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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

LG

SmartThinq-ing. LG Appliances to Work with Google and Alexa

In a Switzerland-like move of neutrality, LG announced today that its SmartThinq line of connected appliances will work with both Google Home Assistant and Alexa (hat tip to Digital Trends). This will allow users to control more than a hundred SmartThinq devices, including ranges, ovens and refrigerators, with their voice through Google Home or Amazon Echos.

LG had previously announced Alexa integration for its new line of Thinq smart refrigerators, and at the same time had stated its commitment to an Open Platform, Open Partnership philosophy, which included incorporating Google Assistant. Today’s announcement seems to make this openness official across all of LG’s SmartThinq devices.

This is a smart (pardon the pun) play for LG, as both Alexa and Google Home devices have been selling in the millions. By working with both Google and Alexa, LG can slide its smart home devices into whatever ecosystem people have chosen for themselves. Removing any barrier to adoption is good — especially when you are asking people to plunk down thousands of dollars for something like a smart fridge.

It’s also a contrast to Samsung, which has chosen to push its own smart assistant, Bixby, in its Family Hub fridges at the expense of working with outside voice services.

In the kitchen specifically, LG is creating a very open platform in a bid to capture early adopters. In addition to working with both Google and Alexa, LG announced at CES that it will work with both Innit and SideChef to provided guided cooking capabilities into its ovens and ranges.

Probably not so coincidentally, LG also announced its own Thinq Google Assistant Speaker today, giving LG its own entrant in the smart speaker market. And since it’s powered by Google, you can talk to it to control your other LG devices.

The Battle For The Kitchen Screen Got A Lot More Interesting At CES 2018

When I wrote about the battle for the kitchen TV last June, the launch of the Echo Show was one of the signals that told me companies were beginning to pay attention to the space. Half a year later, my own usage of the Show has helped me better understand why.

That’s because ever since Amazon’s video-enabled Alexa assistant entered our home, it’s the first thing my eyes are drawn to as I enter the kitchen. The continuous scroll of news and weather, integration with popular apps like Pandora and Allrecipes, and access to videos all have quietly made the small screen indispensable for my entire family.

And now, with a slew of standalone smart displays and kitchen-centric video screens at CES last week, I’m more convinced than ever as we enter 2018 the kitchen TV market will be a fascinating one to watch.

Here are some of the kitchen screen entrants from this year’s big consumer show:

Echo Show And The Competitors

In some ways, the Echo Show and its small screen competitors are the early favorites. Whether or not to purchase a $200 or below (today the Show is on sale for $179) countertop video-enabled voice assistant is a much easier decision to make than that of a $3 thousand fridge. And now, with Google pouring money into the space, you can expect many more choices and over time.

CES 2018 featured some new smart displays on, um, display, many of them designed to be used with Google Assistant. I suspect at some point Google will likely come out with a first-party device (like the Echo Show), but for now we have displays from the likes of Lenovo, Philips and JBL and the initial reviews are pretty positive.

Fridge TV

Hard to believe, but Samsung’s already on version three of its Family Hub fridge, a product that is fast becoming the central focus of the CE giant’s broader smart home strategy. I stopped by the Samsung CES showroom at the Aria to check out the Family Hub 3, and I have to say the new screen looks good.

And as is often the case, LG has followed Samsung’s lead with the ThinQ Instaview Fridge but took things one step further by making their smart screen translucent so you can also see what’s in your fridge. You can see a demo of the LG ThinQ Instaview Fridge here:

While the idea of fridge TVs continue to gain steam, some argue that there’s a mismatch between the life cycle of cutting-edge tech and that of installed appliances. An appliance is an investment, something most consumers expect to last up to a decade. Technology, on the other hand, can be outdated after a few years. This argument resonated after talking to someone at the Samsung booth, who told me the Family Hub gen-1 likely wouldn’t be updated to the third generation software that is coming out with the Family Hub 3, (though the Family Hub Ones in the field were recently updated to Family Hub 2 software).

Despite this, I think the centrality of the fridge in most kitchens and the early relative success of the Family Hub will fuel interest in making the fridge the star of the kitchen TV market.

