There have been some rumblings over the past few years about various kitchen and food tech companies dead-set on bringing much-needed and smarter improvements to home kitchens everywhere. Think of something like Pantelligent, SproutsIO, or Samsung’s Family Hub refrigerator. Each of these new technologies aims to make the process of growing, purchasing, preparing and storing food much easier.
In addition, there was a wave of food apps that hit the market a couple of years back that aimed to improve some segment of the shopping or food preparation experience for users. Best Before, Fridge Pal, and Fridge Check are a few of the more popular ones still floating around today.
According to Alex Burdine, the co-founder of FreshFridge, “The biggest problem with existing apps in our experience is that they don’t connect the dots between tasks: shopping lists, food inventory, recipe suggestions, deals, and purchasing.” It’s his recently launched iOS and Android app; however, that’s gearing up to be that all-in-one solution that consumers are indeed looking for—something that Burdine and co-founder Jared Moyer spent two years researching before launching the company in 2017.
How FreshFridge Plans to Improve the Food Tech Space
“My wife is a registered dietician and Jared’s wife is a chef, so food is at the center of a lot of what we do at home. That translates into hours of meal planning, coupon cutting, recipe finding, food shopping, dinner making, food consuming, and leftover storing.”
Burdine continued, “It’s a lot for any family or person to take on, and why we created FreshFridge: to help cut down on repetitive tasks, eliminate the need for multiple apps, and ultimately, create a single ecosystem for your kitchen’s essential functions.”
So, what exactly does the food app do? Well, it covers most of those time-consuming tasks Burdine mentioned:
- It uses your phone as a scanner for easy recording of your kitchen’s inventory as well as the expiration dates on all items.
- It keeps track of items in your refrigerator.
- It keeps tracks of non-perishables in your pantry.
- It comes with a built-in shopping list app, so you can conveniently add expired or missing items to your list.
- It also has a recipe suggestion tool in case you need help planning last-minute meals with soon-to-expire food items.
Burdine further elaborated on this by explaining that FreshFridge is a versatile food app. The last thing they intended to do was create an app that forced users to download other apps to complement their kitchen management solution. Such apps take up a lot of space and data on smartphones, and Burdine and Moyer didn’t want their app seen as another unnecessary download.
“Every family is unique, and each user will resonate with different features within the app. We designed FreshFridge to include functions that help families of all sizes or even housemates to sync and share shopping lists, storage spaces (fridge, freezer, pantry), and even recipes from across the internet.”
The Future of Food Tech IoT
The team at FreshFridge is always looking to innovate and grow their offering. In fact, they encourage users to send them suggestions that they can use for feature upgrades or additions in upcoming releases.
They’re also planning on further innovations in the food tech IoT space, though there are no specific details they can release about what those are just yet. Here is what Burdine had to say about this, “Later this summer we will be announcing hardware developments that will truly revolutionize kitchen and food management. Food tech IoT is all I can say for now, but it will be baked right into the FreshFridge app to provide even more functionality and usefulness to our users.”
While FreshFridge is not the first app to try and revolutionize home kitchen management, they seem to have the right intent behind it. They currently have plans to attend the Propelify Innovation Festival where they will be participating in a speed investing event, discussing the details of their roadmap for development, and kicking off fundraising efforts. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of future innovations they unveil at this event.
Brenda Barron is a writer from Southern California specializing in technology and business. When she’s not writing, you can usually find her outdoors with her family or knitting.
I am guessing that the setup for an app like this is a little overwhelming, but once you have it going, the results are great! I always forget about things that are in the fridge and if I have a busy week and am not cooking all that much, food goes bad quickly.
Just the fact that the application will add expired foods to my shopping list is a major bonus!
Just having a shopping list app alone is the only other feature that makes this a sure thing for me! Awesome idea!
I totally agree. There are things in my fridge that I am guessing about how old they are. I HATE to open containers, but that is the only way to check 🙂 I have many apps on my phone, so what is another one?
Oh man, my fridge would smell so much better if I was getting a reminder all the time 🙂
LOL, I was thinking the same thing. But just like every other of the 5 million apps that I use, I will just start to ignore it and I would be back into the same situation as i was before 🙂
Well, it will only be a matter of time before there are RFID tags on my food and my fridge is reading the information in them to control lighting, temperature and the expiration dates.
Not that I need another app for my diet and exercise, but if this is going to remind me when the milk is bad, I’ll take it! That will save me enough grief and is worth the download right there!