Project description
Reducing food waste
The EU-funded Prognolite project aims to combat food waste within the restaurant sector with the use of artificial intelligence. Around 10.5 million tonnes of edible food is wasted each year by EU restaurants, mainly due to the difficulty of estimating food demand. To tackle this, the Swiss Prognolite GmbH has developed a software that accurately predicts food demand and promises the reduction of food waste by up to 50 %. The software has already caught the eye of 6 renowned Swiss and German multi-unit restaurants, testing it in 12 of their restaurants, reporting reduced food costs by up to 6 % and staff costs by 5-15 %.
Objective
Prognolite GmbH is a Swiss SME that is using artificial intelligence to combat the €20 billion food waste crisis within the restaurant sector. Through Prognolite software, restaurants can reduce food waste by up to 50% by accurately predicting food demand. The software has already caught the eye of six renowned Swiss and German multi-unit restaurants (including an international chain), testing it in 12 of their restaurants, reporting reduced food costs by up to 6%, and staff costs by 5-15%.
10.5 million tonnes of edible food is wasted each year by EU restaurants, primarily due to the difficulty of estimating the exact food demand. This complexity of accurately forecasting sales is causing restaurants to (i) dispose to waste over 10% of the purchased food and (ii) reduce efficiency of staff planning, resulting in poor customer service and unnecessary high staff costs. Traditional methods of demand forecasting of manually analysing historical data are inaccurate, highly dependent on staff experience and time consuming. The few digital solutions that exist fail to, within one software, optimise the two cost centres (food and wages) that gobble 80% of restaurateurs’ costs and often unaffordable to many. Moreover, most of these solutions are designed by Point-of-Sale (POS) systems providers and are only compatible with their own POS who cannot scale in an EU and global market where there are numerous POS systems.
As such, we have a unique advantage within the burgeoning €2.64tn global restaurant/food service market that has >2.5mn restaurants (EU & US only). With a product that enables restaurants to save, within a month, up to 8x what they would have paid us and widest POS compatibility (>80% of EU & US), we seek to be the global leader in demand forecasting solutions for the restaurant sector. We have estimated that we will need an additional investment of €1.3 million to achieve that and bring our product to the market.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
8610 USTER
Switzerland
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.