Restaurants, buffets and caterers looking to cut down on food waste have a new tool at their disposal: AI-powered trash cans. Leanpath, Winnow Solutions and Orbisk are among the companies offering high-tech trash cans equipped with smart cameras, scales and sometimes touch screens. The systems gather granular details about items being discarded down to the type of food and whether it was cooked or chopped.
The aim is to help the industry stop billions of dollars worth of food from just being chucked, reducing a significant source of greenhouse gasses. The world wasted 1.05 billion tons of food in 2022, according to the United Nations Environment Program, the rotting of which generated almost five times the emissions of the aviation sector.
Nearly a third of that waste came from the food service industry, which discarded 290 million tons. “When we started in the past, food waste was just an accepted part of business as usual,” said Leanpath CEO Andrew Shakman, who founded the company in 2004. “It was the elephant in the kitchen.
People just thought they had to waste food and that was how it worked, and no one was particularly worried about it. And it was costing them an immense amount of money.” Leanpath’s waste-tracking technology is used in over 4,000 kitchens, including Google offices, Marriott hotels and university dining halls.
Its line of trackers have scales and touch screens on which chefs select the type of food, reason for disposal and time of day among oth.
