Rethinking Waste With Marc Zornes CEO Co-Founder of Winnow

Tune in to this episode where we talk to Mark Zornes, the founder of Winnow Technologies. Marc discusses the mission of Winnow, which is to help chefs reduce food waste and save money. Marc explained that a third of all food around the world is wasted, resulting in economic loss and environmental damage. Winnow uses artificial intelligence and computer vision in order to:

·      track and analyze food waste in commercial kitchens

·      helps chefs understand and reduce their waste pattern

·      make better production and purchasing decisions, and ultimately reduce food waste

Marc shares success stories of working with clients such as Hilton, Marriott, and Iberostar, who have achieved significant reductions in food waste and he emphasizes the importance of valuing food and changing the mindset around waste. Marc also discussed the economic benefits of reducing food waste and the need for businesses to track and measure the impact of their efforts. 

Listen in to hear how the role of technology enhances creativity, and culture change in driving sustainable practices in the hospitality industry.

#SustainableHospitality, #Sustainabilitypodcast, #Hospitalitypodcast, #FoodWasteReduction #WinnowTechnologies, #ZeroWasteKitchens #F&B, #CircularEconomy, #SustainableFood #RegenerativeTourism, #GreenBreakfast, #GreenRamadan, #Hilton, #IberostarWaveOfChange, #CuttingFoodWaste, #FoodWastePrevention, #FoodTech #SustainabilityROI, #ESGHospitality, #ReduceReuseRefuse, #FoodRescue, #SustainableChefs, #WasteNotWantNot, #SustainableProcurement, #HospitalityInnovation

Transcript

Amy Wald (00:07):

Well, hello everyone. Welcome back to the Sustainable Hospitality Podcast. We are so glad you joined us because today we're going to have an exciting conversation with Mark Zornes, the founder of Winow Technologies, and there's a little history on the name of how he came up with that, but I'm coming to you from Columbus, Ohio. And Mark, you're coming to us from Chicago. Thank you for joining us today. 

Marc Zornes (00:35):

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Really, really glad to be here. 

Amy Wald (00:38):

Thank you so much. Well, we are going to solve the world's waste problems and under an hour today, I cannot wait to tell people who don't know about your technology and how it came to be all about it. But you are working with some great brands, you're saving them a lot of money and you're really helping to tackle one of the biggest problems we have in the world. But I want to let you get to that. So Mark, will you tell us how you came to be the founder of Winnow and a little bit of history behind there? 

Marc Zornes (01:17):

Yeah, for sure. Well, I've worked in food my entire life. I sort of came out of school working for one of the biggest food distributors in the us and I both developed kind of a big respect for the food supply chain, but also a desire to see the food supply chain evolve. It feeds billions of people every single day. It's incredibly complex, but we've grown this food supply chain and the way we eat has been for so many years focused on increasing output to be able to feed, to feed more people. And for me, what really became center was as I evolved in my career, I got more concerned about the topic of climate change and then beyond just climate change issues around water and land use. And I learned more as well through the work that I was doing when I was doing some consulting in the food industry and around sustainability with McKinsey, just how much food is actually thrown away. 

(02:28)
And it was really kind of when I was at McKinsey, I was working for the McKinsey Global Institutes writing a report called Resource Revolution. And what we were looking at, we were looking at what opportunities are there out there for what we call resource productivity, which is more efficient uses of resources. And through that work, the analysis that we looked at that showed that around a third of all food around the world is wasted, that it's about what's over $1 trillion a year of economic value that is lost, but it's also 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. A very significant part of the water that we use around the world goes into our agricultural system kind of over 70%. And if we waste a third of that food, gosh, think about how much water is actually being wasted in those cases. And it was kind of to me that said, actually, look, if this much food's being wasted around the world, there absolutely has to be solutions to solve it. 

