Nest co-founder tackling food waste
The device blends right into the room. It looks like a trash can — one of those sleek, steel models, cream-colored with a small foot pedal at the base.
Matt Rogers taps the pedal to open the bin’s lid and reveal a pile of what looks like thinly shaved brown mulch, the dehydrated remnants of three week’s worth of his colleague’s household kitchen scraps. This mush includes discarded fish bones, now unnoticeable. Fish, banana peels, eggshells, an entire turkey carcass after Thanksgiving — Rogers says it can all go in. He hired a mechanical engineer to design the grinders at the bin’s bottom, stainless steel paddles and hammer blades that churn and pulverize the foodstuff.
Thirteen years ago, Rogers, then a manager for Apple’s ipod division, co-founded Nest, the company that made internetconnected thermostats and effectively invented the smart home. Now Rogers wants to revolutionize another commonplace appliance. But this time he’s not selling a smart gadget; he’s trying to reinvent an entire system for managing food waste.
Rogers and Harry Tannenbaum, another Nest alum, have quietly built their new startup since early 2020. So quietly that they’ve hired nearly 100 people without sharing the company’s name or what they do. It’s called Mill, both the company and its 2-foot-tall kitchen bin that, as Rogers puts it, “dries, shrinks and de-stinks” all the food heaved in. You can only get the bin by signing up for Mill on a subscription plan, starting today at $33 a month.
When your bin fills up, you pour the dried remains into a cardboard box — Mill ships you these — and leave that on your porch, where it’s picked up and trucked to a facility that processes your kitchen scraps into a feedstock ingredient, before shipping it to a farm where it’s
fed to chickens. It’s a neat little loop: farm-to-table-to-farm.
Uneaten food is the most abundant material in landfills. It wastes nutrients, costs money to sort and never gets to hungry mouths. And it rots, releasing enough methane gas in the U.S. alone to equal the emissions of 274 natural gas power plants. No one has managed to keep large quantities of food out of dumps and reuse it effectively, nationwide, as Mill is setting out to do.
To work, Mill must pull off a logistics feat, coordinating with trucks, farms, city governments and federal regulators. Hardest of all will be convincing people to change what they do in their kitchens. Rogers sees altering consumer behavior as Silicon Valley’s forte.
“That’s our special sauce. That’s what we did at Nest. It’s what we did at Apple,” he says. “We don’t need a fusion energy breakthrough. This is not like the pinnacle of physics and rocket science. This is keeping food out of the trash. It’s literally
a solvable problem.”
Some 35 percent of all food made in the U.S. is discarded or lost. Landfills, brimming with excess food, emitted 109.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2020, more than half the total from natural gas systems, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Then there’s all the resources blown making food no one eats. The EPA estimates that each year food waste knocks out 14 billion pounds of fertilizer and enough water to quench 50 million households.
Project Drawdown, a research nonprofit, lists the solutions necessary to avoid global temperatures rising 2 degrees Celsius by the century’s end. Topping the list? Eliminating food waste.
Less than 6 million American households have access to curbside composting, according to research from Biocycle, an industry publication. Most composting facilities only accept yard waste. Besides, the better tactic, economically and environmentally,
is to feed excess food to people or animals.
REFED estimated that in 2019, households accounted for the largest portion of the 80.6 million tons of surplus food in the U.S.
In 2020, Harry Tannenbaum left his job as a director at Google, Nest’s owner, in search of climate-related work, and found himself sifting through PDFS on food waste. “You just start seeing it everywhere,” he says. Tannenbaum had a budding idea for a company and messaged Rogers, who, since leaving Google in 2019, had become an active climate investor. Rogers wanted in himself.
The pair rented an old Honeywell office in San Bruno, keeping the corporate sign up as a lark. Like Nest, Mill didn’t have to invent an appliance from scratch. Their bin works like other food dehydrators — tiny heaters and vents dry and remove moisture, and a charcoal filter, connected to the main bucket via a small hose, moderates odors. The bin plugs in and is designed to grind the day’s food during the night, emitting a hum somewhere between a refrigerator and a dishwasher.
A room in Mill’s office is devoted to stress-testing the products. There’s a row of machines rigged up to slam hard on the lids and pedals, gauging their endurance. Others get the “stink bombs” — putrid concoctions meant to see how well the bin masks smell. During a December visit, a Mill employee prepared a baggie of rotting squash, eggs and unrecognizable stuff to pour into a receptacle. Rogers gave it a sniff: “That’s pretty gnarly!” It’s effective, however. For the past year, his staff have been trialing bins in their own homes. A batch of recent pulverized scraps from a household of four smelled faintly of a musty wood chips.
The bin is equipped with a miniature scale to weigh discarded food. And it has Bluetooth, connecting to an app where consumers get FAQS — “Can I throw avocado pits in there?” (yes) — and a regular report of their disposal and emissions impact, built to convince people to toss and even use less food.
Once the bins are full and emptied into boxes — Mill predicts this will be every three weeks or so — U.S. Postal Service trucks pick them up along mail routes. Alyssa Pollack, Mill’s head of business, who joined from Uber, says the startup opted for USPS, in part, because of the limited carbon footprint. Mail trucks already visit homes, so pickups don’t add new vehicles to the road. The trucks will take boxes to Mill’s depots to strip out any contaminants and convert the foodstuff into chicken feed. Mill plans initial sites outside of Seattle and in the Northeast.
Mill says its bin uses about as much electricity as an energyefficient dishwasher and that its overall energy usage will be canceled out by the emissions savings from keeping food out of the dump.*