Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Samsung Family Hub

Editor Roundtable Podcast: AI Everywhere, CBD Crackdown & Finding Love in a Fridge

Sure you’ve tried Tinder or Bumble, but have you looked for love with a fridge?

Now you can, kinda (not really), with Refrigerdate.

Samsung’s gimmicky smart fridge dating service is just one of the topics we talk about on our latest Spoon editor’s roundtable podcast edition of the Smart Kitchen Show.

Other topics include:

  • The growing number of AI-meets-food stories and whether the term AI is being overused
  • The pushback by local city and state governments against the use of CBD in beverages
  • The foodtech accelerator trend (including agtech) and why the new BSH Appliances smart kitchen accelerator may be a new angle for the appliance industry

Joining me on the podcast are the usual cast of characters: Jenn Marston, Chris Albrecht and Catherine Lamb.

As always, you can download the episode, listen to it on your favorite podcast app like Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or Soundcloud, or just click play below.

Freshub Partners With Big Data To Make Smart Kitchen Shopping Easier

Freshub is one of the companies looking to own point-of-sale solutions for the kitchen. Home replenishment services and in-home grocery shopping have been buoyed by connected appliances like Samsung’s FamilyHub fridge and voice assistant devices like Amazon Echo.

Just a few months ago, the company launched the second generation of its software platform, enabling grocery ordering using natural language interfaces such as voice and gesture recognition on appliances and devices. Now Freshub is partnering with IRI, a big data and predictive analytics company that works with large retail companies to deliver relevant consumer data and analytics solutions.

The partnership will allow Freshub to have access to enormous amounts of data about what consumers like to buy, preferences based on the types of things they already buy and predictions about what they’ll want or need next. This is similar to Amazon’s suggestion engine, with recommendations for similar things that a shopper might want after they establish a buying history. The joint press release from IRI and Freshub also indicates “the relationship also will spur development of a range of additional innovative features, such as product-level health indicators.”

IRI Retail President David Hoodis commented,

“Retail and CPG companies can more rapidly adapt to the demands of today’s connected consumers by offering effortless and efficient shopping experiences.”

Having a platform that can offer this type of “if you buy this, then you’ll like that” platform for appliance and device makers to add to their connected kitchen offerings is appealing. The real story behind connected devices in the home is what will happen to all that data and how marketers can use it to make personal recommendations for each consumer in their home, and Freshub’s partnership with IRI could give them the data chops necessary to compete with the likes of Amazon and Google.

Samsung Continues to Push the Smart Fridge Envelope at CES 2017

Samsung continues to push forward with its vision of the smart refrigerator as the center of the smart kitchen with the announcement of its Smart Hub 2.0 model (dubbed Family Hub 2.) at 2017 CES. Family Hub 2.0 represents an update to the company’s flagship 1.0 version announced at the 2016 CES. Family Hub 2.0 will be expanded into 10 new models as opposed to four which featured the initial version.

Improving upon such features as its voice controller, Samsung announced new application partners such as  GrubHub, Nomiku, Glympse, Ring, Spotify, and iHeartRadio. In Europe, Samsung is working with local home grocery services to add greater consumer convenience, and with music/audio services, the new Family Hub can offer the latest tunes, news headlines and weather reports from a central family gathering place.

Family Hub 2.0 has increased its usability by offering an internal camera to keep track of what food needs to be replenished and then connecting to a MasterCard grocer-ordering app. Integration with AllRecipes allows cooks to connect to recipes that can be read in large text via a 21.5-inch LED screen. As a smart hub, individual family members can set up their own profiles and use the built-in screen to create shopping lists, calendars, and memos.

The new Family Hub 2.0 smart refrigerators start at $5,799, not exactly priced for mass consumption. Samsung continues to have faith in the smart fridge category, firmly believing that the refrigerator is a logical hub for other IoT appliances in the smart kitchen including its new line of ovens. Beyond the kitchen, if Samsung were able to tie together its various point-solution hubs from around the home (using its IoT platform ARTIK) it could become a dominant player in the world of IoT.

LG also announced a new smart refrigerator at CES 2017, the InstaView model with its standout feature being integration with Amazon’s Echo to provide voice-control. Echo’s Alexa voice assistant can be used to order groceries from the Seattle-based retailer with Amazon software built into the appliance. A 2-megapixel camera with a wide-angle lens will allow consumers to see what food needs to be reordered via the 29-inch LED screen built into the front of the appliance.

