Even though no one can see you eating peanut butter off a spoon in the middle of the night, the jar's label might soon be “watching.”

Adrich, a Pittsburgh company that designs smart labels that could alert customers when they're running low on their favorite products, just signed its first major deal to slap their innovation on products bound for consumers' homes.

“This is a huge milestone for us,” said Adhithi Aji, founder and CEO of Adrich .

Aji said she couldn't say what products the smart labels will go on, but she hopes people will see them in stores by this summer.

The labels will be able to track when and how much of a product people use. Sensors embedded in the labels can detect movement and also determine how much of a product remains, Aji said. Adrich then uses a proprietary algorithm to make sense of the data.

For example, during tests in which labels were on jars of peanut butter, Adrich found that people snacked on peanut butter at all hours of the day.

Companies can send coupons or other promotions when they sense a customer is about to run out of a product. Customers can learn when they should restock.

“It's helping the brands position their new products as well as get feedback from the consumers in real time,” Aji said.

Adrich tested the early technology with the Strip District distillery Maggie's Farm Rum and Petagogy, a pet store in Shadyside and Hempfield. The labels were bulky, the size of a deck of cards, and stuck out from the bottles. Adrich slimmed down the devices in future designs. Aji said the labels are now thin enough to fit behind a traditional label.

Maggie's Farm Rum put the labels on bottles it shipped to bars to know when supplies ran low. Petagogy put labels on dog food bins and gave them to loyal customers. The labels detected when food was running low, automatically ordered more and notified Petagogy to deliver it.

“It was awesome,” said Cole Wolfson, owner of Petagogy and the program director at AlphaLab Gear. “The tech worked. We got notification, and we seamlessly dropped new bags at people's door.”

The labels — “almost like a mini-computer,” Aji said — contain a battery and sensors but are nearly as thin as a regular label. The label connects to a user's smartphone through Bluetooth. Brands using the labels will clearly indicate that the products have the smart labels, Aji said.

“Which they like because they want the consumers to know there's something tech inside it,” Aji said.

Aji came up with the idea behind Adrich in 2015. The next year, she took the company through the AlphaLab Gear accelerator.

Adrich plans to move to Alloy 26, a co-working space inside Nova Place in Pittsburgh's North Side, this month. The company has about five full-time employees but plans to hire interns and more employees by the end of the year, Aji said.

Aaron Aupperlee is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at aaupperlee@tribweb.com, 412-336-8448 or via Twitter @tinynotebook.

---

Copyright ©2026— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)

---