Winnow raises $12M Series B for its food waste solution for commercial kitchens

Winnow, the U.K. startup that has developed smart kitchen tech to help commercial kitchens reduce food waste, is disclosing $12 million in Series B funding.

Backing the round is Ingka Group (a strategic partner to the IKEA franchisee system), Mustard Seed, Circularity Capital, D: Ax and The Ingenious Group. It follows a recent $8 million loan from The European Investment Bank (EIB), meaning that Winnow has added $20 million of capital in the last month.

Counting global clients such as IKEA and the Armani Hotel in Dubai, Winnow is on a mission to offer the hospitality industry technology to help cut down on food waste by making commercial kitchens ‘smarter.’ Its latest Winnow Vision product automates waste tracking by using computer vision to track what food is being discarded and therefore enabling kitchens to make better inventory decisions.

Notably, the Winnow system claims to have already reached and surpassed human levels of accuracy in identifying food being thrown away. “This means for clients, over time, these systems will enable their kitchens to automatically register food waste without any human interaction. Food will be thrown in the bin and the data will be captured automatically,” says the company.

More broadly, the idea, as Winnow founder and CEO Marc Zornes likes to put it, is that what gets measured, gets managed. The startups says that kitchens using Winnow tend to see a 40-70% reduction in food waste within 6-12 months, driving food cost savings between 2-8% in total.

Citing its main costs as “hardware and service delivery for each unit deployed,” Zornes says Winnow will use the new cash injection to further improve its technology and focus on “doubling down” on product development. This will include investing in new QA engineers to enhance development, through to front end developers to improve its reporting features.