Smoothies, protein shakes, home made juices are all now a big part of the healthy diet regime. In the last 4-5 years , there has been a steady growth in awareness and adaptability of healthy lifestyle. This accelerated in the last 2 years when everyone was in the run to improve their immunity levels.

Work from home has helped in inculcating this to a certain extent as well. But now with most of the offices slowly getting back to a hybrid model, you are required to be in the office for a day or two in a week or a month. Corporate offices and co working spaces do have canteens to help you get that quick meal or even a healthy salad. Even with all the spread available in canteen , you would prefer to have the protein shake or specially blended smoothie.

There is definitely a small concern with the blenders. Let it be for office use or at home, the moment a blender is switched on the whole house comes to know about it. Now with WFH, if you forget to mute the meeting call then your clients or colleagues also know it is time for you to shake it up :). This can be well avoided if it is only one person WFH but with households who have 2 or 3 people logged in, it definitely is an irritant factor.

So here comes a brand who is asking you to not get mad about this , and says that the solution to this is to use MAD (Magnetic Air Drive) technology to operate their ‘noiseless’ blender.

Millo, started in 2016, is an award winning brand based out of Vilnius, Lithuania. One of the many promising startups based in the Baltic states.

In the last four years, the team at Millo have worked on tweaking the product and finally launched the latest edition this week. They are calling it Millo Air, the next-gen smart wireless blender.

In this edition of PAC Talks, Adam Trakšelis , the founder and CEO of Millo Appliances spoke about his entrepreneurial journey, how it all started and the future plans of designing a complete smart kitchen.

Listen to the podcast where Adam has shared in detail about this whole interesting tech product and his upcoming plans. Spotify, Apple

“We are pushing the barriers of new generation kitchen appliances, eventually want to implement the base part to the kitchen table.”

“I was into more traditional kind of entrepreneurship doing interior design and that kind of business. At some point, I started looking for ideas that can scale globally. Something that can be created in this small country and scaled for the whole world. One of the ideas that came to my mind is to create the best blender. To solve the problem of having a noisy blender at home and doing sports and drinking sports shakes. That became a hobby and eventually a day and night activity for me. “

Adam spoke about the initial days of Millo

This food tech startup has already won awards which include the Amazon Innovation Award.

Adam calls the Millo Air, the 2.0 version as the ‘Silent Blender’. He demonstrated this during the interview and even at 12000 rpm, there was hardly any sound. The final version product is at 15000 rpm. The initial blender from Millo was developed with a focus on user experience, design and convenience. The team behind this wanted to improve this offering and has now launched the new version where they are using the help of a magnetic drive to rotate the blades. There is no motor involved in this now. So the noise levels have reduced drastically in the latest version. The core of the product is a magnetic air drive with a stator.

“We generate magnetic field that spins the permanent magnets inside of the blending lid. There is only a tiny bit of noise coming from the device.” added Adam while demonstrating Millo Air.

Safety was another factor emphasised by Adam. He mentioned that the device can be disconnected from the base at any point and the blade will stop automatically.

The idea of having user specific lids and setting the blending options according to that is an interesting feature. It looks like the mobile app can track this and set the device accordingly.

“The level of consistency of smoothie can be set. The blender will stop at the right time and you will get the smoothie as per your requirement. It is kind of learning for both the user and the technology to get it right. Once you get it as per your preference then this can be set as the user specific choice.” said Adam about the way in which user specific preset modes can be set in the blender. He went on to explain that the energy used by the device to blend is the factor used to determine the texture of the smoothie.

The charging point of Millo comes as a magnetic hook that can be used to hang the base. So it acts up as a charger and a hook. When fully charged, the blender can churn out around 10 smoothies. This will help the user to carry it to his office or while going on a hike or camp.

Talking about the price point, he mentioned that the blender is priced at 299 EUR and is positioned as a premium product in the upper market segment. “It is not that we are greedy. But the technology, battery, magnet, etc. itself is costly. ” concluded Adam.

The blender is dishwasher safe. The first version of the blender has sold around 1000 units and he mentioned that the numbers were low as the production was not scaled during the pandemic. The latest version of the product is now available on the kickstarter platform and distribution available globally.

The team at Millo is working on a coffee grinder as well. He mentioned that it will be a good one for speciality coffee aficionados. The same base of blender can be used for coffee grinder.

Adam shared his vision of Millo. The plan is to build smart tech kitchen which will be sustainable , use recycled products and that reduces requirement of number of utensils and devices inside the kitchen.

The way new homes and offices have charging point for electric vehicles, future kitchens might come with pre fixed charging points for devices like Millo.

Smart kitchen is the future. Robot chefs, smart appliances, automated recipes, cook top island tables and lot more is happening. Just hoping that we do not miss the fun of human cooking, the hacks done to escape smoke alarms, the occasional burning of the food ,etc. Lets see how things shape up with this Smart kitchen world. A future with weekday tech cooking and weekend clever cooking may be the way going forward :).

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You can read more about Millo here.

The startups based out of Baltic states have started making their presence felt in the global market and will be interesting to keep a watch on the upcoming ones from here.