The next time you head outdoors, imagine that the tube of sunscreen in your bag urged you to slap some of it on your skin, or that the pack of pills the doctor prescribed reminded you to take your medication. Or that you could subscribe to your favorite laundry detergent, which would monitor the supply on your shelf and replenish it automatically.

Such prompts will soon become part of the products we purchase via companies like Water.io, which has pioneered a plastic cap with a sensor embedded in it that measures the volume of a liquid, solid or powder in a container. The cap relays the data via Bluetooth technology to an app, which filters it through your preferences and funnels it to the manufacturer.

Software hosted by Water.io allows manufacturers to learn from the data, which displays on a dashboard and flows to their marketing and ordering systems. There it can enable the manufacturer to suggest, for example, a shampoo or skin care, or to offer subscriptions to the products that sit on shelves throughout our homes.

The tightening of ties with consumers that the technology enables holds the potential to reorder relationships between makers of consumer packaged goods and retailers like Amazon or Walmart that also have become rivals who tout brands of their own.

“We are enabling the brands of consumer packaged goods to get data from their products,” Kobi Bentkovski, Water.io’s CEO and co-founder, tells Fast Company. “The moment they know who their customers are, how customers are using a product, and when the product is going to run out is the moment they can compete with Amazon and the private brands of the retailers.”

Bentkovski started Water.io in 2015 with co-founders Yoav Hoshen, an entrepreneur and friend from their service in Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s elite intelligence unit, and Nimrod Kaplan, a fellow tech executive and neighbor, after Bentkovski’s daughter, then 7, was plagued by a urinary tract infection that finally cleared as she drank extra water.

Fast forward to last January, when Mey Eden, an Israeli bottler of mineral water, included a connected cap from Water.io in each of several hundred thousand six-packs. The supply sold out in six weeks – less than half the time the companies anticipated – and boosted sales 60 percent compared with packs that did not include a smart bottle, according to Bentkovski.