How Mel closed the deal with Amazon and Whole Foods

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

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

Now, with an official deal with Amazon and Whole Foods in place, the company’s plan to profit from handling other people’s food waste has become a little more public.

Whole Foods will deploy a commercial version of the Mill’s food waste bin in each of its grocery stores starting in 2027. The bins will grind up waste from the produce department and dry it, reducing costly landfill fees while also providing feed for the company’s egg producers. Both reduce a company’s overhead expenses and lower its environmental footprint.

Meanwhile, Mill’s Bins will collect data to help Whole Foods understand what’s being wasted and why, helping the grocer control costs more. “Ultimately, our goal is not only to make waste operations more efficient, but also to move upstream so that they waste less food,” Rogers said.

The company started selling food waste bins to families a few years ago. As you’d expect from the team that made the Nest thermostat, the devices are well-designed, and — based on Silicon Valley clichés — can be fun to use. My kids were kicked out of the boxes while testing the first and second generations.

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

“It’s actually kind of our enterprise sales strategy,” Rogers continued. “We have conversations with senior leadership at our different ideal clients, and if they don’t have a mill at home yet, we tell them, ‘Hey, try a mill at home, and see what your family thinks.’ It’s a surefire way to get people excited.”

The startup began in talks with Whole Foods about a year ago, Rogers said. In the following months, Mill offered the consumer version in some of the chain’s grocery stores.

Mel also developed artificial intelligence that uses an array of sensors to determine whether food that goes into the trash should remain on the shelf. Reducing “shrink” — the industry term for lost sales due to waste or theft — can give grocers an edge in an otherwise tough market.

Rogers said progress in large language models was key. When he and Harry Tannenbaum, Mel’s co-founder, were at Nest, it took dozens of engineers and “Google’s budget” more than a year to train Nest Cameras to recognize people and packages. With the new MBA, Mel only needed a few engineers and much less time to deliver superior results, according to Rogers, who said “AI is a huge enabler.”

Using AI allowed Mill to deliver commercial copy faster, diversifying its customer base and revenue source.

“If you have one channel, one customer, you’re fragile,” Rogers said. “I grew up at Apple during the iPod era,” he said. “Apple at the time was a one-legged company. The iPod represented 70% of the company’s revenue. That’s why we designed the iPhone.” Steve [Jobs] He pushed us hard about the iPhone because he was worried that people like Motorola — who were working on smartphones at the time — would start eating our lunch in the iPod business and that that would crush us. We needed to build another leg of the stool.

And it looks like Mel isn’t finished adding legs to his symbolic bench. Rogers said he is working on building municipal businesses as well.

“We continue to add more legs to the stool and add more variety to the business,” he said.