KitchenAid Did It Right 87 Years Ago
Modern appliances are rarely built to last. They could learn something from the KitchenAid stand mixer.
My KitchenAid stand mixer is older than I am. My dad bought the white-enameled machine 35 years ago, during a brief first marriage. The bits of batter crusted into its cracks could be from the pasta I made yesterday or from the bread he made then.
I learned to make my grandfather’s crunchy molasses gingersnaps in that stand mixer. In it, I creamed butter and sugar for the first time. Millions of stand mixers with stories like mine are scattered across the globe, sitting on counters in family homes since who knows when. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History displays Julia Child’s cobalt-enameled mixer in its re-creation of her kitchen; when Julia traveled for a cooking demonstration, she demanded that a KitchenAid be provided.
If you buy the popular Artisan model today, your new appliance will look quite similar to the 1937 model designed by Egmont Arens: solid zinc base, enamel coating, arched overhang, a little cap for attachments on the face, room for a bowl to slot into its cradled arm. Inserting a dough hook or a whisk requires a simple click and turn, and adding an attachment to the front face uses the same motion. Arens, who edited the art section at Vanity Fair and designed objects such as aerosol cans, baby carriages, and beach chairs, once said in an interview that a machine’s parts should be “organized into a trim, sleek, streamlined shape—for in addition to lowering wind-resistance, streamlining also lowers eye-resistance.” The KitchenAid’s exterior design is a perfect example of that theory, not only functional but aesthetic: The contained, smooth lines of the casing and the glossy enamel make it easy to put away, satisfying to clean, and decorative on a countertop.
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This sturdy, elegant device holds a lesson. Pry the mixer open, and you will see that many of the parts are interchangeable. If my mixer stopped spinning, I could clean out the debris on the inside, replace a broken gear, re-grease the machine, and screw the top back on again. If need be, the mixer could be outfitted with a new motor, probably for about $100. It is hard to break and easy to fix, and because it is not laced through with computers or a Wi-Fi chip, it will never reach obsolescence because of a software update.
How a device dies is almost as important as how it operates. Appliances that cannot be repaired the way the KitchenAid can become trash in just a few years. In the United States alone, we threw out 2.2 million tons’ worth of hair dryers, coffee pots, toasters, and other small appliances in 2018—the most recently available data from the Environmental Protection Agency—and 75 percent of that waste went into landfills. This is more than quadruple the amount from 1990, when the EPA first started collecting these data; we have become culturally comfortable with disposable gadgets filling an always-growing pile of polluting trash. Mr. Coffee does not biodegrade.
You will never pass down an Apple Watch or Sonos speaker through the generations—they’ve been cut off from that possibility by firmware updates and new operating systems. You are almost certainly not using your grandmother’s phone to call your friends, her toaster oven to cook, or her typewriter to function at your desk job. Yet the stand mixer endures. KitchenAids of a certain vintage may never show their age; newer models, which have more plastic parts, are weaker in some ways, though they are still easily repaired, says Zach Dinicola, a KitchenAid-repair expert known as Mr. Mixer, who makes YouTube and TikTok repair videos. “I've worked on fourth-generation mixers, passed down from great-grandma to youngest daughter,” he told me. “I have people in tears: ‘This is the last piece of my mother, this is the last piece of my grandmother that I had; it broke and I thought I had lost that connection.’”
I deeply relate to this: I’m told that I used to watch my mom making my black-bottom birthday cupcakes from a high chair. Most of our electronic devices are divorced from this kind of history, serving us individually for a while but not lasting long enough to hold our stories. Perhaps this could change if new laws are passed that pressure manufacturers to keep gadgets repairable for longer; one such bill passed in Oregon’s state Senate just yesterday.
As much as I love the history in my mixer, KitchenAid must contend with economic reality, and the device’s endurance makes it less consumable. (Just look at what happened to the Instant Pot.) So for years the company has released mixers in limited-edition colors to encourage new purchases—akin to a “rose gold” or (RED) iPhone. This year’s mixer is an iridescent periwinkle called Blue Salt. The appliance’s design has also been streamlined in recent years beyond those plastic parts: Dinicola explained that in some models, the board that connects the different electrical parts of the machine must be replaced if any one of its components breaks, in contrast to older models in which each piece stood alone. (A representative for KitchenAid said via email that the changes are intended to improve the machine’s performance, and that the company is committed to the foundational idea that the stand mixer should have a limited number of parts, each of which should be long-lasting, easily repairable, and modular.)
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Regardless of the reasons for these adjustments, this simple fact remains true: KitchenAid stand mixers are designed to do one thing well, and for a long time. “They’re still sturdy, they’re built well, and they’ve stayed true to the design,” Dinicola said. “The majority of how the gears function and the motor—all of that has remained the same. It works, and it works well.”
Why can’t other devices offer the same enduring marriage of function and design? Maybe Arens was just a genius with a rare idea. Or maybe there’s something singular about a machine that facilitates the act of baking, which requires skills and recipes that are themselves very old, passed down through families, connecting us with one another.
I want my mixer to sit on the counter of the first house I buy. I want my kids to learn to bake with the same machine that I will use tonight for brioche and tomorrow for shortbread. I have a sappy-sweet vision of my future daughter begging to take my white-enameled giant to her first real apartment, just like I did with my parents a couple of years ago.