Geek Brings IoT In The Kitchen For Fast Cooking And Healthy Eating

The startup’s smart kitchen appliances and pre-set menus aim to make home cooking less hectic

Techvantage makes human life easy, and daily chores may soon be passé. Thanks to smart household gadgets, much of that has already been achieved, but many Indian homes still struggle due to time-consuming food prep rituals. While studying lifestyle trends and consumer demand, marketing professionals Murugan Dhandapani and Prathap A saw that the home and kitchen appliances mostly used in Indian households were not precisely the cutting-edge gadgets they should be, and much of the work was manually done. Their research also showed that Indian women spend an average of five hours a day in the kitchen, amounting to nearly 10 years of cooking and cleaning in one’s lifetime. Determined to use modern tech to reduce such drudgery, the duo started Geek, a tech-powered home and kitchen appliances brand operating under the parent company Harkin Global Solutions.

Between October and December 2022, Geek launched various models of Airocook fryers with 10-23 litre capacity and 8-12 pre-set menus. “Indian consumers are used to small fryers. But now they have a variety of options, which can be used to cook food efficiently,” said Dhandapani. Geek currently offers more than 35 SKUs, has sold over 1.4 Lakh products and served 1.18 Lakh+ customers. Its revenue reached INR 27.5 Cr in FY22.

Geek’s product line includes IoT-enabled smart home and kitchen appliances, which can be app-controlled. Among these are high-tech air fryers for healthy eating, rechargeable fans for convenient usage and top-rung electric pressure cookers for faster, customised cooking. One of its flagships is an 11-in-1 electric pressure cooker that enables programmable intelligent cooking and offers pre-set multicooking functions, bringing down cooking time, cost and waste. “We are the first brand in India to launch with a fully customised Indian menu supported by 1,000+ recipes featured via an app,” said Dhandapani.

Geek will add more pressure cookers and air fryers in 2023, besides venturing into new categories like slow juicers, coffee makers and smart locks, which are already in the works. It will also launch a smart-home category by 2025.