LAS VEGAS (AP) — Avocados will be tricky. Their ripeness window is so narrow that a slew of memes poke fun on the effective art of deciding when to eat them.
Dutch entrepreneur Marco Snikkers goals to resolve that problem with an avocado scanner unveiled this week at the CES tech show in Las Vegas and designed to be used in supermarkets. It uses optical sensing and AI technology to find out ripeness, displaying on a screen whether an avocado is firm or able to eat.
Snikkers’ startup, OneThird, is not just trying to cut back frustration within the kitchen. In accordance with the United Nations, about one-third of food is wasted globally. Meaning all of the carbon emitted to grow, ship and distribute that food was for naught.
“That’s an enormous problem,” Snikkers said. “That’s a trillion dollar issue for our world and it has a big impact on C02 emissions and water usage.”
OneThird is considered one of several start-ups at this 12 months’s CES working to resolve different components of the issue, from helping the food industry limit what it throws away to offering rapid composting solutions to assist keep food scraps out of methane-producing landfills.
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OneThird already works with growers, distributors and others along the provision chain to predict the shelf lifetime of avocados, tomatoes, strawberries and blueberries. It’ll further expand its ability to find out ripeness for more produce later this 12 months, aiming to assist reduce the quantity of food that’s wasted all over the world. And it’s testing the consumer-friendly avocado scanner at a supermarket in Canada this month.
One other Dutch entrepreneur, Olaf van der Veen, is working to empower restaurants to cut back food waste, nearly all of which happens in a kitchen before a meal is even served to customers.
His device, Orbisk, uses a camera positioned over a trash can to scan whatever food is about to be tossed. Along with seeing the form of food, amount and time of day, “we are able to see if it’s on a plate, in a pan, on a cutting board, which supplies circumstantial information on why it was lost,” van der Veen said.
Orbisk organizes and shares that insight with the restaurant in order that they can understand their disposal patterns, helping them get monetary savings and reduce food waste, and with it, emissions and water use.
The startup’s devices are positioned in industrial kitchens in about 10 European countries, with some clients so far as India.
He said that even after some surplus food is donated, there’s more food waste per restaurant within the U.S. than in Europe. That is why the corporate is at CES, he said, hoping to expand its nascent market further.
Reducing the quantity of wasted food is preferable, but keeping tossed food out of landfills is the subsequent best choice.
When food scraps are properly composted, they release carbon dioxide as a part of the biological strategy of turning into nutrient-rich soil. When food is trapped in landfills, the decomposition process produces methane — a potent greenhouse gas that contributes significantly to global warming since it packs a stronger short-term punch greater than 80 times stronger than even carbon dioxide.
The 2006 London Protocol banned dumping food waste into the ocean, prompting South Korea to establish a system of mandatory composting. While the infrastructure allows the country to properly eliminate nearly all its food waste, residents must haul bags of food to designated curbside bins.
Reencle is designed to make that process easier. The metal bin is a hyper-fast composting system showcased at CES this 12 months, and helps households reduce one kilogram (2.2 kilos) of food scraps by 90% volume in only 24 hours.
While the product has sold tens of hundreds of units in South Korea, Reencle’s parent company Hanmi Flexible hopes to expand to overseas markets, marketing director Jinhwi Bang said.
How is it so fast? The device uses self-replicating microorganisms to show scraps into compost. Its competitor, Lomi, grinds and dehydrates food scraps, requiring the byproduct to be mixed with soil before composting, whereas Reencle says its byproduct will be composted directly.
Mark Murray, Executive Director of Californians Against Waste, says he hopes people don’t think advanced technology is required to give you the option to compost.
But he says he understands that not everyone has a yard or a patio, and that “the entire tools within the toolbox must be on the table.”
Technology is an element of the answer. But Murray says economic incentives and systemic change are the opposite key components to reducing global food waste.
“We’d like to make it costlier to waste food,” he said. “That’ll create the inducement for industrial enterprises, for restaurants, for stores, for even consumers to take a position in systems and technology for ensuring that we don’t waste food.”
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