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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food Waste

Smart Composters Are Heading to Retail, But Will Consumers Bite?

Earlier this month, Costco shoppers in select cities across California and Washington State may have stumbled upon a product demo for an item called Lomi. This white countertop appliance, roughly the size of a sewing machine, sat atop a table adorned with a tablecloth, with boxes stacked high just behind.

The images on the tablecloth hinted at the machine’s purpose – perhaps it was a pressure cooker? An air fryer, maybe? The only way to truly discern the machine’s function was to request a demo from one of the beaming representatives or squint and read the sign that proclaimed “Lomi, Smart Waste Composter, $449.99”.

Don’t get me wrong – The very presence of a compost machine at Costco built to help food scraps avoid the landfill is a good thing, a possible sign that better management of food waste is inching toward more mainstream acceptance. But I still had to wonder: will consumers bite on a machine whose main function is to process food waste into something that can be used as fertilizer?

How Big Is Home Composting?

The answer to that question may lie in how many people want to compost their food scraps but don’t currently have an easy way to do it or access to a curbside compost service.

Approximately a quarter of US citizens aged 30 to 59 years own a compost bin in their homes. That number dips to 14% for those over the age of 60, and rises slightly to 32% for those under 30. One reason for these relatively low numbers is that only 27% of households in the US have access to curbside compost pickup. Curbside pickup is crucial because, unless someone is an avid home gardener, they likely have little need for home-generated compost. By offering curbside compost pickup, local municipalities make the diversion of food scraps as simple as recycling your cans and bottles or disposing of your garbage.

However, with a home compost appliance, anyone can compost food in their kitchen and either sprinkle it on their garden or discard the processed scraps into a patch of soil on the side of their yard. Some products, like the Mill, offer a pickup service for processed food scraps (which they turn into chicken feed) via mail-in packages.

But Will Consumers Bite?

All of this brings us back to the question of how many people would be willing to buy a home composting appliance. Past studies indicate that a majority of consumers are open to using home composting services if they’re readily available, but most aren’t prepared to pay extra for a curbside pickup service. And even when folks say they will compost if access is available, in practice, they don’t always follow through.

However, I suspect that these products target a different type of consumer: the home composter with a purpose. This includes the home gardener looking to create their own compost and the food waste warrior looking for a way to reduce their carbon footprint. For those that fit one or both of these descriptions, they would likely welcome a Lomi or another smart home composter into their kitchen.

That is if they can afford one. The Lomi is $449 for the basic option, plus the extra cost to periodically buy the compost pods with microorganisms that speed up the process of breaking down the food. The Vitamix FoodCycler FC 50 costs $349, plus the cost of filters every couple of months. The Mill, whose makers prefer it not to be referred to as a composter because they turn the scraps into animal feed (though we still categorize them as composter), charges a monthly subscription of $33 for the machine and the pickup service for the processed food grounds.

None of these are cheap, especially for a fairly new product category like smart composters, which is probably why Lomi felt the need to start sending demo teams into markets in California and Washington to show people what these products are all about. When I walked up to the Lomi table and asked them about the product, the demo leader was enthusiastic and let me know how to use it.

In the end, I think this market will be an interesting one to watch, in part because it’s so new. It will take some time to teach consumers the benefits of these products, and once they do, we will learn just how many folks are willing to pay for a machine to process their food scraps.

Dispatches from Israel Food Tech Ecosystem: Anat Natan, CEO and Cofounder of Anina

I talked to Anat Natan, the co-founder and CEO of Anina. Anina is an Israeli startup that takes imperfect food and transforms it into ready-made meals in pods. Food waste has significant economic and environmental implications, and it is estimated that the greenhouse gas emissions from food contribute to 7% of the overall greenhouse gasses emitted globally. We talked about the technology that powers Anina, operating in markets outside of Israel, and what she believes sets Israeli founders apart. 

J: Talk to me about the technology behind Anina. 

A: We create these laminates, these vegetable sheets, and we try to incorporate as much food waste as possible. The laminate is strong but flexible. We try to take the ugly produce, and we try to incorporate all this food waste in our production process because we care about all the factors of the produce outside of how it looks. A third of the produce in the US goes to waste due to aesthetic reasons. I think there’s a catch-22. As consumers, we want to be more and more sustainable, consume more sustainable brands, and support sustainable production. But on the other hand, we become, as consumers, more concerned about what’s perfect. 

