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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

smart fridge

Subway Debuts Smart Fridges To Sell Pre-Made Sandwiches

Can you ‘Eat Fresh’ from a vending machine?

Subway believes you can, and to that end, the sandwich franchiser has begun to roll out a new line of smart fridges in the US to sell premade Subway sandwiches. The new fridges feature “artificial intelligence and natural language processing” and are restocked daily with sandwiches from local franchisees. The new line of vending machines is a part of the company’s growing focus on non-traditional formats to target “on-the-go” customers.

Subway’s New Smart Fridge

The first smart fridge from Subway showed up this September at the University of California San Diego. According to the company, the initial feedback has been strong among franchises to install the new fridges near their stores.

While the UC San Diego fridge was the first Subway vending machine to show up in the states, the company began experimenting with vending machines last year in Singapore. The Singapore machines were also supported by Grab & Go but looked a little closer to a traditional vending machine than the newly introduced smart fridges.

In an interview with QSR Magazine, Subway’s senior VP of development Steven Rafferty said the franchisees drove the push into unattended retail solutions.

“The partner says, ‘Hey, how can we maximize our sales even in the hours when we’re not open?’” Rafferty said. “We had some success with limited trials of this in international markets, in some Asian markets specifically. But closer to home, as I said, travel plaza partners have really latched on to this and it’s really meeting the needs of our customers who are our franchisees who in turn want to meet the needs of our consumers.”

I like the idea of the Subway machines and could see them finding traction, especially in public spaces where no fresh options are available. I’d like to see the new machines offer non-sub menu options like their non-bread bowls, which could provide customers with a nice option beyond carb-heavy sandwiches.

While Subway doesn’t mention hardware partners in their announcement, I’d be surprised if they didn’t work with a technology partner to develop the fridges. If one of our Spoon readers knows who Subway may have worked with to build their fridge, drop us a line and let us know.

According to Subway, their new smart fridges will begin appearing at college campuses, airports, and hospitals. Interestingly, the company’s announcement emphasized Subway’s focus on exploring non-traditional formats, including ghost kitchens. If the unattended business begins to take off, I could see how some franchisee partners may forgo the traditional store format and build ghost kitchens to support a network of unattended offerings in their market.

Forget Smart. Samsung’s Latest Fridge Focus is Creating Giant Custom Photo Walls

Who needs fridge magnets when you can create a giant photo wall with a picture of your kids, furbaby, or dream vacation getaway instead?

That’s exactly what you can do if you own a Bespoke fridge from Samsung. According to a release sent to The Spoon, owners of Bespoke fridges can now create custom fridge panels featuring a photo or artwork. The new feature can be added to a new Bespoke fridge or swapped out with a panel on an existing unit.

To create a Bespoke custom printed panel, users go to the Mybespoke website, upload a picture or artwork, edit the layout, and submit the panel for print. Each custom printed panel will set you back $250. The new custom-designed panels feature will be available later this year.

Okay, so pictures printed on your fridge isn’t exactly high-tech, but it is definitely a sign of where Samsung’s head is nowadays when it comes to their fridge lineup. It’s not like Samsung has forgotten about its Family Hub fridge line exactly, at least not yet. After all, they did announce some fairly modest improvements at CES, and you can get a Family Hub version of the Bespoke line. But it’s clear, at this point, that their primary focus seems to be their design-forward lineup with Bespoke.

All of which speaks to the state of the smart fridge market. No one has really cracked the code on figuring out how to leverage smarts to make food management truly easy. Sure, big screens are nice, as it using Alexa and auto-replenishment of grocery staples. But none of them, in our view, is doing a great job of helping us take inventory or reduce food waste without a whole lot of work on the part of the user.

We’re still waiting for that and hope someone will come up with that game-changing innovation soon. If you’ve got a big idea about that, why don’t you let us know and show it off at SKS Invent in October.

Haier Patents a Fridge That Cooks Eggs

If you’re like me, you think the refrigerator can use a rethink. Outside of adding a few smart features like Wi-Fi, internal cameras, and touchscreens, the biggest and most expensive appliance in our kitchen hasn’t changed a whole lot in recent decades.

