Self-heating lunch box warms meals using far-infrared

For anyone who’s always eating on the go, you now have another option to manage hot meals while commuting without requiring the use of a microwave or toaster oven.

Currently on Kickstarter, the HeatWave Go is a self-heating lunch box that uses infrared technology to warm up meals. It reportedly doesn’t affect nutritional value, but provides enough heat to quash bacterial growth while ensuring food remains tasty and moist.

If you’ve ever been to an infrared sauna, you may have noticed that the heat radiants more evenly over your body compared to the heated rocks that leave your extremities feeling a bit cooler and your torso hotter due to the heat waves reaching a range limit.

Warming up meals in a toaster oven likewise results in uneven heating, with the top portion getting dried or burnt and the middle part ending up lukewarm if the element is located on the top – the reverse is true if the element is on the bottom.

With a microwave oven, emitted microwave energy is changed to heat energy that is absorbed by the water molecules in food, causing them to vibrate. This cooks the food only, leaving the container unaffected. High-water-content foods like vegetables are cooked quickly and efficiently in a microwave.

However, this also results in the bottom portion being scalding hot if a meal is sauce-based like pastas, and the top portion being undercooked with random cold spots. Microwaves also cannot heat frozen microwavable meals internally with high enough temperatures, or long enough to fully kill bacteria such as salmonella or listeria due to inconsistent heating.

Heatwave Go

The HeatWave Go features a stainless steel reflective insulated cover and an infrared heat lamp tube in its top section, located above a food-grade stainless steel lunch box. Utilizing this combination, it’s able to achieve a uniform temperature with no direct contact with the food, thus resulting in what the creator claims is “100% heating without dead angles.”

Infrared heating works by transferring the heat directly to the food which warms up and re-radiates the heat evenly throughout. Warming a meal completely takes about 15 minutes, with the temperature reaching 55 ºC (131 ºF) to ensure adequate heating that does not damage nutrients and prevents bacterial contamination.

Heatwave Go

Remote monitoring of the process allows for unsupervised usage, and is made possible via an app that’s programmed to display real-time temperatures and to send completion alerts when the meal is fully warmed.

You can get your very own HeatWave Go lunch box for a pledge of US$99 – the planned retail price is $159. If all goes well in funding and production, it should start shipping mid-2026.

Source: Kickstarter