GE wants its new smart kitchen appliances to do something more ambitious than simply keep food cold or cook it. The company wants to help decide what’s for dinner in the first place and ease its preparation.
Through features such as a grocery barcode reader, both GE’s newest fridges and ovens include new smarts to enable easier meal planning, grocery management, recipe discovery, and voice-enabled cooking assistance to lessen much of the daily “What’s for dinner?” burden.
GE also unveiled a second smaller Opal Mini Nugget Ice Maker designed to address the surprising “nugget” ice trend.
“We didn’t set out to create a smart refrigerator or a smart oven,” explained Rachael Schwartz, executive director of Built-in Cooking at GE Appliances. “We set out to create an ecosystem which helps make this age-old problem of getting food on the table just a little bit easier for our customers.”
GE’s new smarter kitchen gear reflects the evolution of the original raison d’être of home appliances as labor-saving devices. Instead of selling mere wireless connectivity for its own sake, appliance makers such as GE increasingly position smart features as practical tools that save time, reduce household stress, and help free up increasingly scarce leisure time.
A Smarter Smart Fridge
At the center of the company’s growing smart kitchen appliance ecosystem is the GE Profile 27.9-cubic-foot Smart 4-Door French-Door Refrigerator with Kitchen Assistant, which reached stores earlier this year at a suggested retail price starting at $4,899 in both standard- and counter-depth versions.
Built on GE Profile’s best-selling four-door platform, the new fridge incorporates an 8-inch touchscreen, microphones, speakers, an internal camera, and what GE says is the industry’s first built-in barcode scanner integrated into the refrigerator dispenser. Able to recognize more than four million products, users can scan groceries or household items as they run low and then automatically add the correct brand, flavor, and size to a shared GE SmartHQ shopping list. That list can then be sent directly to Instacart for delivery or in-store pickup.
“We did not just want to be an appliance company that puts an iPad on a refrigerator and says, ‘There, we made a smart appliance,’” Jason May, executive director of product management for French-door refrigeration, elucidated. “We wanted to solve real problems.”
For products sans barcodes, owners can simply say, “Hey HQ,” and add products by voice from either the refrigerator or oven. May noted the goal is to eliminate the mental burden of remembering what needs replenishing while reducing grocery-shopping mistakes.
Like many higher-end fridges, GE’s FridgeFocus is a camera mounted above the crisper drawers to capture produce images whenever the refrigerator door closes. While shopping, owners can check the SmartHQ app to ascertain which fruits and veggies they need – or not – to not only reduce duplicate purchases but, more importantly, to reduce food waste. A physical privacy shutter lets owners disable the camera whenever they choose.
While these smart ecosystem features are limited to GE Profile’s premium four-door French-door models, May previewed similar capabilities already being developed for future side-by-side refrigerators.
An Oven That Really Cooks
Complementing the new smart refrigerator is GE’s new family of smart built-in wall ovens, available this month under the GE Profile, Café, and Monogram brands, starting at $3,499 for GE Profile and Café models.
Rather than function as a standalone cooking appliance, the fridge and the wall oven become the final step in GE’s connected “What’s for dinner?” workflow. Owners can discover recipes in the SmartHQ app, build lists and order groceries, then send recipes directly to the oven. On select models, GE’s CookCam can recognize foods, recommend cooking modes, and let owners monitor meals remotely through the SmartHQ app, almost turning cooking into an automated process.
Built-in iHeartRadio also lets users stream music, podcasts, and radio directly from either the fridge or the oven during meal prep or mere puttering around the kitchen.
Partnerships with Taste of Home, King Arthur Baking, Homemade Cooking, HelloFresh, Instacart and iHeartRadio further expand its ecosystem, while GE’s Flavorly AI recipe generator suggests meals based on ingredients already in the kitchen.
Sucking Ice
Rounding out GE’s announcements was the new GE Profile Opal Mini Nugget Ice Maker, a smaller successor to the popular Opal countertop ice maker that helped popularize chewable or suckable hollow nugget ice becoming popular especially with women, according to GE.
“We call them the Ice Girlies because this is a massive thing on TikTok right now,” noted a GE spokesperson. “We see a huge social trend…that’s the up-and-coming craze. People are drinking cold drinks and their caffeine cold. And now there’s ‘dirty soda’ that started on social media. Dirty soda is essentially soda with cream and flavoring. It’s like the old kind of cream sodas.”
Introduced on July 14, the redesigned Opal Mini occupies 30% less counter space while still producing up to 36 pounds of nugget ice daily. Base models start at $279-$299, with Opal Mini Pro and Mini Pro+ versions priced at $379 and $399, respectively.
GE said the new models were developed in response to consumer demand for more portable versions suited to apartments, dorm rooms, RVs, and vacation homes. Besides the smaller footprint, the Opal redesign adds easier cleaning, front-access draining, and optional side water tanks to reduce refill frequency. New earth-tone finishes, including Moss Green, Moonstone Blue, and Peony Pink, are planned for later this year.
See also: Research Shows Generations Consider Different Factors When Purchasing Household Appliances
