The Exchanges

Q as much control over it as they do over, for example, their power bill, but they are paying for it. Um, people would also be paying for mill. Similarly, how do you think about cost in terms of, uh, comparative, but also like, what will people bear? You know, how do you think about what costs you, what can you charge for this better experience of throwing out food waste?

A So the mill membership is going to cost about a dollar a day, uh, which, you know, it's like another kind of Netflix or YouTube subscription. Uh, and I think especially for, uh, Our early customers who are feeling the pain of throwing out food waste or may have tried composting in the past, like they're going to be keen to try something new. But for a city, actually, it's, it's really expensive. And, uh, it's one of the biggest items on a municipal budget. And it's either on your property taxes or you're paying every month. It's like another cell phone bill, frankly, for, for a household. And, I think for, for us in San Francisco and for a lot of the country, we have these things called pay-as-you-throw schemes, which means you pay per month based on the size of the trash cart at the curb. I think our family has a 96 gallon bin, and it's like 70 bucks a month. So what's cool is with Mill, we could downsize our trash bin to maybe a 32 gallon bin and probably save 20 or 30 dollars a month and get the Mill membership for almost nothing. So By pulling the food waste out of the trash stream, individuals could save money, but also cities will save money.

AI assessment note: “the mill membership is going to cost about a dollar a day”

Q going to want to bring this to market and what it's going to take to get consumers to adopt. Is it, is it, is the first step consumer awareness of food waste as a problem? Or do you think intuitively consumers will appreciate, even if not the climate impact, they'll appreciate the taking the bin out less frequently and the beautiful consumer product and all the other things you described.

A That's exactly right. So actually it's, it's multi-part. One is better kitchen. So less stinky food waste, no smells, no drippy bags, no fruit flies, no rats. That's, that's one part. Then there's the kind of the convenience of having to take out the trash, you know, once or twice a month as opposed to every day. That's a, that's a big part. And the third is like the emotional part of feeling good that your food waste is going to a higher and better use now. And, you know, we don't, we don't want people to throw out food because they're going to feed the chickens. The better thing to do would not be to throw the food out. But for the food that we can't or don't eat, you could feel better that it's going to a really good use in feeding animals to stay in the food system. So the way we go to market is actually multi, multi-pronged. One is direct to consumer. People go to mill.com. They sign up for a membership. They get the bin. They get the sendback experience. Uh, they get a better kitchen. That, that's, that's kind of one, one path. The other path is through their employer, through their city, kind of, uh, through their apartment complex. And we're, we're working with a bunch of different cities and companies to provide the mill membership to people, uh, kind of at scale.

AI assessment note: “One is better kitchen... Then there's the kind of the convenience”

Q One thing that I've learned in learning about Mill that is just an area I had never spent time understanding better is, like, what happens to end-of-use food today? When I throw a banana peel in the trash at home, What happens from there, typically?

A Uh, so it gets collected by a, by a usually diesel-powered garbage truck, uh, gets sent to a transfer station, and then gets dumped in the landfill, and You know, there's, there's actually costs associated with each of these steps, too. There's a cost associated with driving those trucks and that transportation, and there's a cost associating with tipping it in the landfill, and it's actually very expensive. It's one of the more expensive areas in any given municipality's budget, uh, and, but today it's the best solution that we have at scale, and, you know, part of coming at this problem with fresh eyes is there could be a new solution that A little bit more tech enabled solution. That's better for people at home. That's also better for municipalities at scale.

AI assessment note: “gets collected by a, by a usually diesel-powered garbage truck, uh, gets sent”

Q So let's talk through what the consumer experience is of mill. Like what, what, what are you doing? What actually happens? So I'm a homeowner. Uh, I've got lots of food waste, growing amount of food waste, as I described a minute ago. Um, what happens when I, how do I get a mill and what happens when I install it?

A So the mill membership is composed of three main parts. One is a new kind of bin for your kitchen, which is beautiful and easy to use. Think if the team at Apple or the team at Nest designed a kitchen bin. So what this bin does is it dries, shrinks, and de-stinks all the food that you don't eat. And what's great about this process is it makes it really small. So you think about, like, you fill up this bin every day with your scraps or the food that your kids throw on the floor, and you wake up the next morning, and it's effectively empty. And there's this kind of a little bit of coffee grounds at the bottom. We call it food grounds. It's basically just dried food. It's not gross, and it doesn't go bad. It's shelf-stable. What's cool about that is one, it says it doesn't smell, but two, but by being small and not gross, it means it's easier to collect and get it back to farms. So the next part of our system is a pathway to send the food back to farms, and we do that through the mail. Because this is small and preserved and not gross, Once a month or twice a month, you pour it in a box, you put it on your front porch or in your mail room, and the mail carrier will come in and collect it and send it back to us so that we can process it and get it back to a farm to feed animals. And the third part is just a better experience for your kitchen. No smells, no gross bins, and frankly, …

AI assessment note: “So the mill membership is composed of three main parts. One is a new kind”

Q And like, where in the process of, from the farm to after we eat, do we throw all that food out? Are you saying we throw out half the food in our homes and our restaurants and all that kind of stuff? Or is it just like all along this value chain, there's waste?