After we create these laminates, we mold them, we fill them, and we close them. Our technology is protected IP, and this IP contains the process from fresh produce to the pod, including the laminate. We’re registering it in the US, the EU, Israel, and Singapore. 

J: Did you choose those markets because those will be your first entry points? 

A: Our go-to market is divided into two approaches. With the US, our brand will have partners to get to the market efficiently and reach customers in the right and creative way. With the rest of the world, we are going to use a B2B approach, which is a joint venture. We bring to the table what we know how to do, which is the production process and R&D. And everybody does what they know how to do best. The partners know the market, the consumers, and the supply chain. We start by creating pilots, and we’re going to conduct pilots in Israel, Spain, Andorra, and Singapore to understand the right way to approach the market. And after that, we will create a long-term collaboration with them. 

J: What type of consumer testing have you done so far? 

A: So much. We have conducted external research in Israel, Spain, in Italy (with Barilla) and very in-depth design thinking research. In the US, we have done a market analysis that organizes qualitative, quantitative, demographics, and surveys. Every time we ask the question, do you understand what it is? Do you know how to use it? We give the product to people to try at home and then answer surveys. Anina was established in June 2020, and I’ve been conducting research since August 2020 because I believe that innovation needs to go hand in hand with understanding how to approach the consumer. Obviously, they cannot imagine what they don’t have in front of them. But you have to evaluate what they think to make sure that you don’t bring an alien to them eventually. 

J: You mentioned a lot of different markets in the US, Europe, Israel, and Singapore. Have you noticed differences in the customers in each place? Maybe customers have different preferences, or it has to be given to them in a certain way? 

A: Yes and no at the same time. Our consumers are millennials and Gen-Z and they care about what they eat and care about investing in themselves. And then, when you look at it, the first difference between the countries is the culinary element. We have five different recipes. One of them has beetroot, spinach, and quinoa, and in Singapore, they told us how nobody eats beetroot. And then we spoke to a Russian lady. And she said, ‘that’s my favorite.’ You can talk about pasta. The Italians don’t want pasta in their meals because they know they do it better, but the rest of the world desires pasta.

The understanding of the culinary element is a very local element: What type of ingredients? What type of produce to use? What’s interesting? What’s weird? What’s familiar? So first, the culinary element. And yet, I will tell you that the differences we have expected to be bigger, but it appears that there are more similarities than what we have expected. When we showed them our recipes, there were only adjustments, mainly in the seasoning, not in the whole concept of the recipe. And I was actually curious about it, and I think there’s more similarity in that generation rather than Gen X because of social media. They’re more exposed to the same culinary element. And yet, there are differences.

The second one is about instructions on how to cook. For example, do you give a range of timing of cooking? Do you prefer words or icons? There’s a lot to how you communicate information. But what’s very amazing is that it doesn’t matter if it’s the US, the land of convenience. If it’s Singapore, which I think is the gate to innovation for tech in the Far East. Or if it’s Spain or Israel or Italy, which are very traditional countries when it comes to cooking. The acceptance of the product is unheard of, and everybody appreciates a good home-cooked mouthfeel experience with convenience.

J: So it’s not just about the product but about the experience and how the user sees it, what kind of instructions and images are used? 

A: The most important thing is the mouthfeel and the taste and flavor experience. We know how to control when and how the pod will break down during the cooking process since not all the ingredients get the same amount of time to cook. The pod from the outside is cooked the whole time, while the filling inside is cooked only part of the time.

What is the result? It’s multi-texture because when you cook different things at different times, it’s not that everything is soft. And then people do not understand that. But they say ‘Wow, it tastes like home cooking, it tastes like each ingredient got a different treatment of cooking.’ And this doesn’t exist in the food industry. 

J: Is this a prototype, or is this what you sell? 

A: This is what we sell now in Israel. We have already planned to do a joint venture with Strauss which is the second-biggest food company in Israel. 

J: Where can people buy this? 

A: Mainly online. 

J: I want to ask about is scaling. You have a very unique technology with the food as a laminate, and I imagine this packaging is also custom. How do you tackle the challenge of scaling up? 

A: We are supported by engineers. We have an advisory board that comes to support us so that we scale up in an efficient way. We already have the capacity to produce a few thousand units a month, and there’s a full plan for mass production. We have to do it as fast as possible to get to the most efficient objectives. 

