An innovative food waste solution
by Dawn Walter
“Artificial intelligence will solve poverty,” declared Ilya Sutskiever, Chief Scientist, Open AI, in the film, The Social Dilemma. He’s shown sitting on a park bench, doing what geniuses do best: thinking. His line of thinking could be summarised as “there’s an app for that”, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the belief that whatever the problem, technology has the answer. (Also known as technological solutionism: the idea that “given the right code, algorithms and robots, technology can solve all of mankind’s problems”.)
But when two social scientists tell me they’ve got an app for one of our most economically and environmentally damaging problems — food waste — I stop and listen. Kesta Kemp and Sophie Elliot studied anthropology and psychology respectively at the University of Bristol — but with a twist. They combined their social science training with innovation at the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which prepares students for turning ideas into practice.
Turning an idea into practice is exactly what these two enterprising MA students have done, together with their fellow collaborators, Edward Stratton and Charlie Royle. Their digital food management system, KnoWaste, won £10,000 in the University of Bristol’s Runway Entrepreneurship Competition. KnoWaste aims to halve food waste at UK schools, colleges, and universities by enabling diners to choose, via an app, what they want to eat a week in advance. Knowing the demand for each meal enables caterers to significantly reduce the food waste produced each day.
Wasted food in the UK was worth £20 billion in 2018, yet 8.4 million people, the population of London, are struggling to afford to eat.
Food waste is one of the twelve major food problems identified by Tim Lang in his book, Feeding Britain: Our Food Problems and How to Fix Them. As Lang points out, “most consumers think that as long as there is food on the supermarket shelves, all is well in the world. It is not”. For the majority of people in Western Europe who are used to plentiful shelves, seeing empty supermarket shelves at the start of the pandemic was a shock. It revealed our lack of understanding of how supermarket and food supply chains work.
Shortages make us less complacent about food certainty and more aware of food waste. As Lang remarks in his book, “consumers in affluent societies waste more food than consumers in poor societies” because “food is so cheap it is sometimes not valued”.
Food waste is a significant problem economically, environmentally, as well as morally. The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) estimated wasted food in the UK (2018) was worth £20 bn. This is a staggering amount especially when you grasp that approximately 8.4 million people in the UK, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, are struggling to afford to eat, and reliance on foodbanks during the pandemic has increased. While the rest of us discard food without much thought, the equivalent of the entire population of London are not getting enough food to eat each day, according to FareShare.
A proportion of this food waste ends up in landfill where it decomposes and releases methane, a poisonous greenhouse gas. And when food is wasted the resources needed to produce, move, store, and cook food (such as land, water, energy and fuel) are also wasted. Wasted food means finite resources are wasted. For example, It takes a hundred buckets of water, for example, to create just one loaf of bread and six buckets of water to grow one potato.
The KnoWaste app shows the environmental impact of diners’ food choices
But food waste is largely invisible to most of us. As Sophie explains, “food waste isn’t particularly glamorous or sexy but it’s a massive issue”. Anthropologist Mary Douglas famously said, dirt is “matter out of place”. In other words, if we categorise unwanted food as ‘dirt’ or waste by putting it in the bin, it is no longer deemed valuable, and it becomes invisible to us.
How did the team decide to solve this particular issue? Explains Sophie: “We didn’t really know where to start” so they drew on their innovation training and “looked quite close to home”. They asked themselves, “we know [food waste] is a problem, what’s going on around us? How can we solve it?” Some of their university friends reminded them that the catered halls at university produce “so much waste at the end of every breakfast, lunch and dinner”, with everyone “just throwing everything in the bin and not knowing what to do about it”.
By talking to students, the university catering staff, and drawing on Edward’s experience working as a chef, they discovered much of the food waste began “on the production side”. This helped them to “really understand what aspect of food waste” they wanted to target. After pinpointing the problem, they spoke to the university catering teams, chefs at places they had worked as students, and different people with the catering industry until they identified the key challenges. Much of this initial research was “talking to people and observing them, which came from Kesta’s anthropology background”.
What they realised was that the “catering teams just had no idea how many diners would be coming to each meal”. While staff were making educated guesses based on how many people had eaten the night before they were “just guessing on a whiteboard”.
So the team decided to target this specific part of the food production chain and tested a couple of their initial ideas using low fidelity methods to get some feedback. Through the Nology programme a tech team developed a MVP (Minimum Viable Product), and KnoWaste are currently in conversation with their first client.
As the app evolves, other features may be added such as guiding people towards healthier eating “without shaming them”. It’s about “balance and making informed decisions”, explains Kesta. This may take the form of gamification such as league tables between catered university halls, or between year groups and schools, “which would be: who’s eating the most sustainably” so that it “creates a friendly and healthy competition”.
The KnoWaste app shows the environmental impact of diners’ food choices
KnoWaste bridges both institutional and individual change, recognising that the two have to work in tandem for the solution to work. It’s evident from talking to Kesta and Sophie that the team have considered all the ‘users’ of their app.
Because the students have realised is that each system is different, there is no one solution that fits all, they see a “co-creative approach” as the way forward, working closely with clients to deliver a targeted solution. It is “super important” for KnoWaste to have “impact,” says Kesta.
Looking ahead to different markets other than universities and schools, the KnoWaste team intend to explore opportunities in “hospitals, oil rigs, cruise ships and catered offices”. What about big chain restaurants? Kesta smiles and explains that “pre-ordering your food at a restaurant would be such a big culture change”. Once the kind of “behavioural change that is needed for KnoWaste becomes more mainstream” then restaurants might be a future market.
So how did their social science backgrounds help ensure the success of the project? “Anthropology enables us to see the system as a whole and the different contexts that are in play in how people behave,” Kesta explains, “to understand the situation or area from within the system, and then work to understand the commonalities between different systems and make those connections and comparisons.”
“This is vital to KnoWaste as we have taken ideas that have worked or been used in certain areas, and re-applied them to a new area. Many people think innovation must be radical or completely new. Sometimes it can occur by making those connections between different spaces and understanding how to adapt it based on the context.”
Sophie’s psychology background “gave us a grounding of the psychological theories around human behaviour that we’ve been able to apply and test to have the biggest impact on creating sustainable behavioural change. For example, on how people effectively digest information and how they connect to information on a personal level.”
What’s really exciting about the KnoWaste solution is that while it was born from a local problem — something the team spotted at university — it can be applied globally.
As our interview comes to an end, I can’t help but hope more social scientists become digital tech entrepreneurs — or at least part of the core team in early-stage tech start-ups. As Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, has said, he wishes he’d hired social scientists in the early days of the company. Tech CEOs take note.