(Bloomberg) – The experience is familiarto anyone who regularly cooks at home: You're at thesupermarket picking up ingredients for tonight's dinner, but yousimply cannot remember if you already haveheavy cream.

You do remember buying it, so you skip it at the store and patyourself on the back for saving a few bucks and not contributing tosociety's insane food waste problem. Then you get home anddiscover: Yes, you have heavy cream, but it'sexpired. Guess you're not making that fancy dessert you hadplanned.

But what if you could actually see the contents of your fridgefrom the supermarket aisle?

This is one solution that Innit Inc., a SiliconValley-based technology company, hopes to provide busy homecooks through its Connected Food platform. The technologyis currently on display at Pirch in SoHo, an appliancestore that encourages shoppers to play with everything on display,from sinks to showers, which opened this past weekend in NewYork.

"Intelligence layer on top of appliances"

Kevin Brown, Innit's chief executive officer and co-founder,describes it as an "intelligence layer on top of appliances,"meaning that select kitchen tools will come with Connected Foodtechnology already embedded. For those looking to upgrade non-WiFiequipped fridges and ovens, there are a few options, but a visitto the hands-on, brightly colored Pirch showroom withoutbuying a new appliance will require a fair amount ofrestraint. The cost of the hardware usedwith Innit's cloud technology — the cameras and sensorsthat connect you to your kitchen — will start ataround $20 to $30 when the line goes on sale in 2017, though finalretail pricing hasn't been announced. 

When everything is installed, simply download an apponto your iPhone or iPad, and voila: a live feed from inside yourrefrigerator. 

On top of showing you what's already in your fridge, Innit willtell you what you can make with those ingredients by pulling datafrom a trove of thousands of recipes from the New York Times, BonAppétit, Good Housekeeping, and Epicurious. It'lleven help you place an order for items you're missing,though the company has yet to announce the partnerships that willprovide this service.

Simplify cooking with technology

The oven technology can "sense" what's inside and tell you howto cook it, down to the right time and temperature, depending onthe food's weight, the oven model, and the kitchen's altitude. Ifyou want to install cameras in your ceiling or in the bottoms ofyour cabinets, it can also watch you put your carrots on a cuttingboard and then tell you that they are, in fact, carrots while itplays a video of you chopping said carrots back to yourself whilesimultaneously giving you carrot recipes from the aforementionedtrove.

Innit is hardly the first company to try to simplify cooking byadding complicated technology. Samsung Electronic Co.'s Family Hubfridge also tells you what's inside it while simultaneouslyconnecting family members' calendars and playing "your favoritetunes." The Gourmia Robotic Cooker is just one of many kitchenrobots awaiting your instruction. And pod pioneer Keurig GreenMountain Inc. was one of the earliest to convince themasses that extra technology is necessary to makecoffee—one of the simplest beverages in our modern diet.

Laith Murad, Pirch's chief marketing officer, called thetechnology "empowering," saying it is "going back to the roots ofhuman to human experiences." (The Innit website similarly describesits mission as "to empower humanity through food.") Brown explainedhow a cook may want to invite friends over for a dinner party,gather around a screen, choose a recipe and make it together, withthe technology serving as a "conversation piece" that could also"make cooking fun."

Related: Hacking the connected world: (Downright scary)implications for insurers

While Innit certainly has some major conveniences, waiting untilyour guests arrive to start making their dinner will probably makeyou feel the opposite of empowered, and gathering around ascreen hardly foments human-to-human interactions. (If you'returning to recipe selection to start a conversation, you might justneed more interesting friends.)

Some people may also wonder if giving the amorphous, all-knowingcloud even more personal information is really a good idea, even ifInnit says its approach "will be to provide consumers with maximumcontrol over their personal information." Thousands of recipes atyour fingertips sounds good — until you realize that you alreadyhave access to most, if not all of them, either through Pinterest,the publications' websites, or their own apps. And anyonethat uses the kitchen for more than just cooking maywonder if cameras in the ceiling are really such a great idea.

Still, in today's age of information sharing, when trackingeverything from steps to menstrual cycles is just part of a dailyroutine, maybe the trade-off — perfectly baked salmon, every singletime — is worth it.