Kitchen playsets have long been a staple toy among little girls (and some little boys). Kids just love to pretend stocking the fridge, stirring the pot, and taking freshly-baked cake out of the oven. You know… all the things adults typically do in the kitchen. The KidKraft Alexa 2-in-1 Kitchen and Market modernizes the kitchen playset by bringing in Amazon’s virtual assistant to the mix.
No, the playset doesn’t have a built-in speaker that kids can use to chat with Alexa. Instead, the toy is meant to work with your existing Echo, along with other Alexa-compatible speakers, to level up the pretend kitchen play, adding bustling kitchen sounds to the mix, so kids can really feel like they are cooking up a storm.
The KidKraft Alexa 2-in-1 Kitchen and Market is a pretty large playset that gives you a kitchen in front and a market in the back. The kitchen comes with a tall two-door fridge, a sink, a cooktop, an oven, a microwave, a cutting board, a hanging rod (for all your cookware), and a set of shelves, along with a collection of pots, pans, plates, cups, and utensils. On the other side of the toy is a market area with shelves and drawers that you can stock up with all sorts of plastic food and supplies. There’s a working scanner for self-checkout, a cash register for swiping the included fake credit card, and even a section filled with shopping bags.
Unlike most kitchen playsets, various parts of the toy are fitted with sensors that allow it to detect what you’re doing at the moment. When fiddling with the faucet, for instance, it can play water sounds to make it sound like you’re washing your produce (or cleaning the dishes), all while playing cutting noises when you’re performing chopping motions on the cutting board. The sounds and light effects are all over the toy, by the way, with the cash register making those “ka-ching” sounds when you swipe, the stove making sizzle sounds and glowing when you cook, and the oven making rumbling noises.
The KidKraft Alexa 2-in-1 Kitchen and Market comes with 24 recipe cards that kids can use to organize their play a little bit, requiring them to grab the correct ingredients from the “market” and perform specific cooking actions step-by-step. Activating the KidKraft skill for Alexa expands the possibilities of play even greater, giving kids new recipes to work on, while keeping them entertained with a veritable library of what we suspect are terrible dad jokes. There’s also built-in games, such as one where Alexa will recite descriptions for ingredients (e.g. red and round) that kids will then have to guess correctly, retrieve from the market, and scan on the register. We imagine they’re looking to expand the variety of games even further, which should make this way more fun than the standard kitchen playset kids have been using all these years.
Want one? The KidKraft Alexa 2-in-1 Kitchen and Market starts shipping November 9th.
- smart connected toy works through the enabled kidkraft kid skill for alexa to provide interactive...