The self-cleaning “refrigerator of the future” will automatically place supermarket home delivery orders when required and move food near its use by date to the front of the shelves.

Researchers hope the fridge could clean itself, cut down on wasted food and offer up recipes ——which could be tailored to different countries, cuisines and seasons.

With Brits putting in 36 million hours every year of free overtime — leaving little time for household chores — the refrigerator could help save precious time during hectic modern-day lives.

These new developments are in the pipeline thanks to collaborations3 between scientists at the University of Central Lancashire and online supermarket Ocado.

The planned new features include the ability for refrigerators to scan their shelves to see what is in stock and use this information to both plan meals and automatically place a supermarket food order.

The smart fridge will use “nano-articulated technology” shelf surfaces which, whilst smooth to the touch, will have millions of independently controlled micro-tiles which will manoeuvre products which soon need to be eaten to the front of the refrigerator.

Ultrasound-scanning technology built into the door will allow the refrigerator to “swipe and capture” the food on a plate before and after mealtime, meaning it can assess what type and amount of food is wasted.

Dr. Simon Somerville, an expert from the University of Central Lancashire, said: “Cookbooks are essentially inventory lists of food items. To this end the most available information that the refrigerator will have is a set of permutations that allow a setnumber of ingredients to produce alarge number of quite different dishes. The key concept in the successful implementation of this process is accurate inventory tracking.”