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Panasonic Launches the HomeCHEF Connect 4-in-1 Multi-Oven, Revolutionizing Everyday Cooking with the Kitchen+ App that Connects with Fresco

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Designed To Reclaim Mealtime And Expand Culinary Possibilities, The Versatile Kitchen Innovation Is
Now Available For Purchase Online

NEWARK, N.J., March 5, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Panasonic, a leading provider of consumer lifestyle technologies, today announced the launch of the HomeCHEF Connect 4-in-1 Countertop Multi-Oven. Featuring four powerful cooking methods—Microwave, Air Fry, Convection Bake, and Broil—the connected appliance empowers users to create delicious meals and save time by connecting with the new Panasonic Kitchen+ app, powered by leading smart kitchen platform Fresco.

Integrated with the Panasonic Kitchen+ smart cooking app, Panasonic’s connected multi-oven seamlessly transforms your ingredients to finished meals with step-by-step guided cooking instructions. Featuring hundreds of expertly tested recipes tailored to various cooking functions and dietary preferences, the app streamlines the cooking process with time-saving solutions that make every meal effortless. With shortcuts for weekly favorites including autocook presets and live appliance updates and notifications, home cooks can spend less time in the kitchen and more time enjoying meals with loved ones, reclaiming precious moments around the dinner table.

With its sleek, space-saving design and cutting-edge technology, the HomeCHEF Connect 4-in-1 Multi-Oven redefines convenience, delivering faster and healthier cooking at the touch of a button. Designed for versatility, it comes equipped with essential accessories, including an Air Fry Basket, Wire Rack, Enamel Tray, and in one model, the HomeChef™ Magic Pot. Built for efficiency without compromising quality, this multi-functional appliance seamlessly integrates powerful cooking methods:

Microwave with Inverter Technology: Enjoy fast cooking with Panasonic’s advanced Inverter Technology, ensuring thorough heating while preserving essential vitamins and nutrients. Perfect for everything from reheating leftovers to poaching, braising, and steaming delicate foods.Air Fry: Achieve crispy, golden-brown results with minimal oil, delivering a healthier alternative to traditional frying. No preheating is required.Convection Bake: Hot air circulates evenly throughout the oven, offering precise baking temperatures ranging from 215°F to 425°F, ideal for everything from pastries and cookies to roasted meats.Broil: Harness the power of dual high-efficiency quartz heating elements for fast, even heating, browning, and crisping. This advanced technology is perfect for elevating mac and cheese, au gratins, thinly sliced meats, seafood, bread, and more. With two power levels to choose from and no preheating required, enjoy perfectly cooked meals in no time.

“At Panasonic, we’re committed to making home cooking more enjoyable and accessible. With the integration of the Fresco-powered Panasonic Kitchen+ app, we’re taking convenience to the next level,” said Sayaka Matsumoto, Product Specialist. “Whether you’re air-frying a steak to perfection, baking fresh cookies, or using the HomeChef™ Magic Pot for a creamy feta pasta, the HomeCHEF 4-in-1 Connect Multi-Oven makes every meal effortless. By combining powerful technology with intuitive design, we’re helping home cooks save time without sacrificing flavor or quality.”

The HomeCHEF™ Connect Multi-Oven is the first Panasonic appliance that connects with Fresco, allowing home cooks to easily access and control the appliance’s unique capabilities and expand their cooking repertoire with confidence. 

“We are thrilled to connect such an innovative and powerful appliance with Fresco,” said Ben Harris, CEO and co-founder of Fresco. “We deeply value Panasonic’s understanding of how to improve the cooking experience with great software, and this is the perfect example, now live in market for home cooks.”

The HomeCHEF Connect 4-in-1 Multi-Oven is now available at shop.panasonic.com and on Amazon for $529.99. The model including the HomeChef™ Magic Pot is exclusively available online at shop.panasonic.com for $579.99, Both models will also roll out to trusted retailers later this month. To learn more about Panasonic Kitchen and its offerings, visit shop.panasonic.com. or follow on Instagram @panasonickitchenusa.

About Panasonic Consumer Electronics Company
Newark, NJ-based Panasonic Corporation of North America is a leading provider of Consumer Lifestyle technologies, as well as innovative Smart Mobility, Sustainable Energy, Immersive Experiences, and Integrated Supply Chain solutions. The company is the principal North American subsidiary of Osaka, Japan-based Panasonic Holdings Corporation. One of Interbrand’s Top 100 Best Global Brands of 2024, Panasonic is a leading technology partner and integrator to businesses, government agencies and consumers across the region. Learn more about Panasonic’s ideas and innovations at na.panasonic.com/us 

About Fresco

Fresco is the only cross-brand smart kitchen platform, making personalized, simplified and consistent cooking possible for millions of home cooks worldwide. Every home cook—and the appliances they use to prepare meals—is unique. That is why Fresco partners with market leaders including Panasonic, AGA, Bosch, Electrolux, GE Appliances, Instant Pot Brands, Kenwood, LG Electronics, Middleby Corporation, and Viking, allowing brands to unlock the full value of any appliance that Connects with Fresco. From IoT appliance control to app development, Fresco’s KitchenOS platform enables brands to innovate their appliances and serve an enhanced cooking experience to their customers, truly powering the smart, connected kitchen.  Founded in 2012, Fresco (formerly Drop) operates globally and has offices in Dublin, Ireland, and Madrid, Spain. To learn more, visit frescocooks.com.