J: What does the timeline look like for entering other countries? 

A: This year, we’re already doing the pilots in the countries I’ve told you about. 

J: How did this idea start? 

A: I met my other two co-founders, Meydan Levy and Esti Brantz. They are industrial designers from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.  They invented the product. They wanted to overcome the challenge of food waste and ugly produce, and they saw it as a phenomenon that only increases with time. With their knowledge, ability, and their artistic way of looking outside of the box, they brought a lot of techniques from other industries to produce all this starting with the laminate and eventually building the pod.

They came to the Kitchen Hub, which is where I met them. The Kitchen Hub creates new teams of founders, allocating technologies, products, innovation, and ideas, and then bringing the right CEO who invents the business.

J: I saw Anina last year in New York at the NY-Israel Foodtech Bridge conference. From your perspective, what was your experience of that conference? 

A:  I met a lot of interesting people that we are even today still thinking of how we can collaborate within the US market. I think the exposure to the US market was very interesting.

J: How would you say Israeli startup founders are different? 

A: There’s a thing in Israel about getting to the bottom line: it looks like being rude. And a lot of Israelis, if you live here, it feels like it’s rude, but we cut to the chase. You can be aggressive in your movement and still be a friend when you finish the meeting, and that’s something that doesn’t exist in the world. I think there are a lot of benefits to that.

Joy Chen is a contributor at the Spoon and has been writing about robotics and alternative proteins for the past year and a half. Although originally from the United States, she is currently studying at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, Israel. 

Sigh. It Looks Like Misinformation is Coming For Food Waste Technology Too

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how misinformation has real potential to harm the nascent cultivated meat industry. As it turns out, meat grown in bioreactors is not the only food tech-related misinformation floating around nowadays.

Over the last couple of weeks, viral media posts have circulated about the fresh produce life extension coating made by Apeel. These tweets and posts often reference Bill Gates’ investment in the company and present a mix of conspiracy theories ranging from claims that the Apeel coating will make users sick, cause skin or eye damage, or increase the population’s reliance on the pharmaceutical industry.

Some of the early posts pointed to a fact sheet which, according to a fact check by the USA Today, was about an industrial cleaner – also called Apeel – instead of the food coating. But even after it became clear that the warnings in the fact sheet were about a product meant for cleaning floors and not for the Apeel food coating, it didn’t seem to deter some on social media from suggesting the ingredients in the Apeel product were harmful or a part of some weird food control plot by Bill Gates.

The primary active ingredient in the Apeel coating mentioned in the posts is mono- and diglycerides. While there is a legitimate conversation to be had about whether excess mono- and diglycerides in our diets can be harmful, the posts suggest that Apeel’s coating is a danger to all those who consume it, despite the fact the company received a ‘no questions’ GRAS notification from the FDA that the additives are safe for their intended use. The posts also largely ignore that mono- and diglycerides are commonly added to various foods, such as bread, peanut butter, and ice cream, and for products with peels like avocados or bananas, the Apeel coating won’t actually be consumed (unless someone chooses to eat the peels for some reason).

Although this recent surge in misinformation does not seem to have the same potential impact as those surrounding cultivated meat, there is no doubt that it has been a concerning development for Apeel. Food misinformation is widespread today, sometimes due to deliberate efforts by organizations with vested interests in a product, and other times simply because self-proclaimed health or food experts raise the alarm based on something they have seen or read.

Bottom line: as new technologies for food become more commonplace, so will bad information about them. The companies behind these products need to work to educate customers and proactively address the flare-ups in the wild before they start burning out of control.

Home Are Still the Biggest Source of Food Waste (44M Tons), and It’s Only Getting Worse

Last week, ReFED released its latest edition of the Food Waste Monitor, which is part of the ReFED Insights Engine, an interactive tool that tracks food waste sources, solutions, capital, and impact.

The organization monitors food waste through the lens of excess food production, which means how much excess food is produced that ultimately doesn’t get consumed. According to ReFED, there were 91 million tons of excess food in the US in 2021 (the latest year for which they have data), of which almost 36%, or 32.7 million pounds, ended up in landfills.

Other destinations for the excess food included sewer (6.91 million tons, 7.6%), composting (16.6 million tons, 18.3%), food that is not harvested at the farm (12.7 million tons, 14%), and animal feed (7.81 million tons, 8.6%) among others.

