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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food waste

Mimica’s “Bumpy” Food Sensor Tells You When Your Milk Goes Bad

I’ve never felt especially constrained by expiration dates. I grew up in a household where moldy bits of cheese were simply cut off and milk was submitted to the “sniff” test before we determined it was safe to pour into our coffee. We relied on our senses of sight and smell to tell us when food was off, not the printed date on the package.

But many people do rely on it. A 2016 study found that 84 percent of Americans throw away food based on the date stamped on packages. And that date isn’t necessarily “expires on”; labels like “best by” and “sell by” can confuse consumers on when exactly they should pitch their food.

This confusion can be costly. A study by ReFed found that date labels cost Americans an estimated $30 billion annually. And then there’s food waste. In America, 40% of food goes to waste, nearly two thirds of which happens at home. In the U.K., 20% of consumer food waste is a direct result of label date confusion.

A big issue at play is regulation. Contrary to what you (and many others) might think, date labels aren’t federally regulated. Which means there’s a lot of inconsistency in the process determining when your half & half should be considered past its prime.

A new startup called Mimica is trying to change that by developing food freshness sensors that anyone can understand. Called Mimica Touch, their small labels are filled with gelatine which is calibrated with a mathematical model to have the same shelf life as a particular product. As they deteriorate, the label’s once-smooth surface becomes bumpy to the touch, providing a very hands-on way for consumers to determine if their milk is expired or not without having to use the sniff test.

Mimica founder Solveiga Pakštaitė stumbled upon the idea of a tactile freshness label while working on her industrial design thesis at Brunel University in London. She noticed that visually impaired people had no way of knowing when their food went bad, which was causing them to shy away from purchasing fresh food. So she developed the concept for a label made of a special gel that would mimic the shelf life of different foods which would go from smooth to bumpy when food had gone off.

Pakštaitė filed a patent for the technology. With a little encouragement, she submitted her work for the James Dyson award after graduating in 2014 — and ended up winning. By 2015 she was working on the project full-time, and in 2016 she hired her first scientist. Soon Mimica was looking for a retail partner for their label technology.

If the label is bumpy, the food is expired.

There was no shortage of interested parties. “Suppliers and manufacturers wanted to make this thing,” said Pakštaitė. “Retailers had a real need for it too.” She explained that these players feel almost forced to put a short date labels on their products. They know that their supply chains aren’t perfect, and they think the only way to keep customers happy is to shorten the printed dates. But short date labels translate to lost profit when stores have to throw away food that isn’t actually expired but is past its “sell-by” date. Producers also have to pay waste management fees to have expired food taken away, which can add up.

In the end, Mimica decided to partner with Danish dairy giant Arla Foods to launch their bumpy labels. They’re currently focusing on fresh proteins for their labels because they’re high cost, high risk, and have a large impact on the environment. “We had identified milk as a huge opportunity for our product,” said Pakštaitė. “We were also impressed with Arla because they had a really good program for working with startups and a budget to just start things, plus a welcoming attitude towards innovation.”

The Arla pilot is still in the consumer testing phase, but if all goes well the market trial should hit U.K. supermarket shelves in Q3 2018. The Mimica Touch-labeled milk will still have a “date of minimum durability” printed on it, Pakštaitė explained, because it’s required by European law. However, supermarkets could display the furthest possible “expected date” on the milk, because they have the added insurance of the Mimica Touch labels.

Photo courtesy of Mimica Labs.

Pakštaitė also added that “even if there was a situation where the date was not legally required, it would not be a good idea for us to ‘pull the rug [out from] under people’s feet’ and simply replace the information that they’ve trusted for so long with a totally new system.”  Instead they hope that the Mimica Touch labels will work in tandem with traditional expiry dates, offering insurance and context — at least for now.

“60% of the food we throw away in the UK is still perfectly edible,” said Pakštaitė. Mimica Touch has the potential to radically reduce that number. “By bringing in a biologically-accurate indicator, more often not it will prove that our food lasts a lot longer than we think it does.” This could lead to a large-scale behavior change in how we view sell-by dates, and perhaps how we purchase and consume food in general. Most importantly, you would never again have to be surprised by a whiff of past-due milk ever again.

