Finding the right equipment in this industry is critical to our success. That’s why we launched the FoodSpace Combi Challenge in 2025, with the singular goal of providing operators, design consultants and equipment manufacturers with objective insights that support thoughtful equipment specification.
You can take a closer deep dive into the outcomes by clicking on the PDF below:
But, without getting into the weeds too much, what was fundamental to setting this up was the idea of reciprocity. That is about believing in something greater than what you are doing. There’s a story I always think of. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Mexico City gathered up money and gifted it to Ethiopia to protect its borders. No loan. No strings attached. 50 years later, a devastating earthquake struck Mexico City, which impacted millions. Ethiopia – which is not a rich country – returned that favor and donated money back to Mexico City to support relief efforts. They recognized the value of what Mexico City had done for them all that time ago, and what it meant to reciprocate it.
So, back to foodservice. Rather than to simply identify a single best combi oven, we wanted to go beyond what trade shows and factory tours teach us about equipment. We can’t keep doing things the same way expecting a different result – that’s how Albert Einstein defined the concept of insanity. We needed to go a step further: to know what this equipment was like to smoke in, roast in, and to taste the food that came out of it. To understand how chefs experience it firsthand. That way, by providing our industry with the best knowledge we can make available, we are contributing towards its ability to evolve – and therefore, succeed.
Using a methodology and controlled and comparable conditions to standardize the assessment, we applied the same process for each oven, as if we were the end-user. We cooked in the units for six days straight, purposely leveraging a variety of cooking styles to test the product in situ, starting with overnight smoking into long, slow cook, dehydrate, sous vide, roasting, air frying, steaming, and so on.
That week of testing taught me and the FoodSpace team more than had we flown to every manufacturer’s booth at a tradeshow. I can now tell that story to my clients, drawn from a place of trying to truly understand what these ovens are capable of and what the operator will experience downstream once the equipment is installed. We saw what this could mean for the entire industry. What value it could bring.
Value for everyone
So how can other consultants use this information? They can use it as they spec and can trust the outcome knowing how we arrived there. From there, they can tell the same story to their clients, and that reciprocity continues onwards.
Meanwhile, the manufacturers get an incredible amount of feedback – real feedback from knowledgeable consultants. The results also proved to us that it’s important to think differently about this equipment. Price points, for example, don’t always reflect the quality of the equipment itself over others. There was about a $22,000 gap between the least and most expensive oven in this test, yet there isn’t a huge gap between what some of them can actually do. Some equipment will also have challenges with things such as availability of parts, which our test doesn’t cover.
So, the test only tells one part of the story. That said, there was an incredible outpouring of support and confidence in what we were doing, why we were doing it, and how. Notably, manufacturers could see the true value in the opportunity to receive insights on how chefs enjoyed working with their equipment.
Looking ahead, we aim to do two of these per year. This summer, we also aim to run a speed-oven challenge, where we let the manufacturers conduct the test, meaning the framework, controls and outcome will be in place, but the manufacturers cook with the product, over a two-week event, with 3-5 manufacturers at a time, followed by blind tasting. They will then be categorized between non-certified, KNLZ certified, and UL 710B certified (both certifications relating to ventless commercial cooking but differing in scope and requirements for fire safety) ovens. We’re still working through that, as cavity size and power consumption of ovens will most likely play a role, but that’s the plan. We will then decide on two new categories to test in 2027, and I would love to get consultants to come experience that live.
It’s always been ingrained in me to be thinking about how we can make things better for the future. Even if your firm just celebrated its 50th anniversary, if we’re doing the same thing from decades ago, things become stagnant. So, we must constantly keep looking for where we can improve.
The bottom line is, for every meal that gets created, we’re feeding somebody that matters. And if we forget that and resort back to doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different result? Well, we do not progress.
Throughout my career, I’ve often felt like I’m feeding people that are changing the world, so why not change the world by way of how we feed people? The combi-oven enables versatility, so what is its – and our industry’s – future? Let’s find out together. If we’re not thinking about how the future might look, we’re already dead. And if we can help each other to change, reciprocally, along the way, then even better.
Last but not least, as we gear up for our Speed Oven Challenge this summer, we have created a survey to go out to designers and another for operators to help gain some insights to aid in developing the challenge.
Here is the survey link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/SpeedOven_Designer. Thanks in advance for filling it in.
Joe Schumaker FCSI