The Food Waste Monitor also breaks down where in the system food waste is happening. Consumers have long been known as being the biggest culprits when it comes to food waste, and we’ve only gotten worse over the last five years, going from 45.6% (39.6M tons) of excess food in 2016 to 48.4% (44.1M tons), which means the home now accounts for almost half of the total excess food in the US.

In addition to quantifying the total size of excess food in our system and how much is wasted, the ReFED Insights engine also has a solutions database that examines and quantifies the different solutions for reducing food waste. As can be seen in the graphic below, the database breaks solutions down by where they touch the food along the value chain (each category is called an ‘action area’), from harvest to consumer environments and beyond, and quantifies the net collective financial benefit the various solutions targeted at each stop along the way could potentially have.

According to ReFED, reshaping consumer environments has the biggest potential to reduce excess food, with an annual net financial impact of over $30 billion in total food value. Within that category, ReFED estimates that the biggest potential lever for reshaping environments is consumer education campaigns, which would help consumers better understand the problem of food waste and how to address it in their meal planning, how they store their food, etc.

A breakdown of the financial and environmental benefits of consumer education campaigns is below. It breaks down not only the direct dollar impact, but shows the total amount of food diverted (3.22M tons), emissions reduction (18.7M metric tons of CO2e), and water saved (795B gallons).

While the ReFED solutions database touches on ways in which consumers can reduce food by employing technology (smart home or food life extension technology) it doesn’t show the economic impact these types of solutions could have. That’s not really ReFED’s fault, because the reality is there hasn’t been a whole lot of innovation in this space.

One category I didn’t see in the consumer solutions that could be added is consumer food tracking and meal planning apps, which have been active areas in terms of new products and consumer adoption (though it’s unclear how impactful they have been).

There is a lot more data and insights in the ReFED Insights engine, so you should definitely check it out for yourself.

Sepura Gets $3.7M Seed Round For Its Under-Sink Food Waste Device

While cooking tech startups have had a hard time of it lately when it comes to raising funding, it appears investors aren’t shying away from products that help consumers manage excess food waste.

The latest example is a new seed funding round for Victoria BC-based Sepura, a startup that makes an under-counter food separation device. The company announced today it had received a $3.7 million seed round led by Blanco, a German manufacturer of faucets, sinks, and home food waste management systems.

Unlike other systems like the Lomi, the Sepura doesn’t accelerate composting of food scraps. Instead, it helps you separate them. The machine goes under the sink and separates water from food, and pushes the food into a small bin within the Sepura device.

You can watch how the Sepura works in the video below:

Installing the Sepura requires a little more effort than countertop composters. Standing approximately 20 inches tall, the device is mounted under the sink and connected to the under-sink plumbing, allowing it to transfer water from the sink and dishwasher into the grey water pipes.

The Sepura operates differently from traditional garbage disposals that use grinding mechanisms. Instead, it has a spinner separating water from food and deposits it into the waste bin below. Users press a button, and the device works automatically, stopping once the food has been separated. Light indicators on the Sepura inform users when the appliance is full, but users don’t have to worry about monitoring the lights since the appliance will not activate if the disposal bin is already full.

What the Sepura won’t do is take your food waste and grind it into useable food grounds or compost. In this sense, it differs from the Mill (which raised $100 million from the likes of Google Ventures), the system developed by ex-Nest executives that makes food scraps for chickens, or the Smartcycle, the popular home compost machine made by Vitamix.

I have two concerns about the Sepura. The first is whether enough consumers will pay for a device that separates food. In many towns like mine, curbside yard waste/food waste pickup is available. Our kitchen has an under-counter scrap bin where we dump food scraps. It’s not a lot of work, and I’m not sure we’d need to automate the process through an appliance.

My second question is whether consumers will cede that much space to an under-sink waste handler. In our kitchen, we store our kitchen waste bags, detergent, and other kitchen cleaning items underneath the sink, and I’m not sure there’d be enough room for all these items if we installed the Sepura.

Still, I think there are probably enough consumers out there looking for smart solutions for waste management to make a market for Sepura. Blanco, which sells its own kitchen waste management products, could target the same customer segment they sell its waste sorting systems to (and likely will) with a Blanco-branded version of the Sepura.

If you’re interested in getting a Sepura, the company is taking deposits for the appliance, which costs $799. Sepura says it is planning to begin shipping the device this summer.

