ATU719 – Brava Oven with Travis Rea and Zac Selmon

I’m Travis Rea from Brava.

And this is Zac from Brava. This is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello, and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update. A weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 719 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on March 7th, 2025.

On today’s show we are excited to welcome Travis Rea and Zac Selmon. They are from Brava, and here to tell us about the amazing Brava Oven and all the great tools it has that can help individuals with disabilities with cooking independently. Listeners, as always, we want to thank you for listening to the show. Don’t forget, you can always reach out to us. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. Or call our listener line at 317-721-7124.

We’d also like to send a huge shout-out to InTRAC. A transcript of today’s show is available at eastersealstech.com. Those are generously sponsored by InTRAC. You can find out more about indianarelay.com. Also, a huge thanks to our teams that participated in our last two episodes for the ATIA rundown and look back episodes. You’ll notice a lot of the really cool things that we found at ATIA, you’ll start hearing in a lot of these episodes, including today’s guests from Brava. Now let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Listeners, we’re super excited that next week, on March 13th, 2025, will be our first full-day training here at INDATA for this year. It’s assistive technology and brain injury. We are super excited to welcome Wendy Waldman, NeuroResource facilitator and clinical research coordinator at the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation from Indiana University School of Medicine, as well as Amy Miller, director of Brain Injury Services here at Easter Seals Crossroads. And of course, the folks from our clinical AT staff as they present on acquired brain injury, managing this chronic condition, cognitive rehabilitation at Easter Seals Crossroads, integrated treatment for brain injury. And of course, assistive technology that can help folks manage some of the challenges that are associated with a brain injury.

If you’ve never attended one of our full-day training, why? No, I’m just kidding. But if you’ve never attended one of our full-day trainings, these go from usually 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM Eastern time. And you can come here to Easter Seals Crossroads in Indianapolis, Indiana and attend in-person if you like. Or, you can also attend online via Zoom. CEUs are available from the AAC Institute for this training, but you do have to register in order to attend. If you’re looking to register, I will put a link down in the show notes. You can also go to eastersealstech.com, go to our full-day trainings, and register there as well. If you’d like to attend our assistive technology and brain injury full-day training, please register online and the link is down in the show notes.

Listeners, today we are kicking off the month of March talking about cooking, which is one of my favorite things. Mostly because it leads to eating, which is probably my favorite thing. But today, we are joined by Travis and Zac. They’re here to tell us all about the Brava Oven. We are so excited to learn all about it.

Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having us.

Hello. Thank you.

Yeah, I’m excited to get into talking about cooking, about Brava, about all the great things it can do. But before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourselves?

Yeah. My name is Travis Rea. I head up sales and marketing for Brava.

I’m Zac Selmon. I’m the head of product at Brava.

Awesome, guys. Onto Brava. I guess let’s just start with where did the idea for the Brava Oven come from?

Well, the Brava Oven, the original idea actually came from our founder, one of our founder’s moms. She was really busy cooking Thanksgiving dinner, and I think everybody can relate to this. The stress of trying to get everything done at the same time and have everything be hot, and it’s a lot of coordination especially when you’re doing multiple dishes. One of our co-founders Dan is a software entrepreneur. His mom said, “Hey, Dan, you’re a pretty smart guy. I’d really like you to think about creating a cooking robot that would know when everything’s done and shuts off automatically.” That was the original idea in his head.

Our other co-founder Thomas was a hardware entrepreneur. They were friends from high school. They had lunch one day, and they had both been working on separate projects and were just catching up. Dan told Thomas about his idea. Thomas had been working on the heater technology using lamps, and we’ll get into that with Brava in just a minute. Dan had said, “Hey, do you think you could make that bigger?” That was the inception of the company right then. They retrofitted a toaster oven with a really high-powered lamp. They were able to sear steaks in record time and that was their real proof of concept.

Nice.

That was back in, gosh, 2016.

Wow. I love it. Yeah, Thanksgiving dinner, definitely I can see how that can do it. I’m not allowed to do that anymore because I get mean in the kitchen, because yeah, it’s so hard to get everything to coordinate.

You said it actually is able to cook with light. Can you tell me how that works?

Yeah, absolutely. It helps to understand a traditional oven first. Traditional ovens use either heater coils or gas to heat up. What they’re doing is heating the air temperature and charging the chamber walls with radiant heat which is used to cook the food. The problem is that they’re really slow to heat up and they’re really slow to cool down, though they’re really good at holding the radiant heat.

With Brava, we do things very differently. Brava cooks with light. We use actual halogen lamps that were originally designed for the solar industry to afage silicon wafers to solar panels. The really unique thing about these lamps is that they go from ambient to full power in less than one second. They shut off just as quickly. Unlike a heater coil that takes time to heat up, we have instant full power. At full power, we have the same energy delivery as a 900-degree wood-fired pizza oven.