Which is why I was intrigued to see this patent by Haier for a fridge with an internal egg boiler.

The patent, which was issued earlier this month to GE Appliance’s parent company, describes an appliance with an internal system for boiling eggs.

Image: Rendering of Egg Boiler from Haier Patent

It works like this: The egg boiler is built into the refrigerator door. Once the system controller determines the boiler has eggs loaded into it, it orders hot water into the boiler to cook the eggs. After the eggs are cooked, the cooking chamber is flushed with cooler water to cool the eggs off. An alert is then sent to the user which would open the egg boiler and remove their finished eggs.

Ok, so maybe building an egg boiler into a fridge seems like a lot of effort, especially when you can buy a Dash egg boiler for about $20. But, if you’re the type who likes to eat hard or soft-boiled eggs regularly and don’t want another kitchen gadget cluttering your countertop, this could be a cool feature.

That’s of course, if Haier ever makes it. Haier is a big company that files patents for everything ranging from a fridge with a cold brew coffee maker to one that dispenses pills, so there’s a good chance fridge with an egg maker inside never sees the light of day.

But hey, until we see the long-rumored Amazon smart fridge, one can hope, right?

The Spoon Weekly: David Chang Loves Food Tech, Cultivated Meat U, Amazon Fridge

This is the web version of the Spoon weekly newsletter where we wrap up of some of the most interesting stories in Food Tech. If you’d like to subscribe to The Spoon Newsletter, you can do so here.

David Chang Dives Into Food Tech

There may be no one with more culinary street cred in America today than David Chang. Not only has the New York-based chef won multiple James Beard awards and seen his restaurant Momofuku called the country’s most important restaurant, but Chang himself is widely recognized as an astute observer of the food world who always has his finger on the pulse of the country’s culinary zeitgeist.

And what’s on Chang’s mind these days is a whole lot of food tech, at least if his new series on Hulu, The Next Thing You Eat, is any indication. While the six-episode series isn’t available until October 21st, we do have the video preview, which features shots of everything from food delivery bots to lab-grown meat to indoor robotic farms, so we thought it would be fun to play a game of ‘guess who’ and see how many people and companies we can recognize from the food tech revolution. 

You can see the different food tech startups and leaders we identified on The Spoon. If you see any we missed, drop us a line.

The Spoon & CES Bring Food Tech To The World’s Biggest Tech Show

Exciting News: The Spoon is CES’s exclusive partner to bring food tech to the world’s biggest tech show!

Many remember the debut of the Impossible 2.0 burger in 2019, a watershed moment for both the company and the plant-based meat industry. There’s also been food robots, ice cream makers and much more that have made a big splash at the big show.

However, up until this year, any food professionals coming to CES were attending despite the lack of a dedicated food technology and innovation area in the exhibition space or in the conference tracks. Because CES is *the* great convener in the tech world, we felt food tech needed representation. This led The Spoon to rent out the ballroom of Treasure Island for a couple of years running to produce Food Tech Live. We wanted to give the food industry a central place to connect and check out the latest and greatest in food innovation.

But now that’s all about to change as food tech hits the big time this coming January. CES announced in June that food tech is going to be a featured theme for the first time ever at the big show. We couldn’t be more excited, in part because we will get to see even more cool food tech innovation, but also because CES has chosen The Spoon as the dedicated CES partner for the food tech exhibition and conference portions of the show!

Personally, this is a big deal as CES has been the one constant in my career as a journalist, analyst and entrepreneur, so I am very excited to help bring food tech to the big show!

Read my full post here with the news and, if you’d like to bring your food tech innovation to CES, let us know here.

We Called It: Amazon is Building a Smart Fridge

Amazon is building a smart fridge.

That’s at least according to a report from Business Insider, who reports that Amazon is building a fridge that would utilize machine vision and other advanced technology to monitor food in the refrigerator, notify us when it’s about to expire, and automatically order & replenish items through Amazon.

Dubbed Project Pulse, the initiative is being led by the company’s physical store unit, the same group that developed Amazon Go’s just walk out technology. Other teams, such as Lab 126 (its California-based hardware team that developed the Echo) and Amazon’s grocery unit are also contributing to the effort.

