Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Samsung

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.

Can Tech Innovation Save Us From Our Food Waste?

Food waste is a major problem across the globe – not only does the U.S. alone throw away close to $200 billion in food each year, but the annual waste also contributes to 13% of food-related greenhouse gas emissions. Many companies in the smart kitchen and food tech space are looking at ways to use food data, cooking techniques and storage mechanisms to reduce food waste. For businesses like restaurants and hotels, throwing away unused food is bad economic sense as well. Food wasted and not sold is profit down the drain, making it an obvious area to explore efficiencies and new technologies.

One U.K. based company has created a solution specifically for the hospitality industry that has the potential to drive smarter ordering and cooking in the commercial kitchen. The Winnow System is a touch interface connected to a smart meter – before anyone dumps food in the trash, they select an icon on the screen to categorize the food being discarded. The system measures the weight of the food waste and marks trends and data over time.

Winnow — an old agricultural term meaning to separate the grain from the chaff, or to separate the good from the bad — is able to use the data from everyday usage to identify and prevent avoidable waste in the kitchen. Chefs and restaurant managers are given insights into where to make improvements and how to dramatically reduce costs. Winnow Solutions has deployed over 100 solutions across the U.K. and reports a 2-6% improvement in gross margins for their customers, saving over £1m. The information that managers receive from the system allows them to purchase smarter as well as find better ways of serving and storing the food they do purchase. One hospitality executive found that eggs at the hotel breakfast buffet were consistently thrown away in massive quantities every morning. The hotel did away with eggs at the buffet and instead set up a custom egg station for customers wanting cooked eggs with breakfast, saving hundreds of pounds of wasted eggs each week.

The Winnow System is not designed for the consumer kitchen – yet. But several professional kitchen technologies have trickled down over time and solutions developed for business often have consumer applications. And there are products hitting the market today that have some tools to manage the food in our kitchens more efficiently. The Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator is connected to Wi-Fi and has interior cameras that allow users to see what’s in their fridge and what state it’s in.

We might have an idea of the food we throw away at the end of the week in our homes, but seeing the hard data, easily analyzed and displayed in front of us as we decide what to buy and cook could be a powerful force to change our behaviors and habits.

 

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.