An interview with Anastasia Hofmann and Naomi MacKenzie, founders of Kitro, one of Forward Fooding’s top 500 Food Tech startups.

Anastasia Hofmann and Naomi MacKenzie, founders of Kitro

It’s time to put a face to the name…

We asked our FoodTech 500 top-runners to give us a bit of insight into how they started out as a company and their thoughts on the role of technology in Food innovation. Meet Anastasia and Naomi, co-founders of Kitro, the first fully automated food waste management solution for the hospitality industry. Let’s see what they had to say.

So tell us a little bit more about you! Where did the idea for your FoodTech company come from?

Anastasia and Naomi: We used to work in kitchens, where we were the ones throwing away tremendous amounts of perfectly edible food on a daily basis. Working in this hectic environment, we saw how kitchen chefs and managers quickly become blind to what ends up in the trash.

During our studies in hospitality management, the severity of the issue became even clearer. We saw the imbalance of food value, with some having nothing and others having so much they become blind to the impact of wasting.

When we started to look deeper we realized that if food waste is not measured it is extremely hard to monitor, let alone reduce it. This sparked the inspiration to design a fully automated system that measures and analyses food waste in restaurants, hotels, and canteens.

During our last year of university, we participated in a challenge on campus, where we had to imagine what a sustainable kitchen in 2025 would look like. We came up with an extremely futuristic and utopian concept, separating, measuring and reducing all kinds of waste in the kitchen. Despite the unrealistic extent of our solution, we were named winners of this competition by the jury.

Together we got stuck with this idea that we couldn’t and didn’t want to give up, a way to improve operations, reduce costs and ultimately make a significant impact on the environment. Since the start, we have been building Kitro with the goal and aspiration that we can make an impact and bring back the value of all food.

How is tech central to your business?

Anastasia and Naomi: Comprised of hardware and software, this solution is based on image processing and machine learning technologies in the backend to automate the identification of what has been thrown away. The hardware allows for automated food waste data collection, data which is then analyzed and shown to customers in the form of an online dashboard. By knowing what they dispose of, chefs and managers can make data-driven decisions to operate more cost-efficiently and consequently reduce their cost. 

Why do you think it’s important to see the food industry embrace tech?

Anastasia and Naomi:  As tech continues to evolve and becomes more fundamental in all aspects of life we believe that it is critical to implement tech in the food industry to ensure sustainable growth, optimized process and feed continuous innovation.

 

Want to know more? Check out Kitro’s full profile here.

Congratulations again to Kitro for ranking 8th in the category “Surplus and Waste Management” of the Foodtech 500 list!

To find out who else made it into the FoodTech 500; the top Food Tech companies in the world, click here.

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