Sanyo has launched the world’s first cooker that can turn rice grains into bread — an innovation that it hopes will be a hit across Asia.
The machine can mill a cup of rice grains into rice flour, then mixes it with water, gluten, yeast and other ingredients to bake a loaf of bread in four hours, Sanyo Electric said.
The machine is named "GOPAN" in Japan — coined from "gohan", meaning cooked rice, and "pan", Spanish for bread. Sanyo will start exporting it to other Asian countries next year after its Japanese launch in October.
The home use bread machine market is basically dead in US but is a booming market in Asia with a 30% yearly growth. I think part of the reason it fail in US is there were too many cheap and poorly made model flooding the US market in the beginning. On top of it making bread is really an art more than science. Simply dumping all the ingredients into the machine will not make you quality bread.
Look like need to look for an importer at end of the year.
