[FICO]

Sure, food recalls happen all the time. However, they are selling as a subscription service- they know what packets they shipped you. If there's a recall they should email you, snail mail you, and automatically issue you a refund on your credit card. WiFi is beyond overkill.

[saalweachter]

I'll say this -- and I'm in the "this is a stupid fucking product" camp -- but I think sending updates to your appliances to keep you from using bad food is actually the right way to go.

I barely read half my mail, snail or electronic. The chances I'm going to see and read and act on a "your food is bad!!!" email (assuming it doesn't get eaten by some filter) before I eat the food in question is low, low low. Some device getting the message and physically stopping me is really the only way to be sure.

[spaceribs]

"Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry."

Kidding aside, this is too simple of a problem to solve. Serious contamination isn't a part of 1st world daily life, because we have excellent news and regulations (so far). Rotten food is easy to detect, and even some of the stuff we consider rotten would probably not make us sick.

It's all a shiny coat of wax on a non-problem, just like bottled water and gingivitis.

[saalweachter]

Food contamination is a low-probability problem, sure, but it is hardly a minor one. It kills people.

[LnxPrgr3]

They could even do this without preventing the machine from squeezing improperly-ordained-by-DRM bags.

"If we recognize the bag, and it's recalled, we'll stop you—or at least yell at you. If you use someone else's bag you're on your own, but we won't stop you."

Surely they were capable of having this thought. That they didn't or chose to ignore it hints at ulterior motives—most obvious is overcharging for the bags, since not buying them makes you the proud owner of a $400 paperweight.

But a prediction: almost everyone who attempts to block consumers from consuming bad food with technology will do it to overcharge for the food. Safety will be the excuse, not the purpose.

[saalweachter]

Oh yeah, it's a shitty move to use that as your excuse.

If your goal is reducing food poisoning through TECHNOLOGY! and CONNECTIVITY! to better inform consumers if their food has been recalled, you'd be better off developing food packaging that could eg change color when the food is recalled - a big giant red skull and crossbones appearing on my food packages would probably keep me from accidentally eating bad food. That would both be a challenging engineering project (since it'd have to be cheap, food-safe, and ideally biodegradable), and work for a far wider range of foods and ingredients.