Farmstead Raises $2M, Releases FreshAI for Retail Food Management

It’s only Tuesday and already it has been a busy week for Farmstead, the startup that uses a combination of machine learning and small food hubs to enable home grocery delivery. On Monday, the company announced it had raised a $2 million seed round, and today, Farmstead opened up its FreshAI predictive analytics software platform to external food companies.

Farmstead is trying to create an entirely new model for grocery stores by limiting its physical footprint and using AI to intelligently curate its inventory. If successful, Farmstead Co-Founder and CEO, Pradeep Elankumaran, believes his company can drastically reduce the huge food waste problem in this country (where 40 percent of our food is never eaten).

Traditional grocery stores are massive buildings stocked to the gills to provide shoppers with a ton of options. Farmstead, on the other hand, uses food “microhubs” that are only about two to three thousand square feet and carry only about 1,000 items across all shopping categories.

It can get away with carrying such a small inventory because its AI platform predicts the items customers will want and orders just the right amount. To do this, Farmstead combines historical sales data and current trend data with consumer recommendations and external factors, such as holidays and product sell-by dates. Its machine learning processes these data points to assess which items to carry and how many it should stock at any given time.

“The system gives us a very fine prediction for stock,” Farmstead Co-Founder and CEO, Pradeep Elankumaran told me. “We want to have just enough on the shelves so no new customers walk away disappointed, but not so much that product gets wasted.”

Because Farmstead microhubs are small, they can be implemented closer to residential neighborhoods rather than warehouse districts to facilitate faster home delivery. Farmstead currently operates in the Bay Area and offers one-hour delivery from 8:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. for people in San Francisco, as well as rolling delivery hours during the morning, afternoon and evening for those in the elsewhere in the Bay. You can also drive to the Farmstead hub in San Francisco or San Mateo and a worker will run out and put your groceries in the car.

Elankumaran said that Farmstead is now making 1,500 – 1,600 deliveries per week. With this $2 million round, Farmstead has raised a total of $4.8 million so far. It will use the new money to scale its delivery service and expand beyond the Bay Area and will build out its core AI technology.

Which brings us back to today’s news about FreshAI. Farmstead is opening up its predictive analytics platform to supermarkets, cafeterias, restaurant chains and other companies that work with food at scale, allowing them to use Farmstead’s automated inventory management system. Farmstead says that using FreshAI has reduced its perishable food waste to sub ten percent as opposed to “35 – 40 percent average perishable food waste for typical supermarkets.”

For now, FreshAI is a pilot program, and companies can apply to take part on Farmstead’s site. If accepted, companies will upload operations data, and Fresh AI will provide daily and weekly order recommendations.

Farmstead is part of a new generation of startups such as Spoiler Alert, Ovie, and LeanPath that are using technology to combat food waste. It’s also reminiscent of CommonSense Robotics, which is using a combination of robots and micro-fulfillment centers. But Elankumaran said Farmstead is still a ways from using robots in their hubs or to fulfill deliveries. Instead, he said that they’re focusing on getting the best possible customer experience.

If Farmstead can deliver on that experience as it scales out, the busy weeks won’t be ending anytime soon for Elankumaran or his company.

Vertical Integration Takes Commonwealth Kitchen’s Incubator to New Heights

Food incubators, coworking spaces for food-related businesses, are nothing new. From Harlem-based Hot Bread Kitchen to the self-proclaimed “food innovation accelerator” Food-X to the (relatively) newly-minted Pilotworks backed by the team behind Blue Hill Stone Barns, the sharing economy has had its foot in the kitchen door for a while—and there are a lot of options for burgeoning food businesses to choose from.

However, in the heart of Boston’s Promise Neighborhood, the nonprofit Commonwealth Kitchen (CWK) is trying to revolutionize the food incubator template by bringing vertical integration into the mix. They still provide a shared kitchen, access to education, and a lower barrier to starting a food company to their 50+ business members, but they don’t stop there. Instead, CWK takes a holistic approach to their incubator business plan, providing their members with resources to overcome the nitty-gritty challenges of food production.