Here at The Spoon, we’re not all that surprised Amazon wants to create a fridge, mostly because we (I) predicted it nearly four years ago. When I asked “Is Amazon building a smart fridge?” in 2017, I tried to connect some of the dots I saw in Amazon’s commerce and devices businesses. And let me tell you, there were a lot of dots.Read more about why we suspected they were building a smart fridge at The Spoon.

Alt Protein

USDA Awards $10 Million to Tufts University to Establish a Cultivated Protein Center of Excellence

Last night, news broke of the USDA’s $10 million award to Tuft’s University to establish a cultivated protein research center of excellence. The award is part of a $146 million investment announced by the USDA on October 6th by its National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s (NIFA) Sustainable Agricultural Systems program.

This is a big deal. The US has fallen woefully behind other countries in its support for developing next-generation food technology, which is why I suggested early this year that the Biden administration create a US taxpayer-funded food innovation hub. This does that for cultivated meat.

It’s also a sign that the US education system is racing to develop a curriculum for a field that – at least up to this point – has lacked the kind of well-established curriculum as other strategically essential fields such as computer science or biotechnology.  It’s about time since cultivated meat is a unique field unto itself which requires an educated and qualified workforce to power if it is to reach its full potential.

You can read the full story about the Tuft’s new Institute for Cellular Agriculture here.  

Revo Foods Wants To Build a 3D Printing Facility For Plant-Based Fish

Austrian startup Revo Foods produces plant-based fish products, but not the formed and fried items that are becoming increasingly common in grocery store aisles. Revo is making structurally sophisticated products: sheets of smoked salmon, salmon fillets, and sushi cuts with a realistic look and feel.

We’ve already seen cell-cultured meat startups use 3D printing to create cuts of meat with complex fat and tissue structures. Revo has brought 3D printing into the plant-based fish arena, and the company is betting that the resulting products will win over more seafood eaters.

See the full story here. 

Food Robots

Basil Street’s Pizza Robot Takes Flight With New Airport Rollout Deal

Basil Street, a maker of automated pizza vending machines, announced this week it has struck a deal with Prepango, a company that specializes in automated retail of food and beverage products in airports, to bring its pizza robot to airports across the US.

Launched this year, the Basil Street pizza smart vending machine – called Automated Pizza Kitchens (APK) – is roughly 20 square feet in size and holds up to 150 10-inch, thin-crust pizzas. When a customer places an order via the touchscreen or mobile app, the APK heats the flash-frozen pizza up using a non-microwave oven that cooks the pies in about three minutes.

Up until this point, the APK has been serving up pizzas in universities, business parks and corporate headquarters. That all changes in a couple weeks when the two companies bring the pizza bot to the San Antonio International Airport. From there, Basil Street and Prepango are eyeing launches of the APK in Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Cincinnati/North Kentucky International Airport, Indianapolis International Airport among others.

Read the full story here.

Flippy The Fast Food Robot Has Its Own National TV Commercial

Flippy’s about to hit the big time.

That’s because the fast food robot from Miso that’s in service in places like White Castle is going to be the focus of a new nationally televised commercial.

The ad opens with Flippy making fries in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant while a voiceover actor proclaims “Nothing hits the spot quite like good food, made fast.”

From there the 30 second spot toggles back and forth between a mother and daughter happily eating food and Flippy making fries back in the kitchen.

The voiceover continues: “The taste you grew up on, now made more consistent, more efficient, and dare we say, more delicous. Introducing Flippy, the world’s first AI kitchen assistant.”

The narrator brings the pitch home with the tag line, “Let the robots do the robotic work, so people can do the people work.”

To read the full story and see the Flippy commercial, click here. 

Restaurant Tech

Kitchen United Acquires Zuul: Has The Wave of Ghost Kitchen Consolidation Begun?

Ghost kitchen operator Kitchen United announced they had acquired Zuul, a ghost kitchen technology and consulting services company, for an undisclosed sum.

While this is one of the most significant acquisitions so far in the ghost kitchen space, it’s likely only the start of a wave of consolidation.

