A hotel chain has installed cameras in trash cans to monitor what guests are throwing away. I found the breakfast croissant to be too large. Many will end up squandering along with their profits.
Supermarkets can suddenly learn that yellow onions hidden in their sales data don't sell as well as red onions and are more likely to be thrown away.
The brain behind these two efforts is artificial intelligence.
It's part of an emerging industry trying to cash in on a senseless human problem: tons of inedible food that ends up in the trash from supermarkets and restaurants. If not composted, much of it ends up in landfills, where it rots and releases powerful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that cause global warming.
Enter new business opportunities. A company called Winnow has developed an AI tool to monitor trash in restaurants. Another company, Afresh, analyzes supermarket data to look for unnecessary discrepancies between what stores stock and what people are buying.
AI has its own dirty environmental footprint. Processing huge amounts of data requires large amounts of electricity. AI will also change what the human brain expects in modern industrial society: fresh avocados in the supermarket year-round, the ever-increasing number of tiny plastic yogurt cups, and the nacho platters served at happy hour. I still can not do it. menu.
Food waste is a big problem
Both companies are part of an emerging industry that is trying to address the problems posed by the modern food industry. In the United States, one-third of the food grown is never eaten.
According to the United Nations Environment Program, 1 billion tons of food will be wasted worldwide in 2022. Food waste accounts for 8-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, about the same as emissions from aviation and shipping combined.
“This is a problem that literally gets swept away,” said Mark Zones, founder of Winnow, which works with restaurants, hotels and institutional caterers.
A further problem is that food's “best before” and “sell by” labels are being confused, resulting in perfectly edible food being thrown into the trash.
Some supermarkets are depressed
There are signs of progress from a group of supermarket chains that have made voluntary commitments to reduce food waste in their operations in the western United States and Canada. From 2019 to 2022, eight chains participating in the Pacific Coast Food Waste Reduction Initiative Project reported a 25% decrease in the total amount of unsold food.
They also reported donating more food to charities and sending more waste to scarce compost facilities instead of landfills.
“This shows that the national goal of cutting food waste in half by 2030 may indeed be achievable, but achieving it will require the support of all food system sectors. More dramatic action will be needed,” said Dana Ganders, president of Refed, a research and advocacy group that tracks voluntary project data.
There are now many new tools to help retailers reduce waste. Some startups, such as Apeel and Mori, offer coatings to prevent fresh food from spoiling quickly. The app, called Flash Food, connects customers to discounted food at grocery stores, similar to Too Good to Go, which connects customers to restaurants and grocery stores that sell surplus food at discounted prices.
How many eggs did you have this week?
Afresh's technology crunches approximately six years' worth of sales data for every product in the fresh produce section of the grocery stores it works with. The company's AI tools can predict when people will buy avocados and at what price. We can mash that up with data on how quickly avocados spoil and advise you on how many avocados to stock.
If egg sales increase during the traditional Easter egg painting season, shoppers typically use leftover eggs at home to make omelets, leaving stores wondering how many more cases of eggs to order, and how many more cases of peppers to order. It is possible to calculate how many cases to add.
Matt Schwartz, co-founder of Afresh, said that experienced store managers would know this, but AI will provide more accurate information on even more products. For example, you might recommend that your store manager order 105 cases of eggs instead of 110 the week before Easter. “Every single case is important,” he said.
Suzanne Long, director of sustainability at Albertsons, which also uses Affresh technology, said experienced store managers are becoming increasingly rare. “What AI is doing is giving us precision. It's not just 'I need to order onions,' it's 'I need to order this kind of onion,'” she said. Ta.
Long said the chain has reduced food waste, but declined to say by how much.
This robot won't dive into trash cans.
Winnow has a camera installed above a garbage can in the restaurant's kitchen. The images are fed into an algorithm that can tell the difference between half a lasagna (something valuable) and a banana peel (something less valuable). The Hilton hotel group that implemented the tool recently learned that many of its breakfast pastries were too large and that baked beans were often left unfinished.
Research group Refed estimates in 2022 that 70% of food wasted in restaurants is leftover food on plates, suggesting portion sizes need to be reconsidered.
Mr. Zones works primarily in hotels and cafeterias. He estimates that restaurants throw away between 5 and 15 percent of the food they buy. “This is an obvious problem that everyone knows about,” Zones said. “That's clearly a problem we haven't solved.”