See into your fridge... how cool is that?

IT’S a good thing my motherin-law visited recently. My fridge tends to be a pretty vile place, filled with sprouting potatoes and ancient slices of ham. But at the moment I attached a camera staring into the interior, it was actually sparkling, thanks to that burst of cleaning one does to pretend to visiting relatives that you don’t live like a beast.

Smarter FridgeCam is an ambitious gizmo: it not only lets you ‘see inside’ your fridge with an app, it tracks expiry dates and creates a shopping list for you. In the end, your fridge will do the shopping, while you sip martinis on the sofa.

That’s the theory, anyway. The sticky-backed FridgeCam isn’t quite the all-seeing electronic eye I yearned for – although it’s great if you’re the type of person who always ends up phoning home from the supermarket to check if you’ve got parmesan.

It can only connect to wi-fi when the door is open, so you get a time-stamped screenshot in the app whenever someone opens the door (a useful early-warning system for greedy children helping themselves).

So it’s a decent aide-memoire, but the field of view is fairly narrow, and you don’t see the shelves in the door, where you tend to keep stuff like milk (and, crucially, wine).

You can keep a rolling list of contents by scanning barcodes or entering items manually (it’s linked to a Tesco database), and tapping in expiry dates. Sadly for my cyber-Utopian dreams, this is not a huge amount easier than just making a shopping list.