Now robots can bake your bread

Each week, we spotlight a cool innovation recommended by some of the industry's top tech writers. This week's pick is an automated breadmaker.

The first bread used "the most rudimentary technologies in human history, fire and stone," said Peter Holley at The Washington Post. Humanity has left that far, far behind with the BreadBot, a new automated baking machine introduced this month. The BreadBot "mixes, kneads, bakes, and cools bread without human assistance." A lot of bread: Up to 10 loaves an hour, 235 in a day if you leave just enough time for a human to pour in the ingredients.

Once the dough is shaped and baked into an individual tray, it's transported to an attached bread-vending machine equipped with a touch screen for purchases. Like a human, the BreadBot can monitor the bread as it's baking, and adjust time and temperature. The machine can even make "nine-grain, honey-oat, and rye breads." Slicing, however, is still left to human hands.

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