519: Getting Real About Food Waste with Mill’s Harry Tannenbaum

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. For restaurants, and I was talking to Jeremiah Stone at Bar Contra, he was like, this is a business decision for us. Every ounce of food, every dollar of food we waste hits our P &L. Yes, there's an environmental impact, but there's an economic and financial impact of wasting food.

0:51This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59Harry Tannenbaum is the co-founder and president of Mill, a tech company aiming to reduce food waste with a kitchen food recycler that turns scraps into nutrient-rich grounds. Prior to Mill, he led analytics and e-commerce at Nest and worked on Google's hardware team. It's so fascinating having Harry on the show to nerd out on sustainability, tech, food waste, and more.

1:29Harry Tannenbaum, this is Taste. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Super happy to be here. So we're here to talk today about Mill, and I'm wondering if you could just give a brief overview of what Mill is and does for somebody who's unfamiliar to start. Yeah. So Mill, we have made a new kind of appliance. And it is this magical device that eats all the food that you don't eat. And basically overnight takes all the water out of it. so in the morning it kind of looks like coffee grounds uh and smells like spices um and it's basically a trash can that doesn't smell and takes forever to fill up and uh the idea behind this is we kind of got hooked on the problem of food waste and we're just completely gobsmacked by one how much food waste is produced in our kitchens but two that most of it ends up and landfills.

2:26And by creating this awesome kitchen experience, we also have the ability to get food that isn't eaten at home and restaurants and offices back to farms. Yeah, I think that's a great overview. And I've noticed that in a lot of the language on the website, you call Mill like a food recycler. Is there a reason why you didn't go for a composter? Because it is essentially like a version of composting that you're doing, right? Okay, this is a good question. So let's get into it. Okay, So can we just start? Can I just talk about food waste for a second? Then I'll get to the. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Okay.

3:00Okay. Just to ground ourselves. This is crazy. 40 % of the food produced for human consumption goes to waste, which is just like the mind blowing thing. It's like five bags of groceries from the grocery store and you just leave two in the parking lot. and the entry point to this for me was like I had no idea food was the biggest thing in the landfill it's like the most common species of stuff and the landfill is food and that just felt like really messed up but kind of the way the system works today is we take food we put it in a diesel truck and we bury it in the ground and it turns into poison in the form of methane gas.

3:50Okay, so now let's talk about what food is and what compost is. So food can turn into compost over time if it is digested aerobically by microbes. And basically, if you have a compost pile in your backyard, put food in there, put some bulking agents in there to keep it fluffy and keep it airful, and microbes will turn it into a nutrient-rich soil amendment. What we do with mill is we dehydrate food. So there's no microbial digestion happening. It is just dewatering the material. And the reason for that is you can't really make compost overnight. We've tried. And anyone that's sort of saying, oh, you can make compost overnight, you can't do it.

4:40So we're really careful in the terminology. What comes out of milk can be used in your garden. It can turn into compost, but what it is is dried food. And food is 80 % water, so when you take the water out of it, it gets really small and doesn't smell and doesn't rot, but taking the water out of it doesn't make it compost. Did that make sense? Yeah. No, I think it's a really great distinction. And you mentioned that you tried to make compost overnight before, so that makes me wonder, how long have you been working on Mill as a product? And when did you land on the version of it as it exists today?

5:18So we've been working on Mill for almost five years now. I guess call it four and a half years. We founded the company in 2020 and we spent about two and a half, three years in pure R &D mode. And there's a ton of different things learned. It's actually, there's a lot of variables you have to control for. One, we knew we wanted our product not to smell at all. Two, we wanted it to take sort of forever to fill up. And three, we wanted it to be able to eat anything that you couldn't eat. So there's a lot of different challenges along the way that we had to figure out. And then today, the meal as it exists, do you have a kind of core or typical customer?

