• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, January 5, 2016

Good Housekeeping has struck a deal with Innit, a company focused on the emerging confluence of cuisine and technology it calls “connected food.” The alliance is intended to raise consumer awareness of Innit’s services through a content and brand partnership.

The deal includes original content created by Good Housekeeping for Innit to help demonstrate the capabilities of its Connected Food Platform.

Founded in 2013, Innit has created a system based on “food information,” connecting technology -- including sensors and machine learning to appliances, mobile devices and other interfaces -- to help consumers streamline and improve cooking and kitchen management at home.

The Innit system determines the optimal cooking process, including seasoning, temperature and length of time, and automates most of it, and can also create recipes based on an existing inventory (in other words, what you happen to have in your pantry and refrigerator). 

Under the terms of the deal, Good Housekeeping will develop content for Innit, enabling consumers to optimize flavor and nutrition while simplifying the cooking process. The campaign will also draw on the magazine’s extensive library of recipes. Good Housekeeping’s content will be delivered directly to consumers via Innit’s platform, giving them access to a range of content in their kitchens.

The partners are also working with PIRCH, a retailer, to promote the Innit “Smart Kitchen” at PIRCH’s experiential showrooms and kitchens.

This isn’t the first collaboration between a magazine and a food technology venture.

In June 2015, Bon Appetit unveiled a collaboration with IBM, called “Chef Watson,” which the partners described as a “cognitive computing app” that helps aspiring epicures to expand their creativity in the kitchen.

Among other features, the Chef Watson app prompts chefs to try new, unexpected flavor combinations, based on Watson’s trained analysis of 10,000 recipes from Bon Appetit’s database. The supercomputer also analyzed how ingredients are used in different dishes, and across cooking styles, and combines this with the science of food chemistry, as well as human evaluations from the app’s beta users.