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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food waste

Is Food Waste Reduction About to Have Its ‘Nest Moment’?

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.

Podcast: The Story of Mill With Matt Rogers

If you follow the world of kitchen and consumer food tech startups, you know there hasn’t been much in the way of venture-funded startups targeting food waste in the home.

That changed last year when Mill lifted the veil on the company and its first product, the Mill Bin, a smart food recycler. The company’s unique approach included a subscription-based home food waste recycler and an accompanying service that would turn the food grounds into chicken feed. 

We decided to catch up with the company’s CEO, Matt Rogers, to hear about the journey to making Mill. During our conversation, we also talk about:

  • The early lessons in building a tech-powered food recycling appliance and service
  • Why Matt decided to target food waste after building a smart home company in Nest
  • The challenges in getting consumers to think about wasting less food
  • How better data can help us change consumer behavior 
  • The future of food waste reduction technology in the consumer kitchen

You can listen to the full episode below or find it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can also watch the video of our conversation on YouTube or below.

A Conversation With Matt Rogers from Mill

If you want to learn more about Mill, you can head to their website or join us at the Smart Kitchen Summit where we will be hearing from company cofounder Harry Tannenbaum. Use discount code podcast for 15% off tickets.

After Hitting Ten Thousand Users, Mill Unveils Second-Generation Hi-Tech Food Waste Bin

Last week, Mill unveiled its second-generation appliance, one year after introducing its high-tech food waste bin (don’t call it a composter!). The news comes as the company reaches ten thousand customers and claims it has helped divert one million pounds of food waste from landfills.

Both the first and second generation Mill turn food waste into inputs for chicken feed called grounds. The significant difference between the two machines is that the second-generation Mill will do it faster and more quietly.

According to the company, one primary area of feedback from users of the first-gen Mill was that the appliance processed food too slowly. When the company returned to the drawing board to build the second-generation device, it redesigned the food chopping blades from horizontally mounted to two vertically mounted blades, according to an interview Mill CEO Matt Rogers gave Fast Company.

Video Credit: Mill

Another upgrade speeding the break down of food faster is a change to how the food waste is heated. While the first-gen Mill was heated only from the bottom, the new Mill’s heating element is connected to the entire bin interior, resulting in faster overall food breakdown.

Finally, unlike the first Mill, this new one comes with a purchase option from the get-go. Spoon readers will remember that the company started opening the doors to purchase the first-gen appliance a few months ago after hearing feedback from many of its customers that they’d prefer to own the appliance, especially those that used the Mill to process food waste for use in their garden rather than sending it back to Mill to use for chicken feed.

According to Mill, the new appliance will sell for $999. For those who still want to rent the appliance, the monthly service (without grounds pickup) will be $29.99, $49.99 with grounds pickup. For those who purchase the Mill and want grounds pickup for the Mill chicken-feed service, that’ll cost an additional $10 monthly.

Stepping back, my guess is the biggest challenge Mill will face is its high price point. Consumers looking for high-tech help processing their food waste into compost can find options like the Vitamix Food-Cycler or the Lomi for less than half the price. I worry that just like June and those bringing new approaches to cooking, products hovering around the thousand-buck mark are too expensive for most customers to roll the dice on what is essentially a new product category. While rental lowers the cost, Mill learned that most customers prefer to own their kitchen appliances, which is why they opened up the purchase option.

We’ll keep an eye on the Mill and how they perform with their second-gen appliance.

Podcast: Overcoming Obstacles To Build Kitchen Tech Hardware With Ovie’s Ty Thompson

Ty Thompson and the rest of the Ovie team recently passed a major milestone: They shipped their first hardware product.

The product, a consumer food waste management system, was over half a decade in the making. Along the way to market, the founding team faced numerous challenges around funding, finalizing the product concept and design, building prototypes for manufacturing, and finding the right manufacturer to work with.

