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Smart Kitchens of the Future

There’ve been so many food delivery and meal kit startups but there’s surprisingly little activity in kitchen technology. In the face of a wave of restaurant closings due to the pandemic, you’d think there’d be a little more focus on smart kitchens. 

Samsung and LG slapped some screens on their fridges and connected them to other appliances, but they don’t have a good track record with software and rarely venture outside their own hardware ecosystems. It’s a good first step but as big as those companies are, they hit some roadblocks. Instead, Google and Amazon are slowly creeping in because they’re actually better positioned to take over the space.

The Smart Kitchen I Want

Let’s travel forward 5 years from now when you’re preparing for Thanksgiving. You’re hosting, but you overslept. So you tell your AI speaker, “I need to make a thanksgiving feast for 10 and I’ve only got 5 hours!”

Your phone and a fridge-mounted screen suddenly display a list of multi-course meal options that you can prepare. Each option is based on the number of servings you need, the available ingredients you have in your fridge and pantry, and your personal historical preferences.

Once you’ve committed to one of the options, the voice assistant will coach you through the preparation. First, it will help you find all your ingredients in the fridge and on the shelves with a mixture of voice and visual indicators. If any IoT appliances are involved, it can assist in operating them. For example, it can pre-heat the oven and let you know when it’s ready. (For the record, I think internet connectivity is a pretty useless feature on ovens).

It will help you coordinate every step of each recipe, and offer video guidance on specific cooking techniques. And it’ll optimize for just-in-time delivery so that each dish finishes in the order you need them, right before your guests arrive. Because it’ll have access to your guests’ gps locations and calendars too. After you’re done, you can rate the recipe.

As an added bonus, you’ll never have to make a shopping list again. Pre-select what you want to eat over the next few weeks, and your kitchen will build your shopping list for you based on what you have and what you need.

How will this become a reality? Here’s the recipe!

Hardware Ingredients

There are a few major hardware pieces required, and Amazon or Google are the front-runners for pulling it off.

  • 1 Google Home or Alexa, Sorry Siri and Cortana.
  • 1 Tablet running on the same OS as the voice assistant
  • Cameras set up to see every shelf in the fridge, freezer, and pantry
  • Scales for each shelf.
  • Odor sensors.
  • Smart appliances like a fridge, oven, microwave, toaster, rice cooker, and smoke detectors

Software Ingredients

Next, we’d need software to make sure all the hardware plays well together. Google and Amazon have already created significant barriers to entry here because they make half the required hardware.

Obviously, they have the AI speakers already, and both companies make versions with screens built in. They also have tablets and proprietary OS’s to enable coordination between the users and all the hardware.

They each own IoT camera companies- Nest and Ring, which are a small pivot away from being able to visually identify and monitor stock levels in your cabinets. Combine this with scales and odor sensors, and they’ll know when you’re running low on ingredients. And both of them have the world’s largest repositories of UPC codes and SKU’s for packaged foods.

Amazon’s Strengths

But Amazon has is ahead in a few things. First, they’ve already deployed the technology to track fridge/pantry stock in their checkout-less Amazon Go market. So with a few cameras and scales connected to Echo, they can also retrofit it to the home. And second, they’re the biggest ecommerce site in the world, so even without sensors in your cabinets, if you order groceries from them regularly, they’ll have a good idea of what you have in stock at any given moment.

For example, Amazon could combine their record of a purchase date with visual and odor data to determine if something you haven’t finished is about to start rotting. And if it were up to Amazon, it wouldn’t matter if you have something in stock or not. If you want to make a certain recipe, they’d just deliver what you need automatically within an hour.

Google’s Strengths

Google has the lead in recipes though. They have provided a structured data format (link below) for people to publish recipes and make them more searchable, and it accounts for all sorts of things like prep time, yield, and calories. They also have a rating and recommendation system, so the more you make, the more relevant the suggestions will be.

It’s Only a Matter of Time

As I mentioned earlier, Samsung and LG did take a stab at this software, but it doesn’t go beyond reading you a recipe and making a shopping list. As of 2020, they’re beginning to use machine vision to recognize what’s in your fridge, but they can’t see in your cabinets. For now you have to manually enter in what you have if you want to keep track of stock. Too tedious.

It’s only a matter of time before Google or Amazon offer voice guidance for multiple recipes at once, hopefully with a visual timeline in a Gantt chart. And perhaps they’ll also account for how many people are cooking and their skill levels for particular tasks.

Coincidentally, one of my friends has just launched a beta for an app to help people learn how to cook, specifically through developing underlying techniques behind each step. It’s called Parsnip.ai (show some support and download the app!)

We’re really not all that far away from this becoming a reality. The biggest hurdle so far has actually been real estate developers, because we have enough trouble just making cabinets fit. So I wouldn’t be surprised if big tech totally sidesteps us and makes this available as an aftermarket add-on that people can install themselves. Although if I were taking the lead on this, the fridge and cabinets would be using the smart closet system I described in this other post.