Samsung’s smart fridges will use AI to suggest groceries to buy on Instacart

Samsung’s smart fridges will soon be able to identify when you’re running low on something and add items to your Instacart app so you can order what you need from the grocery delivery service right from your fridge.

Today, Samsung announced a multiyear partnership with Instacart that will let you shop for groceries from the screen on your Samsung Bespoke fridge — the 32-inch one or the one with the new 9-inch screen the company is debuting at CES this month.

According to the press release, the tech uses Samsung Vision AI food recognition technology to identify what you have in your fridge and determine what you’re running low on. Then, using Instacart’s product matching API, it suggests items from the service you might need and lets you order them from the fridge.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

The service uses “AI Vision Inside” on Samsung’s fridges, which leverages a camera above the fridge door to see when you put items into your fridge as well as when you take them out. It also has cameras inside to keep an eye on what you have in there, although it can’t see items in the refrigerator door bins or freezer.

Samsung says the locally-based AI can recognize “up to” 37 food items including fresh fruits and vegetables. You can also manually input details of other items to your food list on the Samsung Food app on the fridge or on your phone.

While you can currently use Samsung Food to create a shopping list you can send to Instacart, this new feature should make that experience simpler and more automated. It should also automatically update your food list when you purchase items from the shopping list. And, when you make a recipe you’ve saved to the Samsung Food app, it can automatically remove items you’ve used from the food list and add then to the shopping list, working hand-in-hand with the AI-powered cameras to keep your fridge stocked.

However, how well this will all actually work in practice remains to be seen.

Funnily enough, the Instacart app used to be on Samsung’s smart fridges; although it wasn’t integrated with the device’s cameras in this way, it was just a standalone app. It also mysteriously vanished earlier this year, along with a number of other apps — at least from my 2019 model.

Samsung says the Instacart integration will come later this year via a firmware update to models with the AI Vision Inside, which arrived last year.