There’s no more milk in the fridge. It’s the problem that we’ve all had to face and there’s only two options: either you go out and buy more or you go without. Wouldn’t it just be easier if the fridge could fill itself?

Well, two years ago LG unveiled their new ‘smart fridge‘ at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it retails here for around £2000 and includes a LCD touchscreen and internet connection to download new recipes based on the contents inside it.

The idea is that when you’ve bought some food, you scan in the barcodes using the scanner on the front door or describe the product to the fridge using the voice recognition technology. The fridge then keeps track of the freshness and amount of food remaining in the fridge. So, if you’re running low on milk, the fridge can use the internet to order more milk for you from websites such as Ocado. If you select a recipe that it suggests, it once again uses the internet to turn on your oven to the correct temperature and time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJSYkGHhHnE

For £2000, there’s definitely a lot of technology for the money, but there could be problems. The first is that you will have to buy more of LG’s smart technology to work with the fridge, which ups the cost. The second is that some people may not appreciate a fridge that gives you so much information, they may just want a box that keeps the food cool and fresh.

This fridge does look like recognisable as the a future part of our kitchens. But Electrolux, another big firm, has ideas that are slightly more out of the box.

Every year, Electrolux runs the Electrolux Design Lab competition, where people can send in their ideas for the technology of tomorrow. In 2010, one of their finalists was the Bio Robot Refrigerator, designed by Yuriy Dmitriev. Instead of a cool box to store your food, the fridge is filled with a gel containing bio nano robots. You insert the food into the gel which creates an airtight pocket around it, the bio nano robots then absorb the heat from the food and emit it in a form of bioluminescence.

This last idea is still a prototype at the moment, but one day in the far future, fridges like these could be a reality. As for now, internet fridges may be making their way towards your kitchen.