While smart refrigerators that can communicate with a host of other appliances are no longer rare, the fridge now has some new tricks.

The high-tech successor to the humble icebox can help you buy food directly from the farm, track its delivery and get recipe recommendations based on your dietary preferences.

As a result, China"s smart home appliance market is poised to enter a period of rapid expansion as a growing number of consumers are pursuing a smarter, high-end lifestyle, company officials say.

Shipments of smart home equipment in China are expected to grow 14.6 percent year-on-year to reach around 230 million units in 2021, according to a report released by global market research firm International Data Corp.

Over the next five years, the compound annual growth rate of the sector is forecast to be 21.4 percent, and the country is expected to see shipments of smart home devices reach 540 million units in 2025, the report said.

In the first half, China shipped around 100 million units of smart home devices, up 13.7 percent on a yearly basis, IDC data showed.

All this has happened with China"s smart home equipment market still at a nascent stage of development when the market penetration rate still remains pretty low, the report said. But with the continuing improvements in people"s living standards, experts say the sector is expected to see broader prospects.

Traditional home appliance manufacturers are speeding up efforts to launch smart home products and establish an ecosystem based on the internet of things by applying technologies such as artificial intelligence, 5G and blockchain, which is a new type of networked ledgers. The internet of things, or IoT, refers to a network of objects with software or sensors that allows an exchange of data.

Haier Smart Home Co Ltd, a subsidiary of China"s largest home appliance manufacturer, Haier Group, has been readying the acceleration of its smart home ecosystem strategy.

The company has built an IoT ecosystem covering clothing, food, housing, entertainment, healthcare and education by providing customized solutions that tie together multiple home appliance products.

The IoT ecosystem is powered by Haier"s industrial internet platform COSMOPlat. Haier"s "internet of clothing" includes not only machines that wash but that can also oversee everything to do with clothing, including styles, shopping, other types of maintenance and storage.

When consumers put clothes in a Haier smart washing machine, it reads the tag of each piece of clothing, identifies the brand, material, color and style and chooses the related laundry mode based on radio-frequency and AI identification technologies. The washing machine also uses the precise amount of detergent that"s perfect for the load.

Li Huagang, president of Haier Smart Home, said the company does not aim for selling just single household appliances, but providing personalized smart home systems.

"In the era of 5G and IoT, what users need are not homogeneous products but customized solutions to meet personalized lives. We are able to present tailor-made services to families," Li added.

Haier"s IoT service model offers flexible and customized options, from kitchen design and construction to the purchase, delivery and installation of whole suites of appliances. It also offers smart systems catering to many aspects of user needs for the living room, bedroom and outdoor spaces, the company said.