Dive Brief:
- Samsung Electronics announced Thursday a multi-year partnership with Instacart on shoppable refrigerators that use artificial intelligence to monitor their contents.
- The combination of the grocery technology company’s product-matching API with Samsung’s food-recognition technology will allow people to order groceries directly from the screens of their refrigerators, according to the press release.
- The partnership builds on Instacart’s efforts to expand the availability of shoppable grocery integrations following the grocery e-commerce growth it saw during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dive Insight:
The partnership between Instacart and Samsung marks a step forward for the grocery industry’s long-envisioned “smart kitchen” experience, which marries technology with appliances to make grocery shopping and meal preparation easier for consumers.
Samsung said the Instacart partnership will enable a simple, convenient and technology-driven grocery shopping experience for its consumers. The technology integration, which will kick off with Samsung’s 2025 Bespoke refrigerator models, will allow people to replenish grocery items through Instacart by using AI food recognition technology, according to the announcement.
Existing Samsung AI Family Hub+ refrigerators equipped with the appliance maker’s AI Vision Inside camera technology will also gain the Instacart functionality this year through a software update, according to the announcement.
Samsung’s AI food recognition technology, called AI Vision, can recognize up to 37 food items, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, and people can manually add the names and expiration dates of food items the tool doesn’t recognize. AI Vision can’t see items in refrigerator door bins or the freezer.
The tie-up builds off of Instacart’s publicly available API program, which it unveiled in March and allows third parties to integrate the company’s functionality into their websites and apps. At the time it announced the API, Instacart said its integrations would include shoppable ingredients on New York Times Cooking and shoppable, generative AI-created recipes for GE Appliances’ app for its smart appliances.
Kroger and Whole Foods Market are among the companies that have taken steps to adopt smart kitchen technology. At the end of 2023, Kroger and GE linked to allow people to shop for groceries directly from certain ovens and ranges made by the appliance company. In 2018, Whole Foods partnered with smart oven maker June to allow people to automatically cook products from the grocer’s 365 Everyday Value line.
“We’ve all dreamt of a refrigerator that could replenish itself, and now thanks to this partnership with Samsung, that’s no longer the stuff of science fiction,” Instacart Chief Product Officer Daniel Danker said in a statement.
