Imagine the scene: every year, a staggering 100 million tonnes of food quietly slips from chopping boards, plate edges, and refrigerators straight into bins. The global hospitality industry alone sees $100 billion wasted, money that’s vanishing like steam from a bubbling pot. Kitchens can lose up to 20% of the food they purchase1, often mirroring their entire net profits in one tragic bin-fated dance. It’s less a comedy of errors than a colossal kitchen catastrophe. And the villain in this farce? A lack of tools to adequately measure and manage the waste mountain. Picture chefs, without the right tech at hand, bravely attempting to battle food waste blindfolded, with but a trusty ladle and a notepad.
But it’s not all doom and gloom.
Roll out the digital red carpet for Winnow, an AI-powered solution that tackles the problem head-on, helping even the most beleaguered kitchen brigades say farewell to wastage, while reclaiming the sanctity of each vegetable, slice of bread, and succulent cut of meat.
A brilliant technological wonder, Winnow is taking the culinary world by storm by offering food service establishments a previously unimaginable level of visibility into their food waste. Moving kitchens away from the lamentably slow ‘analogue’ era, it combines the wizardry of AI, scales, and cameras to document food as it departs the plate or larder with a machine-learning capability that can identify ingredients as deftly as a seasoned line cook.
The results have been nothing short of remarkable.
Within the first year of adopting Winnow’s technology, kitchens have reported a food waste reduction of up to half and a cost saving between 3-8%. And when you consider that hospitality and restaurant operations account for a whopping 26% of food waste2, contributing a buffet of negative environmental impacts, it’s little wonder that industry stalwarts such as Hilton, Accor, IHG, and Compass Cruises have added Winnow to their kitchens. Through these partnerships, Winnow is helping transform not only kitchen waste bins but also the very ethos of global hospitality, serving up an irresistible blend of environmental sustainability and economic good sense.
Founded in 2013 by Marc Zornes and Kevin Duffy, Winnow began in a single restaurant kitchen but has since rolled out across the globe, transforming the hospitality industry’s approach to one of our most pressing global issues. This clever innovation isn’t just reducing waste, it’s serving us all a new perspective on resourcefulness.
That’s a dish worth celebrating.
Insignia Worldwide crafts new realities at the intersections of strategy and storytelling, by challenging what is humanly possible and creating what is Impossibly Human.TM
1 winnowsolutions.com
2 ce-hub.org