Your Dinner Could Be Spying On You

Prego – as in the pasta sauce company – has a new marketing strategy that involves customers recording their dinner conversations using a small device they place on the table.

The Campbell’s-owned company announced the debut of its “Connection Keeper” on Monday.

This pasta-lid-shaped device is meant to serve as a “simple, screen-free way to capture the real conversations that happen around the dinner table.”

“With just the press of a button, families can record meaningful moments and relive them later – without phones, screens, or distractions getting in the way,” the promotional web copy says.

“Sit down with your loved ones. Place the Connection Keeper on the dinner table and press to record. No setup needed,” it goes on, noting that the device has no Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or AI features. It’s meant to help families disconnect, PR reps for Prego say. It’s a joint effort with the national nonprofit StoryCorps.

“Everything now is AI, and everyone has their phones on the table,” Elyce Henkin, a managing director of StoryCorps studios and brand partnerships, told Wired. “It interrupts the conversation and the flow. We wanted to get rid of that and go back to the basics and have everyone talking to each other.”

What happens after these fascinating dinnertime conversations are captured, you might be wondering? Beginning May 4, users can “easily and safely” upload recorded content to an online portal set up by StoryCorps, to be stored for future listening. 

Then what?

As Prego notes, “The recordings are designed to help families preserve the authentic sounds of time spent together, creating a personal archive to revisit for years to come. Families will have the option to preserve their recordings private within the StoryCorps archive or share them publicly as part of a special Prego Collection.”

There’s also a chance that shared recording could wind up preserved forever. As StoryCorps says in the press release announcing this promo, they are known to preserve the recordings in their archives at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, “the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered.”  

The Connection Keeper Bundle will be available for $20 beginning April 27.