How Mill 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 our Series A deck,” Rogers told TechCrunch.

Now, with an official agreement reached with Amazon and Whole Foods the company’s plan to profit from managing other people’s food waste is a bit more public.

Whole Foods will roll out a commercial-scale version of Millof food waste in each of its grocery stores starting in 2027. The bins will grind and dehydrate waste from the produce aisle, reducing costly landfill fees while also providing food for the company’s egg farmers. Both reduce the company’s overhead costs and reduce its ecological footprint.

At the same time, Mill’s bins will collect data to help Whole Foods understand what is being wasted and why, helping the grocer better control its costs. “Ultimately, our goal is not only to make their waste operations more efficient, but also to go upstream so they waste less food,” Rogers said.

The company began selling food bins to households a few years ago. As you’d expect from the team that made the Nest thermostat, the devices are well-designed and, to draw on a Silicon Valley cliché, they can be a joy to use. My children had a lot of fun in the trash by testing the First of all And second generations.

“Starting with the consumer was very intentional because you build the evidence, you build the data, the brand, the loyalty,” Rogers said. Many members of the Whole Foods team already knew Mill when the two companies began talking.

“It’s actually kind of our corporate sales strategy,” Rogers continued. “We have conversations with senior leaders of our various ideal clients, and if they haven’t had Mill at home yet, we say, ‘Hey, try Mill at home, see what your family thinks.’ It’s a surefire way to get people excited.

The startup began having conversations with Whole Foods about a year ago, Rogers said. Over the next few months, Mill introduced the consumer version to select grocery stores in the chain.

Mill also developed AI that uses a series of sensors to determine whether food that goes into the bin should still be on the shelves. Minimizing “shrinkage” – the industry term for sales lost to waste or theft – can give grocers an edge in a cut-throat market.

Advances in major language models have been key, Rogers said. When he and Mill co-founder Harry Tannenbaum were at Nest, it took dozens of engineers and a “Google budget” more than a year to train Nest cameras to recognize people and packages. With the new LLMs, Mill needed only a handful of engineers and much less time to deliver superior results, according to Rogers, who said “AI is a huge enabler.”

Using AI allowed Mill to release a commercial version more quickly, diversifying its customer base and revenue streams.

“If you’re a single-channel, single-customer business, you’re fragile,” Rogers said. “I grew up at Apple in the days of the iPod,” he said. “At the time, Apple was a single-industry company. The iPod accounted for about 70% of the company’s revenue. That’s why we created the iPhone. Steve [Jobs] pushed us really hard on 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 market and that would crush us. We had to build another leg of the stool.

And it seems that Mill hasn’t finished adding legs to his figurative stool. Rogers said she is also working on creating a municipal corporation.

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