“We saw that our companies needed way more support with things like permits, licenses, food health testing, and insurance,” said Jen Faigel, executive director of CWK, in an interview with the Spoon. And so they hired experienced staff to provide their members with industry-specific support in everything from R&D to FDA registration to listeria testing.“We’re trying to give people a realistic opportunity to build a viable company,” she added. “Our focus is on hardcore scalability.”

To achieve this goal, CWK puts heavy emphasis on efficiency. They invested in a few larger, multi-purpose machines for their kitchen that could produce multiple goods; ones that could, say, make the dough for Quicksilver Baking Co.’s savory rugelach and mix up a batch of fillings for Yang’s Delicious Dumplings. They also aggregated the various part-time workers to form a full-time staff trained in the production of a slew of their members’ products. This somewhat radical step enabled CWK to offer a competitive wage and benefits to its employees, offsetting this cost with increased efficiency in production. This shift also frees up the business owners to spend their time marketing and selling their product.

With this framework in place, they decided to open up their small-batch manufacturing operation for hire, allowing everyone from local farmers and restaurants to outsource their production. “I hadn’t heard of any other incubator doing this kind of manufacturing,” said Faigel. “Probably because it’s unbelievably difficult and complicated to do.” 

But they didn’t stop there. Since their establishment in 2009, CWK has been out to bridge the gaps in the marketplace across all sectors of the food system. So far, this also includes tapping into the ripe institutional markets in Boston, namely universities. “Students often want healthy, transparent, local, authentic foods, and big brands aren’t paying attention to that desire,” said Faigel. But CWK is. Currently, Harvard University stocks salsa fresca from their member business Nola’s Fresh Food, and they produce and package applesauce (made from surplus apples from local farms) for the Boston Children’s Hospital.

In fact, making use of farmers’ surplus has become a key part of CWK’s sales; they’ll take crops that would be thrown in the compost, turn them into a value-added product, then sell them back, either to the farmer or in another market. Surplus tomatoes become tomato sauce peddled at a farm stand, excess pumpkin becomes pumpkin soup for a university dining hall. CWK is looking to shrink their margins wherever possible, and they’re thinking outside the box to make it happen.

This is not to say that CWK has perfected their method, or that their brand of vertical integration is without its challenges. “All of the changeovers are really tricky to manage,” said Faigel. “We have a good theory, but in practice, it’s very hard to execute.” Investing in machines to make multiple foods and putting in place resources and protocols for managing food safety, quality control, and marketing has also been an enormous hurdle. And with 140 employees to coordinate (18 of which work directly for CWK), logistics can quickly become a nightmare. 

For now, though, CWK is expanding—and not just within the realm of edible goods. For example, Suvie, a smart oven which just blew past its Kickstarter goal, is one of its member businesses. “Suvie knew all about the tech side of what they wanted, but needed help early on figuring out permitting on the food side,” said Faigel. “We also assisted with beta testing for packaging, scale issues, and R&D.” She told me that Suvie is the first equipment business that has come their way, but CWK is certainly open to welcoming more kitchen gadget start-ups and food-related tech enterprises in the future.

In fact, Faigel is confident that the CWK model will soon spread. “The integration of services, small-batch manufacturing, lower inventory, and more on-demand production is the way the food industry is going,” she told the Spoon. “We’ve worked hard to figure out a model, which we think is enormously replicable.” That means that this sort of vertically-integrated food incubator model may soon be making its way to your city.

Copia Helps Cap Food Waste and Connect Non-Profits with Excess Food

When you talk with startups trying to combat food waste, you hear a common refrain: you can’t get to absolute zero–there will always be some waste in the system. While we may never hit zero food waste, Copia is a software company fighting to get as close to that as possible through a combination of prevention and recovery.

Based in San Francisco, Copia offers a suite of web apps to help companies that produce or purchase large amounts of food track, analyze and manage inventories. Their customers include organizations that make food, such as the UCSF Medical center cafeteria, and startups like Lyft that provide catered food for employee meals.

