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Kraft Kiosk Scans Your Face, Tells You to Buy Kraft Foods

by Matthew Zuras on January 19, 2011 at 03:05 PM

meal planning solutionKraft Foods -- the manufacturer of such wholesome vittles as Oreo Funstix, Easy Cheese and Handi-Snacks -- would like to scan your face, and then stuff it. Hooray!

Among other enormous and fantastical "innovations" on view at last week's National Retail Federation show was Kraft and Intel's 'Meal Planning Solution' kiosk. According to Fast Company, the kiosk scans your face with some kind of Anonymous Video Analytics software, and then tries to match your physical characteristics with foods that Kraft thinks you might want to nosh. Of course, these will all be Kraft-brand foods -- but, considering the fact that Kraft probably manufactures a plurality of the foodstuffs available at your local supermarket, you've still technically got a lot of choices.

According to Fast Company: "The average shopper, says Kraft's VP of retail experience, Don King, has a paltry 10 recipes in his or her average meal-time rotation: spaghetti, pizza, hamburgers, chicken, etc." (Notice that this does not include those icky Food Pyramid categories like "vegetables," "fruit" and "technically edible items that do not come shelf-stable and plastic-wrapped from a Kraft manufacturing facility.") Kraft wants to help you "expand that repertoire," apparently by suggesting things that a person with your same kind of face is mostly likely to eat. Don't worry, the logic confuses us, too.

But the real question is whether face-scanning technology could ever actually determine what someone wants to eat in the first place. Can we even do that with our own face-scanning brains without resorting to racist, classist or weightist stereotypes? Sure, you can have your marketing team throw together all sorts of demographic numbers, like "Working mothers are more likely to buy Kraft Animal-Flavored Instant Slop than Kraft Foliage-Flavored Instant Slop" -- but there are probably more obvious factors at work than some kind of pseuduoscientific physiognomy. The angle of your cheekbones does not determine whether or not you prefer Tombstone Pizza to Nutter Butters.

In case questionable physical profiling isn't enough to reel you in, the Kraft machine will also send Kraft recipes and lists of Kraft ingredients to your Kraft iFood Assistant-enabled smartphone, and even give you free samples of Oreos and other Kraft foods as enticement to buy more Kraft foods.

It's too bad that 'Meal Planning Solution' is nothing but a transparent marketing gimmick that dumps the hard work of biometric engineers into a machine that tells you to buy Miracle Whip. (The saddest part is that it's not even a new idea; remember that vending machine that only dispensed ice cream to smiling people?) But we would humbly suggest another machine that better understands your dietary needs: the digital scale. It probably wants you to have a salad.

See Kraft's demo of the kiosk's "nutritious and delicious" suggestions to Fast Company below:

Tags: design, dumb, food, intel, kraft, marketing, MealPlanningSolution, top

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