The GE Kitchen Hub 

One of the more interesting concepts in kitchen TV I saw at CES was the GE Kitchen Hub, a screen/smart home controller designed to sit above your oven.  The Kitchen Hub, which was originally conceived in GE Appliances innovation hub FirstBuild, not only has voice and gesture control capability built in but works with Zigbee and Z-Wave to connect to your smart devices.

You can see Digital Trends video walkthrough with the Kitchen Hub below:

GE Kitchen Hub - Hands On at CES 2018

The concept of the Kitchen Hub sits somewhere between the Amazon and Samsung approach, a device that’s separate from a large appliance (and their long life cycles), but one that is also a built-in. The product is priced in that middle territory as well, coming in at $600.

I like the idea of the Kitchen Hub. A separate built-in screen, one that is more affordably priced than a hybrid appliance/TV product and that can also act as a smart home control center is a potential winner. Of course, a lot will rely on execution, but overall this is an intriguing product to watch.

One thing’s that clear: the battle for the kitchen TV became a lot more interesting at CES 2018. Check back at the Spoon and subscribe to our newsletter to monitor our coverage of this market over the next 12 months.

Podcast: The CES 2018 Smart Kitchen & Foodtech Wrapup Show

CES 2018 is in the books. It was a hectic week packed with smart kitchen news and showcases. Mike was on the floor in Las Vegas and reveals the big trends (voice activation everywhere!), the cool news stuff (guided cooking!), and the countertop dishwasher he calls “sexy.”

Take a listen for all the in-depth analysis you need. You can also subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show in Apple Podcasts or download it here.

LG Integrates Innit and SideChef Guided Cooking At CES

LG, which showed off its ThinQ line of smart appliances at CES this week, announced it will integrate with SideChef and Innit guided cooking platforms, allowing them to operate LG appliances. So, when you’re following recipes from SideChef or Innit, those apps will talk to LG SmartThinQ ovens and ranges to automatically set heating temperatures, modes and cooking times.

SideChef and Innit are part of a wave of guided-cooking apps that use a combination of interactive elements such as timers, photos and video to help cooks of all levels prepare meals more easily. In partnering with LG, these guides now move off the screen and into the real world to do some of the actual work of cooking for you.

The guided cooking space heated up this week with with other major players making big announcements. Elsewhere at CES, Whirpool announced that its Yummly guided cooking app will be able to send instructions to its appliances. And over at the Kitchen and Bath Show in Orlando, Hestan announced that its guided cooking technology will move inside appliances, the first of which is a cooktop from a new residential line from Meyer called Hestan Indoor.

Notably absent from all the guided cooking news this week is Samsung. The company showed off its latest Family Hub fridge that could mirror your phone or Samsung TV, but there was no mention of any connections within a smarter kitchen.

Right now, the press announcement only mentions SideChef and Innit interacting with the hot side of cooking, though it’s easy to see that integration extending into the fridge. The new LG ThinQ refrigerator already recommends meals based on the food you already have. Presumably, SideChef and Innit will also get access to that same ingredient list, and customers could see a more valuable end-to-end solution by using their guided recipe app of choice.

And there is value in helping transform anyone into a decent cook by breaking down the silos between recipe and actual cooking. The instructions are no longer an inert list separate from the result, they are now actively involved in the result.

LG says it’s committed to an open strategy when it comes to creating the smart home. So you can expect more announcements like this to come out this year. Which is good, because partnerships like these also helps allay any fears of getting locked into an ecosystem when buying an expensive, connected appliance.

As these smart cooking platforms expand, partner up and open up, recipes talking to your appliances is something we’ll all be talking about.

CES: Will the Newest Smart Fridges Be a Smart Buy?

At CES 2018, Samsung and LG continued their tradition of debuting new connected refrigerators that are less about keeping your food cold and more about becoming the center of not only your kitchen, but your life.

Samsung unveiled its new set of Family Hub fridges, which feature a built-in touchscreen and a host of connected features that offer smart-home integration and meal planning as well as information and entertainment services.

