Industry Collaboration

Winnow Solutions

We have been collaborating with Winnow Solutions since June 2021. As a global AI Leader in commercial food waste solutions, Winnow Solutions has been developing AI-driven food waste tracking systems for commercial kitchens. Winnow is being used every day by thousands of chefs in over 80 countries.

Food waste is hard to measure, and hard to manage. Most kitchens waste more than they think, typically 5%-15% of the food they purchase. Winnow’s food waste tracking technology makes collecting data easy. With Winnow systems, kitchens can easily measure and stratify their food waste down to the level of each disposal transaction, classifying waste as different items at different stages of preparation and processing. The collected data is made available to kitchen managers in daily, weekly, and monthly site reports. Kitchen managers also have access to a portal to dig deeper into the data and conduct further analytics.

My research on AI and food waste is based on a long partnership with Winnow. Utilizing the first-of-its-kind waste data, I aim to pinpoint effective food waste reduction initiatives tailored for commercial kitchens and quantify their impacts. One initiative involves employing computer vision to accurately track and categorize food waste. I conduct an empirical evaluation of the impact of adopting AI-enabled waste information gathering systems, identify where the waste reductions come from, and shed light on the mechanisms of action. Another initiative is to develop AI assistance systems that support front-line staff with decision-making. The end goal is to design an AI co-pilot for a kitchen manager that prescribes good inventory decisions, watches out for biases and nudges kitchen managers into actions that reduce food waste.