(03:29)
And so I left that, started off actually working with the McKinsey office to try to figure out how their staff restaurant could throw away less food and proved out a really interesting prototype case within that. As they say, the rest is history, which is why I built Winnow and Winnows mission is to help inspire chefs and see that food is too valuable to waste. The biggest thing we care about is how much food waste we're preventing, which is actually how much money we're saving our clients. We believe that there doesn't need to be a trade off between the environmental right thing to do and frankly the economically right thing to do. We build technology that helps kitchens understand and prevent food waste and ultimately help 'em cut their food waste in half by value and save some real money in the meantime. 

Amy Wald (04:22):

So much to unpack in that, and I think a couple of things you touched on that are really interesting is it's about rethinking how we view waste, right? It's a commodity. How can we utilize that and look at it in a lens? And I don't believe people realize either that when you're throwing, let's just say a banana away, it's not just a banana. There was water and energy and all kinds of resources utilized in order to produce that. So it's kind of a full circle resource save and we'll talk about that circular idea later. But I would ask you then why waste versus energy and water? But to me it makes sense because I think you're tackling more than just one system. Is that correct? 

Marc Zornes (05:22):

Yeah. I think that in the world of thinking about challenges we have around averting climate change, and now as you think more expansively, the sort of thoughts around planetary boundaries that Johan Strom talks about, food is so much at the center of many of those boundary issues, the water use, the greenhouse gas emissions, the nitrogen use and so forth. And in one way, from sort of a purely economic perspective, you can focus on waste and you can say actually, if you're wasting something, nature doesn't waste. But if you're wasting something, you're throwing away value, you're not valuing something and you can say that banana, it might be sort of at a market price. By the way, prices of food have gone dramatically up as we know. And even though food price inflation has slowed, food prices haven't necessarily dramatically come back down. Many of the clients we're talking to are still facing much higher food costs than they were before the pandemic that's translating into higher consumer prices. 

(06:37)
But all of that, and I think we have to appreciate this, is all of those higher prices aren't even yet taking into account what really probably should be the cost of some of these resources, right? From an agricultural perspective, we don't really properly put a value on the water that we use. We know that there's no carbon cost associated with these things, and as we need to start putting a price on some of these resources to send those market signals, it's going to start to show the true value of all these resources that we're using. So to kind of unpick that, what I would say is there's trillion dollars being thrown away of food, but if you actually valued all of the undervalued resources that go into making that number actually would be a whole lot higher. And so why we focus on food, it's an area that needs a lot of development. 

(07:30)
It's an area that needs a lot of investment to be able to shift the system. We think waste is a wonderful point where it's kind of a no-brainer to go after it. I'm yet to meet someone who likes wasting things and sort of says, actually food waste is something we want to continue to do. So it's kind of a common ground across all different walks of life, all different political spectrums. If we can just reduce waste, that's got to be a good thing. And so we think it's a great lever to start at in terms of making our food system more efficient, making industry more efficient and a real win-win. 

Amy Wald (08:10):

And gosh, not only, I mean of course the money is important, but when you think about a third of all food produced is going to waste, we've been having this narrative for decades about how we could save people out of poverty that are facing food insecurity. If we could just be more intentional and deliberate and put our heads together. So why aren't we doing it? Why at the end of the day you want your business to feel like you have made an impact on something that is so important on humanity. So explain then to us, give us a little bit of the history you mentioned, just a brief before we started recording what the name Winow means, which is very apropos to what it does, and then explain the technology to us. 

Marc Zornes (09:07):

So winow is actually an old agricultural term to Winow wheat is to separate the grain from the chaff or kind of the outer casing, and it's kind of an analog to what we do. Winow is a technology, we basically use artificial intelligence. So we put cameras over bins, over bins where foods thrown away. We use scales underneath those bins to measure how much was thrown away. And then our system actually takes a picture of what was thrown away before what was thrown into the bin. That's new. We basically identify what's new in the bin and we have a global computer vision algorithm that we have trained to identify what that food is, whether that be wasted stuff that's spoiled, whether it be food that was just trimmings kind of off cuts of product or whether it be stuff of real value, maybe like some cooked salmon or a lasagna or like a hot Maine kind of identifying those recipes or those ingredients, understanding what the cost of that is to the kitchen and what it costs them to buy that food because our customers can give us data on what their food costs are. 