Brava doesn’t require preheat for most things. The other unique things that the lamp gives us are searing power. Brava can actually sear steaks. It’s really cool because it can replace the things like a range or a stove top like a normal oven never would be able to.

The last cool thing before I turn it over to Zac to tell you a little bit more about how it works is that Brava is able to cook three different ingredients at the same time with totally different levels of doneness. We call that multi-zone cooking. We’re the only device that I know in the world that has a single chamber but three independent cooking zones. Zac can tell you a little bit more about how that actually works.

Yeah. What’s cool about cooking with light, it’s mostly infrared heat. But what we can do is, when you see the way that the oven is set up, there’s three lamps along the top and three on the bottom. We have these metal reflectors surrounding the lamps. What it does is it focuses all of the energy directly into the food instead of into the chamber walls and in all directions. It’s really like cooking with a spotlight or a magnifying glass. That safely gives us access to this much higher level of cooking power, close to a 900-degree pizza oven.

Wow.

When we talk about cooking in the three different zones relative to the three different pairs of lamps, it’s not actually cooking in each zone at a fixed temperature for a fixed amount of time. It’s more like cooking with a blowtorch that you’re turning on and off, and pulsing it with heat.

Okay.

It’s able to cook like a cooking robot like they were trying to build. It can approximate how a chef would interact with something. This is also how we cook things really fast.

If you think about if you have a 900-degree pizza oven and you put a whole tray of broccoli in it, it will burn on the outside before it cooks all the way through. That’s because, as the surface temperature of the food rises, the amount of energy that it can accept changes as it starts to heat into the center of the food. The way that people handle that, like a chef handles it, if you see somebody cooking on a wok for example, you see them constantly stirring it, and taking it on and off of the flame. What they’re doing there is they’re manually adjusting the amount of heat that’s being applied to the surface of the food to really control the surface temperature, to keep it just below the point where it starts to burn. That’s how they can cook so fast. Because we can flip the lights on and off like a light switch, we can basically do that same thing by just changing the pulsing of the lamps and thereby cooking it as fast as possible.

When we have a three zone cook, say you’ve got steak in one zone, potatoes in another zone, and broccoli in another zone. We’re not cooking one zone at 400-degrees, one at 300, and one at 200. We’ll be doing something where we sear the top and the bottom of the steak and then let that rest. As it comes to temperature, we start pulsing the potatoes to roast that more. Then we might heavily roast the broccoli. The lamps are dancing around between the different zones, cooking it like a chef would manually.

Nice.

Then we have it all coordinated by our chefs who’ve coordinated those pulses of light so that everything is done and perfectly cooked at the same time.

That is so, so cool. I must admit, you make it sound hard to use. Zac, I know it’s not. But tell me just exactly how I, as a user, am able to get it to do all the pulses right and everything else. What does set up and actually using it look like?

For sure.

Well, it’s pretty complicated using software. Our chefs have programmed Brava on back end using a proprietary coding language that we developed that tells each lamp when to fire, at what power level, and for how long. Then we can run loops of those programs to cook so that the actual user experience takes all of that out. All you have to do is enter into Brava’s search function what you want to cook. For example, chicken, Brussel sprouts, potatoes. Brava is going to go find that recipe program. We have 8500 fully automated recipe programs. On the touch screen, it will show you. We’ll get into how you can do this if you’re blind soon. It will show or tell you where on the tray to place the ingredients, how they should be cut. Then all you do is load the tray into the Brava and press the green button, and it fully automates the cooking.

A good analogy that I heard recently was we did for cooking what Tesla did for autonomous driving. But instead of entering a destination, what you’re entering is the final dish that you want to cook, and then allowing Brava to go do its work while you can do something else.

That’s super cool. Because yeah, it sounds so complex. On the back end, I’m sure with the coding and everything that it is. But I love that it’s easier to use than I think my microwave, and it actually cooks the food a whole lot better than that device.

You started alluding to this a little bit, Travis. When did you realize that this could be a helpful device for individuals with disabilities?

That’s a great question, Josh. It was about two years ago. We launched Brava at the end of 2018. The goal was to help home cooks cook faster and with more ease than ever before. What we found is that we had built a lot of safety features into Brava from the very beginning. About two years ago, we started selling to a company called Proven Behavior Solutions, which is in Massachusetts. Because we’re a D-to-C company, it was strange to us that we were getting orders from a business. We ended up calling them and saying, “What are you guys doing with this?”