Even as funding still flows into the ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant space, many operators have realized that running an extensive network of multitenant kitchens is a capital-intensive business. Much of the recent funding in the broader ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant space has gone to companies that are creating platforms that make it easy for restaurant brands to launch new virtual brands through hosted kitchen models. While some companies, like Reef, continue down the heavy capex path powered by huge raises, venture and corporate capital has started to migrate towards hosted kitchen models and virtual restaurant brands that can take advantage of underutilized kitchen capacity in existing QSRs or independents.

Do you think the ghost kitchen space is going to see a wave of consolidation? Read the full piece at The Spoon and let us know what you think in the comments. 

PizzaHQ’s Founders Are Building a Robot-Powered Pizza Chain of the Future

Darryl Dueltgen and Jason Udrija had a choice: Expand their successful New Jersey pizza restaurant brand called Pizza Love, or start a tech-powered pizza concept that could change the pizza industry.

They decided to start a revolution.

“We’ve put a lot of time into building a labor-reduced, tech-driven concept that we believe will revolutionize the pizza industry,” said Udrija, who cofounded PizzaHQ alongside partners Dueltgen and Matt Bassil.

According to Udrija, PizzaHQ will utilize robotics and other technology to create a more affordable pizza (“almost a 50% lower price point”) while using the same recipe and high-quality ingredients of the pies made at their dine-in restaurant.

Once the pizza is boxed, it’s loaded into delivery vans and distributed to heated pickup lockers around Totowa, New Jersey, a borough about thirty minutes north of Newark. Customers will be able to track their delivery and will scan a QR code to pick up the pizza waiting for them in a locker. Third party delivery partners like UberEats will also be able to pick up orders from the pickup lockers and deliver to customers.

Read the full story about PizzaHQ and their pizza robot restaurant chain concept at The Spoon. 

Called It: Just as We Predicted, Amazon is Building a Smart Fridge

Apparently, Amazon is building a smart fridge.

That’s at least according to a report from Business Insider (paywall), who reports that Amazon is building a fridge that would utilize machine vision and other advanced technology to monitor food in the refrigerator, notify us when it’s about to expire, and automatically order & replenish items through Amazon.

Dubbed Project Pulse, the initiative is being led by the company’s physical store unit, the same group that developed Amazon Go’s just walk out technology. Other teams, such as Lab 126 (its California-based hardware team that developed the Echo) and Amazon’s grocery unit are also contributing to the effort.

Here at The Spoon, we’re not all that surprised Amazon wants to create a fridge, mostly because we (I) predicted it nearly four years ago. When I asked “Is Amazon building a smart fridge?” in 2017, I tried to connect some of the dots I saw in Amazon’s commerce and devices businesses. And let me tell you, there were a lot of dots.

Perhaps the biggest being patents filed by the company at the time. In the fall of 2017, Amazon had filed two patents for smart fridge technology: the first described a fridge that uses machine vision to detect food spoilage, and the second described a fridge that utilized an electronic nose to detect food spoilage.

From the post:

The first patent application, filed on September 14th of this year, is called “Image-Based Spoilage Sensing Refrigerator” and centers around utilizing internal cameras to detect spoiled food. The system would use both infrared and visible spectrum cameras to detect spoilage of food and then send an alert to a mobile device.

This patent application was designed to work in concert with a scent-based sensing system defined in another patent application (also filed on September 14th) called “Scent-Based Spoilage Sensing Refrigerator” that utilizes a variety of sensors to detect gasses emitted from spoiled food and then sends an alert to a mobile device.

Of course, Amazon files lots of patent applications, many for technologies that never really go anywhere. But unlike many other companies, Amazon doesn’t just do R&D and build patent war chests for nothing. If they think they can make a product and upend a market, they usually will, so a smart fridge didn’t seem all that far-fetched.

There were other reasons I suspected something was up, including the company’s interest in kitchen commerce with products like Dash, a shoppable recipe patent, and even a partnership with Kenmore to sell fridges. And a year or so later, when the company entered the appliance business with their own branded products, an Amazon smart fridge seemed even more likely.

So now that an Amazon smart fridge is a very real possibility, I’d ask this: Will it be something worth buying? I would say yes if can help consumers better manage their food inventory than existing refrigerators. Samsung, LG, and others have made some significant advances in smart fridges, but it still feels like the category hasn’t achieved its full potential in food management and waste avoidance.