(10:23)
And then we take all of that data, we make it very easy to collect the information in the kitchen because all you really have to do is just throw the food in the bin and the AI is going to come in and help gather that data. We take that information up into the cloud, we analyze that information, we develop analytics for chefs so that in the morning when they come in they could understand how much food was thrown away the previous day, what the key items were, what the trends are around what's being wasted. We help them set targets and then we help them drive change. So really what we do is we have tools that say, here's where you're making too much food. Here's where you need to adjust your production. Here's where actually you have an opportunity to purchase differently. Here's an area where you could be using more of the product that's coming in the door to be able to maximize the yield on what's coming into that.

(11:15)
And then we have a team that will help the chefs in the first a hundred days get really used to using that data as part of their process. And that team is responsible for helping our chefs and our kitchens get on the journey of cutting their food waste for that. And it is really powerful. What gets measured gets managed, and I think one of the things we find when we go into the kitchens is that it's really common for the amount of waste that actually happens in a kitchen to be underestimated. And it puzzled me for a while as to kind of why that happens. And we know that about five to 15% of the food they buy by value ends up in the bin and over 70% of that typically happens before it even gets to a plate. This is stuff that's literally within the control of the kitchen. 

(12:18)
But this waste happens in little parts of the process. At the end of the day when someone's having to clean up the kitchen and clean up the offer, then they're throwing food away and often the chef or the culinary team isn't around to see that. And so we're very good at taking the waste and kind of putting it out of sight and that's great from a health and hygiene perspective, but we want to provide the visibility and the understanding of what's actually happening to be able to unpack that and to prevent it from happening in the first place. And it's through that prevention that we typically can help our customers save 2% to 8% on their food costs. We can deliver an ROI of over 200% within the first 12 months, and it's why we work with thousands of kitchens around the world and continue to grow with what we're doing. 

Amy Wald (13:11):

And when you think about the margins that hospitality and food, the food industry typically has, the restaurant industry I should say, they are operating in such small margins. That's a big deal. And so help me understand. So you're not just going to be able to help them with procurement and placing orders and reducing, but now you have the ability to help them create maybe new menu items with what is there, train their kitchen staff better on recipes. And so you are really touching a lot of areas that filter into customer satisfaction, honestly. That's amazing. Tell us about some of the clients you're working with if you can. I know some of them are, maybe we aren't able to talk about, but I know that you are working with some big brands, which is just proof of the success of this technology and your teams, which by the way, those teams are called customer success teams and I love that because you can't just plug something in and expect it to work. You really need training and you need that additional support. So talk to us about some of those projects you've worked on and what's happening really out there in the marketplace. 

Marc Zornes (14:44):

So today, winnow is in well over 2000 kitchens around the world. We're in over countries. We work with a lot of the leaders in the hospitality industry, so we work in a number of segments of hospitality. We work in quick service, we work in institutional food service. And what that means is like staff, restaurants and universities and hospitals and schools. We work in hotels, we work in resorts, we work in casinos and cruise lines. Kind of the common thread for us is if you're spending over a quarter million dollars a year on food and you are preparing some of that food in advance of service and you've got a high volume operation, you've probably got quite a bit of food waste. And if we can help you analyze and understand that we can deliver a really good return on investment to be able to make that happen. 

