Tech

This 'smart' kitchen recognizes the food in your fridge, creates recipes, and then cooks your meals

Leanna Garfield

2016-05-19T14:17:00Z

There are two reasons why I don’t make ribs at home: The cooking process can take up to three hours, and I doubt I could make them as delicious as a trained chef.

But if I use the new oven from smart kitchen startup Innit, making gourmet ribs takes 40 minutes, and all I have to do is press a few buttons.

The technology aims to make cooking gourmet meals fast and efficient. Innit senses what's in your fridge, helps you decide on a recipe and then makes it for you based on algorithms that figure out the perfect way to cook any given food.

The secret sauce: facial recognition sensors and cameras located inside WiFi-enabled ovens and fridges, which connect to an app that controls the whole experience.

The app features thousands of recipes from publications like Bon Appetit, Epicurious, Good Housekeeping, and The New York Times. Once you choose a recipe, the app sends the cooking directions directly to the oven, which automatically follows them.

I recently had the chance to try out the technology and cook a slab of ribs. Here’s how it works.

I saw Innit’s technology at Pirch Soho, a 32,000-square-foot showroom for kitchen appliances in New York City. On May 23, Pirch will open to the public.

The hardware consists of a system of sensors and cameras. Facial recognition technology in the fridge can recognize specific foods, offer nutritional information, and suggest recipes that incorporate them.

The sensors were relatively accurate in my demo, but the foods need to face forward in line with the cameras.

The app lets you see the contents of your fridge from afar. This could come in handy when you’re thinking about what you need at the grocery store.

The sensors also know when you put, say, a milk carton in the fridge. Since the system knows that milk usually lasts no longer than two weeks, it alerts you when it’s expiring and suggest recipes with milk so it doesn’t go to waste.

The sensors can't read expiration dates, but Brown expects that the system will one day be able to detect when produce is going bad by looking at it.

Innit's tiny cameras can also be integrated into a kitchen ceiling. When I placed a few carrots on the cutting board, the system recognized them and recommended I cook a honey mustard-glazed chicken bake featuring carrots.

Once you choose a recipe on the app, it sends the cooking directions to the oven, which automatically follows them. The GIF below is of a recipe from Innit's app blown up on a giant tablet.

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Innit's technology can be used with an existing oven, or people can buy a special touchscreen-enabled oven (I made the ribs with the latter). The team will announce appliance partners in coming weeks.

Daniel Norton, Innit’s culinary manager and a professional chef, developed the special algorithm for these ribs. First, the app advised that we add salt, pepper, and olive oil to the slab.

Then I put the ribs in the oven.

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According to Norton’s algorithm, the temperature and cooking method (from baking to convection to microwaves) fluctuates about 20 times inside the oven, allowing the ribs to cook in just 40 minutes.

Apart from flipping the ribs about halfway through, all I needed to do was push start.

You can see the ribs cooking in real-time on the app. “You could watch your ribs poolside,” CEO Kevin Brown tells Tech Insider.

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The whole cooking experience was ultra-convenient considering I only tapped a few buttons. The ribs also tasted like they were made in a five-star restaurant.

The idea behind Innit is to eliminate the stresses of cooking, but it also takes the spontaneity out of making a meal.

For some, spending a few hours preparing and cooking a meal can be joyful or even therapeutic. But if you just want to get the job done, Innit makes the whole process quick and efficient.

The startup, which has $25 million in funding and counts former White House chef Sam Kass as a staffer, isn't disclosing pricing yet.

While Innit’s technology might seem lavish, Brown believes that most kitchens will have WiFi-enabled fridges and ovens within the next decade.

"We expect to see this technology in almost every household in the future,” he says.