Running on the same WebOS as LG smart TVs, pricing and availability of the InstaView was not announced.

Whirlpool, who won a CES 2017 innovation award for its Zera food recycler, announced new technology for its line of refrigerators including a door within a door, but has yet to come out with a smart fridge.

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.

Samsung Settles Into The Connected Kitchen, But Will They Stay?

If there’s one thing you can say about Samsung, they’re willing to try new things.

Whether it’s virtual reality, smart home or wearables, you can bet that if there’s a new technology trend charting on Techmeme, Samsung will soon have a new product.

But while the company is known for throwing lots of tech spaghetti against to wall, it’s not always as committed to stuff that doesn’t immediately stick. Whether it’s their lukewarm attachment to different platforms, new form factors or its long and mixed history with things like Internet fridges, they often move on to new, more promising projects fairly quickly.

Which, on the eve of the release of a broad new lineup of smart kitchen appliances, I have to wonder about how dedicated they’ll be to the category.

For the time being, I admit they seem pretty excited, enough so to add a new lineup of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth powered wall ovens, cooktops and range hoods announced to their smart kitchen portfolio. From the looks of it, the Korean manufacturer is hoping the new products will add to the momentum created by the release of the Samsung Family Hub refrigerator, which has been a critical success if not a commercial one (at least not yet).

The new lineup will also work the SmartThings smart home hub, the platform for Samsung’s smart home efforts.

Ultimately, I think the dedication of Samsung to the connected kitchen broadly defined will not waver. The reason is I see a transitional period in the appliance market where the vast majority of big brands add connectivity to their premium tiers, and fairly quickly we’ll see this technology move into all but the low-end budget lines. So in this sense, I don’t think Samsung will move away from smart kitchen.

But just how long they stick with the current configurations and platforms remains to be seen. One example of Samsung’s fickleness towards particular platforms is seen from their treatment of the Galaxy smart watch lineup. One moment it seems they’re abandoning Google’s smartwatch OS, the next moment they’re embracing it again, then they abandon it again.

With smart kitchen, one thing that could reassure potential buyers is the company seems content – for now – to use its smart home platform as the technology foundation, but long term I have to wonder how things might shake out if, say, Samsung does decide to move on from SmartThings.

At the same time, the company is struggling lately as they are put out fires (literally) across the product lineup. Not only have they had to deal with a huge mess around their flagship phone, the Note 7, going up in flames, they’ve also had to deal with consumer complaints about their washing machines catching fire.

All this said, my worry may be overblown. Samsung not only has lots of resources to weather product recalls but also enough to stay committed to new-fangled features even when consumers don’t seem at all interested.

One such example came from Brian Frank at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Frank recalled a time when, as a product manager for Twitter, he was in a meeting with Samsung to discuss their connected refrigerator. The company had put a Twitter client into one of their fridges and told Frank they wanted to license the Twitter client for many years to come to ensure that – yes, you guessed it – the fridge could continue to tweet.

Frank told them it wouldn’t probably be necessary. The reason? When he examined the usage of the Twitter client by actual owners of the Samsung tweeting fridge, he could count the number of people who had used the feature on his hand.

Can Smart Kitchen Avoid The Missteps Of The Smart Home?

A few years ago, signs of the coming smart home era were everywhere: Retailers like Staples launched their smart home lines, old-line manufacturers like GE partnered up with fast-moving startups like Quirky, and even Apple launched its own smart home framework called HomeKit.

And of course, any ‘next-big-thing’ would not be complete without a high-profile acquisition. That came in January 2014, when Google announced they would buy Nest for over $3 billion. If the smart home was hot before Google gobbled up Nest, it got white hot after. More money poured into startups, new standards emerged, and Google, not surprisingly, acquired more companies.

But by mid-2015, the bloom had come off the smart home rose. Quirky booted its CEO and looked to sell off assets, Staples scaled back its smart home ambitions and shuttered the project altogether this year, and Apple’s HomeKit stuttered and stopped right out of the gate.