6:05I know we've talked a little bit and I want to talk more about restaurants versus homes. Do you find that it is like 90 % homes or what's that kind of breakdown like? Yeah. So when we started, and I mean, we're still a toddler as a company. We really designed Mill with a home kitchen in mind. And I think there are sort of three types of customers if I had to bucket them, most common. One is busy parents, families at home. Another are people that garden and then a third are people that cook a lot and mill sort of helps in each of those settings by just one making clean up a snap and we've noticed it at home like you have a mill in your kitchen and there's less friction it's less frictionful cooking um because the cleanup thing is kind of looming over your head a little bit and we actually find we kind of cook different stuff too.

7:07You know, in terms of people that garden, there are a lot of people that have been figuring out how to repurpose food that they don't eat at home. And milk can be sort of a companion to that as well. And then in terms of where mills have gone, yeah, we didn't really design them for restaurants, but then one day, like we were in a Shake Shack and, you know, and we were like, that's pretty cool. And what we found is there were chefs and offices and people with chickens in their backyard that were figuring out all sorts of different ways to use mills and use their output. And so we've sort of leaned into that.

7:50As far as chefs go, like they really get it, you know, in terms of eliminating food waste, but also running a clean shop. Because like instead of having to wait for the compost to get picked up at the end of the week, they can be putting scraps into the mill as it goes? Or how does it kind of fill that gap? I mean, so like, just like one other thing, I would have guessed restaurants actually made a lot of food waste. You know, just in terms of like what ends up in the landfill, but like households are far and above the biggest. And the average American household throws away like$2 ,000 worth of food a year.

8:28For restaurants, and I was talking to Jeremiah Stone at Bar Contra, he was like, this is a business decision for us. Every ounce of food, every dollar of food we waste hits our P &L. And yes, there's an environmental impact, but there's an economic and financial impact of wasting food. So the thing that's been so interesting to me as we spend more time with chefs is they're already thinking a lot about how do you use every part of an ingredient? How do you make the most of the calories that are coming in and out? Then you're also faced with constraints on floor space. You know, there's not a lot of room in restaurants.

9:10And you're faced with constraints on infrastructure. Not every city in the United States offers collection for food scraps. In many places, this is expensive. You've got landlords that are pissed at you for having scraps in the back alleyway, which are attracting vectors, farm mints or militant raccoons, whatever. So Mill has sort of been able to fit in and be helpful from a workflow and work stream perspective. And yeah, it's for a restaurant like Shake Shack, I'm really impressed with them. Yeah, I think it's really interesting to talk about like the way that Mill fits into different kinds of people's lives or kitchens.

9:49Like I know for myself, for example, like I, and I'm scared to admit this on air, but I like secretly dump my compost in a neighboring buildings compost bins because my landlord doesn't let my building have compost and the city doesn't make people opt in. And they also have gotten rid of the community composting site at the farmer's market by me. So instead, I just pretend that I live in this other apartment building and freeze my compost scraps and drop it off there, which I haven't been caught yet. And they have plenty of room in the bins. So I feel pretty good about what I'm doing. But I think like this idea of like composting being this accessible is really interesting because like we're in this weird in-between point where like it isn't as easy to do what we want to do with our scraps in this kind of way but also like the cost of a mill to be honest is like an investment as well like it's a thousand dollars obviously you can do monthly payments and this is new technology i'm curious if like you anticipate that cost shifting over time or if that is just like how much it takes to be able to be doing what Mel is doing at home.

10:56Yeah. I mean, well, first of all, like listening to your workflow, which is like you cook, you have scraps, they go in the freezer, you know, they take freezer space, then they like go with you in like a secret mission. Yeah. Yeah. Secret, like, you know, organics recycling, like um you know side door kind of thing like that's a lot of work and i mean the thing that drives us is can we make it really easy to do the right thing yeah and you know when i look at the stats from the epa if you look at all household food waste created like 4 % of it gets composted. You know, 85 % of it gets buried or burnt.

11:45The food.

