E130: How Mill Is Scaling Food Recycling from Homes to Whole Foods

There’s no shortage of stats to demonstrate the sheer magnitude of our food waste problem: A whopping 40% of food grown for human consumption goes to waste; $400 billion worth of food gets thrown away every year in the U.S — roughly 1.5% of GDP; Food waste is responsible for 8-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Must we go on?

That’s why, after building the Nest Thermostat, Harry Tannenbaum and Matt Rogers turned their attention to our kitchens. They created Mill, a sleek appliance that quietly turns your food scraps into an odorless, coffee-ground-like material, and in the process, began changing the way people think about what they buy and throw away.

And Mill isn’t stopping at our kitchen counters. This week on Everybody in the Pool, Harry returns to the show to talk about how Mill is turning their attention to the places where food waste really piles up: grocery stores, restaurants, stadiums, and beyond.

We talk about:

• Why food waste is a $400 billion problem hiding in plain sight, and why nobody’s actually measuring it
• How the data Mill collects is already changing consumer behavior, and what that means at commercial scale
• What Mill Commercial looks like: a modular, dishwasher-sized unit that processes hundreds of pounds of food per day
• The Whole Foods partnership: deploying Mill infrastructure across all locations by 2027, backed by Amazon's Climate Pledge fund
• Why dehydrated food waste going directly to chickens is a tighter, more valuable loop than composting
• The vision for residential distribution: bundled with waste services or utilities, the way Nest thermostats scaled through utilities

Links:

• Mill: https://mill.com/
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