AN APPETITE FOR CLIMATE ACTION
Restaurants and farms find that artificial intelligence and investment funds can help them make the world more sustainable
T
here are many ways we can change the way we grow or prepare food to help the climate. Sometimes these changes require high-tech artificial intelligence technology in swanky restaurant kitchens. Other times they simply involve a new way to organise small coffee farms in the Amazon forests. A fine example of the technological route to fighting climate change is a device called Winnow Vision, which uses machine vision and artificial intelligence to identify food being throw away and then generate a report that restaurants can use to reduce waste. The Winnow system takes photos of food as restaurants throw it away. Using these images, the machine trains itself to recognise what’s being tossed out more accurately than humans. “Commercial kitchens are wasting 20% to 25% of their volume,” says Kevin Duffy, Winnow’s co-founder. “Winnow’s artificial intelligence makes food-waste tracking so easy and accurate that it should become the standard in every commercial kitchen.” Kitchens aren’t the only places where food goes to waste. An estimated one-third of the world’s food is wasted. According to the United Nations, the resources used to produce this wasted food is equal to 3.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. Winnow’s first food-waste product was a manual tool called Waste Monitor. Daily reports by this tool can help kitchens make smarter decisions, saving up to half the food that might otherwise be wasted. The company, whose research offices are located in Cluj, Romania, says its second-generation product, Winnow Vision, integrates machine vision and artificial intelligence to save even more waste. Over time, Winnow Vision becomes smarter and eventually reaches full automation, giving kitchens pinpoint accuracy without any input from the kitchen staff. “This is machine-learning technology,” says Maria Lundqvist, an economist at the European Investment Bank. “The more you use it, the more effective it becomes.” To increase its staff and further develop its technology, Winnow signed a €7.5 million loan last year with the European Investment Bank.
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2019 ACTIVITY REPORT