With Copia, these clients can track how waste is occurring, such as over production or over purchasing a particular protein, and where in the organization waste is occurring. A site like UCSF provides meals for patients, meals in a commissary as well as event food, and Copia helps them figure out where loss is occurring in which line of business. According to Copia, UCSF has actually reduced its edible surplus by three percent month over month through 2017.

Copia is among a cohort of companies that are using software and analytics to help companies manage food inventories. Others in the space include LeanPath, which provides cafeterias with a scale to precisely measure pre-consumer waste, and Spoiler Alert, which works with large food distributors to move excess inventory.

Unlike these other startups, however, Copia also provides a recovery solution on the back end. When there is excess, Copia’s app can help connect this unused food with a non-profit in need. Additionally, Copia’s software will also help companies figure out and calculate tax benefits for any donations made. In the Bay Area, Copia even employees its own set of drivers and can deliver food within the city of San Francisco in 12 minutes, or 26 minutes across Silicon Valley. Copia says that it redirects 60,000 pounds of food a month to non-profits in the greater Bay Area.

In an age of increasingly conscious capitalism, Copia also helps bolster the brand image of its clients. Customers can showcase how much food it has recovered or waste prevented or water saved both externally and internally.

Copia currently has 15 employees and according to Crunchbase has raised $140,000 in seed funding. The company operates in the Bay Area, Denver, Austin, Dallas and will start up in Los Angeles next month.

Zero food waste may be impossible, but watching startups like Copia reminds you of how much is possible to improve both the lives of people in need and our planet.

You can hear about Copia in our daily spoon podcast.  You can also subscribe in Apple podcasts or through our Amazon Alexa skill. 

Spoiler Alert’s Software Helps Food Companies Steer Clear of Spoilage

Spoiler alert! The enterprise software startup, Spoiler Alert, works to help large food manufacturers, distributors and grocery distribution centers better manage their inventory to help reduce food waste and recoup potentially lost revenue.

Hopefully that doesn’t ruin the rest of this story for you.

It shouldn’t, as Spoiler Alert is one of the many companies using technology to tackle the very real problem of food going unused. Based in Boston, Spoiler Alert offers a business intelligence and relationship management platform that lets companies that move large amounts of food better understand their inventory and navigate when unexpected surpluses happen.

Unsold food inventory happens for a lot of reasons. Severe weather can interrupt transport, a buyer can cancel an order, or someone in the office could just be really bad at ordering the right amounts. Spoiler Alert’s software lets companies put this excess food to use, whether that’s finding an alternate buyer, turning it into a donation, or connecting it with a composting facility.

Let’s say TomatoCorp suddenly finds itself with a ton of extra tomatoes. These tomatoes are not spoiled and totally fine to eat.

Typically, TomatoCorp would have to go out and manually find someone to take the excess inventory, and hopefully do it before the food spoils and has to be thrown out. This takes time and pulls already busy people off the work they normally do.

With Spoiler Alert, this process is more automated. In this example, TomatoCorp has uploaded all the SKU data about the tomatoes, as well as the partners and buyers it does business with. Spoiler Alert will look at the surplus and help the company connect with potential buyers in its network, or with non-profits that can take the tomatoes as a donation. The software even compares whether a straight sale or the tax benefits of a donation are more economical for the company.

Spoiler Alert also helps companies understand their own ordering with granular tracking, so if it’s actually a person in a particular department that is consistently over ordering, the company can address that problem so it’s no longer a cause of inventory mismanagement.

Founded in 2015, Spoiler Alert has 11 employees and received a $2.6 million seed round from Acre Ventures (which is backed by Campbell Soup Company). The company operates in 19 states and counts Sysco among its clients.

Spoiler Alert isn’t the only startup looking to help get extra food into the right hands. Copia‘s platform helps organizations donate excess food, Imperfect Produce sells “ugly” produce at a reduced rate, and LeanPath sets up a scale and camera in cafeterias to help monitor and reduce pre-consumer waste.

But the folks at Spoiler Alert think their biggest competition is the status quo. Organizations are fine doing things the way they’ve always done them and don’t want to learn anything new. The easier companies like Spoiler Alert and others mentioned here can make it to put that surplus food to work, the better it is for our communities, our planet and (spoiler alert!) the bottom line.

