This week, the team that brought us the Nest Learning
Thermostat
and other smart home products launched Mill — a new system
to prevent waste, starting with food. Mill takes food scraps and spoiled food
from home kitchens, conserves the nutrients, and converts it into chicken feed
for farms. It’s a practical, impactful way to reduce home food waste and the
resulting, climate-changing greenhouse gases — with minimal effort on the part
of users.
Mill was founded in 2020 by Matt Rogers and Harry Tannenbaum, who worked
together at Nest. The lessons they learned about encouraging new habits at home
that are good for people and the planet are incredibly relevant to changing our
perception of waste, starting in the kitchen.
When the 119 billion pounds of food
wasted
in the US alone each year is left to rot in landfills, we waste the nutrients
and resources that went into creating it; but worse — it releases methane, a
greenhouse gas that is 80 times more potent than CO2. Retailers removing
confusing best-by
dates
and brand consumer-education
campaigns
are part of ongoing efforts to help reduce food waste at home — but our kitchens
remain the single largest source of food in landfills.
Municipal composting, where available, can be a alternative to landfill — but
it’s available at a pitifully small scale in the US: Less than 2 percent of US
consumers
have access to municipal composting, particularly in metropolitan areas. And as
most kitchen composters can attest, fruit flies can quickly suck the joy and
ease out of the process.
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A Mill Membership includes a Mill kitchen bin that dries, shrinks and de-stinks
your kitchen scraps overnight — turning them into nutrient-rich Food Grounds,
minus the fruit flies. Once the bin is full — which takes a few weeks — users
can schedule a pickup for their Food Grounds in the Mill app to be sent back to
the company, which then turns the Food Grounds into an ingredient for chicken
feed.
"Food isn't trash. But until today, it was hard to do anything except throw
uneaten food in the garbage,” explains founder and CEO Matt
Rogers. “From my time at
Nest, we know that a small step at home can have a positive impact for people
and the planet. Resources are increasingly scarce — wasting food at home is a
solvable problem that we can tackle together."
As head of product Kristen Virdone told Fast Company, the priority for the team was making the user experience as simple as possible — in terms of both process and appearance.
“We could have made it look like anything,” she said. “There was no reason it had to look like a trash can. But when you’re trying to ask people to engage in behavior change, you don’t want to put a lot of mental load on them.”
Mill also lets users track the positive impact they’re having — including the
amount of food they've diverted from landfill and more; the company estimates
that Mill members can avoid about a half-ton of greenhouse gas emissions per
household per year. This estimate includes the manufacturing of the bin, energy
usage, and the transportation of Food Grounds back for processing into chicken
feed. To learn more, go to
mill.com/impact.
"Waste doesn't exist in nature; yet we create it everywhere and have been
trained to ignore it — or worse, believe it's inevitable," says founder and President Harry
Tannenbaum. "Food in landfills is one of the most solvable climate problems facing us
today. At Mill, we're building a pathway to connect what people can't eat at
home with farms that benefit from a more sustainable feed ingredient. Our
approach is a practical and easy way to stop wasting food at home, prevent
rotting garbage on the curb, and reduce methane emissions. Together with our
members and the communities and policymakers we work with, we can make progress
towards a better planet."
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Sustainable Brands Staff
Published Jan 19, 2023 1pm EST / 10am PST / 6pm GMT / 7pm CET