Hazel’s New CEO Focused on Diversifying Life Extention Products and Expanding Geographically

Today, produce life extension startup Hazel Technologies named Parker Booth as its new CEO. Booth, who has had a varied career in produce distribution, vertical farming, as well as a stint as general manager of Washington State Correctional Industries, takes on the new role after serving three-plus years as the company’s chief operating officer.

Booth, who has been in the role of CEO on a temporary basis, takes over the role permanently as he replaces Aidan Mouat, who was involved in an accident last September that left the company’s founding CEO fighting for his life. The accident, in which a motorist struck Mouat as he was out walking his dogs (both dogs were killed in the accident) in a suburb of Chicago, has left Mouat unable to fulfill the role as he is still in active recovery. According to Booth, Mouat will remain as an advisor to the company.

I caught up with Booth last week to talk about the state of the company and where he sees things going under his leadership.

Can you give me an update on Hazel and what’s been happening over the past year?

We’re an eight-year-old company, and we’re past the stage of ‘does our technology work?’ It’s been proven that it does. It’s now one of customer adoption and executing our scale-up plans. We’re excited about that. We’ve added some new technology through the acquisition of a company’s assets last year that extend the shelf life of berries, and large berry growers are really latching on to this.

How does this new product differ from Hazel’s sachet product?

Hazel CEO Parker Booth

The intellectual property is a membrane about 10 inches by 10 inches. When you take a pallet of a product like berries, you put this giant bag over the top of it, seal it up, and then inject CO2 in the membrane. Again, it’s very similar to the concept of breathable saddlebags, as you’re allowing co2 to transmit through that membrane and equilibrates at a certain level that inhibits decay for berries, for raspberries in particular. It’s a really proven technology, and we’re excited about that. We’re going to be looking at bananas in Southeast Asia. It has a pallet option, but has a carton option, a little smaller bag with a smaller membrane. And so that just gives us a lot more conversations with the customers.

So Hazel is now a life extension technology company, essentially, with a variety of tools.

Yes, so far in our life, we’ve had 5 billion pounds of produce we’ve used our detection technology on, and we’ve eliminated 400 million pounds in waste. We like to track that metric because that’s our mission.

But that’s it. Shelf life extension that reduces yield loss. And that becomes an actual, very objective data point for the owner of the product. So we can say we’re going to save you ‘X dollars per carton’ or per shipment by using Hazel. That’s a bottom line benefit for them. That savings goes right to the customer’s bottom line.

Can you give me an update on the sachet business?

We had our first customer five years ago, and it’s been ramping up ever since. One change we made is that at the beginning, we were producing our product internally, making our secret sauce, and packing the sachets. About two years ago, we began to outsource manufacturing to third-party contract manufacturer who specializes in this. They use our recipe, they use our quality standards, and we check them on all that. We did this because they can scale to the volume that we need to keep up with the business.

For those who aren’t familiar with your sachet product, can you explain how it works?

There’s a component in there called 1-MCP (short for 1–Methylcyclopropene). It’s been around for a long time, and what we do is combine the 1-MCP into that secret sauce – which has different sorts of materials – into a sachet, and that becomes a very slow release. That’s the benefit of our product. What happens is we attach the materials through a vapor to the ethylene (the natural ripening hormone in fruit) receptors that actually emit ethylene in a product and stop the ethylene from being created.

What other products do you have?

We actually have a product called Datica that senses ethylene, it senses 1-MCP, and so it’s instant feedback for apple long-term storage. It’s an internet-connected device and software that traces the levels of 1-MCP and, as a result, detects the real-time level of the ethylene.

Another product called Hazel Trex is focused on pre-harvest. What that does is it allows growers of, say, kiwis to predict within a day or two accuracy when the bud is going to bloom for kiwis. Now, why is that important? They could hit it with nutrients just prior to that if they knew exactly when it’s going to be. So it’s a cost savings for them.

Was one of the goals after the last funding round to diversify the product portfolio as you become a more mature company?

