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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Samsung

Samsung Adds Bixby AI To Family Hub Fridges

When Samsung debuted Bixby, its AI-enabled home assistant on Galaxy S8 phones, we wondered how well it would do as an Amazon Echo or Google Home competitor. After all, carrying your phone from room to room to control your smart home with voice makes about as much sense as….carrying your phone room to room to control your smart home with an app.

But it didn’t take Samsung long to take Bixby out of the phone and put it in some of its existing smart appliances – namely, the mother of all smart appliances, the Samsung Family Hub 2.0.

The Family Hub debuted at CES several years ago, with a giant touchscreen interface on the front and all kinds of interesting kitchen functions, including grocery ordering and to-do lists for family members. But Samsung clearly had plans to use the technology they were building inside these fridges as more than just glorified tablets.

On Sunday, Samsung announced it will include Bixby’s AI functionality inside Family Hub fridges, allowing users to search for recipes and ask Bixby for news and weather – very similar to competitive AI-powered speakers. But the Family Hub also allows for food ordering through partners such as Nomiku (sous vide company making sous vide-ready meal kits) and Grubhub and with the native voice functions paired with the touchscreen, along with possible connectivity to Samsung’s other smart devices in the home, it makes for an interesting voice solution in the kitchen. Samsung recently invested in Nomiku as they launched their RFID meal kits and laid out clear plans to form a cohesive ecosystem in the kitchen.

According to Pulse News in Korea,

“Bixby’s deep learning will enable the fridge to control temperature automatically, call up recipes based on user’s eating habits or recommend favorite music.”

Samsung recently invested in Nomiku as they launched their RFID meal kits and laid out clear plans to form a cohesive ecosystem in the kitchen. From Mike’s piece on the investment and news, “Fetterman said Samsung plans integrate the Nomiku with their smart home platform, SmartThings….However, the consumer electronics giant has been fairly successful in their effort to integrate SmartThings with their various product lines in the home such as appliances and TVs. While Samsung had previously announced an integration of SmartThings with their own Wi-Fi ovens, Nomiku appears to be the first small precision cooking appliance integrated with the SmartThings smart home platform.”

Current Family Hub users can also get upgraded to include Bixby functionality inside their fridges through a software update – a nice feature for a pricey appliance that we’ve often wondered how appliance giants plan to support with new functionality coming out regularly.

The install of Bixby has just begun and the updates aren’t rolled out yet. But soon, the voice in the kitchen might be your fridge telling you what’s for dinner.

Podcast: Here’s A Fresh, Hand-Squeezed Podcast For Your Enjoyment

This week’s guest is Home:On’s Richard Gunther. Richard and I discuss the Bloomberg story about Juicero that showed you can bypass the company’s $400 juicer and squeeze the Juicero packs with your hands. We also talk about the ongoing story of Ring’s acquihire of Zonoff, the acquisition of iDevices by Hubbell, IKEA’s smart lights, and Samsung investment in Nomiku and the August’s new Z-Wave smart lock.

Enjoy!

Podcast: Nomiku’s Lisa Fetterman Talks New Hardware, Meal Kits & Samsung Investment

It was a big week for Lisa Fetterman, who not only was named top 30 under 30 by Inc. magazine, but her company also happened to drop the news of new hardware, a new meal delivery service and, to top it all off, an investment by Samsung Ventures.

I caught up with Lisa the day before the Nomiku made their big announcement. You can hear us talk about the latest Nomiku hardware, their entry into meal delivery and – bonus – hear Lisa give details about the planned integration of Nomiku with Samsung’s SmartThings and Family Hub refrigerator.

In the second half of the pod, you can also listen to super smart James Ehrlich of ReGen Villages talk about how he’s trying to create the Tesla of Ecovillages.

Have a listen!

With Investment In Nomiku, Samsung Expands Presence In The “Connected Kitchen”

Today Nomiku, maker of sous vide immersion circulators, announced their latest generation connected cooking appliance and the launch of a subscription meal service that will deliver frozen, pre-cooked meals that owners of the new Nomiku can cook in 30 minutes or less. As part of the announcement, Nomiku also announced that Samsung Ventures had invested in the company.

