Food Waste Reduction Topic of Talk at UKIVA Machine Vision Conference and Exhibition

A new technology that reduces food waste and successfully trialed in 23 IKEA stores in the U.K. will be the topic of a talk to be presented by Minh-Tri Pham at the opening of the UKIVA Machine Vision Conference and Exhibition in June.

The keynote address, “Sustainability in the Food Industry: AI Vision Tools Reduce Food Waste at IKEA,” will focus on Winnow Vision, a new technology that uses computer vision to help chefs easily pinpoint food waste in the kitchen and in doing so cut costs and save time.

The system takes images of waste food as it is thrown away. Using these images, the machine trains itself to recognize what has been thrown in the bin. Winnow’s test systems have reached and surpassed human levels of accuracy in identifying waste foods.

Over time, these systems enable food waste to be automatically registered without any human interaction.

Winnow has been testing the system in the field since late 2017 with two of their pioneering launch partners: IKEA and Emaar Hospitality Group. At IKEA, they are already live in every store across the U.K., officials said.