Millions of dollars worth of wasted food can be redistributed, thanks to artificial intelligence tools that are being tried throughout the company, including Nestlé.

The AI ​​tool has already reduced edible food waste by 87% in one of the Swiss conglomerates' factories during its first two-week trial, aiming to "design" food waste by providing real-time monitoring, tracking and insights of wasteful ingredients and products.

According to the pilot plan, Nestlé said it could save up to 700 tons of high-quality surplus food (equivalent to 1.5 million meals). The test also estimates that up to 1,400 tons of carbon dioxide can also be prevented from launching, saving up to £14 million in operating costs.

Alina Sartogo, one of the co-founders of Zest, which developed the tool, said that all food waste it determined is edible but cannot be sold at the manufacturer's profits. For example, waste may include a broken Kitkat bar or product with an expiration date too short to be sold to retailers.

After a range of pilots from different manufacturers, enthusiastic software can be expanded in subscriptions by March next year.

After receiving funding from the Bridgeai program of government agency Innovate UK, the second pilot of Nestlé has recently launched, which provides a £1.9 million race funding grant for AI projects.

Esra Kasapoglu, director of AI and data economics at the agency, said the project represents “Designed to transform solutions for food procurement and distribution in the UK, reducing waste, reducing carbon emissions and reducing costs. ”

About 4.6 million tons of edible food are wasted in the UK every year, equivalent to 1 billion meals.

Simon Millard, director of food at charity Fareshare, said the technology will “To redistribute food to more than 8,000 charities and community groups in the UK.

For the latest pilots, sustainability venture capital firms supporting climate startups bring together several companies, including Nestlé; Bristol Superlight, a machine learning-based logistics system provider, Howard Tenens logistics, supply chain management systems FuturePlus, Fareshare, and Google Cloud’s BigQuery and Vertex AI platforms.