Food delivery marks an ambitious new direction for Nomiku, one of the original sous vide startups that has been shipping immersion circulators since 2013. By moving into subscription food delivery, Nomiku has its first business line with recurring revenue. The move also makes Nomiku one of the first companies to create a connected hardware device tied to a subscription meal service. While other companies such as Whirlpool and Barilla have been selling RFID powered cooking systems with specially designed packaged food for a couple years, and startup Tovala announced a meal subscription service tied to their cooking appliance last year, Nomiku appears to be the first to launch a meal subscription plan with intelligent auto-reordering built into the connected cooking appliance.

By offering fast-prep meals, Nomiku is also hoping to expose sous vide cooking to a wider audience. Sous vide is often seen as the domain of foodies, the types that are willing to wait longer for a cook to finish in exchange for a better tasting meal. By accelerating the cooking process, the company hopes to change the perception of sous vide circulators from a device synonymous with slow cooking to one that offers both convenience and better tasting food than other fast-cook methods such as microwave ovens.

Nomiku Pork Shoulder pre-cooked meal. Photography by Albert Law

The company plans to start small, shipping to 100 customers in May and expanding to a broader audience in the early summer time frame. The subscription food packages will be modular in nature, consisting of both “mains” and “sides” that can be mixed and matched. The average price of a meal is $15 and, after 20 or so meals, the company says it will credit the price of the Nomiku circulator ($149) towards meals.

The circulator is equipped with an RFID reader, which allows the user to scan an RFID tag on the meals and send the Nomiku circulator specific time and temperature settings for each dish. The device will also be synced with the customer’s existing food inventory and, according to Nomiku, will automatically reorder food when the meals left available are down to four.

The Samsung Connection

One of the most interesting aspects of today’s announcement is the Samsung connection. Samsung’s investment arm invested an undisclosed sum in the company, an amount that Fetterman calls “the most money any single investor has put into Nomiku”. The move marks the second investment in a precision cooking/sous vide startup by a large appliance maker in a short time period, coming just a couple months after the acquisition of Anova by Electrolux.

According to Fetterman, Samsung “is a logical partner for us because they do the connected home.” The investment in Nomiku is, according to Fetterman, a move by Samsung “to dominate the connected kitchen.”

Fetterman said Samsung plans integrate the Nomiku with their smart home platform, SmartThings. Samsung acquired SmartThings almost three years ago, and since that time has had somewhat mixed success in establishing the platform as one which other companies will commit to building around. However, the consumer electronics giant has been fairly successful in their effort to integrate SmartThings with their various product lines in the home such as appliances and TVs. While Samsung had prevously announced an integration of SmartThings with their own Wi-Fi ovens, Nomiku appears to be the first small precision cooking appliance integrated with the SmartThings smart home platform.

Fetterman also told The Spoon that Samsung plans to launch a Nomiku app for the Family Hub refrigerator. The app will come preloaded with the Family Hub and will control the Nomiku device directly from the fridge. Fetterman also believes existing Family Hub models will see in-field software updates that will install the Nomiku app on the connected fridge.

It will be interesting to see where Samsung takes this investment/partnership. I am sure they will be watching Nomiku’s efforts to enter food delivery closely since that business represents a new potential revenue stream for the company. The South Korean consumer electronics conglomerate displayed an early and aggressive embrace of the smart TV market and the associated revenue streams tied to apps included on these new devices. With their investment in Nomiku and the growth of the connected kitchen, one has to wonder if they possibly see food delivery as an enticing new service model in an era of ever-declining hardware margins.

To see Lisa Fetterman and other leaders talk about the future of the connected kitchen, come to the Smart Kitchen Summit. Get your tickets today.

What Does Samsung’s Bixby Mean For The Smart Kitchen?

If you follow any tech news, you’ve seen announcements in the past week coming out of Samsung around their Galaxy S8 launch. One of the most intriguing parts of the Samsung event was the news around Bixby, Samsung’s AI assistant and answer to Siri, Cortana and Google Assistant. In some ways, it competes with the Amazon Echo too – Bixby is both a voice assistant and a smart home controller as well as an augmented reality camera.

Bixby comes with a range of new functions baked into the Galaxy S8, many of which have some interesting implications in the smart kitchen.