It was to build out our fundamentals, and expand our product line, but also expand the countries that we’re in. We’re trying to get the footprint expanded. It’s very important in the produce world that you’re in the southern hemisphere as well as the northern hemisphere. That way, you get a year-round cycle, a year-round supply for, say, table grapes. A grower might have table grapes coming out of Peru, which are just ending now, and now you move on to table grapes coming out of California for the US market. We have a plan that, in the next five years, we will be in 23-plus countries with various products.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Mill Nabs First Municipal Pilot in Partnership With the City of Tacoma

Mill, a startup that makes a home food waste management appliance that turns food scraps into chicken feed, has captured its first municipal pilot in a partnership with Tacoma, Washington, the company announced this week.

The company partnered with the city of Tacoma to launch a pilot program that uses technology to address residential food waste. As part of the program, Tacoma residents will receive priority access to Mill Memberships, which they will pay directly to Mill at the cost of $33 per month. According to the News Tribune, the city “gained priority access to at least 600 Mill memberships and access to new data that can help inform the city on waste prevention and food-waste reduction projects.”

A Mill subscription, announced last month, is a $33-a-month subscription and includes a kitchen bin and a pickup service for the processed Food Grounds. Once Mill customers activate their bin via Wi-Fi, they can start tossing food scraps. Once the bin is full, they put the Food Grounds into a prepaid box and schedule a pickup with the Mill app.

“We are proud to be at the forefront of creative public-private solutions to tackle the challenging problem of food waste in landfills. The City of Tacoma began collecting and recycling residential food waste in 2012—since then, diverting up to 1,000 tons per year of compostable food waste from landfills. With this first-of-its-kind-agreement with Mill, we are excited to be the first municipality in the country to pilot this innovative new approach to preventing food waste and to support residents who want a better kitchen experience and want to take practical action to address climate change at home,” said Lewis Griffith, City of Tacoma Solid Waste Division Manager.

It will be interesting to see how many Tacoma residents subscribe to the Mill service. One incentive could be offsetting the cost by moving to a smaller garbage can; according to the city, food scraps make up 28% of residential waste, and by taking food waste out of their garbage can by using the Mill, residents could save up to $25.60 by downsizing their container.

According to the announcement, the Mill memberships will be available to Tacoma residents starting next month.

Evigence Raises $18M for Its Food Freshness Sensors Small Enough to Fit on a Packaging Sticker

Food technology company Evigence announced the close of an $18m series B funding round this week. The company, which makes real-time food freshness detecting sensors, plans to use the money to further develop its system’s data collection and analytics capabilities and launch additional commercial partnerships in the US and Europe

Evigence’s sensors, which are small enough to be incorporated into a sticker that goes onto produce packaging, can detect the temperature and time passage and uses that data to calculate the current and projected freshness of produce. Retailers, distributors, and consumers can use them to determine the real-time freshness of a product. Evingen’s sensors can give visual cues such as through color change on the sticker or have an hourglass empty to let the consumer know when a product is no longer fresh.

You can watch the Evigence system in action below:

Real Time Freshness Monitors

“At Evigence, we aim to redefine the way the world manages fresh food”, said Evigence Founder & CEO Yoav Levy. “Today there is no objective way to measure freshness. Small variations in temperature during transit or storage can lead to waste of perfectly good food on one end of the spectrum, or problems with food safety on the other end. Date codes don’t account for these fluctuations. We want to change the paradigm.”

The company recently announced it is working with meal kit delivery company Marley Spoon by Martha Stewart. Marley Spoon implemented the Evigence solution, wich allows it and consumers to ensure freshness of meal kit ingredients when they arrive to customers’ homes. Evigence’s sensors track time and temperature exposure over the course of the meal kits’ shipping journey, from packing to the customers’ doorstep. When the meal kit arrives at home, customers can scan the sensor upon receipt of the meal kit to confirm freshness.

According to Levy, “tens of millions” of Evigence sensors have been deployed across a variety of food and beverage markets which has collectively resulted in 20% shelf life extension and 33% reduction in waste.

Mill Wants You to Create Chicken Feed Out of Food Scraps

Want to stop sending food waste to the landfill?

A new device and service from a company called Mill will help you do just that while also letting you feed a chicken or two while you’re at it.

Debuting today, the Mill kitchen bin, a new eponymous device from a company founded by a couple of ex-Nest execs, will take your food waste and shrink & “de-stink” it as it turns into what it calls Food Grounds, something the company says is a “safe and nutritious chicken feed ingredient.”

