If you’re reading this post, chances are the topic of waste is nothing new to you. Stem4Free’s mission is, after all, to reduce food waste by bringing food from restaurants and grocery stores to people who need it. But Stem4Free focuses only on the seller’s side of things, and there are always more ways to reduce food waste.
One of these ways is explored in an Israeli startup called Wasteless. Their product is a gadget that replaces ordinary price markers in grocery stores. Rather than specifying a base price and applying that to all products, their unique innovation uses machine learning to decide the price of stock based on many factors, including freshness, amount of units left on the shelf, and when the next shipment of inventory is arriving. This can help to reduce food waste in an immediately impactful way: incentivizing consumers to purchase food with an earlier expiration date lessens the chances that perfectly good perishables will remain on shelves until they are no longer sellable, creating unnecessary waste where there need be none.
How does all of this work?
Unfortunately, it requires a lot of work on the side of the grocery stores. Each new shipment needs to be scanned with a special app or device as it comes in to give the algorithm crucial information upon which it can base its calculations. And that’s only once the system has been set up: replacing old-fashioned labels with the new type is not only time-consuming but also costly. And while Wasteless’s website continually stresses the money that full implementation will eventually save for stores by drastically increasing the amount of inventory that actually gets sold, the large initial cost may put many businesses off.
Wasteless is currently testing their wares at a location in Madrid with a limited run of 250 product; since using Wasteless, the store’s waste went down by around a third, and they saw a slight 6% increase to their bottom line: a good portent for the future.
Wasteless may not be the perfect solution to the problem of food waste, but it’s at least a step on the long road there.