(15:44)
Some of those brands we in the travel and tourism industry, we work with Hilton in a very large number of hotels around the world. We work with Marriott. We just announced a rollout with Marriott's uk, Ireland and Nordic's business across all of their managed properties. I'm really excited to see the impact there. We work with the core hotels in a large number of their properties across a lot of their brands. We work with four Seasons, almost every major hotel brand we've got operations with and we're the global partner, the preferred partner for a vast majority of them as well. And the types of things that we're doing with them is we're going into their hotels typically into their main restaurants, other high volume operations, banqueting staff, restaurants and so forth, implementing our technology, helping them make better production decisions, helping them make better purchasing decisions and as you say, really helping them derive a culture change inside the kitchen that is around minimizing waste, but doing it also from a data first led perspective to really have the confidence that they understand where the opportunities are and that they're focusing in on what matters beyond those hotel groups. 

(17:13)
We also work in areas like all inclusive resorts. So I Bureau Star for example has rolled out winnow globally and I can tell a couple of stories about some of those hotels and resorts if you'd like me to a couple of vignettes around the work we're doing there. But the common thread really is all of these brands have a stated aspiration to reduce food waste. So there's a knowledge and an understanding that they need to do something about it, and they look to us as a partner and a tool to be able to help them do that at scale. All of these hotel groups have hundreds or thousands of properties. How do you make sort of widespread institutional change to be able to make that happen? And that's really what we focus on building the tools to be able to enable. 

Amy Wald (18:05):

And when you talk about creating your ESG, right, I mean this is just a no-brainer if you need to start formulating that this is a huge win and brands like that, it's a good technology when they're using it because like you said, they're operating at such scale that they understand this is about business first, bottom line and then doing good typically precedes that. But regardless, and I have to believe that when you start to implement this and those employees in those kitchens start to see the change that happens, there's a whole nother lift that they're going to get from knowing that just the things that they're doing every day in those kitchens are making a difference in people's lives. Don't you think? 

Marc Zornes (19:08):

I completely agree. Let me give you one example, right? Okay. So we're doing some really cool work at the moment with Hilton, big fan of the team. They're EA team VP of FN. I'm a bank, Sebastian knows who's their director of culinary. We've got a couple of programs with them that both drive real value in the kitchen, but what I'm also excited about is it communicates what they're doing in a really sort of full way. So we have two programs, one we call the Green Breakfast Program and one we call the Green Ramadan program. So the Green Breakfast Program is really starting from the place that every hotel's got a breakfast. In fact, it's probably a big part of the f and b offer that they have is kind of when you're staying at a hotel, you're going to have some breakfast at the hotel, you may have a restaurant that brings people in, you may have other things, but kind of the breakfast is that sort of common thread across all of that. 

(20:14)
And what we did was we worked with a bunch of hotels with Hilton and we said, let's really understand the waste that happens in breakfast. They augmented that as well with understanding the carbon footprint and doing a whole lot more around that. We worked with unap as well to be able to make that happen. The United Nations Environmental program and the work we did with Green Breakfast was we did a few things. First of all, we went in and really analyzed where is all the waste happening around breakfast before it gets to a plate and optimizing production, getting people to make the right amount at the right time, getting that food to be as fresh as possible, not having the eggs that sit out there from the beginning of service all the way to the end or that they cooked a bunch ahead of time. 

(20:59)
Really kind of dialing in that production using our technology, identifying ways that you can take products that would've otherwise been thrown away and turn them into new dishes. Actually on the offer, there's a chef in the uua e chef Layla that has helped to do a lot of work with this and kind of even goes out and kind of does videos on some of the recipes that they've identified that you can then do that are these delicious recipes that are using stuff that was honestly, we shouldn't call it waste. We should call it food. It's waste when it goes in the bin, but if you can intercept that and you can take that food and you can turn it into something beautiful and delicious, then that's actually what we're focusing the energy on making happen. When we did that, we cut what we call pre-consumer waste, which is the amount of waste that happens before it gets to plate. 