First, Bixby actually gives you virtual control over apps on your phone with your voice. At the moment, that functionality is extended only to Samsung apps – the phone, messaging, email, camera and video, etc – but it opens up the possibility for mobile apps to be “Bixby” friendly. Adding voice to apps that help you in your kitchen could be a unique way to get voice control without a standalone device that sits on your countertop. A recipe app that Bixby could read you the instructions step-by-step would be a quick way to get guided cooking without an extra gadget or device.

The Verge got an up close look at another Bixby feature – augmented reality via the S8’s camera. Point the camera at an object and Bixby recognizes what it is you’re both looking at and identifies it. Though not a new concept (Google Googles, Amazon Flow), it seems like a fairly flawless execution and Samsung is supposedly in talks with folks like Amazon, making it an interesting AR solution for things like grocery shopping. Other interesting applications include a partnership with Vivino that gives you tasting notes when you scan a bottle of wine.

Finally, there’s Bixby Home, which is Samsung’s answer to aggregating your home’s smart devices and controlling them via voice. Similar to the Echo or Google Home, with the difference again being the in phone location as opposed to an external device. If you could tell your phone, which might be in your kitchen as you follow a recipe app, to preheat the oven as you finish mixing cupcake batter, that might be useful. But do users typically carry around their phones from room to room at home? The benefit of an Echo or Google Home is the convenience – walk into a room, issue a command.

It seems like Bixby has some potential benefits, but it remains to be seen if it will work as promised. CNET had some fairly buggy experiences with Bixby though and they point out that Samsung isn’t even committed to putting Bixby on the S8 quite yet. It could appear as a software update later in the year. There are also other AI and machine learning technologies developing in the kitchen that might make a voice assistant on your phone irrelevant in the future. After all, the smartphone is just another pane of glass where information can be consumed and controlled – artificial intelligence can be baked into just about anything.

Want to meet the leaders defining the future of food, cooking and the kitchen? Get your tickets for the Smart Kitchen Summit today.

Why The Chatbot Interface Might Just Be The Smart Home Story of 2017

Voice interfaces are so 2016.

Not that Alexa and Google’s voice assistant won’t grow a bunch more in 2017, they will. But the reality is the smart home continues to evolve at a rapid clip, and one of the early trends I’ve noticed for 2017 is the emergence of the social messaging chatbot as a natural language interface for the smart home.

Credit Mark Zuckerberg for kicking off the trend in a big way at the end of 2016 when he debuted Jarvis, a personal growth project that the Facebook founder worked on for much of 2016. But Jarvis was more than just a skunkworks project, as the chatbot platform built into Messenger is gaining steam, including as an AI assistant for the smart home.

I recently used Facebook Messenger’s chatbot myself when I cooked steak with my Joule, and I was struck by how intuitive chat was as a command and interaction interface. While Joule is the first connected home device I know of to use the Messenger chatbot, I can certainly envision more devices that would work well with Messenger as the primary interface.

And if you’re more of a text message person than a Facebook Messenger user, don’t worry: text chatbots are coming your way as well.  As Lauren wrote this morning, a startup by the name of Unified Inbox is working with the likes of Bosch and Samsung to text-messaging based chatbots into the smart home as a way to work with their products. And while Yahoo’s text-messaging chatbot platform Captain is mainly focused on organizing communication with other family members, it’s not a stretch to imagine it as a control interface for our smart home.

While this trend is picking up speed, we should note that it’s not entirely new. Back in 2015, I wrote about how one of the biggest social messaging platforms in WeChat had started to integrate with smart home platform company Arrayent to utilize the messaging platform as an interface for products using Arrayent’s IoT platform.

While Alexa and other voice interfaces will no doubt continue their eye-popping growth this year, the reality is they are only one form of conversational interface for connected products. That’s why you can expect 2017 to be the year people starting talking about – and to – chatbots as a way to start controlling their things.

How The Smart Kitchen May Help Induction Cooking Finally Heat Up In The US

In the world of food tech, induction burners and cooktops have an uncertain future, despite some of their obvious benefits. Known for their ability to save energy and offer precise cooking temperatures, the market is poorly differentiated and highly segmented.  This has confused consumers and led to slow growth and adoption in the home kitchen. For those looking to optimize their smart kitchen design, it’s difficult to determine whether an induction surface aims to be a platform for other devices or an intelligent loner. And for masses, the induction burner may be a costly, unnecessary luxury.

