NPRE Students Design the BreakfastBox

 

Three NPRE graduate students have put a high-tech spin on the age-old question, “What’s for breakfast?”

 

The BreakfastBox device, the brainchild of inventors Peter Fiflis, Pawel Piotrowicz and Matthew Szott, is to the morning meal what the Keurig is to coffee. The gadget was born from hunger pains the three had felt but had found little time to satisfy.

“We would come into the lab, sometimes without eating breakfast, because we might be working long hours as grad students,” Fiflis explained. Being engineers, they decided to solve the problem and automate the process with a new device. “We would actually be well fed coming into the lab, be a lot happier people, and be able to work more efficiently.”

Their answer has hit home; the BreakfastBox has been chosen to compete in the 2015 Cozad New Venture program that the University of Illinois’ Technology Entrepreneur Center sponsors to encourage students to create new businesses.

 

To put it simply, BreakfastBox, an internet-enabled countertop appliance, aims to have breakfast cooked and ready for hungry users right when they need it in the morning.

 

“The idea,” said Fiflis, “is that you as a user would load up your BreakfastBox on the weekend with raw ingredients into a refrigerated section. Over the course of the week, you could then order a breakfast for the next morning (on an app) on your phone. All you have to do is specify what you want and the time that you want it ready. BreakfastBox then takes care of the rest, dispensing material from the refrigerated section onto a pair of skillet type heaters and cooks breakfast according to the users’ tastes.”

Right now, BreakfastBox offers eggs, pancakes, bacon and sausage. “We think we can also use the current design to make omelettes, but we're trying to improve the functionality of the Box before expanding the menu.”

The designers have considered many details, including how long to cook the eggs. “The program will incorporate a machine learning algorithm that, along with some user feedback on meal quality, should quickly adapt to each user’s individual tastes,” Fiflis said.

As the students refine their prototype, they have plans to move from a device in which the user has to load ingredients to a more accessible and commercial solution.

“We plan to quickly transition to a model similar to Keurig, where users could purchase BreakfastPacks – containers holding individual raw ingredients – to put into their BreakfastBox. BreakfastPacks will reduce loading time and make the device much easier to clean."

Fiflis, Szott and Piotrowicz plan to engineer a sleek and reliable product for consumers. After some initial surveying, they foresee a market within young professionals, newly graduated, tech-savvy college students, and possibly young mothers.

“We have heard responses like ‘Oh yeah this would be awesome to have! I really wanna buy one of these right now. When are you doing beta testing? Can I be a beta tester?’ So it’s been a very encouraging response that we have received so far from some of our target market,” Fliflis said.

First and foremost nuclear engineers, Fiflis, Szott and Piotrowicz have gained engineering knowledge from throughout the College’s disciplines, and believe that experience has been useful in designing the BreakfastBox. “We have enough breadth of experience that we’re actually able to solve a lot of the problems that have come up with the device, a good portion of which so far has actually been related closer to mechanical engineering.”

“It feels like every day’s a little victory,” Fiflis said of the process. “It was little things that we weren’t quite sure how to do. Normally when you flip an egg on a skillet, you shove something under it and you flip it over, but how do you do that in a BreakfastBox? As soon as we were able to accomplish that the first time, it was a big success. Cooking the first breakfast was definitely a pretty big victory.”