11:50And the key thing that, you know, we're working on is behavior change. And there's two parts to it. You know, there is a part of this that is infrastructural, which is do municipalities, cities, towns have the infrastructure to collect and process organic materials? But then there's the other side of it, which is what's going on in someone's kitchen. And there's like this moment in time cutting board decision, which is, is the food going into a garbage can or is it going on a pathway to be recycled and reintegrated in the food system? Cost is something we think about a lot. And yeah, it's a thing with new technology that cost is high at the beginning.

12:40Solar panels over time, if you look at the cost of solar energy over the last 30 years, it's come down, down, down, down, down. And cost for mil will decrease over time as we make more of them and get more of them in the world just as quantities go up. But I think the thing that's really cool is that cost for mill will also come down as the economic benefits of it are recognized. And this is something that we really saw happen at our last company, which was Nest. We made thermostats. Thermostats are like another pretty unsexy thing. and you know when we launched the nest thermostat um you know 250 bucks for a thermostat is kind of like an eye-watering thing but like a couple things happened over time one that price came down to 99 dollars over time you know there are lower cost versions and two the utility companies started recognizing the value of this infrastructure on their grid and you could apply energy efficiency dollars towards it, or there are market failures, momentary spikes and troughs of electricity demand that could be avoided with thermostats.

13:57And now you can get a rebate from your utility provider across the country. And for most folks, you can get Nest Thermostat for free if you sort of look for it and apply for it. I think that's where this goes over the long term. But in the beginning phase, the individuals that adopt mills are actually great proof points in that journey towards systems change. Yeah, I've read you talk a little bit about this before, about how the data that Mill provides you've seen translate into fewer food waste. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, there's sort of two sides of economic savings. So one is what's happening in people's kitchens.

14:38We've at this point amassed like 3.5 million days worth of data in terms of like food waste behavior in kitchens. And there's like no, there's nothing to do with this data other than learn from it. There's no one who's like, I'd like to acquire that food waste data to do stuff. Yeah, the FBI is like tapped into everyone's compost bins. Totally. Yeah. They're tracking you down. They know somebody's been depositing. You had five banana peels instead of two who's over at your house. Yeah, what's going on? So we have this really large data set. And what we noticed when we looked at it is that people keep using their mills.

15:28You know, and they get open regularly. About a pound of scraps goes into a mill per day in a household, which is a lot if you think about it. Like 360 pounds of food scraps a year. but over the first four months what we see is that usage stays about the same but by about month two and three we see that the amount of material that goes in decreases by about 20 percent and we ask customers like what's going on you know and first of all people 60 percent of people that have a mill say since i got a mill i actually i'm surprised by just how much food waste we make. We make more than I thought we did.

16:08And then about 40 % of people separately are like, having a meal is actually reducing the amount of food waste we make. And we ask them like, okay, how? And they say, we're cooking differently and we're shopping differently. And I've actually experienced this. Like for me, it was the Persian cucumbers, you know you can get them in like a little bag from trader joe's and there were like a couple instances where they had gone kind of slimy and weird and i found myself like dumping a whole bag of those into a mill and we were like okay we got to like change up our shopping game here and the average number is it's two thousand dollars worth of food thrown away per household per year So if we can decrease that by 20%, that's$400 a year in savings.

17:01So Harry, beyond the kind of household savings, are there any other learnings that you're seeing on the state side as well? Yeah, I think the other set of learnings are sort of, the word to use would be around participation. And this results in municipal savings. So, you know, you can go to mill.com and get a mill for your house and try it out. Long term, we're really excited about partnering with cities. And over the last year, we did a pilot with a city in Washington state, Tacoma, Washington. And the interesting thing about Tacoma is, you know, for a bunch of cities across the U.S., they are starting to introduce the idea of curbside collection for food scraps.

17:53And right now, about 15 % of the U.S. has that. In the other 85 % of cities, there's no municipally provided pathway to recycle organics, and most of it ends up in the garbage. So Tacoma was a city that had, back in 2012, introduced curbside collection for organics. And what they found is that in 2015, three years later, still 30 % of the garbage can was food. And when they looked at their green cart, only about 4 % of it was food. The rest was yard. So we did this pilot where we put mills into about 100 households. And what we found was that the households with mills separated out and diverted 10 times as much material than the average Tacoma household.

