Amazon is reportedly building a smart fridge that will track groceries and suggest recipes

According to a new report from Business Insider, Amazon may be working on its own smart fridge. Project Pulse, as the product is called internally according to the publication, is being developed by the same "physical stores division" of Amazon that worked on the high-tech Amazon Go stores.

The Just Walk Out technology used in Go stores tracks what shoppers put in their carts and automatically charges them when they leave. Members of the hardware groups at Amazon Fresh and Lab126 are also involved in the refrigerator project.

Project Pulse is "designed to track your inventory and buying habits, predict what you want, and carry out assigned tasks". The fridge could also track the expiration dates of food, suggest recipes based on what is in the fridge, and recommend an easy way to order more food from an Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods grocery store.

A source familiar with the matter told the publication that Amazon's work on the fridges has apparently been underway for at least two years under the leadership of Gopi Prashant, "director of computers and artificial intelligence". It is still unknown whether and when the company will present the product, but according to the report, it will work with other manufacturers.

While Amazon has recently been focusing more on making its own devices, the company is in talks with several major home appliance brands that it could potentially partner with to produce refrigerators. However, entering the home appliance market would lead to more direct competition for Amazon with well-known retailers such as Samsung, LG and General Electric, brands the company sells through its online marketplace.

Smart fridges are far from a new idea. Samsung and LG offer devices that can identify food products, connect to digital assistants such as Bixby, and in some cases even make ordering groceries easy. If Amazon is indeed working on a fridge, its added value would be the company's grocery store network and the computer vision work already done to identify products in Amazon Go stores and Dash carts.

The concept itself is not new. In 2016, Samsung introduced a fridge that helps users keep track of what is inside without opening the door. It can even be used to order groceries through a built-in touchscreen. However, Amazon's fridge would take the idea a bit further, since it would flag items that are about to run out and help reorder more through the company's own grocery ecosystem.

The device would also collect data on product popularity, anticipate the owner's tastes, suggest suitable foods and offer useful recipes for healthy dishes. However, the project could be canceled due to the imperfect performance of the neural network that would allow the fridge to recognize what is on its shelves. Insider writes that testers of the device in India often have to label products manually.

As with other product categories the company has only recently entered (thermostats, for example), Amazon has good capabilities to undercut its competitors on price and easily integrate another smart home device into its ecosystem after many years of developing Alexa. A company representative told The Verge: "We do not comment on rumors or speculation".

Of course, the report should be treated with skepticism. Amazon is a huge and wealthy company that may try and test many things without ever releasing them. Leaks and rumors about Amazon's product ambitions have also been hit or miss. Bloomberg predicted that the company would not announce its long-awaited robot at its fall hardware event, but ultimately it did, provoking, among many other reactions, possible privacy concerns.

Although Amazon fairly successfully disguises all its innovations as harmless home technologies designed to make your life easier, their potential to undermine privacy cannot be ignored, hiding behind the dual slogans of "convenience" and "home security". For example, the cute home assistant Astro, introduced in September 2021, literally memorizes the entire layout of your home, including the rooms where children sleep.

To date, there is no estimate of the cost or expected release date for Project Pulse, but anonymous sources told Insider that the price is expected to be "high" given the relative complexity of the hardware involved. According to a source, the company is currently spending more than $50 million a year on the project. The target audience for the smart fridge would be high-income households already subscribed to Amazon Prime.

It is unclear what Amazon is really working on, but this is the company that surprised the world with a microwave featuring Alexa support. Who knows what the new device will be?