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Product Info:  https://shop.panasonic.com/pages/kitchen

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SOURCE Panasonic Corporation of North America

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Chef Robotics Physical AI Models Can Now Automate Baked Goods Packing

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Chef Robotics, a leader in physical AI for the food industry, today announced that Chef robots can now automate tray assembly for baked goods packing. The application places baked products, such as burger buns, chocolate chip cookies, biscotti, butter cookies, biscuits, fortune cookies, granola bars, rusks, and shortbreads into trays and packaging containers before sealing.

Watch Chef robots in action.

Baked goods packing has historically been difficult to automate for high-mix production. Each item behaves differently on the production line—a granola bar compresses under the wrong grip, while a biscotti or rusk can crack if placed at the wrong angle. Surface textures range from glazed and smooth to crumbly and irregular, and strict presentation requirements leave little room for error. This variability has made it challenging for automation systems to reliably handle baked goods at production speeds, leaving food manufacturers dependent on manual labor and traditional bakery equipment.

To address this, Chef built its baked goods packing application on its existing piece-picking capability, which uses Chef’s AI-powered computer vision and physical AI models trained across diverse real-world production environments. This allows Chef robots to assess each item’s position, shape, and orientation in real time and determine how to pick the items from the pan and place them quickly and precisely without damaging them.

The baked goods packing application supports four distinct placement capabilities.

First, Chef’s vision system detects the angle at which each item sits in the pan and reorients it after picking, placing it on the tray at the exact angle required, regardless of its original position, enabling retail-ready presentation for SKUs that require precise angular placement.

Second, Chef robots can place multiple baked goods into the same packaging container in a single automated pass, completing full tray assembly without manual intervention.

Third, for packaging containers with multiple small compartments, Chef robots can precisely place items into each designated section, including multiple items in the same compartment, using Chef’s AI vision model to detect compartment positions and orientations in real time.

Fourth, Chef’s vision system identifies the exact center of each tray and places every item at a predefined offset from that center, ensuring a uniform, consistent arrangement across every pack regardless of how trays arrive on the conveyor.

For food manufacturers evaluating bakery systems and baked goods packaging automation, the application offers higher throughput, reduced labor dependency, and consistent presentation across shifts. The capability runs on Chef’s existing robotic hardware and software, allowing manufacturers to deploy it without requiring any changes to their production lines.

Chef’s baked goods packing application is available in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the UK and is included as part of Chef’s robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) pricing model.

About Chef Robotics
Chef is the first company to have commercialized a scalable AI-driven food robotics solution. With over 104 million servings made in production, Chef leverages ChefOS, an AI platform for food manipulation, to offer a Robotics-as-a-Service solution that helps industry-leading food companies increase production volume and meet demand. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Chef aims to empower humans to do what humans do best by accelerating the advent of intelligent machines. Visit https://chefrobotics.ai to learn more.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chef-robotics-physical-ai-models-can-now-automate-baked-goods-packing-302756923.html

SOURCE Chef Robotics

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Chef Robotics Physical AI Models Can Now Automate Baked Goods Packing

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on

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Chef Robotics, a leader in physical AI for the food industry, today announced that Chef robots can now automate tray assembly for baked goods packing. The application places baked products, such as burger buns, chocolate chip cookies, biscotti, butter cookies, biscuits, fortune cookies, granola bars, rusks, and shortbreads into trays and packaging containers before sealing.

Watch Chef robots in action.

Baked goods packing has historically been difficult to automate for high-mix production. Each item behaves differently on the production line—a granola bar compresses under the wrong grip, while a biscotti or rusk can crack if placed at the wrong angle. Surface textures range from glazed and smooth to crumbly and irregular, and strict presentation requirements leave little room for error. This variability has made it challenging for automation systems to reliably handle baked goods at production speeds, leaving food manufacturers dependent on manual labor and traditional bakery equipment.

To address this, Chef built its baked goods packing application on its existing piece-picking capability, which uses Chef’s AI-powered computer vision and physical AI models trained across diverse real-world production environments. This allows Chef robots to assess each item’s position, shape, and orientation in real time and determine how to pick the items from the pan and place them quickly and precisely without damaging them.

