After 10 years of design and development, the appliance maker Breville has just released a $300 toaster that the company believes will revolutionize the category. The Eye Q Auto Toaster, now hitting stores in the U.S., rethinks the core process behind making a piece of toast. Instead of applying heat for a set amount of time, Breville’s Eye Q toaster uses optical sensors and advanced algorithms to see when bread has been toasted just the right amount. For Breville, an Australia-based company that has been making kitchen appliances for almost a century, this proved to be an unexpectedly complicated paradigm change. “We don’t mind a challenge, but if somebody had said to me it’s going to take 10 years to develop a toaster at the beginning of this project, I would have thought, you’re crazy, we shouldn’t do it,” says Tom Groundes-Peace, Breville’s senior global category manager and head of research. [Photo: Breville] But the company couldn’t stop thinking about the inherent shortcomings of traditional toasters. “Every toaster in the world up until this point has just used time as its proxy for toasting,” Groundes-Peace says. Timing a toast only works, however, if what you’re toasting is always the same. According to Breville’s research, many homes toast multiple kinds of breads in a given week or day, from white to wheat to bagels to sourdough. “Different bread, different amounts of time,” Groundes-Peace says. The look test Toasting may be the bare minimum of culinary acts, but Breville’s product designers have been working for decades to make even this simplest of kitchen tasks easier for people. The company introduced the “A bit more” button in 2007, which puts undertoasted bread back in the heat for another 30 seconds. In 2016 it created a toast type selector, with preset toasting times for different breads. [Photo: Breville] But even these advancements in toasting couldn’t match the ultimate test for toastedness. “How do you check that your toast is done? You

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