Nestlé’s Purina Brand Smart Bowl Uses IoT to Help Pet Owners Care for Furry Friends

Many people consider pets to be members of their family, and owners simply want to provide the best care for their furry friends. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted just how much we want and need pets for companionship during stressful times. With the spike in pet adoptions over the past two years, now 75% of U.S. households own a pet.

Whether you’re a long-time or recent pet owner, you want to keep your pet as happy and healthy as possible. Nestlé Purina Australia’s new smart bowl lets you do just that. It’s called Nestlé Purina CHEKR, and it’s an IoT-enabled food bowl that syncs to an app in order to help you care for your pets with:

• Personalized recommendations for the ideal timing and food portion.
• Suggestions for food based on your pet’s breed, weight, activity level, and food consumption.
• Reminders about vaccines—flea, tick, and worm treatments—as well as vet and grooming appointments.
• Automated food replenishment via the Purina online store.

Simultaneously, all of the data provided by pet owners and from the device is collected and analyzed by data scientists at Nestlé Purina in order to provide more insights about the health and preferences of different breeds and ages of dogs and cats. This additional information can help pet owners optimize the care and feeding of their pets with more or less food and exercise based on what’s best for their particular pet.

Powered by AWS Cloud Solutions

Wondering how something innocuous like a pet feeding bowl can become an IoT-enabled smart device? It’s powered by AWS IoT services. According to Sandra Martinez, Nestlé Oceania’s CEO, “We’ve created a connected pet ecosystem through an app and a smart bowl.” The product leverages the following technologies:

• AWS IoT Core—This lets Nestlé Purina connect the IoT-sensor data from the smart bowls to the underlying cloud architecture and route pet care data messages to the AWS analytics services.
• AWS IoT Analytics—This fully managed service lets Nestlé Purina data scientists run sophisticated analytics on the millions of data points, which in turn drives the personalized care, feeding recommendations, and alerts to pet owners.
• Apache Solr Container Solution by Bitnami VMware is an open-source enterprise search platform based on the Apache Lucene library. Bitnami, in collaboration with AWS, has made the solution available to AWS customers via the AWS Marketplace.

CHEKR Smart Bowl Unlocks New Opportunities for Purina

With the data-driven food bowl, Purina can delight pet owners by giving them insights to take better care of their furry friends. It can also open doors for:

• Innovative New Product Development—Nestlé Purina quickly developed its smart bowl with AWS technologies, thereby helping the company accelerate time-to-market with a modern R&D infrastructure that facilitated virtual testing and development cycles. Over time, as Purina data scientists analyze information from the CHEKR smart bowl, new data insights are likely to inspire the company’s product development team to create additional pet-friendly smart products.
• Enhanced Consumer Engagement—Since the product is connected to an app and provides personalized recommendations and reminders to pet owners, Nestlé Purina can engage directly with consumers, something that’s often a challenge for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. As pet owners provide general contact information when setting up the app on their phone, as well as specific information about their pets, Nestlé Purina is in the perfect position to collect coveted first-party data that will become even more valuable as the marketing landscape evolves in the coming years.
• Increased Product Sales—As more and more pet-owners take advantage of the product ordering subscription functionality between the CHEKR smart bowl app and the Purina online store, Nestlé Purina hopes to see a rise in pet food product sales. The convenience factor will ease the burden of busy pet owners who would rather have their pet’s favorite food delivered to their door, instead of running to different retail stores looking for a specific food.

You can learn more about this and other connected consumer product mechanisms by reaching out to Justin or your AWS account team.