In the end, I’m both cautiously optimistic and a bit skeptical about an Amazon smart fridge. Optimistic given Amazon’s proven ability to think out of the box and completely rethink an existing product category. Skeptical because the company’s innovation in hardware has often historically been not-so-subtly motivated by a desire to serve Amazon’s broader corporate goal, which is to get people to buy more stuff. Because of this, I’m worried a technically impressive Amazon smart fridge might in the end just be a big connected shopping cart.

For this prediction at least, I hope Amazon proves me wrong.

Samsung Debuts the 6th Generation of its Family Hub Smart Fridge

Looking for a new smart fridge? Samsung’s got you covered and this time they’re bring Alexa with them.

Today the company announced the sixth generation of their flagship smart fridge, the Family Hub. The first of the big changes with the latest version of Family Hub is the addition of Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa. Samsung, which has long pushed its own voice assistant in Bixby, looks like it’s finally recognizing that the dust has settled in the voice assistant battle and Alexa is the dominant platform. That said, it looks like the company hasn’t given up on Bixby just yet, as it is giving users the choice of using Alexa or Bixby.

The other addition of what they are calling the SmartThings Cooking service. Many of the meal-planning features in the cooking service had been made available in the previous versions of the Family Hub, but in January at virtual CES the company had announced an expanded set of capabilities such as guided cooking and the ability to send cooking instructions to synced cooking appliances like the company’s Slide-In range. With the new upgrade, users of the Family Hub will be able to access all of these features from the Family Hub screen. The SmartThings Cooking service is powered by the Whisk platform.

If you’re a chicken lover, we’ve also got some good news in the Family Hub’s newest food shopping partner: Perdue Farms. In the announcement Samsung said they have added the chicken and premium meats-by-mail provider to their integration partner list.

You got to give Samsung credit: Despite early reviews mocking what some called a Frankenfridge, the company has stuck to its vision of building a smart fridge platform and updating it every year. Six generations in, one would assume that the Family Hub line of fridges is selling well, but the reality is we don’t know since the company doesn’t make sales numbers available. We can make some assumptions, though, based on looking at the number of reviews for SKUs like the 27″ French door edition, which is garnering enough reviews at Home Depot (1664 reviews) and Best Buy (433 reviews) that make it look as if it’s selling as well as other Samsung top models.

Owners of previous generation Family Hubs may be wondering if they will be able to get in on the Alexa and upgraded Smart Things cooking capabilities. According to a Samsung spokesperson, any Samsung Family Hub with generation 2 software or higher can be upgraded to generation 6 software.

The announcement didn’t say when the models will be in stores, but if the past rollouts of the Smart Hub are any indication, I’d expect them in stores this fall.

Fraîche’s Smart Fridges Aim to Help NYC Offices Freshen Up Lunch Options

One of the big questions companies face as more of the population gets vaccinated is if and how they will re-open their physical offices. As Bloomberg wrote last month, some workers are just quitting their jobs instead of returning to offices. As such, companies are looking for ways to entice employees back into the building with different schedules and perks. Fraîche is pitching its smart fridges as one of those perks that can help ease people back into office life. The company is installing 10 of its fridges in locations across New York City this September.

On it’s face, Fraîche is kind of like Byte Technology in that it makes smart fridges where customers can grab what they want and get charged automatically. Unlike Byte however, Fraîche isn’t licensing its technology out to other retail brands. It will operate each fridge by itself and control what goes inside.

Technically speaking, Fraîche’s fridges work only with the accompanying app (unlike Byte, which allows you to swipe a credit card). Users create an account with the Fraîche app, including a selfie and their payment information. They can then check the inventory of their local fridge from the app, and when they go to grab something, the Fraîche fridge uses facial recognition (based on the selfie) to unlock itself. People take what they want and computer vision inside the fridge automatically keeps track of the items and charges users accordingly.

There are two main parts to Fraîche’s pitch. First, it can offer companies healthier, fresh food for employees without the need to build out a cafeteria or other on-site services. Smaller companies can’t afford to have such a cafeteria to begin with, and larger companies are figuring out their on-site food strategies. A Fraîche fridge can be stocked with healthy food choices, and is available around the clock.

