Earlier this month at IFA, Midea showed off a range of new smart kitchen gear, including a new refrigerator lineup that features a smart clip system to keep track of food expiration dates.
The smart fridge system, called the INSTA-FIT MASTER, included what the company calls “AI PREPMASTER” and the NFC clips “AI Food Clips”. The clips, which include an NFC communication chip, can be assigned to different food items by the home user within the app.
As can be seen in the video above, users of the new fridge deploy a new NFC smart clip by walking through a series of choices in the app, such as food category (meat, dairy products, vegetables, etc), where the food is stored (freezer, refrigerator) and recommended storage duration. According to MIDEA representative Haoyu Wang, the light in the clip storage rack will turn red when the food is hitting the end of its freshness window.
In some ways, the MIDEA clip system is reminiscent of the Ovie smart clip system, only unlike Ovie the system is integrated with the fridge itself. To our knowledge, it’s the first effort tby an appliance maker to use a fridge-integrated clip system for food tracking. Other smart fridge efforts to track food often featured built-in fridge cams and/or an app in which consumers logged food as they put it into the fridge.
The company indicated that the AI Food Clips and the AI PREPMASTER system will chip in 2026.
