I can’t stop thinking about Tineco’s smart toaster

Living in Australia we miss out on a lot; AI wearables, watching iPhone events at a reasonable hour - it results in some major FOMO. We’ve all fallen into an obsession with a piece of tech that you just can’t have, for me it is the Tineco Toasty One smart toaster. It is my white whale, with an LCD touchscreen on its face.

I was first introduced to the Toasty One at a local Tineco event bringing some new hard floor cleaners to the Australian market. It wasn’t much - just a couple of words on a slide deck - but even without a picture, the Toasty One stood out to me. Smart toasters as a concept are the perfect gadget. They’re novel, totally unnecessary, and provide an overengineered solution to a small quandary. Bundle that with a name like Toasty One, and it makes my geeky little heart sing.

Tineco’s version harnesses smart sensors to toast your bread to your ideal toasted colour. The touchscreen interface has an ‘Intuitive Toasting Level Slider’ which could probably do double duty at a spray tan establishment. According to Tineco it has a “nearly infinite” amount of toasting levels, all determined by what shade you prefer your bread to tan to. Once you’ve decided on a shade, the Toasty One uses infrared sensors to detect the hue on the bread, and change the heating cycle to colour match that slice. Each slot can be customised during the same cycle, so you can burn one piece and lightly roast another simultaneously. All of this is controlled by a 4-inch LCD touch screen which, if Tineco’s floor washer LCDs are anything to go by, is probably lovely. Do you see what I mean by over engineered?

Staring at the product photos, and the resulting toast makes me hungry. Not just for bread and butter, but for the Toasty One itself. Alas, not only is it not available in Australia, but I can't even find a grey import. The 'Buy Now' link on Tineco's website lands at a 404, and according to Amazon it is simply not available.

Tineco has a huge range of home appliances globally from smart toasters, to floor cleaners, to stick vacuums, and hair dryers. Currently only its floor cleaners are available in Australia, but during the event there was chatter about what they may possibly bring here next. Nothing official, just questions about what consumers might want. This consumer wants the Toasty One.

If its performance, and that of any other Tineco products live up to the high bar its floor cleaners have set, then it could come in as a real challenger brand to home tech giants like Dyson. It has already secured a partnership with Aldi for Special Buys products alongside its sibling company Ecovacs. When we spoke with Ecovacs ANZ Regional Director Karen Powell earlier this year, she told us how valuable Aldi has been to robot vacuum adoption in Australia, and the Ecovacs brand. This new partnership with Tineco could be just as precious to the budding brand in the local market. More competition in the home appliance space is always welcome, and from the rumblings around Tineco, it seems like there is more to crumb.