The second part of Fraîche’s pitch is that, like Byte, companies can subsidize as much of the food offered as the like. So companies could foot the bill for half of a meal, or all of it, depending on their needs and budget. Tximista Lizarazu, CEO & Co-Founder at Fraîche told me by video chat this week that most companies he is talking to are choosing to subsidize food 100 percent. “They want to subsidize to make the office a better place than it used to be and convince people to come back,” Lizarazu said.

It’s not just companies that are interested in Fraîche, however. Building owners, too, are looking to attract tenants back, and Fraîche’s smart fridges are part of those leasing perk packages.

Right now Fraîche is focused solely on New York City. The company charges a monthly service fee to operate and maintain the machines, and also generates revenue from selling food. Fraîche currently makes and sells its own line of meals through its machine, but Lizarazu said that the company will be phasing that out in January to selling only food from local New York brands.

Fraîche started two years ago and has raised $1.2 million in Pre-Seed funding so far. Lizarazu said the company is stronger now than it was prior to the pandemic. “What we are doing is perfect for these hybrid offices,” he said. “We are in a better position now post-COVID, because of the health and wellness component.”

The question remains, however, whether food will help bring people back into offices.

Fighting Consumer Food Waste at Home Means Rethinking the Refrigerator

What’s the most effective way to fight food waste in the home? Take a look at your fridge.

Most consumers at this point are aware of the world’s multibillion food waste problem. A great many more now understand that, at least in North America and Europe, the bulk of that waste happens at consumer-facing stages of the food journey, including our own homes. What we’re less certain of is how to curb that excess.

Researching solutions for “The Consumer Food Waste Innovation Report,” which you can read on Spoon Plus, I came across a number of different methods for reducing food waste in the home. But after sifting through the many storage and preservation options out there, the meal-planning and meal-sharing apps, I’m left wondering if the trick to reducing at-home food waste isn’t just re-envisioning the refrigerator itself.

The appliance hasn’t changed much over the last several decades. But in 2020, the pandemic is keeping more folks at home, we have more information about how much food we’re actually wasting (it’s a ton), and more investment in the food tech sector in general. The convergence of those factors makes now an ideal time to change that point and introduce more innovation into the world of refrigerators. Here are a few ideas:

Smarter Features That Are Actually Affordable

By now, many consumers are at least aware of high-tech refrigerators that can track items placed in the fridge, alert owners when those items are running low, and scan and identify foods to help consumers plan meals and find recipes. LG’s ThinQ and the Samsung Family Hub are two appliances that lead the smart fridge market.

They also cost thousands of dollars, making them out of reach for most consumers. True, having cameras and image-recognition technology inside the fridge is a relatively new concept, so a higher price point is to be expected. But in order for the new applications of those technologies to be most effective, they’ll need to get cheaper. By that I mean, we’ll need to see options for them build into most fridges.

Another option is add-on tech for the fridge. As we note in the report, Smarter makes a device can be retrofitted for any fridge and recognize the items inside. Fridge Eye has a similar device.

Smaller Fridge, Bigger Freezer

“Everyone loses something in the back of the fridge,” food waste expert Dana Gunders told us when interviewed for the report. Her point is that the sheer size of most modern refrigerators means older items will get pushed out of view and forgotten as newer ones are placed in the fridge.

High-tech fixes like the ones mentioned above can help, but the fridge design itself seems ripe for an upgrade. Or downgrade, as it were, since a smaller fridge compartment with a bigger freezer might be a surefire way to reduce food waste. Much of our food, even items like milk and bread, can be frozen until we need to use them. And research shows that things like frozen fruits and vegetables maintain more or less the same nutrients as their fresh counterparts. 

Better Storage to Accompany the Fridge

Back in the 1930s, when the electric refrigerator was just starting to get popular, General Electric sold fridges by promoting the then-newish concept of leftovers to consumers. Along with tips and cookbooks, the appliance-maker sold food storage containers designed to stack up in the fridge and hold leftovers. 