18:43And like the delta there is the ick factor, you know, or the level of work required, you know, to sort out scraps. Just mill made it easier. But the thing that's exciting for the city of Tacoma is, you know, it's really expensive for them to get these tons diverted otherwise. So the conversation there has been, how can mill be integrated into the rate structure? and um lewis griffith who runs solid waste in tacoma was recently quoted in the wall street journal saying you know most people in tacoma have a 60 gallon garbage cart it would be great to be able to downgrade people to a 30 gallon garbage cart and give them a mill for the same price so you basically get a mill for free and what's neato is that like half of the people in that study had never participated in composting before.

19:37So it's like, can we get more people participating quantity and increase the quality of that participation? Well, the savings bit of this is cool too. It's, you know, if a quarter of our garbage trucks are filled with food and 80 % of that food is water, if we can get, if we could stop hauling around so much water, there's, there's economic savings to the whole waste grid there. Yeah. I think the like transportation element is really interesting. I know like here in New York, we have to be like shipping all of our garbage, like largely outside of the city. A lot of the composting is even doing that.

20:10And it just feels so counterintuitive to be like trying to have a lower like impact on the environment and then have like your food scraps going on a diesel truck, like out of the city to get composted in the first place. So this like pilot that you're talking about with Tacoma, Is it something that you're trying to do in other cities? Like, do you see some kind of potential for scale? Yeah, we published that data and we've sort of been getting flooded by inquiries from different cities, lots of different opportunities. You know, another really cool program I'll highlight is what we're doing in the Phoenix Valley in Arizona, where we've partnered with a local farm called Recycled City.

20:53and this is a farm that was collecting scraps from households in Phoenix and the surrounding cities and bring them back to the farm and composting them and they would have to go weekly to people's houses to pick up the scraps because they get pretty ripe and we dropped mills in households and now the farmer can go to households monthly to collect the dehydrated material which is a lot more efficient for them there are more people that are participating and then that all goes back to the farm and feeds the community. And actually what we have set up there is you send your grounds that come out of mill back to the farm and you get vegetables from the farm in return.

21:35And this is a market where there's no municipal infrastructure for composting, but this distributed infrastructure in homes is enabling that. It's really cool. And I really like the fact that you can be trading wet mill processes for vegetables from the farm because I think that's teaching that like our food waste does have actual value. Like it isn't trash. It can be helping the planet. It also like shows the value like in food and like using it before it goes bad in the first place, which I imagine might be a helpful way to kind of be driving participation, like how you're talking. Yeah. I mean, I got totally messed up by this problem and now I kind of can't go anywhere without seeing waste.

22:21And, yeah, I mean, you said something there where, like, food isn't trash.

22:30And the next airport you're in, you know, I encourage you to, like, look at the garbage cans. And, you know, they have, like, often, like, pictographic icons on them. You know, there's, like, garbage, recycling, and maybe they'll have a compost bin in some airports. The San Francisco one is like the only one I've ever been to that has a compost in the airport. And I remember this because it was so unusual to see. Yeah. And you go through an airport and it says garbage. And then on the garbage label, there's a picture of a sandwich. And it's like, no, it's not garbage. And we are even hesitant to ever use the term food waste when we talk about what we're doing, because what we're taking is food and we're keeping it as food.

23:17If you're interested in further geeking out on the concept of waste, waste is really about mixing. If you have batteries or glass or even Christmas tree lights, these things can be recycled. You can make more Christmas tree lights out of Christmas tree lights. but the second they get commingled with all together food and batteries and Christmas tree lights and now you have waste so yeah I think the thing that's like so exciting about this is like yeah food doesn't actually ever have to become food waste it can just stay as food and there's so much care and energy and beauty and awesomeness that goes into food it just feels criminal that it like turns into methane that's cooking the planet yeah or fruit flies that are like invading the kitchen yeah i mean i think for me as a new yorker like part of it is that i care a lot about food and like i want to be keeping food in the system but also like i don't want pests in my kitchen like i don't this is why i freeze my scraps also is that it's just like the least smelly like easiest way and luckily i happen to live very close to a building whose compost bins i use but like not everybody has that option as well We care about climate.

