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<\/a><\/p>\nThermomix\u2019s new Southbank space is designed as more than a showroom, bringing consultants, customers and the wider Thermomix community together.<\/p>\n
The sauce problem<\/p>\n
There is a point in making a good sauce where you really can\u2019t do anything else.<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t wander off. You can\u2019t answer an email. You probably shouldn\u2019t even become too invested in the conversation happening on the other side of the kitchen.<\/p>\n
You stir.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s one reason Thermomix has found a place in professional kitchens.<\/p>\n
I was at Thermomix\u2019s new Southbank space for an intimate dinner hosted by acclaimed chef Darren Robertson and food writer Magdalena Roze. The idea was to showcase Robertson\u2019s produce-led cooking through a menu built around seasonal ingredients, while giving us a chance to see the latest Thermomix TM7 at work.<\/p>\n
There was plenty to eat. Plenty to drink. And, naturally, plenty of Thermomix.<\/p>\n
Robertson is hardly someone who needs a machine to tell him how to cook. He\u2019s been using Thermomix in professional kitchens for years.<\/p>\n
It turns out Robertson and I have at least one thing in common as cooks \u2014 and admittedly, the list may end here.<\/p>\n
We were both introduced to Thermomix through a demonstration and came away surprised by what we\u2019d just watched.<\/p>\n
Robertson recalled seeing one demonstrated years ago in a professional kitchen surrounded by more than 20 chefs. He was blown away. He\u2019s had Thermomix machines in his kitchens ever since.<\/p>\n
The attraction isn\u2019t that the machine can cook something he can\u2019t.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s that it does it again.<\/p>\n
And again.<\/p>\n
And again.<\/p>\n
Give it the same ingredients and instructions and tomorrow\u2019s result should resemble today\u2019s. Meanwhile, the chef who would otherwise be standing there stirring can get on with something else.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s when something about Thermomix clicked for me.<\/p>\n
The machine I remembered from 12 years ago was designed to take variables away.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Now, watching a professional chef use one, the same philosophy was there in a different form.<\/p>\n
Reduce the variables.<\/p>\n
Make the result repeatable.<\/p>\n
But don\u2019t necessarily make the result the same.<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t stuff it up<\/p>\n
Robertson had been talking about Cookidoo, Thermomix\u2019s guided recipe platform.<\/p>\n
This created an amusing contradiction.<\/p>\n
Professional chefs, Robertson explained, aren\u2019t necessarily great fans of following someone else\u2019s recipes. Give them ingredients and they\u2019ll improvise, adjust and make something their own.<\/p>\n
Yet that\u2019s almost exactly the opposite of what Cookidoo is designed to do.<\/p>\n
Choose a recipe and the Thermomix walks you through it. Add this. Weigh that. Press next. Set the temperature. Wait.<\/p>\n
Robertson\u2019s assessment was considerably more succinct: \u201cYou can\u2019t stuff it up.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s easy to interpret as cooking with the training wheels permanently attached.<\/p>\n
And it raised a question for me.<\/p>\n
If you remove enough of the variables, are you actually teaching someone to cook?<\/p>\n
Or are you teaching them to use a Thermomix?<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve completely stuffed it up.<\/p>\n
Failure becomes part of the skill.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n His answer was that Thermomix can occupy both ends of the spectrum.<\/p>\n For someone young or someone who has never learnt to cook, guided recipes provide a way in. For an experienced cook \u2014 and clearly for chefs like Robertson \u2014 it\u2019s less a teacher than a support tool.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Perhaps that\u2019s where \u201cyou can\u2019t stuff it up\u201d becomes more interesting.<\/p>\n Removing failure isn\u2019t necessarily the same thing as removing learning.<\/p>\n Someone might not emerge knowing how to rescue a split hollandaise with a whisk.<\/p>\n But they might emerge believing they can cook.<\/p>\n And confidence, after all, is a skill too.<\/p>\n Following the recipe. Sort of.<\/p>\n Robertson demonstrated the other end of that spectrum with dessert.<\/p>\n He was making a whole-orange cake, except it wasn\u2019t quite the recipe as written.<\/p>\n Blood oranges were in season, so those went in. He\u2019d changed some of the flour. There was a miso cream and a syrup involving fennel, passionfruit and blood orange.<\/p>\n In other words, he was doing exactly what cooks do.<\/p>\n Messing with the recipe.<\/p>\n Yet underneath that creativity was a predictable process.<\/p>\n Ingredients went in. The machine chopped. It mixed. Twenty seconds here, another instruction there, then into the cake tin and eventually the oven.<\/p>\n The machine supplied the consistency.<\/p>\n Robertson supplied everything that made the dish his.<\/p>\n And that distinction had actually been playing out throughout dinner.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Twelve years after someone showed me how vegetable scraps could become stock, here was the considerably fancier version of much the same idea.<\/p>\n Use what you\u2019ve got.<\/p>\n Waste less of it.<\/p>\n And make the process do more than one job.<\/p>\n Consistency, it turns out, doesn\u2019t have to mean sameness.<\/p>\n Sometimes it\u2019s simply a reliable foundation from which you can do something different.<\/p>\n Cookidoo guides users through recipes step by step \u2014 useful for beginners, while experienced cooks can use the same framework as a starting point.<\/p>\n The second pair of hands<\/p>\n That\u2019s arguably more important in a restaurant than it is at home.<\/p>\n A customer doesn\u2019t particularly care who is working the kitchen tonight. If they loved a dish last week, they\u2019re expecting that it tastes just as good this week.<\/p>\n Sauces are a particularly good example.<\/p>\n Making some sauces conventionally demands almost continuous attention. An experienced chef can do it, of course, but that chef can\u2019t simultaneously be doing three other things.