And what about Nest, Google’s $3 billion smart home unicorn? After some high-profile struggles over the past few years, founder Tony Fadell left in June 2016, while the group he left behind is forced to watch as Google hands newer smart home efforts like Google Home to other groups.

Can smart kitchen, which relies on many of the same technologies, avoid the same fate? Below are some ways in which the smart kitchen may differ from the broader smart home.

Focused Benefits

One of the greatest ironies of the smart home – where the promise of your things working together is the raison d’être – is that some of its biggest hits are those products that work well largely on their own. Smart doorbells, video cams, and connected lightbulbs all work as part of a larger fabric of devices but often fly solo as consumers embrace them for the product-specific benefits they offer.

As it turns out, many consumers buy new kitchen tech with a singular focus in mind.  Whether it’s a Bluetooth meat thermometer to monitor your steak while you’re watching football or the sous vide circulator you use to cook seafood, those smart kitchen products that have been successful have been focused tools that do one or two things well.

Just Stash It

One of the reasons retailers have been disappointed with smart home products is the category suffers from high return rates. With complaints ranging from installation problems or interoperability issues, there’s a good chance that a consumer will return a smart home product once the shine wears off.

With smart kitchen, things are a little different. Some products like sous vide circulators often get put into regular usage as consumers embrace a new way to cook, while others, like Bluetooth thermometers, may get stuck in the drawer for long periods of time, only to get called upon when needed.

Either way, according to retailers like b8ta, consumers appear less likely to return them.

Smart kitchen products have “extremely low return rates” relative to other connected home products according to Vibhu Norby, CEO of IoT product retailer b8ta.

“I think people are more likely to stash connected kitchen products they don’t use vs. return, which is quite different from the rest of connected home.”

Riches in Niches

While some early adopters may have a deep passion for tech, no one but the most ardent geeks would say they’re passionate about connected lighting or a learning thermostat.

With food, there are deep veins of passion to mine nearly everywhere you look. If juicing is your life, $700 for a Keurig for juice might seem like a good deal. Want to explore precision cooking to try and cook like a James Beard award winning chef? Drop $1800 on the Control Freak. Love entertaining at home but can’t afford a bartender? Perfect Drink might be your answer.

One Big Similarity: It’s All New To Consumers

However, despite these differences, there is one thing that the smart kitchen and smart home have in common: both are mostly new to consumers.

While most consumers would instantly understand something like a robotic bartender, the reality is it – and many other smart kitchen products – represent a much different way of doing things than the status quo. And even more staid products like Samsung’s Family Hub fridge are going to take some time to catch on, as most consumers will find features like image-based inventory recognition – and $5 thousand plus price tags – somewhat exotic.

Bottom line: The smart kitchen has unique dynamics and taps into deep areas of interest for consumers that may enable it to avoid some of the broader smart home’s problems but, just as with the smart home, the need for market education remains.

Samsung Begins To Ship The Family Hub Refrigerator

The Gist: Samsung had the most high profile of the smart kitchen product debuts at CES this year with the Family Hub refrigerator, an Internet-connected fridge with a massive 21-inch screen and a hefty six thousand dollar price tag.  This week Samsung announced commercial availability of the product.

Our Take: Of all the categories in the connected kitchen, the connected refrigerator is most likely to receive a healthy dose of skepticism. That’s because companies like Samsung, LG and Whirlpool have been trying to fuse the Internet with the fridge since the early 2000s, and the result has been a string of fairly clunky products with little staying power and even less tangible consumer benefits. However, in recent years the arrival of low-cost cameras and internal sensors have intrigued consumers and, as a result, Samsung and others have decided to give the connected fridge another go.

While we felt the LG smart fridge was perhaps the most interesting of this year’s CES crop due to intriguing features like the ability to see what’s inside by knocking on the front of the fridge, the Samsung Family Hub also was interesting for different reasons. For one, the massive Tizen-powered touch screen on the front offers a lot of screen real estate for tailored apps. The inventory manager app also appears interesting, giving consumers some new ways to do fairly easy (but not perfect) inventory tracking using photo-tagging (as demoed here in the initial CNET review).

Bottom line, the challenge for Samsung will be adding enough value to make the fridge’s big price tag seem worth it, while also managing to keep the device relevant and up to date from a technology perspective in a category where consumers expect 10 or 15-year life spans from their fridges.