The company has expanded support for the SmartThings connected home platform (which Samsung owns). Standing at your Family Hub fridge, you will be able control your smart thermostat and lights, or check video feeds from your connected cameras.

The new Meal Planner feature provides users with recipes based on food preferences, dietary restrictions, and, using the fridge’s internal cameras, the food you already have. A new Deals app helps you find bargains and save them to a shopping list. And the View Inside app lets you remotely check what’s in your fridge, so no more forgetting if you already have broccoli at home while you’re at the store.

Samsung’s voice assistant, Bixby, is built into the fridge and can now recognize more than one voice. So it can tell apart different family members when they speak and bring up personalized information such as calendars, news, weather and updates, depending on who’s talking.

The Family Hub screen can also mirror Samsung TVs, stream content from phones, and access audio and video content like music streaming services as well as HomeAdvisor, Pinterest and Buzzfeed’s Tasty.

Over at LG, the company unveiled its InstaView ThinQ Refrigerator, which sports a 29-inch touchscreen and has the ability to “talk” with other LG ThinQ devices.

LG’s touchscreen adds a bit of magic by turning transparent if you knock on it twice, so you can see what’s inside your fridge without opening the door.

The ThinQ fridge also recommends recipes based on the food you have inside it. And once you’ve picked a recipe, the Alexa-powered fridge will guide you through it on-screen. Then the ThinQ fridge will automatically talk with the ThinQ oven to preheat to the proper temperature, and to the ThinQ dishwasher to select a fitting wash cycle for all those dirty dishes you create making the dish.

The ThinQ also allows you to “Smart Tag” foods in your fridge with information like expiration dates, so your fridge will know when something is about to go bad. Finally, it lets you remotely access the internal camera when out shopping.

Pricing information wasn’t provided, but a quick look at Home Depot shows that existing Family Hub fridges start at $3,000, and the previous generation of LG smart fridges start at $3,600.

That ain’t cheap. But the bigger issue with purchasing a major smart appliance is that technology moves quickly and companies want you to buy into a bigger ecosystem beyond just one appliance.

Most people don’t buy a new fridge every year, let alone five or even ten years. So smart fridges like these beg the question, what happens when the smarts of your fridge get outdated and can no longer run the latest version of of your favorite streaming service? And heaven forbid that your fridge gets bricked.

Then there’s the question of diving into an ecosystem. With the Samsung, you have to use Bixby, not Alexa, so you lose access to that (ubiquitous) Amazon integration. And while the LG makes use of Alexa, if you want it to talk to your oven or your dishwasher, you’ll have to pony up for those LG-branded devices as well.

We love smart kitchen devices here at The Spoon, it’s just that when it comes to major appliances, we like to be extra smart about what we buy.

Amazon Brings Cooking Capabilities To Alexa Smart Home Skill API

While over 50% of Echos end up in the kitchen, a lack of cooking-specific commands and categories within the popular voice assistant’s smart home API has meant few people actually prepare food with Alexa today.

But that could soon change.

That’s because today Amazon introduced built-in cooking controls for cooking appliances into the Alexa smart home API. Initially rolling out in microwaves from Whirlpool and others, the new cooking capabilities will let users define time and temperature parameters and will eventually use the Alexa voice interface to walk through cooking a meal.

From the Alexa developer blog:

Customers are increasingly using voice user interfaces (VUIs) as a hands-free way to manage their lives, and hands-free control is especially valuable when cooking. With the built-in cooking device controls in the Smart Home Skill API, you will make it easier for your customers to control your cloud-connected microwave. Instead of pressing multiple buttons to enable advanced microwave features, your customers can now use their voices. For example, a customer can say “Alexa, defrost three pounds of chicken” or “Alexa, microwave for 50 seconds on high.”

Initially, there are four new capability interfaces in the Smart Home Skill API – Alexa.Cooking, Alexa.Cooking.TimeController, Alexa.TimeHoldController, and Alexa.CookingPresetController. You can leverage these interfaces today for microwaves and for appliances that support preset cooking. The interfaces are designed for future extensibility as support for more cooking devices becomes available.

