Prego Pivots From Budget-Tier Pasta Sauce to Small Microphones That Listen to Your Family’s Intimate Conversations

Ever sit down at an awkward family dinner and think to yourself: “You know what this conversation needs? A device that records all of our painful attempts at small talk and the weird noises we make when we eat.” Prego, the company that makes cheap — and according to the taste buds of many gourmands, overly sweet — pasta sauce, has the answer to your prayers.

On Monday, the Campbell’s Soup-owned brand announced a new hockey puck-shaped device, called the “Connection Keeper,” designed for documenting dinner table exchanges so that they may be preserved for all time. If this lofty mission seems beyond the ken of Prego, the device was developed in collaboration with StoryCorps, a nonprofit dedicated to interviewing everyday Americans and preserving these conversations.

The device, which resembles the lid of one of Prego’s pasta jars, seems to be more of a one-off doodad than an indicator that Prego is making a serious foray into being a tech company. (Though in an age when shoe brands are pivoting to AI, and when pretty much everyone else makes an extra buck by collecting and selling your data, it’s reasonable to be skeptical at the motives at play here.)

Prego says that the screen-free Connection Keeper has no wifi or Bluetooth, doesn’t hook up to the cloud, and doesn’t pack any AI features. The point, in fact, is that it’s supposed to help families disconnect, encouraging everyone to put their phones away during dinner and live in the moment. 

“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.”

Using the gadget is simple. Just press a button, and the device’s two microphones begin recording, and you press the button again to make it stop. You can upload your recordings to StoryCorps’ website after manually transferring them to your computer using a cable — and if you opt in, share it with the company, which makes physical copies of its recordings and adds them to its collection in the Library of Congress.

If this sounds awesome to you, or if you’re some kind of Prego evangelist, you can buy the device, which releases next Monday, as part of a video game console-esque bundle. For $20, you get, according to a release: “one Prego® x StoryCorps Connection Keeper”; “Prego® meal essentials, including Prego Traditional Pasta Sauce”; and “one Prego® x StoryCorps conversation prompt card deck to help spark real dinnertime conversations.” You also get a complimentary USB-C cable for transferring the audio files.

Well, thank you, Prego®. We guess every family deserves a chance to immortalize the barbs traded between slurps of spaghetti.

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