“Respect for food is a respect for life, for who we are and what we do.” 💯

Says Helen Keller, a chef and advocate for food waste.

How would you go about reducing food waste? 😕

Plan meals ahead of time? Plan a week before?

Serve one less dish than the number of people at a table sharing food?

Weigh customers before entering a store to recommend how much food they need?

These ideas are being deployed by the Chinese government to reduce the nation’s food waste. It follows both general tips and the directive from President Xi Jinping to reduce food waste and practice thriftiness.

How practical are these ideas? Just weigh your customers? Just don’t eat? Isn’t there a better solution?

How much food is being wasted?

Globally, around one-third of all food, 66500 tons, are wasted every year. 😲

“For Canada as a whole, that amounts to almost 2.2 million tonnes of edible food wasted each year, costing Canadians in excess of $17 billion!” states Love Food Hate Waste Canada.

📊 Planning consultancy Arcadis, with RMIT, in a report into food waste in Australia found “that in 2016–17 (the base year):

Australia produced 7.3 million tonnes of food waste across the supply and consumption chain of this,

2.5 million (34%) was created in our homes, 2.3 million tonnes (31%) in primary production and 1.8 million tonnes (25%) in the manufacturing sector. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, an estimated 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted globally each year, one-third of all food produced for human consumption.

Supermarkets are responsible for 10% of all U.S. food waste in the U.S. alone or 43 billion pounds. In Canada, the value of all food that is lost or wasted is $49 billion.

Not only does food waste result in lost profit, but it also heavily contributes to the emission of greenhouse gases. Food that is thrown out often goes to landfills where it rots and emits methane, which is 25 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide. Food waste affects us both economically and environmentally.

How can Artificial Intelligence assist in reducing food waste? How can businesses such as grocery chains optimize profits by reducing the number of products thrown out? 🤔

One more time for…FoodMeter! 🤗

In an ideal world, supermarkets would ship in only enough food needed to sell, leaving the minimal amount of unsold, expired food left for the trash. Our A.I. will help do exactly just that. Our A.I. will help predict how much food products a supermarket should initially order. By predicting how much input will result in a minimal wasted output for different supermarkets, businesses can reduce their food waste and loss profit.

What is FoodMeter, and how exactly will our A.I. minimize food waste? FoodMeter’s prediction will be based upon and trained by past sales and food waste data of various supermarkets. 💭

Let us take bananas, for example: 👩‍💻

According to a study from Sweden’s Karlstad University, bananas are the most likely product tossed from supermarket shelves.

With FoodMeter, the A.I. will take input data of past banana sales compared to the number of excess bananas thrown out.

Through neural networks, FoodMeter will recognize patterns in how much a store actually sells on various days or seasons.

In turn, FoodMeter will then create an output that predicts how many bananas a supermarket should initially ship to optimize profits and reduce waste. The smaller the difference between bananas shipped in and bananas thrown out, the more accurate the model.

FoodMeter will help analyze different sales patterns to aid businesses in how much of a product should be shipped into best match predicted sales.

SWOT (Food waste away)!

Strengths 💪

Provide accurate predictions.

Have a widespread application and impact due to the high number of supermarket and grocery store chains.

Weaknesses 😔

It will take a lot of time to train the A.I. due to the mass amount of data involving different products and variables.There may be some unpredictable variables or events that affect sales, but our A.I. will adjust based on new data.

Opportunities 😻

• FoodMeter will one day confidently predict the correct amount of shipment orders needed to optimize profits for all products within a store.
• Not only can FoodMeter be applied to a few food products, but almost anything.

Threats 🙈

• One threat to FoodMeter is the issue of privacy. Data from supermarkets and grocery chains need to be kept secure and confidential to the business.
• Overall, FoodMeter brings to the table many benefits and positive effects on all grocery businesses with minimal initial setbacks.

(Food) Demeter

Demeter, the Greek goddess and protector of agriculture, is an entity in which people believe. Keyword: believe. With FoodMeter, we channel that belief into reality. FoodMeter is for today. 😋

TL;DR:

• There is SOOOO much food being wasted.
• The current ways of preventing food waste and eliminating its continuation are old, ineffective and are a belief. 👵
• FoodMeter will record, analyze, and predict the amount of products to purchase for vending to maximize profit. 😉

Action Items: ⭐

• Evaluate how much food waste you make and what grocery shopping tendencies you have.
• Record this information. 🗒️

Use FoodMeter and save food by the meter! 📏