When the Nest came out in 2011, it quickly became popular for its innovative design and its ability to allow users to track their energy usage more accurately. While the Ecobee thermostat is largely recognized as the first true smart thermostat, most would agree it was Nest—especially after Google acquired the company in 2014—that exposed a much broader swath of the population to the concept of using smart home technology to manage energy and reduce energy bills.
Nowadays, about one in six households has a smart thermostat, and using one to reduce energy bills is often listed at the top of home energy management and budget-saving tips.
Meanwhile, although most people recognize that food waste is also a waste of money, only a tiny fraction of US households use any innovative technology to avoid it. The main reason is that tracking food waste is difficult. Until recently, it required users to pull out a spreadsheet and make numerous estimations of how much food ended up in the waste bin.
But that may soon change, in part because those who helped build the Nest are now trying to bring the same type of management and tracking dashboards that helped users become more aware of how much money they could save by better managing their home heating and cooling. Mill, co-founded by Nest co-founder Matt Rogers and one of the thermostat company’s first hires, Harry Tannenbaum, helps users keep track of how much food they are keeping out of the waste bin. According to the company, this is helping them reduce waste and save money.
According to Mill, their device is resulting in changed consumer behavior. In a new report published today, Mill states that users of their device reduced the amount of food they throw out by 20% within a few months of using the food recycler.
From the report:
Mill aggregated millions of device days of data from April 2023 to May 2024 and found that the median Mill household added around 5.5 pounds of food scraps per household per week. Notably, the median amount of food scraps added to Mill decreased over time—by over 20% in the first four months—and then stabilized.
With the average US household wasting up to $1,900 in food annually, this translates to roughly $380 in savings over the course of a year. If you’re doing the math, that’s about three times the savings a household gets from using a Nest.
With such obvious bottom-line benefits, will users start embracing smarter food waste management tools? Possibly, but with a couple of caveats. While energy management is something that is easy to track via lower energy bills, the savings from food waste reduction are less direct and obvious to the consumer. It’s also more expensive to buy a Mill recycler, setting a home back a thousand dollars (or $30 a month if on a subscription plan). There are cheaper products—the Lomi costs about $379—but from my experience using it for six months, the Mill is quieter and compacts more food than competing composters.
There’s no doubt that food waste reduction is having a moment. Just last week, the Biden administration announced the first national White House strategy on food waste reduction, and businesses have finally begun taking it seriously, in part because of state and local laws forcing their hand. All this comes against a backdrop of higher consumer prices for food, which has translated into consumers buying less food and being a bit more mindful of the food they already have in their fridges and pantries.
My hope is that companies like Mill will now start eyeing how to keep food from going to the bin in the first place. Other startups like Wisely, Silo, and Ovie are making products that help consumers more smartly store in their fridges, while big companies like Amazon have been researching ways to make the fridge smarter when it comes to food waste management. If someone, Mill or otherwise, can finally build food waste management systems millions of consumers use – before and after it goes bad – then we might finally be able to make a dent in our national home food waste problem.
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