Have you ever found yourself thinking, “Wow, I wish I could cook that at home,” after watching a culinary scene on television? Perhaps it was the beef bourguignon in “Julie & Julia” or the il timpano in “Big Night.” If you get a Samsung TV in 2025, you will be able to satisfy your need for anything related to television.
Samsung revealed Samsung Food, a new feature on its TVs that uses the company’s AI processor to identify food on your screen and find a recipe for it, during its CES 2025 press conference in Las Vegas on Monday.
Samsung Food has likely been in brand for a long time if it seems familiar. In 2019, Samsung acquired the food app Whisk, and in 2023, it changed its name to Samsung Food. These days, if you pay more than $7 a month for the premium edition, the Samsung Food app for iOS and Android, which provides features like a meal planner and AI-guided cooking procedures, can now recommend recipes based on an image.
Of course, the features of the Samsung Food experience designed for TV are rather more constrained. Samsung Food on TV can also display the status of shopping and takeaway orders you place via the Samsung Food mobile app, in addition to suggesting recipes based on what it “sees.”
Samsung highlights in a press release how the app can create an ingredient shopping list based on what’s in your refrigerator. The startup declares openly that it is the best AI sous chef.
The screen-to-recipe feature from Samsung Food is interesting. But whether it lives up to the marketing hype will have to be determined. Popular AI summarizers and chatbots like ChatGPT don’t fare much better than the recipe app SideChef’s AI feature for converting photographs into recipes, which falls short. (Anyone up for glue pizza?)
Another issue is that AI won’t actually cook for you. As someone who is too lazy to meal prep these days, let alone cook an as-seen-on-TV dish, this is surely a deal breaker. But these might be the TVs for you if you enjoy preparing the kouign amann from “The Great British Bake Off.”
Samsung Food is available on the future QN90F, QN80F, and QN70F models from Samsung.