Here’s how it works:

You sign up for a Mill “Membership,” a $33-a-month subscription service that includes a kitchen bin and a pickup service for the processed Food Grounds. You connect the Mill to Wi-Fi, activate it using the Mill app, and start tossing in your food scraps. Once the bin is full, you put your Food Grounds into a prepaid box and schedule a pickup with the Mill app.

While it’s tempting to call the kitchen bin one of a new cohort of smart food composters, Mill wants you to know that its box is definitely not a composter. The Food Grounds “aren’t compost,” says Mill, because instead of having the food sit and get eaten by microbes, it’s processed into an edible chicken feed ingredient they say can be put back into the food system.

Still, aside from the chicken feed system, the Mill isn’t that different from some of the other composters we’ve written about. Like the Lomi and the Kalea, the machine accelerates the shrinking and drying of the food into something other than the original food waste you dropped into the container.

The framing of the Mill is primarily about sustainability and reducing food waste, and it’s a positioning that makes sense. If we’re going to throw food out, it’s better to have those scraps turned into something that can feed chickens or your local garden than end up in a landfill.

That said, the optimal solution for food is not to have it end up as food waste at all, but instead, have it eaten by humans. That’s why I’m hoping the Mill team’s next product will be something that helps us preserve food from entering a waste bin altogether.

For those interested, Mill is taking reservations now and plans to ship the kitchen bin this spring.

These New Scanners Will Help Us All From Squeezing (and Damaging) The Avocadoes

Every year, tens of thousands of tons of avocadoes are thrown into the trash or compost. Whether on the farm or in our fridges, the delicious fruit is one of the most difficult to get right when it comes to determining ripeness, resulting in a whole lot of wasted food.

One startup hoping to help us reduce the amount of avocadoes going to waste is OneThird, a startup out of The Netherlands that has built a line of spectral scanners that determine the freshness of an avocado.

When a OneThird scanner looks at the spectral fingerprint of an avocado, it compares the data gathered to its database to determine how ripe the fruit is and then sends the information to its app. You can see the scanner in action in the video below:

A Look at the OneThird Ripeness Checker at CES 2023

According to company CES Marko Snikkers, because farmers and distributors often don’t know how ripe avocados are, they will often ship the produce to retailers when it should have gone to a processor or some other application that can make use of ripe or overripe produce.

“What we try to do is give our customers the data so they know if it should go to the store or be repurposed for other methods such as dry freeing or juices,” said Snikkers.

The company debuted their in-store version and the quality lab version of their scanners at CES 2023.

OneThird isn’t the only company with a spectral imaging scanner targeted at grocery retailers to determine avocado freshness. In October of last year, Apeel debuted their avocado scanner, which it built using technology acquired from Impact Vision.

I for one am looking forward to seeing one of these scanners in my local grocery store, not only because it’s hard to determine freshness without it, but also because it would hopefully prevent me and others from squeezing the fruit.

“We all squeeze,” said Snikkers. “And that is definitely damaging the avocadoes.”

Israel’s Wasteless Uses A.I. As A Solution for Food Waste

The aptly named Wasteless is a triple threat as it offers a solution that simultaneously benefits retailers, consumers, and the environment. The Israeli company provides an AI-driven solution to cut down on food waste in retail by allowing supermarkets to give consumers dynamic pricing based on the freshness of a given product.

Wasteless has reached a milestone in announcing a partnership with Hoogvliet, a leading European supermarket chain with over 70 stores across The Netherlands. Using Wasteless’ dynamic pricing technology, the retailer will reduce food waste by optimizing costly price markdowns. This partnership forms part of a wider store rollout to stop throwing viable perishable goods into the dumpster, increasing margins while benefiting shoppers and the planet.

“The E.U.’s supermarkets alone are responsible for nearly 7% of all food waste, leading to more than 15 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions,” Oded Omer, Co-Founder, and CEO of Wasteless, said in a company press release. “By the time this waste occurs, all the energy and resources have already gone into the food. It’s the costliest waste we’re creating – indeed, it costs each store up to 4% of its revenues. In addition, Wasteless will help customers make smarter grocery decisions. Our solution also helps retail managers by optimizing inventory control systems. Joining forces with leading innovative retailers like Hoogvliet means we’re another step closer to saving the environment and achieving our goal of reducing food waste in retail by 80% while increasing retailers’ profits. This is a concrete step toward the Food Waste Pledge we signed at the COP27 Climate Conference and other signatories, including the World Wildlife Fund.”

