How Mill landed deals with Amazon and Whole Foods

The Mill may have started with homes, but co-founder and CEO Matt Rogers says the food waste startup has long aspired to expand into commercial customers.

“This has been part of our plan since the Series A deck,” Rogers told TechCrunch.

Now, with a formal deal between Amazon and Whole Foods, the company’s plans to profit from processing other people’s food waste have become a little more public.

Starting in 2027, Whole Foods plans to introduce commercial-scale versions of Mill’s food waste bins to its grocery stores. The bins will crush and dewater waste from the produce sector, reducing expensive landfill fees while providing feed for the company’s egg producers. Both reduce a company’s overhead costs and reduce its environmental footprint.

At the same time, Millsbin collects data to help Whole Foods understand what goes to waste and why, allowing the grocer to further control costs. “Ultimately, our goal is to not only make waste processing more efficient, but also to actually go upstream to reduce food waste,” Rogers said.

The company started selling food bins to households a few years ago. As you’d expect from the team that created the Nest thermostat, the device is well designed and, to borrow a Silicon Valley cliché, comfortable to use. My kids had a blast out of the trash can while testing the 1st and 2nd generation.

“Starting with the consumer was very intentional because we’re building proof points, we’re building data, we’re building brand, we’re building loyalty,” Rogers said. Many members of the Whole Foods team were already familiar with Mill when the two companies began discussions.

“This is actually kind of our enterprise sales strategy,” Rogers continued. “We’re having conversations with senior executives at a variety of ideal customers, and if they don’t already have a mill at home, we say, ‘Let’s try a mill at home and see what our families think.’ That’s a surefire way to get people excited.”

Rogers said the startup began discussions with Whole Foods about a year ago. Over the next few months, Mill demonstrated the consumer version at some of the chain’s grocery stores.

Mill has also developed an AI that uses a variety of sensors to determine whether food that has been placed in the bin should still be on the shelf. Minimizing “shrink” (an industry term for lost sales due to waste or theft) gives grocers an advantage in a competitive market.

Rogers said advances in large-scale language models are key. When he and Mill co-founder Harry Tannenbaum were at Nest, it took more than a year and dozens of engineers and “Google’s budget” to train Nest cameras to recognize people and packages. Using the new LLM, the mill required only a few engineers and was able to significantly reduce time to produce superior results, according to Rogers. “AI is a huge enabler.”

The use of AI has allowed Mill to deliver commercial versions faster, diversifying its customer base and revenue streams.

“If you’re a single-channel, single-customer business, you’re vulnerable,” Rogers said. “I grew up with Apple during the iPod era,” he said. “At the time, Apple was a one-legged business. The iPod was about 70% of the company’s revenue. That’s why we created the iPhone. Steve. [Jobs] Because he was worried that people like Motorola, who were working on smartphones at the time, would start eating our lunch with the iPod business and that would put us out of business. I needed to make another leg for the stool. ”

And it looks like Mill isn’t done adding legs to that metaphorical stool just yet. Rogers said he is also working on building municipal businesses.

“We will continue to add legs to chairs and add more diversity to our business,” he said.