(21:51)
We cut that by over 70%. Okay, but we do that all the time. That's no big deal, but that that's kind of like what we expect to do. I mean these guys do a phenomenal, they lean so much, it was kind of like that of course isn't going to happen. The other really cool thing that we did was we really started thinking about behavioral science and we started thinking about what can we understand around what the guests are doing? And we develop these cards that are sort of slight nudges to people think about taking the right amount, but that's also been done from time to time. The novel thing we did with them that we're excited about is we also began to look at what was coming back from plate. And because we can use our AI in our photos to understand what's not being eaten, we identified that there were actually just a few products that were being left over on the plate. 

(22:48)
Of course, if you looked at everything, yes, there's a little bit of everything that ends there, but a majority was made up by just a few dishes there, breads and pastries, some of their fruits, some of the sausages. And actually what that meant was from a culinary perspective, we went back to the chefs and we shared this data and they said, I wonder if on some of these is the portion size not right. And they made some adjustments on the portion sizes of what they built. They made some adjustments on how that food was displayed, changing what's called in sort of an environmental perspective or behavior change perspective, a choice architecture if you will, changing kind of what gets presented to the diners in a way that they're having all of the choice they want, having a wonderful culinary experience, but having a higher likelihood to just take what they need on the plate. 

(23:42)
It's like if I have a cresson and the cresson relatively large and I have lots of things on a buffet, actually that may not be the right thing to do. Maybe I need to have a slightly smaller one so that I can kind of get that choice and take that. And we cut what was coming back from the plate by over 50% as well. And that led to an over 60% of 62% reduction in food waste across both what was on the plate and what happened in the kitchen. And to us, that was really kind of an example of when you take this stuff seriously, what can be achieved. And the lessons we hope to share is, again, going back to it, every hotel's got a breakfast, we're now replicating and we've done that with a program called Green Ramadan during the holy month of Ramadan. 

(24:28)
It really is. We have these iftars, which are these big feasts, and to be clear across lots of religions, when you have these sort of religious festivities, there are these huge sort of culinary affairs. We talk in the US about how in Thanksgiving food waste goes up. This is no different. But around a lot of these, we are thinking about being grateful for what we have. We're thinking about the blessings that the food brings us, right? And yet we waste so much of it. Why do we set it up that way? Is there a smarter way to do it? And so we run these green Ramadan programs and the Hilton team have branded it and I love it, which is right twice the blessings, half the food waste. And that messaging then gets carried over to the guests in a way that I think presents sustainable consumption without being in any way preachy or anything like that, having a phenomenal presentation of a food, but just running it in a smarter way. And you can take that sort of story with Hilton and that is a lot of the type of work that we do with other brands. It's a lot of the work that we do in sort of all-inclusive resorts is really kind of understanding this, bringing a combination of optimizing production, bringing a combination of getting, buying and utilizing what's there, and also making sure that the portion sizes are right. When you really dial that in, that's how you can deliver the savings and the impact that we have. 

Amy Wald (26:03):

That is so cool. And there's an element of creativity that you are affording now these chefs who one of the fundamentals of being a chef is being creative and now they can start to infuse some more of that and really kind of think outside the box. That is so amazing and cool, I would think as well is if you are going to something called Green Ramadan, now you start to take even more pride in that event and that holiday and taking in those blessings at the same time because you're doing something additionally good and layering on the goodness. Wow, that is so interesting. And it's just proof too that science is really what we need in collaboration to help solve some of these climate problems that we have. And that's exactly what you're doing. 

Marc Zornes (27:02):

Yeah, I think of it as the marriage of technology and creativity. Technology is a tool. We're a tool how you want to use that tool. We do a lot of work to make sure that our clients and help our clients use the tool in the most effective way possible. But we don't reduce the food waste. The chefs we work with reduce the food waste and the twinkle in the eye of the chefs and the excitement that they have when they've come up with new recipe ideas out of things that we're being discarded. When you unleash that creativity and that mindset, you create a culture change in the kitchen. I don't want to overstate that because I want to be really clear. I've never met a chef that likes throwing away food. I've never met a chef that hasn't been trained for many, many years to avoid food waste. 

