How Mill closed deals with Amazon and Whole Foods

The Mill may have started with families, but co-founder and CEO Matt Rogers says the food waste startup has been eager to expand its business clientele.

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

Now, it’s an official deal that’s sealed Amazon and Whole Foods The company’s policy to benefit from the management of food waste other people a little in the open.

Whole Foods will ship a commercial version of Millfood waste bins in all of its food stores starting in 2027. These bins will digest and dispose of waste from the produce department, reducing expensive landfill costs and providing food to the company’s egg producers. They both reduce the company’s head and reduce the environmental impact.

At the same time, Mill’s databases will collect data to help Whole Foods understand what is wasted and why, helping retailers manage costs. “Ultimately, our goal is not only to make waste more efficient, but also to move it upstream so it wastes less food,” Rogers said.

The company started selling disposable food bins to households a few years ago. As you might expect from the team behind the Nest thermostat, the devices are well-designed and – to lean on the Silicon Valley cliché – they can be fun to use. My kids were chased into bins and tried first and second generations.

“The consumer startup was intentional because you build testimonials, you build data, brand, loyalty,” Rogers said. Many members of the Whole Foods team already knew about Mill when the two companies first started talking.

“It’s our way of doing business,” Rogers continued. “We talk to senior leaders at our various clients, and if they haven’t had Mill at home, we say, ‘Hey, try Mill at home, see what your family thinks.’ That is a surefire way to please people.”

The startup began discussions with Whole Foods about a year ago, Rogers said. In the following months, Mill introduced the brand to consumers in other grocery stores.

Mill has also developed an AI that uses various sensors to determine whether food that goes into the bin should remain on the shelf. Reducing “slump” – the company’s time to sell products lost due to waste or theft – can give retailers a boost in the mid-market.

The progress of the big brands has been significant, Rogers said. When he and Mill’s co-founder Harry Tannenbaum were at Nest, it took several engineers and “Google’s budget” more than a year to train Nest Cameras to recognize people and packages. With the new LLMs, Mill needs fewer engineers and less time to deliver better results, according to Rogers, who said “AI is a huge enabler.”

The use of AI allowed Mill to quickly deliver a business model, differentiating its customers and source of income.

“If you’re a one-channel, one-customer business, you’re fragile,” Rogers said. “I grew up at Apple in the iPod era,” he said. “Apple at that time was a one leg business. The iPod was like 70% of the company’s revenue. This is why we did the iPhone. Steve (Jobs) pushed us hard on the iPhone because he was worried that people like Motorola – who were working on mobile phones at the time – would start eating lunch on the iPod business and that would break us. We needed to build another leg.

And it seems Mill isn’t done adding legs to his symbolic stool. Rogers said it is working to rebuild the downtown business community.

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