Source: CHEAA-run China Appliance magazine
How can consumers easily enjoy a fresh, healthy, and satisfying meal at home? In response, smart stir-fry cookers—touted for features such as low fumes and intelligent automation—quickly gained popularity among busy professionals, inexperienced home cooks, and parents. But the initial enthusiasm has not fully translated into lasting approval. Today, smart stir-fry cookers continue to divide opinion at the consumer level, and some leading brands have even scaled back their focus on the category altogether. What, then, has held these once-hyped appliances back?
How Smart Are Smart Stir-Fry Cookers, Really?
Smart stir-fry cookers are designed to automate and speed up the cooking process while addressing long-standing pain points in Chinese home kitchens, from oil fumes to precise heat control. Aligned with the broader push toward smarter kitchen appliances, they promise to bring restaurant-style dishes within reach of home cooks across the spectrum—from those with little cooking experience to seasoned hands in the kitchen.
For beginners, preset programs lower the barrier to cooking a variety of dishes; for experienced cooks, the appeal lies in reducing hands-on labor without sacrificing results. These promises helped turn smart stir-fry cookers into one of the most talked-about segments in the home appliance market several years ago, drawing in a wide range of players, including Tineco, Supor, Joyoung, Bosch, Midea, GEMSide, and Ptbab.
According to data from Insight and Info, the domestic market for smart stir-fry cookers has posted annual growth of more than 20% over the past three years, reaching 219 million yuan in 2024, even as momentum has begun to ease. At the same time, consumer sentiment has grown increasingly polarized. On Xiaohongshu, searches for “smart stir-fry cooker” turn up glowing endorsements—praised as “effort-saving” and “beginner-friendly”—alongside sharp criticism dismissing the products as a “gimmick” or faulting them for lacking wok hei, the smoky aroma widely regarded as essential to Chinese cooking. Much of this debate can be traced back to two recurring concerns: how intelligent these machines truly are, and whether they deliver sufficient value for their price.
To begin with, the level of automation still falls short of many consumers’ expectations of a fully hands-off experience spanning preparation, cooking, and cleanup. Reporters from China Appliance magazine note that while most models can manage automatic stirring and temperature control—and some can dispense seasonings—numerous steps still require manual involvement.
This gap is particularly noticeable given the audience these products are meant to serve. Busy professionals, parents, and inexperienced home cooks tend to place a premium on short prep times, intuitive operation, and reliable results. When those needs are only partially met, mixed reviews are hardly surprising. “The model I bought only takes care of the stir-frying itself,” one JD.com user wrote. “Overall, the experience isn’t great.”
Cleaning is another frequent point of frustration. Oil residue can easily accumulate inside the machine, especially around stirring arms and seams in the pot, often requiring disassembly and time-consuming manual cleaning. Some models also depend heavily on smartphone apps: users must connect the device, select recipes or cooking modes, and add ingredients in a specific order and weight. For elderly users or those less comfortable with technology, this process can feel more burdensome than empowering. “What we really need is a one-stop solution,” another JD.com reviewer commented.
Beyond usability, cooking results themselves remain a sticking point. Some consumers argue that dishes produced by smart stir-fry cookers lack the wok hei, leaving them unable to fully meet expectations for authentic Chinese flavors.
Price further complicates the equation. With products ranging from a few hundred yuan to well over ten thousand, questions around cost-effectiveness loom large. For some consumers, the perception that smart stir-fry cookers offer limited gains relative to their price has dulled enthusiasm for a category that once seemed poised for rapid takeoff.
Flaws Aside, Technology and Functionality Continue to Advance
Despite the ongoing debate surrounding smart stir-fry cookers, consumer criticism has also helped clarify the direction of the category’s evolution. Leading players in the industry have pressed ahead, steadily upgrading both technology and functionality in an effort to raise the level of automation and improve the overall user experience.
Today, smart stir-fry cookers are markedly more capable than earlier generations. Advances in core technologies, feature sets, and automation have begun to translate into more integrated solutions—ones that aim to cover the entire journey from preparation and cooking to cleaning, offering consumers a more seamless, end-to-end dining experience at home.
Cooking performance remains at the heart of the category. In response to long-standing concerns that smart stir-fry cookers fall short on wok hei, some manufacturers have made tangible technical progress. According to a Tineco representative, wok hei is influenced by a complex mix of factors, including the Maillard reaction, moisture evaporation rates, and temperature curves—placing high demands on a device’s ability to precisely control heat.
Most smart stir-fry cookers now rely on three-dimensional IH heating systems to ensure even heat distribution and prevent scorching. By increasing power output, these systems are capable of delivering the high temperatures needed for rapid, high-heat stir-frying. Tineco, for example, combines infrared sensing with NTC temperature sensors to achieve fast, uniform heating, aiming to replicate the texture associated with intense, direct-flame cooking. In practice, many models on the market can now reach peak temperatures of around 200°C during operation.
