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ScrapWorks

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ScrapWorks is a service that can dramatically reduce the food waste from industrial kitchens caused by faulty or non-existent demand forecasting. We also generate a large amount of consumption-related data that could be of great value to the food and catering industries. In addition, we are developing pathways to produce sustainable animal feed from the food waste. We use machine learning to predict what, and how much, of each item kitchens should prepare. We have already run early pilots and reduced food waste an average of 60% by helping kitchen managers make smarter prep decisions. In our next phase we plan to conduct larger, longer term pilots to conclusively establish the credibility of our technology platform at a scale that would be required by the broader industry. Ultimately, we aim to be the go-to service for large-scale kitchen data and analytics and our datasets will allow us to build large- scale databases that forecast food trends across different demographics.

Team Members

Sonia Baltodano (PhD, ME), Prof. David Beach, ME (PI)