Without necessarily knowing it, you may well be a Vorwerk customer: this great German family-owned company is behind the powerful Kobold vacuum cleaner, as well as a wide range of cosmetics, skin and body care products through its Jafra subsidiary.
But if you’ve ever been inspired by ‘Bake-Off’ or taken a stab at banana or sourdough bread during many months of Lockdown, you may have invested in a cook’s favorite helpmate, the Thermomix®. This appliance can seemingly do it all—whisk, caramelize, brown, chop, steam, sauté, blend, boil, knead, emulsify and about a million other things. It’s no wonder at least two get sold every minute!
Thermomix appliances link up with a vast online recipe library called Cookidoo. Cookido’s Guided Cooking function takes you visually, step-by-step through each recipe, complemented by short video tips on Thermomix’s more advanced processes, from emulsifying hollandaise sauce to sous-vide-ing steaks. This hardware/software linkup is all about bringing the Internet of Things (IoT) to life in the kitchen—and the Cloudinary’s media experience platform is at the heart of Vorwerk’s strategy.
Vorwerk wanted to enhance its new generation of Thermomix appliances, deepening its quality promise to its global marketplace through compelling visual assets. Vorwerk needed a robust content delivery network (CDN) to efficiently deliver images and videos across all the regions it serves; that’s a challenge in the critical Chinese market, where content must be delivered through a local CDN.
Also, to make the Thermomix appliance work as an IoT device, you need special video codecs, as video generates a lot of data that must be compressed. To play back video smoothly for all our users, it needs to be delivered in different resolution, bit rate, quality, and with adaptive streaming for uninterrupted buffering across all devices and bandwidth. Different use cases also need different video variants, which takes time, resources, and technical skills to manage. Finally, Vorwerk also needed a solution that could play well in its custom Amazon Web Services-hosted micro services architecture, which includes Contentful for CMS, Algolia for search, and Docker for fully automated deployment.
Vorwerk reports that by working with Cloudinary, it’s delivering exceptional customer experience across all devices and served markets, including that critical Chinese market. Cloudinary is enabling Vorwerk to deliver image and video content fast, without interruptions, on all its devices, including (of course) these amazing new Thermomix IoT-enhanced appliances. Even better, Vorwerk is that much faster at sharing delicious new recipe collections, as its marketing team can now easily resize and crop images, then deliver them in the most efficient format, quality, and resolution, and/or apply filters and effects.
If you’re fortunate enough to own a Thermomix appliance already, feel free to post your latest lockdown creations to our Twitter account. We’d love to see them!
Bon appetit!
