Wrote this because I got in a similar conversation on twitter: https://medium.com/@nickparkerprint/in-defense-of-juicero-an...
However, that tracking belongs at the kitchen door using a common industry standard format, and the ability to manually enter inventory items.
If you need a different appliance to prepare food from each vendor, then you won't be able to make Alphabet spaghetti with Amazon beef and Apple tomatoes; you can't pop to the local shop to get some milk; you can't go into your garden to pick some carrots; you can't go to a specialist vendor to get a particular spice mix or exotic vegetable; you can't buy your favourite varieties from a local grower.
I can't picture giving up on those advantages just so that Mr. Bezos can tell me what to eat.
The only thing I can add is perhaps a corollary to this, which is "nothing causes a business to fail more than solving a non-existent problem" which is what Juicero did.
Your eyes/nose won't pick up bacteria in the flour.
You'd remember if it was anthrax.
I barely read half my mail, snail or electronic. The chances I'm going to see and read and act on a "your food is bad!!!" email (assuming it doesn't get eaten by some filter) before I eat the food in question is low, low low. Some device getting the message and physically stopping me is really the only way to be sure.
Kidding aside, this is too simple of a problem to solve. Serious contamination isn't a part of 1st world daily life, because we have excellent news and regulations (so far). Rotten food is easy to detect, and even some of the stuff we consider rotten would probably not make us sick.
It's all a shiny coat of wax on a non-problem, just like bottled water and gingivitis.
"If we recognize the bag, and it's recalled, we'll stop you—or at least yell at you. If you use someone else's bag you're on your own, but we won't stop you."
Surely they were capable of having this thought. That they didn't or chose to ignore it hints at ulterior motives—most obvious is overcharging for the bags, since not buying them makes you the proud owner of a $400 paperweight.
But a prediction: almost everyone who attempts to block consumers from consuming bad food with technology will do it to overcharge for the food. Safety will be the excuse, not the purpose.
If your goal is reducing food poisoning through TECHNOLOGY! and CONNECTIVITY! to better inform consumers if their food has been recalled, you'd be better off developing food packaging that could eg change color when the food is recalled - a big giant red skull and crossbones appearing on my food packages would probably keep me from accidentally eating bad food. That would both be a challenging engineering project (since it'd have to be cheap, food-safe, and ideally biodegradable), and work for a far wider range of foods and ingredients.
If only we had some kind of olfactory or optical equipment stuck on the front of our faces that could help determine the rottenness or mouldiness of food.
Failing that, perhaps producers of packaged food could use some kind of common standard system to inform consumers of the date by which the food should be used by, or before which it might be at its best.