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Ooni, known for building the pizza oven category, announced a surprising new product today. It’s not a new pizza oven, but rather a new mixer that will make better pizzas.
The innovative Ooni Halo Pro Spiral Mixer is going to be released this April at a price of $799. It brings a type of mixing that makes superior dough to the home cook.
Planetary Mixer vs. Spiral Mixer
The popular KitchenAid Stand Mixer is the most well-known example of a planetary mixer. It’s named that because mixing attachment rotates around the mixing bowl, much like that planets in the solar system. While this happens, the bowl stays stationary. Below is a YouTube video from KitechenAid where you can see what I mean.
Planetary mixers are great for their versatility and cost, which is why they’ve been so popular. I have one in my kitchen and it does a great job for most things.
Where it doesn’t do a great job is for things like pizza dough or bread dough. The dough is too thick for the paddle to effective mix it, the mixer is loud doing it, and it gets hot which isn’t great for dough making. That’s exactly why if you go to a bakery, they’re not using a planetary mixer for dough making, they’re using a spiral mixer.
A spiral mixer operates differently in that the mixing attachment is stationary, but the bowl rotates. This more closely mimics the hand kneading process. You can buy spiral mixers for home, but most of them are expensive or don’t sit on the counter. Just look at a search at a restaurant supply store. Those things are big, ugly, and expensive.
Much like the at-home pizza oven market, Ooni saw that as an opportunity to innovate. In the video below you can see the new Ooni mixer coming out. One, look for movement of the bowl instead of the mixer attachment, but also look at how sleek their mixer is. It’s night and day from what’s out there.
Just because the Ooni spiral mixer excels at making dough, it doesn’t mean you can’t use it for other mixing like a stand mixer. It comes with three different attachments for making things like cake batter, cookies, and pastries.
Features and Specs
- Retail price of $799 (check price)
- Includes a 7.3 Qt, stainless steel, dishwasher safe bowl
- Has a nice looking digital interface that lets you set timers or precisely control the mixing seed
- Cast aluminum body that looks good and provides durability
- Comes in Polar White or Charcoal Grey
What We Really Like About the Ooni Mixer
While the feature listed above are enough to get excited, there are a couple more details that takes this mixer to the next level. The first is that Ooni preserved the useability of a KitchenAid type mixer that home cooks love. Unlike other spiral mixers on the market, this mixer has a tilting head for easy access (like the KitchenAid Artisan Mixer), and the bowl is removeable.
The other is I really like the splash guard design on the mixer. It tilts down with the head and, because the mixer attachment is moving all over, it covers the bowl really well. The covers for planetary mixers aren’t as nice and don’t work as well, leaving a messy kitchen.
Product Expansion for Ooni
Ooni invented the category that they’re in, and they’re the biggest company in the space. That being said, with overall macroeconomic pressures on the consumer, and the pizza oven category maturing, it’s harder for them to grow.
They’re certainly trying with innovative new ovens, like the Koda 2 Max, but this gives them another area to expand into. The mixer is an unexpected product for them to release, but when you see it, it makes a ton of sense. They are trying to make better pizza at home after all, and there’s nothing more important than good dough to do it.
Why it Could Be Hard
Like I said, developing a new category is something that Ooni is used to. The mixer category is a beast of its own though with KitchenAid reigning supreme.
That can be hard to contend with, because with KitchenAid being the incumbent and having such a strong brand, it doesn’t necessarily matter if Ooni releases a superior product. They’ll have to focus on educating and evangelizing spiral mixers to win.