Why it matters to you
Don’t buy a brand-new smart fridge. Just teach your existing fridge a few new tricks with the Smarter FridgeCam.
Sometimes, the only thing your old refrigerator needs to become a smart refrigerator is a camera. But not just any camera — the Smart FridgeCam. Heralded as the first wireless camera that fits inside any fridge, allowing you to see the contents from anywhere thanks to its companion Smarter app, this camera will help you keep tabs on expiry dates, remind you when you’re starting to run low on essentials, and suggest recipes based on what’s available in your fridge. Think of it as having an assistant live inside your fridge.
Set to launch in the United Kingdom in September, the Smarter FridgeCam hopes to address the ongoing issue of food waste. After all, the company notes, British households throw away some 7 million tons of food and drink every year, and more than half of this discarded sustenance is still edible. But this new connected device hopes to help reduce this waste by up to 50 percent while saving users money.
Sure, there are refrigerators that include this picture-taking functionality, not only are these smart refrigerators expensive, but they also require homeowners to, well, replace their entire fridge. But with the Smarter FridgeCam (which costs under $130, by the way) you need only to mount the device inside your existing appliance.
“The supermarkets tell us that the way we shop has fundamentally changed,” Christian Lane, the founder of Smarter, told the Guardian. “People are shopping little and often and using different shops. The more we developed and trialed this technology, the more we found that it could not just help reduce food waste but it also encourages people to shop in a smarter and more efficient way.”
Like many other smart devices, the more you use the FridgeCam, the better it gets at helping you. And not only do your own user habits contribute to the overall effectiveness of the device, but as Lane noted, “Our platform gets smarter by learning from our customer network of FridgeCams. It is similar to how Tesla automatically improves by constantly learning from all the cars on the road.”
So if you’re interested in reducing food waste and saving some money in the meantime, the Smarter FridgeCam might be the connected device for you.