Amazon, Brita deal takes consumer IoT to a new level

Water filter vendor Brita has been added to the growing list of companies signed up to the Amazon Dash Replenishment Service (DRS), adding further to momentum generated behind the consumer IoT industry.

Amazon DRS was launched on 1st April last year and, in essence, provides IoT-ish buttons to facilitate the straight forward ordering of pantry goods around the house. After six months it expanded its ecosystem to include companies like General Electric and Samsung, and this most recent announcement sees Brita’s wifi-enabled water filter become part of that list.

The premise is for Brita filters to be automatically ordered and delivered via Amazon when existing filters come to end of life, adding another level of convenience and automation to the home and moving one step closer to realising the utopian dream of a fully connected house inside of which one scarcely has to do anything.

According to Amazon the Brita “Infinity” jug is fully wifi-enabled, of course, and autonomously tracks the level of water passing through the filter. Upon getting close to capacity, Brita connects to DRS and orders a new one, claiming to provide owners with “exactly what they want – a new Brita filter on their doorstep at the time they need it. “ Another problem solved.

“With the Brita Infinity Pitcher and Amazon Dash Replenishment, customers will always have clean, great-tasting water,” said director of Amazon Devices, Daniel Rausch. “That moment of realizing you haven’t changed your filter in months, and you don’t have one on-hand, is gone – a new filter magically appears on a customer’s doorstep right when it’s needed.”

Exactly who will benefit most from this latest smart-homey gadget is up for debate, with the repeat-purchasing of filters the most expensive aspect of owning a Brita jug. There exists a fairly large demographic that is less-than disciplined in replacing filters in a timely fashion, and possibly indifferent towards doing so. Ostensibly, this announcement is a way of Brita upselling disorganised customers or finally solving the problem of convenience for the more disciplined filter-user among us, while adding another “smart” gadget to a growing repertoire of IoT-enabled tech.