Pallate is a new smart fridge technology aimed to reduce the amount of food waste in the fridge. In developed countries, food waste has become a pressing environmental and social issue. In the United States, for example, an estimated 40% of food is wasted each year. This amounts to around $165 billion worth of wasted food.
If you’re like most people, you have a love/hate relationship with your refrigerator. You love that it keeps your food cold and fresh, but you hate when it becomes a cluttered mess. Well, thanks to new “smart fridge” technology, your fridge can now help you reduce the amount of food waste you produce.
How Does Pallate Smart Fridge Tech Reduce Food Waste?
In the United States, one-third of the food produced for human consumption is wasted. This amounts to approximately 133 billion pounds of food per year.
While some of this waste is unavoidable, much of it is caused by careless consumers who buy too much food or don’t use it before it goes bad.
According to the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, in the United States, 31 percent of the food supply is wasted each year. A lot of that waste comes from households, where people often discard food because they don’t know how to use it or it has gone bad. But what if there were a way to prevent that food from going to waste in the first place?
Do you ever wonder what you have in your fridge? What you had for lunch the other day? What you should make for dinner tonight? Pallate is a new app that is designed to help you answer all of these questions and more!
A new Indiegogo campaign is looking to reduce food waste with technology. Called Pallate, the smart fridge system is designed to keep track of what’s in your fridge and help you plan meals accordingly. The goal is to reduce the amount of food that’s thrown away each year due to lack of organization or because something has gone bad.
The system consists of a smart Pallate’s camera placed in the fridge and an app. Pallate only captures video when the door opens and the view is limited to the inside of the fridge.
Pallate’s camera senses your products as you place them inside the fridge and it needs the combination of food image + change in weight to record a new food or change in size in your Pallate App. This set of information required is exactly why items from your freezer do not affect Pallate’s accuracy. Without a camera in your freezer, the app only receives weight and ignores the changes.
The app comes with a free version and a premium version. The free version allows you to inventory, get personalized recipes, and order groceries, while the premium version offers more recipes, allergies and diet tracking, better personalization.
Don’t forget to check our Crowdfunding section for more new inventions that can make our life easier.
Photos/Video: Pallate / Thomas Cote