The industry has also moved to address persistent pain points in ingredient preparation and post-cooking cleanup.
To reduce the time and effort required for prep work, some brands have introduced ready-to-cook ingredient solutions. Tineco’s Shiwan Mini smart stir-fry cooker, for instance, offers pre-prepared meal kits that can be cooked straight out of the package, with app-based ordering and rapid home delivery designed to further lower the barrier to everyday cooking.
Cleaning, another frequent source of frustration, has seen notable improvements as well. Common approaches include non-stick coatings and built-in self-cleaning functions. Tineco’s Shiwan 3.0 Pro supports automatic water-assisted steam cleaning, using a 360-degree scraping mechanism to eliminate residue with as little as 300 milliliters of water in a 90-second cycle. Bosch’s Cookit takes a modular approach: in addition to an eight-minute standard automatic cleaning program and a dedicated dough-cleaning mode for stubborn residue, all components are fully detachable and dishwasher-safe, allowing users to enjoy cooking without the burden of manual cleanup.
Beyond hardware, manufacturers are increasingly turning to software and content to differentiate their products. Features such as personalized recipe recommendations and scheduled cooking have been introduced to accommodate a wide range of Chinese and Western cuisines.
In 2022, Tineco established a Digital Flavor Research Institute and entered into strategic partnerships with leading international sensory science laboratories to understand Chinese cuisine at a foundational level. Through its tools, elements like heat control, wok-tossing techniques, and seasoning ratios are translated into data models and then reproduced with precision through hardware.
More recently, the rollout of scheduled cooking on Bosch’s Cookit has added another layer of flexibility for time-pressed households. By allowing meals to be prepared automatically at preset times, the feature effectively gives busy users a chance to reclaim their mornings—using technology to better align home cooking with the pace of modern life.
After the Shakeout, Different Paths Emerge
For now, smart stir-fry cookers remain a niche segment within the broader home kitchen appliance market, with a relatively short development history. As the category encounters skepticism from consumers, companies across the industry have responded in markedly different ways.
According to reporters from China Appliance magazine, Supor—once an active participant with products such as the Little C Chef and COOK3—has quietly adjusted its product strategy. While smart stir-fry cookers remain available in its lineup, the company no longer positions them as a core focus. Joyoung and Midea have similarly slowed the pace of product updates and promotional efforts in this category. By contrast, leading players in the segment continue to express confidence in the long-term prospects of smart stir-fry cookers, particularly given their positioning around “intelligence” and “healthy cooking.”
A Tineco representative noted that future iterations of smart stir-fry cookers will continue to center on two priorities: full-process automation and user experience upgrades. In March this year, Tineco introduced its latest home model, the Shiwantiangong, which builds on a foundation of replicating professional chef techniques and end-to-end intelligent cooking. Through partnerships with large language models such as Doubao, the product aims to deliver three key advances.
First, it enables dynamically generated recipes: a user can simply say, “I want a spicy Sichuan-style dish,” and receive a tailored cooking plan. Second, the system supports progressive learning—if a user indicates that a dish is “not spicy enough,” the device can automatically adjust the type or quantity of chili used in future attempts. Third, it allows for multi-turn interaction, refining flavors through dialogue in a way that more closely resembles how a human chef responds to feedback. From Tineco’s perspective, AI functions as the “organ system” of a smart stir-fry cooker, one that must be capable of sensing, judging, and executing.
Executives at BSH Home Appliances offered a broader industry view, arguing that smart stir-fry cookers in China are still in a phase of rapid development. Looking ahead, they identify four major trends shaping the category.
The first is rising levels of automation and intelligence, as more products integrate automatic stirring, temperature control, recipe programs, and one-touch cooking to minimize user intervention. The second is a shift toward health and personalization, reflecting growing consumer interest in low-oil, low-fume cooking, nutrient retention, and easy-to-clean designs—positioning smart stir-fry cookers as health-oriented kitchen assistants. The third trend is deeper connectivity and AI support, with future models expected to integrate more fully into IoT ecosystems, leverage cloud-based recipes, learn user preferences, and offer remote control alongside data-driven cooking optimization. The fourth is broader adoption driven by falling costs, as maturing technologies, supply-chain optimization, and economies of scale gradually lower price barriers and make these appliances accessible to more households.
Taken together, these developments suggest that smart stir-fry cookers still have room to grow. As intelligence levels continue to improve and average prices decline with technological maturity, this category—defined by its emphasis on health and convenience—may yet deliver on its promise of making home cooking both easier and more reassuring for consumers.