They turned out to be one of the agencies in Massachusetts that does assistive technology assessments. They are serving young individuals with autism who were trying to live independently. It turned out that a lot of the safety features that we built into Brava had an elevated level of importance for assistive technology users. Some of these features include the fact that it’s cool to the touch on the exterior. Any other toaster oven or countertop oven will get very hot and can burn you if you touch the top surface, but Brava stays cool to the touch. We have a camera in Brava that sends a live video feed of what’s cooking inside the oven chamber to the mobile app. You can also shut off the oven remotely from the mobile app.

Nice.

That turned out to be a really great feature for caretakers because if you have an adult child that’s trying to live independently, or if you have parents that are aging in place, and you want to have some peace of mind knowing that when they’re cooking that they’re going to turn the oven off, or things like that. You can get a notification, even if you don’t own the Brava. As long as you’re signed into their account, you’ll get a notification on your mobile phone any time that oven turns on. They can click into that notification and see the live video feed. The caregiver can shut the oven off if they want to.

The fact that Brava shuts off automatically was a huge thing for them because a lot of people, whether they’re elderly or they have executive function difficulties, it’s very easy to forget to turn off the oven. But when Brava’s done cooking, it shuts off automatically. Brava cools off very quickly, unlike a traditional oven, so that you don’t have to rush to get things out. You got to think of a regular oven at 400-degrees, when you turn it off it’s still 400-degrees inside the chamber. But Brava, even though it has more power delivery than a traditional oven, it doesn’t get as hot as a regular oven inside in most of the instances of cooking. The Brava cools off to about 100, 120-degrees within five minutes. You can leave things inside Brava, whether you’ve roasted a chicken breast or you’ve roasted some vegetables like broccoli, you don’t have to rush to get them out. That was a big, big win for people with assistive technology.

Yeah. I’m not going to lie, that was one of the biggest things just for me personally using it. I’ve got two young kids. The combination of not having to plan things out and preheat, and then remember to put the food in, and then remember to take the food out at a certain time. There’s a bunch of these low level anxieties that you have when cooking that I wasn’t even aware of until I first got my Brava and started using it. If my kids are fighting in the back room and I get distracted, I’m not going to burn something.

Yeah.

Even in my own personal experience, I realized that removing some of those anxieties just led to me cooking more and leaning on it more. That’s what we’ve seen with folks we’ve introduced it to. As we’ve talked to more of these agencies and things like that, there’s a lot of those anxieties. Worries about leaving the oven on, or burning risks, or things like that. By smoothing those edges off and removing some of those concerns, people start to get more excited about cooking.

Then the last thing that is really great about the Brava is because it is controlled by software, we can update it and add features. As we’ve been learning more about the assistive technology community and the different needs that people have, we can work to add new features and functions. We try to approach it in a modular way so that we build out different sets of features that can be set up and combined to accommodate different user needs and scenarios. We’re always learning and trying to add more in so that we can be more helpful for a wider group of people.

Yeah. I love that they were features already built in, things to just make it easier, more user-friendly. Then, yeah, how the community figured out that, “Hey, these are really helpful in this kind of way, too.” Yeah. The real goal of assistive technology and a lot of the services that are provided around it are independence. Yeah, something that can be used and be independent. Zac, you mentioned small kids, I have them, too. One of them always wants to help cook, and always has their little, tiny chair, and they’re three.

Yeah.

Just it not being hot on the outside is a really great thing, too. Because yeah, whenever I try to cook with a cast iron or anything, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, it’s going to burn into their hand,” or everything else. Just what great safety features that were already there. Then I love how those translated over so well.

It ended up so that my kids could make their own grilled cheese and not worry about-

Everything that goes along with it.

Worrying about them trying to flip something and burn it, and getting to eat right. Instead, they just take out the bread and the cheese, set it up on the middle of the tray, and basically push a button. It’s been great.

Oh, that’s so cool. You also mentioned that individuals with a visual impairment or blind can use it as well. How does that work?

Yeah. That was one of the first things that we noticed. As we started leaning into this world and trying to learn more about it, we pretty quickly heard that, “Well, the touchscreen on the oven is the least accessible aspect of the cooking process.” We started learning more about it.

Last year at HEIA, we met the folks from the Lighthouse in San Francisco. We partnered up with them and we spent basically all of last year rebuilding the entire back end of the oven so that you could fully control the oven using the app and to optimize the app experience so that it works with screen readers.

Nice.

Both voiceover and talk back. It’s the same process blind and visually impaired folks. To make a grilled cheese for example, you go using the screen reader, go through the app, search for a grilled cheese. It’ll ask you a couple questions like what kind of bread you’re using, white, wheat, or sourdough. It’ll ask how many sandwiches that you want to make. As you make your preference selections, it updates the ingredient list. Then the preparation instructions, it’ll tell you to butter both sides of the bread, put the cheese in, and tell you what zones to place it onto the cold tray. The tray actually has physical indicators of where the zones are. Then from the app, you can send the recipe to the oven. All you have to do is slide the tray in and there’s a large physical button on the top of the oven that you press to start the cook.

