Device for warming food and beverage containers having support plate and perimeter skirt structure

Abstract

A warming unit for warming a vessel for containing food or beverages, such as a coffee pot for an automatic drip coffee maker, reduces scorching and burning resulting from non-uniform heating of the vessel. The warming device has a support plate with an upper surface dimensioned to support the vessel and a perimeter skirt extending downwardly from a perimeter of the support plate to surround a heating element beneath the support plate. The upper surface includes raised support structures formed as dome-shaped structures thereon. The cooking vessel rests on and is supported by the top surfaces of the support structures in spaced relation to the plate thus creating a convection space which reduces thermal conductive heating and allows both convection heating and infrared heating. The support plate also comprises a thermal mass sufficient to dampen fluxuations of temperature at the upper surface. Vent holes through the top plate and perimeter skirt vent steam and vapors from underneath the support plate and facilitate convective warming of the vessel. An alternative embodiment may be constructed as an interface plate device with a flat plate dimensioned correspondingly to a hot plate of a conventional warming device for insertion between the hot plate and a cooking vessel.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.