The new Alexa cooking capability understands food categories (for example, Alexa will take a food term from the Echo user – such as “sockeye salmon” – to categorize food in the “Fish” category) and cooking modes.  Appliance makers are able define their different cooking modes that are discoverable within the Alexa app, which means users will be able to access modes such as “defrost” in products such as Whirlpool’s line of connected microwaves. The new cooking capability from Amazon also allows appliance makers to make their presets libraries available through Alexa.

While Whirlpool’s expected to be the first to launch the new Alexa cooking capability for its connected microwaves (no exact date has been given), Amazon also announced Samsung, GE, Kenmore and LG are all working to bring the new Alexa cooking capability to market.

And finally, one last piece of news embedded in the announcement: The company has invested in June, high profile maker of the June connected oven, via the Alexa fund. This means, of course, you can expect the June oven to work with Alexa’s cooking capabilities sometime in 2018.

Enjoy the podcast and make sure to subscribe in Apple podcasts if you haven’t already.

The Battle For The ‘Kitchen Screen’ Has Just Begun. Here’s The Leading Contenders

Back in the year 2000, the world’s first Internet-connected refrigerator was introduced. Made by LG, the Digital DIOS came with a webcam, an Ethernet port and perhaps most importantly, an LCD touchscreen.

The fridge was one of the first examples of an appliance with a digital screen created specifically for the consumer kitchen, but with a $20 thousand price tag, consumers stayed away.  Today, nearly two decades after the introduction of the world’s first smart fridge, some of the world’s biggest consumer electronics companies are rushing to put screens back into the kitchen again.

Why now? There are a few reasons, but most come back to one simple truth: today’s kitchen is becoming the home’s central gathering place, where people not only come to make meals but also to hang out with friends, pay bills or do homework. In other words, the kitchen has become the modern home’s ‘everything room’, and unlike the family room where a TV or family computer often resides, there’s no defined product today in the kitchen that’s accepted as the go-to screen for family members to share information, manage home systems, keep tabs on things and communicate with one another.

Not that some companies aren’t trying. Here’s a look at the leading contenders:

Refrigerators

With ample flat surface space and usually centered in the middle of the kitchen, you can see why appliance makers see the fridge as the logical place to put a big digital screen. And unlike past efforts where companies would sometimes slap a screen on a fridge with limited functionality, today’s smart fridges have big, high-definition LED touch screens. The Samsung Family Hub’s screen is 21.5″, while LG’s Smart Instaview refrigerator has a huge 29″ screen.

Pros: The main advantage of having the refrigerator act as a family’s community screen is the simple fact the fridge has long served as the home’s de facto analog bulletin board, where families stick shopping lists, family pictures, and calendars. Given what seems a natural progression for the fridge to become the home’s digital command center, it’s no surprise companies have been pursuing the idea of the smart fridge for two decades.

Cons: The biggest challenge fridges face in becoming the main ‘family screen’ is simple: these are devices that are meant to stay in a house for ten years or more. This long lifespan is much different from traditional computing devices, such as mobile phones or tablets, which typically have much faster replacement cycles.  Consumers plopping down $2,500 for the latest fridge are going to want their new device to last for at least a decade, no matter how smart they are when they purchase them.

Smart Assistants

Though the Amazon Echo is only a couple years old, its success has create a whole new category of devices alternatively called ‘smart speakers’ or ‘virtual assistants’ (for our purposes I’ll call them ‘smart assistants’, since not all are speakers and the hardware part beyond the voice assistant is hardly virtual).

And now, the company’s new Echo Show represents an entirely new and exciting direction, with a 7″ touch screen and a new visual skill API that allows third party developers to create skills that leverage visual information such as live stream video from a networked camera or cooking videos from Twitch.

And let’s not forget HelloEgg, a smart assistant with an embedded visual display designed specifically for the kitchen created by a company called RND64 that is expected to ship this year.

