CES 2020 Kitchen Ggadget: OCD Pantry

I have 4 jars of shrimp paste – YES, FOUR (one pink, one brown regular, and 2 brown spicy) because I bought two jars (brown regular and brown spicy) not realizing I already had 2 (pink and brown spicy) at home. How many times have you been at the grocery store and were uncertain if you already had a certain item and decide to buy it because you didn’t think you did, only to go home and see you already have it? Since I travel constantly for typically at least 2-3 weeks at a time, I often forget what I do have vs. don’t. If I had the Pantryon, I would not have so many jars of shrimp paste!

Pantryon is a WiFi enabled IoT Shelf like appliance that measures ~30″L x 12″W with dedicated sensors that monitors your pantry items, sends data and alerts through the cloud that is accessible through a mobile app. This plugs into a regular outlet and up to 4 can be connected together within 6 feet of each other with longer extension cables up to 100ft available. By monitoring exactly what are on the Pantryon shelves, this eliminates the risk of buying something already in the pantry.

I do love this idea, it’s a great way to keep organized and stop me from buying too many jars of shrimp paste! In ~15 minutes, it is fully set up, which basically consists of plugging the appliance in (and together if you have more than one) and using the app to log what is placed on each sensor. Items can be stacked on top of each other on one sensor, like 4 boxes of spaghetti as an example.

Viewing videos on the website, I noticed the app shows the item name/description, cost, and store it was bought from. While this is great information, I wonder how easy and quickly these details are input into the app. I did not come across a video that steps through that in detail, but I did see screenshots of the app that shows there is a barcode scanner. Putting groceries away is already somewhat of a chore, but having to log every single item on the PantryOn app is only going to take more time. I am OCD to a degree, but even I think this may be too too time consuming.

What I don’t love is the price! The Bruno (top shelf of the image above) has 12 sensors and costs $675. This is the 25% discounted pre-order price, which means the retail price is $900. Estimated availability of this product is end of March 2020.

The Asoota Package (image above) has 18 sensors across the 2 shelves and has a pre-order price of $937.50 (retailed at $1250).

The Adoola Package has 24 sensors across 3 shelves and costs $1200 pre-order (retailed at $1600). I am inclined to think most people have at least 20 items in their pantry so would need this package if not two!

Thrown into all the pre-orders is 2 years complimentary premium membership ($480 value, which means one year membership is $240). There is a value membership option and neither of the memberships are required to use the product. The features of the membership will be published on the website in 2020 (I did not see anything detailed as of this posting).

This smart solution, while very appealing for the solution it provides, is cost-prohibitive for me.  I would rather spend that money on a trip to Japan and log my pantry items the old fashioned way, as a note on my cell phone so I can access it when I’m at the grocery store.  If you have money to burn, would you buy this?