A Yeah, so there's waste all along the value chain. But actually, but if you look at kind of where the food we throw out comes from, about half of that comes from our houses, from our kitchen tables. Uh, and then there's kind of a even spread of restaurants, food service, the farms themselves, but actually, you know, farms, grocery stores are actually in the business of not wasting food. That's kind of, that's their bottom line. So really the bulk of food waste is us, which is, you know, again, astonishing. And if you think about those split second decisions, when you're sitting in your kitchen, prepping dinner for your family, uh, You know, it's a lot of work to have to think about separating out your food waste, or do you have a compost bin on your countertop? The easiest thing to do is throw it away, and that's why we have the problem.

AI assessment note: “there's waste all along the value chain. But actually... about half of that comes from our houses”

Q into something. They turned it into power in some cases and other cases into biogas or renewable natural gas, things like that. Um, aside from that though, where are we in terms of the world of landfills? Let's just focus on, on the U S like, do we have abundant landfill capacity? Um, That we can keep filling up? Are we running out of space? What does that look like?

A Yeah, landfill real estate is actually really hard to permit. So an area of kind of national concern is, as we start to fill up these landfills, what do you do? And I think about like in the New York City metropolitan area is a good example. Uh, when the Staten Island landfill got filled and closed and turned into a park, actually, which is pretty cool, they're now trucking waste like a hundred miles away. And think about, like, in the Seattle area. I think Seattle is putting their trash on trains all the way down to Oregon, which is just crazy. So, like, yeah, landfill real estate's a big deal. It's also really hard to create new ones. No one wants a landfill in their backyard. It's a huge environmental justice concern, and generally, landfills are placed in communities where, frankly, like, people are most impacted, and, uh, we liked, uh, As, as Mill looks to the future, how can we send fewer and fewer things to landfill, and maybe eventually can we send nothing to landfill?

AI assessment note: “landfill real estate is actually really hard to permit... as we start to fill up”

Q food waste to a landfill is especially bad. Um, how does that weigh against composting either, you know, if I doing composting myself or composting service, how does that weigh against, for example, I live in Berkeley, California, we have a green bin program, municipal green bin program where we put all of our organic waste. Um, how do we think about all those things from an emissions perspective specifically?

A Right. So, so first, uh, I think only about five percent of households have access to a green bin program, so they're actually pretty rare. From an emissions perspective, composting is much better than landfill because you avoid those methane emissions from the landfill. Uh, you do have Uh, you know, biogenic CO two emissions from composting. But again, like it's much better than sending things to landfill. But the best thing to do with food actually is to keep it as food and avoid having to grow more crops and more food to basically to, to, to replace itself. Uh, so if you think about like the composting process, you're effectively feeding those calories and nutrients, uh, to microbes. And then those microbes then, you know, create byproducts that then feed the soil, which then feed more plants. The best thing to do with food waste is actually to feed it to someone. And we can't always feed it to a person, but the next best thing would be to feed it to an animal. So you could avoid all of the emissions of having to grow more crops to feed those animals. Something like one-third of the arable land on Earth is just to create food for livestock. It's an insane amount of land and energy and water just to feed the animals that feed us. So the best thing to do with our food waste actually would be to feed those animals. And that's exactly what Mill is doing.

AI assessment note: “From an emissions perspective, composting is much better than landfill because you avoid those methane”

Q So landfill, particularly bad, because food waste goes to landfill, turns into methane, and Methane sucks. Everybody who's listening to this podcast knows methane particularly sucks. Um, what about compost? Lots of folks, though, I would suspect you probably know these numbers. It's, it's still a fairly small minority of the population that, that compost. But if you do compost, uh, what does that do?

A So, uh, composting returns, uh, the nutrients to a, to the soil. So the output of composting is a soil amendment. Actually, in the process of composting does create emissions too. Uh, Composting is really good. It's a circular solution. Uh, composting is really good for, like, things like yard waste or agricultural waste, things that are really bulky. Composting is really not great for food waste. Uh, food waste is kind of gloopy. You know, that's a technical term. Uh, and large-scale composters actually have, have a lot of trouble with food waste, especially because there's a lot of contamination, too. Uh, the best thing you can do with food is to feed it to someone. And if you can't feed it to someone, you should feed it to an animal. You should keep it in the food system. And that was, The big aha moment for us at Mill is that we could keep food in the food system in this new circular way.