(28:01)
And so when we talk to chefs about food waste, one thing we're really careful to respect is we're not saying that they're doing nothing here. They're doing a lot to reduce food waste, but the problem is they don't have the tools. Tools also, they don't have the time to really dig into all of this. And if we can make it easy and part of their day to day that they have the data to be able to then make those choices and instruct their teams better and come up with those creative ideas to unlock that and get them in the kitchen driving that change where they want to be. As opposed to in a chef's office where they're doing the drudgery of having to key in recipe data and all that types of stuff, that's when I think we've really hit success. That's the change that we're looking to enable. 

Amy Wald (28:51):

That's a really great point. And I think that's when you start to see even deeper retention and see talent elevated because now you're taking those constraints away from them, giving them tools, which is exactly what you're saying, and giving them the ability to be creative and feeling even better about the work that they're doing. So I wanted to ask you, but you've kind of already mentioned it, but I would love to ask it straight, which is how do you think, is this the answer to helping people understand how to view, not view food as waste and view it as more of a commodity and a material, an opportunity versus trash, which I think, I don't know if you're familiar with true zero Waste, they're a certification through United States Green Business Council, but they look at things like managing materials versus managing trash and that everything is a commodity. So what are we going to do? How else can we adopt that kind of thinking, do you think, mark? 

Marc Zornes (30:10):

Yeah, well, I mean we do, the first thing is we try to use the business tool that is to put a clear value on it. When you put a value on it and it actually shows up in a p and l or on a report, you then start to say, well, why is this waste happening here where it's not happening somewhere else? And being able to benchmark performance, there's all these tools I think that we've become, we've done things a certain way for a long time and whether that is how you run a breakfast buffet, whether that is how you cater for your meetings and events where you run a restaurant, you begin to see an operation working, you see waste happening. And the easy, and frankly, I think the very normal reaction when you see it happening is that's probably the best that we can do. 

(31:18)
This is just the way that things are done and being able to demonstrate that there is a better way to do it and to value that is important. I think at Winow we're saving our clients about 54 million a year in food costs. It's our ambition to save our clients a billion dollars a year by the end of the decade. By the way, the US hospitality industry that's all out of home consumption wastes 138 billion a year in food waste. So even if we achieve that, we're still talking about unfortunately a very small percent, but we're talking about trying to deliver real value to our clients. I think that you need technology to make it happen. I think you need culture change and kind of awareness raising on this. You need creativity and branding. You're going to have to bring a lot to that. And we're really trying to do that. I mean, we love working with chefs that want to lead and sort of evangelize that this is something that can be done. This is something that's there. There's some really great zero chefs out there that are doing some really cool work. 

(32:36)
There's a gentleman by the name of EK over in Eastern Europe who's doing work around these pictures of here's everything you can do with an ingredient, let's show you a picture of a carrot and then 30 different things you can do with the carrot. And we love what that type of thinking can kind of bring to it. And we think all of that adds up. If I can though add one other thing, which is that let me talk about how do you really activate this in business. And there's a couple of ways you can do that. Legislation can drive that. You can then use sort of public demand. I do think both of those are happening in the background. Those types of things are coming, but I'll go back to this economic and this financial piece. And one of the things that we've learned and we'd be happy to talk to anybody about that's kind of hearing this is that when you get into food waste, if you're going to reduce food waste, you actually need to do the work to track that through into your p and l and understand what happens. 

(33:47)
And actually understanding that is not as intuitive as one might think. One might think that when you reduce food waste that your food costs are going to automatically go down. Well, the reality is many chefs have a lot of flexibility in what they're going to do around food costs. If I'm running a high food cost mid month, I may actually need to work on preparing and using lower cost ingredients and sort of changing the product mix that goes out there. If I'm running below on a food cost, I can increase the quality of the product mix. And so we have what we call sort of a food purchase analysis that we do with our clients that looks at and kind. What we want to show is that if you're reducing food waste, actually what you're doing is you're getting, so you can buy less food per person that comes through the door. 

