Who Are We?
For many years, we, the owners of Yum Asia had been in love with Asian food but found that the biggest problem was that we couldn’t replicate the perfect rice which you can readily get in Asia and good restaurants.
We wanted to bring this cooking technology to the UK and Europe and did just that and have since encouraged people to get interested in cooking perfect rice through our website www.yum-asia.com and foodie blog www.greedypanda.co.uk.
No matter how hard we tried, rice cooked in a saucepan just wasn’t the same! After some really disastrous purchases of non-fuzzy logic (non-premium style) rice cookers, which rather than cooking the perfect rice we were looking for, just spat out starchy water all over our kitchen worktop, we bought a Zojirushi fuzzy logic rice cooker and it changed the way we cook completely. This is how Yum Asia began.
1000s
of 5 star reviews
+30,000
Rice Cookers Sold
28
countries we sell to
15+
Years experience with rice cooking
700+
Facebook Likes
Multi Award Winning Rice Cookers
Why Did We Design Our Own Rice Cookers?
In the early 2000s we dreamed up the idea of introducing Zojirushi premium rice cooker technologies to the UK, Europe and USA to an unmet need of rice lovers. We then soon realised that it wasn’t just us that had been tired of poor quality rice cookers that broke after a few uses or were too basic to meet our perfect rice cooking demands. We scaled up our operations from the UK to the whole of Europe shipping hundreds of rice cookers at a rate we sometimes struggled to keep up with.
For more than 15 years we have worked with Japanese rice cooking technologies and learned how they work and their best and most useful features.
10 years later our sales were doing great but having worked with Zojirushi for so long we began to see where we could improve and build on their solid foundation. We noticed that certain functions, features, styling and price points were missing from the Zojirushi range which is why we decided to start research and developing our own range of rice cookers. After several years of trial and error we then launched our first model, Sakura, in 2016 followed by the first UMAI IH for the UK/EU markets ‘Bamboo’ in the summer of 2018. A few months later we identified the market for a mini rice cooker and so Panda was born in the autumn of 2018. Kumo our low carb rice cooker launched early 2020 for the more health conscious and there are more developments still to come. More recently in the middle of 2021 we brought our products to the USA.
Every part of the cooker from the display panel, moulded materials, inner bowl, packaging and instruction manual was designed with meticulous detail to ensure that customers would get the very best value for their money.
Our aim is always to keep our range small but powerful, to constantly develop and improve the existing models by listening to our customers and adjusting accordingly. We will never just sit on the designs we have. Instead we will innovate, lead and continue to provide the best rice cookers with the best pre and post sales service for all of our customers who want to join the Yum Asia rice cooker revolution.
Our Idea….
“To bring rice cooking perfection to the UK, USA and Europe by introducing the latest and best in rice cooker technology to those markets. To make it affordable and effortless for everyone to cook Asian quality rice at the touch of a button and to create a cooker that is an expert rice cooker at it’s core but with useful add-on features”
What Is Unique About Yum Asia Rice Cookers?
Our Bonsai, Kumo, Panda, Sakura Bamboo and Fuji models are made in dedicated factories that also make other premium rice cooker brands such as Cuckoo and Tiger. Everything from styling, components through to functionality has been thought with the customer in mind. We often found that some people liked certain features of one cooker model but also features of another cooker model but obviously didn’t want to buy both models. So we combined all the great stuff into our rice cookers that made them not just ordinary rice cookers but great rice cookers with useful add-on multi-cooker functionality.
Crucially, our rice cookers have a fuzzy logic brain which carefully controls the amount of heat applied to your food, the type of cooking stage to be applied and just the optimal cooking time to give you perfect results every time.
Add-on cooking functions such as slow cooking, steaming and cake baking which we made sure Kumo, Panda, Sakura, Bamboo and Fuji could perform extremely well at. At the core of every great rice cooker is the inner bowl and so our rice cookers have premium, durable inner pots made out of a thick hard wearing 5 layered ceramic coating.
We gave them optimal capacities – up to 8 cups for Bamboo and Sakura which is between the usual 5.5 and 10 cup sizing of rice cookers to offer customer more flexibility in serving sizes. Kumo with the rice cooker standard 5.5 cups. Fuji with a mid range 4 cup capacity. Finally, for Panda we went with 3,5 cups to offer a reduced capacity cooker at a much lower price point yet with excellent quality features.
Bamboo was the UK and Europe’s first IH rice cooker. We then launched the smaller capacity Fuji IH rice cooker. Bamboo uniquely has a GABA brown setting and also a Yumami setting which add flavour to the rice due to specific changes in temperatures and cooking types and times. Both Fuji and Bamboo use our unique UMAI smart cooking technology for perfect rice every single time.
With more than 20 years in using and selling advanced rice cooker technologies and thermalware to the UK, USA and European market. We only design and sell the best for tomorrow’s future today!
