Breville Group Acquires ChefSteps

Transaction brings together two of the most innovative companies in connected cooking and kitchen appliances

SYDNEY, July 16, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Global kitchen appliance maker, Breville Group, today announces its acquisition of Seattle-based food and technology company, ChefSteps.  The acquisition brings together two companies with an aligned mission to help home cooks achieve perfect results, while offering an unparalleled opportunity to further invest in growth, original content and innovation for the benefit of consumers, retailers and the ChefSteps community.

Founded in 2012, ChefSteps, with its website ChefSteps.com, is designed to inspire creativity and encourage experimentation in the kitchen through high-quality interactive content, techniques, tools, and resources. In 2015, the company announced its expansion into smart kitchen hardware with its Joule™ product, the world's smallest and most powerful sous vide immersion circulator controlled by a smartphone app that includes recipes, tips, and ground-breaking features like its Visual Doneness™ feature, precise sous vide control, and a robust collection of recipes created by the ChefSteps team.

Breville's acquisition of ChefSteps will enhance the long-term R&D capacity that brought the Joule™ product to market, allowing for continued and sustained focus on innovation, while increasing global commercial scale to further maximize the value of the ChefSteps content platform and portfolio of fast-growing connected Joule™ products. It also forms a natural consumer-focused extension to Breville's existing commercial sous vide range of products following its acquisition of the PolyScience Culinary division in 2014.  Renowned for its immersion circulators and temperature control technology, PolyScience Culinary is a commercial sous vide category leader revered by professional chefs.

Commenting on the acquisition, Breville's CEO, Jim Clayton, explained, "ChefSteps has produced tremendous innovation in the content and connected hardware space, and we are excited at the scale we can achieve by combining their content and intellectual property with our current and future consumer products.  We also look forward to engaging with, and serving, the very active and enthusiastic community ChefSteps has built around its product and content. I am thrilled with the opportunity to leverage this extraordinary combination of assets while pursuing our shared mission."

Co-founder and CEO of ChefSteps, Chris Young, added "From inception, our mission at ChefSteps has been to help people cook smarter.  By staying true to our unwavering dedication to innovation, we have achieved great things. Becoming part of Breville Group marks an incredibly exciting new chapter, opening up significant opportunities to help ChefSteps realize its full potential on a global stage."

ChefSteps will be integrated into the Breville Group business while maintaining its offices in Seattle.

The ChefSteps business will be reported as part of the Breville's Global segment but is not expected to have a material impact on the business of the Group.

About Breville Group
Over the past 80+ years Breville has grown to become an iconic global brand, delivering kitchen products to over 70 countries around the globe. The company goes to market as the Sage brand in Europe, and as the Breville brand in the rest of the world.   Breville has enhanced people's lives through the delivery of brilliant innovation and thoughtful design based on deep consumer insights, empowering people to do things more impressively or easily than they'd thought possible in their own home and ultimately allowing them to Master Every Moment™.

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