Want to talk about this story and other foodtech news? Join our foodtech Slack community and jump into the conversation.

You can hear about Spoiler Alert in our daily spoon podcast.  You can also subscribe in Apple podcasts or through our Amazon Alexa skill. 

Cup Club

Cup Club Brews Up an IoT-Powered Solution to Coffee Cup Waste

One of the most famous songs from the old musical 70, Girls, 70 is a song called “Coffee in a Cardboard Cup,” where one character decries the use of to-go cups: “The trouble with the world today/It’s plain to see/Is coffee in a cardboard cup.” The musical was written in back the ’50s, long before Starbucks, but its creators were unknowingly on to something.

Fast-forward to 2018, we’re throwing out over 40 billion single-use cups across the U.S. and Europe each year. Many have tried to address the waste issue; no one’s succeeded on a large scale. Offering to knock 10 cents off the cost of my $5.00 coffee isn’t much of an incentive to lug a bulky, reusable cup around (if I haven’t already lost said cup in a taxi cab).

Safia Qureshi considered all this when she created Cup Club, a subscription service using the Internet of Things and RFID to reinvent the reusable cup.

It works like this: Participating coffee retailers stock the cups, made of plant-based plastic, and give them to a Cup Club member buying a coffee. The latter can then “return” the cup to any number of locations around the city. Once returned, the cups are collected, washed, and redistributed to the participating stores. And since each cup is RFID tagged and registered to a user’s account, Cup Club can charge a user for unreturned cups.

Cup Club will reportedly be available to the public this month in London, and will be followed by a worldwide rollout in the future.

Qureshi took inspiration for the company from the chai wallahs in India, who sell chai in glass cups that are returned, washed, and reused. “I’m very passionate about putting an end to products that are only used one time,” she recently said. “It’s a selfish and arrogant stance.”

For Cup Club to work on a large scale, Qureshi will need not just the support of the coffee shops who participate, but also a strong enough interest from the general population. I speculate here, but I could see Cup Club or its technology eventually getting acquired by a heavyweight coffeeshop chain, one with the kind of reach and brand power Cup Club needs to influence consumer behavior.

The fact that she’s not the only one to consider this type of approach is encouraging. In Germany, the city of Frieberg has introduced The Freiberg Cup: users put a 1 euro deposit down on a cup and can return it to one of the 100 participating businesses across the city. The system is reportedly cheaper for both consumers and businesses, and early results are “encouraging.” It’s not unfathomable for similar systems to start popping up all over the country as more people ditch the cardboard cup.

Because that’s what the success of the reusable cup really comes down to: changing our behavior. It’s automatic at this point to walk into a coffeeshop, order, and walk out clutching a paper cup. That companies like Cup Club offer an environmentally conscious option without the inconvenience of having to keep track of a reusable cup means the concept could have a real shot at success. If it doesn’t, “Coffee in a Cardboard Cup” is just going to get more and more relevant as time goes on.

Worried Those Leftovers will Make You Sick? Ovie’s Tags Will Help

If your fridge is anything like mine, it holds stacks of Tupperware containers filled with various leftovers from meals past. And if your brain is anything like mine, it gets nervous about eating two-day-old salmon, so you leave the fish in the fridge in the hopes that your spouse is either brave enough to chow down — or will just throw it out.

I’m ashamed to admit that these leftover minefields in my fridge lead to way too much food waste on my part. Which is why I’m intrigued by the Ovie food tags. Mike Wolf describes Ovie’s tech pretty accurately as “Tile for food.”

Basically, Ovie makes LED-lit tags that you can affix to food through either a special Ovie container or clip or strap. These tags work with Amazon’s Alexa and when you press the button you tell Alexa “This is lasagna.” From there, Ovie’s LED tags will keep track of how long it’s been in the fridge and alert you when something is about to or has already gone bad. Green light is good, yellow light means it’s nearing the end and a red light means its bad. The company pulls its spoilage information from USDA guidelines.

With the accompanying Ovie app, you can see what foods you have stored and what state they’re in. The app will even make rudimentary pairing suggestions based on other food you have stored with Ovie. So you can enjoy some lasagna, and Ovie might also suggest some green beans that should be eaten soon.

