• Winnow

  Participated · Series C · Jun 2023

  Winnow develops AI-enabled systems that recognise and record food waste at the point it is thrown away, capturing 100% of the waste stream and delivering analytics to identify where wastage occurs. Its tools enable kitchens to optimise operations, change behaviour, and reduce waste; customers average a 50% reduction in food waste and 2–8% cost savings. Winnow is deployed across more than 2,000 sites in over 70 countries and counts major hospitality brands among its users. The company is headquartered in London with offices in Singapore, Chicago, Dubai, and Cluj-Napoca, and is a Certified B Corporation. Winnow plans to expand further into Asia (notably Singapore, Japan, and Indonesia) and to continue enhancing its AI capabilities to bring greater profitability and sustainability to commercial kitchens. Winnow builds computer-vision and AI tools that identify wasted food items in real time and provide analytics to help kitchen teams pinpoint waste sources. Its solution is designed for the hospitality sector, where the company estimates more than $100 billion of food is wasted annually. Winnow says its analytics have helped clients cut waste in half by enabling operational improvements. The company reports its solutions have saved $174 million and reduced 217,000 tonnes of CO2e emissions worldwide, equivalent to nearly 50,000 cars off the road for a year. Winnow plans to use new funding to further develop and expand its AI capabilities and increase impact across its customer base. The product-focused approach pairs automated detection with actionable insights for operators to reduce costs and emissions. Winnow develops smart kitchen technology, notably its Winnow Vision product, which uses computer vision to automatically track discarded food. The company says Winnow Vision has reached and surpassed human levels of accuracy in identifying food waste. Winnow serves commercial hospitality clients including Ikea and the Armani Hotel in Dubai and aims to enable better inventory decisions by automatically capturing discard data. The startup reports that kitchens using its system typically see a 40–70% reduction in food waste within 6–12 months, driving food-cost savings of 2–8%. Financially, Winnow recently raised $12M in a Series B and secured an $8M loan from the European Investment Bank, adding $20M of capital in the last month. It plans to use the new funds to improve its technology and double down on product development, including hiring QA engineers and front-end developers, while noting its main costs are hardware and service delivery for each deployed unit. Winnow develops the Winnow Waste Monitor, a system of smart scales and a tablet app that lets kitchen staff log discarded food; data are uploaded to the cloud, analysed by Winnow’s algorithm, and shared to reduce waste. Launched in May 2013 and led by founder and CEO Marc Zornes, the company serves more than 600 commercial kitchens including IKEA, Compass Group and AccorHotels. Winnow says its customers collectively save about 4,300 tonnes of food waste annually and that customers typically cut food waste in half within 12 months, reducing food purchasing costs by 3–8%. To support this growth the company disclosed a further $7.4M in funding. The product targets both environmental impact and margin improvement for thin-margin hospitality operators by turning waste data into actionable insights. Winnow offers a set of smart scales that sit under kitchen bins and a tablet app that lets staff log discarded food; that data is uploaded to the cloud and analyzed by Winnow’s algorithm. The system delivers daily reports to chefs highlighting top areas of waste by value so they can adjust operations and reduce costs. Winnow says clients typically see a 30–60% uplift in food profitability by cutting food waste. The company launched in May 2013 and is London-based, and it reports working with over 200 kitchens, including Compass Group, Accor Hotels and River Cottage Canteens. Winnow recently opened an office in Singapore to serve the Asia–Pacific market. It raised a $3.3M Series A to further develop the product and support global expansion.

No current team members are available.