<\/p>\n A Thermomix can.<\/p>\n Robertson described the machine as a practical labour-saving tool \u2014 effectively another pair of hands in kitchens where there are always more jobs than hands available.<\/p>\n And there\u2019s a wonderfully unromantic appeal to that.<\/p>\n Which perhaps wasn\u2019t the best choice of words on this particular evening.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also roughly how they met. Twelve years ago, Roze was a Channel 10 presenter competing on Ready Steady Cook\u00a0and was paired with Robertson. She remembers him appearing to casually swan around the kitchen while she did essentially nothing. Twenty minutes later he\u2019d produced three dishes.<\/p>\n Roze put some parsley on a plate.<\/p>\n They won.<\/p>\n And, somewhere along the way, apparently decided to keep cooking together.<\/p>\n The Thermomix offers a rather less romantic version of the partnership: it doesn\u2019t mind doing the repetitive jobs while you get on with something else.<\/p>\n Kitchen technology is often sold to us on what it makes possible. More functions. More techniques. More elaborate dishes.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s enormous value in simply making something repeatable.<\/p>\n The hollandaise works this time.<\/p>\n And next time.<\/p>\n And when someone else makes it.<\/p>\n That isn\u2019t terribly sexy marketing.<\/p>\n It\u2019s incredibly useful.<\/p>\n Time, health, environment and money<\/p>\n Grundler later described four motivations Thermomix sees among customers: time, health, environment and money \u2014 THEM.<\/p>\n I hadn\u2019t heard the acronym 12 years ago, but apparently I\u2019d already understood the pitch: icing sugar made from white sugar, scraps becoming stock, dough made instead of bought.<\/p>\n It isn\u2019t necessarily about making something impossible possible. It\u2019s about removing enough friction that you\u2019re more likely to do it.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s where the evening took a turn I hadn\u2019t expected.<\/p>\n Because Thermomix applies much the same thinking to people.<\/p>\n Thermomix remains deeply committed to direct selling and its network of independent consultants.<\/p>\n That model isn\u2019t for everyone, just as a premium kitchen appliance costing thousands of dollars isn\u2019t for everyone.<\/p>\n And because consultants are independent contractors, income isn\u2019t guaranteed. They carry the responsibility of finding customers and making sales themselves.<\/p>\n But the scale surprised me.<\/p>\n Grundler told me Thermomix Australia generated almost $170 million in revenue last year and had, at its peak, around 5,500 consultants.<\/p>\n Predominantly women, but otherwise remarkably diverse in background and motivation.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The company provides training around selling, bookings and social media, among other things.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the training.<\/p>\n Here are the tools.<\/p>\n What you make of them is up to you.<\/p>\n It struck me that I\u2019d heard something similar already that evening.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the recipe.<\/p>\n Here are the tools.<\/p>\n What you make of them is up to you.<\/p>\n For a novice cook, structure can get them started. Robertson can confidently deviate from it.<\/p>\n The parallel with Thermomix\u2019s consultants isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n The sale Thermomix didn\u2019t want<\/p>\n Then Grundler told me something I found considerably more interesting.<\/p>\n Thermomix had experimented with allowing customers to buy online without a consultant being involved.<\/p>\n On the surface, that makes perfect sense.<\/p>\n We\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n According to Grundler, those direct online purchases grew to around 10 to 15 per cent of sales.<\/p>\n Then he switched them off.<\/p>\n His reasoning was surprisingly simple.<\/p>\n Imagine a consultant spends several hours arranging a demonstration, showing someone the machine, cooking with them and following up afterwards.<\/p>\n The customer decides they like it.<\/p>\n Then they go home, order one online and the consultant receives nothing.<\/p>\n Grundler thought that was unfair.<\/p>\n His team pointed out the obvious: they could potentially lose around 10 per cent of revenue.<\/p>\n Grundler\u2019s response was essentially that the consultants had invested their time in Thermomix. The company needed to trust them in return.<\/p>\n So they did it.<\/p>\n There is, of course, another way to look at that decision.<\/p>\n Thermomix\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Trust and commercial self-interest aren\u2019t mutually exclusive.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n There\u2019s always a temptation at company events to talk about culture in big, polished terms.<\/p>\n Trust. Community. Opportunity. People first.<\/p>\n Those words are easy.<\/p>\n Turning off a working sales channel is harder to fake.<\/p>\n When the CV doesn\u2019t fit<\/p>\n Grundler\u2019s own career provides another perspective on what he means by opportunity.<\/p>\n He has a master\u2019s degree in journalism and communication.<\/p>\n Naturally, he joined Vorwerk in Germany as an internal auditor.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 and beyond what\u2019s written on someone\u2019s CV.<\/p>\n Prove yourself and earn people\u2019s trust, he says, and opportunities follow.<\/p>\n More than a showroom<\/p>\n There\u2019s a reason the physical space matters here too.<\/p>\n Thermomix doesn\u2019t describe it as a retail store. Grundler was quite explicit about that.<\/p>\n It\u2019s somewhere consultants, customers and potential customers can gather, cook, smell, taste, learn and \u2014 importantly \u2014 spend time with other people.<\/p>\n There was something slightly old-fashioned about the idea in a world obsessed with shifting every possible interaction online.<\/p>\n Perhaps that\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n Thermomix can put more than 100,000 recipes onto a screen and guide someone through dinner step by step.<\/p>\n Its business still depends heavily on one person standing in a kitchen with another.<\/p>\n Technology provides the consistency.<\/p>\n People provide everything else.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n