According to Ovie Co-Founder and CEO Ty Thompson, the company is exploring partnerships with recipe apps and delivery services to expand its capabilities. By working with Ovie, a recipe app could see what foods you already have, suggest a recipe and forward a list of any additional ingredients to Instacart for delivery that day.

The Ovie system is not available yet. The Chicago-based company is funded through friends and family at this point and aims to do a crowdfunding campaign at the end of February. When Ovie does hit stores, Thompson says the price points will be roughly $59 for three tags (complete with straps), “a little bit more” for three of the clip version, and close to $89 for three containers.

The big concern for a company like Ovie is when this type of technology gets embedded directly into fridges. LG’s forthcoming ThinQ fridge lets you put virtual stickers on items to let you know when they are about to go bad. And Amazon is researching using scent sensors in the fridge to do the same thing.

That will happen, but over the course of the next five years, there is still a sizable market of people who would rather spend $89 to keep track of food in their existing fridge rather than thousands of dollars on a new one.

One thing that won’t change is how nervous I get about eating leftovers (or even opening the container to see what they are). Hopefully, a system like Ovie’s can help me reduce the amount of food I embarrassingly waste.

LeanPath Fights Food Waste with Behavior Change in Kitchen Staff

Given that up to 40 percent of the food in the United States is never eaten, it’s no wonder there are a number of startups tackling the issue. Whether it’s working at the farm level, creating marketplaces for excess food, or dynamically adjusting menu prices, companies are working to reduce food waste from almost every angle.

LeanPath has been combating food waste since it was founded in 2004. And while it fights food waste with technology, it’s bigger goal is to fundamentally change behaviors both inside the kitchen and out.

Based just outside of Portland, OR, LeanPath works with high-volume kitchens that prepare food for masses of people. Think: college cafeterias, buffets at casinos or hotels, etc., places where food is not made-to-order.

LeanPath provides these kitchens with a connected scale with a camera mounted on it. When a kitchen worker throws out food pre-consumer (meaning anything before a consumer puts it on their plate), they enter the type of food it is on a touchscreen, weigh it and take a picture. This data is sent to the cloud and tracked.

From this, LeanPath can help kitchens categorize the reasons for the food waste. The food could be spoiled, or burnt, or there could have just been too much of it. Equipped with this insight, kitchen managers can see where the waste is coming from. This manual act of weighing food, seeing the pictures of it and tracking daily waste helps kitchen staff see how big the problem is and begin to change behavior.

Once a kitchen understands how big a food waste problem they have, LeanPath offers training services to improve the situation. The company offers both algorithmic advice as well as live coaches who work with the kitchen to reduce waste. LeanPath even has chefs on staff to guide kitchen managers in efficient food rotation, adjusting production levels and a big issue: trimming. Behind overproduction, LeanPath has found that improper cutting of meat or vegetables is the second leading cause of food waste in the kitchens they serve.

LeanPath President and CEO, Andrew Shakman says that his company typically finds that four to ten percent of food purchased becomes pre-consumer waste. Shakman says that LeanPath typically cuts pre-consumer waste in half or more for those kitchens, generating a two to eight percent savings on the food bill. For a low margin business like food service, this can add up to meaningful amounts of money.

Right now, LeanPath is in 1,200 kitchens across 20 countries, and counts high-profile companies such as Google, Ikea and Aramark as customers. LeanPath is bootstrapped, and has raised an undisclosed amount of “impact funding” from environmentally conscious investors. Shakman said the company may explore to equity fundraising this year as it looks to double the number of countries it’s in.

But for Shakman, the problem of food waste isn’t just in the kitchen, it’s also with us. Consumer expectations bear an equal amount of blame for food overproduction. So-called “merchandising” of food creates expectations in all of us that buffets should be bountiful and filled with abundant displays of croissants and sculpted strawberries — a lot of which goes in the trash.

Getting consumers to shift their thinking on that will be a huge challenge. Hopefully as LeanPath and other startups generate awareness about food waste, they can change our behavior as well.