AI assessment note: “composting returns, uh, the nutrients to a, to the soil.”

Q looked at a lot of this stuff as well. So for example, shelf life extension, how do we make, uh, produce last longer so that we don't, so it doesn't go rotten and we don't throw it out. You know, what do you think of as in this broad category of like, how do we create less food waste? What do you think of as being the promising solutions there?

A I'm super excited about some of the new technology around supply chain management and helping restaurants order the right amount of produce that they're going to sell and You know, helping restaurants become more efficient. Same with grocery stores. Uh, there's some really good new software solutions there. There's great companies looking at new coatings, like a peel, that are going to extend the shelf life of produce. This is awesome. Again, getting back to the, the problem, about half of food waste is from our kitchens. So, you know, we, we could go and we could help restaurants, and we could help grocery stores, and we should do all those things. Like, in, in the traditional, like, how do we solve climate change, we have to do everything fashion. Uh, we hate, we need to do everything, but we have to get to the root of the problem, which is, today, the easiest thing to do in your kitchen is to throw things in the garbage.

AI assessment note: “I'm super excited about some of the new technology around supply chain management”

Q Is this, uh, you taking over a portion of their responsibilities and refuse collection? Should this ultimately be something that cities primarily distribute? Uh, do they have a, a, you know, centralization function? Do you always want mill to be where the The food waste gets sent to, or would you at some point send it to a city processing facility? Like, what's the, what's the role of the city?

A So we think cities are great partners, and there are lots of different flavors of what different waste services exist in various cities. So some cities have a more kind of centralized municipal model, like, like in the energy spacing, like Austin Energy, where it's municipally owned and run, uh, like Tacoma, Washington is kind of in that flavor, like where the city runs their own waste, uh, Uh, and some cities have a hybrid kind of private public model, and some are completely privatized. So there's a lot of different models there. I think as we grow, we would like to partner with cities. Actually, we've got about a dozen pilots kind of in work right now, where we're going to be deploying our memberships in partnership with cities to their residents to help them achieve their zero waste goals, or their food diversion goals, or their climate goals. Again, like, food waste is, One of the biggest parts of a city's carbon footprint. It's one of the biggest parts of their zero waste plan. And even in a city that's doing everything right today, like, you know, Seattle, Tacoma area as an example, they have a green bin program, which people still don't use because in your kitchen, the easiest thing to do is throw it in the trash.

AI assessment note: “we've got about a dozen pilots kind of in work right now, where we're going to be deploying”

Q know, mainstream adoption, will they act based on, let's just say, you know, you could snap your fingers and that consumer awareness went from 25% to a hundred percent. Everybody knew that food waste was a big, was a big climate problem, not just a landfill capacity, sort of general environmental problem. Do you think that that would spark behavior change, or is climate not enough of a behavior motivator?

A I mean, at the end of the day, people are busy, and I have two little kids at home. We have a super busy household, and if there's not an easy thing to do, we're gonna throw the food in the garbage. Especially, like, when the kids drop, like, the pizza on the floor, and there's, you know, like, you know what I'm talking about. Like, there's the, there's the food you can't eat, and the easiest thing to do today is to throw it away, and Today, there just isn't a better way to do it, and a way that's frictionless, and that's just incredibly practical, and that's why Mill built this new solution. It just, today, there just isn't an easier way, and when I think about Achieving kind of mainstream and being everywhere. Uh, the way you do that is you make a new daily ritual. You make a new habit, and you make that habit just so frictionless. That's what we did at Apple with the iPhone. Uh, it's what we did at Nest. Just the, it's the easiest product to use, and you just turn the dial, and you look for the leaf, and you save energy. And with Mill, with our, with our new solution, it is, it's easier than throwing things in the garbage.

AI assessment note: “if there's not an easy thing to do, we're gonna throw the food”

Q to the solution you came to? Like, so once you decided, okay, food waste is a big problem. This is an area we could innovate on a consumer product that is going to Going to be frictionless and is going to be delightful and is going to solve all these problems. Like, what were your, what were your criteria that you came in with and then describe the ultimate solution?

A So we've been working on this for about two years now. Uh, we've got a team of about a hundred and they're some of the best folks that I've worked with throughout my career at Apple or Nest, but also, uh, a pretty large contingency of folks from kind of the Uber and Lyft industry. Kind of distributed infrastructure and logistics DNA, and a lot of folks who have worked in public policy or in the regulatory space, or actually a few have even worked in waste management. So it's a, it's a pretty diverse team of folks with a lot of different skill sets. And when we approached the solution, we looked at how can we eliminate friction at every step? How can we make it the easiest thing? And also, how can we make it delightful? How can we make it something that's fun that your kids will want to get involved in? Uh, and how can this be something that could really achieve scale?

AI assessment note: “we looked at how can we eliminate friction at every step?”