.
Consistency, Grundler pointed out, is exactly why professional kitchens use machines like the Thermomix.
A chef can make a beautiful sauce by hand.
A great chef can probably make it beautifully most of the time.
But a restaurant doesn’t need most of the time.
It needs Tuesday night’s sauce to taste like Wednesday night’s sauce, regardless of how busy the kitchen is or who’s standing at that station.
And suddenly the appliance and the company behind it seemed remarkably alike.
Thermomix’s real product may not simply be chopping, blending, heating, steaming or following recipes on a screen.
It’s the idea that you can take something dependent on individual skill, remove some of the unnecessary variables and make a successful outcome easier to repeat.
But repeatable doesn’t have to mean identical.
Robertson can take a recipe and make it his own.
A child can follow every instruction and discover they can cook.
And an internal auditor with a journalism degree can eventually become General Manager.
Twelve years ago, I watched a TM5 turn white sugar into icing sugar and vegetable scraps into something useful.
This time around, I saw the same philosophy playing out on a much bigger scale.
The clever part isn’t making everyone follow the same recipe.
It’s giving them a reliable place to start.
What they do after that is up to them.
It all started with dinner at Thermomix’s new Melbourne home.