Ty talks about all of these challenges and the lessons learned, including:

  • Battling mission creep around the product’s vision
  • How to find the right minimum viable product to get it into production
  • What you need to do (and what you shouldn’t do) when looking to find the right manufacturing partner
  • How to balance your life and your day job while hustling to build a startup

And much more!

You can listen to the full episode by clicking play below or you can find it in the usual podcast spaces such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Mill, Maker of a High-Tech Home Food Waste Bin, Adjusts Plans and Enables Purchase Option

It’s been just over a year since the Mill, the company behind a high-tech home food waste bin, was announced to the public. The company, which made an initial splash with a unique waste-to-chicken feed service and a management team with impressive smart home pedigrees, has spent much of the past year shipping to initial customers and working on partnerships with local municipalities in Washington and Arizona to integrate their product into places with limited curbside composting pickup.

And, starting last month, the company began allowing customers to purchase the Mill bin, adding a new option for a product that had previously only been available as part of a monthly subscription fee option. Before, customers had to pay a $33-a-month subscription service to Mill that included the home bin and the Mill grounds pickup service. Now, they have the option to purchase the Mill bin for $999 a year ($899 with promotion), which gets them the bin, a year of Mill essentials like charcoal filter refills and parts and maintenance, the option to opt into Mill pickups, and a 12-month warranty. 

Where the company works with local pickup partners, plan options may be slightly different, according to Mill. Today, that primarily applies to the Phoenix market, where the company has partnered with a local compost pickup company called R.City. This Phoenix business makes a business out of picking up residential food waste and using the compost to regenerate the soil on its farm in South Phoenix.

I’ve been trialing the Mill myself, and I have to say the device works really well. I’ve tried the grounds pickup service, and it was as easy as advertised. However, since I prefer to put the grounds into the ground, buying the machine probably makes the most sense for me in the long term. That said, I imagine most folks might balk at coughing up almost a grand for a high-tech machine to manage food waste.

After Over Half a Decade in Development, Ovie Ships Food Freshness Trackers

Since I first saw the Ovie team standing in a small booth in the bottom floor of the Sands Convention Center during CES 2018, I’ve been following them to see if this group of founders could bring their vision for a smart food tracker to life. The team, which at that time consisted of Ty Thompson, Dave Joseph, and Stacie Thompson, had scratched together a prototype to showcase their idea at the big show: a low-cost visual tracking system to help people waste less food.

I liked the idea, so I was happy – and a bit surprised – to see that after over half a decade, the company’s founders had persevered and finally shipped product. Sure, the original idea – a “smart storage system” that not only included tags but some Tupperware-like containers as well as an app that allowed you to track your food inventory in one place – was a little bigger than what they ultimately brought to market (more on that in a minute), but the reality is it’s hard to ship hardware. Most project teams make compromises by the time the final product ends up in the consumer’s hands.

When I first wrote about them, I called the Ovie Smarterware trackers a ‘Tile for food’; in reality, the idea is a bit closer to an intelligent sticky note system to help you track your food’s freshness. The way the final, shippable product works is you stick Ovie smart trackers (called LightTags) on the food items you want to track, and you tell them how long you want to monitor a food item by clicking the light on the LightTag once for each day. So, for example, I would click a LightTag seven times for a pound of ground beef with an expiration date of a week from now.

As you can see above, if the light is teal, you have more than 24 hours left on your timer. Yellow warns that you have 24 hours or less on that food. The red light means time has run out. According to Ovie, each color has a blink pattern for the color-challenged. The blinks are slowest in the Teal stage and speed up as the expiration date inches near.

The company persevered through a series of challenges to finally reach this point. They launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2018, looked for investors and manufacturing partners, and fought through a pandemic and a significant hardware winter. While the Ovie tag system isn’t exactly as proposed in the company’s Kickstarter, the fact that founders saw it through and shipped it is a pretty impressive feat.

If interested, you can buy an Ovie system on the company’s website.

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.

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.