How does Kumo compare to other rice cooker brands?
We spent many years thinking about, designing and developing Kumo with one central idea in mind:
to create a rice cooker that people who genuinely love Asian food would be proud to own and use every day.
Our primary focus was always great-tasting rice. We believe that a rice cooker should first and foremost be exceptional at cooking rice, but we also wanted Kumo to offer much more than that.
From the beginning, we decided that Kumo would need to combine excellent cooking performance, attractive design, premium materials, useful functionality and dependable reliability in a single appliance.
Our benchmark was the level of performance and reliability associated with premium rice cooker brands such as Zojirushi. We wanted Kumo to provide customers with a premium cooking experience while also offering excellent value for money.
Meticulous Attention to Detail
We didn't want to create a product that was simply functional.
Kumo had to look good, feel good and perform exceptionally well.
Every aspect of the cooker was considered during its development, from the largest components down to the smallest details.
This included:
The display and control panel
Exterior styling and moulded materials
Cooking technology
The inner bowl and cooking surface
Internal components
Packaging
Instruction manual
Overall usability and customer experience
We designed these elements with meticulous attention to detail because we believe customers should receive a product that feels premium from the moment they open the box and throughout its many years of use.
An Experienced Manufacturing Partner
Choosing the right manufacturing facility was also extremely important.
The factory we selected to manufacture Kumo also produces rice cookers for highly regarded brands including Cuckoo, Cuchen and Tiger.
This gives the facility extensive experience in manufacturing sophisticated rice cookers and other kitchen appliances for established international brands.
However, Kumo isn't simply an existing cooker with a Yum Asia badge applied to it.
We specified the product, its functionality, materials and performance requirements, working with our manufacturing partner to turn our design into the finished appliance.
Extensively Tested for Rice Quality
We extensively tested Kumo during its development, concentrating particularly on the most important aspect of any rice cooker:
the quality of the rice it produces.
We also carried out blind taste tests with members of the Yum Asia team, comparing rice cooked using Kumo with rice prepared using a Zojirushi rice cooker.
The result was extremely encouraging.
Our team agreed that Kumo produced rice that was every bit as good as the rice produced by Zojirushi.
Of course, taste and texture are ultimately personal preferences, and different people have different ideas about what constitutes the perfect bowl of rice. But our blind testing gave us considerable confidence that Kumo could deliver the level of rice-cooking performance we were aiming for.
More Than Just a Rice Cooker
Although our primary objective was to make Kumo an excellent rice cooker, we didn't want it to be limited to cooking rice.
We deliberately incorporated additional functionality that isn't always available on smaller rice cookers.
One particularly useful example is the steaming function, allowing you to steam ingredients such as vegetables, fish and other foods while making use of the cooker as part of a wider meal preparation process.
This adds another dimension to Kumo and means it can become a much more useful part of your everyday kitchen rather than an appliance that only comes out when you want to cook rice.
Premium Performance Without the Premium Compromise
Kumo represents the result of years of experience, product development and listening to what our customers actually want from their rice cookers.
We wanted to create something that combined:
Excellent rice cooking
Advanced cooking technology
Premium design
High-quality materials
Useful additional functions
Experienced manufacturing
Extensive testing
The result is Kumo – a rice cooker designed around the food it is meant to produce, rather than simply the technology inside it.
We didn't set out to make another rice cooker. We set out to make a rice cooker that could genuinely compete with the best – while giving our customers exceptional value for money.