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Food

This App Could Cut Restaurant Food Waste in Half

A new app from London start-up Winnow claims to have saved £2 million worth of food since launching in 2013.

With stats showing that 7 million tons of food ends up in the bin every year in the UK (yes, you have to actually take the recycling out for collection, rather than bickering with your flatmates over whose turn it is to brave the bins), food waste is impacting our pockets and our environment.

But the problem goes beyond the furry peaches in your fruit bowl—the restaurant industry is also to blame for the amount of food sent to landfill each year. It's something Winnow, a new app and winner of a Guardian Sustainable Business Award this week, hopes to combat.

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Launched in 2013 by a London-based startup, Winnow uses a touchscreen tablet and digital scale that attaches to a restaurant's garbage bin. Staff are asked to select which items they're chucking from on-screen icons, and the weight and cost of the item is automatically recorded. The app then feeds this information into a data analysis system that shows the restaurant exactly how much they're wasting.

READ MORE: How Tinder Food Apps and Dumpster-Diving Restaurants Could Help End British Food Waste

"In large kitchens, most waste comes because too much food is produced relative to the demand," explains David Jackson, Winnow's business development manager. "If you know exactly what you're throwing away, you can reduce your production volumes and cook the correct amount of food and reduce waste."

According to waste research company WRAP, food makes up 41 percent (that's 600,000 tonnes) of the stuff thrown out by "pubs, restaurants, hotels, and quick service restaurants." Initiatives like Winnow are clearly of environmental benefit, but the app's developers also offer another incentive: cash.

Winnow's latest figures boast that they "consistently see food waste cut by 50 percent" and have saved their customers a collective total of £2 million since launching. They say restaurants and pubs can see between two and ten times the return on their investment in the app, which costs around £350 a month to use.

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Cutting rubbish and saving money? That's the sustainability dream.

Winnow was founded by former business consultants Marc Zornes and Kevin Duffy after Zornes co-authored a report on resource productivity in large companies. He quickly realised the scale of the food waste problem, both in economical and environmental terms.

"This an age-old problem which exists because chefs and teams lack the data to properly understand where food waste occurs in their kitchen, and crucially how much it costs their business," explains Jackson. "Our reporting pinpoints where food waste occurs, giving them the insight to drive change and reduce waste."

READ MORE: How Beer Made from Leftover Bread Could Help End Global Food Waste

The Breakfast Club, a restaurant with sites across London and in Brighton, recently tested Winnow in their kitchens.

"It's a cool system and it helped us measure our plate waste for the first time," says Georgia Habgood, who looks after sustainability for the company. "However being known and loved for our big portions, we didn't want to reduce what we were serving on a plate. We now recycle our plate waste so their system and the initial trial we did with them had a positive impact on us and influenced our ongoing sustainability efforts."

With Winnow planning to move into the kitchens of schools and hospitals, we kind of wish it could have a go at pinpointing exactly who's putting what in our bins, too. The mystery of those passive-aggressively rotting avocados could be solved, once and four all.