Maybe to curb food waste, we need a kind of rebirth of that concept, this time geared towards curbing food waste and with a high-tech twist. Major appliance manufacturers could team up with startups like Mimica, BlakBear, or Silo to sell smarter storage options — think smart labels and temperature sensors — alongside their appliances. They could also find ways to integrate some of those new technologies into fridge doors, drawers, and other compartments.

For more thoughts on the reinvention of the refrigerator as well as how else we can fight food waste at home, check out the full “Consumer Food Waste Innovation” report at Spoon Plus.

Byte Adds Dynamic Pricing to Its Smart Vending Fridges

Byte Technology added dynamic pricing to its smart fridges this week, giving its clients the ability change prices of stocked items on the fly.

Through a combination of RFID and IoT, Byte makes smart vending refrigerators that allow shoppers to swipe their credit card, take what they want from that fridge and get charged automatically. The company licenses its technology platform to retail operations like supermarkets or restaurants, which brand the fridge to sell their packaged food (or anything really).

Because of the RFID tags and connectivity, a Byte fridge knows exactly what’s in its inventory as well as what items sold, when and to whom. With the addition of dynamic pricing, Byte fridge operators can now automatically discount items for just about any reason.

For example, if a fridge is stocked with fresh sandwiches, the operator can create a 25 percent discount on any of them set to expire. Because the fridge already knows everything about its inventory, it automatically knows which sandwiches this discount would apply to, so the operator doesn’t have to set a specific date or create a new rule each time. It could also run promotions on particular drinks, such as half-off carrot juice after 5p.m. on weekdays, or broader discounts like discounts on cobb salads every Monday.

By giving operators the ability to offer dynamic pricing, Byte hopes to reduce the amount of spoilage and food waste created through its platform. This type of dynamic pricing already exists in grocery stores through solutions like Wasteless, which algorithmically discounts food price based on factors like expiration date. And the Karma app teamed up with Electrolux to create special fridges in grocery stores that sell almost expired food for at least half off.

As I wrote about in my recent The Great Vending Reinvention: The Spoon’s Smart Vending Machine Market Report, the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing retailers to examine new, contactless ways of selling. Vending services like Byte’s offer the ability to sell products without human-to-human interaction. And though the pandemic has shut down offices, which were a main line of business for Byte’s machines, Byte Founde, Lee Mokri told me by phone this week that it is seeing increased interest from places like residential buildings.

Come to think of it though, having a smart vending machine in the lobby of an apartment building that can automatically discount a pint of ice after midnight might not be the greatest thing in the world.

Bevi Will Socially Distance Its Smart Water Coolers With Touchless Tech

As restaurants reopen and (some) employees go back to the office, ensuring sanitary, socially distanced public spaces is a major topic of discussion, and contactless is fast becoming a requirement for everything from restaurant menus to grocery deliveries to lunch.

Your office water cooler can join that list now, too. Today, Bevi, a tech company that makes smart water coolers for office and commercial spaces, announced a new touchless dispensing feature meant to make it machines feel more sanitized and socially distanced to users.

The Bevi machine dispenses both still and sparkling water in a variety of flavors. The system involves an internet-connected dispenser that hooks up to a tap water source. Up to now, users could set flavors, carbonation levels, and other preferences using a touchscreen built into the machine. But come July 13, both new and existing Bevi machines will offer touchless dispensing that utilizes an individual’s mobile phone, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Come July 13, Bevi will send an on-screen animation to all its machines that includes instructions on how to use touchless dispensing. To enable the animation, companies just have to run a simple software update. From there, users can scan a QR code, which will replicate Bevi’s dispensing menu on their own personal screen. The same options for drink customization (carbonation levels, flavor, etc.) will appear on the user’s phone just as they would have on the machine’s touchscreen.

On the surface, the update seems a small one, but actually, these micro innovations from the tech world play an important role in making the world, or at least your office or local restaurant, a more sanitary place. While the scale of germophobism varies from one individual to the next, the pandemic has definitely called into question our use of these screens in public settings.

Various efforts are in place to address those concerns. Restaurants across the world are being urged to adopt contactless menus. My colleague Chris Albrecht makes a good argument for gesture control on kiosks and smart dispensers. Others are releasing facial recognition technology on their machines, so that a user need only have their face scanned to access the customer profiles and past orders. 

