Better manage its food stock, avoid over-purchasing, or even strive towards zero waste: this is Squikit's ambition.
Combined with RFID chips to stick on its food reserves and an application, this kitchen assistant is the creation of three French people.
Sold for 199 euros, Squikit imposes a few small constraints of use during its first installation which requires recording most of its food, but keeps its promises.
Better manage your food purchases, avoid wasting, take the path to zero waste while spending less: an equation that many of us want to try to solve… Alas!
To put an end to over-stocked products, those that are thrown away because they are expired, those that have disappeared at the bottom of the freezer, but also those that we have forgotten to buy, make way for Squikit.
Launched by three young French people, this “20 Minutes” tested solution is likely to change our lives in the kitchen.
Three biotechnicians in the kitchen
They are three.
Jean-Francois, Gregory and Benjamin.
Thirty-somethings, former colleagues who worked in a biotechnology company who, one day, wanted to launch their own project.
It was Grégory, a young dad struggling to manage the races, who lit the fuse.
How do you answer this daily question "what are we eating tonight?"
".
“Increasingly tight budgets, over-buying, waste… we all had the same problems,” recalls Jean-François Quintard, one of the three founders of Squikit.
Squikit?
Word à portmanteau combining “squirrel” (squirrel, in English) and kitchen, it is the one given to the solution that the three acolytes have found to simplify our daily cooking.
It consists of a connected assistant with LCD screen, RFID tags (U-Tag), and an application.
Fleas on all our food
The idea is first to assign food contained in a box or bag an RFID chip (called U-Tag).
Then to weigh or quantify them.
To identify them in the application (which lists 2,500 foods).
And finally to possibly assign them an expiry date.
U-Tag, assistant and application communicate in good intelligence.
Goal: to constantly update the inventory of food available.
A constraint for this: each time you remove legs from their package, sweets from their box, or lentils from their jar, you have to think about weighing the remaining food before putting it away!
A certain discipline which is however good.
Because from then on, the application will perform its update.
It will not only be possible to know at any time the state of its food stocks, to have a shopping list automatically filled with foods that are running out, but also to be alerted when a product reaches its expiry date. .
A simple mechanism to implement
Everything works simply and quickly as we have seen.
The longest remains, at the first use, to draw up an inventory of what our cupboards contain.
“There are those who want to get everything in right away, and those who do it gradually,” notes François Quintard.
After our first jars of tagged beans, bulgur and noodles and entered the application, the mechanics seemed quite easy to us.
Thus, the solution may seem a little restrictive during its installation, but will then quickly be forgotten, imposing only one additional gesture in the kitchen: that of weighing a container after each use.
And a good point: the U-Tags (sold for 25 euros for ten) are resistant to cold and heat.
They thus support dishwasher and freezer.
And are reusable.
“We have customers who even use fixed paste to stick them on boxes of formula milk,” laughs François Quintard.
Squikit also provides specially designed containers that incorporate their own U-Tag.
A bit expensive, they are sold for 80 euros for four (2 x 1.3 liters and 2 x 1.8 liters).
If Squikit seems to us to be particularly useful and well thought out for managing the contents of our kitchen cupboards, its concept seems less relevant to us for managing stocks of fresh food, such as fruits and vegetables, for which we generally know the state of the reserves.
Insufficient number of recipes
Small disappointment: the Squikit application still only offers 50 recipes adapted to the inventory of our cupboards.
The question "what are we eating tonight?"
will leave few possibilities for answers, but the founders of Squikit promise 150 new recipes soon.
We imagine the tremendous potential that Squikit could constitute, associated with a Thermomix, Cookeo or Silvercrest robot which have tons of recipes... No wonder that a "large group" has already approached Jean-François, Grégory and Benjamin...
At 199 euros with 10 U-Tags, Squikit seems to appeal to 24-40 year olds for the moment.
“We have quite a few students among our clients.
We also see that people in couples, with children, are seduced.
The men, who are a bit techno, spot us and their partner buys us because their partner has found us!
», notes François Quintard.
For the time being sold on the site of its manufacturer, Squikit will soon adapt the sale at home.
And aims to develop internationally, especially in the United States where food waste is skyrocketing.
At the rate of 422 grams of food thrown away daily, Americans waste seven times more than the French.
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