Speaking to the origins of the company, Omer told The Spoon, “I stood in the supermarket, and I said to myself, well, it doesn’t make sense that I’m going to pay the same price for Chobani for that expires in two days and six days,” he recalled. “So, I started to contact some the academic professors and so on, and to understand the perspective of revenue management.”

That revelation in 2016 led to Wasteless, a machine-learning system embedded in a retailer’s data center. It can be applied using electronic shelf markers (which are more common in the E.U. than in the U.S.) or stickers applied to anything from meat and poultry to apples and salad greens. The pricing scheme is done in small increments using sell-by and consumer shopping data. Wasteless’ pricing can also be applied using a consumer-facing application.

To date, Wasteless is backed by $9.75M in funding, led by Slingshot Ventures (N.L.), Zora Ventures (U.S.), SOSV (U.S.) IT-Farm (Japan), Food Angels (Germany), strategic industry-related investors, and Israel Innovation Authority grants.

In 2021, Wasteless announced a collaboration with NX-Food, a German food tech hub, to bring its pricing systems into stores from METRO, one of the world’s leading wholesale specialists. Omer summed up the win-win bottom line for implementing dynamic pricing. “It’s a huge win for us as we grow and show the world what our technology is capable of. Most importantly, this is a huge win for the environment. There’s a lot of talk about sustainability in business, but it only really works if it’s also profitable.”

Re-Nuble Aims to Use Food Waste To Make Indoor Agriculture More Sustainable

The role of indoor growing, ranging from small indoor vertical farms to large greenhouses, is vital to sustaining the world’s food supply. Controlled Environmental Agriculture is essential for growing crops in underused spaces, rooftops, and rows of vertical gardens. Seizing upon this vital resource, Tinia Pina, Founder & CEO of ReNuble, has taken up the challenge to help this idea scale. With a best-in-class nutrient and growing medium, Pina’s company has created organic compounds sourced from food waste for sterile, technology-driven hydroponic and soilless systems.

For the dynamic Pina, her vision for what became Re-Nuble started more than six years ago in the New York school system. “I also saw our outreach educational classes for this program were from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m.,” she recalled in an interview with The Spoon. “I noticed what the kids were bringing for class for lunch, and those options were very processed. With that diet, you see a direct impact on their level of attention. And I felt, from a systemic perspective, that will immediately impact the type of productivity and retention of the information we’re teaching. So overall, I always felt that people with better access to nutrition are spending more time being able to be fully immersed and retaining the information. And they are calling less out of work with fewer sick days.”

The genesis of Re-Nuble’s solution, Pina goes on to explain, came from her observation of how food waste was disposed of. “At that time, New York was spending $77 million to export its food waste to China, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. And that’s simply because we don’t have the composting infrastructure to handle it,” Pina said.” I wondered how we could make food waste a consistent alternative for conventional synthetic fertilizers by doing it for soils or hydroponic systems. So, we focused on using food waste as a viable alternative for chemical fertilizers in indoor grow environments.”

Specific to its product lines, Re-Nuble’s Head of Business Development & Strategy, Riyana Razalee, said in a company press release, “CEA is a large part of the future of farming, and so, we have to prioritize its role in decarbonization. Solutions need to address the gamut of the food supply chain, decarbonizing as many parts of it as possible. This vital issue is what our team is focused on”. The company states that for every acre of an indoor farm that uses Re-Nuble’s organic hydroponic nutrient, Away We Grow, the company can remove up to 5 metric tons of carbon emissions annually. That’s approximately one home’s energy use for a year.

In addition, its grow medium, ReNu Terra, supports the anti-peat movement. Companies, activists, and governments are demanding the reduction of drained peatlands. When farmed for agriculture needs, peat changes from a carbon sink to a greenhouse gas emitter, releasing approximately 1.9 gigatonnes of CO2e annually. This amounts to 0.4 billion gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for a year.

Pina said Re-Nuble has three customer segments now. First is the consumer market. Away We Grow could be part of a kit offered for an indoor growing system. “Consumers are eager to find more environmentally and people and animal-friendly solutions,” Re-Nuble’s CEO noted. The second segment is commercial farms such as Gotham Greens. The third, she said, is “disruptive farms.” For the last group, she stated, “There are severe supply shortages globally, and so there’s a lot of urgencies to find something that could be more sustainable, but even more importantly, something that they can afford.”