The GE Profile Smart Fridge prevents you from buying too much kale

If you’ve ever bought a bag of spinach only to come home and find you already have a bag of spinach, you might enjoy this freezer. I had a chance to check out the GE Profile Smart Fridge and Kitchen Assistant at CES and was surprised to find that I wanted it quite a bit. To be completely honest, most of the attempts I’ve seen in the show to “stick AI into it” are pretty funny but often completely unnecessary.

Here, however, AI has a purpose. After seeing how the auto-fill water dispenser worked, I asked the GE Appliance reps how easy it was to change the refrigerator’s water filter. Jason May, GE Appliances product management officer, went to the refrigerator’s touch screen (which is the right size) and said “Hey HQ, where’s my water filter?” (HQ is short for SmartHQ, the GE Profile assistant). Then, based on the information it gathered from the user manual of this model, the AI ​​assistant explained exactly where to find it (on the left hand door under the ice maker). It took another about two seconds to remove the filter and, just like that, the job was done.

As for the spinach mystery, that’s handled by a shiny drawer camera, called Fridge Focus. Every time you open the drawers, the built-in camera (which you can literally turn off or turn off in the app) takes a video snapshot of what’s left when you’re done. So if you’re at the grocery store and wondering how much kale you already have, you can take a look and see.

Wendy Treinen, GE Appliances’ senior director of product communications, told me that the camera can see what’s in the cooler, but it can’t see who accessed it. So if you’re hoping your fridge will get anyone out of the grape end, you’re out of luck. However, it can help a picky eater easily add fruit to the family grocery list.

That’s the most unique feature the fridge has to offer: a patented built-in barcode scanner. It sits on the drain and when you step up, a little green light activates and scans the barcode of whatever you’re holding. So when you drink last minute almond milk, you scan the container and it will automatically add it to your list.

That list can be accessed through the SmartHQ app that you can buy in-store or, if you really want to get deluxe about it, use the Instacart integration and have it delivered to your door. I scanned a few products – a box of vitamin C mix and a package of cinnamon raisin bagels – both of which quickly appeared on the screen and joined the active list.

The scanner can see four million products, including household items like paper towels and trash bags, but you can add items in other ways as well. The easiest is probably just asking your refrigerator to do so, saying “Hey HQ, add paper towels to my shopping list.” The app allows manual additions and you can add ingredients using the recipe function as well.

To launch the refrigerator, GE Profile partnered with Taste of Home and will send 50 refrigerator recipes every month for users to try. Once you’ve seen the ingredient list, you can add anything you’re missing from your purchase. Those 50 recipes will rotate at the end of the month to make 50 new ones, so if you cook something and you like it, you’ll need to add it to your personal recipe vault.

An AI assistant can make recipes for you. A GE representative took a picture of the product list and asked SmartHQ what it could do with it. A list of recipe suggestions came up and they all looked really delicious (to be honest, I hadn’t eaten and it was 2PM).

I’ve mentioned the hands-free automatic refill feature of the handsfree dispenser before. That has been available in GE Profile fridges for a long time and allows you to choose the capacity of your glass and go while it fills. You can also ask for, say, half a cup of water for a recipe. The new “accurate fill” feature will output large amounts in sequence. Say you need ten cups of water to make the soup. Since you won’t be able to fit a large vat into the drain tray, you can use a small jug and the automatic filler will fill it the correct number of times.

One of my favorite things is the screen. Fridges with large, interactive screens fill my eyes. Yes, it’s novel and eye-catching and maybe funny, but what problem might it be trying to solve? The screen here is eight inches, which is enough to display scanned items, display recipes, and display the weather on top of a nice picture if you’re not visually using the interface.

GE Appliances representatives were eager to point out that this is just the beginning of what they want to do with the refrigerator. My college Sam Rutherford asked if the refrigerator would be able to alert you before your lettuce goes bad, and we were told something to deal with that problem is close. It will probably work by seeing when you bought the perishables, and how long the perishables usually last. The company is also working with a chef on a feature that can reimagine your leftovers to create something new.

During the demo, May told me that the whole idea behind the design of the fridge was to do something different and “put a big screen on it with a bunch of apps that have nothing to do with anything.” Instead, developers started with problems that people really have – knowing what to buy at the grocery store, knowing what’s in the fridge, answering the eternal, never-ending “What’s for dinner?” question – and designed a fridge around that.

I’ll have to live with it for a while to know if those issues are resolved, but so far, I can say that this is the most amazing thing I’ve heard about a smart refrigerator yet. The GE Profile Smart Fridge with Kitchen Assistant will be available in March from geappliances.com for $4,899.