KITRO: automating food waste management for commercial kitchens
Two thirds of all food that is thrown away could have been avoided. A big portion of this waste is contributed by the tourism and hospitality industry leading to the depletion of natural resources such as water, land and energy.
Not only does this have detrimental impacts on the environment but for food & beverage (F&B) businesses avoidable food waste also leads to unnecessary costs in food, labor and disposal. Switzerland’s foodservice industry alone is responsible for 290 000 tons of food waste costing the industry 1 billion francs annually (BAFU, 2019). Current solutions to measure food waste require staff to manually track every item once it is thrown away adding more work and interrupting the staff’s work flow.
KITRO tackles this problem by providing restaurants, hotels and canteens with an innovative solution to automatically measure their waste. Using an IoT-device (scale, camera) and an image processing and machine learning software in the backend, food waste data is automatically tracked and analysed. Customers pay a monthly subscription and receive actionable insights in form of an online dashboard on their waste allowing them to quickly understand their main operational inefficiencies. Combining this data with goal setting meetings and food waste reduction methods enables them to decrease their avoidable food waste while increasing their performance and resource efficiency.
www.kitro.ch