The baked goods packing application supports four distinct placement capabilities.

First, Chef’s vision system detects the angle at which each item sits in the pan and reorients it after picking, placing it on the tray at the exact angle required, regardless of its original position, enabling retail-ready presentation for SKUs that require precise angular placement.

Second, Chef robots can place multiple baked goods into the same packaging container in a single automated pass, completing full tray assembly without manual intervention.

Third, for packaging containers with multiple small compartments, Chef robots can precisely place items into each designated section, including multiple items in the same compartment, using Chef’s AI vision model to detect compartment positions and orientations in real time.

Fourth, Chef’s vision system identifies the exact center of each tray and places every item at a predefined offset from that center, ensuring a uniform, consistent arrangement across every pack regardless of how trays arrive on the conveyor.

For food manufacturers evaluating bakery systems and baked goods packaging automation, the application offers higher throughput, reduced labor dependency, and consistent presentation across shifts. The capability runs on Chef’s existing robotic hardware and software, allowing manufacturers to deploy it without requiring any changes to their production lines.

Chef’s baked goods packing application is available in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the UK and is included as part of Chef’s robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) pricing model.

About Chef Robotics
Chef is the first company to have commercialized a scalable AI-driven food robotics solution. With over 104 million servings made in production, Chef leverages ChefOS, an AI platform for food manipulation, to offer a Robotics-as-a-Service solution that helps industry-leading food companies increase production volume and meet demand. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Chef aims to empower humans to do what humans do best by accelerating the advent of intelligent machines. Visit https://chefrobotics.ai to learn more.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chef-robotics-physical-ai-models-can-now-automate-baked-goods-packing-302756923.html

SOURCE Chef Robotics

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Air Products to Expand Industrial Gas Supply for Samsung Electronics’ Next-Generation Semiconductor Fab in South Korea

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New investment underscores the company’s long-term commitment to Korea and its leading role in the global semiconductor industry 

LEHIGH VALLEY, Pa., April 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Air Products (NYSE:APD), a world-leading industrial gases company and serving Samsung globally, today announced it has been selected by Samsung to supply industrial gases for its new advanced semiconductor fab in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea.

Under the agreement, Air Products will build, own and operate multiple state-of-the-art production facilities and a bulk specialty gas supply system to supply nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and hydrogen for Samsung’s new semiconductor fab. The new facilities are expected to come onstream in multiple phases from 2028 through 2030.

Air Products has a long track record of executing multiple phase expansions in Pyeongtaek to support Samsung’s growing manufacturing needs. This latest project represents Air Products’ largest investment to date in the semiconductor industry and will establish Pyeongtaek as the company’s single largest operations site globally supporting the electronics industry. 

“Air Products is honored to be selected once again by Samsung and to have their continued confidence as a trusted partner supporting their strategic growth plans,” said SR Kim, President, Air Products Korea. “This significant investment reinforces Air Products’ role as a leading global supplier to the semiconductor industry and underscores our long-standing commitment to supporting our strategic customers with safety, reliability, efficiency and excellent service.”

Air Products has served the global electronics industry for more than 40 years, supplying industrial gases safely and reliably to many of the world’s leading technology companies. The company has operated in Korea for more than 50 years and has established a strong position in electronics and manufacturing sectors.

About Air Products

Air Products (NYSE: APD) is a world-leading industrial gases company in operation for over 85 years focused on serving energy, environmental, and emerging markets and generating a cleaner future. The Company supplies essential industrial gases, related equipment and applications expertise to customers in dozens of industries, including refining, chemicals, metals, electronics, manufacturing, medical and food. As the leading global supplier of hydrogen, Air Products also develops, engineers, builds, owns and operates some of the world’s largest clean hydrogen projects, supporting the transition to low- and zero-carbon energy in the industrial and heavy-duty transportation sectors. Through its sale of equipment businesses, the Company also provides turbomachinery, membrane systems and cryogenic containers globally.

Air Products had fiscal 2025 sales of $12 billion from operations in approximately 50 countries. For more information, visit airproducts.com or follow us on LinkedInXFacebook or Instagram.

This release contains “forward-looking statements” within the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on management’s expectations and assumptions as of the date of this release and are not guarantees of future performance. While forward-looking statements are made in good faith and based on assumptions, expectations and projections that management believes are reasonable based on currently available information, actual performance and financial results may differ materially from projections and estimates expressed in the forward-looking statements because of many factors, including the risk factors described in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2025 and other factors disclosed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, we disclaim any obligation or undertaking to update or revise any forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect any change in the assumptions, beliefs or expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances upon which any such forward-looking statements are based.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/air-products-to-expand-industrial-gas-supply-for-samsung-electronics-next-generation-semiconductor-fab-in-south-korea-302757497.html

SOURCE Air Products

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