Although it might be marginally useful to have some gauge on food in the refrigerator a good deal of food in my fridge is prepared and leftovers that are usable for several days. It seems a trend to delegate simple decision making necessary for a healthy life to gadgetry that, to me, seems superfluous. The overview in the long run seems towards a machine nanny society that I find repulsive. But that may be a rather individual attitude.

great idea but its up to the supermarket chains, or their suppliers to actually place the barcodes, rfid tags ect on the products in the first place. an idea for the future as it requires the co operation of various parties, if it is to become effective that is..

There's an episode of "Big Bang Theory" where Sheldon, the obsessive-compulsive theoretical physicist rfid tags his cloths to 'simplify' organizing them. If you could watch this, you'd see how futile and wasteful such an activity is.

And I've made my living off of RFID tags for many years, on trains. They're just too complex to make a fridge provide useful info. When you only have a pint of milk but in a gallon jug or if the egg carton only had two eggs left, the computer would never be able to tell. until the carton wasn't there anymore. You'd have to write software to tell it the expiration of butter vs. grapes and when you put something new in the fridge, you'll have to answer questions--unless you want to write more software and have some dedicated site to tell refrigerators the expected life span of an ugli fruit. And who's to say the expiration of say a can of pop? I'm not throwing them away just because they're out of date.Just not worth it.