Pros: Unlike a heavy appliance like a fridge, smart assistant products can be purchased and installed anywhere on a countertop.  In a way, they’re like a highly optimized tablet, but instead of being a personal computing device they’re created to act as a shared screen. In many ways, the Echo Show is Amazon’s concept of a kitchen computer.

Cons: The touchscreen enabled smart assistant category is just simply too new to know how well it will do with consumers. While the Amazon Echo and other smart assistant products are no doubt becoming popular, it’s just a little soon to see how popular smart assistants with touchscreen will be.

Kitchen Counters And Flat Surfaces

The concept of using the kitchen counter as a Minority Report like interactive touch screen has been bouncing around in future-forward design studios for much of the past decade and, in the past couple years, big kitchen electronics makers like Whirlpool have even toyed with the idea of the countertop touch screen.

IKEA Concept Kitchen 2025

Pros: First and foremost, the idea of your surface as interactive computing screen is just cool. It also offers an extremely flexible and dynamic format to display information and adjust to specific design needs of a kitchen.

Cons: While the idea has been floating around and touted by such big brands like Whirlpool and IKEA, a projected surface touchscreen has yet to roll out in any significant way in a mass market consumer product.

Kitchen-Centric PCs

For a hot moment back in 2008-9, some in the computer industry decided that since people spend lots of time in the kitchen, they should create a line of Kitchen PCs. The idea wasn’t altogether bad since, in some ways, was a predecessor concept to the Echo Show since these products centered around the early touchscreen Windows PCs. But not surprisingly, the late aughts “kitchen PC” movement fizzled out as quickly as it started.

Pros: The idea of a kitchen computer with a touchscreen is not a bad idea, and lots of people actually have their PCs in the kitchen.

Cons: These devices were just Windows PCs with touchscreens that were very much a product of 2009.

The Microwave Oven

The fridge isn’t the only device where a screen could reside. In fact, a decade ago appliance giant Whirlpool toyed around with the concept of putting a TV screen on a microwave oven. While they never rolled the product out to market, others have since toyed around with the idea.

Games Console Microwave

Pros: Some appliances, like the microwave, are nearly as prevalent as refrigerators. Chances are a touchscreen enabled microwave would likely be much less expensive than a smart fridge.

Cons: At this point, I know of no product company that is considering a smart microwave, perhaps because of the complications of sticking a flat screen computing device on the front of a microwave. Not to say someone couldn’t surprise me, but this one seems to be the domain of tinkerers and video-bloggers at this point.

Bottom line, we’re likely to see many more screens in the kitchen in coming years. Unlike the personal computing devices most of us carry in our pockets or backpacks, these “kitchen screen” will be tailored for shared use and act as a modern equivalent of family bulletin board/digital command center for the modern home.

The only open question is exactly which device will it be.

The Smart Kitchen Summit is around the corner. Get your ticket today before early bird ticket pricing before it expires to make sure you are the the one and only event focused on the future of food, cooking and the kitchen. 

Smart Kitchen | Food Tech Wrap-Up From CES 2017

Is it fair to say we’re all collectively exhausted from CES news? The first few weeks of the year are just a deluge of tech press releases about all the things manufacturers plan to do, make, ship, partner with and promulgate during the rest of the year. And even though CES has yet to carve out a specific floor area for food and kitchen related tech items, we definitely saw an uptick in announcements in this emerging space.

We saw smart kitchen products and integrations from larger companies and startups alike across the connected home, appliances and wearables – here’s the rundown.

Alexa, has the smart kitchen arrived? (And have you seen Google?)

It seems no one is sick of Amazon Echo quite yet and we saw even more manufacturers outside of the traditional smart home adding Alexa integration to their product lines. The biggest announcement came from Whirlpool, who made a splash last year with Amazon Dash integration at the show and this year adds voice functionality to its Wi-Fi connected ovens, fridges and washing machines. Alexa, is my laundry done?

And now, if you own a Ford with the Sync 3 platform, you can ask Alexa to preheat the oven from your car.

LG announced a competitor to the Samsung Family Hub with its own smart fridge (more on that later) – with a gigantic touch screen that looks like you might need a step stool to reach the top of, the appliance also integrates with Amazon Echo. Alexa, can you reach that icon for me?

