Nestlé UK&I Joins Forces with Google Cloud and Industry Allies in AI Pilot to Slash Food Waste

Image Credit: Nestlé UK & Ireland

In an ambitious push to tackle one of the UK’s most stubborn sustainability challenges, major players like Nestlé UK & Ireland and Google are teaming up with homegrown tech innovators and food redistribution charities. Their mission? Deploy artificial intelligence to curb the staggering amount of edible food that currently ends up in the bin.

Backed by £1.9 million from the UK Government’s BridgeAI programme, the project seeks to bring together cutting-edge data science and boots-on-the-ground logistics to rewire how surplus food is handled before it goes to waste. The stakes are high: Britain discards 4.6 million tonnes of edible food every year. That’s enough to make a jaw-dropping 10 billion meals.

The technology at the heart of this pilot is being developed by Zest, formerly known as The Wonki Collective, and is powered by Google Cloud’s BigQuery and Vertex AI. The AI-driven system is designed to intelligently match excess food from manufacturers with real-time demand from food charities, thereby automating the redistribution process that inefficiencies, delays, and manual bottlenecks have historically plagued.

Nestlé UK&I, the pilot’s anchor food manufacturer, has already put the system through its paces. In a two-week trial at one of its production sites, the tool slashed edible food waste by an impressive 87%.

But this is no one-off experiment. The pilot will soon expand to multiple sites across the UK, with projections showing that up to 700 tonnes of food, the equivalent of 1.5 million meals, could be redistributed. In doing so, organizers anticipate preventing 1,400 tonnes of carbon emissions and cutting supply chain costs by up to £14 million.

This isn’t just about technology for technology’s sake. The initiative is deeply collaborative. Partners include logistics firm Howard Tenens, AI logistics innovator Bristol Superlight, food redistribution giant FareShare, and impact-measurement platform FuturePlus. Leading the orchestration is Sustainable Ventures, a programme manager that supports a network of over 850 climate tech organisations.

Still, amid all the promise AI brings to the fight against food waste, it comes with caveats. The UN Environment Programme has raised concerns over the environmental costs of AI itself—namely, its reliance on rare earth minerals and its substantial demand for water and energy. Data centres could soon consume six times more water than Denmark. At the same time, some generative AI models might use up to 33 times the energy of traditional software, much of it still derived from fossil fuels.