(34:38)
You can then take that benefit and you can use that to either put a higher quality food out on the offer, which some of our clients do. You can take that benefit and you can make that to improve the profitability of the business. You can take that benefit and you can use it in other ways too, but you've really got to be able to do the work to track that down. And you've got to make an explicit decision as a business around how you want to do that. Because when you go to the finance team and you say, we want to make a big investment in doing something around food waste, the finance team is going to say, it's great that we have this ambition. We're of course committed to it for our sustainability targets to be a responsible business, but show me the business case to make that happen. 

(35:22)
You've got to be able to prove that through. And so we work with our clients to really do that in the meaningful way. And I think that kind of getting that right is frankly within industry, one of the really important things that we to help people understand and get right so that we can, because the ROI is great, there's lots of these studies out there. The return on investing in food waste prevention is some people say it's three to one, some people say it's seven times your money back. I've seen quotes that say it's 14 times your money back. So if it's all that times your money back, why isn't everybody doing it? Well, because the food budget is actually, there's a lot that goes into that and we've got to unpick that. We've got to understand where food waste prevention is driving that benefit. We've got to prove that out so that we can then convince businesses that investing in this at scale is in their interest. And that's the last thing that I think we have to do. 

Amy Wald (36:20):

And it's interesting that you say that because I think that we have attached food is a big portion of hospitality and their offering, and I think we've attached customer satisfaction with that. And so there is this, they're terrified if I change anything about that, that means my customer satisfaction goes down, which we know isn't the case. But there definitely is a cost regardless of the scale. When you start composting, you reduce your hauling fees immediately. So I mean, regardless of where you are in your journey and how big of a institution you are, you can take steps to reduce your cost, but what a valuable service you are offering somebody in addition to this incredibly powerful tool. And I think that that is obviously owed to your expertise and the thought that you really put into this as it's not just you drop off some tool and you leave that there has to be a lot of education and handholding and thought process and really digging into a business to figure out where you can see that lasting change. Well Mark, okay, I have one more question for you, but wait, I did want to mention, so you are going to be at skit this year, right? Ski AI and data conference? 

Marc Zornes (37:56):

Yeah, really excited. A big fan of the work that SCIF does in early June. We're going to be in New York City. I'm going to be giving a talk, talking about what we do, giving a couple of the stories around that, hoping we might even have a system there that people who attend can kind of play with and kind of understand the technology a bit more. But we're really at this point in time trying to help educate the industry of the success that we're having, trying to share those stories, ideally with the ambition of getting others excited to lean in and do more about it. And going back to one of the things we're going to talk about at skis, and you sort of talked a lot about how we help, I call it partnership. We partner with our customers and our clients to help them achieve their goals. 

(38:45)
And for us, and the proudest moments that I have as an entrepreneur with our business is when we see our clients achieve really meaningful goals that they get excited to shout about. So IKEA globally was the first hospitality company in the world that cut their food waste in half. They did it with winnow. Iberostar announced in the middle of last year that they had a 28% reduction in food waste. We get really excited about Hilton talks about the 62% reduction in the green breakfast program. So we get excited about partnering with our clients to deliver change across their business and kind of enabling that and how to use a really powerful technology like artificial intelligence and how to use data to, in a practical way, plug into something as challenging to manage as a kitchen is the story we're going to tell its gift and kind of how we make that happen. 

Amy Wald (39:48):

So cool. Yeah, I love skit and I'm actually going to be in New York. I hope I can catch that. So I've got a last question for you. It's a little bit loaded. So when you travel, mark, what do you look for in an accommodation or a destination when it comes to sustainability? Are you seeking specific accommodations and destinations out because of what they are doing? Do you just let it unfold organically and then put it in your top 10? How do you go about traveling? 