Speaking of Samsung – the upped the ante this year with Family Hub 2.0, adding a bunch of new service integrations (GrubHub and Spotify, to name a few) but not much else. And LG jumped in the smart fridge game with giant touchscreen game with new Smart InstaView Model, boasting much of the same features as the Family Hub, including voice integration, cameras to see what’s inside your fridge when you’re away (or too lazy to open the door) and software to help run your house. LG’s model also has grocery ordering but theirs is Amazon-powered.

Google Home, the Echo’s main competitor, was announced in a few integrations. Conversation Actions, their equivalent to Alexa’s Skills, hasn’t shown us much that is kitchen or food related (with the exception of a Dominos pizza ordering action) as of yet, so Alexa is still your main sous chef for the kitchen. For now.

For their part, Whirlpool had a host of announcements around their “Smart Kitchen Suite”, including their first step into guided cooking. Their assisted cooking will guide users through three step recipes that will send instructions to the oven and program it for the cook. They also introduced “scan-to-cook” which will allow the user to scan barcodes to “send the right directions, temperature and cooking time settings straight to the appliance.”

The smart bar gets customized….and sees more competition

PicoBrew showed off its now-shipping Pico unit at CES and announced that it will offer customized PicoPaks, the pods used to make different types of beer with the device. Previously, PicoPaks were premade by the company’s professional brewers, making it more of a do-it-for-me experience. Now, you can create your own beer selecting flavors and ingredients on the platform with some guidance from the pros.

The area of smart beverages is one we’ve kept our eye on for a while, with device makers and beverage companies all vying for a piece of the pie. But The Spoon’s Allen Weiner found an interesting story NOT at CES, writing, “while companies such as Picobrew and Whirlpool’s Vessi were showcasing their high-tech methods for brewing beer at CES, two giants of the beverage industry confirmed a partnership.” Turns out that AB InBev, the world’s largest beer brewer and the makers of Keurig are teaming up to create a home-brewing system designed to deliver homemade beer and cocktails. Will it do for cocktails what the Keurig did for coffee? We’ll see.

Food waste prevention goes mainstream

The prevention of food waste has been an area I’ve been fascinated with for a while – especially as it relates to technology’s potential to really change our bad habits and help us stop bludgeoning our environment with trash. But so far, most of the solutions are niche or designed for commercial use. But -CES saw the introduction of some smart solutions that might actually change things.

First, there’s the Zera Food Recyler from Whirlpool – which is basically a fancy name for a tech-savvy composter that can live in your kitchen and turn food scraps into fertilizer with very little involvement from you. Composting is a cool idea, and the earth-friendly concept of it appeals to this generation of more health-conscious, organic-buying consumers, but is generally not pursued by the vast majority of us. Whirlpool smartly saw this as a way to use technology and create a one-button solution to this. Zera is on Indiegogo now for a little under $1k (fully funded and still taking backers as of this posting) and expected in stores later this year.

Also pretty cool – the GeniCan, a smart device you place on your trash can that scans items as you toss them in the bin and creates a grocery list from which you can reorder. You can also set it up to connect to Amazon Echo and have it automatically reorder items for you (from Amazon, of course). This might not prevent food waste in the traditional way, but it could stop you from ordering too much food and help you be more accurate with the stuff you need. If you scan everything you throw away first.

The robots are here, and they’re going to teach you how to cook

Robots at CES are not a new thing. For years, companies have been using them – sometimes in the form of product announcements, sometimes just as booth eye candy to lure traffic in – to make a splash. This year, the name of the robot game was giving arms and legs to Alexa – and making her dance, apparently.

But one appliance maker decided to create its own smart robotic assistant for the kitchen, bypassing the popular “put Alexa behind everything” trend. Bosch launched its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-connected appliances last year and this year introduced Mykie (my kitchen elf, shortened) which is basically an Amazon Echo voice device with a small touchscreen that helps you out in the kitchen. Need a recipe? Want to know what’s in the fridge? Want to listen to some music? Mykie’s got you covered. It seems odd that Bosch would want to compete with Amazon in this category, but Mykie does do some cool stuff that the Echo doesn’t, including project images onto a wall via the tiny projector in its rear, allowing you to blow up a recipe video you’re following. Mykie also offers virtual social cooking classes so you can learn to cook with an actual human instructor and the AI assistant. Is it enough to compete with the Echo? Time will tell.

