North London Food & Culture

What’s it like quitting your job to seek Kickstarter funding for an invention?

Kentishtowners Ben Hall and Adam Alexander have created an app-controlled sous vide cooker. Now all they need is £100k to get it off the ground.

Adam Alexander & Ben Hall with prototype Juvo units
Adam Alexander & Ben Hall with prototype Juvo units

Back in September, my friend Adam and I decided to combine our love of food, engineering (our profession) and sleek design into a new, all-consuming project.

We’d made our first domestic sous vide machine a few years ago, having been frustrated by the fact that there were only large commercial versions on the market. Sous vide is, for the uninitiated, a water-bath method of cooking food that uses low but precise temperatures to create incredible textures and flavours.

Juvo Sous Vide steak, looking very nice indeed
Juvo sous vide steak, looking very nice indeed

We were convinced that professional cooking like this needn’t be confined to restaurants, and made it our mission to bring this to the home. So, Juvo was born, and suddenly we’d become business partners.

Our idea was that the machine that could be controlled by a simple mobile phone app that did all the thinking for you: to be able to press ‘cook’ whilst sitting at your desk, and then be greeted by the perfect steak on arriving home. The longer we worked on the concept, the more we knew we were onto something.


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Although we’re both engineers, Adam and I have different skillsets, so we make a great team. We realised though that without some input from a food industry professional, our offering wouldn’t be strong enough. Bringing chef Rich Harris on board further bolstered the team and quickly put us in a position to launch.

Sous vide cooking, controlled from the train home
Sous vide cooking, controlled from the train home

As we’ve moved through the process from inventors to entrepreneurs we’ve found networking a lifeline. It’s easy to end up spending a fortune on expensive lunches in the West End, but we’ve been so lucky that Kentish Town has so many coffee shops and pubs to introduce people to instead. There are also many local businesses that have helped us: we took our packshots at a place on Holmes Rd for example, and that in turn was moments away from the house we used to film the promo video.

It’s now been nine months since I quit my day job to make Juvo a reality, and I’d be lying if I said it was easy. Over the course of developing the product and the lead up to the Kickstarter campaign, it’s been hard to ignore the pressure that comes with not earning a steady income.

Oh, and the need for Juvo to be successful is even more important to me now, as last weekend I asked my long-term girlfriend to marry me on Parliament Hill, meaning we have a wedding to save for. Wish us luck, or even better, contribute to the Kickstarter. There’s an endless supply of perfectly cooked steak in it for you.

The Juvo Kickstarter campaign runs until 31st July. If the funding target is reached, Juvo will be taken into production. for more info, including what you get in return for various levels of funding, visit juvosousvide.co.uk

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About Kentishtowner

The award-winning print and online title Kentishtowner was founded in 2010 and is part of London Belongs To Me, a citywide network of travel guides for locals. For more info on what we write about and why, see our About section.