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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Is Amazon Considering Making A Smart Fridge? Probably Not (But Maybe)

Is Amazon working on a refrigerator?

Maybe.

Recent patent applications suggest the company is researching advanced refrigerator technology around spoilage detection while they also expand efforts to help you order groceries and have them delivered inside your home. Taken together with their investment in smart home tech and growing interest in the kitchen, one scenario could have the company creating a smart fridge.

Skeptical? You should be. It probably won’t happen. But there are signals it is at least a remote possibility, so let’s analyze them and speculate about the possibility of an Amazon Smart Fridge.

First the patent applications.

Amazon Files Fridge Patents

In September, Amazon filed two related patent applications that centered around spoiled food detection in refrigerators.  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.

Here is a mockup drawing of the fridge included in both of the patent applications that show where gas-based spoilage sensors would be placed in the fridge:

Both patent applications go into a lot of detail about how exactly the systems would work, but the essence of these concepts is that Amazon wants to put digital eyes and a nose into your refrigerator to automatically detect when food is spoiled and let you know.

As with any patent applications, you need to take them with a grain of salt. Amazon files a whole lot of patents these days and more often these do not turn into granted patents. But the very fact Amazon is researching spoilage detection is interesting in itself, even if it’s not enough.

Amazon Investment in Kitchen Commerce

For the last few years, Amazon has invested in kitchen replenishment and ordering platforms. First, there’s Amazon Dash Replenishment Service, the integrated automated ordering system that today is largely about replenishing non-spoilables like coffee filters or printer ink. However, there’s no reason why the same technology couldn’t work in a fridge.

Then there’s the Amazon Echo and Alexa. Over half of all Amazon Echos are ending up in the kitchen, and Amazon continues to build out the capabilities of their Alexa-powered voice assistants to act as virtual grocery shoppers.

We’ve also seen Amazon continuing to invest in their own mobile app to enable new commerce possibilities. Just this week the company announced it had added augmented reality capabilities to its mobile app. One could easily imagine the mobile app getting alerts from a smart fridge to tee up a new set of groceries.

Amazon’s Recipe-Driven Commerce Patent

Amazon’s fridge patent applications are no doubt intriguing, but things get even more interesting when considering Amazon IP such as its patent for recipe-driven commerce. Amazon was issued a patent in 2015 to enable for recipe-driven commerce that breaks down a recipe and inserts ingredients into a virtual shopping cart.

Here’s an image from the patent filing showing a recipe with a commerce/shopping cart component:

The patent application was originally filed in 2011, which shows you how long Amazon has been thinking about food and automated ordering.

Amazon Is Investing in Unattended Delivery

Last week, Amazon revealed Amazon Key, a new initiative centered around unattended delivery. The idea here is an Amazon delivery person would be able to enter your home to deliver a product while you aren’t there. The system utilizes an Amazon smart video doorbell and works with smart lock partners to enable access.

While Amazon Key could be used for pretty much anything Amazon delivers, unattended delivery makes lots of sense for groceries given fresh food needs to be put into a fridge at some point. Of course, an Amazon fridge isn’t necessary to make this all happen, but as long as Amazon is moving down the path of automated ordering, it could be one of many potential scenarios.

Amazon’s Partnership With Kenmore

A couple of months ago, Kenmore made news by announcing it would start selling its appliances via Amazon. It was a big deal since this was the first time in the brand’s century-plus history that it would sell outside of a Sears’ sales channel.

As I wrote here, the deal was a big win for Amazon, while Sears/Kenmore will also benefit from Amazon’s e-commerce capabilities. At the same time, Sears continues to struggle and, long-term, this deal could the first step towards new business models where Kenmore works with other players to help develop partner products. Who’s to say that at some point Amazon doesn’t consider working with Kenmore to make a refrigerator or – as they did with Whole Foods – just buy the company?

Amazon Loves Food

This one might seem obvious, but Amazon loves the food business. If the surprising acquisition of Whole Foods wasn’t enough to convince you, certainly their decade-long investment in grocery delivery, experimentation with new store formats, their drive-through pick up concept, Fresh subscriptions and various other initiatives are signs of how excited Amazon is about the food market. And why not? They know along with Walmart that food is the biggest portion of consumer wallet spend outside of housing and transportation (roughly 13% of consumer household budgets go towards food).

Much how Amazon eventually invested in hardware for entertainment because they saw a huge opportunity for new business models as the living room became digitized, who’s to say they won’t think the same thing about food as the kitchen goes through the same digital transformation?

The Fridge Is The Heart Of The Kitchen

In some ways, one could argue the fridge is the heart of the kitchen. Samsung certainly thinks so, doubling down on a strategy around their Family Hub refrigerator this year and likely continuing to bet on the smart fridge. Rumors have been floating for the last couple years that Amazon was making a kitchen computer – which eventually turned into was the Echo Show – but who’s to say Amazon wouldn’t just consider moving the technology for the Show into the fridge itself alongside all the other tech they are have developed for the kitchen?

