The refrigerator is often the center of the kitchen experience. Not only does it store most essential foods in the American diet, but it's also a place for storing notes, crayon drawings and recipes. But what if you could turn your refrigerator into a device that you could buy your groceries directly from?
This is what Visa Europe executive director Jonathan Vaux envisions will be in the refrigerator's future. Vaux explored the potential of such a device in his exclusive interview with Business Insider. Vaux believes that Samsung's mobile-payment option, known as Samsung Pay, could be implemented into a fridge in the near future: "People are immediately associating [Samsung Pay] with the phone, but they're the biggest provider of white goods and so I will have a fridge, I'm sure, that will have connected payments in it."
When asked how secure such a practice would be, Vaux believed that it depended on the circumstances. "If I'm buying stuff through my fridge, it's probably going to be milk ... If I suddenly start to order a MacBook Air from my fridge then your fraud detection systems are probably going to start setting off some alarms," he said.
The idea of a connected fridge isn't new. Technologists and futurists have imagined implementing similar devices in the past. Samsung already sells one for about $3,600 on its site. However, Samsung's current smart refrigerator is designed for social functions (such as Twitter or Pinterest), not for commercial purchases.
Such a device may seem unnecessary to some, considering that 95 percent of the wireless functions one would implement with a fridge could also be performed on a tablet or smartphone.
As of the publishing of this article, Samsung hasn't made any mention of incorporating Samsung Pay into its smart fridges.