Marc Zornes (40:25):

Yeah. I care a lot about what the property that I'm staying with or the group that I'm staying with is doing. I'm a proud, loyal customer of a lot of our clients and so I always try to stay with one of our clients. When I'm in a city, sometimes I try and pick properties that we're not yet working with so that during breakfast I can possibly have a little bit of a conversation with the chef. At the same time I've been known to kind of walk up and start having conversations with teams randomly and there's something like, what are we doing here? But it's important to me that in tourism and in hospitality, your property is a major part of the local ecosystem and plugging into that ecosystem is really important. I'll tell the story about why I Bureau Star talks about why what they do, and I'm not going to say it as fairly as they do, but what inspires in how they say it is their business depends on the natural beauty of where they exist. 

(41:41)
And if they're not stewards of that natural beauty and they're not helping to make sure that that place is a really exciting place to visit for not just the next five years but for generations to come, then what are they in business for, right? I mean that to me is I think a really, really good articulation of it in their wave of change program. I know you've had Megan Marwa sort of on your podcast. I am always such impressed by the work that they're doing there and she's such an incredible individual in what they're driving well beyond, well beyond the work that we're doing with them on waste. I will say though that there's also other factors. I tend to prefer hotels in the states that have a Peloton because that's kind of how I stay sane. So it's not just the sustainability, but I would say sustainability for me is kind of a minimum. 

(42:44)
They've got to be able to get that right when I'm traveling for business, that when I'm traveling for pleasure, if I can find some of the most sustainable properties out there, that's where I tend to choose. And the other thing that I do is when I go into the community, we were just in Costa Rica and visiting sort of regenerative farms and sort of plugging into that community is something that I personally enjoy. Again, going back to the food system, I think there is a way for us to sustainably feed the global population. We can waste less. We can grow our food in a more regenerative way. We don't have to a hundred percent give up on meat. You look at what the Eat Lancet report talks about, it's about actual sort of proportionate eating of meat. Some people want to be vegetarian. I'm all for that. 

(43:38)
I'm an omnivore, but I sort of take a very limited amount of that myself and to grow it in a way that heals the land and that captures carbon, I think is all possible to do that if we can just rethink the way that we do it in a number of ways. And that's what I get excited about being a part of. And that's the sort of community that I plug into of hoteliers of colleagues of other entrepreneurs and businesses that are trying to drive that change. It feels at the moment like it's a small niche, but a powerful crew. But we're all growing and I have high hopes that we can grow fast enough to see the change that we all want to see. 

Amy Wald (44:33):

Yeah, you touched on Ibero Star and they have this built into their DNA and you can feel that. And I think it's so interesting they brought Megan on who is of a complete different discipline of hospitality. And I think you are proof to that too. And I think that's really what we need. We need people outside of that traditional hospitality lens to help us get to these places because hospitality has such a powerful place in this movement. And you're right, it's really about, I think it's interesting that people who are still pushing up against climate change and some of these change in practices, they feel threatened. They're going to have to give something up. And I think it's just about us being a little bit more thoughtful about how we live our lives every day. And you don't have to give anything up. 

(45:35)
Well, mark, I have kept you longer than I'm sure you planned on today, but I just want to say thank you for the work that you're doing, and I think it is so inspiring. I think it just is proof that we are going to solve some of these problems, but we need collaboration and we need people like you with those brains to come up with these kind of technologies and innovations. So keep in touch. We are going to follow along on your journey and see what you do in the future. I know it's going to be big. 

Marc Zornes (46:10):

Thanks, Amy. It's been a real pleasure talking with you 

Amy Wald (46:12):

Today. Aw, thank you. Well, enjoy the springtime in Chicago. It's coming. And listeners, let us know what did you love about this episode, what can we bring you more of? We hope that you are inspired to take on your sustainability journey regardless of where you are. And reach out to me on LinkedIn, Amy Wald, and follow us and like us, we hope you will at the Sustainable Hospitality Podcast so we can continue to bring this content. Mark, have a great day. Thank you. Great to see you, and we'll talk to you soon and talk to everyone else soon. Stay in touch and.