Matsmart Raises €7.5M to Tackle Food Waste in Europe

As I did my weekend grocery shopping, I noticed my local store is still selling eggnog. Freezers full of the stuff. I can’t imagine anyone buying it post-holidays, and it seems like its fate is to wind up as waste in a landfill.

Which is just the kind of problem Stockholm, Sweden based startup Matsmart wants to fix. The company just raised 7.5 million Euros ($9 million USD) to expand it’s e-commerce marketplace that sells surplus food. EU-Startups reports that “Matsmart sells surplus food that would otherwise be thrown away, due to changes in branding or packaging, seasonality or short expiration dates.”

Matsmart operates in Sweden, Norway and Finland and says it has kept 708 tons of food out from going to waste and has revenues of €20 million per year. The new funding will help Matsmart expand across the Nordic countries and into Europe.

Food waste is a huge problem around the world. According to the USDA: “In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply.” This is food that could have gone to families in need. It’s also a waste of labor, energy and materials, and food waste fills up landfills, releasing harmful methane gas.

Matsmart is certainly not alone in this space as startups are attacking the problem from many different angles. Gebni is an app looking to reduce restaurant waste by dynamically lowering the price of food for delivery. Industrial/Organic develops an anaerobic fermentation process to break down food waste and turn it into fertilizer and other products. And ImpactVision uses hyperspectral imaging to assess food freshness.

Hopefully ending food waste will be a rising trend in 2018, one that will lead to fewer unused cartons of eggnog in 2019.

Alexa Skill ‘Waste Guru’ Aims to Cut Waste in Restaurants

Last weekend, I wrote a piece speculating on some of the uses of Alexa inside restaurants. If the Waste Guru skill is any indication, getting Alexa integrated into restaurants might be tougher than I thought.

Based in the Bay Area, Zabble, Inc., started off as a consulting firm to help restaurants reduce waste. Co-Founder Nik Balachandran said he got tired of getting texts and calls from clients wondering which bin the yogurt container goes in and other small questions from befuddled restaurant workers. So he built the Waste Guru skill for the Amazon Echo to let Alexa answer those questions.

Once enabled, Waste Guru let people in the back of the house at restaurants ask Alexa how different items should be sorted for trash or recycling. Waste disposal can be tricky for businesses given the patchwork of city and county laws. For example, one county might allow compostable plastic cutlery in green bins while a next door county does not.

Waste Guru launched in October but Balanchandran has not gotten much traction out of his base in San Francisco. He estimates that only about three restaurants there implemented Waste Guru. He said that with restaurant margins being thin and the status quo working just fine for establishments, there hasn’t been a huge desire to implement a new Alexa-powered routine.

But Balachandran is undeterred, and is broadening the scope of his target market to go after buildings with cafeterias and food courts in malls. While many establishments already have signage that indicates where leftover items go, Balachandran thinks people are blind to those signs and that the interaction with Alexa will help make sorting better.

To help with that pitch, Balachandran is building out a visual component to Waste Guru, using an Echo Show as an interactive display to help people sort their waste. With the built-in GPS, these Waste Guru enabled Echos would automatically know the local city, county and state laws, and help people accordingly.

Having worked at a restaurant, I can understand how asking Alexa everytime you wanted to put something in the trash may have been too much hassle in such a frantically-paced environment. But I applaud Waste Guru’s out-of-the-box thinking and real-world attempt at diverting trash out of landfills. And, perhaps Waste Guru can still find a home in home kitchens helping out anyone who’s wondering where to put that used yogurt container.

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EatBy Tries Tackling Our Food Waste Problem With An App

We’ve all had that moment – we look in the fridge, and there sitting at the bottom of the vegetable crisper lies a rotted pepper, a wholly overripe avocado and some furry grapes. Into the trash it goes. It’s not a particularly proud moment – between the guilt of throwing away food that was once perfectly edible and the act of basically placing money right in the trash, it’s pretty awful.

And then there’s the larger picture: close to a third of food produced in the world goes into the garbage, totaling almost 1.3 billion tons. In the U.S. alone, we waste $689 billion worth of food every year. It’s both an individual problem and a global one – and when we talk about food tech and smart kitchen innovation, one would hope that somewhere in all of it will be some actual solutions to stop or at least significantly curb food waste.

