If there was an inventory of all the food in your fridge and cupboards, figuring out what to make for dinner would be a matter of using that list to find recipes that brought some of these ingredients together. And if there was a way for the four-pound chicken you bought last night to communicate with your oven, it would also take some of the guesswork out of you trying to figure out how long and at what temperature to cook it.
Both of these big ideas were mentioned during the debut of Innit at this week’s Smart Kitchen Summit. The company says it wants to digitize food and “give it a voice.”
“There’s a wealth of information within food,” said president Eugenio Minvielle during the announcement. Coffee makers, for example, need to understand where their beans come from and what type they are. “You really need to know what’s in it,” says Minvielle, a former CEO for Nestlé in France.
Instead of building the oven that the chicken talks to, Innit built the cloud-based platform that does the connecting. It’s speaking to a number of partners, and to show what the future could hold, Minvielle says, “We put together a kitchen that listens and cooks by itself.” So not only would your list of food help you decide on a recipe to make, sensors, cameras, and other tech in the fridge could help you keep track of spoiling food and expiration dates.
“It’s not just pushing another box,” CEO Kevin Brown told Digital Trends at the summit, meaning it’s not about making a single smart appliance. Instead, it wants to help answer three questions; What can I make, how can I make it more easily, and how do I do it consistently and not ruin dinner for my family? Innit’s platform, he says, should make the kitchen truly connected. It will take advantage of sensors, connected appliances, machine learning, and other technology currently being introduced to the kitchen.
“The kitchen’s been stuck in the ‘70s,” Brown says, but for it to truly become smart, “It comes down to the food.”
