Mar 9, 2021
FloWaste — Providing Data and Insights to Minimize Food Waste
FloWaste recently announced the close of their $270K Pre-Seed round. The round was led by Plug and Play Ventures, and other investors include: Elevate Ventures, RSLP Ventures, Flywheel Fund, Culvex Investments, and individual investor Angie Stocklin. Flowaste is providing data and analytics for cafeterias and restaurants to reduce food waste costs.
Why does this matter?
- One third of food is wasted globally (roughly 1.6 billion tons). At the current rate, annual food loss and waste is likely to rise by a third by 2030, with 2.1 billion tons, worth $1.5 trillion, being lost or thrown away.
- If food waste was a country it would be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world. For context, food waste has a carbon footprint 6x larger than global aviation.
- COVID-19 has fractured the food supply chain and has impacted the food service industry.
- Now is a transformational, once in a generation opportunity to revolutionize the food supply chain.
- FloWaste’s food analytics platform allows food service providers to optimize portion sizing, ingredient combinations, and meal preparation to significantly reduce waste and costs.
What’s next?
- FloWaste aims to be a wholistic solution by looking at meal performance and supplier ingredient performance.
- Compared to competitors, FloWaste is focused on food waste before and after the meal.
- The insights FloWaste gives result in up to $50K in value generation per year for an average fast food restaurant.
- Rian McDonnell, the CEO of FloWaste says: “This investment really allows us to capitalize on our sales momentum and complete high profile pilots in the coming months. We have 7 pilots on the books right now, we are aiming to get the first 3 installed by the end of April. Hopefully, these pilots can give us enough data and insights in preparation for a larger funding round and scaling later this year.”
Thoughts
Project Drawdown has reducing food waste as the third largest solution to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. It is promising to see FloWaste secure funding and deploy their technology. Pilot customers include well-known global fast food chains, corporate cafeteria management companies, a large European beef processor, and the U.S. Air Force. FloWaste can give granular level insights, providing up to a 2% reduction in procurement costs and a 35% reduction in disposal costs.
Between organizations making net zero commitments and as work from home restrictions lift, it will be interesting to see how technologies, like FloWaste, are adopted into cafeterias.
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