All The Reasons They Won’t Make a Fridge

As I said, there are lots of reasons not to make a fridge. One is the company usually invests in smaller, low-cost hardware products in new categories. Another is there’s a good chance that if Amazon wanted inside our fridge, they would simply consider making a retrofit solution similar to the Smarter fridge cam.  And if they wanted to make a home storage device, why not just make a front-door locker system, something akin to an Amazon locker for the front door?

But still…

Conclusion: Gene Munster, My Apologies

The Amazon fridge question reminds me of a few years ago when folks speculated whether Apple would make a TV. One analyst in particular, Gene Munster, seemed to bet his whole career on the idea before eventually admitting he’d been wrong.

Part of the reason Munster speculated for years about an Apple TV was there were lots of signals.  Patent filings, investment in digital entertainment platforms and the recurring pattern of Apple coming up with a new hero consumer product every couple years fed into Munster’s thinking.

So, while I don’t intend to become the Gene Munster of the Amazon fridge and wage a multiyear speculation battle about why its the right thing to do, I figured I’d at least play Munster for a day and ask the question: will Amazon make a smart fridge?

Probably not.

Buy maybe.

The IFA 2017 Smart Refrigerator Roundup

Fridges are sexy again.

Ok, so maybe they weren’t ever sexy in the first place, but if you were at IFA this past week, you would have seen a host of fridges with interactive touchscreens, image recognition software, internal cams and even the ability to move around the home and deliver a frosty one.

If this year’s CES and IFA are any indications, the fridge is fast becoming the focal point for many appliance makers, who are jumping at the opportunity to remake their product with advanced hardware and software that transform their fridges into the smart kitchen -- and smart home -- hubs.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the fridges that were on display at IFA:

Haier Link Cook Series

Haier showed off their Link Cook series of smart refrigerators, a new line of products that looks similar in feature set to the Samsung Family Hub refrigerator.

Haier smart fridge "Link Cook" @IFA 2017

The Link Cook series of fridges is part of a broader lineup from Haier. According to Ashlee Clark Thompson at CNET, the Link Cook is part of “Haier’s U+ Smart Home Platform, which connects the Link Cook Series to a Haier oven and range hood. According to Haier, you’ll be able to select a recipe on the refrigerator, automatically send the heating instructions to the oven and view the recipe on a small screen on the range hood.”

At this point, Haier is vague on timing and pricing. It will be interesting to see is if Haier’s new fridge eventually enters the US market under the GE brand.

Samsung’s Family Hub

Samsung tends to make its biggest news at CES, but it had a nice update on some new features and partner integrations for its flagship smart fridge at IFA.

While the company has had voice commands (both Alexa and its voice assistant, Bixby), they announced expanded voice command features at IFA. From the press release: “Family Hub’s voice capabilities provide a new way to interact with the refrigerator. Users can ask for the time and weather updates, search the internet, read news articles, play music and radio, add items to their shopping list, and even view inside of the refrigerator without opening the door.”

It also became more evident that Samsung sees their Family Hub as the central command center for the smart home. They teased this at CES and at the Smart Kitchen event at Samsung’s NYC location in June, but now users can use the Samsung Connect smart home features from the fridge. Samsung Connect, based on the SmartThings platform (which Samsung acquired a few years ago), is now built into the fridge.

Panasonic’s Mobile Fridge

Panasonic turned in one of the most intriguing showings of IFA as far as future kitchen tech is concerned, showing off an AI-powered kitchen assistant and a combo microwave-steam oven, but the show stealer was their moveable fridge named “Cool.”  Cool utilizes similar technology employed by any number of robot vacuums in that it has internal sensors that measure the distance between itself and obstacles in its way like, say, a kitchen island, and continuously develops a map and improves its understanding of the overall home layout as moves around.

Cool, which is about the size of a dormitory fridge, does not currently have a price or ship date.

Smarter/Liebherr

The smart fridge showing at IFA wasn’t all touch screens and robot fridges. Smarter, the smart kitchen appliance startup from the UK founded by Dragon Den wunderkind Christian Lane and his wife Isabella, showed off production models of the smart fridge cam is debuted last year at IFA and also had a major partner announcement. The company announced that their FridgeCam smart fridge camera would ship with every smart refrigerator from German industrial conglomerate Liebherr, the biggest privately held manufacturer of refrigerators in the EU (and also the inventor of the tower crane).  The deal is a good one for Smarter. While the announcement did not break out what percentage of total volume from the German manufacturer is smart, the company ships an estimated 2 million fridges per year.

The Rise of the Smart Fridge

In many ways, this focus on the fridge by big appliance manufacturer makes sense. In many homes, the fridge is the central focal point of the kitchen, where pictures, school assignments, and shopping lists go. Why not digitize that?

The fridge is also where the bulk of our fresh food is stored, all of which have a limited lifespan. Smarter fridges could help us manage this inventory and make sure we waste less (and keep us from buying redundant food that will inevitably be wasted).

Lastly, no platform really dominates the kitchen screen, but with the rise of guided cooking, the growing popularity of food and cooking content, and more and smarter appliances to manage, the front of the fridge makes sense for that big attractive touchscreen.

And of course, there are those of us there are who have long dreamed of a day when a robot assistant could bring us a beer. Just who could have predicted that robot would also be a fridge?