Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Innit finds a link in digitizing the food chain with acquisition of ShopWell app

ShopWell. Bring the Nutritionist
Let’s say you have a smart scale that gives you the nutritional breakdown of your breakfast. Chances are, you’ll have to use an app to tell the scale you’re about to weigh Cheerios, so it can give you an accurate picture of the sugar, fat, and carbs contained within. If you’ve just bought a bunch of groceries, there are apps that will let you scan your receipt to put all the nutrition information in one place. Innit, which aims to “digitize” food, wants to put these two functions together to make shopping and cooking easier.

Innit recently acquired ShopWell, makers of an app that helps you avoid certain foods and find healthier options. If the app knows you’re avoiding sugar and want to lose weight, it will send up a red flag when you scan a carton of ice cream and suggest fruit pops instead. “That whole food journey of plan, shop, prep, and cook, today there’s no one that has stepped up to really help users through that journey and to use the power of food information, so it’s sort of like driving with a paper map,” Kevin Brown, Innit’s CEO, told Digital Trends. He sees ShopWell as a bit like a GPS, guiding people to healthier choices.

Recommended Videos

While Innit isn’t ready to announce other partners at the moment, ShopWell is just one piece of the puzzle. Innit’s not trying to change what the app does at the moment, but once the platform is in place, it will play one role in that plan, shop, prep, cook journey. If you snap a picture of your receipt with ShopWell’s app, it could then provide recipes based on what you’ve bought. But what if your fitness tracker pings in to say you’ve been slacking on exercise? The app could use the information and automatically recommend only low-calorie recipes. Eventually, once you pick what you’re making for dinner, your connected oven will set itself to the proper temperature.

These other steps are expected to roll out later in 2017, said Brown. By digitizing food, you’ll not only be able to keep track of what’s in your pantry and what you’ve made for dinner the past week, but you could get an alert to your phone if, say, you bought frozen vegetables that were recalled because of a listeria outbreak. “We’re really excited about a bunch of use cases like that,” said Brown. “Even the name of our company is Innit, like, what’s in it.”

The success of all this depends on what companies Innit manages to partner with, and it’s already working with Whirlpool to make its smart appliances a link in the digitized food chain. But it also depends on people giving up their data to the company, their grocery stores, and so on. Grocery stores already know how many boxes of cookies they sell a month, but apps such as ShopWell also let them know just how many of those boxes go to you.

Download Shopwell for iOS Download Shopwell for Android

Jenny McGrath
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jenny McGrath is a senior writer at Digital Trends covering the intersection of tech and the arts and the environment. Before…
Amazon just launched its largest Echo Show yet
Amazon's new Echo Show 21 and updated Echo Show 15.

Amazon has just unveiled its largest Echo Show yet, sporting a 21-inch display. It’also upgraded the existing Echo Show 15, which up until now had the largest display in the company's expanding lineup of smart displays.

The new Echo Show 21 (below) and the refreshed Echo Show 15, announced by Amazon on Wednesday, offer the best audio yet of any of its Alexa-enabled smart displays, with room adaption technology and double the bass.

Read more
Travelers: Come one, come all for these Bluetti Black Friday hauls
BLUETTI Elite 200 V2 portable power station deal -- hero

If you've been paying attention, and I'm sure you have, you already know that a bunch of BLUETTI Black Friday deals have dropped, including on its latest Elite 200 V2 portable power station, and more gear like the Charger 1. But if you thought it all ended there, you were mistaken. There's a lot more on offer this year and now's a great time to stock up on portable power, accessories -- like solar panels -- and much more. See, the idea is to make sure you have home backup and off-grid power before any big events happen. Before all those hurricanes and tornadoes and big storms. Being from Florida myself, I know better. But either way, you should consider these deals and I highly recommend grabbing something, so let's get into it.

As an aside, right now you can use code DT01 for an extra 5% discount on top of all sale prices. That code is exclusive to Digital Trends readers and applicable to all products on BLUETTI's website.

Read more
Tesla Powerwall is the best solar, home backup, and EV charging companion
Tesla Powerwall 3 installed on outside of home

Solar power, and having solar panels on your home, is a fantastic way to conserve energy and cut down on power bills, especially if you live somewhere sunny like Florida or California. There's just one glaring issue. When the grid goes down you still lose power because of how it's connected. Your solar panels cannot generate enough energy or keep it stored to keep your power on. So, essentially, your power setup doesn't offer much benefit there, unless you get a home power backup system. More specifically, something like a Tesla Powerwall is a compact home battery that stores energy generated from the grid. That energy is then used as a backup when traditional grid power is unavailable.

To make it even more clear, with a Tesla Powerwall, the power stays on even during a major blackout or outage. It's whole-home backup, too, which means you can power your lights, appliances, electronics, you name it. If you've ever had to throw away an entire refrigerator's worth of spoiled food because of a multi-day outage -- like I have -- you'll certainly appreciate the option to keep your appliances running. But that's not all it can do. The Tesla Powerwall is an excellent companion for Tesla EV owners, creating an entire smart ecosystem of power. Let's explore.

Read more