Your fridge will soon buy your groceries!

Today,we are going to talk about food (I love food!), and how IoT (Internet of Things) can help food businesses to expand their operations and increase the number of point of sales in an economically efficient way.

An American start up called Pantry provides food companies with a very smart business solution to sell their products unattended/without staff.

You can discover their product in the following video:

The “intelligent” fridge uses the RFID technology to charge the customers. They will be billed what they removed from the fridge.

Value is not only added for the customer, who can assess and check the food  before actually buying it, but for the company too. Indeed Pantry  provides its customers with analytics enabling the food providers to optimize restocking, identify trends, and ensure freshness. They also provide up to minute inventory and sales data. This data will be used to optimize operations and increase both customer satisfaction and profits.

In the near future we can imagine a company like Corte Ingles in Spain (of Whole Foods in the USA). To develop the same kind of technology where a customer would fill in a database their standard fridge inventory, and every week Corte Ingles would only refill the items that are no longer recorded as being in the fridge. The company could also send text messages to the customers when there is a shortage of an item in fridge reminding them to do pick it at the store.

A new breed of products are coming our way

In previous blogs we have focused on the consumer side of the Internet of Things (IoT), but what about businesses, what are they doing with the information provided? As products start to connect to the Internet, the amount of information available becomes exponential. A phone is no longer a  communication tool, its a database carrying more information than any customer study. The iPhone is more advanced than the Apollo computers that put the man on the moon. Actually, the comparison is better with the IBM PC XT launch in 1979.  Today’s technology is equipped with sensors, software, and digital user interfaces that are now connected to the Internet and each other. What this will mean? How will products of the future look like? Who is using this information?

The iPad was the world first tablet computer. Tablets are mobile computers with display, circuitry and battery in a single unit. They are built around a touchscreen that replaces the mouse and keyboard.  In 2010, Apple introduced the iPad to the market.  Critics received the iPad with mixed feelings, making both the list of 10 worst products of 2010 and the best product list. By 2013, 193 million tablets were being sold yearly. What changed? How can a completely new product become so popular? How can a company led by a man like Steve Jobs, who constantly was saying that “people don't know what they want until you show it to them” could launch such a product, the answer: the IoT.

Today information is a grasp away from businesses. Information is generated in everything that we use and is connected to the Internet.  Even if we do not realize it, information is being gathered, collected and used by most corporations.

According to the article “Stop Bothering Your Customers To Learn About Your Products”, from Forbes Magazine, the success of a company will be based on unleashing the “Voice of the Product (VoP) – to capture, analyze and capitalize on what the product is saying” and change the objective from “talking to the customer about your product, to talking to your product about the customer”.

The iPad was one of the first successful stories of the IoT and VoP. But the question will remain on who can unlock the power of the 50 billion devices estimated to be connected at the end of the decade, and who will adapt the most to the transformation requirements needed to create, operate, and service the smart, connected devices of the IoT. For those that get it right, the future represents a huge opportunity to create advantageous products and services.

According to a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, the IoT has the potential to unleash as much as $6.2 trillion in new global economic value annually by 2025. The firm also projects that 80 to 100 percent of all manufacturers will be using IoT applications by then, leading to potential economic impact of as much as $2.3 trillion for the global manufacturing industry alone.