Apparently, Amazon is building a smart fridge.
That’s at least according to a report from Business Insider (paywall), who reports that Amazon is building a fridge that would utilize machine vision and other advanced technology to monitor food in the refrigerator, notify us when it’s about to expire, and automatically order & replenish items through Amazon.
Dubbed Project Pulse, the initiative is being led by the company’s physical store unit, the same group that developed Amazon Go’s just walk out technology. Other teams, such as Lab 126 (its California-based hardware team that developed the Echo) and Amazon’s grocery unit are also contributing to the effort.
Here at The Spoon, we’re not all that surprised Amazon wants to create a fridge, mostly because we (I) predicted it nearly four years ago. When I asked “Is Amazon building a smart fridge?” in 2017, I tried to connect some of the dots I saw in Amazon’s commerce and devices businesses. And let me tell you, there were a lot of dots.
Perhaps the biggest being patents filed by the company at the time. In the fall of 2017, Amazon had filed two patents for smart fridge technology: the first described a fridge that uses machine vision to detect food spoilage, and the second described a fridge that utilized an electronic nose to detect food spoilage.
From the post:
The first patent application, filed on September 14th of this year, is called “Image-Based Spoilage Sensing Refrigerator” and centers around utilizing internal cameras to detect spoiled food. The system would use both infrared and visible spectrum cameras to detect spoilage of food and then send an alert to a mobile device.
This patent application was designed to work in concert with a scent-based sensing system defined in another patent application (also filed on September 14th) called “Scent-Based Spoilage Sensing Refrigerator” that utilizes a variety of sensors to detect gasses emitted from spoiled food and then sends an alert to a mobile device.
Of course, Amazon files lots of patent applications, many for technologies that never really go anywhere. But unlike many other companies, Amazon doesn’t just do R&D and build patent war chests for nothing. If they think they can make a product and upend a market, they usually will, so a smart fridge didn’t seem all that far-fetched.
There were other reasons I suspected something was up, including the company’s interest in kitchen commerce with products like Dash, a shoppable recipe patent, and even a partnership with Kenmore to sell fridges. And a year or so later, when the company entered the appliance business with their own branded products, an Amazon smart fridge seemed even more likely.
So now that an Amazon smart fridge is a very real possibility, I’d ask this: Will it be something worth buying? I would say yes if can help consumers better manage their food inventory than existing refrigerators. Samsung, LG, and others have made some significant advances in smart fridges, but it still feels like the category hasn’t achieved its full potential in food management and waste avoidance.
In the end, I’m both cautiously optimistic and a bit skeptical about an Amazon smart fridge. Optimistic given Amazon’s proven ability to think out of the box and completely rethink an existing product category. Skeptical because the company’s innovation in hardware has often historically been not-so-subtly motivated by a desire to serve Amazon’s broader corporate goal, which is to get people to buy more stuff. Because of this, I’m worried a technically impressive Amazon smart fridge might in the end just be a big connected shopping cart.
For this prediction at least, I hope Amazon proves me wrong.
Leave a Reply