Enter the EatBy smartphone app. At first glance, it seemed like just a fancy database of all the food you had in your house and required manual input which seemed tedious. And when it first launched a few years ago, that’s pretty much all there was. Users complained about the clunkiness of the interface and lack of features. But a recent update to both iOS and Android versions have some interesting additions that might make this app a useful tool in the fight against food waste.

The real utility of this app starts if you bring it to the grocery store. It lets you scan in items as you shop – and yes, that means it relies on a database that constantly needs updating. But through increased user inputs, it’s gotten better. You can also create grocery lists with the app which would be even more compelling if the app had an Amazon Echo skill for Alexa…which, it doesn’t. But if I scan as I go – or using my cell phone’s voice interface, telling it what I’m buying as I go, it will take that information and figure out when I need to use all of the items I’ve bought. And not only will EatBy remind me when things need to be used by, but with the recent update, it will also suggest recipes based on the ingredients I have in my fridge and based on what needs to be used first.

This feature alone is incredibly helpful because produce and meats go bad at different rates when left to sit at the same temperature, but who can keep track of that? Maybe the spaghetti squash and pork-based meat sauce should be cooked first before the chicken kebabs because the chicken will stay fresh longer and so will the peppers and onions. That type of data could help change the way consumers cook during the week and result in less sad, rotten food in the garbage before the next trip to the store.

EatBy used to be free and supported by advertising with an upgradable no-ads version, but it’s now only available as a paid app, for $2.99. But the future of food storage, usage and ultimately waste prevention doesn’t lie in a smartphone app, I’m afraid. The systems in which we purchase, store and cook our food have to fundamentally shift to give us a more holistic picture of what’s in our fridge and pantry and how to use them without requiring so much user input. But for folks who don’t want to wait for technology to enable a lazier, less proactive approach to food waste, the EatBy app offers a solution.

 

Can Tech Innovation Save Us From Our Food Waste?

Food waste is a major problem across the globe – not only does the U.S. alone throw away close to $200 billion in food each year, but the annual waste also contributes to 13% of food-related greenhouse gas emissions. Many companies in the smart kitchen and food tech space are looking at ways to use food data, cooking techniques and storage mechanisms to reduce food waste. For businesses like restaurants and hotels, throwing away unused food is bad economic sense as well. Food wasted and not sold is profit down the drain, making it an obvious area to explore efficiencies and new technologies.

One U.K. based company has created a solution specifically for the hospitality industry that has the potential to drive smarter ordering and cooking in the commercial kitchen. The Winnow System is a touch interface connected to a smart meter – before anyone dumps food in the trash, they select an icon on the screen to categorize the food being discarded. The system measures the weight of the food waste and marks trends and data over time.

Winnow — an old agricultural term meaning to separate the grain from the chaff, or to separate the good from the bad — is able to use the data from everyday usage to identify and prevent avoidable waste in the kitchen. Chefs and restaurant managers are given insights into where to make improvements and how to dramatically reduce costs. Winnow Solutions has deployed over 100 solutions across the U.K. and reports a 2-6% improvement in gross margins for their customers, saving over £1m. The information that managers receive from the system allows them to purchase smarter as well as find better ways of serving and storing the food they do purchase. One hospitality executive found that eggs at the hotel breakfast buffet were consistently thrown away in massive quantities every morning. The hotel did away with eggs at the buffet and instead set up a custom egg station for customers wanting cooked eggs with breakfast, saving hundreds of pounds of wasted eggs each week.

The Winnow System is not designed for the consumer kitchen – yet. But several professional kitchen technologies have trickled down over time and solutions developed for business often have consumer applications. And there are products hitting the market today that have some tools to manage the food in our kitchens more efficiently. The Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator is connected to Wi-Fi and has interior cameras that allow users to see what’s in their fridge and what state it’s in.

We might have an idea of the food we throw away at the end of the week in our homes, but seeing the hard data, easily analyzed and displayed in front of us as we decide what to buy and cook could be a powerful force to change our behaviors and habits.