Table of Contents
- What Fresco Announced
- How Recipe Import Works
- The Redesigned Guided Cooking Experience
- Which Appliances Are Supported
- Why This Matters
- Conclusion
What Fresco Announced
Fresco's KitchenOS is a software platform that sits between kitchen appliances and the home cook. Rather than each brand building its own standalone app, appliance manufacturers license Fresco's platform to deliver guided cooking, remote monitoring, and recipe management to their customers.
On May 19, 2026, the company launched two features: Recipe Import and a redesigned Guided Cooking Experience. Both are now live for Instant Pot users via the Instant Brands Connect™ app, with the remaining partner apps rolling out in the weeks that follow.
How Recipe Import Works
Recipe Import allows users to take any recipe — from a food blog, a cooking website, or a personal note — and convert it into a guided cooking session that controls a connected appliance automatically.
The feature handles the translation between a written recipe and the precise temperature and timing settings a smart appliance needs. For a home cook who has bookmarked years of recipes across dozens of sources, this closes a long-standing gap: recipe discovery and appliance control have historically lived in separate apps with no connection between them.
The Redesigned Guided Cooking Experience
The previous guided cooking interface walked users through recipes in a fixed, linear flow. The new version introduces real-time flexibility: cooks can adjust serving sizes, swap ingredients, or edit individual steps mid-cook without losing their place or disrupting the appliance connection.
"Cooking has always been flexible and improvisational, but digital cooking experiences haven't been," said Ben Harris, Fresco's Co-founder and CEO. The redesigned flow is intended to match how people actually cook — working around what's in the fridge, scaling a recipe up for guests, or skipping a step they already know by heart.
Which Appliances Are Supported
The May 2026 update is rolling out across four partner apps:
- Instant Brands Connect™ (Instant Pot) — live now
- Panasonic Kitchen+
- Viking Cloud
- Kenwood & Me
Fresco's broader platform also works with Bosch, GE Appliances, and LG. Because the company operates as a neutral, cross-brand layer, future appliances from additional manufacturers can be added without users changing apps.
Why This Matters
For US home cooks, the gap between finding a recipe and actually executing it has always required manual effort. Most people who own a connected appliance use a separate app — or none at all — for recipes. Fresco's Recipe Import addresses this directly: instead of manually keying appliance settings from a recipe card or browser tab, the platform handles the conversion automatically.
The update also reflects a broader trend in how kitchen appliances are differentiated. Connected features — guided cooking, remote monitoring, recipe management — increasingly determine which products stand out at the same price point. A home cook buying an Instant Pot today is effectively buying into a software ecosystem, not just a pressure cooker. Fresco's role as the middleware layer means improvements reach multiple brands at once, without requiring a hardware upgrade.
For the tens of millions of Instant Pot units already in US kitchens, the update arrives through an existing app. No new hardware is required.
Conclusion
Fresco's May 2026 update is a practical quality-of-life improvement for home cooks who use connected appliances. Recipe Import removes the manual step of translating a web recipe into appliance settings; the redesigned Guided Cooking flow removes the rigidity that made earlier versions feel more like a script than an assistant. Home cooks who already own a supported appliance can access both features now through their existing apps.