- Some kitchens are turning to AI to monitor how much food they waste.
- Artificial intelligence company Winnow tracks food waste thrown in the trash using a motion-sensing camera and scale.
- Hilton uses Winnow to reduce waste at its breakfast buffets by serving smaller portions of croissants, fruit and salmon.
Hotels are reducing the amount of food wasted at their breakfast buffets by installing AI-powered cameras above their kitchen trash cans.
British company Winnow’s hardware includes a scale that kitchens place a bin on, as well as a screen equipped with a motion-sensing camera. Its AI scans items after they’re placed in the bin—it can identify whether it was a bowl of carrot peelings, excess guacamole, or uneaten mashed potatoes—and the scale then records how much of that item was thrown away.
Chefs and restaurant managers can see this data in real time.
“The system makes it very easy for us to collect accurate data on what’s being wasted in these kitchens,” said Winnow co-founder Marc Zornes, noting that the difficulty of collecting accurate records was the “biggest problem” many businesses faced in tackling their food waste.
“It’s important to make this process easy because kitchens are busy places,” he said.
Winnow then uses this data to advise chefs on purchasing the right amount of ingredients and how to prepare them to minimise waste.
Zornes said Winnow’s accuracy in identifying foods “can vary from site to site.”
“If the product is identified, he can identify it,” Zornes said. “If he doesn’t know what it is and he thinks there are multiple options, he can present it to the user, and the user can help the system improve over time.”
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, 19% of the food available to consumers worldwide, or more than 1.1 billion tonnes, was wasted in 2022. Nearly 30% of this food was wasted in the food service sector. According to UNEP, food losses in the supply chain and food waste generate nearly five times more greenhouse gas emissions than the aviation sector.
Reducing food waste can boost a business’s green credentials – and cut costs.
Winnow’s clients include hotels, cruise lines, universities and catering companies that provide professional catering services.
And it’s not just the back kitchen waste they’re monitoring.
In the Middle East, Hilton is using Winnow to determine which items on its breakfast buffets are most wasted, Sebastian Nohse, senior culinary director, Hilton EMEA, told BI.
Breakfast buffets generate “a huge amount of waste that we in the hospitality industry in general don’t really have a clear idea of,” he said.
He said Hilton had used Winnow’s data to experiment with smaller croissants, fruit and smoked salmon served in smaller portions for its breakfast buffets.
“If we can remove choice, it will have an impact,” Nohse said. “If we can give customers a choice by giving them a smaller croissant or a smaller donut or cutting fruit in a different way, we can create a positive impact without giving customers a choice, but by creating impact by default.”
It’s not just oversized portions that contribute to customers leaving food on their plates. With Winnow, chefs can see which dishes aren’t going down well with customers, Paul Fairhead, CEO of Guckenheimer, the foodservice arm of ISS that provides commercial catering services, told BI. They can then, for example, determine if the flavors of the dish were off or check photos captured by Winnow to see if the dish simply looked burnt that day.
Winnow declined to share details about the cost of its services.
Hilton said that as part of a “Green Breakfast” pilot involving Winnow’s data-driven decision-making and the introduction of sustainable behavior “nudges,” it reduced food waste at 13 of its hotels in the UAE over a four-month period in 2023 by 76% for pre-consumer, or kitchen waste, and 55% for post-consumer waste.
The most wasted foods are bread and pastries, egg whites, porridge, congee, sambar, shakshuka and baked beans, Hilton said.
