With the launch of Samsung Food, Samsung Hypes AI & Consolidates Food Features Discovered Over the Years
Over the years, Samsung has acquired and launched several products in an effort to become the king of the kitchen with the power of technology.
First, there was the introduction of the Family Hub refrigerator, the company’s attempt to create a smart refrigerator built around the company’s operating system and equipped with technology such as refrigerator cameras to identify food and help you when shopping.
Then, there was the acquisition of Whisk, a smart food and shopping app that helped pioneer the affordable cooking space. Whisk was not only amassing an extensive food database, which would eventually form the basis of other Family Hub (now Bespoke Family Hub) shopping and recipe capabilities, but also provided the basis for the ‘Food AI’ now being pushed forward by Samsung.
Then, there were various attempts to use AI to automate the kitchen, as the company announced (and never commercially released) various cooking and kitchen work robots at CES.
And we can’t forget that Samsung also took some of the smart home technology from its SmartThings smart home group (another Samsung acquisition) and paired it with Whisk’s recipe intelligence to create SmartThings Cooking, a guided cooking app.
This leads us to this week, when Samsung announced how much to pack this collected information and technology – save (at least for now) robots – into a newly expanded application and platform called Samsung Food. Samsung Food, which the company describes as an “AI-powered food and recipe platform,” looks to be an important step forward in the company’s efforts to create a centralized digital food management app. And it is a logical step to combine the many efforts gathered under the Samsung brand after the company has gathered various platforms that serve as the basis of what we see today.
Let’s take a closer look at what the company is revealing. In the announcement, Samsung detailed the four main areas of Samsung Food’s work: Recipe Testing and Personalization, AI-Enhanced Meal Planning, Kitchen Connectivity, and Social Sharing.
To test the recipe, Samsung appears to be actually using what was already a feature set in Whisk. Samsung says they can save recipes to a user’s digital recipe box anytime, anywhere, create a shopping list based on their ingredients, and be accessible through the Family Hub. In addition to mobile devices, users can access Samsung Food through their Bespoke Family Hub refrigerators, which will provide recipe recommendations based on user-managed grocery lists and affordable recipe capabilities.
With the Personalization service, Samsung Food appears to be building on the personalization engine created by Whisk and plans to take it even further by integrating with Samsung Health. According to the announcement, by the end of this year, Samsung plans to merge with Samsung Health to provide power for food management suggestions. This integration will include information such as the user’s body mass index (BMI), body composition, and calorie consumption in order to achieve their health goals and efforts to maintain a healthy diet.
The AI-enhanced meal planning feature looks like a long-term planning feature that includes personalized recipe recommendations, and will no doubt benefit from the Samsung Health integration as well.
With Connected Cooking, Samsung has reinvented and expanded the features of the SmartThings Cooking app, adding new devices like the BeSpoke oven and including the same guided cooking features.
And, of course, an integrated food-related platform from Samsung wouldn’t be complete without a social media component. My guess is the Social Sharing feature – which will allow users to share with their community – is a little-needed addition to the app and won’t be that successful, as consumers will continue to use the main social apps (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook) to share food-related food.
The company also teased expanded computer vision capabilities by 2024 in the announcement. The company’s Vision AI technology will “enable Samsung Food to recognize food and feed captured by the camera and provide information about it, including nutritional information.”
Overall, I’m impressed with the overall fit and feel of what I see from Samsung Food. I think it’s a sign that Samsung – despite having bad times and not being clear about their food ideas – seems like they are still committed to being the leader of the kitchen of the future, something they started way back in 2016 with the launch of the Family Hub line.