Nice.

We set that up.

The other cool thing that I’ve learned through this process with assistive technology is a lot of times making things easier to use for the assistive technology world, for all of our customers it makes things easier. There’s a lot of overlap between thinking through those different use cases and needs.

That’s awesome, that’s awesome. You guys have both mentioned the app a little bit. Tell me what all it can do and how it works along with the Brava Oven?

Yeah. The app, up until basically the very end of last year when we released this new feature, it used to be you could still search for the recipes and get a sense of what you could cook on there. If you were grocery shopping or something like that, you could be away from your oven and still plan out what you wanted to make. It receives notifications when a cook starts or when the cook’s over. We mentioned that there’s a camera inside so when it’s cooking, you can open the app and monitor what’s happening in the oven. There’s some other fun features, like you can see your cook history and see little time lapse videos of your previous cooks. Which is actually also great, because we use that feature to help troubleshoot. If somebody’s having an issue with a given cook, we can go through the history with them and help figure out preparation needs for them. You couldn’t actually make the selections, like your amount or your doneness preferences and stuff, for example.

What we’ve added just at the end of last year is the ability to do all of those controls and basically set everything up directly from the app. Something else that we have mentioned yet, but is possible. Brava has the 8500 recipes, but it also has 10 manual modes. It will still bake and air fry, and we’ve got a reheat and a rice cooker mode. You can still use it to cook traditionally.

Nice.

From the app, you can also, we have a community of people that can build what we call custom cooks and share them with the rest of the community. There’s the recipes that the Brava chefs have made. But if you have your mom’s favorite lasagna recipe, you can dial that in so that it bakes at 400-degrees for 40 minutes, and then moves into a top-sear for two minutes. You can save that, add all the instructions, and share that with the community. And save that to your favorites, so that you have a shortlist of the recipes that you want to make and totally control the oven from there.

Super cool, super cool. Do you guys have a story of maybe someone’s experience with the Brava Oven that stuck with you?

I have a million stories. Travis mentioned one of the ways that we first got into assistive technology. One of the first cases that we heard about was from a couple that had been married for 50 years. The husband hadn’t cooked once-

Wow.

… in the whole 50 years. Then she had a stroke and was unable to cook. They were ordering DoorDash nonstop until their kids bought them a Brava. We heard from them thanking us because they were able to start cooking at home again. That was one of the things that got us thinking about this and looking into this.

Nice.

Then I think one of the newer stories that I heard that I loved was from Proven, that Travis mentioned. Where Rachel was working with a young man who was a self-described picky eater. For the last several years, he’d only eaten frozen chicken nuggets and frozen french fries. But he was scared to use the oven, so he was microwaving them. That hurt our hearts a little bit because frozen nuggets and frozen french fries out of microwave get all soggy and gross. They set him up with a Brava. We actually have the ability in Brava to do chicken nuggets and french fries at the same time on the same tray. It’s about as fast as the microwave, maybe a minute or two longer, but it actually crisps everything up and comes out delicious. He was super happy because it guided him through it, it was easy, he could totally do it, and the food was coming out so much better.

Rachel said the last time that she went to visit him, he was really excited and wanted to make pancakes for her. She said that he did gag a little bit when he took his first bit, but he kept eating. He’s since expanded his cooking repertoire and has been trying new foods because that feeling of agency and ownership makes food taste better, and being involved in that process was giving him the confidence to expand his palette and explore more foods.

Nice.

Which is so great to hear.

I love it, I love it. Guys, if our listeners want to find out more about the Brava Oven and everything it can offer, what’s a good way for them to do that?

Just go to our website. It’s www.brava.com. You can also find Brava at Amazon or Williams Sonoma online. It’s also on Wayfair and Parable. If the listeners want to see the demo of the screen readers in action, all you have to do is search Brava accessibility on Google and it will take you to a landing page that shows you about a two-minute video of one of the guys from the Lighthouse who’s fully blind making a grilled cheese on Brava.

Well, Travis, Zac, thank you so much for coming on the show, for telling us all about Brava. I love the way that it started off as just an amazing tool that could help folks, and then ended up being able to help whole other populations. Then even the changes you’ve been able to make to make it even more accessible for everybody. Thanks again, and really, really love it, and love getting to talk about it.

Thank you for having us.

Yeah. Thank you so much. This was great.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124, send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter @indataproject.

Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation, or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easter Seals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update, and I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.