24:39If I'm speaking about the employee base at Mill, that's why we're working on this problem. But that does not sell. For this to make sense to an individual, we need to relieve pain in the kitchen. That's why it took us three years working on it. It needs to not smell at all. For me and my wife, Rachel, our Mill takes a month to fill up and needs to take everything. And then for a city, it needs to make economic sense. We can't rely on like, hey, I want to do the right thing for the planet to get us there. If we're going to decarbonize the economy, we need new systems. And if we're going to replace an old system with a new system, it needs to be better, faster, cheaper.

25:25So we're driven by figuring out how to make something better versus make something greener. definitely i want to talk to you a little bit about this zero waste restaurant week that we were talking about a little bit at the beginning um so this is i think the first time that you've done this before here in new york there was a really impressive lineup of restaurants like karima that you mentioned and bar contra wind sun that all were making a low waste dish and then also using the mill composter or the mill recycler for the you got it i got it um how did your team like go about choosing the restaurants and like how did you see this as kind of like uplifting mills mission overall we reached out to chefs who had i think generally been like vocal about reducing food waste or had talked about local food systems regenerative agriculture and that was our initial outreach and we hoped we would get like three or four bites and we ended up you know going out with a lineup of 12 restaurants across new york which were just awesome.

26:32From people like Fidel Caballero at Karima to Jeremiah Stone at Far Contra to Dan Kluger, it was an awesome response. And I think in retrospect, the reason for it is that chefs get it. And that in a lot of these restaurants, they've been working hard to minimize food waste, both from an economic, from a cleanliness and mess standpoint and from an environmental standpoint already. So Mill was kind of a natural fit. And they were excited to use their platform and their plates to help people think more about it. And through the week, all the restaurants produced dishes. They committed to producing zero food waste over the week, but produced dishes that highlighted how you could sort of use all parts of what you grew or caught, et cetera, across a menu.

27:27Yeah. And then do they all get to keep the mill afterwards? Yeah, they're keeping them. That's good. Yeah, we've heard a mix of things. There are some restaurants where like the mills are just there, you know, and are going to be there. There are some other restaurants where the chefs have taken them home, which, you know, that's cool with us, too. But, yeah, I mean, you know, to use an example, the Oberon Group, Rodora and Rucola and Anais and June, all those restaurants have mills installed and all the material, all the food scraps that are being generated at those restaurants, even before Restaurant Week, were getting milled and reintroduced to the local food system.

28:12Yeah, I live close to Rodora. And when they first opened, they had this whole zero waste mission that even went down to the tin fish that they were serving in the restaurant and having it be in a kind of tin that they could recycle from or something like that. And I think that was interesting to me as a food person to look at this lineup of restaurants is that some of them immediately off the bat, I was like, yes, obviously Rodora would be a part of this because it's been so core to their mission. And then for others, like, you know, maybe it is quarter their mission to be low waste just because that's how you run a good business.

28:44But it maybe isn't something that was being highlighted in that kind of way before. And I'm curious, like you were in New York, you were eating at a lot of these restaurants. Did you have any dishes or experiences in the restaurant that you felt were like a really good embodiment of what you hoped the week would be? Yeah, I mean, actually, I haven't mentioned this, but I got to go out to Winsome in sort of East Williamsburg, which is a Taiwanese restaurant.

29:21and I think the coolest thing about that restaurant not necessarily related to restaurant week etc was just seeing a restaurant that was so perfectly apportioning dishes to table size you know we were a party of eight and like the way the menu is designed and the way even like the ordering and flow of the meal went was that like there wasn't a scrap left on the table. And I think it was like the exact right amount of dumplings and like the exact right amount of cucumbers. And that was just, it was a cool feeling to see plates go off the table, just completely clean. And maybe that's the secret to food waste.