Future Fridge: Tomorrow’s AI-Powered Tech Fights Food Waste & Helps You Grocery Shop

Tomorrow, a new startup from Seattle, is hoping to disrupt the refrigerator category with technology that prolongs the shelf life of produce and reduces food waste.

Would you eat a bell pepper you bought three weeks ago?

It’s what a new US startup is hoping to help you do: make your food and money last longer, save you time from extra supermarket visits, and cut back on household food waste.

Tomorrow, the brainchild of Outreach co-founder Andrew Kinzer, does so by employing a patent-pending artificial-intelligence-powered technology that stops the rot (quite literally), making fruits and vegetables last up to three times longer than a legacy fridge.

Due to be launched in summer 2025, the company is keeping most details about its refrigerator under wraps. But Tomorrow’s refrigerator relies on postharvest physiology and is targeting millennial households who are conscious about their health, and that of the planet.

“Postharvest physiology is the science of how fresh produce is cleaned, sorted, stored and transported to stores after being harvested from a farm,” Kinzer tells Green Queen.

“They use the term ‘physiology’ because fresh fruits and vegetables are still alive and metabolically active even when on the shelf at the store or in your refrigerator – taking in oxygen, breathing out CO2, and losing water,” he adds.

Tomorrow is targeting food waste because it accounts for up to a tenth of global emissions – five times higher than the aviation industry – with over a quarter of farmland given over for the production of food that’s eventually thrown away. Its impact on climate change and biodiversity loss has led the UN to implore countries to halve food waste by 2030 as part of its Sustainable Development Goals and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

The high-tech fridge also has cameras that can track what items you’re running out of (akin to Samsung’s $5,100 model), saving you that additional weekday trip to the grocery store – that adds up to around 40 minutes a week. Plus, it can help you figure out what you can cook with the produce you have on hand.

“The primary category we’ve focused on for shelf life extension to date is fruits and vegetables, which is one of the most prized and under-optimised food categories in homes, and also the greatest contributor to food waste by weight,” Kinzer explains. According to the FAO, 41% of household food waste is made up of fresh produce.

How Tomorrow slows the ageing of fruits and vegetables

“If you want to make something live longer, you have to know what’s actually preventing it from living longer. For produce, the warmer the items are, the faster they age. The dryer the air is, the faster they lose water and shrivel,” says Kinzer. “Too much moisture leads to mould growth. When we stack items deep, they get physically injured.”

He continues: “If you’ve ever gone into the crisper and found bruised, mouldy, or dried-out items at the bottom, you’ve experienced these problems first hand.”

Tomorrow is addressing one of the primary drivers of premature ageing in produce: water loss. Fridges have always been designed to be dehydrators, keeping food fresh by pulling moisture out of it.

“When you take carrots out of the fridge and they are super bendy and limp, that’s water loss. When you see strawberries looking dry and dull with their seeds popping out, that’s water loss. Wilted lettuce or cilantro? Water loss,” Kinzer points out.

Tomorrow is shaking up both the hardware and software of refrigerators, leveraging a cooling architecture that manages the atmosphere through different principles than legacy versions to stem water loss.

It has conducted hundreds of experiments to benchmark its results. Cilantro, for example, retains four times more water than in conventional fridges, and this rises above fivefold for broccoli and eightfold for bananas.

The Tomorrow fridge also has a “computer vision system”, which identifies what’s in each chamber and optimises the atmosphere based on that data. “Because fruits and vegetables are alive, they have different needs from eggs or milk or ketchup. They must be treated like the unique category they are to get them closer to their theoretical maximum lifespan,” says Kinzer.

But what if you store a variety of produce in each chamber, as is the norm? “Today, consumers already tend to store items with similar storage requirements together,” he says. “We expect them to continue their current behaviour, but our system can help adjust the atmosphere based on understanding the set of contents inside. We can also provide feedback to the user if an item could be more optimally stored elsewhere.”

Inventory management can save time, money and food waste

Tomorrow has designed the appliance for time-poor, eco-conscious millennials, who place importance on exercise, hands-on parenting, and having a wider selection of meal options. This cohort tends to waste more food than other generations, and – according to the company – cares significantly about eating healthier and reducing food waste.

Of the 1.05 billion tonnes of food wasted in 2022, 60% came from households, according to the UN’s latest Food Waste Index Report. We collectively threw away over a billion meals every day that year, and that’s a very conservative estimate. It’s also equivalent to 1.3 meals daily for each person impacted by hunger globally.

In the US, annual food waste amounts to 73kg per person, costing the average family $1,800. It has prompted states to introduce bans on food waste, while the White House launched the first-ever national strategy dedicated to tackling the problem.

One of the most impactful ways to reduce individual food waste is meal and grocery planning, something the Tomorrow fridge hopes to streamline. “Our software tracks both the age and quantity of your items, and can suggest creative ways to use ingredients before they go bad,” says Kinzer.

“This real-time inventory management helps you avoid unnecessary purchases, ensuring that when you’re at the store, you know exactly what you have at home and don’t end up buying duplicates ‘just in case’,” he adds.

“At a high level, you can think of it as a learning system for the household that can track patterns across inventory and preferences. The longer you use it, the more it can help.”

Kinzer wouldn’t be drawn on the exact mechanisms that help slow water loss, or the expected price point for the fridge – for that, you’ll have to wait until next summer.

But the technology holds tremendous potential if it can deliver what it promises. Soon, your three-week-old pepper may not be wrinkle-free anymore.