Induction cooking uses magnetic induction as opposed to the more common thermal induction used in gas and electric cooktops. Magnetic induction rapidly generates heat and is safer and more efficient than other heat sources. Restaurant and commercial kitchens have recognized the value of the burners, adding capacity when needed in peak order times.  Kitchen in revolving restaurants 50 stories up discovered the value of these burners, as have RV-ers and boaters.

It is important to note that not all cookware can be used with induction cooktops. The easiest way to determine if your pots and pans are suitable is to test them with a magnet. Many manufacturers of induction burners sell specially designed cookware to complement the overall purchase.

At issue is the confusing array of choices available, with variations coming among the options accompanying the burner itself. The entry level segment is those single burners that look to be fancy hotplates, often showcased on infomercials and home shopping shows. They frequently are on television cooking shows in food trucks or small kitchen operations. Because of general consumer unfamiliarity, a well-designed TV commercial can illustrate the benefits and versatility of the appliance.

The next segment is the market for standalone induction burners with some degree of IoT smarts. Offerings in this area are quickly “heating up” with products from established manufacturers (Salton and Hamilton Beach) to crowdsourced-based hopefuls and newcomers such as FirstBuid’s Paragon and the Oliso Smarthub. Cookware giant Meyer has bet on the pairing of induction heating with Bluetooth pan and app control and guidance to present a “guided cooking” system in the Hestan Cue, which the company plans to finally roll out to customers in the spring. Using Bluetooth or WiFi, a sensing probe and in some cases proprietary pots and pans, these induction burners can be controlled using apps on your smartphone tailored to individual recipes.

The move from standalone burner where the home chef provides the smarts to those controlled by sensors and apps adds cost. Entry level units, such as the NuWave (the one As Seen on TV), are priced as low as $70, but the addition of IoT features takes the price up to $500. For those on an unlimited budget, there is the Breville PolyScience model (with the apt name Control Freak) with a special probe and precise temperature control for $1,800.

Moving up in price, but down in intelligence, are the induction burner cooktops that are sold either separately or along with a stove. Whirlpool and General Electric, along with other major appliance manufacturers, are in on this part of the market with prices ranging from $600 up to $7,000 (for the Wolf induction cooktop and stove) and beyond. Many induction cooktops offer timers and precise heat controls but little more in additional functionality. The exception is the Samsung version which projects an artificial flame to show consumers the level of heat being generated. Samsung does have a few induction models that can be controlled with a smartphone app, but that functionality is limited to such features as a virtual on/off switch.

At CES 2014, Whirlpool showcased an interactive cooktop that functions as a platform similar to Samsung’s Family Hub which currently is baked into their newer refrigerator lines. The vision for the interactive cooktops is one in which the home chef can find recipes on a stove-top screen and use built-in heat-controlling sensors to facilitate culinary greatness.  The induction range in this scenario becomes an IoT platform to control and interact with other smart appliances. That was three years ago and now, with the fridge a more popular choice as an IoT hub, the cooktop may be reduced to a lesser role in the smart kitchen.

And finally, at this year’s CES Panasonic introduced a unique spin on induction with a countertop induction oven. Unlike other induction heating products, Panasonic’s Countertop Induction Oven (CIO) is a fully enclosed cooking unit that is the size of a microwave oven. According to Digital Trends Jenny McGrath, the CIO was able to cook a full meal of chicken cutlets in about 23 minutes.

There have been past concerns about adoption of induction cooking in the U.S., compared to its popularity in the European market with smaller kitchen spaces. That appears to be changing.  Poor uptake was based on the limited consumer choices and consumers figuring out how the burners fit into their personal culinary style. The smart induction cooktop will have a challenge finding its market niche, most likely needing to capture the imagination of architects and designers seeking low energy, smart kitchen functionality. The fastest growing segment, souped-up induction hotplates (with or without IoT functionality) appeals to the niche of those in search of nice-to-have gadgets like sous vide machines. For the massive Blue Apron recipe-in-a-box crowd, however, it’s a bright shiny object that looks cooler in a YouTube video than on a ceramic countertop. The most obvious appeal is to provide an extra burner when you have your friends and family over to cook together.

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!

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.