innit

How will we eat in 2025? No doubt, the way we choose, buy and consume food is in flux. 2016 was the first year in the history of the United States that people spent more in eating and drinking establishments than in grocery stores. Why? Convenience, time scarcity, lack of culinary skills, and a strong desire to try new foods difficult to prepare in the home.

Enter Innit. Innit is a food technology company on a mission to empower humanity through food and make this world a better, healthier place. Their connected food platform links food, nutrition information, appliances, grocers, QSRs, and even lifestyle brands to reimagine the way we buy, store, prepare and cook food. The company wants to be the platform that guides you throughout the entire cooking process - starting with the food you have in your fridge through helping you to prepare it and then cooking it to deliver perfect results every time. That's a tall order, especially considering all the variables involved, including the size and shape of different fresh and packaged food and the fact that not everyone knows how to cook. But thanks to machine learning smarts and a variety of high-tech sensors, Innit believes it is up to the task. 

Want to make Jamie Oliver’s salmon soba with ginger citrus but short the noodles and citrus? Innit could seamlessly reorder the missing ingredients based on what’s already in your fridge and pantry. Not sure what to cook for the picky gluten-free guests coming over on the weekend? Innit can help there too. How does it work? Think of it like a GPS for your kitchen. Innit sensors in your oven, fridge and pantry “read” the food information (weight, type, temperature and more) to suggest recipes, offer preparation instructions, and set the ideal program to cook the food to perfection. A rack of ribs that would normally take 3 hours can be on the table in 50 minutes. 

The technology goes beyond making traditionally ‘dumb’ appliances ‘smart’. While traditional appliance makers have taken a “just add wi-fi” approach to their refrigerators and ovens, Innit takes a platform approach. It’s the connective tissue across all appliances and all stages of cooking. Beyond modernizing the kitchen, Innit has ambitions to be the largest repository of food information in the world. ThoughtWorks created a data lake to help them reach this goal. The data lake ingests large amounts of data from a plethora of sources; cooking data from the Innit culinary test lab, Epicurious, Bon Appetit, and Wikipedia, to name a few. This large pool of data paves a flexible future for Innit, giving them the ability to use food insights in real time and support new buying behaviors that are connected to the context of their customer’s lives.

Since its Inception, Innit has raised more than $18M in funding. With only 5 Months left to launch a customer demo ready experience at Pirch, a high-end homewares store in New York, Innit engaged ThoughtWorks to bolster their expertise in custom software development, data analytics, and AI. In addition to creating the data lake, we delivered two mobile applications. The first intelligently suggests recipes based on an individual’s dietary preferences, health-related issues, wellness goals and what’s in the fridge and pantry. The second dynamically controls the cooking sequence based on the food type and weight as well as feedback transmitted by sensors inside the oven. The dynamic cook sequence ensures the food is cooked to perfection every time.

What’s next? ThoughtWorks is a technology partner of choice to help Innit scale the technology. Innit technology opens up completely new possibilities in the way people buy and prepare food, and we’re excited to explore the future with them.