Cooking tech heats up

Drop adds a second appliance manufacturer to its roster – announcing its recipe platform can now control GE Wi-Fi appliances (it announced Bosch integration in September last year.)

Panasonic showed off an entire smart kitchen with technology like a smart wine fridge with different temps for each shelf and a cool display, inductive heating built into countertops and tables to discretely heat and keep food warm and a machine learning / camera combo that lets appliances react to and adjust cooking based on the recipe you’re trying to follow.

The Smart Kitchen Show hits the CES floor

The Spoon’s Mike Wolf hit the CES floor in search of interesting conversations on food tech and smart kitchen – check out The Smart Kitchen Show’s newest podcasts.

Hear from the CEO of nutrition and food delivery startup Habit about their offerings and how they’re building the next generation of personalized nutrition.

Mike caught up with AppKettle’s founder Robert Hill to talk US shipping dates and what’s behind the company’s initial delay to bring the product to market.

Mike and I catch up on all that we saw at CES in our CES smart kitchen wrap-up.

Over the next few weeks we’ll continue to analyze what we saw in smart kitchen and future of food at CES. Stay tuned! If you want to get all our analysis in your inbox, make sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

The 2017 Smart Home Prediction Show

It’s the smart home prediction show & CES 2017 wrap up all in one super-sized episode.

For this episode, we bring back two of our favorite guests: Nate Williams of August Home and Adam Justice of ConnectSense.

We talk Alexa, Google Home, service provider smart home, smart appliances, smart kitchen and so much more.

You can listen Soundcloud above, subscribe in iTunes or download the episode here.

Enjoy!

What Happened To Smart Fridges In 2016?

As we continue our end of year wrap-up series, we wanted to drive into some smart kitchen appliance categories to see what happened (or didn’t happen) to the category as a whole and make some predictions for what’s on the horizon for 2017.

Hey Alexa, what’s in my fridge?

If there was a darling of connected tech in 2016, the Amazon Echo was it. Voice control was barely a whisper at CES last year and by September, if you didn’t have voice control baked into your smart home or entertainment device (or at least have it on your product roadmap), you were irrelevant. And Alexa fit right into the kitchen, with hands-free control in the one room if the house you don’t want to be touching your smartphone.

Voice control makes more sense for devices that do stuff – telling Alexa to pre-heat the oven is a pretty useful skill. So, the Amazon Echo compatibility for fridges is a shorter list, but worth a look:

  • GE – GE launched their Geneva skill to control a range of GE Wi-Fi appliances, including fridges but also ovens and washing machines. For fridges, Alexa can control the temperature, turn the icemaker on or off, prep hot water for coffee or tea, or just give you a status on how the fridge is doing.
  • The Samsung Family Hub connects to Amazon Echo and you can use Alexa to control all the things on the Hub’s OS like Pandora but you can also order groceries through the Groceries by Mastercard app, mirroring Amazon’s own ordering services available through voice.

Speaking of Samsung…

The fridge as the home hub

The concept of the connected fridge isn’t a new one, with appliance makers adding Wi-Fi connectivity to their products for the last several years. One of the companies on the early smart fridge bandwagon was Samsung, who began talking about an internet refrigerator back in 2001. Later during that decade, Samsung was demoing smart fridges at CES; the fridge displayed a small-ish touch screen with basic connected functionality.

Then came the Samsung Family Hub. A beast of a machine (in both size and price), this fridge first debuted last year at CES 2016 with its official launch in May. With its giant 1080p touchscreen on the front, it looked at first glance, like a version of their other Wi-Fi connected fridges on steroids. But the Family Hub actually packs some interesting features that while might seem frivolous at the outset, actually hint at some larger tech trends for fridges and other appliances in the future.

