This slow cooker of the future could replace your Crock-Pot

The Crock-Pot has been a staple in many kitchens since the 1950s. The cooking process is simple: Throw in meat, veggies, herbs, potatoes, and broth for a stew, turn it on, and let the ingredients simmer until they're tender.

Crock-Pots make it easy to cook one-pot meals, since you can put everything in before work and come home to a warm dinner. But the device has a major flaw: different ingredients - like chicken and potatoes - have vastly different cooking times, which means one can wind up under-cooked while the other gets soggy or too well-done.

Enter Oliver, a sleek new slow cooker from the San Francisco design consultancy Matter. Controlled by an app, the device has six canisters that keep a dish's ingredients separate. The containers are programmed to drop their ingredients into the mixture at the ideal time in a given recipe, ensuring that each component of the dish comes out with the optimal texture.

Oliver's inventor, Khalid Aboujassoum, tells Business Insider that Oliver will start a pilot program in September, but the device is not yet available to buy.

Here's how it works.