But facial recognition systems are expensive and come with a double side of privacy concerns. In lots of cases, it may be that a simple QR code is more feasible for a business to implement, especially if it’s for something simple like dispensing a lime-flavored water.

That seems to be Bevi’s thinking behind its new feature update. Doubtless we’ll see many other device-makers rolling out their own touchless functionality in the near future.

New Smart Fridges Should Help Us Organize Our Food Better

If you’re like, well, practically everyone, the inside of your fridge is probably a dystopian nightmare: half-used bottles of condiments jammed into the doors, leftover boxes stacked precariously atop one another, limp broccoli tucked away in vegetable bins.

Earlier this month, The Wirecutter ran a fun piece on how to Marie Kondo your fridge. It’s packed with great advice on how to get rid of stuff and organize your food in a way that makes sense.

As I read through The Wirecutter’s tips, I started thinking about the new wave of smart fridges with cameras built into them. Both LG and Samsung showed off these camera-equipped fridges this month at CES, touting the image recognition’s ability to help you with grocery shopping, meal planning and recipe discovery.

Seems like these all-seeing, AI-powered fridges could also help out with food organization. At first, this may seem like a silly add-on. I mean, anyone can place a carton of milk in the fridge. But as The Wirecutter points out, not all zones inside a fridge are created equal. Some parts are colder than others (the back, bottom self), some slots are better suited for condiments (door shelf), and there are even food safety considerations (don’t place raw chicken on the top shelf).

So a smart fridge could suggest where to place an item inside the fridge based on what that item is. Or it could suggest arrangements based on expiration date so you’ll know which food is going bad first. And if you are using the embedded meal planning function, it could suggest grouping items together that will all be used in a specific recipe.

Again, I don’t think this needs to be a priority for appliance manufacturers. But it is a small step that could bolster the new features like meal planning they want to be adopted, and in a small way, could perhaps save us from our own dystopian levels of food waste.

CES 2020: Bosch and Chefling Introduce Inventory Management Tech to Their At-Home Smart Kitchen System

Appliance-maker Bosch, part of the BSH Home Appliances family, and AI-powered kitchen assistant Chefling will show off the latest features of their connected kitchen system at CES this week. At the center of those features is inventory management technology that uses in-refrigerator image recognition to identify items that are added or removed from the fridge and automatically update inventory lists, according to a press release from Chefling.

Chefling’s AI-powered kitchen assistant aids the consumer meal journey in the home kitchen by helping users manage food inventory, create shopping lists, and send digital recipes to their connected kitchen appliances. As part of this package, the Chefling app can recommend recipes based on what’s in a user’s connected fridge or pantry — a feature that could potentially save consumers lots of time and money since it helps them utilize what food is already at home rather than sending them to the store. To do that, however, the system needs the most up-to-date inventory of what’s actually in the fridge when it’s time to cook.

That’s where the new inventory management technology comes in. Previously, users had to scan a barcode or take a picture of their receipt in order for Chefling to keep track of what was in the fridge. With the new technology, users can simply put groceries into a Bosch-connected fridge (or take them out) and their at-home food inventory automatically updates within the Chefling app. The system can be used with any camera-equipped fridge that is equipped with BSH’s Home Connect system. New recipes based on the updated inventory will be available from the Chefling app.

As our awareness of the food waste problem increases and companies work to find solutions to fight the issue, technology that can help manage at-home food inventory is poised to become more commonplace in the average consumer’s kitchen. Connecting the fridge to systems that keep track of food already in the home is one way to do so, and Bosch/Chefling aren’t alone in highlighting new technology for this at CES. Both LG and Samsung are also showing off high-tech refrigerators that can recognize the food inside and suggest recipes based on those items. LG, in particular, uses a computer vision system to keep a real-time inventory of what’s inside the fridge.

BSH invested in Chefling in May of 2019, acquiring one third of the latter’s shares as part of the terms of the deal (other details were not disclosed). Since the deal, Chefling has increased both the number of users on its platform and the system’s ability to self learn, which is vital to keeping track of inventory in real time.

Bosch and Chefling will be showing off the system at the Bosch booth this week at CES.