The giant touchscreen features interesting apps like the Groceries by Mastercard app which allows you to order food from FreshDirect and ShopRite, right from your fridge. The fridge also gives users the ability to photo tag their items to keep track of what’s there.

The other future-facing features are the cameras placed in the fridge’s doors to let you see what’s inside when the doors are closed. Why would we want to do that? Well to check when you’re at the grocery store to see what you’re out of, for one. You can also look inside the fridge from the touchscreen on the front, negating the need to open the doors. LG debuted similar functionality at CES 2016, with theirs using a “knocking” feature and a clear window on the front of the fridge to let someone knock, illuminate the interior lights and see what’s in the fridge without opening the door.

But ordering groceries from your fridge’s touchscreen and being able to see what’s inside from your phone in a supermarket isn’t really the compelling story here. The story is what Samsung (and others) haven’t yet put inside this device – and what will make refrigerators way smarter in the future.

The fridge as a part of the kitchen’s OS ecosystem

Moving from connectivity and entertainment to a true smart appliance, the fridge of the future might actually have a database of knowledge and machine learning behind it that will allow it to know things about your food. Startups like Innit are pioneering a new category using food data along with image recognition software to allow an appliance like a refrigerator to recognize food without any user inputs and generate useful information from that. Information like a recipe that could be made with the contents left in the fridge on the day before shopping day would help prevent food waste and also give users helpful ideas for dinner.

The technology concept driving Innit is what’s missing from the Samsung Family Hub and every other Wi-Fi connected fridge. Cameras and connectivity are great, but when something requires the user to constantly input and maintain a database in order to fully deliver on its usefulness, it falls apart. Consumers don’t want another thing to have to update, they want tech that makes things easier.

Innit’s partnership with appliance giant Whirlpool is proof that manufacturers are recognizing the shortcomings of current technology. And the opportunity in the kitchen isn’t going unnoticed; Microsoft announced in a blog post in early September it too is planning to build a fridge with a connected, machine learning based platform. Microsoft will collaborate with Liebherr’s appliance division to create a platform that uses computer-based deep learning algorithms with imaging software to recognize food that’s placed inside a refrigerator.

Unique to Microsoft is the modularity they’re building into every “SmartDevice ready” appliance, theoretically making any refrigerator purchased today easily upgradable in the future. Products like the Samsung Family Hub fridge have been criticized for offering a host of features without any clear answers on how the device will keep pace with future innovation and developments. With the price tags on connected appliances still one to three times what consumers pay for their dumb counterparts, future-proofing these products seems critical to their long-term success. This coupled with the longer buying cycles of white goods mean appliance manufacturers might start thinking about their revenue streams and what kind of role that plays, whether that’s through a grocery replenishment partnership or technology upgrades that offer new functionality.

Appliance-As-A-Service (AAAS….?) 

Mike Wolf wrote a post here at The Spoon and an even larger analysis at the NextMarket blog on the concept of paying monthly fees to obtain a consumer good, or what’s known as the “X as a service” model. Much of the consumer market is trending towards a service or subscription model, from streaming videos to clothing and furniture. Could kitchen appliances follow suit?

Bad acronym aside, it’s not completely crazy. We’re finally seeing appliances evolve to provide significant value beyond the existing reactive position they’ve held in the kitchen for the last fifty or sixty years. There’s machine learning and artificial intelligence set to change how we cook and how tasty and well-prepared the food we sit down to eat will be along with connectivity giving us capabilities and efficiencies that might make us want to cook more with more convenience. But the current trajectory requires consumers to piece together a smart kitchen and then also keep tabs on upgrades and seek out tech support for issues they encounter. What if appliances like smart fridges could be purchased as a service, with upgrades and support and maybe other services baked in?

Though we haven’t seen any company make a serious move towards AAAS just yet, we think it’s an area to watch in 2017 and beyond. If for no other reason than it’s actually a pretty awesome acronym.

With CES 2017 just a week away, we’re sure to see more developments in the smart fridge and more broadly, smart kitchen appliance category.