An interview with Simon WU, Vice President R&D and co-founder, Homa Appliances

Q - Being among the founders of one of the largest cooling products manufacturers in the world and in your position as VP R&D, you have been a privileged witness and actor of technological evolution in the cooling industry over the past twenty years. How did R&D in this field evolve over the years?

Simon Wu - In the past, R&D concentrated mostly around the industrialisation stage of a product's lifecycle. It was mainly about finding ways of optimising production while constantly improving product performance, which substantially amounted to the capacity of an appliance to produce cold efficiently.
Over time there has been a shift in focus, from the product, i.e.the "container", to the "content", i.e. the food items it is meant to preserve. A lot of research was conducted on food, and the industry learned a lot about how it kept over time, and how different foods reacted to temperature and humidity, hence the re-discovery of crispers, the appearance of cool boxes and an increased degree of flexibility for consumers to set temperature and humidity levels themselves.
It's as if R&D had moved out of the factory and into the consumers' homes.

Q - What's in store for us now? What are the current trends and scenarios that will influence the cooling industry in the near future?

SW - Today, the name of the game is "food preservation" as opposed to "cooling appliance", and another effect of this changing perspective is that consumers lifestyles have also come into the equation.  That produced a huge leap forward both under the technology aspect and in terms of design.
The objective of R&D isn't simply meeting technical specifications anymore, but also satisfying consumers' expectations in terms of emotions, status and eating and shopping habits. In recent years, there's been a growing attention on the part of consumers to environmental issues. Healthy eating, translating into increased demand for wholesome foods and well-being in general, are also trending.
That's a clear indication of what the market expects of us: products that are respectful of our planet and serve our new, healthier lifestyles. Add to that the fact that the refrigerator has become the centrepiece of the most important room in our homes, the kitchen, and a leading character in the staging of our lifestyles, and you'll know where we're going next: mean-looking, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly and food-savvy fridges featuring innovative, leading-edge technology.

Q - How do you go about matching that brief-for-the-future?

SW - For us, it's not as much a brief-for-the future as it is the current status of our proposition! Homa is OEM by vocation, and serving global leading brands gave us invaluable insight into both technology advances and consumer trends. Also, working in close collaboration with suppliers, technical partners and University research organisations, helped us gain a unique understanding of which technologies are significant and when they are mature enough to be most effectively used and become mainstream. It is the case of No-Frost. We haven't invented it, and it's been around for a while, but it's come a long way and is now ready for us to take it to the next level and systematically feature it across our entire range of products.

Q - How do you do that, and how can you take No-frost to the next level?

SW - Since our beginnings as OEM, which we still proudly are, we've also achieved true ODM status and are offering client brands our own take on the industry's state-of-the-art. No-Frost is substantially about having air constantly flowing around the cavity, managing humidity and preventing the formation of frost while at the same time ensuring even temperature levels throughout the appliance. This way, food lasts longer and in fresher conditions.

Q - Only, No-frost systems use more energy than old-style standard direct cooling.

SW - Yes, you are right; this is why we are investing growing resources in an exclusive "AI Inverter technology" applied to the compressor, which helps offset the relative increase in energy consumption and even improves the refrigerator's overall energy performance.
The intelligent use of LED lighting also reduces energy consumption and elevates the product from a design standpoint. In the end, we can offer a product that saves energy, with high-end features, and this on a scale few other producers in the world can attain. As a matter of fact, we're offering exclusivity, but for all. With the timely introduction of leading-edge technology that can be immediately scaled to any dimension, we are offering our clients a key competitive advantage. A claim we can sustain because in our industry, size does matter, and our being specialised in cooling and at the same time having such a large production footprint further boosts our relative scale, and edge, over generalist players, and offers our clients compelling and competitive products in a record go-to-market timeframe.

Q - What other innovations are you introducing?

SW - We tend to infuse the same sense of care that customers have toward their food into every aspect of development, and new features in our products reflect this state of mind. We like to describe our approach to design and engineering as "nature-inspired", though every intuition is tried out and validated through testing and prototyping with external, specialised partners.
So, just like no-frost is inspired by the air masses constantly moving around in a natural context, we have introduced the new proprietary concept our MultiClimate System^TM  .
Different levels of temperature and humidity to preserve other foods in conditions that are best adapted to them and as close as possible to their natural environment.
Sometimes we draw on the idea of simple, traditional ways of keeping certain foods fresh and wholesome, like the beds of ice in market stalls, which keep fish and seafood cool without freezing it.  We recreated this situation in our “converter box” in the fridge cavity that can reach temperatures below O°C.
Flexibility and choice are also critical to a new customer experience, with larger boxes and drawers to accommodate larger shopping, more freedom to organise the internal spaces of the refrigerator, and even switch the basic function of individual compartments from refrigeration to refrigeration to freezing. New, intuitive and precise User Interface solutions are also being introduced and will enhance customer experience, which ultimately is the principal driver of the current trends in our industry.
You can discover in-depth our innovative Food Preservation philosophy by "browsing" our audacious brand-new Four Doors platform (FF 4-73).

Copyright HOMA 2022- Issued By Homa Marketing dept. on September 2022