An interview with Oded Omer and Yossi Regev, founders of Wasteless, one of Forward Fooding’s top 500 Food Tech startups.

The team behind Wasteless

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 Oded and Yossi, the power-duo behind Wasteless, helping food retailers slash food waste and boost the bottom line by selling perishable products with shorter expiration dates at their optimal price point. Let’s see what the founders had to say.

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

Oded and Yossi: We made an exit with a Data for Food company, and were intimately aware that the real challenge wasn’t how to make more money from food. But rather how to repair the food system, that’s the biggest source of CO2 emissions, of squandering resources while 800 million are hungry. We didn’t want a cute solution, we wanted to find a scalable and impactful answer to this pressing crisis. So we founded, in August 2016, Wasteless, a turnkey food waste solution which optimizes food price markdowns based on expiry dates. Retailers can sell products with a limited expiration date, as we help them to mark off prices along the demand curve.

It doesn’t make sense, to pay the same price for a lasagna with an expiration date of March 20 as one with a March 16 expiration. Wasteless boosts sell through of the shortest expiration date, with a lower discount than arbitrary markdowns, while slashing food waste in half (or more). Supermarkets sell more, waste less and consumers get to choose how much they want to pay for a product based on expiration dates. And most importantly: by also creating actionable awareness among consumers, we can save more than 500GT of CO2e emissions. That’s roughly the output of the UK. Every year… that’s impact on scale.

How is tech central to your business?

Oded and Yossi: We bring data into the food system. Data that’s available in siloed parts already, but not shared. The Supply Chain is weakened by this missing link. We make the business case for optimization with AI (Reinforcement Learning to be precise). With Wasteless, there’s a business case in the food systems for a wide range of other solutions, that can thrive on the efficiencies we uniquely create.

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

Oded and Yossi: The challenge is to cut emissions now, to prepare the food system for a growing world population, to stop the disastrous annihilation of ecosystems. We need solutions that are scalable, profitable, easy to implement. And that educate consumers and industry alike.

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

Congratulations again to Wasteless for ranking 6th in the “Surplus & Waste Management” category 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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