Hotels are reducing food waste at their breakfast buffets by installing AI-enabled cameras above kitchen trash bins.
British company Winnow's hardware includes a scale for your kitchen trash can and a screen with a motion-sensing camera. AI can scan items that go into the bin and tell if it's a bowl of carrot peels, leftover guacamole, or leftover mashed potatoes. The scale then records how much of the item has been thrown out.
Chefs and restaurant managers can view this data in real time.
Winnow's hardware includes a screen with a weighing scale and a motion-sensing camera. Winnow
The system “makes it much easier to collect accurate data about what's going to waste in our kitchens,” said Winnow co-founder Mark Zolnes, who said the difficulty of compiling accurate records is the “biggest problem” faced by many companies trying to tackle food waste.
“The kitchen is a very busy place so it's important to make this process easy,” he said.
Winnow uses this data to advise chefs on how to buy the right amounts of ingredients and how to prepare them in a way that minimises waste.
Zolnes said Winnow's food identification accuracy “may vary from location to location.”
“Once we have a clear idea of what it is, we'll identify the product,” Zolnes said. “If we don't know what it is and we think there are some options, we'll present it to the user and they can help improve the system over time.”
Winnow will identify what food is being thrown out and how much of it is being thrown out. Winnow
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, 19% of food available for consumers was wasted worldwide in 2022, or more than 1.1 billion tonnes. Of this, around 30% was wasted in the foodservice sector. Food loss and food waste in the supply chain generate almost five times the greenhouse gas emissions from the aviation sector, according to UNEP.
Reducing food waste makes your business more environmentally conscious and also saves you money.
Winnow's clients include hotels, cruise lines, universities and food service companies providing professional catering services.
It's not just backyard waste they're tracking.
Hilton is using Winnow in the Middle East to find out which items at its breakfast buffets are being wasted the most, Sebastian Nose, senior director of culinary for Hilton EMEA, told BI.
He said breakfast buffets “create a huge amount of waste that hasn't been very clearly understood by the hotel industry at large.”
He said Hilton used Winnow's data to experiment with offering smaller croissants, fruit and small portions of smoked salmon at its breakfast buffet.
“If you can eliminate choice, it's going to have more impact,” Nose says. “If you can give guests a choice, whether that's a smaller croissant or a doughnut or cutting fruit differently, you can create a positive impact by creating an impact by default without giving the guest a choice.”
Customers aren't just leaving food on their plates because they have too much to eat. Winnow can help chefs see which dishes are not popular with customers, Paul Fairhead, CEO of Guckenheimer, the food services division of commercial catering company ISS, told BI. Chefs can review whether a dish tasted bad, for example, or check photos captured by Winnow to see if it simply looked burnt that day.
Winnow declined to provide details on how much its services cost.
Hilton announced that its “Green Breakfast” pilot, which uses Winnow data to inform decisions and introduce “nudges” for sustainable behavior, reduced pre-consumption, i.e. kitchen, food waste by 76% and post-consumption food waste by 55% across 13 hotels in the UAE over a four-month period in 2023.
Hilton said the most discarded items included bread and pastries, egg whites, porridge, congee, sambal, shakshuka and baked beans.
